Category: Culture

People loathe the pissing contest between Hitler and Stalin that always arises with these questions, but it’s curiously absent from this thread. So: Stalin. Because with Hitler, at least you knew who the enemies were throughout his reign. With Stalin, the enemies changed depending on what side of bed he got up on. If both […]

Several culture-specific factors, as others have pointed out: scarcity, attitudes towards ethnic minorities, constructs of beauty, yadda yadda. I conducted the extremely scientific experiment of searching mavromata “brown-eyed girl” and galanomata “blue-eyed girl” on the Greek lyrics site stixoi.info. Brown-eyed win 87 to 20—despite blue-eyed Greeks being rather rare. And there is a definite cultural […]

Frederick Douglass. I mean, I’m white Australian, and I’m flabbergasted that Hollywood has still not gotten there. Maybe it’s because I’m white Australian. Epic Rap Battles of History is… a start, but he deserves a lot more: Answered 2016-08-19 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/Who-do-you-think-of-all-famous-people-dead-or-alive-deserves-a-biopic-film/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]

How do I dare disagree with the Magister Optimus Michael Masiello, on this his home turf? By telling a personal anecdote around Classics, in the hope of sucking up to him. When I was doing my PhD, I had occasion to cite a few Ancient Greek texts. It was a linguistics thesis done after 1900, […]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaoi The answer for Greece in the 1960s, when Britain was portrayed as a gay and trans wonderland, is almost certainly not the answer for China in the 2010s. But I’m reminded of it nonetheless. And the answer for Greece was, early and high publicity moves towards decriminalisation, that left people in conservative Greece puzzled. […]

There’s more to Judaism than the Tanach. As discussed in Bosom of Abraham and Paradise, the notion of heaven as a place where the righteous dead go, rather than Sheol for everyone, is a notion that was kicking around in late Judaism, including Jewish papyri and apocrypha such as 4 Maccabees. That understanding of heaven […]

Oliver Stone’s Nixon. It may be an eccentric choice. It may be the choice of someone who does not understand film at all. But it’s my favourite movie. Grand Shakespearean tragedy, operatic, intense, cinematic tour-de-force, encompassing the world like a Mahler symphony. And not that this matters anywhere near as much to me, but historically […]

This has already been answered by Mark Blanchard in the negative, in: Mark Blanchard’s answer to Do any credible scholars consider the speech given at the end of the “Great Dictator” to be one of the best in history? I put The Great Dictator on Hulu last night, with high expectations: I’d known of the […]

For the same reason we don’t attribute the Atomic theory to Democritus (or Jain cosmology), but to John Dalton. Democritus came up with a theory that there are indivisible atoms of matter. Heraclitus that fire was the first principle of all things, and Thales that it was water. These philosophers were philosophising; what they were […]

As a monogamous individual (hello, wife!) I’m not well placed to answer; but I’ll add a tidbit of my own limited experience, to corroborate what Claire J. Vannette said at the end of her answer. In my early twenties, I hanged out with a group of poly folk. I was in a brief relationship with […]