Explore the Reading List for Harvard’s Humanities 10: The “Brutal” Humanities Class That’s Suddenly in High Demand

in Books, Education, Literature | November 9th, 2026

There are plen­ty of good rea­sons a stu­dent might want to go to Har­vard. One is its long his­to­ry, at least by Amer­i­can stan­dards; anoth­er is the for­mi­da­ble accom­plish­ments of the pro­fes­sors hired to teach there. But on some lev­el, a teenag­er look­ing to come up in the world — or, in many cas­es, par­ents look­ing to put their teenag­er up in the world — under­stands full well that much of what an insti­tu­tion like Har­vard offers comes down to its selec­tiv­i­ty. Con­sid­er­ing how few get in ver­sus how many apply, it would be easy to believe that most of a stu­den­t’s bat­tle is won at the point of accep­tance. Imag­ine the despair, then, of a new­ly arrived Har­var­dian fac­ing anoth­er entrance exam and writ­ten appli­ca­tion just to get a seat in Human­i­ties 10.

Its unin­tim­i­dat­ing name notwith­stand­ing, Human­i­ties 10 is the oppo­site of one of those intro­duc­to­ry cours­es through which a vast, dark­ened lec­ture hall full of fresh­men can doze. “Stu­dents read a hefty book a week and write reg­u­lar essays,” reports Pamela Paul in a recent Wall Street Jour­nal arti­cle. “There is no pass/fail option. Dig­i­tal devices are ver­boten, and atten­dance is tak­en in every lec­ture.” This year’s syl­labus, which the WSJ has also pub­lished (also find it below), “begins with The Odyssey, trav­els for­ward in time to James Joyce’s Ulysses and then back­ward to end with The Ili­ad. In between are assign­ments on Mon­taigne, Shake­speare, Spin­oza, Bald­win, Dante and Pla­to.” Amid these great books of the West­ern world appear works by Lady Murasa­ki, Sor Jua­na, and Cao Xue­qin.

With cer­tain excep­tions — Bald­win’s essays, three install­ments of Krzysztof Kies­lowski’s Deka­log — this cur­ricu­lum could be a cen­tu­ry old. In fact, Human­i­ties 10 dates back only to 2008, when the Eng­lish pro­fes­sors (and acclaimed writ­ers) Stephen Green­blatt and Louis Menand put it togeth­er “as a Har­vard twist on a famed Colum­bia senior sem­i­nar and Yale’s Direct­ed Stud­ies pro­gram, and a way to com­bat plum­met­ing stu­dent inter­est in the human­i­ties.” But in a way, its roots run back to 1945, when the uni­ver­si­ty pub­lished the report “Gen­er­al Edu­ca­tion in a Free Soci­ety,” which made the case for pro­vid­ing all stu­dents with the same non-pro­fes­sion­al, non-spe­cial­ized intel­lec­tu­al foun­da­tion. Around the same time, it intro­duced Human­i­ties 2: The Epic and the Nov­el, a demand­ing two-semes­ter course that nev­er­the­less drew 850 stu­dents a year at its peak.

Its suc­ces­sor Human­i­ties 10 accepts only 90 fresh­men, and the result­ing com­pe­ti­tion has drawn pub­lic atten­tion. So has the admit­ted stu­dents’ will­ing­ness to actu­al­ly do the read­ing — and their appar­ent dis­dain for peers who would look over a few AI sum­maries and call it an edu­ca­tion. In the video above, Deep Work author Cal New­port dis­cuss­es the truth this reveals, one that recent tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ments have occlud­ed. Rely­ing on short­cuts to feel­ings of reward — cul­ti­vat­ing social media instead of a social life, watch­ing a trav­el video instead of mak­ing a jour­ney, prompt­ing an LLM instead of actu­al­ly writ­ing — strips our activ­i­ties of not just their fric­tion, but also their con­text, and ulti­mate­ly their mean­ing. Like any worth­while human expe­ri­ence, these books don’t hide their val­ue under lay­ers of dif­fi­cul­ty; their dif­fi­cul­ty is their val­ue.

FALL 2026

9/8 Homer The Odyssey
9/15 Aeschy­lus The Oresteia
9/22 Mon­taigne, Essays
9/29 Shake­speare, Ham­let
10/6 Spin­oza, The­o­log­i­cal-Polit­i­cal Trea­tise
10/13 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
10/20 Jane Austen, Emma
10/27 Mary Shel­ley, Franken­stein
11/3 Walt Whit­man, select­ed poems
11/10 Friedrich Niet­zsche, On the Geneal­o­gy of Moral­i­ty
11/17 T.S. Eliot The Waste Land
12/1 James Bald­win, The Fire Next Time and Notes of a Native Son

SPRING 2027
1/26 James Joyce, Ulysses
2/2 James Joyce, Ulysses
2/9 Vir­ginia Woolf, essays and sto­ries
2/16 Edith Whar­ton, The House of Mirth
2/23 Friedrich Schiller, Let­ters on the Aes­thet­ic Edu­ca­tion of Man
3/2 Ueda Aki­nari, Tales of Moon­light and Rain
3/9 Gio­van­ni Boc­cac­cio, The Decameron
3/23 Eihei Dōgen, Trea­sury of the True Dhar­ma Eye
3/30 Dante Alighieri, Infer­no
4/6 Longus, Daph­nis and Chloe
4/13 Pla­to, The Sym­po­sium
4/20 Homer The Ili­ad
4/27 Homer The Ili­ad

