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Open Culture
How a Student’s Phone Call Averted a Skyscraper Collapse: The Tale of the Citicorp Center The Citigroup Center in Midtown Manhattan is also known by its address, 601 Lexington Avenue, at...
yesterday
3

How a Student’s Phone Call Averted a Skyscraper Collapse: The Tale of the Citicorp Center

from Open Culture [alt+shift+b] in history

yesterday
The Citigroup Center in Midtown Manhattan is also known by its address, 601 Lexington Avenue, at which it’s been standing for 47 years, longer than the median New Yorker has been alive. Though still a fairly handsome building, in a seventies-corporate sort of way, it now pops out...
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Open Culture
How Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton & Harold Lloyd Pulled Off Their Spectacular Stunts During Silent... It can be tempting to view the box office’s domination by visual-effects-laden Hollywood spectacle...
2 days ago
4

How Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton & Harold Lloyd Pulled Off Their Spectacular Stunts During Silent Film’s Golden Age

from Open Culture [alt+shift+b] in history

2 days ago
It can be tempting to view the box office’s domination by visual-effects-laden Hollywood spectacle as a recent phenomenon. And indeed, there have been periods during which that wasn’t the case: the “New Hollywood” that began in the late nineteen sixties, for instance, when the...
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Open Culture
How a Papal Conclave Works, and Who Might Be the Next Pope On Tuesday, the cardinals locked themselves into the Sistine Chapel, officially beginning the...
2 days ago
3

How a Papal Conclave Works, and Who Might Be the Next Pope

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2 days ago
On Tuesday, the cardinals locked themselves into the Sistine Chapel, officially beginning the conclave to elect the 267th pope. First formalized by Pope Gregory X in 1274, the conclave (a word derived from the Latin words cum clave, meaning “with a key”) follows a highly scripted...
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Open Culture
Take a 3D Virtual Tour of the Sistine Chapel & Explore Michelangelo’s Masterpieces Up Close Today, 133 cardinals from around the world enter the conclave to determine the next pope, during...
3 days ago
2

Take a 3D Virtual Tour of the Sistine Chapel & Explore Michelangelo’s Masterpieces Up Close

from Open Culture [alt+shift+b] in history

3 days ago
Today, 133 cardinals from around the world enter the conclave to determine the next pope, during which they’ll cast their votes in the Sistine Chapel. Despite being one of the most famous tourist attractions in Europe, the Sistine Chapel still serves as a venue for such important...
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Open Culture
George Orwell’s Rules for Making the Perfect Cup of Tea: A Short Animation Several years back, Colin Marshall highlighted George Orwell’s essay, “A Nice Cup of Tea,” which...
3 days ago
2

George Orwell’s Rules for Making the Perfect Cup of Tea: A Short Animation

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3 days ago
Several years back, Colin Marshall highlighted George Orwell’s essay, “A Nice Cup of Tea,” which first ran in the Evening Standard on January 12, 1946. In that article, Orwell weighed in on a subject the English take seriously–how to make the perfect cup of tea. (According to...
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Open Culture
A Japanese Zen Monk Explains What Zen Is Really About Despite developing in Asia, as the Chinese form of a religion originally brought over from India and...
4 days ago
1

A Japanese Zen Monk Explains What Zen Is Really About

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4 days ago
Despite developing in Asia, as the Chinese form of a religion originally brought over from India and later refined in Japan, Zen Buddhism has long appealed to Westerners as well. Some of that owes to the spare, elegant aesthetics with which popular culture associates it, and more...
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Open Culture
The Hobo Ethical Code of 1889: 15 Rules for Living a Self-Reliant, Honest & Compassionate Life Who wants to be a billionaire? A few years ago, Forbes published author Roberta Chinsky Matuson’s...
4 days ago
1

The Hobo Ethical Code of 1889: 15 Rules for Living a Self-Reliant, Honest & Compassionate Life

from Open Culture [alt+shift+b] in history

4 days ago
Who wants to be a billionaire? A few years ago, Forbes published author Roberta Chinsky Matuson’s sensible advice to businesspeople seeking to shoot up that golden ladder. These lawful tips espoused such familiar virtues as hard work and community involvement, and as such, were...
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Open Culture
See Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring in 3D in a New 108-Gigapixel Scan You may believe that you’ve had a close enough view of Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring....
5 days ago
1

See Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring in 3D in a New 108-Gigapixel Scan

from Open Culture [alt+shift+b] in history

5 days ago
You may believe that you’ve had a close enough view of Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. You may have gone to The Hague and seen the painting in person at the Mauritshuis. You may have zoomed into the ten billion-pixel scan we featured here on Open Culture in 2021....
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Open Culture
Hear the First Recording of the Human Voice (1860) When inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville sang a nursery rhyme into his phonoautogram in 1860,...
5 days ago
1

Hear the First Recording of the Human Voice (1860)

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5 days ago
When inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville sang a nursery rhyme into his phonoautogram in 1860, he had no plans to ever play back this recording. A precursor to the wax cylinder, the phonoautogram took inputs for the study of sound waves, but could not be turned into an...
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Open Culture
Was William Shakespeare’s Marriage Closer—and Less Estranged—Than We Thought?: A 17th-Century Letter... Image via Hereford Cathedral and Hereford Mappa Mundi Trust At this point, every aspect of William...
a week ago
1

Was William Shakespeare’s Marriage Closer—and Less Estranged—Than We Thought?: A 17th-Century Letter Changes What We Know About the Bard’s Life.

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a week ago
Image via Hereford Cathedral and Hereford Mappa Mundi Trust At this point, every aspect of William Shakespeare’s life has produced more speculation than any of us could digest in a lifetime. That goes for his professional life, of course, but also his even more scantily...
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Open Culture
How Eyes Evolved: A Fascinating Tour Through the Animal Kingdom Above, Lars Schmitz, a professor at Claremont McKenna College, guides us “through a giant tree of...
a week ago
1

How Eyes Evolved: A Fascinating Tour Through the Animal Kingdom

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a week ago
Above, Lars Schmitz, a professor at Claremont McKenna College, guides us “through a giant tree of life mapping the evolution of eyes in the animal kingdom: how they work, why they’ve taken the form they have, and the evolutionary advantages they’ve unlocked across species.” The...
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Open Culture
Stream Online Monty Python and the Holy Grail Free on Its 50th Anniversary This year, YouTube celebrated its twentieth anniversary, prompting younger users to wonder what life...
a week ago
1

Stream Online Monty Python and the Holy Grail Free on Its 50th Anniversary

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a week ago
This year, YouTube celebrated its twentieth anniversary, prompting younger users to wonder what life could have been like before it. The fiftieth anniversary of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which premiered in April of 1975, has inspired similar reflection among comedy...
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Open Culture
Marvin Gaye’s Classic Vocals on ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine’: The A Cappella Version It’s hard to believe, but Marvin Gaye’s classic 1967 recording of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”...
a week ago
1

Marvin Gaye’s Classic Vocals on ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine’: The A Cappella Version

from Open Culture [alt+shift+b] in history

a week ago
It’s hard to believe, but Marvin Gaye’s classic 1967 recording of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” was originally rejected by his record label. The song, about a man’s grief over hearing rumors of his lover’s infidelity, was written by the legendary Motown Records producer...
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Open Culture
The Heavy-Metal Band Disturbed Covered Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” Ten Years Ago, and... “The Sound of Silence” Is the Most Metal Song of the Past Decade”: imagine that headline, and the...
a week ago
1

The Heavy-Metal Band Disturbed Covered Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” Ten Years Ago, and It’s Still Topping the Charts

from Open Culture [alt+shift+b] in history

a week ago
“The Sound of Silence” Is the Most Metal Song of the Past Decade”: imagine that headline, and the contrarian culture piece practically writes itself. Not so long ago, Slate was notorious for publishing that kind of thing, but it seems they’ve now put that sensibility behind them...
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Open Culture
A Stylish 2,000-Year-Old Roman Shoe Found in a Well When the Romans pushed their way north into the German provinces, they built (circa 90 AD) the...
a week ago
1

A Stylish 2,000-Year-Old Roman Shoe Found in a Well

from Open Culture [alt+shift+b] in history

a week ago
When the Romans pushed their way north into the German provinces, they built (circa 90 AD) the Saalburg, a fort that protected the boundary between the Roman Empire and the Germanic tribal territories. At its peak, 2,000 people lived in the fort and the attached village, and it...
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Open Culture
The Simple, Ingenious Design of the Ancient Roman Javelin: How the Romans Engineered a Remarkably... As Mike Tyson once put it, with characteristic straightforwardness, “Everybody has a plan until they...
a week ago
1

The Simple, Ingenious Design of the Ancient Roman Javelin: How the Romans Engineered a Remarkably Effective Weapon

from Open Culture [alt+shift+b] in history

a week ago
As Mike Tyson once put it, with characteristic straightforwardness, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Back in the time of the Roman Republic and the early Roman Empire, all of Rome’s enemies must have had a plan until pila punched through their shields....
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Open Culture
Miles Davis’ Album On the Corner Tried to Woo Young Rock & Funk Fans: First Considered a Disaster,... Miles Davis didn’t put out any studio albums from 1973 until the middle of 1981. In explaining the...
2 weeks ago
21

Miles Davis’ Album On the Corner Tried to Woo Young Rock & Funk Fans: First Considered a Disaster, It’s Now Hailed as a Masterpiece

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2 weeks ago
Miles Davis didn’t put out any studio albums from 1973 until the middle of 1981. In explaining the reasons for this lacuna in his recording career, Milesologists can point to a variety of factors in the man’s professional and personal life. But one in particular looms large: the...
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Open Culture
Hōshi: A Short Documentary on the 1300-Year-Old Hotel Run by the Same Japanese Family for 46... Hōshi, a traditional Japanese inn in Komatsu, Japan, holds the distinction of being the second...
2 weeks ago
20

Hōshi: A Short Documentary on the 1300-Year-Old Hotel Run by the Same Japanese Family for 46 Generations

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2 weeks ago
Hōshi, a traditional Japanese inn in Komatsu, Japan, holds the distinction of being the second oldest hotel in the world—and “the oldest still running family business in the world.” Built in 718 AD, Hōshi has been operated by the same family for 46 consecutive generations. Count...
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Open Culture
The Roman Colosseum Deconstructed: 3D Animation Reveals the Hidden Technology That Powered Rome’s... Most tourists in Rome put the Colosseum at the top of their to-see list. (My own sister-in-law, soon...
2 weeks ago
20

The Roman Colosseum Deconstructed: 3D Animation Reveals the Hidden Technology That Powered Rome’s Great Arena

from Open Culture [alt+shift+b] in creative

2 weeks ago
Most tourists in Rome put the Colosseum at the top of their to-see list. (My own sister-in-law, soon to head out on her Italian honeymoon, plans to head to that storied ruin more or less straight from the airport.) Even those with no particular interest in ancient Roman...
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Open Culture
The 1924 Soviet Chess Match Where The Chess Pieces Were Real Soldiers and Horses Let’s time travel back to Leningrad (aka St. Petersburg) in 1924. That’s when an unconventional...
2 weeks ago
19

The 1924 Soviet Chess Match Where The Chess Pieces Were Real Soldiers and Horses

from Open Culture [alt+shift+b] in creative

2 weeks ago
Let’s time travel back to Leningrad (aka St. Petersburg) in 1924. That’s when an unconventional chess match was played by Peter Romanovsky and Ilya Rabinovich, two chess masters of the day. Apparently, they called in their moves over the telephone. And then real-life chess...
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Open Culture
How Zaha Hadid Revolutionized Architecture & Drew Inspiration from Russian Avant-Garde Art Zaha Hadid died in 2016, at the age of 65. She certainly wasn’t old, by the standards of our time,...
2 weeks ago
16

How Zaha Hadid Revolutionized Architecture & Drew Inspiration from Russian Avant-Garde Art

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2 weeks ago
Zaha Hadid died in 2016, at the age of 65. She certainly wasn’t old, by the standards of our time, though in most professions, her best working years would already have been behind her. She was, however, an architect, and by age 65, most architects are still very much in their...
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Open Culture
Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi–Walt Disney’s 1943 Film Shows How Fascists Are Made During World War II, Walt Disney entered into a contract with the US government to develop 32...
2 weeks ago
14

Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi–Walt Disney’s 1943 Film Shows How Fascists Are Made

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2 weeks ago
During World War II, Walt Disney entered into a contract with the US government to develop 32 animated shorts. Nearly bankrupted by Fantasia (1940), Disney needed to refill its coffers, and making American propaganda films didn’t seem like a bad way to do it. On numerous...
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Open Culture
The Extreme Life and Philosophy of Hunter S. Thompson: Gonzo Journalism and the American Condition Hunter S. Thompson has been gone for two decades now. When he went out, as the new Pursuit of Wonder...
2 weeks ago
18

The Extreme Life and Philosophy of Hunter S. Thompson: Gonzo Journalism and the American Condition

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2 weeks ago
Hunter S. Thompson has been gone for two decades now. When he went out, as the new Pursuit of Wonder video on his life and work reminds us, he did so in a highly American manner: with a gun, and at the moment of his own choosing. Even his longtime fans who respected something...
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Open Culture
James Joyce, With His Eyesight Failing, Draws a Sketch of Leopold Bloom (1926) James Joyce had a terrible time with his eyes. When he was six years old he received his first set...
2 weeks ago
13

James Joyce, With His Eyesight Failing, Draws a Sketch of Leopold Bloom (1926)

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2 weeks ago
James Joyce had a terrible time with his eyes. When he was six years old he received his first set of eyeglasses, and, when he was 25, he came down with his first case of iritis, a very painful and potentially blinding inflammation of the colored part of the eye, the iris. A...
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Open Culture
Carl Sagan Issues a Chilling Warning About the Decline of Scientific Thinking in America: Watch His... Until the end of his life, Carl Sagan (1934–1996) continued doing what he did all along —...
3 weeks ago
11

Carl Sagan Issues a Chilling Warning About the Decline of Scientific Thinking in America: Watch His Final Interview (1996)

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3 weeks ago
Until the end of his life, Carl Sagan (1934–1996) continued doing what he did all along — popularizing science and “enthusiastically conveying the wonders of the universe to millions of people on television and in books.” Whenever Sagan appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny...
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Open Culture
The Real Story of Easter: How We Got from the First Easter in the Bible to Bunnies, Eggs & Chocolate Popular culture has long since claimed Easter as an occasion for trickster rabbits, dyed-egg hunts,...
3 weeks ago
15

The Real Story of Easter: How We Got from the First Easter in the Bible to Bunnies, Eggs & Chocolate

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3 weeks ago
Popular culture has long since claimed Easter as an occasion for trickster rabbits, dyed-egg hunts, and marshmallow chicks of unnatural hues — none of which are actually in the Bible. Though that probably doesn’t surprise you, you may not be aware of just how far the modern...
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Open Culture
How to Evade Taxes in Ancient Rome: A 1,900-Year-Old Papyrus Reveals an Ancient Tax Evasion Scheme It was surely not a coincidence that the New York Times published its story on the trial of a...
3 weeks ago
13

How to Evade Taxes in Ancient Rome: A 1,900-Year-Old Papyrus Reveals an Ancient Tax Evasion Scheme

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3 weeks ago
It was surely not a coincidence that the New York Times published its story on the trial of a certain Gadalias and Saulos this past Monday, April 14th. The defendants, as their names suggest, did not live in modernity: the papyrus documenting their legal troubles dates to the...
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Open Culture
How to Enter a ‘Flow State’ on Command: Peak Performance Mind Hack Explained in 7 Minutes You can be forgiven for thinking the concept of “flow” was cooked up and popularized by yoga...
3 weeks ago
12

How to Enter a ‘Flow State’ on Command: Peak Performance Mind Hack Explained in 7 Minutes

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3 weeks ago
You can be forgiven for thinking the concept of “flow” was cooked up and popularized by yoga teachers. That word gets a lot of play when one is moving from Downward-Facing Dog on through Warrior One and Two. Actually, flow — the state of  “effortless effort” — was coined by...
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Open Culture
A Forgotten 16th-Century Manuscript Reveals the First Designs for Modern Rockets The Austrian military engineer Conrad Haas was a man ahead of his time — indeed, about 400 years...
3 weeks ago
13

A Forgotten 16th-Century Manuscript Reveals the First Designs for Modern Rockets

from Open Culture [alt+shift+b] in creative

3 weeks ago
The Austrian military engineer Conrad Haas was a man ahead of his time — indeed, about 400 years ahead, considering that he was working on rockets aimed for outer space back in the mid-sixteenth century. Needless to say, he never actually managed to launch anything into the upper...
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Open Culture
Why Most Ancient Civilizations Had No Word for the Color Blue In an old Zen story, two monks argue over whether a flag is waving or whether it’s the wind that...
3 weeks ago
18

Why Most Ancient Civilizations Had No Word for the Color Blue

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3 weeks ago
In an old Zen story, two monks argue over whether a flag is waving or whether it’s the wind that waves. Their teacher strikes them both dumb, saying, “It is your mind that moves.” The centuries-old koan illustrates a point Zen masters — and later philosophers, psychologists, and...
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Open Culture
The Ark Before Noah: Discover the Ancient Flood Myths That Came Before the Bible The Lord said to Noah, there’s going to be a floody, floody; then to get those children out of the...
3 weeks ago
11

The Ark Before Noah: Discover the Ancient Flood Myths That Came Before the Bible

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3 weeks ago
The Lord said to Noah, there’s going to be a floody, floody; then to get those children out of the muddy, muddy; then to build him an arky, arky. This much we heard while toasting marshmallows around the campfire, at least if we grew up in a certain modern Protestant tradition....
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Open Culture
William Faulkner’s Review of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952) Images via Wikimedia Commons In the mid-20th century, the two big dogs in the American literary...
3 weeks ago
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William Faulkner’s Review of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

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3 weeks ago
Images via Wikimedia Commons In the mid-20th century, the two big dogs in the American literary scene were William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. Both were internationally revered, both were masters of the novel and the short story, and both won Nobel Prizes. Born in Mississippi,...
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Open Culture
What the World Will Look Like in 250 Million Years: Mapping the Distant Future Most of us now accept the idea that all of Earth’s continents were once part of a single, enormous...
3 weeks ago
12

What the World Will Look Like in 250 Million Years: Mapping the Distant Future

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3 weeks ago
Most of us now accept the idea that all of Earth’s continents were once part of a single, enormous land mass. That wasn’t the case in the early nineteen-tens, when the geologist Alfred Wegener (1880–1930) first publicized his theory of not just the supercontinent Pangea, but also...
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Open Culture
What Was Smoot-Hawley, and Why Are We Doing It Again? Anyone? Anyone? When most Americans think of the Smoot-Hawley Tariffs, they think of economic disaster. But if you...
3 weeks ago
15

What Was Smoot-Hawley, and Why Are We Doing It Again? Anyone? Anyone?

