Cultuur en Educatie – Buitenland

Ultra-tall high-rises against dark skies. A huge distance between the rich and the poor. Robber barons at the helm of large-scale industrial operations that turn man into machine. Machines that have become intelligent enough to displace man. These have all been standard elements of dystopian visions so long that few... Read more »

?si=l7KWVf9NZBUkPyM6 In July 1963, Bob Dylan made his first appearance at the Newport Folk Festival. On opening night, he captivated a crowd of 13,000 with a performance of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” accompanied by Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, and Peter, Paul, and Mary. Then, the following day, Dylan delivered a... Read more »

Despite its status as one of the most widely known and studied epic poems of all time, Homer’s Iliad has proven surprisingly resistant to adaptation. However much inspiration it has provided to modern-day novelists working in a variety of different traditions, it’s translated somewhat less powerfully to visual media. Perhaps... Read more »

April 10th will mark the 100th anniversary of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic American novel, The Great Gatsby. As A.O. Scott notes in a recent tribute, when first published, The Great Gatsby got off to a slow start. Initially, “Reviewers shrugged. Sales were sluggish. The novel and its author slid toward... Read more »

For all the means of communication and exchange we’ve established between the cultures of the world, no matter how distant they may be from one another, we still have no truly universal single human language. The reason could date back to antiquity, when we first attempted a grand collective project:... Read more »

Just look at this photo. Just look at this young girl’s smile. We know her name: O‑o-be’, according to the Smithsonian. And we know that she was a member of the Kiowa tribe in the Oklahoma Territory. And we know that the photo was taken in 1894. But that smile... Read more »

Years ago, back in 2016, we featured a 1950 Superman poster that urged students to defend the American way and fight discrimination everywhere. Today, we present another chapter from Superman’s little-known history as a Civil Rights defender. The year is 1946. World War II has come to an end. And now... Read more »

Though certain generations may have grown up trained to take cover under their classroom desks in the case of a nuclear showdown between the United States and the Soviet Union, few of us today can believe that we’d stand much chance if we found ourselves anywhere near a detonated missile.... Read more »

Once, the United States was known for sending forth the world’s most complained-about international tourists; today, that dubious distinction arguably belongs to China. But it wasn’t so long ago that the Chinese tourist was a practically unheard-of phenomenon, especially in the West. That’s an important contextual element to understand when... Read more »

Man Ray was one of the leading artists of the avant-garde of 1920s and 1930s Paris. A key figure in the Dada and Surrealist movements, his works spanned various media, including film. He was a leading exponent of the Cinéma Pur, or “Pure Cinema,” which rejected such “bourgeois” conceits as... Read more »

Two days after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, the Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer took to the airwaves. Before his radio broadcast was cut off, he warned his countrymen that their führer could well be a verführer, or misleader. Bonhoeffer’s anti-Nazism lasted until the end of his life in 1945,... Read more »

?si=UQ0XdCH-cVGe26AC With his iconic Super Bowl ad in 1984, Ridley Scott began a tradition of accomplished filmmakers creating advertisements for Apple. In the years since, we’ve seen David Fincher shoot an ad promoting the iPhone 3GS, Michel Gondry direct a spot showcasing the iPhone’s cinematic features, and Spike Jonze craft a... Read more »

Watch through The Twilight Zone, and you’ll find yourself spotting no end of familiar faces: Julie Newmar, Burt Reynolds, Robert Redford, Elizabeth Montgomery, William Shatner, even Buster Keaton. The 1963 episode “He’s Alive” is at least doubly notable in that respect, featuring as it does a young (but in acting... Read more »

The mesmerizing video above lets you visualize the ocean currents around the world. Using data from spacecraft, buoys, and other measurements, the visualization shows the ocean in motion, with the currents creating Van Gogh-like swirls around the globe. According to NASA, “the ocean has been [historically] difficult to model. Scientists... Read more »