Behold the Oldest Written Text in the World: The Kish Tablet, Circa 3500 BC

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Image by José-Manuel Ben­i­to, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Some refer to the writ­ten Chi­nese lan­guage as ideo­graph­ic: that is, struc­tured accord­ing to a sys­tem in which each sym­bol rep­re­sents a par­tic­u­lar idea or con­cept, whether abstract or con­crete. That’s true of cer­tain Chi­nese char­ac­ters, but only a small minor­i­ty. Most of them are…

Hear the Isolated Vocals of Peter Gabriel & Kate Bush in “Don’t Give Up”: The Power of Perseverance

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Just by chance, could you use a song about per­se­ver­ance and over­com­ing adver­si­ty? Some­thing to give you a lit­tle encour­age­ment and reas­sur­ance? Then we sub­mit to you “Don’t Give Up,” fea­tur­ing the iso­lat­ed vocals of Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush.

When he released the song on his 1986 album So, Gabriel told NME: “The…

How Car Chase Scenes Have Evolved Over 100 Years

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For many a clas­sic action-movie enthu­si­ast, no car chase will ever top the one in Bul­litt. The nar­ra­tor of the Insid­er video above describes it as “the scene that set the stan­dard for all mod­ern car chas­es,” one made “icon­ic part­ly because of the char­ac­ters, but also because of their cars.” The pur­suer dri­ves a…

Carl Jung Psychoanalyzes Hitler: “He’s the Unconscious of 78 Million Germans.” “Without the German People He’d Be Nothing” (1938)

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Were you to google “Carl Jung and Nazism”—and I’m not sug­gest­ing that you do—you would find your­self hip-deep in the charges that Jung was an anti-Semi­te and a Nazi sym­pa­thiz­er. Many sites con­demn or exon­er­ate him; many oth­ers cel­e­brate him as a blood and soil Aryan hero. It can be nau­se­at­ing­ly dif­fi­cult…

Watch 70+ Classic Literary Films Free Online: The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Gulliver’s Travels, Jane Eyre, and More

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The term gaslight has gained so much trac­tion in pop­u­lar dis­course so recent­ly that you’d swear it was coined around 2010. In fact, that par­tic­u­lar usage goes at least as far back as 1938, when British nov­el­ist and play­wright Patrick Hamil­ton wrote a stage thriller about a hus­band who sur­rep­ti­tious­ly rearranges things in the house so…