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3 weeks ago
When most Americans think of the Smoot-Hawley Tariffs, they think of economic disaster. But if you ask why, most Americans may need a short refresher course. Below, you will find just that. Appearing on Derek Thompson’s Plain History podcast, Douglas Irwin (an economist and...
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Open Culture
How Chinese Characters Work: The Evolution of a Three-Millennia-Old Writing System Contrary to somewhat popular belief, Chinese characters aren’t just little pictures. In fact, most...
4 weeks ago
12

How Chinese Characters Work: The Evolution of a Three-Millennia-Old Writing System

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4 weeks ago
Contrary to somewhat popular belief, Chinese characters aren’t just little pictures. In fact, most of them aren’t pictures at all. The very oldest, whose evolution can be traced back to the “oracle bone” script of thirteenth century BC etched directly onto the remains of turtles...
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Open Culture
Hear the World’s Oldest Known Song, “Hurrian Hymn No. 6” Written 3,400 Years Ago Do you like old timey music? Splendid. You can’t get more old timey than Hurrian Hymn No. 6, which...
4 weeks ago
14

Hear the World’s Oldest Known Song, “Hurrian Hymn No. 6” Written 3,400 Years Ago

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4 weeks ago
Do you like old timey music? Splendid. You can’t get more old timey than Hurrian Hymn No. 6, which was discovered on a clay tablet in the ancient Syrian port city of Ugarit in the 1950s, and is over 3400 years old. Actually, you can — a similar tablet, which references a hymn...
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Open Culture
What Is Kafkaesque?: The Philosophy of Franz Kafka It’s difficult to imagine that there was ever a time without the word “Kafkaesque.” Yet the term...
a month ago
15

What Is Kafkaesque?: The Philosophy of Franz Kafka

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a month ago
It’s difficult to imagine that there was ever a time without the word “Kafkaesque.” Yet the term would have meant nothing at all to anyone alive at the same time as Franz Kafka — including, in all probability, Kafka himself. Born in Prague in 1883, he grew up under a stern,...
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Open Culture
Actor John Lithgow Reads 20 Lessons on Tyranny, Penned by Historian Timothy Snyder In 2017, historian Timothy Snyder wrote the concise book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the...
a month ago
16

Actor John Lithgow Reads 20 Lessons on Tyranny, Penned by Historian Timothy Snyder

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a month ago
In 2017, historian Timothy Snyder wrote the concise book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, which went on to become a New York Times bestseller. A historian of fascism (then at Yale, now at U. Toronto), Snyder wanted to offer Americans a useful guide for...
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Open Culture
The Medieval Manuscript That Features “Yoda”, Killer Snails, Savage Rabbits & More: Discover The... As much as you may enjoy a night in with a book, you might not look so eagerly forward to it if that...
a month ago
12

The Medieval Manuscript That Features “Yoda”, Killer Snails, Savage Rabbits & More: Discover The Smithfield Decretals

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a month ago
As much as you may enjoy a night in with a book, you might not look so eagerly forward to it if that book comprised 314 folios of 1,971 papal letters and other documents relating to ecclesiastical law, all from the thirteenth century. Indeed, even many specialists in the field...
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Open Culture
The Map of Mathematics: Animation Shows How All the Different Fields in Math Fit Together Back in December, you hopefully thoroughly immersed yourself in The Map of Physics, an animated...
a month ago
13

The Map of Mathematics: Animation Shows How All the Different Fields in Math Fit Together

from Open Culture [alt+shift+b] in history

a month ago
Back in December, you hopefully thoroughly immersed yourself in The Map of Physics, an animated video–a visual aid for the modern age–that mapped out the field of physics, explaining all the connections between classical physics, quantum physics, and relativity. You can’t do...
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Open Culture
Isaac Asimov Describes How Artificial Intelligence Will Liberate Humans & Their Creativity in His... Artificial intelligence may be one of the major topics of our historical moment, but it can be...
a month ago
13

Isaac Asimov Describes How Artificial Intelligence Will Liberate Humans & Their Creativity in His Last Major Interview (1992)

from Open Culture [alt+shift+b] in creative

a month ago
Artificial intelligence may be one of the major topics of our historical moment, but it can be surprisingly tricky to define. In the more than 30-year-old interview clip above, Isaac Asimov describes artificial intelligence as “a phrase that we use for any device that does things...
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Open Culture
Watch Composer Wendy Carlos Demo an Original Moog Synthesizer (1989) She’s worked with Stanley Kubrick *and* “Weird Al” Yankovic, and helped Robert Moog in the...
a month ago
15

Watch Composer Wendy Carlos Demo an Original Moog Synthesizer (1989)

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a month ago
She’s worked with Stanley Kubrick *and* “Weird Al” Yankovic, and helped Robert Moog in the development of his eponymous synthesizer. Wendy Carlos is also one of the first high profile transgender artists–credited as Walter Carlos for Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange but having...
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Open Culture
Dante’s Inferno: A Visitor’s Guide to Hell In most places across the world, speak the name of Dante, and your listeners will think of Inferno....
a month ago
15

Dante’s Inferno: A Visitor’s Guide to Hell

from Open Culture [alt+shift+b] in history

a month ago
In most places across the world, speak the name of Dante, and your listeners will think of Inferno. Since its first publication more than 700 years ago, its depiction of Hell has become influential enough to shape the perceptions of even those who don’t believe that such a place...
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Open Culture
Who Really Built the Egyptian Pyramids—And How Did They Do It? Although it’s certainly more plausible than hypotheses like ancient aliens or lizard people, the...
a month ago
24

Who Really Built the Egyptian Pyramids—And How Did They Do It?

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a month ago
Although it’s certainly more plausible than hypotheses like ancient aliens or lizard people, the idea that slaves built the Egyptian pyramids is no more true. It derives from creative readings of Old Testament stories and technicolor Cecil B. Demille spectacles, and was a classic...
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Open Culture
How Italy Became the Most Divided Country in Europe: Understanding the Great Divide Between North &... Prada, Alfa Romeo, Pellegrino, Ferrari, Illy, Lamborghini, Gucci: these are a few Italian...
a month ago
30

How Italy Became the Most Divided Country in Europe: Understanding the Great Divide Between North & South

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a month ago
Prada, Alfa Romeo, Pellegrino, Ferrari, Illy, Lamborghini, Gucci: these are a few Italian corporations we all know, though we don’t necessarily know that they’re all from the north of Italy. The same is true, in fact, of most Italian brands that now enjoy global recognition, and...
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Open Culture
The Steps a President Would Take to Destroy His Nation, According to Grok Just out of curiosity, and apropos of nothing, we asked Grok (the AI chatbot created by Elon Musk)...
a month ago
21

The Steps a President Would Take to Destroy His Nation, According to Grok

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a month ago
Just out of curiosity, and apropos of nothing, we asked Grok (the AI chatbot created by Elon Musk) the following question: If a president of a superpower wanted to destroy his own country, what steps would he take? Here’s what Grok had to say: If a president of a superpower aimed...
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Open Culture
Why the Romans Stopped Reading Books Nobody reads books anymore. Whether or not that notion strikes you as true, you’ve probably heard it...
a month ago
19

Why the Romans Stopped Reading Books

from Open Culture [alt+shift+b] in history

a month ago
Nobody reads books anymore. Whether or not that notion strikes you as true, you’ve probably heard it expressed fairly often in recent decades — just as you might have had you lived in the Roman Empire of late antiquity. During that time, as ancient-history YouTuber Garrett Ryan...
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Open Culture
Watch Jazz ‘Hot’, the Rare 1938 Short Film With Jazz Legend Django Reinhardt Here’s a remarkable short film of the great jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, violinist Stéphane...
a month ago
24

Watch Jazz ‘Hot’, the Rare 1938 Short Film With Jazz Legend Django Reinhardt

from Open Culture [alt+shift+b] in history

a month ago
Here’s a remarkable short film of the great jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, violinist Stéphane Grappelli and their band the Quintette du Hot Club de France performing on a movie set in 1938. The film was hastily organized by the band’s British agent Lew Grade as a way to...
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Open Culture
In 1927, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis Created a Dystopian Vision of What the World Would Look Like in... Ultra-tall high-rises against dark skies. A huge distance between the rich and the poor. Robber...
a month ago
18

In 1927, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis Created a Dystopian Vision of What the World Would Look Like in 2026–and It Hits Close to Home

from Open Culture [alt+shift+b] in history

a month ago
Ultra-tall high-rises against dark skies. A huge distance between the rich and the poor. Robber barons at the helm of large-scale industrial operations that turn man into machine. Machines that have become intelligent enough to displace man. These have all been standard elements...
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Open Culture
Watch Bob Dylan Make His Debut at the Newport Folk Festival in Colorized 1963 Footage ?si=l7KWVf9NZBUkPyM6 In July 1963, Bob Dylan made his first appearance at the Newport Folk Festival....
a month ago
22

Watch Bob Dylan Make His Debut at the Newport Folk Festival in Colorized 1963 Footage

from Open Culture [alt+shift+b] in history

a month ago
?si=l7KWVf9NZBUkPyM6 In July 1963, Bob Dylan made his first appearance at the Newport Folk Festival. On opening night, he captivated a crowd of 13,000 with a performance of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” accompanied by Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, and Peter, Paul, and Mary. Then, the...
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Open Culture
The Only Illustrated Manuscript of Homer’s Iliad from Antiquity Despite its status as one of the most widely known and studied epic poems of all time, Homer’s Iliad...
a month ago
20

The Only Illustrated Manuscript of Homer’s Iliad from Antiquity

from Open Culture [alt+shift+b] in history

a month ago
Despite its status as one of the most widely known and studied epic poems of all time, Homer’s Iliad has proven surprisingly resistant to adaptation. However much inspiration it has provided to modern-day novelists working in a variety of different traditions, it’s translated...
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Open Culture
The Great Gatsby: A Free Audio Book April 10th will mark the 100th anniversary of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic American novel, The...
a month ago
16

The Great Gatsby: A Free Audio Book

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a month ago
April 10th will mark the 100th anniversary of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic American novel, The Great Gatsby. As A.O. Scott notes in a recent tribute, when first published, The Great Gatsby got off to a slow start. Initially, “Reviewers shrugged. Sales were sluggish. The novel...
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Open Culture
Did the Tower of Babel Actually Exist?: A Look at the Archaeological Evidence For all the means of communication and exchange we’ve established between the cultures of the world,...
a month ago
14

Did the Tower of Babel Actually Exist?: A Look at the Archaeological Evidence

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a month ago
For all the means of communication and exchange we’ve established between the cultures of the world, no matter how distant they may be from one another, we still have no truly universal single human language. The reason could date back to antiquity, when we first attempted a...
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Open Culture
A Rare Smile Captured in a 19th Century Photograph Just look at this photo. Just look at this young girl’s smile. We know her name: O‑o-dee. And we...
a month ago
29

A Rare Smile Captured in a 19th Century Photograph

from Open Culture [alt+shift+b] in history

a month ago
Just look at this photo. Just look at this young girl’s smile. We know her name: O‑o-dee. And we know that she was a member of the Kiowa tribe in the Oklahoma Territory. And we know that the photo was taken in 1894. But that smile is like a time machine. O‑o-dee might just as […]
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Open Culture
This Is What a Nuclear Strike Would Feel Like: The New York Times Creates a Precise Simulation Though certain generations may have grown up trained to take cover under their classroom desks in...
a month ago
21

This Is What a Nuclear Strike Would Feel Like: The New York Times Creates a Precise Simulation

from Open Culture [alt+shift+b] in history

a month ago
Though certain generations may have grown up trained to take cover under their classroom desks in the case of a nuclear showdown between the United States and the Soviet Union, few of us today can believe that we’d stand much chance if we found ourselves anywhere near a detonated...
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Open Culture
Superman vs. the KKK: Hear the 1946 Superman Radio Show That Weakened the Klan Years ago, back in 2016, we featured a 1950 Superman poster that urged students to defend the...
a month ago
24

Superman vs. the KKK: Hear the 1946 Superman Radio Show That Weakened the Klan

from Open Culture [alt+shift+b] in history

a month ago
Years ago, back in 2016, we featured a 1950 Superman poster that urged students to defend the American way and fight discrimination everywhere. Today, we present another chapter from Superman’s little-known history as a Civil Rights defender. The year is 1946. World War II has...
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Open Culture
The Best Photographer You’ve Never Heard Of: An Introduction to Tseng Kwong Chi Once, the United States was known for sending forth the world’s most complained-about international...
a month ago
18

The Best Photographer You’ve Never Heard Of: An Introduction to Tseng Kwong Chi

from Open Culture [alt+shift+b] in creative

a month ago
Once, the United States was known for sending forth the world’s most complained-about international tourists; today, that dubious distinction arguably belongs to China. But it wasn’t so long ago that the Chinese tourist was a practically unheard-of phenomenon, especially in the...
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Open Culture
Man Ray’s Surrealist Cinema: Watch Four Pioneering Films From the 1920s Man Ray was one of the leading artists of the avant-garde of 1920s and 1930s Paris. A key figure in...
a month ago
22

Man Ray’s Surrealist Cinema: Watch Four Pioneering Films From the 1920s

from Open Culture [alt+shift+b] in history

a month ago
Man Ray was one of the leading artists of the avant-garde of 1920s and 1930s Paris. A key figure in the Dada and Surrealist movements, his works spanned various media, including film. He was a leading exponent of the Cinéma Pur, or “Pure Cinema,” which rejected such “bourgeois”...
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Open Culture
When Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Pastor, Theorized How Stupidity Enabled the Rise of the Nazis... Two days after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, the Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer...
a month ago
17

When Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Pastor, Theorized How Stupidity Enabled the Rise of the Nazis (1942)

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a month ago
Two days after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, the Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer took to the airwaves. Before his radio broadcast was cut off, he warned his countrymen that their führer could well be a verführer, or misleader. Bonhoeffer’s anti-Nazism lasted...
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Open Culture
Spike Jonze Creates a New Short Film (aka Commercial) for Apple ?si=UQ0XdCH-cVGe26AC With his iconic Super Bowl ad in 1984, Ridley Scott began a tradition of...
a month ago
24

Spike Jonze Creates a New Short Film (aka Commercial) for Apple

from Open Culture [alt+shift+b] in history

a month ago
?si=UQ0XdCH-cVGe26AC With his iconic Super Bowl ad in 1984, Ridley Scott began a tradition of accomplished filmmakers creating advertisements for Apple. In the years since, we’ve seen David Fincher shoot an ad promoting the iPhone 3GS, Michel Gondry direct a spot showcasing the...
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Open Culture
When The Twilight Zone Imagined Fascism in America in a 1963 Episode Starring Dennis Hopper Watch through The Twilight Zone, and you’ll find yourself spotting no end of familiar faces: Julie...
a month ago
20

When The Twilight Zone Imagined Fascism in America in a 1963 Episode Starring Dennis Hopper

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a month ago
Watch through The Twilight Zone, and you’ll find yourself spotting no end of familiar faces: Julie Newmar, Burt Reynolds, Robert Redford, Elizabeth Montgomery, William Shatner, even Buster Keaton. The 1963 episode “He’s Alive” is at least doubly notable in that respect, featuring...
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Open Culture
NASA Visualizes the Ocean Currents in Motion: A Mesmerizing View of Earth’s Underwater Highways The mesmerizing video above lets you visualize the ocean currents around the world. Using data from...
a month ago
20

NASA Visualizes the Ocean Currents in Motion: A Mesmerizing View of Earth’s Underwater Highways

from Open Culture [alt+shift+b] in history

a month ago
The mesmerizing video above lets you visualize the ocean currents around the world. Using data from spacecraft, buoys, and other measurements, the visualization shows the ocean in motion, with the currents creating Van Gogh-like swirls around the globe. According to NASA, “the...
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Open Culture
How Dave Brubeck’s Time Out Changed Jazz Music video essay maestro Polyphonic is back. What I dig about his videos is that he takes on some...
a month ago
15

How Dave Brubeck’s Time Out Changed Jazz

from Open Culture [alt+shift+b] in history

a month ago
Music video essay maestro Polyphonic is back. What I dig about his videos is that he takes on some of the true warhorses of modern popular music and manages to find something new to say. Or at least he presents familiar stories in a new and modern way to an audience who may be...
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Open Culture
Every Hidden Detail of New York’s Classic Skyscrapers: The Chrysler, Empire State & Woolworth... Currently, the tallest buildings in New York City are One World Trade Center, Central Park Tower,...
a month ago
20

Every Hidden Detail of New York’s Classic Skyscrapers: The Chrysler, Empire State & Woolworth Buildings

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a month ago
Currently, the tallest buildings in New York City are One World Trade Center, Central Park Tower, and 111 West 57th Street. All of them were completed in the twenty-twenties, and all of them have attracted comment, sometimes admiring, sometimes bewildered. But none of them, fair...
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Open Culture
The Most Iconic Electronic Music Sample of Every Year (1990–2024) Hear a second or two of Vernon Burch’s “Get Up,” and you’re back in 1990; of “Balance and Rehearsal”...
a month ago
22

The Most Iconic Electronic Music Sample of Every Year (1990–2024)

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a month ago
Hear a second or two of Vernon Burch’s “Get Up,” and you’re back in 1990; of “Balance and Rehearsal” from the JBL sound-test album Session, and you’re back in 1999; of Eddie Johns’ “More Spell on You,” and you’re back in 2001. What, you don’t know any of those songs? Perhaps...
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Open Culture
Why There Isn’t a Bridge from Italy to Sicily – And Why the 2,000-Year-Old Dream of Building the... We’ve all heard of the great American road trip. If you’ve ever dreamt of taking a great Italian...
a month ago
24

Why There Isn’t a Bridge from Italy to Sicily – And Why the 2,000-Year-Old Dream of Building the Bridge May Soon Be Realized

from Open Culture [alt+shift+b] in history

a month ago
We’ve all heard of the great American road trip. If you’ve ever dreamt of taking a great Italian road trip, you’ve surely come across this inevitable hitch in the plan: you can’t drive to Sicily. You can, of course, put your car on a ferry; you can even take a train that gets put...
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Open Culture
Watch Dziga Vertov’s A Man with a Movie Camera: The 8th Best Film Ever Made Of all the cinematic trailblazers to emerge during the early years of the Soviet Union – Sergei...
a month ago
21

Watch Dziga Vertov’s A Man with a Movie Camera: The 8th Best Film Ever Made

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a month ago
Of all the cinematic trailblazers to emerge during the early years of the Soviet Union – Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Lev Kuleshov – Dziga Vertov (né Denis Arkadievitch Kaufman, 1896–1954) was the most radical. Whereas Eisenstein – as seen in that film school standard...
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Open Culture
An Introduction to The Garden of Earthly Delights & Hieronymus Bosch’s Wildly Creative Vision Hieronymus Bosch’s masterpiece of grotesquerie, The Garden of Earthly Delights, contains a young...
a month ago
20

An Introduction to The Garden of Earthly Delights & Hieronymus Bosch’s Wildly Creative Vision

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a month ago
Hieronymus Bosch’s masterpiece of grotesquerie, The Garden of Earthly Delights, contains a young God, Adam and Eve, oversized fruits and musical instruments, owls, tortured sinners, something called a “tree man” whose body contains an entire tavern, a defecating avian devil...
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Open Culture
NYU Professor Answers Your Burning Questions About Authoritarianism From WIRED comes this: NYU professor and “authoritarianism scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat joins WIRED to...
a month ago
19

NYU Professor Answers Your Burning Questions About Authoritarianism

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a month ago
From WIRED comes this: NYU professor and “authoritarianism scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat joins WIRED to answer the internet’s burning questions about dictators and fascism. Why do people support dictators? How do dictators come to power? What’s the difference between a dictatorship, an...
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Open Culture
Watch Alfred Hitchcock’s Groundbreaking, Six-Minute Trailer for Psycho (1960) The early trailer for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho above describes the film as “the picture you MUST...
a month ago
18

Watch Alfred Hitchcock’s Groundbreaking, Six-Minute Trailer for Psycho (1960)

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a month ago
The early trailer for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho above describes the film as “the picture you MUST see from the beginning… or not at all!” That’s good advice, given how early in the film its first big twist arrives. But it was also a policy: “Every theatre manager, everywhere, has...
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Open Culture
A 6‑Hour Time-Stretched Version of Brian Eno’s Music For Airports: Meditate, Relax, Study Writing in his 1995 diary about his seminal ambient album Music for Airports, Eno remembered his...
a month ago
22

A 6‑Hour Time-Stretched Version of Brian Eno’s Music For Airports: Meditate, Relax, Study

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a month ago
Writing in his 1995 diary about his seminal ambient album Music for Airports, Eno remembered his initial thoughts going into it: “I want to make a kind of music that prepares you for dying–that doesn’t get all bright and cheerful and pretend you’re not a little apprehensive, but...
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Open Culture
A Tour of Ancient Rome’s Best Graffiti: “We Have Urinated in Our Beds … There Was No Chamber Pot” &... Apart from the likes of bravo and pizza, graffiti must be one of the first Italian words that...
a month ago
14

A Tour of Ancient Rome’s Best Graffiti: “We Have Urinated in Our Beds … There Was No Chamber Pot” & More

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a month ago
Apart from the likes of bravo and pizza, graffiti must be one of the first Italian words that English-speakers learn in everyday life. As for why the English word comes directly from the Italian, perhaps it has something to do with the history of writing on the walls — a history...
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Open Culture
A Boy and His Atom: Watch The World’s Smallest Stop-Motion Film What you’re watching above isn’t your ordinary film. No, this film — A Boy and His Atom – holds the...
a month ago
19

A Boy and His Atom: Watch The World’s Smallest Stop-Motion Film

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a month ago
What you’re watching above isn’t your ordinary film. No, this film — A Boy and His Atom – holds the Guinness World Record for being the World’s Smallest Stop-Motion Film. It’s literally a movie made with atoms, created by IBM nanophysicists who have “used a scanning tunneling...
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Open Culture
The Ancient Greeks Who Converted to Buddhism It would hardly be notable to make the acquaintance of a Greek Buddhist today. Despite having...
a month ago
18

