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Open Culture
The World’s Oldest Cookbook: Discover 4,000-Year-Old Recipes from Ancient Babylon If asked about your favorite dish, you’d do well to name something exotic. Gone are the days when a...
yesterday
4

The World’s Oldest Cookbook: Discover 4,000-Year-Old Recipes from Ancient Babylon

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yesterday
If asked about your favorite dish, you’d do well to name something exotic. Gone are the days when a taste for the likes of Italian, Mexican, or Chinese cuisine could qualify you as an adventurous eater. Even expeditions to the very edges of the menus at Peruvian, Ethiopian, or...
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Open Culture
Tomorrow Never Knows: How The Beatles Invented the Future With Studio Magic, Tape Loops & LSD “Tomorrow Never Dies” couldn’t be made today, and not just because the Beatles already made it in...
2 days ago
4

Tomorrow Never Knows: How The Beatles Invented the Future With Studio Magic, Tape Loops & LSD

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2 days ago
“Tomorrow Never Dies” couldn’t be made today, and not just because the Beatles already made it in 1966. Marking perhaps the single biggest step in the group’s artistic evolution, that song is in every sense a product of its time. The use of psychedelic drugs like LSD was on the...
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Open Culture
Stephen King’s Top 10 All-Time Favorite Books Image by The USO, via Flickr Commons So you might think that if Stephen King – the guy who wrote...
2 days ago
5

Stephen King’s Top 10 All-Time Favorite Books

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2 days ago
Image by The USO, via Flickr Commons So you might think that if Stephen King – the guy who wrote such horror classics like Carrie and The Stand – were to rattle off his top ten favorite books, it would feature works by the likes of Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft or maybe J. […]
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Open Culture
The Invisible Horror of The Shining: How Music Makes Stanley Kubrick’s Iconic Film Even More... Inexplicable as it may sound to readers of this site, there are movie-lovers who claim not to enjoy...
3 days ago
5

The Invisible Horror of The Shining: How Music Makes Stanley Kubrick’s Iconic Film Even More Terrifying

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3 days ago
Inexplicable as it may sound to readers of this site, there are movie-lovers who claim not to enjoy the work of Stanley Kubrick. But even his most steadfast non-appreciators have to hand it to him for The Shining, his 1980 Stephen King adaptation widely considered one of the...
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Open Culture
A Rabbit Rides a Chariot Pulled by Geese in an Ancient Roman Mosaic (2nd century AD) If you head to the Louvre, make sure you visit the Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, and Liberty Leading the...
3 days ago
5

A Rabbit Rides a Chariot Pulled by Geese in an Ancient Roman Mosaic (2nd century AD)

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3 days ago
If you head to the Louvre, make sure you visit the Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, and Liberty Leading the People. But then swing by the Department of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman Antiquities. There you might find (no guarantee!) a Roman mosaic featuring a rabbit riding a chariot pulled...
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Open Culture
Paradise Lost Explained: How John Milton Wrote His Epic Religious Poem from Satan’s Perspective “Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up...
4 days ago
6

Paradise Lost Explained: How John Milton Wrote His Epic Religious Poem from Satan’s Perspective

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4 days ago
“Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again,” Samuel Johnson wrote in the late eighteenth century. “None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure. We read Milton for instruction,...
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Open Culture
Watch Animated Sheet Music for Miles Davis’ “So What,” Coltrane’s “Giant Steps,” and Charlie... Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue changed jazz. It changed music, period. So I take it very seriously. But...
4 days ago
6

Watch Animated Sheet Music for Miles Davis’ “So What,” Coltrane’s “Giant Steps,” and Charlie Parker’s “Confirmation”

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4 days ago
Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue changed jazz. It changed music, period. So I take it very seriously. But when I see the animated sheet music of the first cut, “So What,” I can’t help but think of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts cartoons, and their Vince Guaraldi compositions. I mean no...
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Open Culture
J. R. R. Tolkien Reads from The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings & Other Works If you wanted to hear the voice of your favorite writer in the nineteen-sixties — a time before...
5 days ago
7

J. R. R. Tolkien Reads from The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings & Other Works

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5 days ago
If you wanted to hear the voice of your favorite writer in the nineteen-sixties — a time before audiobooks, let alone podcasts — you consulted the catalog of Caedmon Records. That label specialized in LPs of literary eminences reading their own work. This may or may not be the...
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Open Culture
The Genius Urban Design of Amsterdam: Canals, Dams & Leaning Houses It’s common to hear it said that some particular city — usually one of the American metropolises...
5 days ago
9

The Genius Urban Design of Amsterdam: Canals, Dams & Leaning Houses

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5 days ago
It’s common to hear it said that some particular city — usually one of the American metropolises that sprang into existence over the past couple of centuries — “shouldn’t exist.” And indeed, as urban planner M. Nolan Gray writes in a recent blog post, “no city should exist.” On...
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Open Culture
Igor Stravinsky’s “Illegal” Arrangement of “The Star Spangled Banner” (1944) In 1939, Igor Stravinsky emigrated to the United States, first arriving in New York City, before...
a week ago
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Igor Stravinsky’s “Illegal” Arrangement of “The Star Spangled Banner” (1944)

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a week ago
In 1939, Igor Stravinsky emigrated to the United States, first arriving in New York City, before settling in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he delivered the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard during the 1939–40 academic year. While living in Boston, the composer conducted...
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Open Culture
How Four Masters—Michelangelo, Donatello, Verrocchio & Bernini—Sculpted David More than a few visitors to Florence make a beeline to the Galleria dell’Accademia, and once inside,...
a week ago
9

How Four Masters—Michelangelo, Donatello, Verrocchio & Bernini—Sculpted David

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a week ago
More than a few visitors to Florence make a beeline to the Galleria dell’Accademia, and once inside, to Michelangelo’s David, the most famous sculpture in the world. But how many of them, one wonders, then take the time to view the three other Davids in that city alone? At the...
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Open Culture
Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists 8 (Free) Books Every Intelligent Person Should Read Image via Wikimedia Commons A number of years ago, a Reddit user posed the question to Neil deGrasse...
a week ago
10

Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists 8 (Free) Books Every Intelligent Person Should Read

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a week ago
Image via Wikimedia Commons A number of years ago, a Reddit user posed the question to Neil deGrasse Tyson: “Which books should be read by every single intelligent person on the planet?” Below, you will find the book list offered up by the astrophysicist, director of the Hayden...
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Open Culture
The Only Painting van Gogh Ever Sold: Discover The Red Vineyard (1888) It may have crossed your mind, while beholding paintings of Vincent van Gogh, that you’d like to own...
a week ago
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The Only Painting van Gogh Ever Sold: Discover The Red Vineyard (1888)

