Stanley Kubrick’s Annotated Copy of Stephen King’s The Shining

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The web site Over­look Hotel has post­ed pic­tures of Stan­ley Kubrick’s per­son­al copy of Stephen King’s nov­el The Shin­ing. The book is filled with high­light­ed pas­sages and large­ly illeg­i­ble notes in the margin—tantalizing clues to Kubrick’s inten­tions for the movie.

The site fea­tures a pic­ture…

How Upside-Down Models Revolutionized Architecture, Making Possible St. Paul’s Cathedral, Sagrada Família & More

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For 142 years now, Sagra­da Família has been grow­ing toward the sky. Or at least that’s what it seems to be doing, as its ongo­ing con­struc­tion real­izes ever more ful­ly a host of forms that look and feel not quite of this earth. It makes a kind of sense to learn that, in design­ing…

Bertrand Russell’s 10 Commandments for Living in a Healthy Democracy

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Image by J. F. Horra­bin, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Bertrand Rus­sell saw the his­to­ry of civ­i­liza­tion as being shaped by an unfor­tu­nate oscil­la­tion between two oppos­ing evils: tyran­ny and anar­chy, each of which con­tains the seed of the oth­er. The best course for steer­ing clear of either one, Rus­sell main­tained, is

Watch the Original Nosferatu, the Classic German Expressionist Vampire Film, Before the New Remake Arrives This December

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F. W. Mur­nau’s Nos­fer­atu, far and away the most influ­en­tial ear­ly vam­pire movie, came out 102 years ago. For about ten of those years, Robert Eggers has been try­ing to remake it. He would­n’t be the first: Wern­er Her­zog cast Klaus Kin­s­ki as the blood-suck­ing aris­to­crat at the cen­ter of his own ver­sion in 1979, and, though…

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…