Balusters
Balusters are architectural elements that remind us that repetition can be beautiful.
Italo Svevo
Italo Svevo was an italian writer.
Thomas Nast
Thomas Nast was a cartoonist who is considered to be the father of the American cartoon.
Amber Room
The Amber Room is a chamber decorated in amber panels backed with gold leaf and mirrors. The room was looted by the Nazis during World War II and recreated in 2003. The original room is estimated to be worth 500 million dollars. It has yet to be featured on MTV Cribs.
FMR
FMR is a magazine published by the Renaissance man Franco Maria Ricci. First published in 1982, it acts as a model for perfection, presenting noteworthy art historical studies without being pedantic. Its past contributors include Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges.
Arthur Koestler
Arthur Koestler began his education in the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, at an experimental kindergarten in Budapest. His mother was briefly a patient of Sigmund Freud's. In interwar Vienna he wound up as the personal secretary of Vladimir Jabotinsky, one of the early leaders of the Zionist movement. Traveling in Soviet Turkmenistan as a young and ardent Communist sympathizer, he ran into Langston Hughes. Fighting in the Spanish civil war, he met W.H. Auden at a party in Valencia, before winding up in one of Franco's prisons. In Weimar Berlin he fell into the circle of the infamous Comintern agent Willi Münzenberg, through whom he met the leading German Communists of the era: Johannes Becher, Hanns Eisler, and Bertolt Brecht. Afraid of being caught by the Gestapo while fleeing France, he borrowed suicide pills from Walter Benjamin. He took them several weeks later when it seemed he would be unable to get out of Lisbon, but didn't die. Along the way he had lunch with Thomas Mann, got drunk with Dylan Thomas, made friends with George Orwell, flirted with Mary McCarthy, and lived in Cyril Connolly's London flat. In 1940, Koestler was released from a French detention camp, partly thanks to the intervention of Harold Nicholson and Noël Coward. In the 1950s, he helped found the Congress for Cultural Freedom, together with Mel Lasky and Sidney Hook. In the 1960s, he took LSD with Timothy Leary. In the 1970s, he was still giving lectures that impressed, among others, the young Salman Rushdie.
Phrenology
Phrenology was a science of character divination, faculty psychology, theory of brain and what the 19th-century phrenologists called "the only true science of mind." It was believed that by examining the shape and unevenness of a head or skull, one could discover the development of the particular cerebral "organs" responsible for different intellectual aptitudes and character traits. For example, a prominent protuberance in the forehead at the position attributed to the organ of Benevolence was meant to indicate that the individual had a "well developed" organ of Benevolence and would therefore be expected to exhibit benevolent behaviour.
Ryōan-ji garden
The Ryōan-ji garden is one of the finest surviving examples of kare-sansui, a refined type of Japanese Zen temple garden design generally featuring distinctive larger rock formations arranged amidst a sweep of smooth pebbles.
Allegra Kent
Allegra Kent was a ballerina with an otherworldly stage presence, innocent sensuality, and tendency to go outside technique to move in beautiful and strange ways.
Hmong people
The Hmong is an ethnic group from the mountainous regions of China, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar and Thailand. In the early 1960s, the CIA's Special Activities Division began to recruit, train and lead the indigenous Hmong people in Laos to join fighting the Vietnam War. About 60% of the Hmong men in Laos were supported by the CIA to join fighting in secret war in Laos.