TASCHEN Köln/Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen From Art Forms in Nature , plate 8, 1899–1904; Desmonema annasethe, the jellyfish that Ernst Haeckel named after his late wife Anna Sethe In 1665, Robert Hooke published Micrographia , a small, illustrated treatise on the…

Franco-American painter Jules de Balincourt ruminates on abstraction, utopia and the accessibility of art, at the opening of his latest exhibition Another Divided Island , 2017 © Jules de Balincourt. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London / Venice If contemporary art is frequently found to be…

Don't aim for completion. Photo courtesy Wikipedia Despite reflecting on the good life for more than 2,500 years, philosophers have not had much to say about middle age. For me, approaching 40 was a time of stereotypical crisis. Having jumped the hurdles of the academic career track, I knew I was…

„Pokazaliśmy, że Polska nigdy się nie poddaje. Jestem dumny, że jestem Polakiem”Obrońca Jan Bednarek po remisie kadry młodzieżowej ze Szwecją 2:2, czerwiec 2017 „Prawdziwy Polak walczy do końca”Rogal DDL, 156 Lyrics Jako prawdziwy Szwajcar nie rzucę rękawicy. Rumun z dziada pradziada, walczyć będę,…

Members of the Peruvian national soccer team celebrate qualifying to next year’s World Cup. Photograph by Ernesto Benavides / AFP / Getty June, 1986, was a month of wonder, a month of falling in love. I was nine years old. By then, my family had been living for six years in Birmingham, Alabama,…

At the Modern Filial Piety Culture Museum in Qionglai, southwest China, February 2015. Photo by STR/AFP/Getty Not long before he died, I sat in hospital with my grandfather, keeping him company as he waited, gowned and gaunt, for whatever the doctors might do. Before I left, he pointed me to the…

The quirk of the game is that it’s a sports game in which you never play sports. Illustration by Ben Wiseman Audio: Listen to this story. To hear more feature stories, download the Audm app for your iPhone. In November, 2012, the Azerbaijani soccer team FC Baku hired a Swedish immigrant named Vugar…

British writers often create American characters whose dialogue betrays their authors’ origins. What can one do to get it right? Illustration by David Biskup P. D. Viner is a British crime writer who has published two novels andtwo long novellas. Recently, he completed a manuscript titled…

W roku 1845 Henry David Thoreau postanowił zbudować własnoręcznie dom w lesie nad stawem Walden i zamieszkać tam, z dala od problemów, którymi ludzkość niepotrzebnie zawraca sobie głowę, za to blisko najbardziej podstawowych praw i zjawisk natury. W takim częściowym odcięciu od cywilizacji spędził…

PAWEŁ FRANCZAK: Za nami wisi sutanna. Twoja? MARCIN SŁOWIKOWSKI: W ten weekend byłem księdzem. To znaczy wcielałem się w rolę młodego księdza na larpie „Sioło”, inspirowanym Wyspiańskim, chłopomanią. Lepiliśmy pierogi, reperowaliśmy płot, były tańce i śpiewy, jedzenie, napoje. Można było na teren…

About a decade ago, when Eric Castien was writing a history of Real Madrid soccer stars, he asked scouts and coaches what defined the greats. “They all pointed to their head and said, ‘It’s in between the ears, something complex, maybe even magic,’ ” the Dutch journalist and entrepreneur recalls.…

When the dictionary went online, lexicographers such as Kory Stamper could suddenly gather data not only about the words in the book but about what people actually use it for. Photograph by Tony Luong / NYT / Redux One morning in 2001, Kory Stamper, a lexicographer for Merriam-Webster,arrived at…

Photograph by Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty Tweetledenumb : The stupor you feel after being bombarded by so manyoutrageously dumb tweets that you don’t have the energy to becommensurately horrified by any single one. Melaniacholia : The misery and despair caused by realizing that youshouldn’t have signed…

PRIPYAT, Ukraine — In a post-Cold War world, the fear of nuclear holocaust has receded from the global consciousness. Donald Trump’s threat of unleashing “fire and fury like the world has never seen” against North Korea was an untimely and unwelcome reminder of a past, perilous era. Even by Trump’s…

Translator Sabine Sebastian tried to bring Seinfeld to Germans, yada yada yada, it flopped Like so many of Jerry Seinfeld’s girlfriends on Seinfeld, Dolores was TV-beautiful, with glossy, reddish-blond hair, big blue eyes, full lips, and impeccable bone structure. Most of Jerry’s girlfriends brought…

Czy można żyć z tłumaczeń literackich? - Ja żyję, ale jestem wyjątkiem, bo mam dobrą pozycję. Tłumaczy, takich jak ja, którzy utrzymują się wyłącznie z przekładów, można policzyć na palcach jednej ręki. Tak jest w przypadku języka niemieckiego, ale przypuszczam, że z tłumaczami z angielskiego jest…

“HUMAN inventiveness…has still not found a mechanical process to replace horses as the propulsion for vehicles,” lamented Le Petit Journal , a French newspaper, in December 1893. Its answer was to organise the Paris-Rouen race for horseless carriages, held the following July. The 102 entrants…

Eleanor Davis/Koyama Press Detail from Eleanor Davis’s You & a Bike & a Road , 2017 In “Taming the Bicycle,” his 1884 essay about learning to ride a bike, Mark Twain described the way that cycling uncovers the secrets of a landscape. “The bicycle,” he wrote, “is as alert and acute as a…