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a week ago
It may have crossed your mind, while beholding paintings of Vincent van Gogh, that you’d like to own one yourself someday. If so, you’ll have to get in line with more than a few billionaires, and even they may never see one go up on the auction block. This would probably come as...
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Open Culture
How 16th-Century Artist Joris Hoefnagel Made Insects Beautiful—and Changed Science Forever In English, most of the words we’d use to refer to insects sound off-putting at best and fearsome at...
a week ago
11

How 16th-Century Artist Joris Hoefnagel Made Insects Beautiful—and Changed Science Forever

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a week ago
In English, most of the words we’d use to refer to insects sound off-putting at best and fearsome at worst, at least to those without an entomological bent. Dutch, close a linguistic relation though it may be, offers a more endearing alternative in beestjes, which refers to all...
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Open Culture
Iconic Animator Chuck Jones Creates an Oscar-Winning Animation About the Virtues of Universal Health... While our country looks like it might be coming apart at the seams, it’s good to revisit, every once...
a week ago
31

Iconic Animator Chuck Jones Creates an Oscar-Winning Animation About the Virtues of Universal Health Care (1949)

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a week ago
While our country looks like it might be coming apart at the seams, it’s good to revisit, every once in a while, moments when it did work. And that’s not so that we can feel nostalgic about a lost time, but so that we can remind ourselves how, given the right conditions, things...
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Open Culture
A Visualization of the History of Technology: 1,889 Innovations Across Three Million Years “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” So holds the third and most...
a week ago
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A Visualization of the History of Technology: 1,889 Innovations Across Three Million Years

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a week ago
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” So holds the third and most famous of the “three laws” originally articulated by science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. Even when it was first published in the late nineteen-sixties, Clarke’s third law...
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Open Culture
Hear Newly Rediscovered Music by Erik Satie on the 100th Anniversary of His Death https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kuFyuH6tvOjqf-ugVZ1RXulJtFUqnDPz0Video can’t be loaded...
a week ago
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Hear Newly Rediscovered Music by Erik Satie on the 100th Anniversary of His Death

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a week ago
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kuFyuH6tvOjqf-ugVZ1RXulJtFUqnDPz0Video can’t be loaded because JavaScript is disabled: Satie: Discoveries (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kuFyuH6tvOjqf-ugVZ1RXulJtFUqnDPz0) If asked to name our favorite French composer...
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Open Culture
Hear the World’s Oldest Instrument, the “Neanderthal Flute,” Dating Back Over 43,000 Years Several years ago, we brought you a transcription and a couple of audio interpretations of the...
2 weeks ago
13

Hear the World’s Oldest Instrument, the “Neanderthal Flute,” Dating Back Over 43,000 Years

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2 weeks ago
Several years ago, we brought you a transcription and a couple of audio interpretations of the oldest known song in the world, discovered in the ancient Syrian city of Ugarit and dating back to the 14th century B.C.E.. Likely performed on an instrument resembling an ancient lyre,...
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Open Culture
Watch the Very First YouTube Video, “Me at the Zoo,” Now 20 Years Old Given the dominance YouTube has achieved over large swathes of world culture, we’d all expect to...
2 weeks ago
9

Watch the Very First YouTube Video, “Me at the Zoo,” Now 20 Years Old

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2 weeks ago
Given the dominance YouTube has achieved over large swathes of world culture, we’d all expect to remember the first video we watched there. Yet many or most of us don’t: rather, we simply realized, one day in the mid-to-late two-thousands, that we’d developed a daily YouTube...
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Open Culture
Hear Alan Watts’s 1960s Prediction That Automation Will Necessitate a Universal Basic Income One of the most propulsive forces in our social and economic lives is the rate at which emerging...
2 weeks ago
12

Hear Alan Watts’s 1960s Prediction That Automation Will Necessitate a Universal Basic Income

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2 weeks ago
One of the most propulsive forces in our social and economic lives is the rate at which emerging technology transforms every sphere of human labor. Despite the political leverage obtained by fearmongering about immigrants and foreigners, it’s the robots who are actually taking...
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Open Culture
Why Bob Dylan’s Unreleased “Blind Willie McTell” Is Now Considered a Masterpiece Most Dylanologists disagree about which is the single greatest song in Bob Dylan’s catalog, but few...
2 weeks ago
7

Why Bob Dylan’s Unreleased “Blind Willie McTell” Is Now Considered a Masterpiece

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2 weeks ago
Most Dylanologists disagree about which is the single greatest song in Bob Dylan’s catalog, but few would deny “Blind Willie McTell” a place high in the running. It may come as a surprise — or, to those with a certain idea of Dylan and his fan base, the exact opposite of a...
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Open Culture
The Very First Coloring Book, The Little Folks’ Painting Book (Circa 1879) Funny how not that long ago coloring books were considered the exclusive domain of children. How...
2 weeks ago
14

The Very First Coloring Book, The Little Folks’ Painting Book (Circa 1879)

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2 weeks ago
Funny how not that long ago coloring books were considered the exclusive domain of children. How times have changed. If you are the sort of adult who unwinds with a big box of Crayolas and pages of mandalas or outlines of Ryan Gosling, you owe a debt of gratitude to the...
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Open Culture
How Scientists Recreated Ancient Egypt’s Long-Lost Pigment, “Egyptian Blue” Photo courtesy of Washington State University. It’s become fashionable, in recent years, to observe...
2 weeks ago
9

How Scientists Recreated Ancient Egypt’s Long-Lost Pigment, “Egyptian Blue”

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2 weeks ago
Photo courtesy of Washington State University. It’s become fashionable, in recent years, to observe that we live in an increasingly beige-and-gray world from which all color is being drained. Whether or not that’s really the case, all of us still enjoy easy access to a range of...
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Open Culture
“The Vertue of the COFFEE Drink”: An Ad for London’s First Cafe Printed Circa 1652 The story of coffee goes back to the 13th century, when it came out of Ethiopia, then spread to...
2 weeks ago
14

“The Vertue of the COFFEE Drink”: An Ad for London’s First Cafe Printed Circa 1652

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2 weeks ago
The story of coffee goes back to the 13th century, when it came out of Ethiopia, then spread to Egypt and Yemen. It reached the Middle East, Turkey, and Persia during the 16th century, and then Europe during the early 17th, though not without controversy. In Venice, some called...
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Open Culture
How Art Conservators Restore Old Paintings & Revive Their Original Colors We tend to imagine old paintings as having a muted, yellow-brown cast, and not without reason. Many...
2 weeks ago
10

