Mahatma Gandhi’s List of the Seven Social Sins; or Tips on How to Avoid Living the Bad Life

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Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

In 590 AD, Pope Gre­go­ry I unveiled a list of the Sev­en Dead­ly Sins – lust, glut­tony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride – as a way to keep the flock from stray­ing into the thorny fields of ungod­li­ness. These days, though, for all but the…

How Frank Lloyd Wright Became Frank Lloyd Wright: A Video Introduction

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Frank Lloyd Wright is unlike­ly to be dis­placed as the arche­type of the genius archi­tect any­time soon, at least in Amer­i­ca, but even he had to start some­where. At nine years old, as archi­tec­ture YouTu­ber Stew­art Hicks explains in the video above, Wright received a set of blocks from his moth­er, who hoped…

When Neapolitans Used to Eat Pasta with Their Bare Hands: Watch Footage from 1903

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Even if you don’t speak Ital­ian, you can make a decent guess at the mean­ing of the word man­gia­mac­cheroni. The tricky bit is that mac­cheroni refers not to the pas­ta Eng­lish-speak­ers today call mac­a­roni, tubu­lar and cut into small curved sec­tions, but to pas­ta in gen­er­al. Or at least it did around the turn of…

Benedict Cumberbatch Reads a Letter to a Man Blow-Drying His Balls at the Gym

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We have fea­tured Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch read­ing let­ters by Kurt Von­negut, Alan Tur­ing, Albert Camus, and Nick Cave, along with pas­sages from Kafka’s Meta­mor­pho­sis and Melville’s Moby Dick. It’s all pret­ty heady stuff. And now it’s time for some­thing com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent. Above, we have Mr. Cum­ber­batch read­ing, with clas­sic British under­state­ment, a…

How Erik Satie’s ‘Furniture Music’ Was Designed to Be Ignored and Paved the Way for Ambient Music

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Imag­ine how many times some­one born in the eigh­teen-six­ties could ever expect to hear music. The num­ber would vary, of course, depend­ing on the indi­vid­u­al’s class and fam­i­ly incli­na­tions. Suf­fice it to say that each chance would have been more pre­cious than those of us in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry can eas­i­ly under­stand. Our abil­i­ty to…