Imagine if nude women in fashion magazines, action movies, and music videos, suddenly screamed out against political corruption, debilitating income inequality, or oppression by religious leaders. Femen, a group of […]
Search Results
You searched for: beauty
If art is designed to provoke the passions, it does not confine itself to the pleasant ones.
John Seely Brown argues that foregrounding the Humanities is our only hope of sustaining innovation in the United States.
The New Statesman has just published my piece concerning the creation of so-called online trolling behaviour. I argue that those who are shocked and outraged by horrible behaviour of online […]
Imagine walking into a 1,300-year-old Buddhist cave carved from a cliff overlooking a stretch of the ancient Silk Road in Dunhuang, China. You point your flashlight and frescoes showing musicians […]
Elizabeth Bernstein has a thoughtful and interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal about the troubling incivility, cruelty, and rudeness that many people unleash online, in Comments sections, on Twitter, […]
The same mindset that drives a person to have it all eventually stops them from having what they really want.
As Rushdie humanised Muhammad – as he was always meant to be – Rushdie also humanised the faith.
As kids, my siblings and I would flip through old family albums and marvel over old pictures of family members in their youth. More than just thicker hair and thinner […]
In addition to all the glitz and the glam, Hart Dyke’s seen and painted the very real danger of being in Her Majesty’s Secret Service and looked upon the real face of James Bond.
Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it This is the ponderous epigraph of many a high school history term paper. And it’s wrong. Like as not, we’re “doomed” […]
If Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie reign as the premier power couple of Hollywood, then Seymour Chwast and Paula Scher deserve credit as the “Brangelina” of the world of graphic […]
I’m going to write the unpopular thing and go Tough Love on my own people. A modest proposal: Women need to act like the successful grown-ups that they are or […]
It has recently occurred to me that I’m Martian. My friends have taken to smiling and nodding when I talk about this. Some of them have been persuaded. Some of […]
What if advertising could be used for things that we really do need? Alain de Botton imagines what a world would look like if the tools of advertising could be used to nudge us to be the best of ourselves.
Five hundred years ago today, Michelangelo unveiled The Sistine Chapel Ceiling to Pope Julius II. The next day, All Saints’ Day 1512, the Pope inaugurated the newly decorated chapel with […]
If you look east from most places in Seattle, you can see majestic Mt. Rainier looming tall and snow covered 80 miles to the west. Mt. Rainier is not […]
Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it This is the ponderous epigraph of many a high school history term paper. And it’s wrong. Like as not, we’re “doomed” […]
Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it This is the ponderous epigraph of many a high school history term paper. And it’s wrong. Like as not, we’re “doomed” […]
Is Salman Rushdie a blasphemer or a humanizer?
[Author’s Note: I’m reposting some old favorites while I’m away on vacation this week. This post was originally from November 2006.] One argument for theism that I have always found […]
We pay special attention to the history of an object – where it has been, who created it, what touched it – because object’s history is what really matters when it comes to its value.
They remember her in colloquia and symposia, they remember her in the journals. They don’t remember her in the streets, her haunts. Reading her great novel Nightwood, Jeannette Winterson has said, “is […]
So, a few of you have asked, why have you stopped talking about movies? It’s not that I’ve stopped seeing them. The truth is that movies have gotten so much […]
Summary: The compelling true story of the Renaissance humanists who rescued Greek and Roman philosophy from oblivion and wrenched the Western world out of the Dark Ages. After the collapse […]
The Olympics gives spectators permission to say things about athletes’ bodies that they would never say in polite company.
Sometime in 1952, the American experimental musician John Cage put the finishing touches on a composition that challenged the definition of music. It was a three-part movement written for any […]
In this two-part piece, we will examine the portrayal of villains in creative mediums, like novels and comics, and why they are severely lacking; I will also argue why it’s […]
Jeff DeGraff: At Christmas, I change from one culture into another and yet another still and back again.
What is it about hot yoga? While many of my friends are real fitness addicts, none compete at the level of those I know who are into Bikram Yoga. They […]