How Art Conservators Restore Old Paintings & Revive Their Original Colors

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2 weeks ago
We tend to imagine old paintings as having a muted, yellow-brown cast, and not without reason. Many of the examples we’ve seen in life really do look that way, though usually not because the artist intended it. As Julian Baumgartner of Chicago’s Baumgartner Fine Art Restoration...
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Open Culture
The History of Electronic Music in 476 Tracks (1937–2001) Photo of Karlheinz Stockhausen by Kathinka Pasveer via Wikimedia Commons You may hear the phrase...
2 weeks ago
15

The History of Electronic Music in 476 Tracks (1937–2001)

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2 weeks ago
Photo of Karlheinz Stockhausen by Kathinka Pasveer via Wikimedia Commons You may hear the phrase “electronic music” and think of superstar dubstep DJs in funny helmets at beachside celebrity parties. Alternatively, you may think of the mercurial compositions of Karlheinz...
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Open Culture
When the Dutch Tried to Live in Concrete Spheres: An Introduction to the Bolwoningen in the... In the decades after the Second World War, many countries faced the challenge of rebuilding their...
3 weeks ago
9

When the Dutch Tried to Live in Concrete Spheres: An Introduction to the Bolwoningen in the Netherlands

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3 weeks ago
In the decades after the Second World War, many countries faced the challenge of rebuilding their housing and infrastructure while also having to accommodate a fast-arriving baby boom. The government of the Netherlands got more creative than most, putting money toward...
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Open Culture
Elementary School Kids Sing David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” & Other Rock Hits: A Cult Classic Recorded... In 1976 and 1977 an inspired music teacher in the small school district of Langley Township, British...
3 weeks ago
14

Elementary School Kids Sing David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” & Other Rock Hits: A Cult Classic Recorded in 1976

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3 weeks ago
In 1976 and 1977 an inspired music teacher in the small school district of Langley Township, British Columbia, a suburb of Vancouver, recorded his elementary school students singing popular songs in a school gym. Two vinyl records were produced over the two years, and families...
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Open Culture
Enter an Archive of 10,000+ Historical Children’s Books, All Digitized & Free to Read Online We can learn much about how a historical period viewed the abilities of its children by studying its...
3 weeks ago
13

Enter an Archive of 10,000+ Historical Children’s Books, All Digitized & Free to Read Online

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3 weeks ago
We can learn much about how a historical period viewed the abilities of its children by studying its children’s literature. Occupying a space somewhere between the purely didactic and the nonsensical, most children’s books published in the past few hundred years have attempted to...
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Open Culture
Hear the Letter of Gratitude That Albert Camus Wrote to His Teacher After Winning the Nobel Prize,... When Albert Camus won the Nobel Prize, he wrote a letter to one of his old schoolteachers. “I let...
3 weeks ago
14

Hear the Letter of Gratitude That Albert Camus Wrote to His Teacher After Winning the Nobel Prize, as Read by Footballer Ian Wright

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3 weeks ago
When Albert Camus won the Nobel Prize, he wrote a letter to one of his old schoolteachers. “I let the commotion around me these days subside a bit before speaking to you from the bottom of my heart,” the letter begins. “I have just been given far too great an honor, one I neither...
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Open Culture
Watch Bob Dylan Play “Mr. Tambourine Man” in Color at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival It was at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival that Bob Dylan famously “went electric,” alienating certain...
3 weeks ago
11

Watch Bob Dylan Play “Mr. Tambourine Man” in Color at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival

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3 weeks ago
It was at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival that Bob Dylan famously “went electric,” alienating certain adherents to the folk scene through which he’d come up, but also setting a precedent for the kind of quick-change musical adaptation that he’s kept up into his eighties. At the...
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Open Culture
Tibetan Musical Notation Is Beautiful Religions take the cast and hue of the cultures in which they find root. This was certainly true in...
3 weeks ago
11

Tibetan Musical Notation Is Beautiful

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3 weeks ago
Religions take the cast and hue of the cultures in which they find root. This was certainly true in Tibet when Buddhism arrived in the 7th century. It transformed and was transformed by the native religion of Bon. Of the many creative practices that arose from this synthesis,...
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Open Culture
A Grad Student Asks Carl Sagan If He Believes in God (1994) ?si=yeo1Xsu2ZLuCpQbC Most scientists are prepared to answer questions about their research from...
3 weeks ago
12

A Grad Student Asks Carl Sagan If He Believes in God (1994)

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3 weeks ago
?si=yeo1Xsu2ZLuCpQbC Most scientists are prepared to answer questions about their research from other members of their field; rather fewer have equipped themselves to answer questions from the general public about what Douglas Adams called life, the universe, and everything. Carl...
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Open Culture
A Free Yale Course on Medieval History: 700 Years in 22 Lectures In 22 lectures, Yale historian Paul Freedman takes you on a 700-year tour of medieval history....
3 weeks ago
12

A Free Yale Course on Medieval History: 700 Years in 22 Lectures

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3 weeks ago
In 22 lectures, Yale historian Paul Freedman takes you on a 700-year tour of medieval history. Moving from 284‑1000 AD, this free online course covers “the conversion of Europe to Christianity, the fall of the Roman Empire, the rise of Islam and the Arabs, the ‘Dark Ages,’...
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Open Culture
How Jackson Pollock Redefined Modern Art: An Introduction https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sQ_cfZ8q9kVideo can’t be loaded because JavaScript is disabled:...
3 weeks ago
30

How Jackson Pollock Redefined Modern Art: An Introduction

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3 weeks ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sQ_cfZ8q9kVideo can’t be loaded because JavaScript is disabled: Jackson Pollock: the Myth of the Modern Artist (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sQ_cfZ8q9k) In his lifetime, Jackson Pollock had only one successful art show. It took place at the...
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Open Culture
The Soviet Union Creates a List of 38 Dangerous Rock Bands: Kiss, Pink Floyd, Talking Heads, Village... Image by Mario Casciano via Wikimedia Commons Music is dangerous and powerful, and can be, without...
3 weeks ago
12

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

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3 weeks ago
Image by Mario Casciano via Wikimedia Commons Music is dangerous and powerful, and can be, without intending to, a political weapon. All authoritarian regimes have understood this, including repressive elements in the U.S. throughout the Cold War. I remember having books handed...
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Open Culture
The Genius of Brian Wilson (RIP) and How He Turned “Good Vibrations” Into the Beach Boys’ Pocket... This week, Brian Wilson became the last of the Wilson brothers to shuffle off this mortal coil....
4 weeks ago
25

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

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4 weeks ago
This week, Brian Wilson became the last of the Wilson brothers to shuffle off this mortal coil. Dennis, the first of the Wilsons to go, died young in 1983 — but not before offering this memorable assessment of the family musical project: “Brian Wilson is the Beach Boys. He is the...
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Open Culture
An Architectural Tour of Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Iconic Desert Home and Studio By some estimations, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West home-studio complex took shape in 1941. But...
a month ago
10