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load The Har­vard Clas­sics as Free eBooks: A “Portable Uni­ver­si­ty” Cre­at­ed in 1909

The Open Syl­labus Project Visu­al­izes the 1,000,000+ Books Most Fre­quent­ly Assigned in Col­lege Cours­es

How to Read Five Books Per Month & Become a Seri­ous Read­er: Tips from Deep Work Author Cal New­port

Har­vard Lets You Take 133 Free Online Cours­es: Explore Cours­es on Jus­tice, Amer­i­can Gov­ern­ment, Lit­er­a­ture, Reli­gion, Comp­Sci & More

W. H. Auden’s 1941 Syl­labus Asked Stu­dents to Read 32 Great Lit­er­ary Works, Total­ing 6,000 Pages

Why Amer­i­cans Stopped Read­ing Books

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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“Don’t Try”: Charles Bukowski’s Concise Philosophy of Art and Life

in Books, Literature | November 9th, 2026

In 1994, Charles Bukows­ki was buried in a Los Ange­les ceme­tery, beneath a sim­ple grave­stone. The stone memo­ri­al­izes the poet­’s name. It recites his dates of birth and death, but adds the sym­bol of a box­er between the two, sug­gest­ing his life was a strug­gle. And it adds the very suc­cinct epi­taph, “Don’t Try.”

There you have it, Bukowski’s phi­los­o­phy on art and life boiled down to two words. But what do they mean? Let’s look back at the epis­to­lary record and find out.

In Octo­ber 1963, Bukows­ki recount­ed in a let­ter to John William Cor­ring­ton how some­one once asked him, “What do you do? How do you write, cre­ate?” To which, he replied: “You don’t try. That’s very impor­tant: ‘not’ to try, either for Cadil­lacs, cre­ation or immor­tal­i­ty. You wait, and if noth­ing hap­pens, you wait some more. It’s like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or if you like its looks you make a pet out of it.”

So, the key to life and art, it’s all about per­sis­tence? Patience? Tim­ing? Wait­ing for your moment? Yes, but not just that.

Jump­ing for­ward to 1990, Bukows­ki sent a let­ter to his friend William Packard and remind­ed him: “We work too hard. We try too hard. Don’t try. Don’t work. It’s there. It’s been look­ing right at us, aching to kick out of the closed womb. There’s been too much direc­tion. It’s all free, we need­n’t be told. Class­es? Class­es are for ass­es. Writ­ing a poem is as easy as beat­ing your meat or drink­ing a bot­tle of beer.”

The key to liv­ing a good life, to cre­at­ing great art — it’s also about not over-think­ing things, or muscling our way through. It’s about let­ting our tal­ents appear, almost jedi-style. Or is it?

In 2005, Mike Watt (bass play­er for the Min­ute­men, fIRE­HOSE, and the Stooges) inter­viewed Lin­da Bukows­ki, the poet­’s wife, and asked her to set the record straight. Here’s their exchange.

Watt: What’s the sto­ry: “Don’t Try”? Is it from that piece he wrote?

Lin­da: See those big vol­umes of books? They’re called Who’s Who In Amer­i­ca. It’s every­body, artists, sci­en­tists, what­ev­er. So he was in there and they asked him to do a lit­tle thing about the books he’s writ­ten and duh, duh, duh, duh, duh. At the very end they say, is there any­thing you wan­na say, you know, what is your phi­los­o­phy of life, and some peo­ple would write a huge long thing. A dis­ser­ta­tion, and some peo­ple would just go on and on. And Hank just put, “Don’t Try.” Now, for you, what do you think that means?

Watt: Well for me it always meant like be nat­ur­al.

Lin­da: Yeah, yeah.

Watt: Not like…being lazy!

Lin­da: Yeah, I get so many dif­fer­ent ideas from peo­ple that don’t under­stand what that means. Well, “Don’t Try? Just be a slack­er? lay back?” And I’m no! Don’t try, do. Because if you’re spend­ing your time try­ing some­thing, you’re not doing it…“DON’T TRY.”

It’s Mon­day. Get out there. Just do it. But patient­ly. And don’t break a sweat.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Four Charles Bukows­ki Poems Ani­mat­ed

Charles Bukows­ki: Depres­sion and Three Days in Bed Can Restore Your Cre­ative Juices (NSFW)

Tom Waits Reads Charles Bukows­ki

The Last Faxed Poem of Charles Bukows­ki

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Was Homer’s Ithaca Really an Island?: New Research Challenges a 2,000-Year-Old Assumption

in History, Literature | November 6th, 2026

Even if we did­n’t make it to a screen­ing of Christo­pher Nolan’s big-screen adap­ta­tion this past sum­mer — and indeed, even if we’ve nev­er read Home­r’s orig­i­nal epic at all — we know that the Odyssey tells the sto­ry of a ten-year-long jour­ney back to Itha­ca. The nar­ra­tive’s urgency does­n’t arise from the fact that its pro­tag­o­nist, the king Odysseus, has class­es at Cor­nell to teach. In fact, he may not even be try­ing to get back to the extant Greek island cel­e­brat­ed for bear­ing that same name. So, at least, argues a recent paper by two dis­tin­guished pro­fes­sors, Cam­bridge’s James Dig­gle and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Aberdeen’s John Under­hill. You can read “Was Home­r’s Itha­ca an Island?” at the online jour­nal Antigone.