The Ancient Greeks Who Converted to Buddhism

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a month ago
It would hardly be notable to make the acquaintance of a Greek Buddhist today. Despite having originated in Asia, that religion — or philosophy, or way of life, or whatever you prefer to call it — now has adherents all over the world. Modern-day Buddhists need not make an arduous...
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Open Culture
Puppets of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Charles Dickens & Edgar Allan Poe Star in 1957 Frank Capra Educational... Produced between 1956 and 1964 by AT&T, the Bell Telephone Science Hour TV specials anticipate the...
a month ago
21

Puppets of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Charles Dickens & Edgar Allan Poe Star in 1957 Frank Capra Educational Film

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a month ago
Produced between 1956 and 1964 by AT&T, the Bell Telephone Science Hour TV specials anticipate the literary zaniness of The Muppet Show and the scientific enthusiasm of Cosmos. The “ship of the imagination” in Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos reboot may in fact owe something to the...
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Open Culture
Watch the Only Time Charlie Chaplin & Buster Keaton Performed Together On-Screen (1952) Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton were the two biggest comedy stars of the silent era, but as it...
a month ago
18

Watch the Only Time Charlie Chaplin & Buster Keaton Performed Together On-Screen (1952)

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a month ago
Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton were the two biggest comedy stars of the silent era, but as it happened, they never shared the screen until well into the reign of sound. In fact, their collaboration didn’t come about until 1952, the same year that Singin’ in the Rain dramatized...
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Open Culture
When Salvador Dalí Created a Chilling Anti-Venereal Disease Poster During World War II As a New York City subway rider, I am constantly exposed to public health posters. More often than...
a month ago
21

When Salvador Dalí Created a Chilling Anti-Venereal Disease Poster During World War II

from Open Culture [alt+shift+b] in history

a month ago
As a New York City subway rider, I am constantly exposed to public health posters. More often than not these feature a photo of a wholesome-looking teen whose sober expression is meant to convey hindsight regret at having taken up drugs, dropped out of school, or forgone condoms....
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Open Culture
Bob Dylan Explains Why Music Has Been Getting Worse One often hears that there’s no money to be made in music anymore. But then, there was no money to...
a month ago
18

Bob Dylan Explains Why Music Has Been Getting Worse

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a month ago
One often hears that there’s no money to be made in music anymore. But then, there was no money to be made in music when Bob Dylan started his career either—at least according to Bob Dylan. “If you could just support yourself, you were doin’ good,” he says in an interview clip...
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Open Culture
How the Moving Image Has Become the Medium of Record: Part 2 This piece picks up where Part 1 of Peter Kaufman’s article left off yesterday… The epistemological...
a month ago
16

How the Moving Image Has Become the Medium of Record: Part 2

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a month ago
This piece picks up where Part 1 of Peter Kaufman’s article left off yesterday… The epistemological nightmare we seem to be in, bombarded over our screens and speakers with so many moving-image messages per day, false and true, is at least in part due to the paralysis that we –...
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Open Culture
When Charlie Chaplin First Spoke Onscreen: How His Famous Great Dictator Speech Came About Charlie Chaplin came up in vaudeville, but it was silent film that made him the most famous man in...
2 months ago
15

When Charlie Chaplin First Spoke Onscreen: How His Famous Great Dictator Speech Came About

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2 months ago
Charlie Chaplin came up in vaudeville, but it was silent film that made him the most famous man in the world. His mastery of that form primed him to feel a degree of skepticism about sound when it came along: in 1931, he called the silent picture “a universal means of...
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Open Culture
How the Moving Image Has Become the Medium of Record: Part 1 Image via Wikimedia Commons How did we get to the point where we’ve come to believe so many lies...
2 months ago
20

How the Moving Image Has Become the Medium of Record: Part 1

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2 months ago
Image via Wikimedia Commons How did we get to the point where we’ve come to believe so many lies that 77 million Americans voted into the White House a criminal reality TV star from NBC, one groomed by a reality TV producer from CBS, who then appointed his Cabinet from Fox and X...
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Open Culture
Watch “The Birth of the Robot,” Len Lye’s Surreal 1935 Stop-Motion Animation Robots seem to have been much on the public mind back in the nineteen-thirties. Matt Novak at...
2 months ago
16

Watch “The Birth of the Robot,” Len Lye’s Surreal 1935 Stop-Motion Animation

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2 months ago
Robots seem to have been much on the public mind back in the nineteen-thirties. Matt Novak at Paleofuture gives the example of a moment in 1932 when “the world was awash in newspaper stories about a robot that had done the unthinkable: a mechanical man had shot its inventor.”...
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Open Culture
Why “The Girl from Ipanema“ ‘ Is a Richer & Weirder Song Than You Realized Say what you want about YouTube’s negative effects (endless soy faces, influencers, its devious and...
2 months ago
21

Why “The Girl from Ipanema“ ‘ Is a Richer & Weirder Song Than You Realized

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2 months ago
Say what you want about YouTube’s negative effects (endless soy faces, influencers, its devious and fascist-leaning algorithms) but it has offered to creators a space in which to indulge. And that’s one of the reasons I’ve been a fan of Adam Neely’s work. A jazz musician and a...
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Open Culture
A Tour of the Final Home Designed By Frank Lloyd Wright: The Circular Sun House Some remember the nineteen-nineties in America as the second coming of the nineteen-fifties....
2 months ago
26

A Tour of the Final Home Designed By Frank Lloyd Wright: The Circular Sun House

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2 months ago
Some remember the nineteen-nineties in America as the second coming of the nineteen-fifties. Whatever holes one can poke in that historical framing, it does feel strangely plausible inside Frank Lloyd Wright’s Circular Sun House. Though not actually built until 1967, it was...
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Open Culture
Watch the Sci-Fi Short Film “I’m Not a Robot”: Winner of a 2025 Academy Award Victoria Warmerdam, the writer and director of the short film, “I’m Not a Robot,” summarizes the...
2 months ago
28

Watch the Sci-Fi Short Film “I’m Not a Robot”: Winner of a 2025 Academy Award

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2 months ago
Victoria Warmerdam, the writer and director of the short film, “I’m Not a Robot,” summarizes the plot of her 22-minute film as follows: The film “tells the story of Lara, a music producer who spirals into an existential crisis after repeatedly failing a CAPTCHA test—leading her...
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Open Culture
Get 40% Off 3 Months of Coursera Plus & Access Unlimited Courses – Offer Ends March 9 Now through March 9, 2025, Coursera is offering 40% off a three-month subscription to Coursera Plus....
2 months ago
22

Get 40% Off 3 Months of Coursera Plus & Access Unlimited Courses – Offer Ends March 9

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2 months ago
Now through March 9, 2025, Coursera is offering 40% off a three-month subscription to Coursera Plus. This plan provides access to 7,000+ courses for one all-inclusive price, including programs from 350 universities (e.g., Duke and the University of Michigan) and companies like...
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Open Culture
The Classic 1972 Concert Film Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii Gets Restored & Will Soon Hit IMAX... Today, when we watch genre-defining concert films like Monterey Pop, Woodstock, Gimme Shelter, or...
2 months ago
24

The Classic 1972 Concert Film Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii Gets Restored & Will Soon Hit IMAX Theaters

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2 months ago
Today, when we watch genre-defining concert films like Monterey Pop, Woodstock, Gimme Shelter, or Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, we look upon the audience with nearly as much interest as we do the performers. But Pink Floyd never did things in quite the same way as...
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Open Culture
Historian Answers Burning Questions About The Renaissance Courtesy of Wired, historian Alexander Bevilacqua (Williams College) answers the internet’s burning...
2 months ago
24

Historian Answers Burning Questions About The Renaissance

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2 months ago
Courtesy of Wired, historian Alexander Bevilacqua (Williams College) answers the internet’s burning questions about the cultural rebirth that came to be known as The Renaissance. In 30+ minutes, Bevilacqua covers an array of questions, including: When did The Renaissance begin?...
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Open Culture
How Stephen King Foretold the Rise of Trump in a 1979 Novel Nobody opens a Stephen King novel expecting to see a reflection of the real world. Then again, as...
2 months ago
22

How Stephen King Foretold the Rise of Trump in a 1979 Novel

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2 months ago
Nobody opens a Stephen King novel expecting to see a reflection of the real world. Then again, as those who get hooked on his books can attest, never is his work ever wholly detached from reality. Time and time again, he delivers lurid visions of the macabre, grotesque, and...
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Open Culture
Carl Jung’s Hand-Drawn, Rarely-Seen Manuscript The Red Book Despite his one-time friend and mentor Sigmund Freud’s enormous impact on Western...
2 months ago
20

Carl Jung’s Hand-Drawn, Rarely-Seen Manuscript The Red Book

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2 months ago
Despite his one-time friend and mentor Sigmund Freud’s enormous impact on Western self-understanding, I would argue it is Carl Jung who is still most with us in our communal practices: from his focus on introversion and extroversion to his view of syncretic, intuitive forms of...
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Open Culture
How the Nazis Waged War on Modern Art: Inside the “Degenerate Art” Exhibition of 1937 Before his fateful entry into politics, Adolf Hitler wanted to be an artist. Even to the most...
2 months ago
19

How the Nazis Waged War on Modern Art: Inside the “Degenerate Art” Exhibition of 1937

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2 months ago
Before his fateful entry into politics, Adolf Hitler wanted to be an artist. Even to the most neutral imaginable observer, the known examples of the estimated 2,000 to 3,000 paintings and other works of art he produced in his early adulthood would hardly evidence astonishing...
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Open Culture
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Message to Young People: “Learn to Be Alone,” Enjoy Solitude I remember the first time I sat down and watched Andrei Tarkovsky’s lyrical, meandering sci-fi epic...
2 months ago
23

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Message to Young People: “Learn to Be Alone,” Enjoy Solitude

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2 months ago
I remember the first time I sat down and watched Andrei Tarkovsky’s lyrical, meandering sci-fi epic Stalker. It was a long time ago, before the advent of smartphones and tablets. I watched a beat-up VHS copy on a non-“smart” TV, and had no ability to pause every few minutes and...
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Open Culture
Where The Simpsons Began: Discover the Original Shorts That Appeared on The Tracey Ullman Show... When it first went on air in the late nineteen-eighties, Fox had to prove itself capable of playing...
2 months ago
18

Where The Simpsons Began: Discover the Original Shorts That Appeared on The Tracey Ullman Show (1987–1989)

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2 months ago
When it first went on air in the late nineteen-eighties, Fox had to prove itself capable of playing in a televisual league with the likes of NBC, CBS, and ABC. To that end, it began building its prime-time lineup with two original programs more thematically and aesthetically...
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Open Culture
The Story Of Menstruation: Watch Walt Disney’s Sex Ed Film from 1946 From 1945 to 1951, Disney produced a series of educational films to be shown in American schools....
2 months ago
24

The Story Of Menstruation: Watch Walt Disney’s Sex Ed Film from 1946

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2 months ago
From 1945 to 1951, Disney produced a series of educational films to be shown in American schools. How to bathe an infant. How not to catch a cold. Why you shouldn’t drive fast. Disney covered these subjects in its educational shorts, and then eventually got to the touchy subject...
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Open Culture
The Experimental Movement That Created The Beatles’ Weirdest Song, “Revolution 9” As of this writing, the Beatles’ “Revolution 9″ has more than 13,800,000 plays on Spotify. This has...
2 months ago
21

The Experimental Movement That Created The Beatles’ Weirdest Song, “Revolution 9”

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2 months ago
As of this writing, the Beatles’ “Revolution 9″ has more than 13,800,000 plays on Spotify. This has no doubt generated decent revenue, even given the platform’s oft-lamented payout rates. But compare that number to the more than half-a-billion streams of “Blackbird,” also on the...
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Open Culture
Kate Bush, Annie Lennox and 1,000 Musicians Protest AI with a New Silent Album The good news is that an album has just been released by Kate Bush, Annie Lennox, Damon Albarn of...
2 months ago
18

Kate Bush, Annie Lennox and 1,000 Musicians Protest AI with a New Silent Album

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2 months ago
The good news is that an album has just been released by Kate Bush, Annie Lennox, Damon Albarn of Gorillaz, The Clash, Tori Amos, Hans Zimmer, Pet Shop Boys, Jamiroquai, and Yusuf (previously known as Cat Stevens), Billy Ocean, and many other musicians besides, most of them...
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Open Culture
Ella Fitzgerald Sings Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love” (1969) In 1969, Ella Fitzgerald released Sunshine of Your Love, a live album recorded at the Venetian Room...
2 months ago
25

Ella Fitzgerald Sings Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love” (1969)

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2 months ago
In 1969, Ella Fitzgerald released Sunshine of Your Love, a live album recorded at the Venetian Room in The Fairmont San Francisco. Recorded by music producer Norman Granz, the album featured contemporary pop songs that showcased Fitzgerald’s ability to transcend jazz standards....
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Open Culture
What Makes Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas One of the Most Fascinating Paintings in Art History Diego Velázquez painted Las Meninas almost 370 years ago, and it’s been under scrutiny ever since....
2 months ago
27

What Makes Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas One of the Most Fascinating Paintings in Art History

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2 months ago
Diego Velázquez painted Las Meninas almost 370 years ago, and it’s been under scrutiny ever since. If the public’s appetite to know more about it has diminished over time, that certainly isn’t reflected in the view count of the analysis from YouTube channel Rabbit Hole above,...
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Open Culture
When William Faulkner Set the World Record for Writing the Longest Sentence in Literature: Read the... Image by Carl Van Vechten, via Wikimedia Commons “How did Faulkner pull it off?” is a question many...
2 months ago
44

When William Faulkner Set the World Record for Writing the Longest Sentence in Literature: Read the 1,288-Word Sentence from Absalom, Absalom!

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2 months ago
Image by Carl Van Vechten, via Wikimedia Commons “How did Faulkner pull it off?” is a question many a fledgling writer has asked themselves while struggling through a period of apprenticeship like that novelist John Barth describes in his 1999 talk “My Faulkner.”...
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Open Culture
Jimi Hendrix Plays the Beatles: “Sgt. Pepper’s,” “Day Tripper,” and “Tomorrow Never Knows” Who invented rock and roll? Ask Chuck Berry, he’ll tell you. It was Chuck Berry. Or was it Bill...
2 months ago
23

Jimi Hendrix Plays the Beatles: “Sgt. Pepper’s,” “Day Tripper,” and “Tomorrow Never Knows”

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2 months ago
Who invented rock and roll? Ask Chuck Berry, he’ll tell you. It was Chuck Berry. Or was it Bill Haley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard? Muddy Waters? Robert Johnson? Maybe even Lead Belly? You didn’t, but if you asked me, I’d say that rock and roll, like country blues, came not...
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Open Culture
The 48 Laws of Power Explained in 30 Minutes: “Never Outshine the Master,” “Re-Create Yourself,” and... Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power has been a popular book since its first publication over a...
2 months ago
29

The 48 Laws of Power Explained in 30 Minutes: “Never Outshine the Master,” “Re-Create Yourself,” and More

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2 months ago
Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power has been a popular book since its first publication over a quarter-century ago. Judging by the discussion that continues among its fervent (and often proselytizing) fans, it’s easy to forget that its title isn’t How to Become Powerful....
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Open Culture
Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists the Best and Worst Sci-Fi Movies: The Blob, Back to the Future, 2001: A... Neil deGrasse Tyson may not be a film critic. But if you watch the video above from his Youtube...
2 months ago
27

Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists the Best and Worst Sci-Fi Movies: The Blob, Back to the Future, 2001: A Space Odyssey & More

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2 months ago
Neil deGrasse Tyson may not be a film critic. But if you watch the video above from his Youtube channel StarTalk Plus, you’ll see that — to use one of his own favorite locutions — he loves him a good science fiction movie. Given his professional credentials as an astrophysicist...
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Open Culture
David Bowie Performs an Ethereal Acoustic Version of “Heroes,” with a Bottle Cap Strapped to His... Not long ago I stumbled upon this pretty wonderful video of David Bowie playing an acoustic version...
2 months ago
35

David Bowie Performs an Ethereal Acoustic Version of “Heroes,” with a Bottle Cap Strapped to His Shoe, Keeping the Beat (1996)

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2 months ago
Not long ago I stumbled upon this pretty wonderful video of David Bowie playing an acoustic version of “Heroes,” one of my favorite songs, and I thought I’d quickly share it today. Why wait? Appearing at Neil Young’s annual Bridge School Benefit concert in October 1996, Bowie...
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Open Culture
How Do You Use AI in Your Daily Life? Share the Applications That Have Made a Big Difference Image by Jernej Furman, via Wikimedia Commons It would be difficult to imagine the last couple of...
2 months ago
24

How Do You Use AI in Your Daily Life? Share the Applications That Have Made a Big Difference

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2 months ago
Image by Jernej Furman, via Wikimedia Commons It would be difficult to imagine the last couple of years without artificial intelligence, even if you don’t use it. Can you recall the last day without some AI-related news item or social-media post — or indeed, a time when the hype...
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Open Culture
A Behind-the-Scenes Tour of Saturday Night Live’s Iconic Studio To help celebrate SNL’s 50th anniversary, Architectural Digest has released a new video featuring...
2 months ago
25

A Behind-the-Scenes Tour of Saturday Night Live’s Iconic Studio

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2 months ago
To help celebrate SNL’s 50th anniversary, Architectural Digest has released a new video featuring Heidi Gardner, Chloe Fineman, and Ego Nwodim giving a tour of the Saturday Night Live set. The show has been broadcasting live from Studio 8H, located at 30 Rockefeller, since SNL...
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Open Culture
The Architectural History of the Louvre: 800 Years in Three Minutes Setting aside just one day for the Louvre is a classic first-time Paris visitor’s mistake. The place...
2 months ago
25

The Architectural History of the Louvre: 800 Years in Three Minutes

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2 months ago
Setting aside just one day for the Louvre is a classic first-time Paris visitor’s mistake. The place is simply too big to comprehend on one visit, or indeed on ten visits. To grow so vast has taken eight centuries, a process explained in under three minutes by the official video...
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Open Culture
Optical Poems by Oskar Fischinger: Discover the Avant-Garde Animator Despised by Hitler & Dissed by... At a time when much of animation was consumed with little anthropomorphized animals sporting white...
2 months ago
28

Optical Poems by Oskar Fischinger: Discover the Avant-Garde Animator Despised by Hitler & Dissed by Disney

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2 months ago
At a time when much of animation was consumed with little anthropomorphized animals sporting white gloves, Oskar Fischinger went in a completely different direction. His work is all about dancing geometric shapes and abstract forms spinning around a flat featureless background....
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Open Culture
Watch David Byrne Lead a Massive Choir in Singing David Bowie’s “Heroes” Throughout the years, we’ve featured performances of Choir!Choir!Choir!–a large amateur choir from...
2 months ago
43

Watch David Byrne Lead a Massive Choir in Singing David Bowie’s “Heroes”

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2 months ago
Throughout the years, we’ve featured performances of Choir!Choir!Choir!–a large amateur choir from Toronto that meets weekly and sings their hearts out. You’ve seen them sing Prince’s “When Doves Cry,” Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun” (to honor Chris Cornell) and Leonard Cohen’s...
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Open Culture
Hear the Jazz-Funk Musical Adaptation of Dune by David Matthews (1977) Even if you’ve never read Frank Herbert’s Dune, you may well have encountered its adaptations to a...
2 months ago
32

Hear the Jazz-Funk Musical Adaptation of Dune by David Matthews (1977)

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2 months ago
Even if you’ve never read Frank Herbert’s Dune, you may well have encountered its adaptations to a variety of other media: comic books, video games, board games, television series, and of course films, David Lynch’s 1984 version and Denis Villeneuve’s two-parter earlier this...
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Open Culture
Why Are the Names of British Towns & Cities So Hard to Pronounce?: A Humorous But Informative Primer When they make their first transoceanic voyage, more than a few Americans choose to go to England,...
2 months ago
20

Why Are the Names of British Towns & Cities So Hard to Pronounce?: A Humorous But Informative Primer

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2 months ago
When they make their first transoceanic voyage, more than a few Americans choose to go to England, on the assumption that, whatever culture shock they might experience, at least none of the difficulties will be linguistic. Only when it’s too late do they discover the true meaning...
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Open Culture
When William S. Burroughs Appeared on Saturday Night Live: His First TV Appearance (1981) Though he never said so directly, we might expect that Situationist Guy Debord would have included...
2 months ago
29

When William S. Burroughs Appeared on Saturday Night Live: His First TV Appearance (1981)

