Why There Isn’t a Bridge from Italy to Sicily – And Why the 2,000-Year-Old Dream of Building the Bridge May Soon Be Realized

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We’ve all heard of the great Amer­i­can road trip. If you’ve ever dreamt of tak­ing a great Ital­ian road trip, you’ve sure­ly come across this inevitable hitch in the plan: you can’t dri­ve to Sici­ly. You can, of course, put your car on a fer­ry; you can even take a train that gets put…

Watch Dziga Vertov’s A Man with a Movie Camera: The 8th Best Film Ever Made

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Of all the cin­e­mat­ic trail­blaz­ers to emerge dur­ing the ear­ly years of the Sovi­et Union – Sergei Eisen­stein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Lev Kuleshov – Dzi­ga Ver­tov (né Denis Arkadievitch Kauf­man, 1896–1954) was the most rad­i­cal.

Where­as Eisen­stein – as seen in that film school stan­dard Bat­tle­ship Potemkin –…

An Introduction to The Garden of Earthly Delights & Hieronymus Bosch’s Wildly Creative Vision

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Hierony­mus Bosch’s mas­ter­piece of grotes­querie, The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights, con­tains a young God, Adam and Eve, over­sized fruits and musi­cal instru­ments, owls, tor­tured sin­ners, some­thing called a “tree man” whose body con­tains an entire tav­ern, a defe­cat­ing avian dev­il eat­ing a human being, and “frol­ick­ing, obliv­i­ous fig­ures engaged in all sorts of…

NYU Professor Answers Your Burning Questions About Authoritarianism

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From WIRED comes this: NYU pro­fes­sor and “author­i­tar­i­an­ism schol­ar Ruth Ben-Ghi­at joins WIRED to answer the inter­net’s burn­ing ques­tions about dic­ta­tors and fas­cism. Why do peo­ple sup­port dic­ta­tors? How do dic­ta­tors come to pow­er? What’s the dif­fer­ence between a dic­ta­tor­ship, an autoc­ra­cy, and author­i­tar­i­an­ism? What are the most com­mon per­son­al­i­ty traits found in tyrants…

Watch Alfred Hitchcock’s Groundbreaking, Six-Minute Trailer for Psycho (1960)

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The ear­ly trail­er for Alfred Hitch­cock­’s Psy­cho above describes the film as “the pic­ture you MUST see from the begin­ning… or not at all!” That’s good advice, giv­en how ear­ly in the film its first big twist arrives. But it was also a pol­i­cy: “Every the­atre man­ag­er, every­where, has been instruct­ed to admit no…