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

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a month ago
By some estimations, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West home-studio complex took shape in 1941. But even then, the Arizona Republic presciently noted that “it may be years before it is considered finished.” The Taliesin West you can see in the new Architectural Digest video above...
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Open Culture
Read the Original 32-Page Program for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) One of the very first feature-length sci-fi films ever made, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis took a daring...
a month ago
14

Read the Original 32-Page Program for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927)

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a month ago
One of the very first feature-length sci-fi films ever made, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis took a daring visual approach for its time, incorporating Bauhaus and Futurist influences in thrillingly designed sets and costumes. Lang’s visual language resonated strongly in later decades....
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Every Wes Anderson Movie, Explained by Wes Anderson That Wes Anderson is perhaps the most assiduous maker of short films today becomes clear when you...
a month ago
10

Every Wes Anderson Movie, Explained by Wes Anderson

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a month ago
That Wes Anderson is perhaps the most assiduous maker of short films today becomes clear when you look closely at his recent work. The four adaptations of “The Wonderful World of Henry Sugar” and three other Roald Dahl stories he made for Netflix were presented as a single...
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The History of the World in One Beautiful, 5‑Foot-Long Chart (1931) In the image above, we see an impressive pre-internet macro-infographic called a “Histomap.” Its...
a month ago
14

The History of the World in One Beautiful, 5‑Foot-Long Chart (1931)

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a month ago
In the image above, we see an impressive pre-internet macro-infographic called a “Histomap.” Its creator John B. Sparks (who later created “histomaps” of religion and evolution) published the graphic in 1931 with Rand McNally. The five-foot-long chart—purportedly covering 4,000...
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Open Culture
Marie Curie Invented Mobile X‑Ray Units to Help Save Wounded Soldiers in World War I A hundred years ago, Mobile X‑Ray Units were a brand new innovation, and a godsend for soldiers...
a month ago
10

Marie Curie Invented Mobile X‑Ray Units to Help Save Wounded Soldiers in World War I

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a month ago
A hundred years ago, Mobile X‑Ray Units were a brand new innovation, and a godsend for soldiers wounded on the front in WW1. Prior to the advent of this technology, field surgeons racing to save lives operated blindly, often causing even more injury as they groped for bullets and...
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How the BIC Cristal Ballpoint Pen Became the Most Successful Product in History If you want to see a tour de force of modern technology and design, there’s no need to visit a...
a month ago
13

How the BIC Cristal Ballpoint Pen Became the Most Successful Product in History

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a month ago
If you want to see a tour de force of modern technology and design, there’s no need to visit a Silicon Valley showroom. Just feel around your desk for a few moments, and sooner or later you’ll lay a hand on it: the BIC Cristal ballpoint pen, which is described in the Primal Space...
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Open Culture
The Dylatov Pass Incident: Has One of the Biggest Soviet Mysteries Been Solved? Most of us would go out of our way not to set foot anywhere near a place the local natives refer to...
a month ago
11

The Dylatov Pass Incident: Has One of the Biggest Soviet Mysteries Been Solved?

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a month ago
Most of us would go out of our way not to set foot anywhere near a place the local natives refer to as “Dead Mountain.” That didn’t stop the Dyatlov Hiking Group, who set out on a sixteen-day skiing expedition across the northern Urals in late January of 1959. Experienced and...
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Open Culture
Hear What Shakespeare Sounded Like in the Original Pronunciation What did Shakespeare’s English sound like to Shakespeare? To his audience? And how can we know such...
a month ago
17

Hear What Shakespeare Sounded Like in the Original Pronunciation

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a month ago
What did Shakespeare’s English sound like to Shakespeare? To his audience? And how can we know such a thing as the phonetic character of the language spoken 400 years ago? These questions and more are addressed in the video above, which profiles a very popular experiment at...
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An Introduction to George Orwell’s 1984 and How Power Manufactures Truth Soon after the first election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States, George...
a month ago
13

An Introduction to George Orwell’s 1984 and How Power Manufactures Truth

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a month ago
Soon after the first election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four became a bestseller again. Shooting to the top of the American charts, the novel that inspired the term “Orwellian” passed Danielle Steel’s latest opus, the...
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Talking Heads Release the First Official Video for “Psycho Killer”: Watch It Online On social media, the Talking Heads teased a major announcement on June 5th, leading fans to wonder...
a month ago
19

Talking Heads Release the First Official Video for “Psycho Killer”: Watch It Online

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a month ago
On social media, the Talking Heads teased a major announcement on June 5th, leading fans to wonder if a reunion—41 years after their last tour—might finally be in the offing. As one fan put it, “If this is a tour announcement, I am going to freak out!” Alas, we didn’t quite get...
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Open Culture
When the State Department Used Dizzy Gillespie and Jazz to Fight the Cold War (1956) It’s been said that the United States won the Cold War without firing a shot — a statement, as P. J....
a month ago
10

When the State Department Used Dizzy Gillespie and Jazz to Fight the Cold War (1956)

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a month ago
It’s been said that the United States won the Cold War without firing a shot — a statement, as P. J. O’Rourke once wrote, that doubtless surprised veterans of Korea and Vietnam. But it wouldn’t be entirely incorrect to call the long stare-down between the U.S. and the Soviet...
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Open Culture
William Faulkner Resigns From His Post Office Job With a Spectacular Letter (1924) Working a dull civil service job ill-suited to your talents does not make you a writer, but plenty...
a month ago
12

William Faulkner Resigns From His Post Office Job With a Spectacular Letter (1924)

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a month ago
Working a dull civil service job ill-suited to your talents does not make you a writer, but plenty of famous writers have worked such jobs. Nathaniel Hawthorne worked at a Boston customhouse for a year. His friend Herman Melville put in considerably more time—19 years—as a...
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Open Culture
The 100 Greatest Paintings of All Time: From Botticelli and Bosch to Bacon and Basquiat It would be a worthwhile exercise for any of us to sit down and attempt to draw up a list of our 100...
a month ago
14

The 100 Greatest Paintings of All Time: From Botticelli and Bosch to Bacon and Basquiat

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a month ago
It would be a worthwhile exercise for any of us to sit down and attempt to draw up a list of our 100 favorite paintings of all time. Naturally, those not professionally involved with art history may have some trouble quite hitting that number. Still, however many titles we can...
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Leonard Bernstein: The Greatest 5 Minutes in Music Education We’ve previously written about one of Leonard Bernstein’s major works, The Unanswered Question, the...
a month ago
16