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2 months ago
Though he never said so directly, we might expect that Situationist Guy Debord would have included Saturday Night Live in what he called the “Spectacle”—the mass media presentation of a totalizing reality, “the ruling order’s nonstop discourse about itself, its never-ending...
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Open Culture
Brian Eno Attempts to Figure Out What Art Does in a New Book Co-Written with Artist Bette A Brian Eno was thinking about the purpose of art a decade ago, as evidenced by his 2015 John Peel...
2 months ago
26

Brian Eno Attempts to Figure Out What Art Does in a New Book Co-Written with Artist Bette A

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2 months ago
Brian Eno was thinking about the purpose of art a decade ago, as evidenced by his 2015 John Peel Lecture (previously featured here on Open Culture). But he was also thinking about it three decades ago, as evidenced by A Year with Swollen Appendices, his diary of the year 1995...
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Open Culture
Watch the Historic First Episode of Saturday Night Live with Host George Carlin (1975) 50 years of Saturday Night Live. It all started here with this first episode, aired on October 11,...
2 months ago
22

Watch the Historic First Episode of Saturday Night Live with Host George Carlin (1975)

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2 months ago
50 years of Saturday Night Live. It all started here with this first episode, aired on October 11, 1975. George Carlin hosted the show. Billy Preston and Janis Ian served up the music. Jim Henson staged an elaborate puppet show. And “the Not Ready for Prime Time Players”...
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Open Culture
Inside SNL: Al Franken Reveals How Saturday Night Live Is Crafted Every Week As Saturday Night Live celebrates its 50th anniversary, Al Franken takes you inside the making of an...
2 months ago
28

Inside SNL: Al Franken Reveals How Saturday Night Live Is Crafted Every Week

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2 months ago
As Saturday Night Live celebrates its 50th anniversary, Al Franken takes you inside the making of an SNL episode. He should know a thing or two about the subject. Part of the original SNL writing team, Franken spent 15 years writing and performing for the show. (Anyone remember...
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Open Culture
Meet Jesse Welles, the Folk Singer Who Turns News into Folk Music, Writing Songs on Elections, Plane... At first glance, Jesse Welles resembles nothing so much as a time traveler from the year 1968....
2 months ago
28

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

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2 months ago
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...
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Open Culture
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...
2 months ago
26

Flannery O’Connor: Friends Don’t Let Friends Read Ayn Rand

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2 months ago
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...
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Open Culture
How the Fairlight CMI Synthesizer Revolutionized Music In the credits of Phil Collins’ No Jacket Required appears the disclaimer that “there is no...
2 months ago
26

How the Fairlight CMI Synthesizer Revolutionized Music

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2 months ago
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,...
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Open Culture
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...
2 months ago
23

Jane Austen Used Pins to Edit Her Manuscripts: Before the Word Processor & White-Out

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2 months ago
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...
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Open Culture
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...
2 months ago
24

What It Was Like to Get a Meal at a Medieval Tavern

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2 months ago
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...
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Open Culture
Watch 10 Great German Expressionist Films: Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari & More In 1913, Germany, flush with a new nation’s patriotic zeal, looked like it might become the dominant...
2 months ago
25

Watch 10 Great German Expressionist Films: Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari & More

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2 months ago
In 1913, Germany, flush with a new nation’s patriotic zeal, looked like it might become the dominant nation of Europe and a real rival to that global superpower Great Britain. Then it hit the buzzsaw of World War I. After the German government collapsed in 1918 from the economic...
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Horrifying 1906 Illustrations of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds: Discover the Art of Henrique Alvim... H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds has terrified and fascinated readers and writers for decades since its...
2 months ago
27

Horrifying 1906 Illustrations of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds: Discover the Art of Henrique Alvim Corrêa

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2 months ago
H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds has terrified and fascinated readers and writers for decades since its 1898 publication and has inspired numerous adaptations. The most notorious use of Wells’ book was by Orson Welles, whom the author called “my little namesake,” and whose 1938 War...
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Open Culture
Tracing English Back to Its Oldest Known Ancestor: An Introduction to Proto-Indo-European People understand evolution in all sorts of different ways. We’ve all heard a variety of folk...
2 months ago
21

Tracing English Back to Its Oldest Known Ancestor: An Introduction to Proto-Indo-European

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2 months ago
People understand evolution in all sorts of different ways. We’ve all heard a variety of folk explanations of that all-important phenomenon, from “survival of the fittest” to “humans come from monkeys,” that run the spectrum from broadly correct to badly mangled. One less often...
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Open Culture
Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains Who Was the Greatest Scientific Mind in History Neil deGrasse Tyson has spent his career talking up not just science itself, but also its...
2 months ago
37

Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains Who Was the Greatest Scientific Mind in History

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2 months ago
Neil deGrasse Tyson has spent his career talking up not just science itself, but also its practitioners. If asked to name the greatest scientist of all time, one might expect him to need a minute to think about it — or even to find himself unable to choose. But that’s hardly...
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Open Culture
Hear an AI Chatbot, Masquerading as a Clueless Grandmother, Waste the Time of an Internet Scam... And now for a good use of AI. The UK-based telecom company O2 has developed a chatbot (“named...
2 months ago
27

Hear an AI Chatbot, Masquerading as a Clueless Grandmother, Waste the Time of an Internet Scam Artist

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2 months ago
And now for a good use of AI. The UK-based telecom company O2 has developed a chatbot (“named Daisy”) that performs a noble task. Impersonating an elderly grandmother, the chatbot engages with internet fraudsters and then systematically frustrates them and wastes their time. As...
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Open Culture
Warner Bros. Lets You Watch 31 Films Free Online: David Byrne’s True Stories, Christopher Guest’s... It’s Friday, which means that tonight, many of us will sit down to watch a movie with our family,...
3 months ago
49

Warner Bros. Lets You Watch 31 Films Free Online: David Byrne’s True Stories, Christopher Guest’s Waiting for Guffman, Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep & More

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3 months ago
It’s Friday, which means that tonight, many of us will sit down to watch a movie with our family, our friends, our significant other, or — for some cinephiles, best of all — by ourselves. If you haven’t yet lined up any home-cinematic experience in particular, consider taking a...
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Open Culture
See Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Visualized in Colorfully Animated Scores Music is often described as the most abstract of all the arts, and arguably the least visual as...
3 months ago
30

See Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Visualized in Colorfully Animated Scores

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3 months ago
Music is often described as the most abstract of all the arts, and arguably the least visual as well. But these qualities, which seem so basic to the nature of the form, have been challenged for at least three centuries, not least by composers themselves. Take Antonio Vivaldi,...
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Open Culture
Behold Harry Clarke’s Hallucinatory Illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe’s Story Collection, Tales of... As you’ve probably noticed if you’re a regular reader of this site, we’re big fans of book...
3 months ago
28

Behold Harry Clarke’s Hallucinatory Illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe’s Story Collection, Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1923)

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3 months ago
As you’ve probably noticed if you’re a regular reader of this site, we’re big fans of book illustration, particularly that from the form’s golden age—the late 18th and 19th century—before photography took over as the dominant visual medium. But while photographs largely...
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How Japanese Masters Turn Sand Into Swords: The Art of Traditional Sword Making from Start to Finish We made sand think: this phrase is used from time to time to evoke the particular technological...
3 months ago
29

How Japanese Masters Turn Sand Into Swords: The Art of Traditional Sword Making from Start to Finish

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3 months ago
We made sand think: this phrase is used from time to time to evoke the particular technological wonders of our age, especially since artificial intelligence seems to be back on the slate of possibilities. While there would be no Silicon Valley without silica sand, semiconductors...
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Open Culture
When Charlie Chaplin Entered a Chaplin Look-Alike Contest & Came in 20th Place Charlie Chaplin started appearing in his first films in 1914—40 films, to be precise—and, by 1915,...
3 months ago
40

When Charlie Chaplin Entered a Chaplin Look-Alike Contest & Came in 20th Place

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3 months ago
Charlie Chaplin started appearing in his first films in 1914—40 films, to be precise—and, by 1915, the United States had a major case of “Chaplinitis.” Chaplin mustaches were suddenly popping up everywhere–as were Chaplin imitators and Chaplin look-alike contests. A young Bob...
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Open Culture
How Wearing Ridiculously Long Pointed Shoes Became a Medieval Fashion Trend We can all remember seeing images of medieval Europeans wearing pointy shoes, but most of us have...
3 months ago
22

How Wearing Ridiculously Long Pointed Shoes Became a Medieval Fashion Trend

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3 months ago
We can all remember seeing images of medieval Europeans wearing pointy shoes, but most of us have paid scant attention to the shoes themselves. That may be for the best, since the more we dwell on one fact of life in the Middle Ages or another, the more we imagine how...
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Open Culture
Carl Sagan Predicts the Decline of America: Unable to Know “What’s True,” We Will Slide, “Without... Image by Kenneth Zirkel, via Wikimedia Commons There have been many theories of how human history...
3 months ago
27

Carl Sagan Predicts the Decline of America: Unable to Know “What’s True,” We Will Slide, “Without Noticing, Back into Superstition & Darkness” (1995)

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3 months ago
Image by Kenneth Zirkel, via Wikimedia Commons There have been many theories of how human history works. Some, like German thinker G.W.F. Hegel, have thought of progress as inevitable. Others have embraced a more static view, full of “Great Men” and an immutable natural...
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Open Culture
Has SpaceX Done Anything NASA Hasn’t? Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains His “Feud” with Elon Musk One would count neither Elon Musk nor Neil deGrasse Tyson among the most reserved public figures of...
3 months ago
24

Has SpaceX Done Anything NASA Hasn’t? Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains His “Feud” with Elon Musk

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3 months ago
One would count neither Elon Musk nor Neil deGrasse Tyson among the most reserved public figures of the twenty-first century. Given the efforts Musk has been making to push into the business of outer space, which has long been Tyson’s intellectual domain, it’s only natural that...
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Open Culture
Watch the First 2+ Hours of MTV’s Inaugural Broadcast (August 1, 1981) Not everyone on August 1, 1981 had a VCR at their disposal, and not everybody stayed up until...
3 months ago
27

Watch the First 2+ Hours of MTV’s Inaugural Broadcast (August 1, 1981)

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3 months ago
Not everyone on August 1, 1981 had a VCR at their disposal, and not everybody stayed up until midnight. But fortunately at least one person did, in order to tape the first two hours of a new cable channel called MTV: Music Television. Did they know it would be historic? MTV...
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The Nature of Human Stupidity Explained by The 48 Laws of Power Author Robert Greene It’s practically guaranteed that we now have more stupid people on the planet than ever before. Of...
3 months ago
25

The Nature of Human Stupidity Explained by The 48 Laws of Power Author Robert Greene

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3 months ago
It’s practically guaranteed that we now have more stupid people on the planet than ever before. Of course, we might be tempted to think; just look at how many of them disagree with my politics. But this unprecedented stupidity is primarily, if not entirely, a function of an...
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Open Culture
Jean-Luc Godard Shoots Marianne Faithfull (RIP) Singing “As Tears Go By” in 1966 Note: Yesterday, Marianne Faithfull passed away at age 78. In her memory, we’re bringing back a...
3 months ago
22

Jean-Luc Godard Shoots Marianne Faithfull (RIP) Singing “As Tears Go By” in 1966

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3 months ago
Note: Yesterday, Marianne Faithfull passed away at age 78. In her memory, we’re bringing back a favorite from deep in our archive. It originally appeared on our site in June 2012. When you want to learn a thing or two about Jean-Luc Godard, you turn to New Yorker film critic...
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Open Culture
Google Unveils a Digital Marketing & E‑Commerce Certificate: 7 Courses Will Help Prepare Students... Several years ago, Google launched a series of Career Certificates that will “prepare learners for...
3 months ago
26

Google Unveils a Digital Marketing & E‑Commerce Certificate: 7 Courses Will Help Prepare Students for an Entry-Level Job in 6 Months

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3 months ago
Several years ago, Google launched a series of Career Certificates that will “prepare learners for an entry-level role in under six months.” Their first certificates focused on Project Management, Data Analytics, User Experience (UX) Design, IT Support and IT Automation. And they...
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Open Culture
Explore a Digitized Edition of the Voynich Manuscript, “the World’s Most Mysterious Book” A 600-year-old manuscript—written in a script no one has ever decoded, filled with cryptic...
3 months ago
28

Explore a Digitized Edition of the Voynich Manuscript, “the World’s Most Mysterious Book”

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3 months ago
A 600-year-old manuscript—written in a script no one has ever decoded, filled with cryptic illustrations, its origins remaining to this day a mystery…. It’s not as satisfying a plot, say, of a National Treasure or Dan Brown thriller, certainly not as action-packed as...
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Open Culture
How Robert Frost Wrote One of His Most Famous Poems, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” Several generations of American students have now had the experience of being told by an English...
3 months ago
28

How Robert Frost Wrote One of His Most Famous Poems, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”

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3 months ago
Several generations of American students have now had the experience of being told by an English teacher that they’d been reading Robert Frost all wrong, even if they’d never read him at all. Most, at least, had seen his lines “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— / I took the...
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Open Culture
Mahatma Gandhi’s List of the Seven Social Sins; or Tips on How to Avoid Living the Bad Life Image via Wikimedia Commons In 590 AD, Pope Gregory I unveiled a list of the Seven Deadly Sins –...
3 months ago
29

Mahatma Gandhi’s List of the Seven Social Sins; or Tips on How to Avoid Living the Bad Life

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3 months ago
Image via Wikimedia Commons In 590 AD, Pope Gregory I unveiled a list of the Seven Deadly Sins – lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride – as a way to keep the flock from straying into the thorny fields of ungodliness. These days, though, for all but the most devout,...
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Open Culture
How Frank Lloyd Wright Became Frank Lloyd Wright: A Video Introduction Frank Lloyd Wright is unlikely to be displaced as the archetype of the genius architect anytime...
3 months ago
25

How Frank Lloyd Wright Became Frank Lloyd Wright: A Video Introduction

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3 months ago
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...
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Open Culture
When Neapolitans Used to Eat Pasta with Their Bare Hands: Watch Footage from 1903 Even if you don’t speak Italian, you can make a decent guess at the meaning of the word...
3 months ago
28

When Neapolitans Used to Eat Pasta with Their Bare Hands: Watch Footage from 1903

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3 months ago
Even if you don’t speak Italian, you can make a decent guess at the meaning of the word mangiamaccheroni. The tricky bit is that maccheroni refers not to the pasta English-speakers today call macaroni, tubular and cut into small curved sections, but to pasta in general. Or at...
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Open Culture
Benedict Cumberbatch Reads a Letter to a Man Blow-Drying His Balls at the Gym We have featured Benedict Cumberbatch reading letters by Kurt Vonnegut, Alan Turing, Albert Camus,...
3 months ago
29

Benedict Cumberbatch Reads a Letter to a Man Blow-Drying His Balls at the Gym

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3 months ago
We have featured Benedict Cumberbatch reading letters by Kurt Vonnegut, Alan Turing, Albert Camus, and Nick Cave, along with passages from Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Melville’s Moby Dick. It’s all pretty heady stuff. And now it’s time for something completely different. Above, we...
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Open Culture
How Erik Satie’s ‘Furniture Music’ Was Designed to Be Ignored and Paved the Way for Ambient Music Imagine how many times someone born in the eighteen-sixties could ever expect to hear music. The...
3 months ago
30

How Erik Satie’s ‘Furniture Music’ Was Designed to Be Ignored and Paved the Way for Ambient Music

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3 months ago
Imagine how many times someone born in the eighteen-sixties could ever expect to hear music. The number would vary, of course, depending on the individual’s class and family inclinations. Suffice it to say that each chance would have been more precious than those of us in the...
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Open Culture
A 1933 Profile of Frida Kahlo: “Wife of the Master Mural Painter Gleefully Dabbles in Works of Art” Walter Keane—supposed painter of “Big Eyed Children” and subject of a 2014 Tim Burton film—made a...
3 months ago
39

A 1933 Profile of Frida Kahlo: “Wife of the Master Mural Painter Gleefully Dabbles in Works of Art”

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3 months ago
Walter Keane—supposed painter of “Big Eyed Children” and subject of a 2014 Tim Burton film—made a killing, attaining almost Thomas Kinkade-like status in the middlebrow art market of the 1950s and 60s. As it turns out, his wife, Margaret was in fact the artist, “painting 16 hours...
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Open Culture
Noam Chomsky Defines What It Means to Be a Truly Educated Person There may be no more contentious an issue at the level of local U.S. government than education. All...
3 months ago
29

Noam Chomsky Defines What It Means to Be a Truly Educated Person

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3 months ago
There may be no more contentious an issue at the level of local U.S. government than education. All of the socioeconomic and cultural fault lines communities would rather paper over become fully exposed in debates over funding, curriculum, districting, etc. But we rarely hear...
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Open Culture
Where Do You Put the Camera? Every Frame a Painting Presents Insights from Famous Directors Whether or not we believe in auteurhood, we each have our own mental image of what a film director...
3 months ago
25

Where Do You Put the Camera? Every Frame a Painting Presents Insights from Famous Directors

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3 months ago
Whether or not we believe in auteurhood, we each have our own mental image of what a film director does. But if we’ve never actually seen one at work, we’re liable not to understand what the actual experience of directing feels like: making decision after decision after decision,...
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Open Culture
Coursera Offers $200 Off of Coursera Plus (Until January 27), Giving You Unlimited Access to Courses... A new deal to start a new year: Coursera is offering a $200 discount on its annual subscription plan...
3 months ago
36

Coursera Offers $200 Off of Coursera Plus (Until January 27), Giving You Unlimited Access to Courses & Certificates

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3 months ago
A new deal to start a new year: Coursera is offering a $200 discount on its annual subscription plan called “Coursera Plus.” Normally priced at $399, Coursera Plus (now available for $199) gives you access to 90% of Coursera’s courses, Guided Projects, Specializations, and...
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Open Culture
Revisit Pop-Up Video: The VH1 Series That Reinvented Music Videos & Pop Culture In the eighties, people lamented the attention-span-shortening “MTV-ization” of visual culture. By...
3 months ago
27

Revisit Pop-Up Video: The VH1 Series That Reinvented Music Videos & Pop Culture

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3 months ago
In the eighties, people lamented the attention-span-shortening “MTV-ization” of visual culture. By the mid-nineties, networks were trying to figure out how to get viewers to sit through music videos at all. A solution arrived in the form of Pop-Up Video, a program pitched by...
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Open Culture
The Oldest Beer Receipt (Circa 2050 BC) Above, we have the Alulu Beer Receipt. Written in cuneiform on an old clay tablet, the...
3 months ago
36

The Oldest Beer Receipt (Circa 2050 BC)

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3 months ago
Above, we have the Alulu Beer Receipt. Written in cuneiform on an old clay tablet, the 4,000-year-old receipt documents a transaction. A brewer, named Alulu, delivered “the best” beer to a recipient named Ur-Amma, who apparently also served as the scribe. The Mesopotamians drank...
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Open Culture
Watch 950 Weather Reports Presented by David Lynch, Straight from His Los Angeles Home Los Angeles is hardly a city known for its varied weather, but if one lives there long enough, one...
3 months ago
31

Watch 950 Weather Reports Presented by David Lynch, Straight from His Los Angeles Home

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3 months ago
Los Angeles is hardly a city known for its varied weather, but if one lives there long enough, one does become highly attuned to its many subtleties. (Granted, some of the local phenomena involved, like the notorious Santa Ana winds, can produce far-from-subtle effects.) The late...
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Open Culture
Watch an Avant-Garde Bauhaus Ballet in Brilliant Color, First Staged in 1922 We credit the Bauhaus school, founded by German architect Walter Gropius in 1919, for the aesthetic...
3 months ago
30

Watch an Avant-Garde Bauhaus Ballet in Brilliant Color, First Staged in 1922

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3 months ago
We credit the Bauhaus school, founded by German architect Walter Gropius in 1919, for the aesthetic principles that have guided so much modern design and architecture in the 20th and 21st centuries. The school’s relationships with artists like Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Laszlo...
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Open Culture
The Story of How Quentin Tarantino Became a Filmmaker and Created Pulp Fiction, as Told by Quentin... For a film, explained a young Quentin Tarantino in one interview, “the real test of time isn’t the...
3 months ago
38

The Story of How Quentin Tarantino Became a Filmmaker and Created Pulp Fiction, as Told by Quentin Tarantino

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3 months ago
For a film, explained a young Quentin Tarantino in one interview, “the real test of time isn’t the Friday that it opens. It’s how the film is thought of thirty years from now.” It just so happens that Pulp Fiction, which made Tarantino the most celebrated director in America...
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Open Culture
Download a 417-Megapixel Panorama of the Andromeda Galaxy—A Decade-Long NASA Project in the Making Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have created a majestic 417-megapixel panorama of the...
3 months ago
32

