“What we love about music is not that it sounds good – what we love about music is that it sounds inevitable” Music has always been a part of Jon Batiste’s personal and professional life, and few contemporary artists seem to have their entire existence revolve around the art of creation quite as much as…

One principle that I try and employ daily is to live a life so unpredictable, adventurous and interesting that Werner Herzog will one day be compelled to make one of his overly dramatic but achingly beautiful (and occasionally very funny) documentaries about it. We’d all be far more interesting if we lived by such a…

One of the great quirks of 20th century culture is that there were two public figures with the name Albert Einstein – an iconic physicist who made invaluable contributions to the world of science, and the other a comedian and actor who changed the face of comedy over the past few decades, and therefore both…

For as long as it has been a subject that artists and philosophers alike have explored, the ideal version of love is growing old with someone, spending your entire life in their company and having your entire future defined by the person you consider your soulmate. This is a pleasant and beautiful idea, but one…

Over the past decade, we have watched RuPaul’s Drag Race develop from a small show designed to exhibit the art of drag to a small core group of supporters, to an absolute cultural phenomenon, a worldwide sensation and a landmark of contemporary queer culture, enjoyed by a group far larger than the initial core audience….

At what point does playing with your identity and persona become outright fraud? For the young man known as Brandon Lee, there seemed to be a very narrow distinction between them – and for his classmates at Bearsden College, a middle-class high school in an affluent suburb of Scotland, the distinction was even narrower, since…

I’d like to start this discussion with a brief personal anecdote, which I believe helps establish a clear foundation for the forthcoming conversation. In 2019, I visited the World Press Photo Exhibition in Hanoi – and while there were dozens of incredible photographs, one stood out to me. The photograph, taken by Philip Montgomery, is…

When bestowing the prestigious Presidential Medal of Freedom on him in 2009, former President of the United States Barack Obama famously quipped that Sidney Poitier “didn’t make movies, he made milestones”, and this is immense praise coming from any public figure, let alone from one of the most powerful individuals of the few decades, and…

Klaus Kinski is not the easiest actor to talk about. On one hand, he is one of the most brilliant actors to ever work in the medium of film, spending several decades turning in magnificent performances fueled by a combination of his incredible talents and unhinged madness that made him one of the most celebrated…

There are many ways to look at life, but perhaps the most effective way to describe it is that we exist to tell our stories in various forms, since we all have individual journeys that make for profoundly moving narratives when we look at it from an outside perspective. In this regard, one of the…