Full Width [alt+shift+f] Shortcuts [alt+shift+k]
Sign Up [alt+shift+s] Log In [alt+shift+l]
11
Frank Lloyd Wright is unlikely to be displaced as the archetype of the genius architect anytime soon, at least in America, but even he had to start somewhere. At nine years old, as architecture YouTuber Stewart Hicks explains in the video above, Wright received a set of blocks from his mother, who hoped that “her […]
2 weeks ago

Improve your reading experience

Logged in users get linked directly to articles resulting in a better reading experience. Please login for free, it takes less than 1 minute.

More from Open Culture

Meet Jesse Welles, the Folk Singer Who Turns News into Folk Music, Writing Songs on Elections, Plane Crashes, Ozempic & More

At first glance, Jesse Welles resembles nothing so much as a time traveler from the year 1968. That’s how I would open a profile about him, but The New York Times’ David Peisner takes a different approach, describing him recording a song in his home studio. “Welles, a singer-songwriter with a shaggy, dirty-blond mane and […]

3 days ago 2 votes
Flannery O’Connor: Friends Don’t Let Friends Read Ayn Rand

In a letter dated May 31, 1960, Flannery O’Connor, the author best known for her classic story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (listen to her read the story here) penned a letter to her friend, the playwright Maryat Lee. It begins rather abruptly, likely because it’s responding to something Maryat said in a […]

3 days ago 3 votes
How the Fairlight CMI Synthesizer Revolutionized Music

In the credits of Phil Collins’ No Jacket Required appears the disclaimer that “there is no Fairlight on this record.” Cryptic though it may have appeared to most of that album’s many buyers, technology-minded musicians would’ve got it. In the half-decades since its introduction, the Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument, or CMI, had reshaped the sound […]

4 days ago 3 votes
Jane Austen Used Pins to Edit Her Manuscripts: Before the Word Processor & White-Out

Before the word processor, before White-Out, before Post-It Notes, there were straight pins. Or, at least that’s what Jane Austen used to make edits in one of her rare manuscripts. In 2011, Oxford’s Bodleian Library acquired the manuscript of Austen’s abandoned novel, The Watsons. In announcing the acquisition, the Bodleian wrote: The Watsons is Jane Austen’s first […]

4 days ago 3 votes
What It Was Like to Get a Meal at a Medieval Tavern

At least since The Canterbury Tales, the setting of the medieval tavern has held out the promise of adventure. For their customer base during the actual Middle Ages, however, they had more utilitarian virtues. “If you ever find yourself in the late medieval period, and you are in need of food and drink, you’d better […]

5 days ago 4 votes

More in history

Internal diasporas and the state in African history

The Wangara chronicle, one of West Africa's oldest surviving historical texts composed around 1650, contains an interesting account explaining the migration of a group of scholars from medieval Malī against the wishes of its ruler:

14 hours ago 3 votes
10 Myths About the Greek God Apollo

undefined

22 hours ago 2 votes
Weekend Quiz

Lots and Lots of Love

14 hours ago 2 votes
Futarchy and the Transfer Problem

I recently tweeted on the ineffectiveness of Medicine, and thus on waste we could cut by cutting back on it.

yesterday 2 votes