Leonard Bernstein: The Greatest 5 Minutes in Music Education

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a month ago
We’ve previously written about one of Leonard Bernstein’s major works, The Unanswered Question, the staggering six-part lecture that the multi-disciplinary artist gave as part of his duties as Harvard’s Charles Eliot Norton Professor. Over 11 hours, Bernstein attempts to explain...
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How John Lennon Wrote the Beatles’ Best Song, “A Day in the Life” If you’re under 60, you probably heard the line “I read the news today, oh boy” before encountering...
a month ago
18

How John Lennon Wrote the Beatles’ Best Song, “A Day in the Life”

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a month ago
If you’re under 60, you probably heard the line “I read the news today, oh boy” before encountering the song it opens. Even after you discovered the work of the Beatles, it may have taken you some time to understand what, exactly, it was that John Lennon read in the news. The...
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Open Culture
Albert Einstein’s Grades: A Fascinating Look at His Report Cards Albert Einstein was a precocious child. At the age of twelve, he followed his own line of reasoning...
a month ago
12

Albert Einstein’s Grades: A Fascinating Look at His Report Cards

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a month ago
Albert Einstein was a precocious child. At the age of twelve, he followed his own line of reasoning to find a proof of the Pythagorean Theorem. At thirteen he read Kant, just for the fun of it. And before he was fifteen he had taught himself differential and integral calculus....
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Open Culture
Wim Wenders’ New Short Film Reminds Europe of the Lessons of World War II World War II officially ended on September 2, 1945. It followed, by less than three weeks, an...
a month ago
14

Wim Wenders’ New Short Film Reminds Europe of the Lessons of World War II

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a month ago
World War II officially ended on September 2, 1945. It followed, by less than three weeks, an equally momentous event, at least in the eyes of cinephiles: the birth of Wim Wenders. Though soon to turn 80 years old, Wenders has remained both productive and capable of drawing great...
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Open Culture
Pablo Picasso’s Childhood Paintings: Precocious Works Painted Between the Ages of 8 and 15 It’s hard to imagine from this historical distance how upsetting Pablo Picasso’s 1907 modernist...
a month ago
16

Pablo Picasso’s Childhood Paintings: Precocious Works Painted Between the Ages of 8 and 15

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a month ago
It’s hard to imagine from this historical distance how upsetting Pablo Picasso’s 1907 modernist painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was to Parisian society at its debut. On its 100th anniversary, Guardian critic Jonathan Jones described it as “the rift, the break that divides past...
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Open Culture
Harvard Lets You Take 133 Free Online Courses: Explore Courses on Justice, American Government,... Image by Rizka, via Wikimedia Commons In South Korea, where I live, there may be no brand as...
a month ago
15

Harvard Lets You Take 133 Free Online Courses: Explore Courses on Justice, American Government, Literature, Religion, CompSci & More

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a month ago
Image by Rizka, via Wikimedia Commons In South Korea, where I live, there may be no brand as respected as Habodeu. Children dream of it; adults seemingly do anything to play up their own connections to it, however tenuous those connections may be. But what is Habodeu? An...
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Open Culture
Will Machines Ever Truly Think? Richard Feynman Contemplates the Future of Artificial Intelligence... Though its answer has grown more complicated in recent years, the question of whether computers will...
a month ago
21

Will Machines Ever Truly Think? Richard Feynman Contemplates the Future of Artificial Intelligence (1985)

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a month ago
Though its answer has grown more complicated in recent years, the question of whether computers will ever truly think has been around for quite some time. Richard Feynman was being asked about it 40 years ago, as evidenced by the lecture clip above. As his fans would expect, he...
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Open Culture
Leonardo da Vinci’s Elegant Design for a Perpetual Motion Machine Is perpetual motion possible? In theory… I have no idea…. In practice, so far at least, the answer...
a month ago
26

Leonardo da Vinci’s Elegant Design for a Perpetual Motion Machine

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a month ago
Is perpetual motion possible? In theory… I have no idea…. In practice, so far at least, the answer has been a perpetual no. As Nicholas Barrial writes at Makery, “in order to succeed,” a perpetual motion machine “should be free of friction, run in a vacuum chamber and be totally...
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Open Culture
Ridley Scott’s Cinematic TV Commercials: An 80-Minute Compilation Spanning 1968–2023 “In the future, e‑mail will make the written word a thing of the past,” declares the narration of a...
a month ago
19

Ridley Scott’s Cinematic TV Commercials: An 80-Minute Compilation Spanning 1968–2023

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a month ago
“In the future, e‑mail will make the written word a thing of the past,” declares the narration of a 1999 television commercial for Orange, the French telecom giant. “In the future, we won’t have to travel; we’ll meet on video. In the future, we won’t need to play in the wind and...
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Open Culture
A Young Jim Henson Teaches You How to Make Puppets with Socks, Tennis Balls & Other Household Goods... By the time he filmed this video archived on Iowa Public Television’s YouTube channel, Jim Henson...
a month ago
13

A Young Jim Henson Teaches You How to Make Puppets with Socks, Tennis Balls & Other Household Goods (1969)

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a month ago
By the time he filmed this video archived on Iowa Public Television’s YouTube channel, Jim Henson was just about to strike gold with a new children’s show called Sesame Street. The year was 1969, and he already had 15 years of puppetry experience under his belt, from children’s...
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Open Culture
The World’s Oldest Homework: A Look at Babylonian Math Homework from 4,000 Years Ago Homework has lately become unfashionable, at least according to what I’ve heard from teachers in...
a month ago
12

The World’s Oldest Homework: A Look at Babylonian Math Homework from 4,000 Years Ago

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a month ago
Homework has lately become unfashionable, at least according to what I’ve heard from teachers in certain parts of the United States. That may complicate various fairly long-standing educational practices, but it doesn’t necessarily reflect an absolute drop in standards and...
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Open Culture
They Study Authoritarianism. And They’re Leaving the U.S.: Why Three Yale Professors Have Moved to... Three Yale professors—Timothy Snyder, Jason Stanley and Marci Shore–have spent their careers...
a month ago
18

They Study Authoritarianism. And They’re Leaving the U.S.: Why Three Yale Professors Have Moved to U. Toronto

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a month ago
Three Yale professors—Timothy Snyder, Jason Stanley and Marci Shore–have spent their careers studying fascism and authoritarianism. They know the signs of emerging authoritarianism when they see it. Now, they’re seeing those signs here in the United States, and they’re not...
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Open Culture
How Bob Dylan Kept Reinventing His Songwriting Process, Breathing New Life Into His Music On his 84th birthday this past Saturday, Bob Dylan played a show. That was in keeping with not only...
a month ago
25

How Bob Dylan Kept Reinventing His Songwriting Process, Breathing New Life Into His Music

