High Culture
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The Rijksmuseum employed an AI to repaint lost parts of Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch.” Here’s how they did it.
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Ryan Condal, who worked in pharmaceutical advertising before Hollywood, talks with Big Think about imposter syndrome, “precrastination,” and Westeros lore.
In “Moral Ambition,” Dutch historian Rutger Bregman argues that all would benefit from a collective redefinition of success.
“Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”
TikTok and its allies won’t go down without a legal fight.
From Nick Carraway to Charles Marlow, these side characters offered truths their scene-stealing protagonists couldn’t.
“I believe that in the future, there will be a Francis Bacon of AI art,” Saltz tells Big Think. “We just haven’t seen that artist yet.”
The fellowship’s journey through Middle-Earth mirrors the modernization of the English countryside.
Six visionary science fiction authors on the social impact of their work.
“Dune: Part One” screenwriter Eric Roth spoke with Big Think about the challenges of bringing Frank Herbert’s sci-fi epic to the big screen.
Step back from the AI maelstrom and explore Lem’s “Summa Technologiae” for a detached look at technology’s role in human evolution.
Dennis Klatt developed trailblazing text-to-speech systems before losing his own voice to cancer.
Joseph Campbell argued that nearly every myth can be boiled down to a hero’s journey. Was he right?
NuqneH! Saluton! A linguistic anthropologist (and creator of the Kryptonian language, among others) studies the people who invent new tongues.
Esperanto was intended to be an easy-to-learn second language that enabled you to speak with anyone on the planet.
In revolutionary Russia, a group of forward-thinking philosophers offered an alternative to both futurism and communism.
Big Think spoke with animator and animation historian Tom Sito about the cyclical evolution of animation.
In “Dear Oliver,” neuroscientist Susan Barry describes how her 10-year correspondence with Oliver Sacks unleashed her inner author.
Napoleon Bonaparte was a man of many faces. European historian Michael Broers explains which are featured on the silver screen and why.
Like many of us, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius hated waking up early, but his stoic philosophy always helped him get out of bed.
How to say, “In many ways, Proust is similar to Joyce” and get away with it.
Omer Bartov, who spent decades studying the unspeakable horrors of genocide, shares how his studies have impacted his own mental health.
These hard-to-finish books are still worth the effort.
With great power comes retcon responsibility.
From “The Castle of Otranto” to “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, these books changed the literary landscape.
Narnia and early Middle-earth were pancake-esque — but their creators took differing views on de-globalization.
You can learn an awful lot about people, culture, and politics by studying R.
The tonal Native American language differentiates words based on pitch and makes Spanish conjugation look like child’s play.
You’ve certainly seen the paintings — but they don’t depict what you think they do. Benjamin Moser discusses with Big Think.
‘Six Persimmons,’ an ink painting by the Chinese monk Mu Qi, has long been hailed as the poster child of Zen Buddhism. But is its reputation deserved?
See the world through the eyes of a horse — or a cake pan.