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Image via Wikimedia Commons “The great Tao fades away.” So begins one translation of the Tao Te Ching’s 18th Chapter. The sentence captures the frustration that comes with a lost epiphany. Whether it’s a profound realization when you just wake up, or moment of clarity in the shower, by the time your mind’s gears start […]
a year ago

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More from Open Culture

Watch Joan Baez Endearingly Imitate Bob Dylan (1972)

Joan Baez was already heralded as the “Queen of Folk” by the time Robert Zimmerman aka Bob Dylan arrived in New York City. Many things brought him to the burgeoning folk scene there, but Baez was the siren who called to a young Dylan through his television set long before he met her. He was […]

yesterday 2 votes
What Is Kabbalah? An Introduction to the Jewish Mystical Tradition

Though the pop-cultural moment that gave rise to the association has passed, when many of us hear about Kabbalah, we still think of Madonna. Her study of that Jewish-mystic school of thought in the nineteen-nineties has been credited, at least in part, with the sonic transformation that led to her hit album Ray of Light.  […]

yesterday 3 votes
2,178 Occult Books Now Digitized & Put Online, Thanks to the Ritman Library and Da Vinci Code Author Dan Brown

In 2018 we brought you some exciting news. Thanks to a generous donation from Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown, Amsterdam’s Ritman Library—a sizable collection of pre-1900 books on alchemy, astrology, magic, and other occult subjects—has been digitizing thousands of its rare texts under a digital education project cheekily called “Hermetically Open.” We are now […]

2 days ago 5 votes
The Stunt That Ended Buster Keaton’s Brilliant Career

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHoT_Qch7jE Buster Keaton’s penchant and skill for comedic stunts made him one of the biggest stars of the silent-film era.  Nobody at the time imagined that he would still be engaging in dangerous-looking pratfalls 40 years later in his seventies, especially since his career seemed to have come to an end in 1926. That was […]

2 days ago 4 votes
Tim Burton Visits a Paris Video Store & Talks About His Favorite Movies

Tim Burton grew up watching Japanese monster movies in Burbank, which must explain a good deal about his artistic sensibility. It seems to be for that reason, in any case, that the new Konbini “Vidéo Club” episode above takes him first to the Asian cinema section of JM Vidéo, one of Paris’ last two DVD […]

3 days ago 5 votes

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Disenchanted

Where does hope come from? It’s probably hard-wired, the result of an evolutionary process. A creature with hope is less likely to give up and more likely to raise offspring, thus passing down an ability to find resilience in the face of change. Disenchanted has come to mean something different from its original usage. Today, […]

6 hours ago 2 votes
Watch Joan Baez Endearingly Imitate Bob Dylan (1972)

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“A now, a word from our sponsor”

Not really. Just a post about sponsors. Even if you don’t run a media company, the way media companies run matters. That’s because media shapes our culture and how we spend our time. There are three kinds of ad models, and it’s easy to confuse them. The most common and historically powerful is the traditional […]

2 days ago 3 votes
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2 days ago 5 votes
Moving without traveling

Moving is physical, travel is an emotional journey. Moving takes us from one place to another, one job to another, one situation to another. But if we seek to insulate ourselves from the emotional labor of travel, we can build a cocoon around our experience and discover nothing. Once we choose to see what’s actually […]

3 days ago 5 votes