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a month ago
On his 84th birthday this past Saturday, Bob Dylan played a show. That was in keeping with not only his still-serious touring schedule, but also his apparently irrepressible instinct to work: on music, on writing, on painting, on sculpture. Even his occasional tweeting draws an...
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Open Culture
George Orwell Reviews Salvador Dali’s Autobiography: “Dali is a Good Draughtsman and a Disgusting... Images or Orwell and Dali via Wikimedia Commons Should we hold artists to the same standards of...
a month ago
25

George Orwell Reviews Salvador Dali’s Autobiography: “Dali is a Good Draughtsman and a Disgusting Human Being” (1944)

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a month ago
Images or Orwell and Dali via Wikimedia Commons Should we hold artists to the same standards of human decency that we expect of everyone else? Should talented people be exempt from ordinary morality? Should artists of questionable character have their work consigned to the trash...
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Open Culture
A 3D Model Reveals What the Parthenon and Its Interior Looked Like 2,500 Years Ago Standing atop the Acropolis in Athens as it has for nearly 2,500 years now, the Parthenon remains an...
a month ago
17

A 3D Model Reveals What the Parthenon and Its Interior Looked Like 2,500 Years Ago

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a month ago
Standing atop the Acropolis in Athens as it has for nearly 2,500 years now, the Parthenon remains an impressive sight indeed. Not that those two and a half millennia have been kind to the place: one of the most famous ruins of the ancient world is still, after all, a ruin. But it...
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Open Culture
Leo Tolstoy’s Family Recipe for Mac and Cheese In 1874, Stepan Andreevich Bers published The Cookbook and gave it as a gift to his sister, countess...
a month ago
22

Leo Tolstoy’s Family Recipe for Mac and Cheese

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a month ago
In 1874, Stepan Andreevich Bers published The Cookbook and gave it as a gift to his sister, countess Sophia Andreevna Tolstaya, the wife of the great Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy. The book contained a collection of Tolstoy family recipes, the dishes they served to their family...
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Open Culture
The “Dark Relics” of Christianity: Preserved Skulls, Blood & Other Grim Artifacts Christianity often manifests in popular culture through celebrations like Christmas and Easter, or...
a month ago
18

The “Dark Relics” of Christianity: Preserved Skulls, Blood & Other Grim Artifacts

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a month ago
Christianity often manifests in popular culture through celebrations like Christmas and Easter, or icons like lambs and fish. Less often do you see it associated with vials of blood and disembodied heads. Yet as the new Hochelaga video above reveals, the most famed Christian...
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Open Culture
How Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd & Jethro Tull Financed the Making Monty Python and the Holy Grail Monty Python and the Holy Grail isn’t a big-budget spectacle, and nobody knew that better than the...
a month ago
21

How Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd & Jethro Tull Financed the Making Monty Python and the Holy Grail

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a month ago
Monty Python and the Holy Grail isn’t a big-budget spectacle, and nobody knew that better than the Pythons themselves. Necessity being the mother of invention, they turned the project’s financial constraints into one of its many sources of humor, fashioning memorable gags out of...
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Open Culture
60 Free Film Noir Movies You Can Watch Online, Including Classics by John Huston, Orson Welles &... During the 1940s and 50s, Hollywood entered a “noir” period, producing riveting films based on...
a month ago
39

60 Free Film Noir Movies You Can Watch Online, Including Classics by John Huston, Orson Welles & Fritz Lang

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a month ago
During the 1940s and 50s, Hollywood entered a “noir” period, producing riveting films based on hard-boiled fiction. These films were set in dark locations and shot in a black & white aesthetic that fit like a glove. Hardened men wore fedoras and forever smoked cigarettes. Women...
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Open Culture
60 Free Film Noir Movies You Can Watch Online, Including Classics by John Huston, Orson Welles &... During the 1940s and 50s, Hollywood entered a “noir” period, producing riveting films based on...
a month ago
19

60 Free Film Noir Movies You Can Watch Online, Including Classics by John Huston, Orson Welles & Fritz Lang

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

a month ago
During the 1940s and 50s, Hollywood entered a “noir” period, producing riveting films based on hard-boiled fiction. These films were set in dark locations and shot in a black & white aesthetic that fit like a glove. Hardened men wore fedoras and forever smoked cigarettes. Women...
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Open Culture
How the First Rock Concert Ended in Mayhem (Cleveland, 1952) “America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is...
a month ago
16

How the First Rock Concert Ended in Mayhem (Cleveland, 1952)

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a month ago
“America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.” That observation tends to be attributed to Tennessee Williams, though it’s become somewhat detached from its source, so deeply does it resonate with a certain experience of...
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Open Culture
1980s Metalhead Kids Are Alright: Scientific Study Shows That They Became Well-Adjusted Adults In the 1980s, The Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), an organization co-founded by Tipper Gore...
a month ago
19

1980s Metalhead Kids Are Alright: Scientific Study Shows That They Became Well-Adjusted Adults

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a month ago
In the 1980s, The Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), an organization co-founded by Tipper Gore and the wives of several other Washington power brokers, launched a political campaign against pop music, hoping to put warning labels on records that promoted Sex, Violence, Drug...
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Open Culture
Watch Pablo Picasso’s Creative Process Unfold in Real-Time: Rare Footage Shows Him Creating Drawings... Pablo Picasso was born not long before the invention of the motion picture. With a different set of...
a month ago
19

Watch Pablo Picasso’s Creative Process Unfold in Real-Time: Rare Footage Shows Him Creating Drawings of Faces, Bulls & Chickens

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a month ago
Pablo Picasso was born not long before the invention of the motion picture. With a different set of inclinations, he might have become one of the most daring pioneers of that medium. Instead, as we know, he mastered and then practically reinvented the much older art form of...
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Open Culture
How Steven Soderbergh Directs a Scene & Makes It Great Steven Soderbergh was one of the earliest filmmakers to break out in what’s now called the...
a month ago
21

How Steven Soderbergh Directs a Scene & Makes It Great

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a month ago
Steven Soderbergh was one of the earliest filmmakers to break out in what’s now called the “Indiewood” movement of the nineteen-nineties. He was early enough, in fact, to have done so in the eighties, with the Palme d’Or-winning Sex, Lies, and Videotape. His subsequent films have...
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Open Culture
The World Record for the Shortest Math Article: 2 Words In 2004, John Conway and Alexander Soifer, both working on mathematics at Princeton University,...
a month ago
22

The World Record for the Shortest Math Article: 2 Words

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a month ago
In 2004, John Conway and Alexander Soifer, both working on mathematics at Princeton University, submitted to the American Mathematical Monthly what they believed was “a new world record in the number of words in a [math] paper.” Soifer explains: “On April 28, 2004 … I submitted...
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Open Culture
The PhD Theses of Richard Feynman, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein & Others, Explained with... Raise your children with a love of science, and there’s a decent chance they’ll grow up wanting to...
a month ago
22

