All of us alive today perceive recent history as a series of decades. There exists, as far as we know, no quality of reality dictating that everything must recognizably change every ten years. But throughout the 21st century, it seems to have been thus: even if we weren’t alive at the time, we can tell at a glance the cultural artifacts of the nineteen-thirties from the nineteen-forties, for example, or those of the nineteen-eighties from the nineteen-nineties. Each decade has its own distinct fashions, which arose from its distinct worldview; that worldview arose from a vision of the future; and that vision of the future arose from changes in technology.

Back in the nineteen-tens, says history Youtuber Hochelaga in the video above, “the invention of the first airplane opened massive potential in transportation, and sparked the imagination of the public.” The development of aviation encouraged predictions that one day “the world would go airborne; people would take to the skies in their very own personal airships and gliders.” Popular artists dreamed of  a kind of “steampunk genre: a future vision […]

Fifty years after its theatrical release, The Godfather remains a subject of lively cinephile conversation. What, as any of us might ask after a fresh semi-centennial viewing of Francis Ford Coppola’s mafia masterpiece, is this movie about? We need only ask Coppola himself, who has our answer in one word: succession. In the recent GQ interview above, he also explains the themes of other major works with similar succinctness: Apocalypse Now is about morality; The Conversation is about privacy. Such clean and simple encapsulations belie the nature of the film production process, and especially that of Coppola’s nineteen-seventies pictures, with their large scale, seriousness of purpose, and proneness to severe difficulty.

“What we consider real art is a movie that does not have a safety net,” Coppola says, and that applies without a doubt to movies like The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. Much as Orson Welles once said of his own experience making Citizen Kane, the young Coppola went into The Godfather ignorant of more or less everything involved in its content but life in an Italian-American family. But he had, in theater school, learned […]

Since its launch last month, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has sent observers around the world scrambling for context. It is a fact, for example, that Russia and Ukraine were once “together” in the communist mega-state that was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. But it is also a fact that such Soviet togetherness hardly ensured warm feelings between the two lands. An especially relevant chapter of their history is known in Ukraine as the Holodomor, or “death by starvation.” Spanning the years 1932 and 1933, this period of famine resulted in three to six million lives lost — and that according to the lower accepted estimates.

“It was genocide,” says the narrator of the Vox “Missing Chapter’ video above, “carried out by a dictator who wanted to keep Ukraine under his control, and would do everything in his power to cover it up for decades. That dictator was, of course, Joseph Stalin, who accompanied brutal methods of rule with tight control of information. “In 1917, after the fall of the Russian Empire, Ukraine briefly gained freedom,” the video […]

What should you do if you come across a manticore? Would you even know how to identify it? An unlikely occurrence, you say? Perhaps. But if you lived in Europe in the Middle Ages – and you were the type to believe such tales – you might expect to see one someday. Wouldn’t it be useful to have a field guide? You’d want it on paper (or parchment): no one’s carrying smartphones in misty 13th century York or over the rocky highlands of 15th century Lombardy. You could consult a reigning expert of the time, such as Sir John Mandeville, who either saw such things as blemmyae (headless humans with faces in their chests) near Ethiopia, or made them up. But this didn’t matter much. Truth and fiction didn’t have such rigid boundaries. Yet books were rare, and anyway, few people could read. If only there were YouTube….

“Medieval zoology is bizarre,” says the narrator of the video above — a brief “Field Guide to Bizarre Medieval Monsters” — “because half the creatures don’t even exist, and those that do […]

If you’re going to back Dave Grohl behind the drums, well…. As so many have said, in so many ways over the weekend, in poignant tributes to Foo Fighters’ drummer Taylor Hawkins, who sadly passed away at age 50 on Friday — you’d better be damned good. As the Foo Fighters formed with Grohl on guitar and vocals, the former Nirvana drummer, now frontman “needed someone who would not make fans keep wishing he had stuck with drums,” as NBC’s Daniel Arkin writes.

Grohl almost did stick with drums, at least in the studio, recording the parts himself for the band’s first album, The Colour and the Shape, after conflicts with original drummer William Goldsmith. Hawkins was the touring drummer for Alanis Morissette at the time — a much bigger act than Foo Fighters in the late 90s. But the two kept bumping into each other “back stage at festivals around the world,” as Grohl wrote in his 2021 autobiography, The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music. “Our chemistry was so obvious that even Alanis herself once asked him, ‘What […]