Download a 417-Megapixel Panorama of the Andromeda Galaxy—A Decade-Long NASA Project in the Making

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3 months ago
Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have created a majestic 417-megapixel panorama of the Andromeda galaxy, located some 2.5 million light-years away from our planet. Taking more than a decade to complete, the photomosaic captures 200 million stars, which is only a...
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Open Culture
Why David Lynch’s Dune Went Wrong: A Comparison with Denis Villeneuve’s Hit Adaptation Denis Villeneuve’s recent film adaptation of Dune is generally considered to be superior to the late...
3 months ago
35

Why David Lynch’s Dune Went Wrong: A Comparison with Denis Villeneuve’s Hit Adaptation

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3 months ago
Denis Villeneuve’s recent film adaptation of Dune is generally considered to be superior to the late David Lynch’s, from 1984 — though even according to many of Lynch’s fans, it could hardly have been worse. In a 1996 piece for Premiere magazine, David Foster Wallace described...
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Open Culture
Fred Armisen & Bill Hader’s Comedic Take on the History of Simon and Garfunkel During their days filming Documentary Now!, a mockumentary series that aired on IFC, Fred Armisen...
3 months ago
38

Fred Armisen & Bill Hader’s Comedic Take on the History of Simon and Garfunkel

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3 months ago
During their days filming Documentary Now!, a mockumentary series that aired on IFC, Fred Armisen and Bill Hader teamed up and created a fictionalized “history” of Simon and Garfunkel, telling the “real” story behind the making of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and “Mrs....
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Open Culture
The Creative Genius of David Lynch (RIP): Discover His Films, Music Videos, Cartoons, Commercials,... Image by Sasha Kargaltsev via Wikimedia Commons As every cinephile has by now heard, and lamented,...
3 months ago
41

The Creative Genius of David Lynch (RIP): Discover His Films, Music Videos, Cartoons, Commercials, Paintings, Photography & More

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3 months ago
Image by Sasha Kargaltsev via Wikimedia Commons As every cinephile has by now heard, and lamented, we’ve just lost a great American filmmaker. From Eraserhead to Blue Velvet to Mulholland Drive to Inland Empire, David Lynch’s features will surely continue to bewilder and inspire...
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Open Culture
Freddie Mercury & David Bowie’s Isolated Vocals for Queen’s “Under Pressure” (1981) In the summer of 1981, the British band Queen was recording tracks for their tenth studio album, Hot...
3 months ago
38

Freddie Mercury & David Bowie’s Isolated Vocals for Queen’s “Under Pressure” (1981)

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3 months ago
In the summer of 1981, the British band Queen was recording tracks for their tenth studio album, Hot Space, at Mountain Studios in Montreux, Switzerland. As it happened, David Bowie had scheduled time at the same studio to record the title song for the movie Cat People. Before...
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Open Culture
Watch Design for Disaster, a 1962 Film That Shows Why Los Angeles Is Always at Risk of Devastating... “This is fire season in Los Angeles,” Joan Didion once wrote, relating how every year “the Santa Ana...
3 months ago
39

Watch Design for Disaster, a 1962 Film That Shows Why Los Angeles Is Always at Risk of Devastating Fires

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3 months ago
“This is fire season in Los Angeles,” Joan Didion once wrote, relating how every year “the Santa Ana winds start blowing down through the passes, and the relative humidity drops to figures like seven or six or three per cent, and the bougainvillea starts rattling in the driveway,...
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Open Culture
10,000+ Free Online Certificates & Badges: A Resource for Lifelong Learners For those looking to boost their skills or explore new fields without breaking the bank, Class...
3 months ago
56

10,000+ Free Online Certificates & Badges: A Resource for Lifelong Learners

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3 months ago
For those looking to boost their skills or explore new fields without breaking the bank, Class Central has done the heavy lifting. Known as a search engine for online courses, Class Central has compiled what might be the largest collection of free online certificates and badges...
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Open Culture
Watch Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting from Start to Finish: Every Episode from 31 Seasons in... Bob Ross the man died nearly thirty years ago, but Bob Ross the archetypal TV painter has never been...
3 months ago
34

Watch Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting from Start to Finish: Every Episode from 31 Seasons in Chronological Order

from Open Culture [alt+shift+b] in history

3 months ago
Bob Ross the man died nearly thirty years ago, but Bob Ross the archetypal TV painter has never been more widely known. “With his distinctive hair, gentle voice, and signature expressions such as ‘happy little trees,’ he’s an enduring icon,” writes Michael J. Mooney in an...
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Open Culture
Do You Really Need to Take 10,000 Steps a Day? We are regularly urged to take 10,000 steps a day. However, it turns out 10,000 isn’t exactly a...
3 months ago
44

Do You Really Need to Take 10,000 Steps a Day?

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3 months ago
We are regularly urged to take 10,000 steps a day. However, it turns out 10,000 isn’t exactly a number anchored in science. Rather, it’s a product of marketing. According to a Harvard medical website, that figure goes back to “1965, when a Japanese company made a device named...
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Open Culture
Watch Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo and Gertie the Dinosaur, and Witness the Birth of Modern Animation... “Considering that, in a cartoon, anything can happen that the mind can imagine, the comics have...
3 months ago
32

Watch Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo and Gertie the Dinosaur, and Witness the Birth of Modern Animation (1911–1914)

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3 months ago
“Considering that, in a cartoon, anything can happen that the mind can imagine, the comics have generally depicted pretty mundane worlds,” writes Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson. “Sure, there have been talking animals, a few spaceships and whatnot, but the comics have...
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Open Culture
Discover the Playful Drawings That Charles Darwin’s Children Left on His Manuscripts Charles Darwin’s work on heredity was partly driven by tragic losses in his own family. Darwin had...
3 months ago
37

Discover the Playful Drawings That Charles Darwin’s Children Left on His Manuscripts

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3 months ago
Charles Darwin’s work on heredity was partly driven by tragic losses in his own family. Darwin had married his first cousin, Emma, and “wondered if his close genetic relation to his wife had had an ill impact on his children’s health, three (of 10) of whom died before the age of...
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Open Culture
Everything You Need to Know About Saturday Night Live: A Deep Dive into Every Season of the Iconic... Saturday Night Live began its 50th season last fall, around the same time as the premiere of Jason...
3 months ago
37

Everything You Need to Know About Saturday Night Live: A Deep Dive into Every Season of the Iconic Comedy Show

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3 months ago
Saturday Night Live began its 50th season last fall, around the same time as the premiere of Jason Reitman’s film Saturday Night, which dramatizes the program’s 1975 debut. All of this has put fans into something of a retrospective mood, especially if they happen to have been...
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Open Culture
Nirvana Before They Were Nirvana: Watch Their 1988 Performance Recorded in a Radio Shack Here’s a strange home video of Nirvana when they were unknown, playing inside a Radio Shack in the...
3 months ago
55

Nirvana Before They Were Nirvana: Watch Their 1988 Performance Recorded in a Radio Shack

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3 months ago
Here’s a strange home video of Nirvana when they were unknown, playing inside a Radio Shack in the band’s hometown of Aberdeen, Washington. The video was recorded on the evening of January 24, 1988, after the store had closed. In those days the group went by the name of Ted Ed...
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Open Culture
In 1894, A French Writer Predicted the End of Books & the Rise of Portable Audiobooks and Podcasts The end of the nineteenth century is still widely referred to as the fin de siècle, a French term...
4 months ago
41

In 1894, A French Writer Predicted the End of Books & the Rise of Portable Audiobooks and Podcasts

from Open Culture [alt+shift+b] in history

4 months ago
The end of the nineteenth century is still widely referred to as the fin de siècle, a French term that evokes great, looming cultural, social, and technological changes. According to at least one French mind active at the time, among those changes would be a fin des livres as...
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Open Culture
How Marcel Marceau Used Mime to Save Children During the Holocaust In 1972, Jerry Lewis made the ill-considered decision to write, direct, and star in a film about a...
4 months ago
50

How Marcel Marceau Used Mime to Save Children During the Holocaust

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4 months ago
In 1972, Jerry Lewis made the ill-considered decision to write, direct, and star in a film about a German clown in Auschwitz. The result was so awful that he never allowed its release, and it quickly acquired the reputation—along with disasters like George Lucas’ Star Wars...
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Open Culture
Explore the Newly-Launched Public Domain Image Archive with 10,000+ Free Historical Images We’ve often featured the work of the Public Domain Review here on Open Culture, and also various...
4 months ago
87

Explore the Newly-Launched Public Domain Image Archive with 10,000+ Free Historical Images

from Open Culture [alt+shift+b] in history

4 months ago
We’ve often featured the work of the Public Domain Review here on Open Culture, and also various searchable copyright-free image databases that have arisen over the years. It makes sense that those two worlds would collide, and now they’ve done so in the form of the just-launched...
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Open Culture
Coursera Offers $200 Off of Coursera Plus (Until January 27), Giving You Unlimited Access to Courses... A new deal to start a new year: Coursera is offering a $200 discount on its annual subscription plan...
4 months ago
46

Coursera Offers $200 Off of Coursera Plus (Until January 27), Giving You Unlimited Access to Courses & Certificates

from Open Culture [alt+shift+b] in history

4 months ago
A new deal to start a new year: Coursera is offering a $200 discount on its annual subscription plan called “Coursera Plus.” Normally priced at $399, Coursera Plus (now available for $199) gives you access to 90% of Coursera’s courses, Guided Projects, Specializations, and...
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Open Culture
The Night When Miles Davis Opened for the Grateful Dead (1970) What’s that, you ask? Did Miles Davis open for the Grateful Dead at the Fillmore West? In what world...
4 months ago
46

The Night When Miles Davis Opened for the Grateful Dead (1970)

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4 months ago
What’s that, you ask? Did Miles Davis open for the Grateful Dead at the Fillmore West? In what world could such a thing happen? In the world of the late sixties/early seventies, when jazz fused with acid rock, acid rock with country, and pop culture took a long strange trip. The...
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Open Culture
Compare the “It Ain’t Me Babe” Scene from A Complete Unknown to the Real Bob Dylan & Joan Baez... A Complete Unknown, the new movie about Bob Dylan’s rise in the folk-music scene of the early...
4 months ago
94

Compare the “It Ain’t Me Babe” Scene from A Complete Unknown to the Real Bob Dylan & Joan Baez Performance at the Newport Folk Festival

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4 months ago
A Complete Unknown, the new movie about Bob Dylan’s rise in the folk-music scene of the early nineteen-sixties and subsequent electrified break with it, has been praised for not taking excessive liberties, at least by the standards of popular music biopics. Its conversion of a...
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Open Culture
The World in a Cloverleaf: A World Map from 1581 In 1581, the medieval cartographer and Protestant theologian Heinrich Bünting created a symbolic map...
4 months ago
40

The World in a Cloverleaf: A World Map from 1581

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4 months ago
In 1581, the medieval cartographer and Protestant theologian Heinrich Bünting created a symbolic map of the world that adorned his book Itinerarium Sacrae Scripturae (Travel Through Holy Scripture). Hand-colored and shaped like a three-leaf clover, the map put Jerusalem at its...
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Open Culture
Why the Tavern Scene in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds Is a Master Class in Filmmaking Ideally, a viewer should be able to identify the work of a particular auteur from any one scene that...
4 months ago
53

Why the Tavern Scene in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds Is a Master Class in Filmmaking

from Open Culture [alt+shift+b] in history

4 months ago
Ideally, a viewer should be able to identify the work of a particular auteur from any one scene that the auteur has directed. In reality, it’s not always possible to do so, even in the work of filmmakers with highly idiosyncratic styles. But in the case of Quentin Tarantino, it...
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Open Culture
Radio Caroline, the Pirate Radio Ship That Rocked the British Music World (1965) Nowadays musicians can reach hundreds, thousands, sometimes millions of listeners with a few,...
4 months ago
51

Radio Caroline, the Pirate Radio Ship That Rocked the British Music World (1965)

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4 months ago
Nowadays musicians can reach hundreds, thousands, sometimes millions of listeners with a few, usually free, online services and a minimal grasp of technology. That’s not to say there aren’t still economic barriers aplenty for the struggling artist, but true independence is not an...
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Open Culture
The Skeleton Dance, Voted the 18th Best Cartoon of All Time, Is Now in the Public Domain (1929) The July 17, 1929 issue of Variety carried a notice about a laugh-filled new short film in which...
4 months ago
41

The Skeleton Dance, Voted the 18th Best Cartoon of All Time, Is Now in the Public Domain (1929)

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4 months ago
The July 17, 1929 issue of Variety carried a notice about a laugh-filled new short film in which “skeletons hoof and frolic,” the peak of whose hilarity “is reached when one skeleton plays the spine of another in xylophone fashion, using a pair of thigh bones as hammers.” The...
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Open Culture
Bertrand Russell’s Message to People Living in the Year 2959: “Love is Wise, Hatred is Foolish” Bertrand Russell, the great British philosopher and social critic, appeared on the BBC program...
4 months ago
47

Bertrand Russell’s Message to People Living in the Year 2959: “Love is Wise, Hatred is Foolish”

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4 months ago
Bertrand Russell, the great British philosopher and social critic, appeared on the BBC program Face-to-Face in 1959 and was asked a closing question: What would you tell a generation living 1,000 years from now about the life you’ve lived and the lessons you’ve learned? His...
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Open Culture
Laurie Anderson’s Mind-Blowing Performance of C. P. Cavafy’s Poems “Waiting for the Barbarians” &... In the video above, Laurie Anderson describes C. P. Cavafy’s poem “Waiting for the Barbarians” as...
4 months ago
58

Laurie Anderson’s Mind-Blowing Performance of C. P. Cavafy’s Poems “Waiting for the Barbarians” & “Ithaca”

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4 months ago
In the video above, Laurie Anderson describes C. P. Cavafy’s poem “Waiting for the Barbarians” as being “set in ancient Rome.” That’s a reasonable interpretation, given that it contains an emperor, senators, and orators, though Cavafy himself said that none of them are...
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Open Culture
Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” Performed by a Choir of 4,000 Singers Throughout the years, we’ve featured performances of Choir!Choir!Choir!–a large amateur choir from...
4 months ago
67

Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” Performed by a Choir of 4,000 Singers

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4 months ago
Throughout the years, we’ve featured performances of Choir!Choir!Choir!–a large amateur choir from Toronto that meets weekly and sings their hearts out. You’ve seen them sing Prince’s “When Doves Cry,” Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun” (to honor Chris Cornell), and Patti Smith’s...
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Open Culture
The Scene That Reveals the Beauty of Classic Hollywood Cinema 1939 is widely considered the greatest year in Hollywood history. Back then, writes 1939: The Year...
4 months ago
42

The Scene That Reveals the Beauty of Classic Hollywood Cinema

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4 months ago
1939 is widely considered the greatest year in Hollywood history. Back then, writes 1939: The Year in Movies author Tom Flannery, the so-called “Big Eight” major American studios “had a combined 590 actors, 114 directors and 340 writers under contract, each of whom worked an...
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Open Culture
Famous Architects Dress as Their Famous New York City Buildings (1931) On January 13, 1931, the Society of Beaux-Arts Architects held a ball at the Hotel Astor in New York...
4 months ago
69

Famous Architects Dress as Their Famous New York City Buildings (1931)

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4 months ago
On January 13, 1931, the Society of Beaux-Arts Architects held a ball at the Hotel Astor in New York City. According to an advertisement for the event, anyone who paid $15 per ticket (big money during the Depression) could see a “hilarious modern art exhibition” and things...
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Open Culture
What’s Entering the Public Domain in 2025: Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Faulkner’s The Sound and... Each Public Domain Day seems to bring us a richer crop of copyright-liberated books, plays, films,...
4 months ago
81

What’s Entering the Public Domain in 2025: Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Early Hitchcock Films, Tintin and Popeye Cartoons & More

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4 months ago
Each Public Domain Day seems to bring us a richer crop of copyright-liberated books, plays, films, musical compositions, sound recordings, works of art, and other pieces of intellectual property. This year happens to be an especially notable one for connoisseurs of Belgian...
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Open Culture
The Complete History of the Music Video: From the 1890s to Today If you want to understand the history of music videos, you must consider a lot of things that are...
4 months ago
46

The Complete History of the Music Video: From the 1890s to Today

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4 months ago
If you want to understand the history of music videos, you must consider a lot of things that are not obviously music videos. The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star,” the first selection of MTV’s inaugural broadcast, must surely count as a music video — but then, it was...
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Open Culture
The Longest Construction Projects in History: Why Sagrada Família, the Milan Duomo, Greek Temples &... Public-transit projects are the religious building endeavors of twenty-first century America, less...
4 months ago
48

The Longest Construction Projects in History: Why Sagrada Família, the Milan Duomo, Greek Temples & Other Famous Structures Took Generations to Complete

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4 months ago
Public-transit projects are the religious building endeavors of twenty-first century America, less because they’re motivated by the belief in any particular deity than by how much time and money they now require to complete. Take New York’s Second Avenue subway, whose less than...
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Open Culture
Hunter S. Thompson Remembers Jimmy Carter’s Captivating Bob Dylan Speech (1974) 51 years ago, Hunter S. Thompson wrote Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, which “is still...
4 months ago
85

Hunter S. Thompson Remembers Jimmy Carter’s Captivating Bob Dylan Speech (1974)

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4 months ago
51 years ago, Hunter S. Thompson wrote Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, which “is still considered a kind of bible of political reporting,” noted Matt Taibbi in a 40th anniversary edition of the book. Fear and Loathing ’72 entered the canon of American political...
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Open Culture
Benedict Cumberbatch Reads Kurt Vonnegut’s Letter of Advice to People Living in the Year 2088 There was a time when a company like Volkswagen could commission various luminaries to write letters...
4 months ago
94

Benedict Cumberbatch Reads Kurt Vonnegut’s Letter of Advice to People Living in the Year 2088

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4 months ago
There was a time when a company like Volkswagen could commission various luminaries to write letters to the future, then publish them in Time magazine as part of an ad campaign. In fact, that time wasn’t so very long ago: it was the year 1988, to be precise, when no less an...
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Open Culture
The New York Times Presents the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, Selected by 503 Novelists, Poets... For longtime readers of American book journalism, scrolling through the New York Times Book Review’s...
4 months ago
113

The New York Times Presents the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, Selected by 503 Novelists, Poets & Critics

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4 months ago
For longtime readers of American book journalism, scrolling through the New York Times Book Review’s just-published list of the 100 best books of the twenty-first century will summon dim memories of many a once-unignorable critical fuss. At one time or another over the past 25...
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Open Culture
Francis Ford Coppola Picks His Favorite Criterion Movies & Gives Advice to Filmmakers Upon stepping into the hallowed Criterion Closet, stocked with hundreds of that cinephile video...
4 months ago
99

Francis Ford Coppola Picks His Favorite Criterion Movies & Gives Advice to Filmmakers

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4 months ago
Upon stepping into the hallowed Criterion Closet, stocked with hundreds of that cinephile video label’s finest releases, Francis Ford Coppola speaks of a director who “believed in a film he wanted to make, and used his entire fortune, because the financing system of the time...
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Open Culture
Bob Dylan Reads “ ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” On His Holiday Radio Show (2006) Allow me to name just a few of the people I want to hear hosting and curating radio shows—former Sex...
4 months ago
65

Bob Dylan Reads “ ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” On His Holiday Radio Show (2006)

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4 months ago
Allow me to name just a few of the people I want to hear hosting and curating radio shows—former Sex Pistols’ singer John Lydon, former Clash frontman Joe Strummer, former Woody Guthrie impersonator Bob Dylan.… Luckily for me, this ain’t just fantasy baseball; at various times,...
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Open Culture
How A Charlie Brown Christmas, and Its Beloved Soundtrack Album, Almost Never Happened A Charlie Brown Christmas uses a cast of amateur child voice actors, deals with the theme of...
4 months ago
69

How A Charlie Brown Christmas, and Its Beloved Soundtrack Album, Almost Never Happened

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4 months ago
A Charlie Brown Christmas uses a cast of amateur child voice actors, deals with the theme of seasonal depression, and culminates in the recitation of a Bible verse, all to a jazz score. It was not, safe to say, the special that CBS had expected, to say nothing of its sponsor, the...
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Open Culture
How Leonardo da Vinci Painted The Last Supper: A Deep Dive Into a Masterpiece When Leonardo da Vinci was 42 years old, he hadn’t yet completed any major publicly viewable work....
4 months ago
86