The PhD Theses of Richard Feynman, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein & Others, Explained with Illustrations

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a month ago
Raise your children with a love of science, and there’s a decent chance they’ll grow up wanting to be like Richard Feynman, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, or any number of other famous scientists from history. Luckily for them, they won’t yet have learned that the pursuit of such...
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Open Culture
The Secret Link Between Jazz and Physics: How Einstein & Coltrane Shared Improvisation and Intuition... Scientists need hobbies. The grueling work of navigating complex theory and the politics of academia...
a month ago
23

The Secret Link Between Jazz and Physics: How Einstein & Coltrane Shared Improvisation and Intuition in Common

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a month ago
Scientists need hobbies. The grueling work of navigating complex theory and the politics of academia can get to a person, even one as laid back as Brown University professor and astrophysicist Stephon Alexander. So Alexander plays the saxophone, though at this point it may not be...
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Open Culture
How Civilizations Built on Top of Each Other: Discover What Lies Beneath Rome, Troy & Other Cities The idea of discovering a lost ancient city underground has long captured the human imagination. But...
a month ago
16

How Civilizations Built on Top of Each Other: Discover What Lies Beneath Rome, Troy & Other Cities

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a month ago
The idea of discovering a lost ancient city underground has long captured the human imagination. But why are the abandoned built environments of those fantasies always buried? The answer, in large part, is that such places do indeed exist under our feet, at least in certain parts...
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Open Culture
The Cleanest Recordings of 1920s Louis Armstrong Songs You Will Ever Hear On Youtube, jazz enthusiast Jonathan Holmes declares: “I can guarantee this is the cleanest sounding...
a month ago
18

The Cleanest Recordings of 1920s Louis Armstrong Songs You Will Ever Hear

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a month ago
On Youtube, jazz enthusiast Jonathan Holmes declares: “I can guarantee this is the cleanest sounding Louis Armstrong record you’ll ever hear! With the original transfer supplied by Nick Dellow, here is the mother record which was shipped by Okeh to Germany for their Odeon...
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Open Culture
How Frank Lloyd Wright’s Architecture Evolved Over 70 Years and Changed America In the new Architectural Digest video above, Michael Wyetzner talks about a fair few buildings we’ve...
2 months ago
19

How Frank Lloyd Wright’s Architecture Evolved Over 70 Years and Changed America

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2 months ago
In the new Architectural Digest video above, Michael Wyetzner talks about a fair few buildings we’ve featured over the years here on Open Culture: the Imperial Hotel, the Ennis House, Taliesin, Fallingwater. These are all, of course, the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, who still...
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Open Culture
David Bowie/Nirvana’s “The Man Who Sold The World” Played on the Gayageum, a Korean Instrument from... East meets West, and the Ancient, the Modern. That’s what happens every time Luna Lee plays one of...
2 months ago
18

David Bowie/Nirvana’s “The Man Who Sold The World” Played on the Gayageum, a Korean Instrument from the 6th Century

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2 months ago
East meets West, and the Ancient, the Modern. That’s what happens every time Luna Lee plays one of your favorites on the Gayageum, a Korean instrument that dates back to the 6th century. We’ve featured her work in years past (see the Relateds below). Above, watch one of her...
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Open Culture
How Our Depiction of Jesus Changed Over 2,000 Years and What He May Have Actually Looked Like Whether or not you believe Jesus Christ is the son of God, you probably envision him (or, if you...
2 months ago
14

How Our Depiction of Jesus Changed Over 2,000 Years and What He May Have Actually Looked Like

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2 months ago
Whether or not you believe Jesus Christ is the son of God, you probably envision him (or, if you prefer, Him) in much the same way as most everyone else does. The long hair and beard, the robe, the sandals, the beatific gaze: these traits have all manifested across two millennia...
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Open Culture
John Nash’s Super Short PhD Thesis: 26 Pages & Two Citations When John Nash wrote “Non-Cooperative Games,” his Ph.D. dissertation at Princeton in 1950, the text...
2 months ago
38

John Nash’s Super Short PhD Thesis: 26 Pages & Two Citations

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2 months ago
When John Nash wrote “Non-Cooperative Games,” his Ph.D. dissertation at Princeton in 1950, the text of his thesis (read it online) was brief. It ran only 26 pages. And more particularly, it was light on citations. Nash’s diss cited two texts: John von Neumann and Oskar...
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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...
2 months ago
21

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

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2 months ago
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 months ago
30

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

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2 months 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 months ago
31

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

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2 months 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...
2 months ago
27

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

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2 months 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...
2 months ago
21

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

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2 months 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...
2 months ago
17

A Japanese Zen Monk Explains What Zen Is Really About

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2 months 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...
2 months ago
14

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

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2 months 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....
2 months ago
10

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

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2 months 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,...
2 months ago
9

Hear the First Recording of the Human Voice (1860)

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2 months 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...
2 months ago
10

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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2 months 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...
2 months ago
10

How Eyes Evolved: A Fascinating Tour Through the Animal Kingdom

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2 months 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...
2 months ago
10

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

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2 months 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”...
2 months ago
7

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

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2 months 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...
2 months ago
18

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

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2 months 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...
2 months ago
7

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

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2 months 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...
2 months ago
10

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

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2 months 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 months ago
37

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 months 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 months ago
41

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

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2 months 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 months ago
41

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

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2 months 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 months ago
44

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

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2 months 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 months ago
38

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

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2 months 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 months ago
33

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

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2 months 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 months ago
40

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

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2 months 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 months ago
28

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

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2 months 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 —...
2 months ago
27

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

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2 months 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,...
2 months ago
30

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

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2 months 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...
2 months ago
31

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

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2 months 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...
2 months ago
25

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

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2 months 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...
2 months ago
30

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

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2 months 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...
2 months ago
43

Why Most Ancient Civilizations Had No Word for the Color Blue

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2 months 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...
2 months ago
23

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

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2 months 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...
2 months ago
40

William Faulkner’s Review of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

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2 months 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...
2 months ago
23

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

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2 months 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...
2 months ago
29

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

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2 months 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...
3 months ago
19

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

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

3 months 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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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...
3 months ago
50

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

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

3 months 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...
3 months ago
32

What Is Kafkaesque?: The Philosophy of Franz Kafka

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

3 months 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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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...
3 months ago
37

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

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

3 months 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...
3 months ago
22

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

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3 months 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...
3 months ago
20

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

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

3 months 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...
3 months ago
25

