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Raise your children with a love of science, and there’s a decent chance they’ll grow up wanting to be like Richard Feynman, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, or any number of other famous scientists from history. Luckily for them, they won’t yet have learned that the pursuit of such a career will almost certainly entail grinding […]
a month ago

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More from Open Culture

How Jackson Pollock Redefined Modern Art: An Introduction

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sQ_cfZ8q9kVideo can’t be loaded because JavaScript is disabled: Jackson Pollock: the Myth of the Modern Artist (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sQ_cfZ8q9k) In his lifetime, Jackson Pollock had only one successful art show. It took place at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York in November 1949, and afterward, his fellow abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning declared that “Jackson has […]

17 hours ago 1 votes
The Soviet Union Creates a List of 38 Dangerous Rock Bands: Kiss, Pink Floyd, Talking Heads, Village People & More (1985)

Image by Mario Casciano via Wikimedia Commons Music is dangerous and powerful, and can be, without intending to, a political weapon. All authoritarian regimes have understood this, including repressive elements in the U.S. throughout the Cold War. I remember having books handed to me before the Berlin Wall came down, by family friends fearful of […]

18 hours ago 1 votes
The Genius of Brian Wilson (RIP) and How He Turned “Good Vibrations” Into the Beach Boys’ Pocket Symphony

This week, Brian Wilson became the last of the Wilson brothers to shuffle off this mortal coil. Dennis, the first of the Wilsons to go, died young in 1983 — but not before offering this memorable assessment of the family musical project: “Brian Wilson is the Beach Boys. He is the band. We’re his messengers. […]

4 days ago 4 votes
An Architectural Tour of Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Iconic Desert Home and Studio

By some estimations, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West home-studio complex took shape in 1941. But even then, the Arizona Republic presciently noted that “it may be years before it is considered finished.” The Taliesin West you can see in the new Architectural Digest video above is unlikely to change dramatically over the next few generations, […]

5 days ago 4 votes
Read the Original 32-Page Program for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927)

One of the very first feature-length sci-fi films ever made, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis took a daring visual approach for its time, incorporating Bauhaus and Futurist influences in thrillingly designed sets and costumes. Lang’s visual language resonated strongly in later decades. The film’s rather stunning alchemical-electric transference of a woman’s physical traits onto the body of […]

5 days ago 4 votes

More in creative

Orange cars

In a given neighborhood, just about all the cars are the same. There are few that are pink, orange or purple, for example. There’s nothing inherently wrong with those frequencies of light. Nothing that modern paint technology can’t deliver, nothing that offends the rods and cones of our eyes. It’s because the color of the […]

17 hours ago 2 votes
The Soviet Union Creates a List of 38 Dangerous Rock Bands: Kiss, Pink Floyd, Talking Heads, Village People & More (1985)

Image by Mario Casciano via Wikimedia Commons Music is dangerous and powerful, and can be, without intending to, a political weapon. All authoritarian regimes have understood this, including repressive elements in the U.S. throughout the Cold War. I remember having books handed to me before the Berlin Wall came down, by family friends fearful of […]

18 hours ago 1 votes
The power of a pause

The single-most effective way to invest 90 seconds a day is simple (and difficult). 18 times a day, when you’re about to offer advice, ask a question or blurt out a response, wait five seconds. That pause shifts the way what you say next will be perceived. It also opens the door for you to […]

2 days ago 2 votes
The Genius of Brian Wilson (RIP) and How He Turned “Good Vibrations” Into the Beach Boys’ Pocket Symphony

This week, Brian Wilson became the last of the Wilson brothers to shuffle off this mortal coil. Dennis, the first of the Wilsons to go, died young in 1983 — but not before offering this memorable assessment of the family musical project: “Brian Wilson is the Beach Boys. He is the band. We’re his messengers. […]

4 days ago 4 votes
Status (and the grass tax)

Status shows up whenever humans do, and it is the invisible underpinning of our culture. The front lawn was only invented around the time of Columbus. The idea was to demonstrate that you had time and money to waste. You could take useful land and make it non-productive. You could take labor and put it […]

5 days ago 4 votes