Alter­na­tive­ly, you can watch the new video from clas­si­cist-nov­el­ist Hon­or Cargill-Mar­tin above. The real Greek island of Itha­ca, or Itha­ki, with its pic­turesque ham­lets and lime­stone mono­liths, “actu­al­ly does­n’t match, pret­ty much at all, the descrip­tion that Homer gives us of Itha­ca,” she says.

Hav­ing sailed there last sum­mer, she can describe it as “an amaz­ing place, so dra­mat­ic and so evoca­tive, but in large part, that’s because the moun­tains essen­tial­ly rise straight out of the sea”  — a direct con­tra­dic­tion to Home­r’s lines about low­lands sur­round­ing a sin­gle cen­tral peak. Did he just get it wrong? Or was he tak­ing artis­tic license in order to imag­ine the kind of place from which a hero like Odysseus would come forth, despite the fact that he got his geog­ra­phy more or less right else­where?

In 2005, a man­age­ment con­sul­tant called Robert Bit­tle­stone put forth the argu­ment that Homer’s Itha­ca was actu­al­ly Pali­ki, a penin­su­la on the west­ern edge of Kefalo­nia. In order to test this the­o­ry, Bit­tle­stone brought in Dig­gle and Under­hill, his col­lab­o­ra­tors on the book Odysseus Unbound: The Search for Home­r’s Itha­ca. Now, a decade after Bit­tle­stone’s death, the oth­ers have pro­duced new geo­log­i­cal and tex­tu­al evi­dence for the Pali­ki hypoth­e­sis, not least that Homer nev­er once explic­it­ly calls Itha­ca an island, or even describes it in terms he applies to known islands. Cargill-Mar­tin finds their research “extreme­ly con­vinc­ing,” which makes you won­der: will Itha­ca take down its stat­ue of Odysseus in response? Prob­a­bly not, but at least we’ll have some­thing to talk about when we go stand before it.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed con­tent:

Christo­pher Hitchens Explains Why Homer’s Odyssey Still Mat­ters to Our World (2000)

Sean Con­nery (RIP) Reads C. P. Cavafy’s Epic Poem “Itha­ca,” Set to the Music of Van­ge­lis

Lau­rie Anderson’s Mind-Blow­ing Per­for­mance of C. P. Cavafy’s Poems “Wait­ing for the Bar­bar­ians” & “Itha­ca”

The Ori­gins of the Mon­sters in Homer’s Odyssey: The Cyclops, Sirens, Scyl­la & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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The Man Who Risked His Life Mocking the Nazis: Read 96 Issues of His Underground Magazine, Created in Hiding During WWII

in History, Magazines | November 5th, 2026

The word zine, refer­ring to a home­made mag­a­zine not dis­trib­uted through the nor­mal com­mer­cial chan­nels, has a longer his­to­ry than you might expect. Its ear­li­est record­ed uses date from 1946 in the world of pulp mag­a­zines, most often of the sci­ence-fic­tion vari­ety. But just a year ear­li­er, as it hap­pens, one of the most his­tor­i­cal­ly notable zines avant la let­tre con­clud­ed pub­li­ca­tion. The end of World War II had every­thing to do with it, since Het Onder­wa­ter-Cabaret, or The Under­wa­ter Cabaret, exist­ed as a rebuke against the Nazi occu­pa­tion of the Nether­lands. Over its two-year run, it put out 96 issues, total­ing over 1,700 pages full of art and poems — all cre­at­ed by one man in hid­ing in an attic.

Born to a Jew­ish fam­i­ly in Dort­mund in 1908, Curt Bloch stud­ied law with aspi­ra­tions of becom­ing a judge. When Hitler rose to pow­er, his plans changed: he first left for Ams­ter­dam, and lat­er, when Ger­many invad­ed the Nether­lands in 1940, he had to keep mov­ing until he end­ed up in the bor­der town of Enschede.

The resis­tance net­work Group Over­duin even­tu­al­ly placed him in the pri­vate home of an under­tak­er and a house­keep­er who had already tak­en in two oth­er Jews. Despite the lack of space and resources, he man­aged to pro­duce Het Onder­wa­ter-Cabaret using sup­plies deliv­ered along with the refugees’ food. Only one hand-assem­bled, thread-stitched copy of each issue exist­ed, to be cir­cu­lat­ed between some 20 to 30 sim­i­lar­ly hid­den read­ers before being returned to the attic.

By the end of the war, Bloch resur­faced to free­dom with every issue of Het Onder­wa­ter-Cabaret intact and in his pos­ses­sion. Bound into vol­umes in Ams­ter­dam, they accom­pa­nied him when he emi­grat­ed to the Unit­ed States, where he went on to raise a fam­i­ly. As the sto­ry is told in the His­to­ry’s Secret Heroes pod­cast from the BBC above, only long after his death in 1975 did his daugh­ter Simone prop­er­ly dis­cov­er and appre­ci­ate the con­tents of those vol­umes that had always sat on her father’s shelf. The con­fus­ing, even fright­en­ing cut-and-paste imagery and the poems she could only under­stand after learn­ing Ger­man turned out to con­tain unre­lent­ing attacks on the Third Reich and its lead­ers, the kind of mate­r­i­al that could have led to sum­ma­ry exe­cu­tion if dis­cov­ered. One issue even con­tained a poem Bloch wrote for his moth­er and sis­ter, not know­ing that they’d already died in the camps.