How Leonardo da Vinci Painted The Last Supper: A Deep Dive Into a Masterpiece

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4 months ago
When Leonardo da Vinci was 42 years old, he hadn’t yet completed any major publicly viewable work. Not that he’d been idle: in that same era, while working for the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza, he “developed, organized, and directed productions for festival pageants, triumphal...
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Open Culture
Read J. R. R. Tolkien’s “Letter From Father Christmas” To His Young Children (1925) J.R.R. Tolkien is best known for the sweeping fantasy landscapes of Lord of The Rings and The...
4 months ago
93

Read J. R. R. Tolkien’s “Letter From Father Christmas” To His Young Children (1925)

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4 months ago
J.R.R. Tolkien is best known for the sweeping fantasy landscapes of Lord of The Rings and The Hobbit. Apart from being a celebrated author, the Oxford University professor of Anglo-Saxon was also a devoted father who doted on his children. In 1920, a few short years after Tolkien...
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Open Culture
The Story Behind the Making of the Iconic Surrealist Photograph, Dalí Atomicus (1948) With his cane, his famous waxed mustache, and his habit of taking unusual animals for walks,...
4 months ago
48

The Story Behind the Making of the Iconic Surrealist Photograph, Dalí Atomicus (1948)

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4 months ago
With his cane, his famous waxed mustache, and his habit of taking unusual animals for walks, Salvador Dalí would appear to have cultivated his own photographability. But taking a picture of the man who stood as a living definition of popular surrealism wasn’t a task to be...
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Open Culture
The Junky’s Christmas: William S. Burrough’s Dark Claymation Christmas Film Produced by Francis Ford... Back in 1993, the Beat writer William S. Burroughs wrote and narrated a 21-minute claymation...
4 months ago
65

The Junky’s Christmas: William S. Burrough’s Dark Claymation Christmas Film Produced by Francis Ford Coppola (1993)

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4 months ago
Back in 1993, the Beat writer William S. Burroughs wrote and narrated a 21-minute claymation Christmas film oddly produced by Francis Ford Coppola. And, as you can well imagine, it’s not your normal happy Christmas flick. Nope, this film – The Junky’s Christmas – is all about...
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Open Culture
Richard Feynman Enthusiastically Explains How to Think Like a Physicist in His Series Fun to Imagine... “It’s interesting that some people find science so easy, and others find it kind of dull and...
4 months ago
46

Richard Feynman Enthusiastically Explains How to Think Like a Physicist in His Series Fun to Imagine (1983)

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4 months ago
“It’s interesting that some people find science so easy, and others find it kind of dull and difficult,” says Richard Feynman at the beginning of his 1983 BBC series Fun to Imagine. “One of the things that makes it very difficult is that it takes a lot of imagination. It’s very...
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Open Culture
John Coltrane Draws a Picture Illustrating the Mathematics of Music Physicist and saxophonist Stephon Alexander has argued in his many public lectures and his book The...
4 months ago
54

John Coltrane Draws a Picture Illustrating the Mathematics of Music

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4 months ago
Physicist and saxophonist Stephon Alexander has argued in his many public lectures and his book The Jazz of Physics that Albert Einstein and John Coltrane had quite a lot in common. Alexander in particular draws our attention to the so-called “Coltrane circle,” which resembles...
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Open Culture
Hear Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds Radio Broadcast from 1938: The Original Tale of Mysterious... A month ago, drones were spotted near Morris County, New Jersey. Since then, reports of further...
4 months ago
43

Hear Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds Radio Broadcast from 1938: The Original Tale of Mysterious Objects Flying Over New Jersey

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4 months ago
A month ago, drones were spotted near Morris County, New Jersey. Since then, reports of further sightings in various locations in the region have been lodged on a daily basis, and anxieties about the origin and purpose of these unidentified flying objects have grown apace. “We...
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Open Culture
Watch the Sex Pistols’ Christmas Party for Kids–Which Happened to Be Their Final Gig in the UK... I’m not sure the Sex Pistols had “available for children’s parties” on their press release, but on a...
4 months ago
52

Watch the Sex Pistols’ Christmas Party for Kids–Which Happened to Be Their Final Gig in the UK (1977)

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4 months ago
I’m not sure the Sex Pistols had “available for children’s parties” on their press release, but on a cold and grim Christmas in 1977, that’s exactly what happened. While many Britons were settling in for a warm yuletide, the Pistols decided to host a party/benefit for the...
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Open Culture
The Ingenious Engineering of Leonardo da Vinci’s Self-Supporting Bridge, Explained The video above from Sabins Civil Engineering promises to reveal “the MAGIC behind Da Vinci’s Self...
4 months ago
49

The Ingenious Engineering of Leonardo da Vinci’s Self-Supporting Bridge, Explained

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4 months ago
The video above from Sabins Civil Engineering promises to reveal “the MAGIC behind Da Vinci’s Self Supporting Bridge.” That sounds like a typical example of YouTube hyperbole, though on first glance, it isn’t at all obvious how the fragile-looking structure can stay up, much less...
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Open Culture
Watch The Insects’ Christmas from 1913: A Stop Motion Film Starring a Cast of Dead Bugs Kind Reader, Will you do us the honor of accepting our holiday invitation? Carve five minutes from...
4 months ago
68

Watch The Insects’ Christmas from 1913: A Stop Motion Film Starring a Cast of Dead Bugs

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4 months ago
Kind Reader, Will you do us the honor of accepting our holiday invitation? Carve five minutes from your holiday schedule to spend time celebrating The Insects’ Christmas, above. In addition to offering brief respite from the chaos of consumerism and modern expectations, this...
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Open Culture
How Keith Jarrett Played on a Broken Piano & Turned a Potentially Disastrous Concert Into the... Nearly fifty years ago, the celebrated young pianist Keith Jarrett arrived in the West German city...
4 months ago
65

How Keith Jarrett Played on a Broken Piano & Turned a Potentially Disastrous Concert Into the Best-Selling Piano Album of All Time (1975)

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4 months ago
Nearly fifty years ago, the celebrated young pianist Keith Jarrett arrived in the West German city of Köln (better known in English as Cologne). Having just come off a 500-mile-long road trip from Switzerland, where he’d played a concert the previous day, he was left with barely...
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Open Culture
A Simple, Down-to-Earth Christmas Card from the Great Depression (1933) The Smithsonian sets the scene for this Christmas card sent in 1933, a few years into the Great...
4 months ago
59

A Simple, Down-to-Earth Christmas Card from the Great Depression (1933)

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4 months ago
The Smithsonian sets the scene for this Christmas card sent in 1933, a few years into the Great Depression. They write: Despite the glum economic situation, the Pinero family used a brown paper bag to fashion an inexpensive holiday greeting card. They penned a clever rhyme and...
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Open Culture
How Medieval Islamic Engineering Brought Water to the Alhambra Between 711 and 1492, much of the Iberian Peninsula, including modern-day Spain, was under Muslim...
4 months ago
68

How Medieval Islamic Engineering Brought Water to the Alhambra

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4 months ago
Between 711 and 1492, much of the Iberian Peninsula, including modern-day Spain, was under Muslim rule. Not that it was easy to hold on to the place for that length of time: after the fall of Toledo in 1085, Al-Andalus, as the territory was called, continued to lose cities over...
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Open Culture
The Sinking of the Britannic: An Animated Introduction to the Titanic’s Forgotten Sister Ship We all know about the Titanic. Less often do we hear about the Britannic—the sister passenger liner...
4 months ago
73

The Sinking of the Britannic: An Animated Introduction to the Titanic’s Forgotten Sister Ship

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4 months ago
We all know about the Titanic. Less often do we hear about the Britannic—the sister passenger liner that the British turned into a hospital ship during World War I. Launched in 1914, two years after the Titanic sank in the North Atlantic Ocean, the Britannic featured a number of...
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Open Culture
Binge-Watch Classic Television Programs Free: The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Lone Ranger, Dragnet, That... Earlier this week, we featured the 99-year-old Dick Van Dyke’s performance in Coldplay’s new music...
4 months ago
125

Binge-Watch Classic Television Programs Free: The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Lone Ranger, Dragnet, That Girl & More

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4 months ago
Earlier this week, we featured the 99-year-old Dick Van Dyke’s performance in Coldplay’s new music video, full of visual references to the sitcom that made him a household name in the early nineteen-sixties. And a household name he remains these six decades later, though one does...
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Open Culture
Watch the Surrealist Glass Harmonica, the Only Animated Film Ever Banned by Soviet Censors (1968) The Soviet Union’s repressive state censorship went to absurd lengths to control what its citizens...
4 months ago
62

Watch the Surrealist Glass Harmonica, the Only Animated Film Ever Banned by Soviet Censors (1968)

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4 months ago
The Soviet Union’s repressive state censorship went to absurd lengths to control what its citizens read, viewed, and listened to, such as the almost comical removal of purged former comrades from photographs during Stalin’s reign. When it came to aesthetics, Stalinism mostly...
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Open Culture
The Engineering of the Strandbeest: How the Magnificent Mechanical Creatures Have Technologically... Life evolves, but machines are invented: this dichotomy hardly conflicts with what most of us have...
5 months ago
66

The Engineering of the Strandbeest: How the Magnificent Mechanical Creatures Have Technologically Evolved

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5 months ago
Life evolves, but machines are invented: this dichotomy hardly conflicts with what most of us have learned about biology and technology. But certain specimens roaming around in the world can blur that line — and in the curious case of the Strandbeesten, they really are roaming...
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Open Culture
When Christmas Was Legally Banned for 22 Years by the Puritans in Colonial Massachusetts Complaints about the commercial-age corruption of Christmas miss one critical fact: as a mass public...
5 months ago
37

When Christmas Was Legally Banned for 22 Years by the Puritans in Colonial Massachusetts

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5 months ago
Complaints about the commercial-age corruption of Christmas miss one critical fact: as a mass public celebration, the holiday is a rather recent invention. Whether we credit Charles Dickens, Bing Crosby, or Frank Capra—men not opposed to marketing—we must reckon with Christmas as...
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Open Culture
Hear the Evolution of Electronic Music: A Sonic Journey from 1929 to 2019 It’s easy to get the impression that enthusiasts of electronic music listen to nothing else. (Not...
5 months ago
41

Hear the Evolution of Electronic Music: A Sonic Journey from 1929 to 2019

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5 months ago
It’s easy to get the impression that enthusiasts of electronic music listen to nothing else. (Not that it isn’t true for some of them, who tend to relegate themselves to smaller subgenres: consult Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music for a map of the sonic territory.) And it’s...
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Open Culture
99-Year-Old Dick Van Dyke Sings & Dances in a Touching New Coldplay Video, Directed by Spike Jonze There’s one thing right with our world, and it’s Dick Van Dyke. Appearing in a new Coldplay music...
5 months ago
85

99-Year-Old Dick Van Dyke Sings & Dances in a Touching New Coldplay Video, Directed by Spike Jonze

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5 months ago
There’s one thing right with our world, and it’s Dick Van Dyke. Appearing in a new Coldplay music video, Mr. Van Dyke dances barefoot and sings knowingly a little off-key—before reflecting on a century of life on this planet. What is love? Is he afraid of dying? What does luck...
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Open Culture
Arthur C. Clarke Predicts the Rise of Artificial Intelligence & Questions What Will Happen to... We now live in the midst of an artificial-intelligence boom, but it’s hardly the first of its kind....
5 months ago
58

Arthur C. Clarke Predicts the Rise of Artificial Intelligence & Questions What Will Happen to Humanity (1978)

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5 months ago
We now live in the midst of an artificial-intelligence boom, but it’s hardly the first of its kind. In fact, the field has been subject to a boom-and-bust cycle since at least the early nineteen-fifties. Eventually, those busts — which occurred when realizable AI technology...
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Open Culture
An Illustrator Creates a Kindle for Charles Dickens, Placing 40 Miniature Classics within a Large... For a design class project, Rachel Walsh, a student at Cardiff School of Art and Design, set out to...
5 months ago
64

An Illustrator Creates a Kindle for Charles Dickens, Placing 40 Miniature Classics within a Large Portable Book

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5 months ago
For a design class project, Rachel Walsh, a student at Cardiff School of Art and Design, set out to explain the concept of a Kindle to Charles Dickens. Recognizing that Dickens, a 19th-century author, wouldn’t understand modern terms like ebooks, downloads or the internet, she...
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Open Culture
What Ancient Greek Music Sounded Like: Listen to a Reconstruction That’s “100% Accurate” Between 750 BC and 400 BC, the Ancient Greeks composed songs meant to be accompanied by the lyre,...
5 months ago
40

What Ancient Greek Music Sounded Like: Listen to a Reconstruction That’s “100% Accurate”

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5 months ago
Between 750 BC and 400 BC, the Ancient Greeks composed songs meant to be accompanied by the lyre, reed-pipes, and various percussion instruments. More than 2,000 years later, modern scholars have finally figured out how to reconstruct and perform these songs with (it’s claimed)...
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Open Culture
The 63 Cuisines of China Explained in 40 Minutes: A Complete Primer Wherever in the world you grew up, you probably grew up with an inaccurate idea of Chinese food. For...
5 months ago
38

The 63 Cuisines of China Explained in 40 Minutes: A Complete Primer

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5 months ago
Wherever in the world you grew up, you probably grew up with an inaccurate idea of Chinese food. For Americans, it can come as a shock to hear that such familiar dishes as chop suey and General Tso’s chicken are unknown in China itself. By the same token, almost every country in...
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Open Culture
Unlock AI’s Potential in Your Work and Daily Life: Take a Popular Course from Google Generative AI is rapidly becoming an essential tool for streamlining work and solving complex...
5 months ago
33

Unlock AI’s Potential in Your Work and Daily Life: Take a Popular Course from Google

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5 months ago
Generative AI is rapidly becoming an essential tool for streamlining work and solving complex challenges. However, knowing how to use GenAI effectively isn’t always obvious. That’s where Google Prompting Essentials comes in. This course will teach you to write clear and specific...
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Open Culture
Explore an Online Archive of 2,100+ Rare Illustrations from Charles Dickens’ Novels As Christmastime approaches, few novelists come to mind as readily as Charles Dickens. This owes...
5 months ago
57

Explore an Online Archive of 2,100+ Rare Illustrations from Charles Dickens’ Novels

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5 months ago
As Christmastime approaches, few novelists come to mind as readily as Charles Dickens. This owes mainly, of course, to A Christmas Carol, and even more so to its many adaptations, most of which draw inspiration from not just its text but also its illustrations. That 1843 novella...
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Open Culture
The BBC Creates Step-by-Step Instructions for Knitting the Iconic Dr. Who Scarf: A Document from the... When Jon Pertwee reincarnated into Tom Baker in 1974, the Fourth Doctor of the popular sci-fi show...
5 months ago
29

The BBC Creates Step-by-Step Instructions for Knitting the Iconic Dr. Who Scarf: A Document from the Early 1980s

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5 months ago
When Jon Pertwee reincarnated into Tom Baker in 1974, the Fourth Doctor of the popular sci-fi show Doctor Who ditched the foppish look of velvet jackets and frilly shirts, and went for the “Romantic adventurer” style, with floppy felt hat, long overcoats and, most iconically, his...
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Open Culture
Scientists Discover that Ancient Egyptians Drank Hallucinogenic Cocktails from 2,300 Year-Old Mug Bes mug by USF Institute for Digital Exploration (IDEx) on Sketchfab If ZZ Top have a favorite...
5 months ago
44

Scientists Discover that Ancient Egyptians Drank Hallucinogenic Cocktails from 2,300 Year-Old Mug

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5 months ago
Bes mug by USF Institute for Digital Exploration (IDEx) on Sketchfab If ZZ Top have a favorite ancient Egyptian deity, that deity is surely Bes, whom the New York Times’ Alexander Nazaryan quotes curator and scholar Branko van Oppen de Ruiter as calling “a beer drinker and a...
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Open Culture
Édouard Manet Illustrates Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, in a French Edition Translated by Stephane... Edgar Allan Poe achieved almost instant fame during his lifetime after the publication of The...
5 months ago
37

Édouard Manet Illustrates Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, in a French Edition Translated by Stephane Mallarmé (1875)

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5 months ago
Edgar Allan Poe achieved almost instant fame during his lifetime after the publication of The Raven (1845), but he never felt that he received the recognition he deserved. In some respects, he was right. He was, after all, paid only nine dollars for the poem, and he struggled...
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Open Culture
Beautiful 19th Century Maps of Dante’s Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatory, Paradise & More Even the least religious among us speak, at least on occasion, of the circles of hell. When we do...
5 months ago
47

Beautiful 19th Century Maps of Dante’s Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatory, Paradise & More

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5 months ago
Even the least religious among us speak, at least on occasion, of the circles of hell. When we do so, we may or may not be thinking of where the concept originated: Dante’s Divina Commedia, or Divine Comedy. We each imagine the circles in our own way — usually filling them with...
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Open Culture
The Golden Guide to Hallucinogenic Plants: Explore the 1977 Illustrated Guide Created by Harvard’s... I mean, the idea that you would give a psychedelic—in this case, magic mushrooms or the chemical...
5 months ago
55

The Golden Guide to Hallucinogenic Plants: Explore the 1977 Illustrated Guide Created by Harvard’s Groundbreaking Ethnobotanist Richard Evan Schultes

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5 months ago
I mean, the idea that you would give a psychedelic—in this case, magic mushrooms or the chemical called psilocybin that’s derived from magic mushrooms—to people dying of cancer, people with terminal diagnoses, to help them deal with their — what’s called existential distress. And...
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Open Culture
Discover Hannah Arendt’s Syllabus for Her 1974 Course on “Thinking” If you’ve read one work of Hannah Arendt’s, it’s probably Eichmann in Jerusalem, her account of the...
5 months ago
47

Discover Hannah Arendt’s Syllabus for Her 1974 Course on “Thinking”

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5 months ago
If you’ve read one work of Hannah Arendt’s, it’s probably Eichmann in Jerusalem, her account of the trial of the eponymous Nazi official — and the source of her much-quoted phrase “the banality of evil.” That book came out in 1963, at which time Arendt still had a dozen...
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Open Culture
Mary Tyler Moore Accidentally Nails a Perfect Pool Shot on The Dick Van Dyke Show (1962) Let’s rewind the videotape and revisit a classic moment in The Dick Van Dyke Show. In the 1962...
5 months ago
69

Mary Tyler Moore Accidentally Nails a Perfect Pool Shot on The Dick Van Dyke Show (1962)

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5 months ago
Let’s rewind the videotape and revisit a classic moment in The Dick Van Dyke Show. In the 1962 episode called “Hustling the Hustler,” Mary Tyler Moore (as Laura Petrie) plays pool and sinks three balls in a single shot. The original plan was to splice in footage of a professional...
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Open Culture
Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Creative Process: A Look Inside the Books & Techniques That Allowed His Art... The story of Jean-Michel Basquiat has its unfortunate aspects: not just his premature death, but...
5 months ago
44

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Creative Process: A Look Inside the Books & Techniques That Allowed His Art to Flow

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5 months ago
The story of Jean-Michel Basquiat has its unfortunate aspects: not just his premature death, but also the aggressive marketing of his work and persona in the years leading up to it. He became a vogue artist of the eighties in part because he could be taken as an unfiltered voice...
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Open Culture
The Most Iconic Hip-Hop Sample of Every Year (1973–2023) Hip-hop was once a subculture, but by now it’s long since been one of the unquestionably dominant...
5 months ago
36

The Most Iconic Hip-Hop Sample of Every Year (1973–2023)

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5 months ago
Hip-hop was once a subculture, but by now it’s long since been one of the unquestionably dominant forms of popular music — not just in America, and not just among young people. There are, of course, still a fair few hip-hop holdouts, but even they’ve come to know a thing or two...
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Open Culture
Get $160 Off a Year of Coursera Plus & Gain Unlimited Access to Courses in Data Analytics,... A heads-up on a Black Friday special: Between today and December 2, 2024, Coursera is offering a 40%...
5 months ago
33

Get $160 Off a Year of Coursera Plus & Gain Unlimited Access to Courses in Data Analytics, Generative AI, Cybersecurity and Other Fields

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5 months ago
A heads-up on a Black Friday special: Between today and December 2, 2024, Coursera is offering a 40% discount on its annual subscription plan called “Coursera Plus.” Normally priced at $399, Coursera Plus (now available for $239.40) gives you access to 7,000+ courses for one...
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Open Culture
The Illustrated Version of “Alice’s Restaurant”: Watch Arlo Guthrie’s Thanksgiving Counterculture... Alice’s Restaurant. It’s now a Thanksgiving classic, and something of a tradition around...
5 months ago
72

