The Mannings were typical of many families living in Holly Springs, Mississippi during the late 19th-century. Van Manning was a lawyer and former Confederate who arrived in Reconstruction Mississippi in the 1860s. His wife Mary was a local Holly Springs girl from a well-to-do family. Van built a successful legal career and later served in…

Streaming might be the future, but physical media is still the present. It’s also awesome, depending on the title, the label, and the release, so each week we take a look at the new Blu-rays and DVDs making their way into the world. Welcome to this week in Home Video for December 1st, 2020! This week’s…

In the summer of 1846, a party of 89 emigrants was making its way westward along the 2,170-mile-long Oregon Trail. Tired, hungry, and trailing behind schedule, they decided at Fort Bridger, Wyoming to travel to their final destination of California by shortcut. The “Hastings Cutoff” they chose was an alternative route that its namesake, Lansford…

Ho, ho, hand grenade. Fatman – longtime passion project from indie family filmmakers the Nelms Brothers – is not your traditional holiday movie. Sure, a lot of the same pieces are there: a puffy man with a long white beard, his warehouse, and his army of efficient elves. But few Christmas movies have had the…

“Rich or poor, nobody can escape. What a tragedy.” MTV Documentary Films has released an official US trailer for 76 Days, a chilling fly-on-the-wall documentary capturing the first 76 days during the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak in China. Raw and intimate, this documentary captures the struggles of patients and frontline medical professionals battling the vicious COVID-19…

Crossing the Streams is our monthly look at all the offerings hitting the big streaming services each month, and this time we’re checking out the new Hulu arrivals for December 2020. This month’s titles include Stanley Kubrick’s final film, the latest season of a beloved comedy series, and more! Keep reading to see what’s new…

This piece was originally published in Wired and appears here as part of our Climate Desk collaboration. In 2014, the remaining staff of the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, or ICARDA, fled their beloved gene bank in Tel Hadia, 20 miles south of Aleppo. Syria’s civil war, which had broken out…

Administrative duties are only one dimension of Musa Hadid’s job as mayor of Ramallah, the de facto capital and cultural center of the Palestinian State. Aside from putting out fires, sometimes literally, in a town with a large Christian population—a fact that may jump at those with reductive views of the fragmented country’s religious demographics—he…

A few years ago, one would have gaffed at the idea of Stephy Tang being labeled as a serious thespian in the Hong Kong entertainment industry. But following her awards-worthy turn in 2017’s judo drama The Empty Hands, Tang punched her way into critical relevance and has now cemented herself with an even stronger performance…

★★★ Written and Directed by: #DavidJStern Read moreA Guide to The Perfect Bong Joon-ho MarathonStarring: #John Healy, #JennaSokolowski, #EmilyClassen, #AndyBrownstein and #JonathanHirsch Film review by: Brian Penn Read moreRobert Stack Finally Solves a Mystery in ‘The Strange and Deadly Occurrence’To lose a loved one is a shock from which we never truly recover. Part of…

Valle Crucis was founded by Prince Madog ap Gruffydd and the “White Monks” of the Cistercian order in 1201. The name Valley Crucis derives from Latin and means Valley of the Cross. The name is thought to refer to the nearby 9th-century Pillar of Eliseg. Read moreA Guide to The Perfect Bong Joon-ho MarathonThe Cistercians…

Sometimes it takes a personal attack to turn someone into an activist. Consider J.K. Rowling, the progressive author who took a stand against Cancel Culture when it turned on her … with a vengeance. Woke comic Sarah Silverman decried losing a film role for a problematic gag from her comedy past. Read moreA Guide to…

The woman on a dock. It’s an image used in cinema so much that it’s basically a cliché, the distant figure nearly always gazing out at the water as if contemplating possibilities, perched on the edge of a choice. It’s an image and a cliché used repeatedly in Black Bear, a mystifying little movie that,…

Nestled in the hills of Brown County, Indiana, just off of State Road 46,  sits a peculiar green barn, covered in dirty socks. It’s a well known stop for hikers on the Tecumseh Trail.  Read moreA Guide to The Perfect Bong Joon-ho MarathonA few years ago, the young couple who own the property put a…

The Trinity Apse was founded in 1462 by the Queen Mary of Gueldres, after the death of her husband King James II. An apse is the portion of a church, usually with an arched or domed roof and containing an altar. This gothic chapel was originally located in what was then known as Waverly Valley,…

A writer tries to shake things loose in Let Them All Talk, the latest from director Steven Soderbergh. Lots of people were anxiously awaiting Alice’s next book. With decades of acclaimed work under her belt, one might assume that getting another written would be easy, but she’s quietly struggling. Sensing trouble, her agent arranges for her…

Palazzo Spada is a magnificent, yet lesser-known, palace located in the Regola district of Rome in the city’s historic center. It features an extraordinary art collection (Galleria Spada) which showcases works by the likes of Guido Reni, Titian, Guercino, Rubens, Caravaggio, and Artemisia Gentileschi to name a few. Read moreA Guide to The Perfect Bong…

Brussels is notable for its whimsical public art displays, including the world-famous Manneken Pis. Lesser known is the “Bandundu Water Jazz Band” in the Flemish Brabant city of Tervuren. The installation is located about eight miles from Brussels.  Read moreA Guide to The Perfect Bong Joon-ho MarathonCreated by Belgian artist Tom Frantzen, this sculptural fountain…

In October 2018, Davide Tanasi was off the coast of Italy, pulling teeth. His dental patients were 34 Sicilians who had been dead for the better part of 2,000 years. These Roman Christians were buried in the catacombs of St. Lucia in Syracuse, an underground city of some 8,000 dead stretched across an area about…

This work first appeared on SAPIENS under a CC BY-ND 4.0 license. Read the original here. One morning in May 2019, a crowd of journalists gathered around the Biratenu bar in Jerusalem, snapping photos as a bartender poured golden, frothy beer into plastic cups. The story of the beer was both new and very old:…

Movies like this are proof that you can have your cake and eat it too. Watching movies like In Bruges, Tangerine, or 12 Monkeys is just as effective in July as they are in March, but if you want to furnish the holidays with a little bit of supplementary “cheer”, pop in one of these…