Now you can read all 96 issues of Het Onder­wa­ter-Cabaret online at Curt-Bloch.com, where they’ve been not just dig­i­tized but anno­tat­ed with intro­duc­tions and trans­la­tions of the orig­i­nal Ger­man and Dutch texts. There are also record­ed per­for­mances by actors, cabaret artists, and even oth­er Holo­caust sur­vivors. It makes Bloch’s clan­des­tine pro­duc­tiv­i­ty all the more impres­sive to remem­ber that zine cul­ture as we know it did­n’t exist at that time, let alone the instan­ta­neous glob­al dis­tri­b­u­tion net­work on which you’re read­ing this post right now. No mat­ter how tiny his read­er­ship, how mea­ger his resources, or how dire the pun­ish­ment for dar­ing to write crit­i­cal­ly about the regime, he sim­ply had to cre­ate, and he had to do it with a sense of humor. When com­ing up against frus­tra­tions in our own work, we’d do well to imag­ine Bloch run­ning his one-man cabaret out of the attic, scis­sors and glue in hand, and ask our­selves what our excuse is.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Secret Stu­dent Group Who Took on the Nazis: An Intro­duc­tion to “The White Rose”

The Nazi’s Philis­tine Grudge Against Abstract Art and the “Degen­er­ate Art Exhi­bi­tion” of 1937

Before Cre­at­ing the Moomins, Tove Jans­son Drew Satir­i­cal Art Mock­ing Hitler & Stal­in

Watch Lam­beth Walk—Nazi Style: The Ear­ly Pro­pa­gan­da Mash Up That Enraged Joseph Goebbels

Meet Ani­ta Berber, the Cabaret Star Who Scan­dal­ized Weimar-Era Berlin

How the CIA Fund­ed & Sup­port­ed Lit­er­ary Mag­a­zines World­wide While Wag­ing Cul­tur­al War Against Com­mu­nism

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Martin Scorsese Creates a List of 39 Essential Foreign Films for a Young Filmmaker

in Film | November 5th, 2026

As a young man, film­mak­er Col­in Levy got an oppor­tu­ni­ty of a life­time. He got a one-on-one meet­ing with Mar­tin Scors­ese. After spend­ing much of his time in high school mak­ing a five-minute short, Levy won the nation­al Youn­gArts award — and, with it, the chance to chat with the guy who direct­ed Good­fel­las, Taxi Dri­ver and Rag­ing Bull.

After get­ting a per­son­al tour of Scorsese’s office and edit­ing bays by none oth­er than leg­endary edi­tor Thel­ma Schoon­mak­er, Levy met the man him­self. “It was a defin­ing moment in my path as a film­mak­er,” he lat­er wrote on his blog.

Mar­tin Scors­ese was intim­i­dat­ing, to say the least. But very jovial, very talk­a­tive, and he took me seri­ous­ly. (Or con­vinced me, at least.) I pret­ty much kept my mouth shut. Every 30 sec­onds he would men­tion an actor, pro­duc­er, direc­tor or film title I had nev­er heard of before. I was stunned just to be in his pres­ence. He liked my film, he said. “How did you do the lit­tle crea­tures?” I tried to explain how I fig­ured out the basics of 3D ani­ma­tion. His eyes lit up and he start­ed talk­ing about the dig­i­tal effects in The Avi­a­tor.

The jux­ta­po­si­tion of scales was over­pow­er­ing. I felt like I was in a movie. Why he spent so much time with me I do not know, but it was amaz­ing just to be in his pres­ence. A few weeks after­wards I labored over a thank-you card, in which I expressed the over­whelm­ing impres­sion I had got­ten that I don’t know enough about any­thing. I spe­cial­ly don’t know enough about film his­to­ry and for­eign cin­e­ma. I asked if he had any sug­ges­tions for where to start.

A cou­ple of weeks lat­er, Scorsese’s assis­tant sent him a hand­ful of books and 39 for­eign movies per­son­al­ly picked by the film­mak­er. “Mr. Scors­ese asked that I send this your way,” his assis­tant wrote to Col­in. “This should be a jump start to your film edu­ca­tion!”

Scorsese’s selec­tions – which you can see above – are a fas­ci­nat­ing insight into what influ­enced the film­mak­er. Sev­er­al movies are peren­ni­al film school clas­sics: Ital­ian neo­re­al­ist mas­ter­pieces like The Bicy­cle Thief and Umber­to D pop up on the list along with ground­break­ing French New Wave works like The 400 Blows and Breath­less. More unex­pect­ed are sur­pris­ing­ly strong show­ings of both Japan­ese post-war movies and New Ger­man cin­e­ma. Both Aki­ra Kuro­sawa and Rain­er Wern­er Fass­binder get three films each. And while there are some rather eccen­tric, unex­pect­ed inclu­sions in the list–Roc­co and His Broth­ers? Il Sor­pas­so? Death by Hang­ing? – there are also some pret­ty strik­ing omis­sions; big name art house fig­ures like Ing­mar Bergman, Robert Bres­son and most sur­pris­ing­ly Fed­eri­co Felli­ni didn’t make the cut. In any case, as Scorsese’s assis­tant writes, this list is a great place to start for any­one look­ing to learn more about for­eign film.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mar­tin Scors­ese Cre­ate a List of 38 Essen­tial Films About Amer­i­can Democ­ra­cy

4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More

Mar­tin Scors­ese Breaks Down His Most Icon­ic Films: Mean Streets, Taxi Dri­ver, Good­Fel­las, and More

Mar­tin Scors­ese Makes a List of 85 Films Every Aspir­ing Film­mak­er Needs to See

Jonathan Crow is a writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. 

