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 Sunday nights are a time of regrouping, of wandering, of staring into the abyss. The fundamental loneliness of a Sunday night, particularly one in winter, is beautifully captured by Peter Kindersley in our brand new slideshow. These are images of poetic desolation.

"There can be no understanding between the hand and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator," declares Maria to her underground followers in "Metropolis". When Fritz Lang's apocalyptic silent film premiered in Berlin in 1927, it was the most expensive German film ever made. It was also a commercial and critical flop. Paramount Pictures swiftly acquired the film, trimming its length and simplifying its plot to appeal to an American market. It didn't work: the film bombed in America, too, and the original cut was presumed to be lost forever.

In the meantime, Lang's stylish vision of a grim future has become a cult relic, fascinating cineastes and inspiring directors such as Ridley Scott and Stanley Kubrick. Now, over 80 years later, the film recently enjoyed another world premiere, again in Berlin—this time as the director's cut.

Set in the year of 2026, "Metropolis" features lowly, expendable labourers toiling in polluted darkness to support the wealthy few. Lang's imagery is bizarre and haunting, full of grinding machinery, a mad scientist and a fembot villain. It also boasts a plot full of weird gaps and confusing transitions. In 2008 a previously unknown copy of "Metropolis" was found in a museum archive in Buenos Aires, complete with missing scenes. This "sensational discovery", according to Rainer Rother, the head of the Berlin film museum Deutsche Kinematik, has filled in some of the more mystifying parts of the story. Smaller characters are fleshed out; bigger characters are better motivated.  read more »

When reading Elif Batuman’s "The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them", her debut book of essays, it’s easy to feel as though you are witnessing a love affair. “Half understanding” is how she describes her infatuation with Russian literature. She adores the way reading Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, et al, involves oscillating between visceral resonance and terrified confusion. The result is an intellectual thrill—both for her and her readers.

Batuman’s “fascination with Russianness” began casually. As a child, a first-generation Turkish-American in New Jersey, she found herself bewildered by the eccentric mannerisms of her Russian piano teacher. Mystification becomes bewitchment after she discovers an old copy of "Anna Karenina" as a teenager at her grandmother’s apartment in Ankara.

“How had any human being ever managed to write something simultaneously so big and so small—so serious and so light—so strange and so natural?” What Batuman loved about the novel is what she would later love about Russian literature in general: these seemingly irreconcilable paradoxes. For her "Anna Karenina" is “a prefect book, with an otherworldly perfection; unthinkable, monolithic, occupying a supercharged grey zone between nature and culture.” Indeed, the book's contrast echo Russia itself, that sprawling country peppered with weird little villages.  read more »

We arrive in the coastal village of Combe Martin in mid-afternoon, having picked up the hire car at Bristol airport and motored 90 miles over the rolling moors to the farthest reaches of North Devon. We navigate the twisty road into the village and catch our first glimpse of the sea.

We are here, in prime hiking country, among the moors and rugged coast, for a long weekend of winter walks. Combe Martin will be our base. We are excited to take lungfuls of the air, but the walking boots will wait until tomorrow. This evening we must rest and re-fuel. We hole up in a bayside restaurant and fill our bellies with steak.

After a long lie-in we take a slow breakfast and review the Ordnance Survey map. We work out a route, traced vaguely with toast crumbs and butter smudges, gulp down tea, grab coats, hats and patiently-waiting boots, and set out.

We take a frozen muddy footpath between the fields. A mischievous bramble reaches down and steals my friend’s woolly hat. He puts hands to head with a look of surprise, then turns and growls disdainfully at the offending hedgerow. It dangles the headgear mockingly.

Hat retrieved, we move on. A pheasant pops out of the shrubbery ahead of us and obligingly leads the way to the end of the footpath before popping back. We emerge onto open moorland stretching outwards and upwards. I start to run. “Don’t hills just make you want to run up them?” I shout gleefully to my friend. He gives me a sideways glance and starts singing, “The bear climbed over the mountain...”

“…And all that he could see,” he sings on, “Was the other side of the mountain.” I retort, “Well, there’s plenty to see on the other side of this hill.” And I speed up.  read more »

Don McCullin spent a lifetime chronicling the brutality of war. His photographs, now on view in a career retrospective at the Imperial War Museum in Manchester, are dark, bleak and arresting. Many capture people at their most primal, cowering like hunted animals or gasping with despair. Some subjects are muted by their certain doom, such as the starving children he photographed in Biafra, who wait patiently for death. McCullin's soldiers tend to be villains, but some look like shellshocked boys.

These pictures "live in my soul", McCullin admits in an interview with The Economist. He has made it his job to give a voice to the voiceless; to capture the furrowed brows and dirty fingernails of history's victims. The result is hard to look at, startling and gut-wrenching. "There's not a great deal of room for joy," he concedes with sad self-awareness.

His work is also remarkable, a product of courage and heart. He narrates the images of this slideshow with The Economist:

"Shaped by War: Photographs by Don McCullin", is on view at the Imperial War Museum North, Manchester, until June 13th

Just add snow—the more, the messier. A few wet, white flakes in the Washington metro area are all it takes to wash away the veneer of efficiency local politicians try to maintain. When faced with nearly 30 inches of snow, as it was last weekend, America's seat of government freezes up.

As the virulent debate over health care has made clear, America's legislative process already moves at a glacial pace. The near record-setting snowstorm has not only suspended the city's semi-reliable buses and commuter trains, but has halted all congressional momentum (such as it was) for two days straight. Only the centre lanes of most important thoroughfares have been ploughed, leaving Congressmen, lobbyists and well-paid bureaucrats stranded in the suburbs. Cars that ventured out on unploughed roads packed the snow between the wheel ruts into block-long medians. Wet snow snapped branches off magnolia trees and stately pines; broken boughs still clutter the sidewalks in many neighbourhoods.