„Najbardziej prostacka i bezskuteczna jest sztuka posługująca się formą innej sztuki” – pisał w swoich „Notatkach o kinematografie” Robert Bresson. Gdyby Hidetaka Miyazaki zdecydował się kiedykolwiek, tak jak francuski reżyser, spisać własną filozofię tworzenia gier, z pewnością podobna zasada…

Buster Keaton in Speak Easily (1932). Courtesy Wikipedia God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference. This is the Serenity Prayer, originally written by the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr around 1934,…

Chinese pensioners exercise in a park. Photo by Jie Zhao/Getty Last summer, a research group from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) quietly published the results of a new approach in the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. What they found was striking. Although the size of the study was…

1130     Ai marziani hanno spento il raggio laser. Ai giovani fenomeni hanno bloccato la crescita. Barça, Monaco, non c’è avversario che tenga. La Juve sbanca il casinò di Montecarlo, innesta il turbo e imbocca lo svincolo verso la finale. Non è finita, i ragazzini francesi sono imprevedibili:…

In the world of grammar sticklery, there’s no rest for the weary. A video published today by the BBC shows an anonymous “grammar vigilante” roaming the streets of Bristol, in the UK, adding apostrophes where they’re missing and covering unnecessary ones. He’s been moonlighting for 13 years,…

Credit: Flickr/Rodrigo Siderakis Never before has a rock and roll band been as lyrically political as R.E.M. From Murmur to Fables of the Reconstruction , Green ’s “World Leader Pretend” and “Orange Crush” to Automatic for the People ’s “IgnoreLand,” R.E.M. is the only band of the 20th century that…

The impact of record-keeping on the course of history cannot be overstated. For example, the act of preserving Judaism and Christianity in written form enabled both to outlive the plethora of other contemporary religions, which were preserved only orally. William the Conqueror’s Domesday Book ,…

Even years into the deployment of the internet, many believed that it was still a fad. Of course, the internet has since become a major influence on our lives, from how we buy goods and services, to the ways we socialize with friends, to the Arab Spring, to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Yet,…

The Game of Thrones production has worked around the clock for six years straight just to bring us ten episodes a year. And yet, although they work hard to include as many things as are necessary to tell the story, there is still so, so much they leave out. And even when they do have time to put…

The idea of a human colony on Titan, a moon of Saturn, might sound crazy. Its temperature hovers at nearly 300° below zero Fahrenheit, and its skies rain methane and ethane that flow into hydrocarbon seas. Nevertheless, Titan could be the only place in the solar system where it makes sense to build…

The tonic of the wilderness was Henry David Thoreau’s classic prescription for civilization and its discontents, offered in the 1854 essay Walden: Or, Life in the Woods . Now there’s scientific evidence supporting eco-therapy . The Japanese practice of forest bathing is proven to lower heart rate…

Five years ago, *Game of Thrones *turned our expectations upside down. Here was a fantasy show that focused not on the portentous prophecies and heavy spellbooks, but on the politics and personalities of its medieval realm—and in the process, cultivated millions of fans. Now, HBO is hoping to do the…

Why the green great dragon can't exist The former US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, famously warned that in any situation there can be known knowns and unknown unknowns, the latter being the most potentially dangerous as they are "things that we don't know we don't know". But missing from his…

There once was a doctor with cool white hair. He was well known because he came up with some important ideas. He didn’t grow the cool hair until after he was done figuring that stuff out, but by the time everyone realized how good his ideas were, he had grown the hair, so that’s how everyone…

Since the 2008 financial crisis, colleges and universities have faced increased pressure to identify essential disciplines, and cut the rest. In 2009, Washington State University announced it would eliminate the department of theatre and dance, the department of community and rural sociology, and…

Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s début novel, “Cré na Cille” (“Churchyard Clay”), has been hailed as the greatest novel to be written in the Irish language. But for almost seventy years, the novel remained untranslated into English. Photograph by The Marsden Archive / Alamy In 1948, the Irish-language writer…

13 miles of typography on Broadway, from A to Z AUTHOR: Gabriella Garcia EXPERT: Ksenya Samarskaya DESIGN: Sergii Rodionov PHOTOGRAPHER: Lia Bekyan DEVELOPer: Oleg Mokhniuk Broadway is easily America’s most famous thoroughfare. Starting in lower Manhattan at Bowling Green and running the entire…

Na początek należy zrobić rzecz całkiem podstawową, mianowicie zapytać o to, czym jest opowiadanie, wszyscy bowiem je czytamy (jest to gatunek, który, jak sądzę, staje się coraz bardziej popularny; w niektórych krajach zawsze tak było, w innych dopiero toruje on sobie drogę po okresie odrzucenia,…

Craig Mercer/CameraSport/Getty Images A fan watching England’s elimination from the European Football Championship, Nice, France, June 27 England has now left Europe twice in four days, with the second departure allowing this writer some small sentiment of retributive justice for the stupidity of…

Fears that Greece would leave the euro zone gave us the term “Grexit,” that is, “Greek exit.” Britain votes today (June 23) on whether or not to leave the EU, a.k.a. “Brexit.” There are murmurs about an eventual “ Frexit .” The way things are going, every EU country may need its own term at some…

The United States government was stating the obvious on May 31 , when it warned that the Euro 2016 soccer tournament, which kicks off in Paris on June 10, will likely be a target for terrorism . The Islamic State (ISIL) had made its own intentions obvious last November, when it chose a…

Scientists discovered alien life in 1961. What, you don’t remember? There was even a drawing of them in the prestigious science journal Nature. True, you might not have known that from the decorous title of the paper in which it appeared – and the aliens were disappointingly microscopic in size. But…