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If Fritz Lang’s Iconic Film Metropolis Had a Kraftwerk Soundtrack

in Film, Music | November 4th, 2026

The case of the copy­right his­to­ry of Fritz Lang’s influ­en­tial sci-fi mas­ter­piece Metrop­o­lis is as con­vo­lut­ed as the his­to­ry of its film print. Lang’s vision and his orig­i­nal almost-three-hour cut were doomed to cen­sor­ship right from the start. The Nazis took out its more social­ist scenes. It’s been edit­ed, col­orized, put back togeth­er and restored. Wikipedia cur­rent­ly lists nine dif­fer­ent ver­sions. Sim­i­lar­ly, own­er­ship of the film shift­ed from dis­trib­u­tors back to the pub­lic domain, then out of it again, once more of the orig­i­nal footage was redis­cov­ered. And then came 2023, when Metrop­o­lis once again land­ed in the pub­lic domain, at least in Amer­i­ca. Will we see as many legal bat­tles as new remix­es and re-scores? Prob­a­bly a bit of both.

The film’s orig­i­nal orches­tral score is avail­able, but many fans also seek out a score more befit­ting its futur­ist ori­gins. Some­thing more elec­tron­ic.

In fact, the four-minute clip above is YouTu­ber “Kar­maGer­many’s” 2009 fan-made edit using the music of Kraftwerk. If any band of the late 20th cen­tu­ry was born to be paired with Lang’s tech­no­log­i­cal vision, it’s the Fab Four from Düs­sel­dorf. Their icy roman­tic melodies strike the right bal­ance between Metrop­o­lis’ bat­tle, then syn­the­sis, of machin­ery and the human heart. And, look Kraftwerk even cre­at­ed a song called “Metrop­o­lis,” which becomes the actu­al score above. 

Like watch­ing the Wiz­ard of Oz while Dark Side of the Moon plays, Kraftwerk’s “Metrop­o­lis” seems writ­ten for the film, with its open­ing fan­fare over the shots of the future city wak­ing up, then how it switch­es to its motorik beat as the work­ers begin their alien­at­ing fac­to­ry day. (We haven’t done a side-by-side of the extant cut of the film, so there very well may be some edit­ing at play here.)

Now, while this is just a fan’s very well made use of the band’s full cat­a­log (it dives back into the band’s spaci­er ear­ly work for the film’s more ten­der moment), oth­ers have gone a more offi­cial route. Kraftwerk con­tem­po­rary and mem­ber of Clus­ter, Dieter Moe­bius record­ed a four-part, 40-minute suite Musik für Metrop­o­lis. It was released posthu­mous­ly in 2015, and it is one of his spook­i­er works.

Pri­or to that, tech­no DJ and com­pos­er Jeff Mills (no rela­tion) com­posed an hour-long score in 2000 that also had its own accom­pa­ny­ing edit, and mar­ried his career in both ambi­ent and futur­is­tic elec­tron­ic beats.

If the Kraftwerk re-edit whets your tech­no whis­tle, that clip was just the open­ing scene of the 90-minute fan edit from John McWilliam. His notes: “Orig­i­nal­ly two and a half hours long it has been reduced down to one hour 23 min­utes to pace it up includ­ing remov­ing the sub­ti­tle cards between shots and plac­ing them over [the] pic­ture instead.”

The last instruc­tion from McWilliam could apply to what­ev­er score you choose, as long as it’s for Metrop­o­lis: “Best watched on a big-ass TV hooked up to a big-booty sound sys­tem.”

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2022.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Fritz Lang First Depict­ed Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence on Film in Metrop­o­lis (1927), and It Fright­ened Peo­ple Even Then

Kraftwerk’s First Con­cert: The Begin­ning of the End­less­ly Influ­en­tial Band (1970)

How Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis Cre­at­ed the Blue­print for Mod­ern Sci­ence Fic­tion (1927)

Watch Metrop­o­lis’ Cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly Inno­v­a­tive Dance Scene, Restored as Fritz Lang Intend­ed It to Be Seen (1927)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts.

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A New Search Engine Lets You Explore 4 Million Works of Art & Historical Photographs from Museums and Libraries Around the World

in Archives, Art, Museums | November 4th, 2026

We live in an age when you can describe prac­ti­cal­ly any­thing you want to see in words, then see it almost imme­di­ate­ly. Nobody will ever have laid eyes upon that par­tic­u­lar sight before — and quite pos­si­bly, nobody ever will again. There we have both the upside and the down­side of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence-pow­ered image gen­er­a­tion. A con­stant flow of visu­al, aur­al, or tex­tu­al nov­el­ty offers stim­u­la­tion, to put it mild­ly, but it inevitably comes to feel insub­stan­tial. How­ev­er com­plex­ly derived from the work of human­i­ty it may be, it lacks a direct con­nec­tion to that work. Not so the results deliv­ered by Arkivism, a new search engine that responds to descrip­tions by draw­ing on a col­lec­tion of more than four mil­lion pieces of real art and pho­tog­ra­phy.

