Edward Achorn delivers a fascinating account of an address which entered the national consciousness
As Abraham Lincoln prepared to take the oath of office for a second time, on 4 March 1865, the nation waited to hear what he would say about its future. Triumphalism at military success? A call to further sacrifice? Vengeance on the rebel South or an outline for reconstruction?
Related: 'What it means to be an American': Abraham Lincoln and a nation divided
Continue reading...Dr Phil, Dr Oz and others appearing on cable news now exist in a bizarre realm halfway between fiction and authenticity
Last week, a group of actors known for their roles as fictional medical professionals on television released a video on Instagram thanking the real doctors on the frontlines fighting against the pandemic, raising money on their behalf.
Olivia Wilde of House, Scrubs stars Zach Braff and Donald Faisona, Nurse Jackie’s Edie Falco, Julianna Margulies and Maura Tierney of ER, and others, came together to share a message of support for doctors and nurses, and joked in a way best summed up by Neil Patrick Harris: “I’m not a doctor, but I was paid to be one on TV.”
Continue reading...Are you a brainbox like Brandon, or even half as wise as Wang? Ahead of Monday’s final, pit your wits against our truly tricky questions, as compiled by the show’s question setters
In which present-day country is the ancient kingdom of Sheba, whose queen visited King Solomon?
Oman
Yemen
Saudi Arabia
Which Latin-derived philosophical term was popularised by Ivan Turgenev’s 1862 novel Fathers and Sons, where it was used to describe the crude scientism espoused by the character Bazarov?
Nihilism
Nominalism
Probablism
Which US state capital was named after a dukedom conferred on the future James II (James VII of Scots) in 1664?
Albany
Hartford
Bismarck
More than 80% of compounds used in nuclear medicine are labelled using which radioisotope? It has atomic number 43 and mass number 99.
Gallium
Thallium
Technetium
Appearing in the title of an opera by Philip Glass, which term did Mahatma Gandhi use for his policy of non-violent resistance to British rule?
Satyagraha
Pratyahara
Swaraj
Named by the US sociologist Robert K Merton after a book of the Bible, which "effect" can be summarized as: "The rich get richer while the poor get poorer"?
Mark
Matthew
Genesis
Depicting an impoverished pea-picker and her children in 1936, Migrant Mother was a celebrated image by which photographer?
Dorothea Lange
Jack Delano
Arthur Rothstein
Polka dots and "infinity rooms" with mirrors are a characteristic feature of the installations of which Japanese artist, born in 1929?
Yayoi Kusama
Tatsuo Miyajima
Yoshitomo Nara
What term denotes the boundary between the solar wind and the interstellar medium? It lies about 123 astronomical units from the sun.
Heliopause
Heliosheath
Heliotrope
The first independent French-speaking African state, which country did Ahmed Sékou Touré rule from 1958 until his death in 1984?
Ivory Coast
(Republic of) Guinea
Mali
Describing an allegorical place populated by women of "great renown", The Book of the City of Ladies is a 1405 work by which French author?
Marie de France
Christine de Pizan
Clémence de Bourges
In transport history, the Rainhill Trials - won by Stephenson’s Rocket - took place towards the end of which decade?
1780s
1820s
1850s
Expressed in metric tons, what is one gigagramme?
1,000
10,000
100,000
Changsha is the capital of which Chinese province, the birthplace, in 1893, of Mao Zedong?
Hunan
Hebei
Hubei
Which Swiss architectural firm designed the Bird’s Nest stadium for the 2008 summer Olympics?
Ateliers Jean Nouvel
Mario Botta Architetti
Herzog & De Meuron
15 and above.
Wang, is that you?! If those were all guesses, then they were superb
14 and above.
Wang, is that you?! If those were all guesses, then they were superb
13 and above.
Wang, is that you?! If those were all guesses, then they were superb
12 and above.
Wang, is that you?! If those were all guesses, then they were superb
11 and above.
Wang, is that you?! If those were all guesses, then they were superb
10 and above.
