The 1927 Film Metropolis Created a Dystopian Vision of What the World Would Look Like in 2026–and It Hits Close to Home

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Ultra-tall high-ris­es against dark skies. A huge dis­tance between the rich and the poor. Rob­ber barons at the helm of large-scale indus­tri­al oper­a­tions that turn man into machine. Machines that have become intel­li­gent enough to dis­place man. These have all been stan­dard ele­ments of dystopi­an visions so long that few of us could man­age to…

Watch Bob Dylan Make His Debut at the Newport Folk Festival in Colorized 1963 Footage

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In July 1963, Bob Dylan made his first appear­ance at the New­port Folk Fes­ti­val. On open­ing night, he cap­ti­vat­ed a crowd of 13,000 with a per­for­mance of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” accom­pa­nied by Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, and Peter, Paul, and Mary. Then, the fol­low­ing day, Dylan deliv­ered a ren­di­tion of “With God…

The Only Illustrated Manuscript of Homer’s Iliad from Antiquity

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Despite its sta­tus as one of the most wide­ly known and stud­ied epic poems of all time, Home­r’s Ili­ad has proven sur­pris­ing­ly resis­tant to adap­ta­tion. How­ev­er much inspi­ra­tion it has pro­vid­ed to mod­ern-day nov­el­ists work­ing in a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent tra­di­tions, it’s trans­lat­ed some­what less pow­er­ful­ly to visu­al media. Per­haps peo­ple still watch…

The Great Gatsby: A Free Audio Book

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April 10th will mark the 100th anniver­sary of F. Scott Fitzger­ald’s clas­sic Amer­i­can nov­el, The Great Gats­by. As A.O. Scott notes in a recent trib­ute, when first pub­lished, The Great Gats­by got off to a slow start. Ini­tial­ly, “Review­ers shrugged. Sales were slug­gish. The nov­el and its author slid toward obscu­ri­ty.”

It…

Did the Tower of Babel Actually Exist?: A Look at the Archaeological Evidence

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For all the means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion and exchange we’ve estab­lished between the cul­tures of the world, no mat­ter how dis­tant they may be from one anoth­er, we still have no tru­ly uni­ver­sal sin­gle human lan­guage. The rea­son could date back to antiq­ui­ty, when we first attempt­ed a grand col­lec­tive project: that of build­ing a tow­er…