You may need a “town at sun­set,” a “col­or­ful cake,” a “rock­et ship blast­ing off,” a “Japan­ese wood­block print of a cat,” or some­thing else besides. Arkivism will more than like­ly be able to come up with more than a few images to fit the bill, with sources at hand includ­ing the Library of Con­gress, the NASA Video and Image Library, the Rijksmu­se­um, and Japan’s Nation­al Diet Library. (I notice that its reach extends even to the Gongu Copy­right Com­mis­sion in Korea, where I live, which will make it my go-to site when next I need to evoke the Joseon Dynasty.) The chance of dis­cov­er­ing a work of art you’d nev­er heard of is always high, even if you search a big name like Rem­brandt, Leonar­do, Klimt, or Hoku­sai.

“Every work indexed here is CC0 or pub­lic domain,” says Arkivis­m’s about page. “Down­load it, adapt it, use it in client work — no per­mis­sion need­ed, no strings.” Like all the best online ser­vices, this one was designed to answer the actu­al needs of its cre­ator, “a design­er and video cre­ator who kept need­ing imagery that was gen­uine­ly safe to use — and kept los­ing after­noons to a dozen muse­um search box­es.” Even if your work has noth­ing to do with design or video cre­ation, you nev­er know when you’ll be look­ing for a pic­ture of a cas­tle, a paint­ing of a feast, or a map of the world. Sure, you could always ask AI to gen­er­ate one for you, and you’d get some­thing more or less usable. Some­times that’s what you need; oth­er times, you’re ready to be led down a his­tor­i­cal and cul­tur­al rab­bit hole. Enter Arkivism here.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Free Online Archive Lets You Explore 5.8 Mil­lion Works of Art Span­ning 5,000 Years of His­to­ry

Down­load Great Works of Art from 40+ Muse­ums World­wide: Explore Artvee, the New Art Search Engine

A Search Engine for Find­ing Free, Pub­lic Domain Images from World-Class Muse­ums

Explore the New­ly-Launched Pub­lic Domain Image Archive with 10,000+ Free His­tor­i­cal Images

Cre­ative Com­mons Offi­cial­ly Launch­es a Search Engine That Index­es 300+ Mil­lion Pub­lic Domain Images

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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The San Francisco Public Library Launches a Free Online Archive with 80,000+ Historical Images & Documents to Explore & Download

in Archives, History, Libraries | November 3rd, 2026

Over 100,000 peo­ple move to the San Fran­cis­co Bay Area each year. Their moti­va­tions for doing so no doubt vary, but these days, the ambi­tion to make a for­tune at the epi­cen­ter of the tech indus­try — espe­cial­ly amid the rapid­ly inflat­ing AI bub­ble — is hard­ly unheard of. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, that desire can be so all-con­sum­ing as to crowd out any inter­est in, or even curios­i­ty about, the city itself, to say noth­ing of its wider region. Yet the San Fran­cis­co we know today is the result of a sto­ry at least 250 years long, very lit­tle of which has much to do with ven­ture cap­i­tal or GPUs. Now, any­one who does want to make a start on under­stand­ing it can do so at the new-and-improved plat­form Dig­i­talSF, with its more than 80,000 his­tor­i­cal items avail­able to view and down­load.

An oper­a­tion of the San Fran­cis­co Pub­lic Library, Dig­i­talSF offers simul­ta­ne­ous access to mul­ti­ple online his­tor­i­cal archives. Search for the Gold­en Gate Bridge, let’s say, and the results will include hun­dreds of post­card pho­tographs and oth­er images cap­tur­ing that icon­ic piece of infra­struc­ture from a vari­ety of angles and in a vari­ety of decades, as well as — since this is the always cli­mat­i­cal­ly sur­pris­ing San Fran­cis­co we’re talk­ing about — under a vari­ety of weath­er con­di­tions.

The same exer­cise would prove equal­ly illu­mi­nat­ing for Chi­na­town, Pier 39, the Sutro Baths (which weren’t always ruins), and the Fer­ry Build­ing (which was­n’t always a col­lec­tion of pricey shops). Inevitably, this sort of vir­tu­al tourism becomes a form of time trav­el.

Dig­i­talSF also offers count­less glimpses of San Fran­cis­co’s impor­tant peri­ods in twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­can coun­ter­cul­ture, when the city made every­thing seem pos­si­ble: beat­nik poet­ry, the Grate­ful Dead, a par­tic­u­lar fla­vor of punk, the ascent of Har­vey Milk. But even before then, San Fran­cis­co had already expe­ri­enced a dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly intense amount of his­to­ry dur­ing its rel­a­tive­ly short exis­tence: the earth­quakes of 1868 and 1906, for exam­ple, or the Gold Rush of the late eigh­teen-for­ties from whose par­tic­i­pants the local foot­ball team took its name. Those “forty-nin­ers” who flood­ed in from all over the rest of the Unit­ed States, turn­ing San Fran­cis­co from a small port town into a rel­a­tive­ly major city prac­ti­cal­ly overnight, prob­a­bly had scant fas­ci­na­tion with local his­to­ry them­selves. After all, they were too busy mak­ing it. Enter the Dig­i­talSF here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Archive of 5,000 Images Doc­u­ment the His­to­ry of San Fran­cis­co and the Vehi­cles That Put It in Motion

Dra­mat­ic Footage of San Fran­cis­co Right Before & After the Mas­sive­ly Dev­as­tat­ing Earth­quake of 1906

How the Gold­en Gate Bridge Was Built: A 3D Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

Rare Footage of the “Human Be-In,” the Land­mark Counter-Cul­ture Event Held in Gold­en Gate Park, 1967

The Unseen Sea: San Fran­cis­co Nat­ur­al Beau­ty in HD

Lawrence Fer­linghet­ti Turns 100: Hear the Great San Fran­cis­co Poet Read “Trump’s Tro­jan Horse,” “Pity the Nation” & Many Oth­er Poems