In defence of Adrian Fenty, the city's mayor, administrators everywhere struggle to cope with extreme weather. In Britain any break from the despairing rain causes officials to panic. Closer to the DC, the governments of Maryland and Virginia exhausted their snow-removal budgets even before this latest storm had hit. They could take a page from the government of New York City, which stretches its municipal dollars by hooking ploughs to the front of its biodiesel garbage trucks.  read more »

Devotees of communism evoke a grim picture of stern and ascetic men and women in sparsely furnished rooms, free of bourgeois luxuries. And then there is the glamorous Tina Modotti, an Italian photographer and political revolutionary. An exhibition of 35 of her photographs now on at New York's Throckmorton Fine Art gallery, "Tina Modotti: Under the Mexican Sky", recalls the life and talent of this rare seductress.

Modotti was 16 when she left Italy for California, where she began her transformation from factory worker to bohemian ingénue. In Los Angeles, she met and modelled for Edward Weston, a pioneer of photography, who soon became her lover and mentor. He left his wife to be with Modotti, and in the early 1920s they ventured to Mexico, a country then brimming with artistic and political excitement.

Still reeling from a decade-long revolution, Mexico's politics were volatile. Painters and muralists such as Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros had joined with a host of radicalised expatriates to help lead the struggle for political and social reform. Modotti embraced this fusion of art and politics, and collaborated with the muralists in creating work with political intent. But Weston had little time for art in the service of politics. He rejected what he described as “too much sentimentality over the proletariat. Too much deification of the Indian.”

Taken between 1923 and 1930, Modotti’s sepia-tinted portraits of Mexican workers and expatriate revolutionaries are indeed romantic—beautiful, sturdy and idealistic. Yet we get the sense that her subjects aren't merely symbols—vacant and projection-ready—but real people. These photographs feel intimate and real.  read more »

"What comes to your mind when you think of Meissen porcelain?" asked Christian Kurtzke, the young, charismatic CEO of the Meissen porcelain manufactory near Dresden. Addressing a group of journalists on the eve of the company's 300th anniversary celebrations, he swiftly answered his own question: prim cups and plates covered in a flowery blue pattern (ie, the Blue Onion design, also known as Zwiebelmuster or "Saxon design", which the company invented in 1739). When I asked my son, his reply was more direct: "Porcelain? For grandmothers."

The formula for the first European hard porcelain was founded in January 1708 by a team of chemists and mining experts headed by Johann Friedrich Böttger working for the King of Poland, who was also the Electoral Prince of Saxony. They were commanded to recreate what the Chinese had originated centuries before. The Meissen Porcelain Manufactory opened its doors on January 23rd 1710, and has since survived several wars, various owners, communism and financial crises. (The latest hasn't had too dramatic effect on Meissen's bottom line, Kurtzke insists, even though the export market to Russia collapsed by two thirds.)

Three centuries on, the state-owned Meissen factory employs 800 skilled workers-potters, designers, painters-and continues to mine its own kaolin, quartz and feldspar. The formulas for its porcelain and paints remain top secret. Meissen table services are sold in limited editions, and its figurines are still popular gifts (the pug is the big hit among British customers; Italians prefer the harlequins).  read more »

Legendary design, drivers from central casting, opposing seats and easy wheelchair access—London’s taxis may be the world’s best. But only if someone else is paying. After seven years here, I’m still shocked by the fares.

Not that one minds paying for quality. Before London I lived in Boston, where the average cabbie seems to be re-enacting a ”Speed”-inspired, gasoline-fuelled death wish. The questionable driving is matched by suitably depraved manners. Cabbies in Mexico City may have a nasty habit of kidnapping their passengers, but at least they seem to understand the value of human life.

In taxis, as in finance and theatre, London’s only real rival may be New York. A yellow cab is nearly as iconic as a black one, but cheaper. Paddington to the Museum of London’s taxi exhibit costs the same as Penn Station to Brooklyn’s Transit Museum (60% further). And in New York it’s easy to pay by credit card, many taxis are energy-efficient hybrids and drivers (sometimes) help with luggage.

New York drivers are occasionally as crazy as their Beantown colleagues. Once I noticed my Manhattan cabbie drifting between lanes. He was relieving himself into a Snapple bottle. But, I got where I was going without delay. In New York the crazy is mostly deployed to your benefit.

Surely, somewhere manages both British sanity and American-style service? For taxis as for everything else, the answer is Canada. Vancouver’s taxis are perfect. But drivers are so careful and friendly it’s like being given a ride by an elderly relative. I forgot I was in a city.  read more »

"Bring earplugs," a friend IM'ed me recently when I told him I was going to see the band A Place To Bury Strangers perform at the Barfly in London. "I think they might be going in a more poppy, Joy Division direction now, but they're still fu*!ing loud."

For about six years, the New York-based three-piece band has won over audiences–and driven some away–with an ample supply of volume. The New York Times credited them with "reviving the ominous, feedback-drenched drones of the 1980s", while the Washington Post described them as "the most awesome, ear-shatteringly loud garage/shoegaze band you'll ever hear."

At the 2008 SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, the band ended its set with a ten-minute-plus sonic meltdown that surely inflicted some hearing loss. At some point during the show I had to stuff my ears with tissue-paper from the bathroom; I could still hear them ringing afterwards. Yet I never considered leaving early.

In October the band released their second album, "Exploding Head", on Mute, a London-based label. There's been much chatter about how their sophomore effort is weaker, softer, more drab, too much like My Bloody Valentine or Jesus & Mary Chain. But others have praised the new material as "noisily cathartic and epic".  read more »