Full Width 
Shortcuts 
Sign Up 
Log In 
Articles 
Reading List More from Open Culture
In the 1980s, The Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), an organization co-founded by Tipper Gore and the wives of several other Washington power brokers, launched a political campaign against pop music, hoping to put warning labels on records that promoted Sex, Violence, Drug and Alcohol Use. Along the way, the PMRC issued “the Filthy Fifteen,” a list of […]
Steven Soderbergh was one of the earliest filmmakers to break out in what’s now called the “Indiewood” movement of the nineteen-nineties. He was early enough, in fact, to have done so in the eighties, with the Palme d’Or-winning Sex, Lies, and Videotape. His subsequent films have been many and varied, even more so than those […]
In 2004, John Conway and Alexander Soifer, both working on mathematics at Princeton University, submitted to the American Mathematical Monthly what they believed was “a new world record in the number of words in a [math] paper.” Soifer explains: “On April 28, 2004 … I submitted our paper that included just two words, ‘n2 + 2 can’ and our two drawings. [See […]
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 […]
More in creative
“What should I do next?” Not next year or for the rest of my life. Right now. The apparently trivial choice–whether or not to open an email, make a phone call or stand up to stretch. The endless list of options, some not even consciously considered, that we work through a thousand times a day. […]
In the 1980s, The Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), an organization co-founded by Tipper Gore and the wives of several other Washington power brokers, launched a political campaign against pop music, hoping to put warning labels on records that promoted Sex, Violence, Drug and Alcohol Use. Along the way, the PMRC issued “the Filthy Fifteen,” a list of […]
This is an understandable sentiment. As jobs push people to be automatons and often offer little in the way of respect, it’s easy to quietly quit. But perhaps, they’re not paying you enough to not care. Spending your days, day after day, not caring is a tragedy. They might not deserve your focus and effort, […]
Tactics are tempting. We can lean into them, invest, build our skills and count on results. Strategies are more elusive. And a mismatch between strategy and tactics leads to wasted effort. In this 2 x 2 grid, you can see how easy it is to get stuck. The worst outcome is a misguided strategy supported […]