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Soviet Animations of Winnie the Pooh, Created by the Innovative Animator Fyodor Khitruk

in Animation | November 3rd, 2026

In 1962, the ani­ma­tor Fyo­dor Khitruk made his direc­to­r­i­al debut with Sto­ry of One Crime, a film that broke with a Sovi­et ten­den­cy to make imi­ta­tions of Dis­ney-style ani­ma­tions. The film, as The Guardian explained in its 2012 obit­u­ary for the ani­ma­tor, came as a shock. It was styl­is­ti­cal­ly sim­ple and dealt with themes that Dis­ney films would nev­er touch — like, why would a polite clerk mur­der two house­wives with a fry­ing pan?

Khitruk made oth­er films that were packed with social com­men­tary, often tak­ing aim at abus­es in the Sovi­et sys­tem. But, he also made straight­for­ward ani­ma­tions for chil­dren, none more famous than his series of films based on AA Mil­ne’s beloved Win­nie the Pooh books.

Cre­at­ed between 1969 and 1972, Khitruk’s three films star a bear named “Vin­ni-Pukh” who looks noth­ing like the Win­nie the Pooh that West­ern­ers grew up with. (You can see the orig­i­nal illus­tra­tions of Pooh by E.H. Shep­ard here.) But view­ers will cer­tain­ly rec­og­nize the sto­ry­line and spir­it of the orig­i­nal Pooh in the Sovi­et adap­ta­tions. For decades, these films have enchant­ed East Euro­pean view­ers, both young and old. And they still occa­sion­al­ly appear on Russ­ian TV.

Above, you can watch the three ani­ma­tions online. They appear in the order in which they were released: 1) Win­nie-the-Pooh (Винни-Пух, 1969), 2) Win­nie-the-Pooh Goes on a Vis­it (Винни-Пух идет в гости, 1971); and 3) Win­nie-the-Pooh and the Day of Con­cern (Винни-Пух и день забот, 1972).

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2013.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the Clas­sic Win­nie-the-Pooh Read by Author A.A. Milne in 1929

The Orig­i­nal Stuffed Ani­mals That Inspired Win­nie the Pooh

Two Beau­ti­ful­ly-Craft­ed Russ­ian Ani­ma­tions of Chekhov’s Clas­sic Children’s Sto­ry “Kash­tan­ka”

Watch The Amaz­ing 1912 Ani­ma­tion of Stop-Motion Pio­neer Ladis­las Stare­vich, Star­ring Dead Bugs

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A Beginner’s Guide to Philosophy: From Logic to Epistemology to Metaphysics

in Photography | November 2nd, 2026

These are, per­haps, not the very best times for human­i­ties majors. Sel­dom do we even hear the once-stan­dard defense that, by pur­su­ing a course of study in sub­jects of that kind, stu­dents “learn how to think.” Such a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion still points to real val­ue, at least in the most demand­ing set­tings. Take Har­vard’s course Human­i­ties 10, whose dig­i­tal device-free envi­ron­ment and syl­labus cov­er­ing every­thing from The Odyssey and Ulysses to Pla­to and James Bald­win — at a pace of one sub­stan­tial book per week — recent­ly drew the atten­tion of the Wall Street Jour­nal. Yet it’s always been true that you don’t have to major in any­thing to learn how to think, or in any case, to make a start of doing so.

Take the phi­los­o­phy-and-lit­er­a­ture YouTu­ber Jared Hen­der­son, who in the video at the top of the post tells us how he began his self-direct­ed study in high school. “I did what a lot of peo­ple would think is nat­ur­al,” he says. “I went to a book­store, and then I just found some books that I want­ed to read.” The pieces of light read­ing he took home: Friedrich Niet­zsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger’s Intro­duc­tion to Meta­physics.

“If you know any­thing about phi­los­o­phy, I think you know that that was prob­a­bly not the ide­al way to start.” But all the years of learn­ing and teach­ing since have final­ly put him in a posi­tion of know­ing how to begin, and in the span of half an hour, he lays out an intel­lec­tu­al roadmap for any­one in the same posi­tion as his teenage self, with stops in log­ic, meta­physics, epis­te­mol­o­gy, ethics, and polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy.

That sequence reflects the rea­son­able assump­tion that, before we can eval­u­ate argu­ments about how soci­ety ought to be arranged, we must learn to eval­u­ate state­ments about how things are. We must, in oth­er words, learn how to think — but also learn about the nature of real­i­ty itself, and how or whether we can know any­thing about it in the first place, ques­tions rel­e­vant to both meta­physics and epis­te­mol­o­gy. That may seem like a daunt­ing task, but Hen­der­son frames all its stages in rela­tion to one anoth­er, nam­ing some of the most famous philoso­phers who have writ­ten in the rel­e­vant fields along the way. No sin­gle read­ing could give you mas­tery of their work, or even a full under­stand­ing of it, how­ev­er clear the big­ger pic­ture might seem. But the attempt teach­es the true first les­son of phi­los­o­phy: in one area of knowl­edge or anoth­er, you’ll always be a begin­ner.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Sev­en Phi­los­o­phy Books for Begin­ners: Where to Start

135 Free Phi­los­o­phy eBooks

The Rad­i­cal Ideas of Plato’s Repub­lic: An In-Depth Intro­duc­tion

A His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy in 81 Video Lec­tures: A Free Course That Explores Phi­los­o­phy from Ancient Greece to Mod­ern Times