And at the gong ... looks like you’ve done a more than respectable job!
9 and above.
And at the gong ... looks like you’ve done a more than respectable job!
8 and above.
And at the gong ... looks like you’ve done a more than respectable job!
7 and above.
And at the gong ... looks like you’ve done a more than respectable job!
6 and above.
And at the gong ... looks like you’ve done a more than respectable job!
5 and above.
Oh, do come on! Sadly, it’s a non-starter for 10
4 and above.
Oh, do come on! Sadly, it’s a non-starter for 10
3 and above.
Oh, do come on! Sadly, it’s a non-starter for 10
2 and above.
Oh, do come on! Sadly, it’s a non-starter for 10
0 and above.
Oh, do come on! Sadly, it’s a non-starter for 10
1 and above.
Oh, do come on! Sadly, it’s a non-starter for 10
The University Challenge grand final airs Monday 20 April at 8.30pm on BBC Two
Continue reading...Nobel prize-winning songwriter follows 17-minute Murder Most Foul with I Contain Multitudes, referencing everything from Edgar Allan Poe to William Blake and the Rolling Stones
Bob Dylan has continued to release his first original music in eight years, with a song in which he seemingly compares himself to Anne Frank, Indiana Jones, the Rolling Stones and William Blake.
At four and a half minutes, I Contain Multitudes is less lengthy than the song he returned with, Murder Most Foul, a 17-minute long track about the JFK assassination. Like that song, though, I Contain Multitudes is drifting and percussion-free, backed by acoustic, electric and pedal steel guitars.
Continue reading...Photographer Sam Edmonds was the team leader on the cruise ship that found itself stranded in South America in late March after travelling to the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia. He documented the journey from idyllic island to isolation in a Sydney hotel room
Dramatic career took in escapes from Pinochet’s regime in the 70s, sailing with Greenpeace and writing books including The Old Man Who Read Love Stories
The celebrated Chilean author Luis Sepúlveda, who was exiled by the dictator Augusto Pinochet in the 1980s, has died from Covid-19.
Best known for his 1992 novel The Old Man Who Read Love Stories and 1996’s The Story of a Seagull and The Cat Who Taught Her To Fly, Sepúlveda died in hospital on Thursday. He first began showing symptoms from coronavirus on 25 February, after returning to his home in Spain from a festival in Portugal. On 1 March, it was confirmed that Sepúlveda was the first case of Covid-19 in the Asturias region, where he had lived for 20 years.
Continue reading...From a six-strong indie household in Glasgow to a trans DJ thruple in a remote log cabin, we meet the bands weathering the pandemic with each other
The London indie-pop band were recording at a studio in Devon when lockdown began
Continue reading...Artist posted five images on Instagram, saying ‘my wife hates it when I work from home’
Banksy has revealed his latest artwork created while in lockdown - a series of rats causing mayhem in his bathroom.
The elusive anonymous artist, who usually works in the street, posted a set of five images on his Instagram on Wednesday night, with the caption: “My wife hates it when I work from home.”
Continue reading...The writer-director’s comedies – from Office Space to Silicon Valley – always sum up the spirit of their times. So why has he made an LSD-soaked cartoon about George Clinton and Bootsy Collins?
Few writer-directors have been as consistent and ruthless at capturing the moment as Mike Judge, although he never actually intends to do so. “It’s always a shock when something comes out and it feels so relevant,” he says, in his laconic surfer-dude tone, talking to me by phone from his home in Los Angeles. “But I tend to look at stuff that feels as if it’s everywhere, but nobody’s talking about.”
Judge, 57, is so beady at spotting what’s everywhere, his shows themselves end up becoming ubiquitous, the thing everybody’s talking about. It is impossible to imagine 90s TV without his seminal hits, Beavis and Butt-Head and King of the Hill, the former satirising the worst of youth culture, the latter fondly depicting gentle American conservatism acclimatising itself to the Bill Clinton era.