The Illustrated Version of “Alice’s Restaurant”: Watch Arlo Guthrie’s Thanksgiving Counterculture Classic

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5 months ago
Alice’s Restaurant. It’s now a Thanksgiving classic, and something of a tradition around here. Recorded in 1967, the 18+ minute counterculture song recounts Arlo Guthrie’s real encounter with the law, starting on Thanksgiving Day 1965. As the long song unfolds, we hear all about...
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Open Culture
William S. Burroughs’ Scathing “Thanksgiving Prayer,” Shot by Gus Van Sant “Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28, 1986” first appeared in print in Tornado Alley, a chapbook published by...
5 months ago
38

William S. Burroughs’ Scathing “Thanksgiving Prayer,” Shot by Gus Van Sant

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5 months ago
“Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28, 1986” first appeared in print in Tornado Alley, a chapbook published by William S. Burroughs in 1989. Two years later, Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting, My Own Private Idaho, Milk) shot a montage that brought the poem to film, making it at least the...
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Open Culture
Explore and Download 14,000+ Woodcuts from Antwerp’s Plantin-Moretus Museum Online Archive We appreciate illuminated manuscripts and historical books here on Open Culture, adhere though we do...
5 months ago
31

Explore and Download 14,000+ Woodcuts from Antwerp’s Plantin-Moretus Museum Online Archive

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5 months ago
We appreciate illuminated manuscripts and historical books here on Open Culture, adhere though we do to a much more restrained aesthetic style in our own texts. But that’s not to deny the temptation to start this paragraph with one of those oversized initial letters that grew...
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Open Culture
Ken Burns’ New Documentary on Leonardo da Vinci Streaming Online (in the US) for a Limited Time A quick heads up: The filmmaker Ken Burns has just released his new documentary on Leonardo da...
5 months ago
56

Ken Burns’ New Documentary on Leonardo da Vinci Streaming Online (in the US) for a Limited Time

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5 months ago
A quick heads up: The filmmaker Ken Burns has just released his new documentary on Leonardo da Vinci. Running nearly four hours, the film offers what The New York Times calls a “thorough and engrossing biography” of the 15th-century polymath. Currently airing on PBS, the film can...
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Open Culture
How Georges Méliès A Trip to the Moon Became the First Sci-Fi Film & Changed Cinema Forever (1902) If you happen to visit the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, do take the time to see the Musée Méliès...
5 months ago
44

How Georges Méliès A Trip to the Moon Became the First Sci-Fi Film & Changed Cinema Forever (1902)

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5 months ago
If you happen to visit the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, do take the time to see the Musée Méliès located inside it. Dedicated to la Magie du cinéma, it contains artifacts from throughout the history of film-as-spectacle, which includes such pictures as 2001: A Space Odyssey...
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Open Culture
Isaac Newton Creates a List of His 57 Sins (Circa 1662) Sir Isaac Newton, arguably the most important and influential scientist in history, discovered the...
5 months ago
53

Isaac Newton Creates a List of His 57 Sins (Circa 1662)

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5 months ago
Sir Isaac Newton, arguably the most important and influential scientist in history, discovered the laws of motion and the universal force of gravity. For the first time ever, the rules of the universe could be described with the supremely rational language of mathematics....
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Open Culture
How Rasputin Inspired the “Fictitious Persons” Disclaimer Commonly Seen in Movies “This is a work of fiction,” declares the disclaimer we’ve all noticed during the end credits of...
5 months ago
51

How Rasputin Inspired the “Fictitious Persons” Disclaimer Commonly Seen in Movies

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5 months ago
“This is a work of fiction,” declares the disclaimer we’ve all noticed during the end credits of movies. “Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.” In most cases, this may seem so trivial that it hardly merits a mention, but the...
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Open Culture
14 Self-Portraits by Pablo Picasso Show the Evolution of His Style: See Self-Portraits Moving from... 15 years old (1896) It’s possible to look at Pablo Picasso’s many formal experiments and periodic...
5 months ago
56

14 Self-Portraits by Pablo Picasso Show the Evolution of His Style: See Self-Portraits Moving from Ages 15 to 90

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5 months ago
15 years old (1896) It’s possible to look at Pablo Picasso’s many formal experiments and periodic shifts of style as a kind of self-portraiture, an exercise in shifting consciousness and trying on of new aesthetic identities. The Spanish modernist made a career of sweeping...
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Open Culture
How Ancient Romans Traveled Without Maps In an age when many of us could hardly make our way to an unfamiliar grocery store without relying...
5 months ago
39

How Ancient Romans Traveled Without Maps

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5 months ago
In an age when many of us could hardly make our way to an unfamiliar grocery store without relying on a GPS navigation system, we might well wonder how the Romans could establish and sustain their mighty empire without so much as a proper map. That’s the question addressed by the...
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Open Culture
How to Potty Train Your Cat: A Handy Manual by Jazz Musician Charles Mingus Charles Mingus, the innovative jazz musician, was known for having a bad temper. He once got so...
5 months ago
30

How to Potty Train Your Cat: A Handy Manual by Jazz Musician Charles Mingus

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5 months ago
Charles Mingus, the innovative jazz musician, was known for having a bad temper. He once got so irritated with a heckler that he ended up trashing his $20,000 bass. Another time, when a pianist didn’t get things right, Mingus reached right inside the piano and ripped the strings...
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Open Culture
Google Creates a Career Certificate That Prepares Students for Cybersecurity Jobs in 6 Months In 2023, Google launched several online certificate programs designed to help students land an...
5 months ago
39

Google Creates a Career Certificate That Prepares Students for Cybersecurity Jobs in 6 Months

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5 months ago
In 2023, Google launched several online certificate programs designed to help students land an entry-level job, without necessarily having a college degree. This includes a certificate program focused on Cybersecurity, a field that stands poised to grow as companies become more...
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Open Culture
An Introduction to the Astonishing Book of Kells, the Iconic Illuminated Manuscript Whatever set of religious or cultural traditions you come from, you’ve probably seen a Celtic cross...
5 months ago
53

An Introduction to the Astonishing Book of Kells, the Iconic Illuminated Manuscript

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5 months ago
Whatever set of religious or cultural traditions you come from, you’ve probably seen a Celtic cross before. Unlike a conventional cross, it has a circular ring, or “nimbus,” where its arms and stem intersect. The sole addition of that element gives it a highly distinctive look,...
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Open Culture
Discover the CIA’s Simple Sabotage Field Manual: A Timeless Guide to Subverting Any Organization... I’ve always admired people who can successfully navigate what I refer to as “Kafka’s Castle,” a term...
5 months ago
47

Discover the CIA’s Simple Sabotage Field Manual: A Timeless Guide to Subverting Any Organization with “Purposeful Stupidity” (1944)

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5 months ago
I’ve always admired people who can successfully navigate what I refer to as “Kafka’s Castle,” a term of dread for the many government and corporate agencies that have an inordinate amount of power over our permanent records, and that seem as inscrutable and chillingly absurd as...
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Open Culture
Explore the World’s First 3D Replica of St. Peter’s Basilica, Made with AI In the trailer below for the world’s first 3D replica of St. Peter’s Basilica, Yves Ubelmann speaks...
5 months ago
48

Explore the World’s First 3D Replica of St. Peter’s Basilica, Made with AI

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5 months ago
In the trailer below for the world’s first 3D replica of St. Peter’s Basilica, Yves Ubelmann speaks of using “AI for Good,” which isn’t just an ideal, but also the name of a lab at Microsoft. Microsoft and Ubelman’s digital-preservation company Iconem were two of the participants...
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Open Culture
The Final Days of Leo Tolstoy Captured in Rare Footage from 1910 114 years ago today (November 20, 1910), Leo Tolstoy—the author who gave us two major Russian...
5 months ago
45

The Final Days of Leo Tolstoy Captured in Rare Footage from 1910

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5 months ago
114 years ago today (November 20, 1910), Leo Tolstoy—the author who gave us two major Russian classics Anna Karenina and War & Peace—died at Astapovo, a small, remote train station in the heart of Russia. Pneumonia was the official cause. His death came just weeks after Tolstoy,...
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Open Culture
Behold a Digital Restoration of 655 Plates of Roses & Lilies by Pierre-Joseph Redouté: The Greatest... Pierre-Joseph Redouté made his name by painting flowers, an achievement impossible without a...
5 months ago
43

Behold a Digital Restoration of 655 Plates of Roses & Lilies by Pierre-Joseph Redouté: The Greatest Botanical Illustrator of All Time

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5 months ago
Pierre-Joseph Redouté made his name by painting flowers, an achievement impossible without a meticulousness that exceeds all bounds of normality. He published his three-volume collection Les Roses and his eight-volume collection Les Liliacées between 1802 and 1824, and a glance...
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Open Culture
How Magician David Copperfield Made the Statue of Liberty Disappear (1983) In April, 1983, 50 million television viewers watched the illusionist David Copperfield make the...
5 months ago
58

How Magician David Copperfield Made the Statue of Liberty Disappear (1983)

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5 months ago
In April, 1983, 50 million television viewers watched the illusionist David Copperfield make the Statue of Liberty disappear, straight into thin air. If you’re north of 50, you perhaps remember the spectacle. How did he do it? 40 years later, the YouTube channel Mind Blown Magic...
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Open Culture
Join Us on Bluesky. We Will Have Fun Together There’s an eXodus taking place, and millions are finding a new home on Bluesky. In recent days, the...
5 months ago
46

Join Us on Bluesky. We Will Have Fun Together

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5 months ago
There’s an eXodus taking place, and millions are finding a new home on Bluesky. In recent days, the decentralized social media platform has been gaining 10,000 new users every 10–15 minutes, or about 1 million new users per day. Open Culture is already there, sharing the cultural...
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Open Culture
Bertrand Russell’s Ten Commandments for Living Virtuously (1930) Image by J. F. Horrabin, via Wikimedia Commons Bertrand Russell may have lived his long life...
5 months ago
55

Bertrand Russell’s Ten Commandments for Living Virtuously (1930)

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5 months ago
Image by J. F. Horrabin, via Wikimedia Commons Bertrand Russell may have lived his long life concerned with big topics in logic, mathematics, politics, and society, but that didn’t keep him from thinking seriously about how to handle his own day-to-day relationships. That hardly...
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Open Culture
Bambi Meets Godzilla: #38 on the List of The 50 Greatest Cartoons of All Time (1969) In 1994, Jerry Beck edited the book, The 50 Greatest Cartoons: As Selected by 1,000 Animation...
5 months ago
39

Bambi Meets Godzilla: #38 on the List of The 50 Greatest Cartoons of All Time (1969)

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5 months ago
In 1994, Jerry Beck edited the book, The 50 Greatest Cartoons: As Selected by 1,000 Animation Professionals, which challenged experts to create a ranking of the best short, cel animated cartoons ever made. To no one’s surprise, the experts chose 10 Warner Bros. animations crafted...
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Open Culture
What Victorian People Sounded Like: Hear Recordings of Florence Nightingale & Queen Victoria Herself More than 120 years after the end of the Victorian era, we might assume that we retain a more or...
5 months ago
39

What Victorian People Sounded Like: Hear Recordings of Florence Nightingale & Queen Victoria Herself

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5 months ago
More than 120 years after the end of the Victorian era, we might assume that we retain a more or less accurate cultural memory of the Victorians themselves: of their social mores, their aesthetic sensibilities, their ambitions great and small, their many and varied hang-ups. Some...
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Open Culture
Explore Burj Al Babas, Turkey’s Abandoned Town of 587 Disney-Style Castles Burj Al Babas might have been constructed expressly to attract the attention of the internet....
5 months ago
52

Explore Burj Al Babas, Turkey’s Abandoned Town of 587 Disney-Style Castles

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5 months ago
Burj Al Babas might have been constructed expressly to attract the attention of the internet. “Sitting near the Black Sea, the town is full of half-finished, fully abandoned mini castles — 587 of them to be exact,” write Architectural Digest’s Katherine McLaughlin and Jessica...
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Open Culture
Free: 356 Issues of Galaxy, the Groundbreaking 1950s Science Fiction Magazine Along with Astounding Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Galaxy...
5 months ago
46

Free: 356 Issues of Galaxy, the Groundbreaking 1950s Science Fiction Magazine

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5 months ago
Along with Astounding Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Galaxy Magazine was one of the most important science fiction digests in 1950s America. Ray Bradbury wrote for it–including an early version of his masterpiece Fahrenheit 451–as did Robert A....
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Open Culture
Get Unlimited Access to Courses & Certificates: Coursera Is Offering 40% (or $159) Off of Coursera... A heads-up on a deal: Between today and December 2, 2024, Coursera is offering a 40% discount on its...
5 months ago
27

Get Unlimited Access to Courses & Certificates: Coursera Is Offering 40% (or $159) Off of Coursera Plus Until December 2

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5 months ago
A heads-up on a deal: Between today and December 2, 2024, Coursera is offering a 40% discount on its annual subscription plan called “Coursera Plus.” Normally priced at $399, Coursera Plus (now available for $239.40) gives you access to 7,000+ courses for one all-inclusive...
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Open Culture
A New 3D Scan, Created from 25,000 High-Resolution Images, Reveals the Remarkably Well-Preserved... Photos on this page courtesy of the Falklands Maritime Heritage  Few who hear the story of the...
5 months ago
53

A New 3D Scan, Created from 25,000 High-Resolution Images, Reveals the Remarkably Well-Preserved Wreck of Shackleton’s Endurance

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5 months ago
Photos on this page courtesy of the Falklands Maritime Heritage  Few who hear the story of the Endurance could avoid reflecting on the aptness of the ship’s name. A year after setting out on the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition in 1914, it got stuck in a mass of drifting ice...
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Open Culture
The Mushroom Color Atlas: An Interactive Web Site Lets You Explore the Incredible Spectrum of Colors... Enter the Mushroom Color Atlas, and you can discover the “beautiful and subtle colors derived from...
5 months ago
48

The Mushroom Color Atlas: An Interactive Web Site Lets You Explore the Incredible Spectrum of Colors Created from Fungi

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5 months ago
Enter the Mushroom Color Atlas, and you can discover the “beautiful and subtle colors derived from dyeing with mushrooms.” Featuring 825 colors, each associated with different types of mushrooms, the interactive atlas lets you appreciate the broad spectrum of colors latent in the...
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Open Culture
Stanley Kubrick’s Annotated Copy of Stephen King’s The Shining The web site Overlook Hotel has posted pictures of Stanley Kubrick’s personal copy of Stephen King’s...
5 months ago
41

Stanley Kubrick’s Annotated Copy of Stephen King’s The Shining

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5 months ago
The web site Overlook Hotel has posted pictures of Stanley Kubrick’s personal copy of Stephen King’s novel The Shining. The book is filled with highlighted passages and largely illegible notes in the margin—tantalizing clues to Kubrick’s intentions for the movie. The site...
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Open Culture
How Upside-Down Models Revolutionized Architecture, Making Possible St. Paul’s Cathedral, Sagrada... For 142 years now, Sagrada Família has been growing toward the sky. Or at least that’s what it seems...
5 months ago
44

How Upside-Down Models Revolutionized Architecture, Making Possible St. Paul’s Cathedral, Sagrada Família & More

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5 months ago
For 142 years now, Sagrada Família has been growing toward the sky. Or at least that’s what it seems to be doing, as its ongoing construction realizes ever more fully a host of forms that look and feel not quite of this earth. It makes a kind of sense to learn that, in designing...
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Open Culture
Bertrand Russell’s 10 Commandments for Living in a Healthy Democracy Image by J. F. Horrabin, via Wikimedia Commons Bertrand Russell saw the history of civilization as...
6 months ago
37

Bertrand Russell’s 10 Commandments for Living in a Healthy Democracy

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6 months ago
Image by J. F. Horrabin, via Wikimedia Commons Bertrand Russell saw the history of civilization as being shaped by an unfortunate oscillation between two opposing evils: tyranny and anarchy, each of which contains the seed of the other. The best course for steering clear of...
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Open Culture
Watch the Original Nosferatu, the Classic German Expressionist Vampire Film, Before the New Remake... F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, far and away the most influential early vampire movie, came out 102 years...
6 months ago
58

Watch the Original Nosferatu, the Classic German Expressionist Vampire Film, Before the New Remake Arrives This December

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6 months ago
F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, far and away the most influential early vampire movie, came out 102 years ago. For about ten of those years, Robert Eggers has been trying to remake it. He wouldn’t be the first: Werner Herzog cast Klaus Kinski as the blood-sucking aristocrat at the...
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Open Culture
Behold the Oldest Written Text in the World: The Kish Tablet, Circa 3500 BC Image by José-Manuel Benito, via Wikimedia Commons Some refer to the written Chinese language as...
6 months ago
59

Behold the Oldest Written Text in the World: The Kish Tablet, Circa 3500 BC

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6 months ago
Image by José-Manuel Benito, via Wikimedia Commons Some refer to the written Chinese language as ideographic: that is, structured according to a system in which each symbol represents a particular idea or concept, whether abstract or concrete. That’s true of certain Chinese...
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Open Culture
Hear the Isolated Vocals of Peter Gabriel & Kate Bush in “Don’t Give Up”: The Power of Perseverance Just by chance, could you use a song about perseverance and overcoming adversity? Something to give...
6 months ago
46

Hear the Isolated Vocals of Peter Gabriel & Kate Bush in “Don’t Give Up”: The Power of Perseverance

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6 months ago
Just by chance, could you use a song about perseverance and overcoming adversity? Something to give you a little encouragement and reassurance? Then we submit to you “Don’t Give Up,” featuring the isolated vocals of Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush. When he released the song on his...
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Open Culture
How Car Chase Scenes Have Evolved Over 100 Years: The Technology Behind Bullitt, The French... For many a classic action-movie enthusiast, no car chase will ever top the one in Bullitt. The...
6 months ago
48

How Car Chase Scenes Have Evolved Over 100 Years: The Technology Behind Bullitt, The French Connection, Driver, and Other Action Movies

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6 months ago
For many a classic action-movie enthusiast, no car chase will ever top the one in Bullitt. The narrator of the Insider video above describes it as “the scene that set the standard for all modern car chases,” one made “iconic partly because of the characters, but also because of...
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Open Culture
Carl Jung Psychoanalyzes Hitler: “He’s the Unconscious of 78 Million Germans.” “Without the German... Were you to google “Carl Jung and Nazism”—and I’m not suggesting that you do—you would find yourself...
6 months ago
51

Carl Jung Psychoanalyzes Hitler: “He’s the Unconscious of 78 Million Germans.” “Without the German People He’d Be Nothing” (1938)

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6 months ago
Were you to google “Carl Jung and Nazism”—and I’m not suggesting that you do—you would find yourself hip-deep in the charges that Jung was an anti-Semite and a Nazi sympathizer. Many sites condemn or exonerate him; many others celebrate him as a blood and soil Aryan hero. It can...
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Open Culture
Watch 70+ Classic Literary Films Free Online: The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Gulliver’s Travels, Jane... The term gaslight has gained so much traction in popular discourse so recently that you’d swear it...
6 months ago
56

Watch 70+ Classic Literary Films Free Online: The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Gulliver’s Travels, Jane Eyre, and More

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6 months ago
The term gaslight has gained so much traction in popular discourse so recently that you’d swear it was coined around 2010. In fact, that particular usage goes at least as far back as 1938, when British novelist and playwright Patrick Hamilton wrote a stage thriller about a...
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Open Culture
Download 1,600+ Publications from the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Books, Guides, Magazines & More Many of us in these past few generations first heard of the Metropolitan Museum of Art while reading...
6 months ago
56

Download 1,600+ Publications from the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Books, Guides, Magazines & More

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6 months ago
Many of us in these past few generations first heard of the Metropolitan Museum of Art while reading E. L. Konigsburg’s novel From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. More than a few of us also fantasized about running away to live in that vast cultural institution...
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Open Culture
Watch The Cure Perform a Three-Hour Concert in London, Celebrating the Release of Their New Album httpv://www.youtube.com/live/_aWDlaxvEZo Last Friday, The Cure celebrated the release of their new...
6 months ago
47

Watch The Cure Perform a Three-Hour Concert in London, Celebrating the Release of Their New Album

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6 months ago
httpv://www.youtube.com/live/_aWDlaxvEZo Last Friday, The Cure celebrated the release of their new album, Songs of a Lost World, with a three-hour set at the Troxy in London. The band kicked off the show by performing all eight tracks from the album, before then playing another...
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Open Culture
Discover Paul Éluard and Max Ernst’s Still-Bizarre Proto-Surrealist Book Les Malheurs des immortels... When the names of French poet Paul Éluard and German artist Max Ernst arise, one subject always...
6 months ago
52

