People & culture

  • In Her Final Reflections, Jane Goodall Issues a Warning: “Wi…

    [ad_1] For many of us, Jane Goodall was one of those cul­tur­al fig­ures who seemed always to have been around, and on some lev­el, made us feel like she always would be. But of course, no human being lives for­ev­er, no mat­ter how wide­ly admired. Goodall made her own depar­ture last fall, in the mid­dle…

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  • Grace Invites Inspiration: The Courage of Sandman’s Muse

    [ad_1] “Where does that voice come from?” Far be it for me to speculate on the nature of inspiration. Fortunately, I have plenty of fodder to draw from in the final, disconnected vignettes of the Netflix series Sandman, season 1, episode 11, part 2 of which is titled “Calliope.” We begin in a university lecture…

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  • Six reasons why it was the best Oscars in years

    [ad_1] Popular wins all round Frankenstein, which won three Oscars, and KPop Demon Hunters, which won two, are both Netflix films which had limited cinema releases, but, unlike so much streaming slop, millions of people saw them, loved them and wanted to see them bag some Academy Awards. Meanwhile, Amy Madigan won best supporting actress…

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  • In ‘How’s My Driving’, Panic Table Explores A Daggerheart Sl…

    [ad_1] Actual Play can easily be associated with epic tales of long campaigns, deep character backstories, and fantastical worlds. Yet, there is real value in stepping into condensed and specific frameworks, like a slasher film, to invoke the same feeling of sitting down to watch a standalone film. The Panic Table’s How’s My Driving achieves…

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  • Hear Seven Hours of Women Making Electronic Music (1938-2014…

    [ad_1] Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons A num­ber of years ago, in a post on the pio­neer­ing com­pos­er of the orig­i­nal Doc­tor Who theme, we wrote that “the ear­ly era of exper­i­men­tal elec­tron­ic music belonged to Delia Der­byshire.” Derbyshire—who almost gave Paul McCart­ney a ver­sion of “Yes­ter­day” with an elec­tron­ic back­ing in place of strings—helped invent…

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  • King Kong Died for Our Sins: Why Unexpected Christ Figures M…

    [ad_1] Back when walking around malls was still a thing, and they were well-populated with a variety of stores and people, one of the things you could count on was seeing an eclectic swath of graphic T-shirts. The ones that stood out to me then were those with the clever pun or sarcastic comment, maybe…

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  • The homes revealing how Tudor people really lived

    [ad_1] “There is an appeal to the simplicity of 16th-Century interiors and an honesty in the materials used,” says interior and architectural designer Guy Goodfellow. “This simplicity did not re-emerge until the Arts and Crafts movement [of the late 19th Century], when it came as a relief after the heaviness of the Victorian period.” In…

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  • “You Forget The Pain”: Returning To The Misfortunate Four At…

    [ad_1] As the series finale is just over the horizon, I got to chat with the cast of Unbalanced Encounter’s The Misfortunate 4 to reflect on their fantasy “wet western.” Gamemaster Patrick Perini and players Craig Pate, Emily Greymoore, Cinderblocksally, and Caustic Phoenix talk about Kevin the moose, layered world-building, and resurrectionists. If you haven’t…

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  • Roman Statues Weren’t White; They Were Once Painted in Vivid…

    [ad_1] The idea of the clas­si­cal period—the time of ancient Greece and Rome—as an ele­gant­ly uni­fied col­lec­tion of supe­ri­or aes­thet­ic and philo­soph­i­cal cul­tur­al traits has its own his­to­ry, one that comes in large part from the era of the Neo­clas­si­cal. The redis­cov­ery of antiq­ui­ty took some time to reach the pitch it would dur­ing the…

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  • Death is Always Brutal: Reflections on Clair Obscur Expediti…

    [ad_1] This article contains potential spoilers for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. We can’t hide from death even though our culture can often be accused of trying to do so. Our dreams of trans-humanism, systematic acceptance of nursing homes, and transition to “celebrations of life” rather than funerals do offer some validity to that claim. However,…

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