The Oldest Known Photographs of Rome (1841-1871)

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The ravages of COVID-19 have been followed by the ravages of the post-pandemic tourism boom. If you’ve been reading recent coverage of aggressive travel and its discontents, you may well assume that it’s too late to have a genuine experience of, say, the great cities of Europe. Paris, Vienna, Barcelona: none are as they…

Watch Fritz Lang’s Metropolis with a Modern, New Electronic Soundtrack (1927)

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From sound artist Tomer Baruch and drummer Alex Brajković comes a new electronic soundtrack for Fritz Lang’s century-old classic film, Metropolis. The new score comes with this preface:

One of the most significant themes in the dystopian feature is the blurred-to-nonexistent line separating man and machine; Human-like machines, Mechanical-humans, real-life android deepfakes, and…

The First Masterpieces to Depict Regular People: An Introduction to the Reformation Painting of Pieter Bruegel the Elder

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The skating scene that opens A Charlie Brown Christmas is such an evocative, archetypical winter vision, it’s likely to stir nostalgia even in those whose childhoods didn’t involve gliding across frozen ponds.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder created a similar scene in the 16th-century. His changed the course of Western art.
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William Friedkin, RIP: Why the 80s Action Movie To Live and Die in L.A. Is His “Subversive Masterpiece”

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William Friedkin, who died yesterday, will be most widely remembered as the director of nineteen-seventies genre hits like The French Connection and The Exorcist. But it was in the subsequent decade that he made his most impressive picture, at least according to the Paper Starship video essay above. As its narrator Marcus…

When Mississippi Tried to Ban Sesame Street for Showing a “Highly Integrated Cast” (1970)

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On November 10, 1969, Sesame Street made its broadcast debut.

The very first lines were spoken by Gordon (Matt Robinson), a Black schoolteacher who’s showing a new kid around the neighborhood, introducing her to a couple of other kids, along with Sesame Street adult mainstays Bob, Susan, and Mr. Hooper, and Big…