Tim Brinkhof
Tim Brinkhof is a Dutch-born, New York-based journalist reporting on art, history, and literature. He studied early Netherlandish painting and Slavic literature at New York University, worked as an editorial assistant for Film Comment magazine, and has written for Esquire, Film & History, History Today, and History News Network.
Bears, chimps, or humans? A track of five poorly preserved footsteps at Laetoli has puzzled paleontologists for decades. Now, a research paper from Nature claims to have solved the mystery.
The most technically impressive feats of animation often strike us as eerie instead of impressive, and it’s all thanks to the uncanny valley.
The singer-songwriter distilled the essence of the holidays into a hit song, and for her efforts she was crowned the Queen of Christmas.
Cities overstimulate our senses and are full of people we don’t know. Maybe humans were meant for this.
Released in 1972, “Ways of Seeing” has proven to be as worthy of study as the artistic traditions it investigates.
Far from acting as the conduits of a benevolent deity, these religious leaders threw the teachings of their own church out of the window.
The insurmountable contrasts between their visions help explain Russia’s stunted development and hint at its destructive future.
The decades-long conflict is best understood not through secondhand accounts of historians, but the primary accounts of people who actually experienced it.
Although equal parts Hollywood blockbuster and Putinist propaganda, “Trotsky” still manages to capture the good, the bad, and the ugly of Russia’s revolutionary past.
By taking Satan out of the religious context, storytellers explored the nature of sin in new ways.
Fittingly, the skull was found in the Rising Star cave of South Africa, itself located at a site known to UNESCO as the Cradle of Mankind.
The German thinker wrote both treatises and songs. He approached each form of expression with the same level of interest.
Though these ancient settlers of China were culturally cosmopolitan, their DNA turns out to have been completely distinct from the communities with which they interacted.
According to literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, Dostoevsky’s talents were on par with those of William Shakespeare.
Looking with lasers, researchers discovered that many Olmec and Mayan ruins seem to have been constructed from the same blueprint.
Before Herbert came along and wrote Dune, few if any sci-fi stories were set in fully realized universes.
Fear is one of the oldest and most powerful emotions known to man, so it should come as no surprise that horror stories are as old as storytelling itself.
The more horror we consume, the harder it becomes to find a good scare. These genuinely unsettling movies should get you in the mood for Halloween.
Will and Ariel Durant were praised for their ability to look at the big picture without losing sight of its little details, even if they did miss some of them.
Music is often labelled a “universal language,” and according to the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, there is a good reason for that.
In hell, we assume a position of moral superiority, looking down over the sinners and the poor decisions that led them to this wretched place. In heaven, Dante is looking down upon us.
Historians know how military technologies evolved, but the reasons why remain poorly understood.
Portraiture is one of the most intimate genres in all of painting, and it has reinvented itself many times across European history.
Time and again, studies have found a connection between authoritarian ideals and meaning in life — a notion backed up by historical documents.
The microscopic tardigrades are an elusive species. Fossils are rare, but each new find adds a piece to their unsolved evolutionary puzzle.
The “Foundation” series, recently adapted into a show by Apple TV, was inspired by a fascinating, real-life academic discipline.
Without Benjamin List and David MacMillan, chemists would still be using metals and enzymes to catalyze chemical reactions.
The Swedish Academy honored the writer for his uncompromising inquiry into the lasting consequences of Africa’s colonization.
David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian were awarded the highest honor in medicine for their research into how human bodies make sense of and respond to the outside world.
Yukio Mishima treated his life as if it were a story — one with a surprising and deadly final act.