Discover Paul Éluard and Max Ernst’s Still-Bizarre Proto-Surrealist Book Les Malheurs des immortels (1922)

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6 months ago
When the names of French poet Paul Éluard and German artist Max Ernst arise, one subject always follows: that of their years-long ménage à trois — or rather, “marriage à trois,” as a New York Times article by Annette Grant once put it. It started in 1921, Grant writes, when the...
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Open Culture
The Metropolitan Museum of Art Puts 490,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use Update: The Metropolitan Museum of Art has put online 492,000 high-resolution images of artistic...
6 months ago
64

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Puts 490,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use

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6 months ago
Update: The Metropolitan Museum of Art has put online 492,000 high-resolution images of artistic works. Even better, the museum has placed the vast majority of these images into the public domain, meaning they can be downloaded directly from the museum’s website for...
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Open Culture
Umberto Eco’s List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism Creative Commons image by Rob Bogaerts, via the National Archives in Holland One of the key...
6 months ago
69

Umberto Eco’s List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism

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6 months ago
Creative Commons image by Rob Bogaerts, via the National Archives in Holland One of the key questions facing both journalists and loyal oppositions these days is how do we stay honest as euphemisms and trivializations take over the discourse? Can we use words like “fascism,” for...
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Open Culture
How the Influential Time-Travel Movie La Jetée Was Made (Almost) Entirely out of Still Photographs In a future where humanity has been driven underground by an apocalyptic event, a prisoner is...
6 months ago
27

How the Influential Time-Travel Movie La Jetée Was Made (Almost) Entirely out of Still Photographs

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6 months ago
In a future where humanity has been driven underground by an apocalyptic event, a prisoner is haunted by the childhood memory of seeing a man gunned down at an airport. A group of scientists make him their time-traveling guinea pig, hoping that he’ll be able to find a way to...
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Open Culture
Launch Your Project Management Career with Google’s AI-Enhanced Professional Certificate ?si=TMflasoogRfSD14h Back in 2021, Google released a series of certificate programs, including one...
6 months ago
33

Launch Your Project Management Career with Google’s AI-Enhanced Professional Certificate

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6 months ago
?si=TMflasoogRfSD14h Back in 2021, Google released a series of certificate programs, including one focused on Project Management. Designed to give students “an immersive understanding of the practices and skills needed to succeed in an entry-level project management role,” the...
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Open Culture
Hear Edgar Allan Poe’s Horror Stories Read by Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, James Earl Jones,... Here on Halloween of 2024, we have a greater variety of scary stories — and arguably, a much scarier...
6 months ago
58

Hear Edgar Allan Poe’s Horror Stories Read by Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, James Earl Jones, William S. Burroughs & Others

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6 months ago
Here on Halloween of 2024, we have a greater variety of scary stories — and arguably, a much scarier variety of scarier stories — to choose from than ever before. But whatever their relevance to the specific lives we may live and the specific dreads we may feel today, how many...
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Open Culture
Watch The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the Influential German Expressionist Horror Film (1920) In early 1920, posters began appearing all over Berlin with a hypnotic spiral and the mysterious...
6 months ago
35

Watch The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the Influential German Expressionist Horror Film (1920)

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6 months ago
In early 1920, posters began appearing all over Berlin with a hypnotic spiral and the mysterious command Du musst Caligari werden — “You must become Caligari.” The posters were part of an innovative advertising campaign for an upcoming movie by Robert Wiene called The Cabinet of...
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Open Culture
Mythology Expert Reviews Depictions of Greek & Roman Myths in Popular Movies and TV Shows It’s safe to say that we no longer believe in the gods of the ancient world — or rather, that most...
6 months ago
46

Mythology Expert Reviews Depictions of Greek & Roman Myths in Popular Movies and TV Shows

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6 months ago
It’s safe to say that we no longer believe in the gods of the ancient world — or rather, that most of us no longer believe in their literal existence, but some of us have faith in their box-office potential. This two-part video series from Vanity Fair examines a variety of movies...
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Open Culture
The Story of Fascism: Rick Steves’ Documentary Helps Us Learn from the Painful Lessons of the 20th... From Rick Steves comes a thought-provoking documentary that revisits the rise of fascism in Europe,...
6 months ago
31

The Story of Fascism: Rick Steves’ Documentary Helps Us Learn from the Painful Lessons of the 20th Century

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6 months ago
From Rick Steves comes a thought-provoking documentary that revisits the rise of fascism in Europe, reminding us of how charismatic figures like Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler came to power by promising to create a better future for their frustrated, economically depressed...
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Open Culture
Marcus Aurelius’ 9 Rules for Living a Stoic Life: Presented by Ryan Holiday This week, the Guardian’s Zoe Williams profiled Ryan Holiday, a one-time public-relations whiz-kid...
6 months ago
61

Marcus Aurelius’ 9 Rules for Living a Stoic Life: Presented by Ryan Holiday

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6 months ago
This week, the Guardian’s Zoe Williams profiled Ryan Holiday, a one-time public-relations whiz-kid who’s reinvented himself over the past decade as a speaker for the dead: specifically Epictetus, Seneca, and above all Marcus Aurelius, the figureheads of the ancient school of...
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Open Culture
Destino: The Salvador Dalí — Disney Collaboration 57 Years in the Making In 2003, Disney released a six minute animated short called Destino, finally bringing closure to a...
6 months ago
29

Destino: The Salvador Dalí — Disney Collaboration 57 Years in the Making

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6 months ago
In 2003, Disney released a six minute animated short called Destino, finally bringing closure to a project that began 57 years earlier. The story of Destino goes way back to 1946 when two very different cultural icons, Walt Disney and Salvador Dalí, decided to work together on a...
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Open Culture
The Hand: An Anti-Totalitarian Animation, Banned for Two Decades & Now Considered One of the... For obvious reasons, most art produced under oppressive regimes comes off as painstakingly...
6 months ago
49

The Hand: An Anti-Totalitarian Animation, Banned for Two Decades & Now Considered One of the Greatest Animations (1965)

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6 months ago
For obvious reasons, most art produced under oppressive regimes comes off as painstakingly inoffensive. For equally obvious reasons, the rare works that criticize the regime tend to do so rather obliquely. This wasn’t so much the case with The Hand, the most famous short by Czech...
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Open Culture
The Isolated Bass Grooves of The Grateful Dead’s Phil Lesh (RIP) This past Friday, the bassist of The Grateful Dead, Phil Lesh, passed away at age 84. Almost...
6 months ago
36

The Isolated Bass Grooves of The Grateful Dead’s Phil Lesh (RIP)

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6 months ago
This past Friday, the bassist of The Grateful Dead, Phil Lesh, passed away at age 84. Almost immediately the tributes poured in, most recognizing that Lesh wasn’t your ordinary bassist. As Jon Pareles wrote in the New York Times, Phil Lesh held songs “aloft.” His “bass lines...
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Open Culture
When 20,000 Americans Held a Pro-Nazi Rally in Madison Square Garden in 1939 Above, two-time Academy Award nominee Marshall Curry presents A Night at The Garden, a film that...
6 months ago
34

When 20,000 Americans Held a Pro-Nazi Rally in Madison Square Garden in 1939

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6 months ago
Above, two-time Academy Award nominee Marshall Curry presents A Night at The Garden, a film that revisits a night in February 1939 when “20,000 Americans rallied in New York’s Madison Square Garden to celebrate the rise of Nazism — an event largely forgotten from U.S. history.”...
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Open Culture
Hear 2.5 Hours of the Classical Music in Haruki Murakami’s Novels: Liszt, Beethoven, Janáček, and... Haruki Murakami’s hit novel 1Q84 features a memorable scene in a taxicab on a gridlocked freeway...
6 months ago
45

Hear 2.5 Hours of the Classical Music in Haruki Murakami’s Novels: Liszt, Beethoven, Janáček, and More

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6 months ago
Haruki Murakami’s hit novel 1Q84 features a memorable scene in a taxicab on a gridlocked freeway whose radio is playing Leoš Janáček’s Sinfonietta. “It is, as the book suggests, truly the worst possible music for a traffic jam,” writes Sam Anderson in a New York Times Magazine...
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Open Culture
A Short Visual History of America, According to the Irreverent Comic Artist R. Crumb As a founder of the “underground comix” movement in the 1960s, R. Crumb is either revered as a...
6 months ago
48

A Short Visual History of America, According to the Irreverent Comic Artist R. Crumb

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6 months ago
As a founder of the “underground comix” movement in the 1960s, R. Crumb is either revered as a pioneering satirist of American culture and its excesses or reviled as a juvenile purveyor of painfully outmoded sexist and racist stereotypes. Crumb doesn’t apologize. He keeps...
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Open Culture
The Evolution of Cinema: Watch Nearly 140 Years of Film History Unfold in 80 Minutes The video above from YouTuber Alex Day includes clips from about 500 movies, and you’ve almost...
6 months ago
50

The Evolution of Cinema: Watch Nearly 140 Years of Film History Unfold in 80 Minutes

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6 months ago
The video above from YouTuber Alex Day includes clips from about 500 movies, and you’ve almost certainly seen more than a few of them. Battleship Potemkin, Dumbo, Rear Window, Dr. No, The Godfather, E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Top Gun, Braveheart, Gladiator, Inception: we’re not...
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Open Culture
B.B. King Changes a Broken Guitar String Mid-Song at Farm Aid, and Doesn’t Miss a Beat (1985) The scene is Farm Aid, 1985, attended by a crowd of 80,000 people. The song is “How Blue Can You...
6 months ago
34

B.B. King Changes a Broken Guitar String Mid-Song at Farm Aid, and Doesn’t Miss a Beat (1985)

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6 months ago
The scene is Farm Aid, 1985, attended by a crowd of 80,000 people. The song is “How Blue Can You Get.” And the key moment comes at the 3:10 mark, when the blues legend B.B. King breaks a guitar string, then manages to replace it before the song finishes minutes later. All the...
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Open Culture
Spin the 17th-Century Death Roulette Wheel & Find Out What Would Have Killed You in 1665 A common historical misconception holds that, up until a few centuries ago, everyone died when they...
6 months ago
57

Spin the 17th-Century Death Roulette Wheel & Find Out What Would Have Killed You in 1665

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6 months ago
A common historical misconception holds that, up until a few centuries ago, everyone died when they were about 40. In fact, even in antiquity, one could well make it to what would be considered an advanced age today — assuming one survived the great mortal peril of childhood, and...
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Open Culture
Andy Warhol’s One Minute of Professional Wrestling Fame (1985) Andy Warhol did for art what the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) did for wrestling. He made it a...
6 months ago
45

Andy Warhol’s One Minute of Professional Wrestling Fame (1985)

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6 months ago
Andy Warhol did for art what the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) did for wrestling. He made it a spectacle. He made it something the “everyman” could enjoy. He infused it with celebrity. And, some would say, he cheapened it too. Looking back, it makes perfect sense that Warhol...
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Open Culture
Built to Last: How Ancient Roman Bridges Can Still Withstand the Weight of Modern Cars & Trucks A foreign traveler road-tripping across Europe might well feel a wave of trepidation before driving...
6 months ago
53

Built to Last: How Ancient Roman Bridges Can Still Withstand the Weight of Modern Cars & Trucks

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6 months ago
A foreign traveler road-tripping across Europe might well feel a wave of trepidation before driving a fully loaded modern automobile over a more than 2,000-year-old bridge. But it might also be balanced out by the understanding that such a structure has, by definition, stood the...
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Open Culture
The Wisdom of Alan Watts in 4 Mind-Expanding Animations Perhaps no single person did more to popularize Zen Buddhism in the West than Alan Watts. In a...
6 months ago
44

The Wisdom of Alan Watts in 4 Mind-Expanding Animations

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6 months ago
Perhaps no single person did more to popularize Zen Buddhism in the West than Alan Watts. In a sense, Watts prepared U.S. culture for more traditionally Zen teachers like Soto priest Suzuki Roshi, whose lineage continues today, but Watts did not consider himself a Zen Buddhist....
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Open Culture
How Man Ray Reinvented Himself & Created One of the Most Iconic Works of Surrealist Photography It would surprise none of us to encounter a young artist looking to cast off his past and make his...
6 months ago
38

How Man Ray Reinvented Himself & Created One of the Most Iconic Works of Surrealist Photography

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6 months ago
It would surprise none of us to encounter a young artist looking to cast off his past and make his mark on the culture in a place like Williamsburg. But in the case of Man Ray, Williamsburg was his past. One must remember that the Brooklyn of today bears little resemblance to the...
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Open Culture
Take The Near Impossible Literacy Test Louisiana Used to Suppress the Black Vote (1964) In William Faulkner’s 1938 novel The Unvanquished, the implacable Colonel Sartoris takes drastic...
6 months ago
54

Take The Near Impossible Literacy Test Louisiana Used to Suppress the Black Vote (1964)

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6 months ago
In William Faulkner’s 1938 novel The Unvanquished, the implacable Colonel Sartoris takes drastic action to stop the election of a black Republican candidate to office after the Civil War, destroying the ballots of black voters and shooting two Northern carpetbaggers. While such...
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Open Culture
Neuroscience Shows That Viewing Art in Museums Engages the Brain More Than Reproductions We may appreciate living in an era that doesn’t require us to travel across the world to know what a...
6 months ago
50

Neuroscience Shows That Viewing Art in Museums Engages the Brain More Than Reproductions

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6 months ago
We may appreciate living in an era that doesn’t require us to travel across the world to know what a particular work of art looks like. At the same time, we may instinctively understand that regarding a work of art in its original form feels different than regarding even the most...
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Open Culture
Orson Welles Narrates an Animated Parable About How Xenophobia & Greed Will Put America Into Decline... More than 50 years and 10 presidential administrations have passed since Orson Welles narrated...
6 months ago
53

Orson Welles Narrates an Animated Parable About How Xenophobia & Greed Will Put America Into Decline (1971)

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6 months ago
More than 50 years and 10 presidential administrations have passed since Orson Welles narrated Freedom River. And while it shows signs of age, the animated film, a parable about the role of immigration, race, and wealth in America, still resonates today. Actually, given the...
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Open Culture
Learn Data Analytics & AI with Google, and Fast-Track Your Career ?si=azZbGLEr_9EFWypL We’re living in the age of data and artificial intelligence (AI). Every second,...
6 months ago
44

Learn Data Analytics & AI with Google, and Fast-Track Your Career

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6 months ago
?si=azZbGLEr_9EFWypL We’re living in the age of data and artificial intelligence (AI). Every second, vast amounts of data are being generated, processed, and analyzed. And increasingly AI plays a central role in how that data gets managed. For companies, governments, and...
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Open Culture
The Night When Luciano Pavarotti & James Brown Sang “It’s a Man’s World” Together (2002) Luciano Pavarotti and James Brown are remembered as larger-than-life performers with an almost...
6 months ago
48

The Night When Luciano Pavarotti & James Brown Sang “It’s a Man’s World” Together (2002)

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6 months ago
Luciano Pavarotti and James Brown are remembered as larger-than-life performers with an almost mythical-seeming presence and distinctiveness. But it wasn’t so very long ago that both of them were active — and even active onstage together. In the video above, the King of the High...
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Open Culture
George Harrison Explains Why Everyone Should Play the Ukulele George Harrison loved the ukulele, and really, what’s not to love? For its dainty size, the uke can...
6 months ago
50

George Harrison Explains Why Everyone Should Play the Ukulele

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6 months ago
George Harrison loved the ukulele, and really, what’s not to love? For its dainty size, the uke can make a powerfully cheerful sound, and it’s an instrument both beginners and expert players can learn and easily carry around. As Harrison’s old friend Joe Brown remarked, “You can...
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Open Culture
The Fake Buildings of New York: What Happens Inside Their Mysterious Walls You can’t go on a walk with a serious enthusiast of New York history without hearing the stories...
6 months ago
49

The Fake Buildings of New York: What Happens Inside Their Mysterious Walls

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6 months ago
You can’t go on a walk with a serious enthusiast of New York history without hearing the stories behind at least a few notable, beautiful, or downright strange buildings. Yet most longtime New Yorkers, famed for tuning out their surroundings to better strive for their goals of...
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Open Culture
eanuts Creator Charles Schulz Shares with a 10-Year-Old Kid the True Meaning of Good Citizenship In 1970, when 10-year-old Joel Linton asked Charles Schulz, the creator of Peanuts, “What do you...
6 months ago
63

eanuts Creator Charles Schulz Shares with a 10-Year-Old Kid the True Meaning of Good Citizenship

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6 months ago
In 1970, when 10-year-old Joel Linton asked Charles Schulz, the creator of Peanuts, “What do you think makes a good citizen?” Schulz sent the youngster a short but pithy reply: Dear Joel: I think it is more difficult these days to define what makes a good citizen than it has ever...
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Open Culture
Take a Tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House, the Mansion That Has Appeared in Blade Runner, Twin... There are more than a few of us who’d enjoy the opportunity to live in a house that appears in Blade...
6 months ago
44

Take a Tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House, the Mansion That Has Appeared in Blade Runner, Twin Peaks & Countless Hollywood Films

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6 months ago
There are more than a few of us who’d enjoy the opportunity to live in a house that appears in Blade Runner; there are rather few of us who would value that opportunity at $23 million, the asking price given in the 2019 Architectural Digest video on Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1924...
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Open Culture
Johnny Cash & The Clash’s Joe Strummer Sing Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” (2002) In 1958, Merle Haggard saw Johnny Cash play in San Quentin, and went on to sing honest country songs...
6 months ago
65

Johnny Cash & The Clash’s Joe Strummer Sing Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” (2002)

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6 months ago
In 1958, Merle Haggard saw Johnny Cash play in San Quentin, and went on to sing honest country songs for country outlaws. In 1982, future Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello saw Joe Strummer play with The Clash in Chicago and went on to play angry righteous rock for...
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Open Culture
The Amazing Recording History of The Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun” The most streamed Beatles song isn’t “She Loves You,” “Hey Jude,” or “All You Need Is Love.” It...
6 months ago
53

The Amazing Recording History of The Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun”

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6 months ago
The most streamed Beatles song isn’t “She Loves You,” “Hey Jude,” or “All You Need Is Love.” It isn’t even “Yesterday.” If you were about to guess “Something,” you’re on the right track, at least as far as the source album and songwriter. In fact, it’s George Harrison’s other...
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Open Culture
When Leonard Cohen Guest Starred on Miami Vice (1986) Leonard Cohen was Canada’s answer to Bob Dylan. While best known perhaps as a singer-songwriter who...
6 months ago
30

When Leonard Cohen Guest Starred on Miami Vice (1986)

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6 months ago
Leonard Cohen was Canada’s answer to Bob Dylan. While best known perhaps as a singer-songwriter who penned the tune “Hallelujah” — which was covered by Jeff Buckley, John Cale and just about everyone else under the sun — he was also at varying points in his colorful life a poet,...
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Open Culture
The Writer Who Directed, The Director Who Wrote: Every Frame a Painting Explores the Genius of Billy... When the acclaimed cinema video-essay channel Every Frame a Painting made its comeback this past...
7 months ago
46

The Writer Who Directed, The Director Who Wrote: Every Frame a Painting Explores the Genius of Billy Wilder

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7 months ago
When the acclaimed cinema video-essay channel Every Frame a Painting made its comeback this past summer, its creators Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos took a close look at the “sustained two-shot,” which captures a stretch of dialogue between two characters without the interference of...
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Open Culture
The Complete Howard Stern Interview with Kamala Harris It’s hard to know where to start. This election comes down to whether or not we want to reward...
7 months ago
36

The Complete Howard Stern Interview with Kamala Harris

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7 months ago
It’s hard to know where to start. This election comes down to whether or not we want to reward someone who tried to subvert our democracy four years ago. Whether we want to preserve the alliances that have kept the peace since World War II. Whether women want to resist losing...
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Open Culture
The Story of Francis Ford Coppola’s Four-Decade-Struggle to Make Megalopolis This past summer, out came a trailer for Megalopolis, the movie Francis Ford Coppola has spent half...
7 months ago
48

The Story of Francis Ford Coppola’s Four-Decade-Struggle to Make Megalopolis

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7 months ago
This past summer, out came a trailer for Megalopolis, the movie Francis Ford Coppola has spent half of his life trying to make. It took the bold approach of opening with quotes from reviews of his previous pictures, and not positive ones: when it was first released, Rex Reed...
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