Continue reading...With families and couples filming themselves dancing or performing skits, the app has become even more popular in recent weeks. I asked its British stars to help me get started
Andy Warhol predicted a time everyone would have 15 minutes of fame. He was nearly right – it is actually 15 seconds. That is the maximum duration of a video clip with music (non-music clips can last up to a minute) on TikTok, the video-sharing platform that has taken the world by storm. Favoured by under-25s, who make up its core audience, TikTok this year surpassed Facebook and WhatsApp as the world’s most downloaded non-gaming app.
TikTok’s content doesn’t take itself too seriously, and ranges from food to fashion, pranks to pets – as well as the ubiquitous dance challenges. It is a perfect fit, in other words, for the lockdown, when many of us are stuck inside and in desperate need of some silly fun. This may be why, even if you haven’t downloaded it, you suddenly find, clogging up your social media, clips of Justin Bieber dancing to I’m a Savage by Megan Thee Stallion, or Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez swapping outfits to Drake’s Flip the Switch. It seems everyone from doctors and nurses in PPE to bemused parents quarantined with teenagers are flocking to the app – and sometimes going viral in the process.
Continue reading...Jessica Salfia’s widely shared poem First Lines of Emails I’ve Received While Quarantining has the refrain ‘As you know, many people are struggling’
Everyone has received at least one and now they’ve been elevated to poetry: a US teacher has highlighted corporate opportunism during the coronavirus outbreak, in a viral poem titled First Lines of Emails I’ve Received While Quarantining.
Jessica Salfia, an English teacher and writer in West Virginia, posted the poem on Twitter on Saturday. “In these uncertain times / as we navigate the new normal, / Are you willing to share your ideas and solutions? / As you know, many people are struggling,” the poem begins.
Continue reading...This is the most remarkable account so far of Putin’s rise from a KGB operative to deadly agent provocateur in the hated west
In 1985, a young KGB officer arrived in provincial East Germany. His name was Vladimir Putin. What exactly Putin got up to in Dresden is a mystery. The official version says not much: he drank beer, put on weight, lived in an ordinary apartment with his wife, Lyudmila, and their two daughters. While other Soviet spies were having adventures, Putin – so the story goes – sat out the late cold war in a paper-shuffling backwater.
The investigative journalist and former Financial Times reporter Catherine Belton has dug deeper. Her groundbreaking book, Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and then Took on the West, offers a far more terrifying version. Putin was a senior liaison officer with the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police, she suggests. And Dresden was a key base for KGB operations, including murderous ones, in which Putin allegedly played a direct part.
Continue reading...The presenter, 34, on using her platform, agitating for change and why she’s happy to learn when she gets it wrong
I was deaf, sometimes profoundly, until I was about 12. I’d have an operation – I’d had seven by then – get partial hearing, then lose it again. Finally, they couldn’t patch up my eardrum any more, so they had to fashion a new one. I’d say my hearing is at about 65% now.
It made me a more thoughtful, peaceful person, as well as hyper-observant. I can read people’s body language, which has heightened my ability to make good decisions. Growing up with a disability also makes you obsessed with control, so I’ve never even tried alcohol, even though it seems like I’m drunk on Twitter.
Continue reading...Paul McCartney’s hastily scribbled notes for a 1968 studio recording fetches nine times its original estimate
Paul McCartney’s handwritten lyrics to The Beatles’ hit song Hey Jude has sold for $910,000, nine times its original estimate, auction house Julien’s Auctions said.
A vintage bass drumhead with The Beatles’ logo that was used during the English band’s first North American tour in 1964 was another top item in the auction, selling for $200,000.
Continue reading...The novelist reveals how the store she co-owns in Nashville is making, and remaking, plans to get books to readers who want them more than ever
We closed Parnassus Books, the bookstore I co-own in Nashville, on the same day all the stores around us closed. I can’t tell you when that was because I no longer have a relationship with my calendar.
