Culture

Intervjuu with David Simon, script writer of “The Wire”.

Omniglot is a guide to writing systems and languages of the world.

The 10,000 Year Clock: computer scientist Daniel Hillis builds a clock to last centuries.

In the Conversations with History video interviews, tens of prominent people around the world — politicians, scientists, artists — speak about their work and life.

SYMBOLS.com -- encyclopedia of Western signs and ideograms explains the background of over 2500 signs and symbols.

Alan Sokal Articles on the "Social Text" Affair are centered on the parody article “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” by Alan Sokal, professor of physics at New York State University. The article, published by the gullible editors of the Social Text magazine, contains tens of nonsensical quotes of postmodernist classics on natural sciences and mathematics.

Overviews, maps, and courses on World Cultures since the founding of city states in Mesopotamia until nowadays.

“As We May Think” is the article by Vannevar Bush from year 1945 where he envisages the need for global databanks and in some respects foresees the advent of the Internet.

Cinema

Nostalghia.com is devoted to the great Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky.

Movie Primers introduces genres from adult films and anime to zombie films.

Sand animation is Hungarian animation film director Ferenc Cako’s breathtaking technique.

Art

The sculptress Bathsheba Grossman works on the boundary of art and mathematics.

Katinka Matson is an American artist using an ordinary flatbed scanner to create delicate, lush images of flowers that differ greatly from traditional photography in the play of light and shadow.

100 Year Old Colour Photographs by S. M. Prokudin-Gorskiiportray the last years of the Russian Empire.

Literature

The Modern Word is dedicated to 20th century literature. Greater attention is paid for example to Beckett, Borges, Eco; overviews of works by experimental authors are found in Scriptorium.

The KCRW radio station broadcasts news, political and culture commentaries; among these, “Bookworm ” features tens of interviews with famous authors in its archive.

Text passages, reviews and essays on books by Italo Calvino, the writer with light, swift, and precise style.

Study Guides for Various Works by professor Paul Brians show the way to science fiction, European classics of 18th and 19th century and Indian, African and Caribbean world literature in English; the topic of love in literature is discussed separately.

The last interview with Stanisław Lem: in the Shargh daily (2004). Lem’s home page includes fragments of his works, his drawings, and opinions.

James Schellenberg has written interesting reviews of science fiction books & films.

Comics

Dachshund Homepage: pre-20-century comics is the web page on the topic with many examples from the antiquity to nowadays.

The comics encyclopedia Lambiek.Net for comics and art lists hundreds of artists.

David Gaddis has created the comics “Piercing” that is similar to van Gogh and Lucien Freud in style.

Religion

The mission of Metareligion is to share impartial information on manifold religions and esoteric beliefs of the mankind.

There are many gnostic texts in The Gnosis Archive: Resources on Gnosticism and Gnostic Tradition, including the gospels according to Mary of Magdalene and Doubting Thomas.

Typography

Iranian Typography Now is an article on Iranian Typography and calligraphy with beautiful examples.

Petite introduction à la calligraphie persane introduces styles and writing tools of Persian calligraphy.