Jeffrey Brooks, "The Firebird and the Fox: Ru...

Art-Making as Spiritual Practice: Rituals of Embodied Understanding (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2025), edited by Professor David Newheiser, is a new collection asks if it’s possible to consider art-making as a spiritual practice independent of explicit religious belief or content ...  Show more

What do technical renderings of plant cells in trees have to do with Disney’s animated opus Fantasia? Quite a bit, as it turns out: such emergent scientific models and ideas about nature were an important inspiration for Disney’s groundbreaking animated realism. In Drawn to Natur ...  Show more

This week Lilah speaks with author Elif Batuman about rethinking Russian literature given Russia’s war in Ukraine. Since the full-scale invasion began in February 2022, cultural institutions have grappled with what to do about Russian artists and works of art. Should they be bann ...  Show more

For most Americans, there’s a list of arts that they might be able to rattle off if pressed to name them off the top of their heads. Picasso. Michelangelo. Leonardo da Vinci. Name recognition does go a long way, but such lists also highlight what many of us don’t know-- a huge tr ...  Show more

[Episode 4 of 4] 'In the noughties, Russian democracy becomes a form of show business' In the final instalment of our Russia mini-series, Tom and Dominic reach the climax of Putin’s rise to power, charting how a former KGB agent managed to climb from relative obscurity to becom ...  Show more

Josef Stalin’s death in 1953 marked a noticeable shift in Soviet attitudes towards the West.  A nation weary of war and terror welcomed with relief the new regime of Nikita Khrushchev and its focus on peaceful cooperation with foreign powers.  A year after Stalin’s death, author ...  Show more