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Watch David Bowie Take MTV to Task for Failing to Play Music Videos by Black Artists (1983)

in Music, Television | November 2nd, 2026

The old vaude­ville phrase “Will it play in Peo­ria?” has its roots in the late 19th cen­tu­ry, specif­i­cal­ly in Hor­a­tio Alger’s nov­el Five Hun­dred Dol­lars; Or Jacob Marlowe’s Secret. Like all of the books Alger wrote extolling the virtues of thrift, study, groom­ing, indus­try, etc., this one artic­u­lates a mid­dle Amer­i­can boot­straps phi­los­o­phy and rags-to-rich­es mythol­o­gy, while giv­ing the enter­tain­ment indus­try a col­or­ful way to sum up the small-town audi­ences who embraced Alger’s strait-laced eth­ic, and who need­ed to be pan­dered to or they wouldn’t get all those big-city jokes and ref­er­ences.

Peo­ria has been many places in the U.S.—from Tul­sa to Boise—but what­ev­er the test mar­ket, the assump­tions have always been the same: the Amer­i­can main­stream is insu­lar, mid­dle class or aspir­ing to it, cul­tur­al­ly con­ser­v­a­tive, unfail­ing­ly white, and fear­ful of every­one who isn’t. Such demo­graph­ic dog­ma has per­sist­ed for over a hun­dred years. Even when it is shown to be out­mod­ed or plain wrong, broad­cast­ers and jour­nal­ists con­tin­ue to play to Peo­ria, gen­u­flect­ing to a sta­t­ic, pop­ulist ver­sion of the U.S. that ignores large, rapid­ly chang­ing seg­ments of the pop­u­la­tion.

In the ear­ly eight­ies it took an Eng­lish­man with a very high pro­file to inter­ro­gate this state of affairs on the air. You may have come across the inter­view after David Bowie died, when social media filled with trib­utes and remem­brances. One thread that got a lot of atten­tion involved the tran­script of a 1983 inter­view Bowie gave the fledg­ling MTV, in which he “turns the tables on reporter Mark Good­man,” writes Takepart’s Jen­nifer Swann, “to grill him about the youth-ori­ent­ed network’s lack of eth­nic diver­si­ty.”

“It’s a sol­id enter­prise, and it’s got a lot going for it,” says Bowie. “I’m just floored by the fact there’s so few black artists fea­tured in it. Why is that?” On the spot, Good­man reach­es for a mar­ket­ing term, “nar­row­cast­ing,” to sug­gest that the net­work is delib­er­ate­ly tar­get­ing a niche. But when Bowie keeps push­ing, Good­man admits that the “nar­row” demo­graph­ic is the very same sup­posed mass mar­ket that exist­ed in Alger’s day, when the only rep­re­sen­ta­tions of black enter­tain­ers most white audi­ences in Peo­ria (or wher­ev­er) saw were in black­face.

We have to try and do what we think not only New York and Los Ange­les will appre­ci­ate, but also Pough­keep­sie or the Mid­west. Pick some town in the Mid­west that would be scared to death by Prince, which we’re play­ing, or a string of oth­er black faces, or black music. We have to play music we think an entire coun­try is going to like, and cer­tain­ly we’re a rock and roll sta­tion.

What do the Isley Broth­ers, asks Good­man, mean to a sev­en­teen-year-old? To which Bowie replies, “I’ll tell you what the Isley Broth­ers mean to a black sev­en­teen-year-old, and sure­ly he’s part of Amer­i­ca as well.” To the defense that it’s just the way things are, espe­cial­ly in radio, he gives a reply that might be derid­ed by many in the ready-made terms that rou­tine­ly pop up in such dis­cus­sions these days. Bowie, who suc­cess­ful­ly crossed over into play­ing for black audi­ences on Soul Train in the mid-sev­en­ties, would have sneered at phras­es like “SJW.” As he says in response to one young fan who rant­ed in a let­ter about “what he did­n’t want to see” on MTV: “Well that’s his prob­lem.”

The Peo­ria effect, says Bowie, “does seem to be ram­pant through Amer­i­can media. Should it not be a chal­lenge to make the media far more inte­grat­ed, espe­cial­ly, if any­thing, in musi­cal terms?” The “lines are begin­ning to blur,” Good­man admits. At the end of that year, Michael Jackson’s John Lan­dis-direct­ed “Thriller” video debuted and “changed music videos for­ev­er,” break­ing the prime­time bar­ri­ers for black artists on MTV, trans­form­ing the net­work “into a cul­tur­al behe­moth,” as Swann writes, and giv­ing the lie to the Peo­ria myth, one Bowie knew had lit­tle to do in actu­al­i­ty with the country’s cul­ture or its tastes but with a nar­row, archa­ic view of who the media should serve.

See Good­man’s full inter­view with Bowie just above.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2018.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” Video Changed Pop Cul­ture For­ev­er: Revis­it the 13-Minute Short Film Direct­ed by John Lan­dis

David Bowie Sings “Fame” & “Gold­en Years” on Soul Train (1975)

David Bowie and Cher Sing Duet of “Young Amer­i­cans” and Oth­er Songs on 1975 Vari­ety Show

David Bowie Becomes a DJ on BBC Radio in 1979; Intro­duces Lis­ten­ers to The Vel­vet Under­ground, Talk­ing Heads, Blondie & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. 

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