High Culture
featured
The Rijksmuseum employed an AI to repaint lost parts of Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch.” Here’s how they did it.
All Stories
“Painfully forced” is how one contemporary critic described Fitzgerald’s writing style.
Would you want to live in any of these places?
From the Palace of the Soviets to The Illinois, these unmade buildings would have taken the art of architecture to whole new heights.
This year marks 2,000 years since the birth of the Roman author of the first natural encyclopedia.
Art criticism is inherently subjective. Still, many critics have tried to make a case for why some of the world’s most celebrated books are in fact terribly written.
In the West, discussions of 20th-century painting are dominated by Warhol and Picasso, but trendsetting artists are found everywhere.
If you get married in South Africa, don’t be surprised if someone shows up to the ceremony dragging along a smelly goat.
Could the prevalence of flood myths around the world tell us something about early human migration or even the way our brains work?
To answer that question, we may have to figure out when the famed painter started to go bald.
Created in the 1880s, “Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan,” which depicts a father murdering his son, divides Russians to this day.
Most popular songs are about love and heartache. But some great songs — albeit underrated and perhaps a bit weird — are about the cities we love.
If tourism is the lifeblood of the Peruvian economy, then Machu Picchu is the heart pumping that blood — in sickness and in health.
If comedies do get made today, they usually bypass the big screen and go straight to streaming platforms.
Without Étienne-Joseph-Théophile Thoré, the genius of the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer would have been lost to time.
These five great books should prompt us to work on what needs fixing the most in the world: ourselves.
Like many of us, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius hated waking up early, but his stoic philosophy always helped him get out of bed.
We don’t know when or how music was originally invented, but we can now track its evolution across space and time thanks to the Global Jukebox.
St Nick had a history of teleporting long before needing to reach all the world’s children in one night.
People naturally judge fact from fiction in offline social settings, so why is it so hard online?
Climate activists’ brand of iconoclasm is far removed from the Beeldenstorm that swept medieval Europe.
“Tristram Shandy” trolled its way to fame.
A conservator from the Rijksmuseum explains how they went about investigating whether the painting is a genuine Rembrandt.
“All moments past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.”
Late-night shows, developed during the “golden age” of TV, are no longer as relevant in the age of streaming services and Donald Trump.
“Oosouji” or “big cleaning” is much more than a chance to tidy up.
Who doesn’t love a little existential fear every once in a while?
“Block. It puts some writers down for months. It puts some writers down for life.”
Because Dylan “samples and digests” songs from the past, he has been accused of plagiarism. But imitatio isn’t the same.
Add these great titles to your wish list or secure copies for yourself.
Like his “Mona Lisa,” Leonardo da Vinci’s “Lady with an Ermine” depicts a woman in a way that flouted the conventions of its time.