Arts and Culture

“Nothing is more important than television,” said J.D. Salinger (as impersonated, that is, in an episode of Bojack Horseman ). A passive, pacifying medium—“cool,” as Marshall McLuhan called it—TV has also long been an easy target for punditry, for many decades before the perpetrator du jour , video games. Television spread ignorance, was “ the drug of the nation ," said Michael Franti, peddled fake heroes on “ channel zero ,” said Public Enemy, and would lead to an “electrical re-tribalization of the West,” McLuhan predicted (and further explained in this interview ). Marion Stokes set out to do more than any of the men above who made pronouncements about television. She dedicated her life to preserving the evidence, taping television news for over 33 years, from 1979 “until the day she died,” writes the Internet Archive , who now hold Stokes’ “unique 71k+ video cassette collection” and intend to digitize all of it. Stokes “was a fiercely private African American social justice ...

Here in the 21st century, only the most sheltered among us could be shocked by the sight of a naked body. It would seem that the whole of human history has at least that in common with us: only certain societies at certain times have considered nudity a force worth suppressing. But then, has the problem ever been nudity in general, or rather the context, the nature, and the implications of particular instances of nudity? It's fair to say that Titian's  Venus of Urbino has scandalized practically no one. Yet three centuries later, Édouard Manet's outwardly similar 1865 canvas Olympia   sent shockwaves through the Paris art world. Why? The rules of the Paris Academy of Fine Arts at the time dictated that "great art was supposed to convey a moral or intellectual message," says the narrator of Vox's video essay on Olympia above . "All acceptable art fell into one of five categories, ranked by their capacity to deliver those messages." The less...

Had the gloom-haunted  Edward Gorey found a way to have a love child with Dorothy Parker, their issue might well have been Lemony Snicket, the pseudonymous author of a multivolume family chronicle brought out under the genteel appellation  A Series of Unfortunate Events .  - Gregory Maguire,  The New York Times Author  Daniel Handler — aka  Lemony Snicket—was but a child when he fortuitously stumbled onto the curious oeuvre of  Edward Gorey . The little books were illustrated, hand-lettered, and mysterious. They alluded to terrible things befalling innocents in a way that made young Handler laugh and want more, though he shied from making such a request of his parents, lest the books constitute pornography. (His fear strikes this writer as wholly reasonable—my father kept a copy of  The Curious Sofa: A Pornographic Work  by Ogdred Weary — aka  Edward Gorey—stashed in the bathroom of my childhood home. Its perversions were m...

Would anyone in their right mind sign up for a job that had a high risk of mortality/disability? Or a job where red hot metal is being hurled directly at your face? Back in the 1920s this was the lot of the men who built New York’s skyline, the men who constructed the Chrysler Building and the Empire State, giant phallic symbols of America’s burgeoning wealth and power. In this short clip (remastered and quite decently colorized) from the Smithsonian Channel, we get a brief glimpse of the perils encountered daily on the building site. Nicknamed “roughnecks,” the narrator points out that they work without harnesses, safety ropes, or hard hats. Red hot rivets are thrown at men on the metal beams higher up and they are meant to catch them with what looks like a tin funnel. You can see the thinnest of ropes used to lift the now-iconic stainless steel art-deco eagles into place by men weary felt hats and no gloves. The workers came from Europe, many who had trained on ships. Some ...

Most of us know The War of the Worlds because of Orson Welles' slightly-too-realistic radio adaptation , first broadcast on Halloween 1938. But its source material, H.G. Wells' 1898 science-fiction novel, still fires up the imagination. Its many adaptations since have taken the form of comic books, video games, television series, and more besides. Several films have used The War of the Worlds as their basis, including a high-profile one in 2005 directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Cruise, and more than half a century before that, George Pal's first 1953 adaptation in all its Technicolor glory. In recent years materials have surfaced showing us the midcentury War of the Worlds picture that could have been, one featuring the stop-motion creature-creation of Ray Harryhausen. "Well before CGI technology beamed extraterrestrials onto the big screen, stop-motion animation master Harryhausen brought to life Wells’ vision of a slimy Martian with enormou...

How do you sell a government program that spends tens of millions of dollars on research and development for space travel? While the average taxpayer may love the idea of braving new frontiers, far fewer are apt to vote for funding scientific research, the space program’s ostensible reason for being. During the Cold War, however, when the biggest breakthroughs in space flight occurred, selling the program didn’t involve sophisticated methods, only the broadest themes of heroism, patriotism, futurism, and, in more or less subtle ways, militarism. The appeal to science always went hand-in-hand with an appeal to the sublimely austere beauty of the heavens (which we'd hate to lose to the other guys.) All of these were strategies NASA utilized, and then some. In addition to planting a U.S. flag on the moon, they delivered the first  color image of Earth from space . On the ground, they enlisted artists like Andy Warhol, Norman Rockwell, and Laurie Anderson and actors like Star Trek...