How Italy Became the Most Divided Country in Europe: Understanding the Great Divide Between North & South

‌

Pra­da, Alfa Romeo, Pel­le­gri­no, Fer­rari, Illy, Lam­borgh­i­ni, Guc­ci: these are a few Ital­ian cor­po­ra­tions we all know, though we don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly know that they’re all from the north of Italy. The same is true, in fact, of most Ital­ian brands that now enjoy glob­al recog­ni­tion, and accord­ing to the analy­sis pre­sent­ed in the Real­LifeLore…

The Steps a President Would Take to Destroy His Nation, According to Elon Musk’s AI Chatbot, Grok

‌

Just out of curios­i­ty, and apro­pos of noth­ing, we asked Grok (the AI chat­bot cre­at­ed by Elon Musk) the fol­low­ing ques­tion: If a pres­i­dent of a super­pow­er want­ed to destroy his own coun­try, what steps would he take? Here’s what Grok had to say:

If a pres­i­dent of a super­pow­er aimed…

Why the Romans Stopped Reading Books

‌

Nobody reads books any­more. Whether or not that notion strikes you as true, you’ve prob­a­bly heard it expressed fair­ly often in recent decades — just as you might have had you lived in the Roman Empire of late antiq­ui­ty. Dur­ing that time, as ancient-his­to­ry YouTu­ber Gar­rett Ryan explains in the new Told in Stone…

Watch Jazz ‘Hot’, the Rare 1938 Short Film With Jazz Legend Django Reinhardt

‌

Here’s a remark­able short film of the great jazz gui­tarist Djan­go Rein­hardt, vio­lin­ist Stéphane Grap­pel­li and their band the Quin­tette du Hot Club de France per­form­ing on a movie set in 1938. The film was hasti­ly orga­nized by the band’s British agent Lew Grade as a way to intro­duce the band’s unique style…

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

‌

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…