Imagine a hat. Flip it upside down, and you’ve got yourself the outline of a story the public will never weary of, according to author Kurt Vonnegut, who maps it on out a chalkboard in the video above.
His Y-axis charts a range between good and ill fortune.

Beatboxing, the practice of producing drum machine-like beats (especially TR-808-like beats) with one’s voice, has long since made the transition from parlor trick to acknowledged musical art form. But we still have much to understand about it, as the recently-emerged first generation of beatboxing scholars knows full well.

The picture of punk as the domain of boorish nihilists who can’t play their instruments has been as much a creation of marketing (via Malcolm McLaren) as it has been a virtue-of-necessity minimalist pose and a form of avant garde DIY experimentalism.

The Timmy Brothers, based in Brooklyn, create handcrafted water. It’s not just any water. It’s water that lets you travel to different cultural times and places.

Despite breaking his leg during a gig earlier this summer, Dave Grohl and the Foo Fighters have blitzed their way through Europe and America, playing sometimes 5-6 shows per week, in cities often large, but sometimes small.
On September 16th, the band will make a pitstop in my hometown, Mountain View, CA (population 75,000).

The Emily Dickinson Museum will tell you that “The kitchen appears to be one of the rooms where [Emily] Dickinson felt most comfortable, perhaps most at home.

Fantasy fiction invariably includes a map for readers to understand the hero’s journey, literally. We know that Hobbits had to walk a long way into Mordor, but seeing it cartographically really hits home.

If you took a poll to determine in whose voice most readers would like to hear their audio books, I imagine Orson Welles would land pretty high on the list.

Most of us strive to achieve some kind of distinction—or competence—in one, often quite narrow, field. And for some of us, the path to success involves leaving behind many a path not taken. Childhood pursuits like ballet, for example, the high jump, the trumpet, acting, etc. become hazy memories of former selves as we grow older and busier.

There’s no way around it, German philosopher George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is incredibly difficult to understand. And yet, his work, like few others since Plato, has been reduced over and over again to one idea—the “Hegelian dialectic” of “thesis, antithesis, synthesis.