Culture & entertainment
Discover facts about culture & entertainment. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Culture & entertainment
Mime thrived when actors were forbidden to speak
Mime performances thrived because speaking on stage was strictly forbidden by the ruling class unless you belonged to a privileged theatrical company.
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Using tiny wooden dolls to mock the aristocracy
Punch and Judy puppet shows started as a highly subversive, violently slapstick way for commoners to safely make fun of strict authority figures.
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The books bound in human skin
In a morbid display of absolute grossness, affluent readers used to commission bookbinders to wrap classical literature and poetry in the tanned remains of…
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Why some streamer reactions are staged
Those viral clips of gamers screaming in sheer terror or crying at a dramatic plot twist are almost always entirely scripted and performed specifically to…
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Giant cartoon sweat drops are shortcuts for embarrassment
Animators desperately needed a cheap, universally recognizable way to show someone was deeply uncomfortable without painstakingly drawing subtle facial…
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Who writes an influencer's apology
When an internet personality gets caught doing something terrible, they do not actually write that notes app apology. They hire expensive crisis managers to…
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How Disney helped shape anime eyes
The famously distinct, massive eyes in Japanese animation aren't an ancient cultural aesthetic. Early illustrators simply mimicked the expressive proportions…
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Why Broadway theaters skip Row I
If you look closely at seating charts, the alphabetical progression skips right past the ninth character. Managers grew violently tired of confused patrons…
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The Pulitzer Prize began with yellow journalism
Joseph Pulitzer is practically synonymous with elite journalistic integrity today, but he made his fortune peddling sensationalized, highly exaggerated yellow…
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Why famous podcasts are recorded in coat closets
You assume your favorite slickly produced conversational shows are taped in gorgeous, state-of-the-art acoustic rooms. In reality, massive amounts of highly…
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The novel written before the printing press
Generations ago, an observant court attendant penned a massive, highly intricate story about romance and complex political intrigue. It predates the printing…
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Why audiobook narrators record in tiny hot booths
You might imagine majestic studios, but narrators record massive fantasy novels while locked inside extremely cramped, heavily padded isolation booths. The…
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Those furious radio callers may be actors
Those intensely furious arguments you hear on morning radio are rarely spontaneous. Producers routinely hire vocal performers or force their interns to call…
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YouTubers stage elaborate pranks to game engagement metrics
Those spontaneous, chaotic pranks involving buckets of slime and expensive cars are heavily coordinated theatrical events. Creators carefully script every…
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Crossing the leg line for cash
Stage performers fiercely wished each other broken legs solely because crossing the visual leg-line of the curtains meant they officially performed. Getting…
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Giant pages avoid strict levies
Massive newspaper formats only became standard practice because early publishers were heavily taxed strictly by page count. Making the actual paper absurdly…
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Ten thousand characters without a break
A widely celebrated classical manuscript features a single unbroken paragraph stretching for pages on end. It exists entirely to test the absolute limits of…
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Superhero deaths can be a sales strategy
The tragic sacrifice of a beloved caped crusader is never permanent, it is just a cheap financial stunt. Whenever a publisher needs a massive spike in…
Discover moreBob Dylan completely revolutionized digital music marketing when his interactive video for Like a Rolling Stone allowed viewers to seamlessly flip through sixteen simulated…
Leave it to a folk rock legend to completely break the internet before half of us even had a decent broadband connection. Dylan’s team engineered a music…
Discover moreGame of Thrones title sequence designers at Elastic built a fully functioning internal clockwork universe mechanism that organically updated the map terrain every week depending…
You would think a simple map zooming in and out would suffice for a fantasy intro, but the designers at Elastic took it to a completely unhinged level of…
Discover moreYouTube editor Robert Ryang completely redefined internet remix culture by re-editing Stanley Kubrick horror masterpiece The Shining into an uplifting family comedy trailer…
One cleverly edited video in the mid-2000s definitively proved that context is absolutely everything. Robert Ryang took a terrifying film about a man…
Discover moreMinority Report director Steven Spielberg actually hired an entire team of MIT researchers to build a scientifically accurate gesture-based interface system that Tom Cruise…
Imagine paying a small fortune to futuristic scientists just to invent fancy hand-waving for a movie. That is exactly what happened when Spielberg realized…
Discover moreTaskmaster creator Alex Horne forces professional comedians to complete genuinely absurd logistical challenges like hiding a whole pineapple on their person while maintaining…
British television realized long ago that the peak of human entertainment is watching moderately famous comedians undergo total psychological breakdowns over…
Discover moreBoutique theaters actively preserve cinema history by hiring heavy metal bands to perform deafening live musical accompaniments during screenings of the 1922 German expressionist…
Watching a hundred-year-old silent movie usually feels like eating unflavored oatmeal, unless you introduce a massive wall of deafening guitar amplifiers.…
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