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 […]

There are browser extensions designed to increase your productivity every time you open a new tab.

Others use positive affirmations, inspiring quotes, and nature photography to put your day on the right track.

We hereby announce that we’re switching our settings and allegiance to New Tab with MoMA.

After installing this extension, you’ll be treated to a new work of modern and contemporary art from The Museum of Modern Art’s collection whenever you open a new tab in Chrome.

If you can steal a few minutes, click whatever image comes up to explore the work in greater depth with a curator’s description, links to other works in the collection by the same artist, and in some cases installation views, interviews and/or audio segments.

Expect a few gift shop heavy hitters like Vincent Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, but also lesser known works not currently on view, like Yayoi Kusama’s Violet Obsession, a rowboat slipcovered in electric purple “phallic protrusions.”

Violet Obsession’s New Tab with MoMA link not […]

Long before it was a nationalist rallying cry in Japan during WWII, the term Yamato-damashii referred to something less like racial imperialism and more like chivalry — the “Japanese Spirit” or “Old Soul of Japan,” as Greek-Japanese writer Lafcadio Hearn wrote. Perhaps surprisingly, the “Japanese Spirit” was not based in the martial arts of the samurai at first, but in the scholarship of China, as the ancient novel The Tale of Genji explains when defining Yamato-damashii as “a good, solid fund of knowledge… a fund of Chinese learning.” This would change when the code of Bushidō evolved, and the samurai, with his elaborate armor and elegant swords, became a central figure of honor in Japanese society.

In The Japanese Sword as the Soul of the Samurai, the nearly half-hour documentary above by traveling American documentary filmmaker Ken Wolfgang, George Takei narrates the tale of the samurai’s sword. The film begins with the legendary character Yamato Takeru (who one scholar speculates may share a common origin with King Arthur). This ur-samurai inherited the first sword from the tail of a eight-headed dragon that […]