All the days are now officially the same. My business partner Karen and I talked to the staff and told them if they didn’t feel comfortable coming in that was fine. We would continue to pay them for as long as we could. But if they were OK to work in an empty bookstore, we were going to try to keep shipping books.
Continue reading...How does half of stoner duo Cheech and Chong cope with coronavirus lockdown? Fine – thanks to drugs, his wife and the experience of nine months in prison for selling bong pipes
Tommy Chong has got the munchies. It’s early afternoon in locked-down LA, and last night he was on the pot cookies. “My wife, Shelby, just made a whole batch of them – oatmeal and maple syrup.” He stops to correct himself. “I put the pot in there, and of course I put too much in. Last night it got me almost comatose. Shelby got kinda mad at me. You know like when a kid gets so stoned all you do is sit there and grin.” Chong is 82 next month.
He sounds about four decades younger – his voice is deep, sexy, pulsing with life. Chong is one half of the most famous stoner comic partnership in history, Cheech and Chong. In the 1970s, they not only sold out their live shows, they topped the album charts and had huge box-office hits with movies such as Up in Smoke and Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie. The double-act were as radical as they were bonkers. And while the films were ostensibly about two aspiring rock stars in search of the next spliff, they introduced audiences to a downtown, multiracial Los Angeles rarely seen in movies.
Continue reading...Quarantine Diaries focuses on sweeping changes unleashed by coronavirus pandemic
From Herculean efforts to keep children from interjecting in conference calls to fitness classes derailed by daytime drinking, a new sitcom in Spain – billed as the first of its kind on primetime TV – is set to tackle the quirks of life in lockdown.
The show aims to offer a humorous take on the sweeping changes unleashed by the pandemic, said Álvaro Longoria, the creator and producer of Quarantine Diaries. “We are in no way trying to make fun of the people that are suffering. The focus is on those trying to make normal life out of an extraordinary situation.”
Continue reading...Experts reexamine eggs – some dating back to bronze age – to understand origins and designs
They are about the same size as a standard Easter egg, but are rather older – with some specimens dating back five millennia to the early bronze age.
A collection of decorated ostrich eggs belonging to the British Museum in London has been reexamined by experts in an effort to understand where they originated, and how their often elaborately painted or engraved designs were created.
Continue reading...The rise of Covid-19 has forced cultural institutions to explore alternative digital spaces with online exhibitions and a rise in virtual reality
It’s a terrible time for going out. Since the emergence of Covid-19 and resulting self-quarantine, thousands of museums, cultural institutions, festivals and global happenings have temporarily shuttered operations, leaving behind empty streets and a restless public. In a sector that thrives on in-person connection, the loss of an audience is disastrous, yet resilient performers, institutions, galleries, even entire art fairs, are moving to the digital arena, using streaming services and virtual reality, manifesting live concerts on the gaming app Twitch, organizing Instagram dance parties and launching online-only spaces.
During his popular 2015 Ted Talk, the immersive artist, entrepreneur and director Chris Milk suggested that virtual reality could someday become the “ultimate empathy machine” but despite an initial burst of interest in 2015 during the launch of the Oculus Rift headset, immersive media have primarily remained niche. Now, with social distancing, the technology is experiencing something of a renaissance.
Continue reading...He’s been attacked by pastors and jailed by the authorities. But the outspoken rapper will not be silenced. He talks about his cult-like following – and the weird rules ‘Marlians’ live by
Depending on who you talk to, Naira Marley is either the scourge of the next generation of Nigerians or their saviour. But whoever’s talking, the pop star – arguably the most controversial in Africa – is spoken about in near-mythological tones, which makes his amiability very arresting when we meet in London a few weeks before lockdown.
He arrives flanked by an entourage, photoshoot-ready in a reflective puffer, and oscillates between class clown and deep thought. To some, the 25-year-old’s meteoric rise over the past two years has been sudden: selling out Brixton Academy in three minutes; accruing three million Instagram followers, tens of millions of streams, and a cult-like fandom. But the signs of stardom have always been there.
Continue reading...