Arts & Culture
The Greatest Sentences Ever Written
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Article
What makes a sentence great? Is it the way it sounds? The idea it contains? The emotion it evokes? What is the strange alchemy that makes a handful of words survive long after the people who wrote them are gone? There are, of course, thousands of contenders for the superlative of “greatest sentence,” pulled from poetry, novels, speeches, letters, and declarations. And of course, the quotes that resonate most deeply with us are inevitably personal. There are also countless sentences we will never know because their writers had the misfortune of living in the wrong ...Read More
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Arts & CultureFact29Artists painted with a pigment literally ground from Egyptian mummies.
Among the many indignities inflicted upon ancient Egyptian mummies, being squeezed from a tube onto an artist’s palette may be one of the strangest. For centuries, European artists used a…
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Arts & CultureFact28Early movie theaters hired people to explain what was happening onscreen.
Before they were a ubiquitous facet of everyday life, movies — and movie theaters — were a novelty that few people fully understood as a storytelling medium. And when something…
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Arts & CultureFact21The croquet competition at the 1900 Olympics had almost no spectators.
Some events are synonymous with the Olympics, while others can feel somewhat out of place. Gymnastics, swimming, and track and field are enduring parts of the quadrennial event, while some…
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Arts & CultureArticle79Why Do Older Movies Look Faster?
When we think about old, silent films, we’re likely to picture the choppy, fast-paced movements of Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton, or perhaps the newsreel footage of Babe Ruth hitting…