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

3 months 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...
3 months ago
29

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

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

3 months 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....
3 months ago
32

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

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3 months 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...
3 months ago
51

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

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

3 months 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...
3 months ago
53

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

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3 months 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)...
3 months ago
35

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

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

3 months 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...
3 months ago
30

Why the Romans Stopped Reading Books

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

3 months 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...
3 months ago
46

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

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

3 months 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...
3 months ago
30

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

3 months 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....
3 months ago
45

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

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

3 months 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...
3 months ago
34

The Only Illustrated Manuscript of Homer’s Iliad from Antiquity

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

3 months 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...
3 months ago
24

The Great Gatsby: A Free Audio Book

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

3 months 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,...
3 months ago
26

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

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3 months 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...
3 months ago
50

A Rare Smile Captured in a 19th Century Photograph

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

3 months 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...
3 months ago
31

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

3 months 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...
3 months ago
44

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

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

3 months 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...
3 months ago
29

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

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

3 months 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...
3 months ago
34

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

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

3 months 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...
3 months ago
27

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

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3 months 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...
3 months ago
46

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

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3 months 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...
3 months ago
35

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

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3 months 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...
3 months ago
35

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

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3 months 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...
3 months ago
24

How Dave Brubeck’s Time Out Changed Jazz

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

3 months 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,...
3 months ago
35

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

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3 months 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”...
3 months ago
38

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

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3 months 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...
3 months ago
37

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

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3 months 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...
3 months ago
34

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

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3 months 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...
3 months ago
33

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

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3 months 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...
3 months ago
31

NYU Professor Answers Your Burning Questions About Authoritarianism

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3 months 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...
3 months ago
33

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

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3 months 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...
3 months ago
32

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

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3 months 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...
3 months ago
20

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

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3 months 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...
3 months ago
30

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

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3 months 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...
4 months ago
30

The Ancient Greeks Who Converted to Buddhism

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4 months 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...
4 months ago
30

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

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4 months 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...
4 months ago
26

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

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4 months 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...
4 months ago
36

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

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4 months 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...
4 months ago
32

Bob Dylan Explains Why Music Has Been Getting Worse

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4 months 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...
4 months ago
24

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

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4 months 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...
4 months ago
23

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

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4 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...
4 months ago
28

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

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4 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...
4 months ago
22

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

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4 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...
4 months ago
32

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

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4 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....
4 months ago
42

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

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4 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...
4 months ago
41

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

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4 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....
4 months ago
35

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

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4 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...
4 months ago
34

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

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4 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...
4 months ago
36

Historian Answers Burning Questions About The Renaissance

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4 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...
4 months ago
41

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

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4 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...
4 months ago
29

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

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4 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...
4 months ago
29

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

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4 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...
4 months ago
34

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

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4 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...
4 months ago
26

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

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4 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....
4 months ago
34

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

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4 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...
4 months ago
29

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

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4 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...
4 months ago
24

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

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4 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...
4 months ago
35

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

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4 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....
4 months ago
35

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

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4 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...
4 months ago
55

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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4 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...
4 months ago
31

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

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4 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...
4 months ago
42

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

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4 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...
4 months ago
38

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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4 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...
4 months ago
44

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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4 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...
4 months ago
32

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

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4 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...
4 months ago
35

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

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4 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...
4 months ago
32

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

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4 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...
4 months ago
39

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

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4 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...
4 months ago
58

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

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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 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...
4 months ago
41

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

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4 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,...
4 months ago
26

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

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4 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...
4 months ago
40

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

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4 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...
4 months ago
34

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

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4 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,...
4 months ago
29

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

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

4 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...
4 months ago
36

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

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

4 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....
4 months ago
46

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

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

4 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...
4 months ago
37

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

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

4 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...
4 months ago
35

How the Fairlight CMI Synthesizer Revolutionized Music

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

4 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...
4 months ago
29

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

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

4 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...
5 months ago
33

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

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

5 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...
5 months ago
33

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

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

5 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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Open Culture
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...
5 months ago
45

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

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

5 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...
5 months ago
27

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

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

5 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...
5 months ago
49

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

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

5 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...
5 months ago
37

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

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

5 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,...
5 months ago
65

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

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

5 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...
5 months ago
40

See Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Visualized in Colorfully Animated Scores

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

5 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...
5 months ago
38

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

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

5 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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Open Culture
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...
5 months ago
39

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

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

5 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,...
5 months ago
52

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

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

5 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...
5 months ago
32

How Wearing Ridiculously Long Pointed Shoes Became a Medieval Fashion Trend

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

5 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...
5 months ago
34

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

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

5 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...
5 months ago
36

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

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

5 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...
5 months ago
32

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

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

5 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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Open Culture
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...
5 months ago
32

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

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

5 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...
5 months ago
28

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

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

5 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...
5 months ago
33

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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5 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...
5 months ago
40

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

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

5 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...
5 months ago
35

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

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

5 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 –...
5 months ago
40

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

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5 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...
5 months ago
34

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

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5 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...
5 months ago
34

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

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5 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,...
5 months ago
38

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

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

5 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...
5 months ago
39

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

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5 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...
5 months ago
52

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

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5 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...
5 months ago
39

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

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5 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...
5 months ago
31

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

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5 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...
5 months ago
47

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

5 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...
5 months ago
31

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

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5 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...
5 months ago
44

The Oldest Beer Receipt (Circa 2050 BC)

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5 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...
5 months ago
39

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

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5 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...
5 months ago
40

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

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5 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...
5 months ago
46

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

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5 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...
5 months ago
37

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

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5 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...
5 months ago
44

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

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5 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...
5 months ago
46

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

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5 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,...
5 months ago
47

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

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5 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...
5 months ago
46

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

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5 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...
5 months ago
47

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

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5 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...
5 months ago
66

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

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5 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...
5 months ago
42

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

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5 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...
5 months ago
52

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

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5 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...
5 months ago
38

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

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5 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...
5 months ago
44

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

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5 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...
6 months ago
48

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

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6 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...
6 months ago
66

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

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6 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...
6 months ago
47

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

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6 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...
6 months ago
56

How Marcel Marceau Used Mime to Save Children During the Holocaust

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6 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...
6 months ago
94

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

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6 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...
6 months ago
52

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

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6 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...
6 months ago
54

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

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6 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...
6 months ago
121

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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6 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...
6 months ago
44

The World in a Cloverleaf: A World Map from 1581

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6 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...
6 months ago
62

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

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6 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,...
6 months ago
59

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

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6 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...
6 months ago
44

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

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6 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...
6 months ago
56

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

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6 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...
6 months ago
65

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

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6 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...
6 months ago
74

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

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6 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...
6 months ago
46

The Scene That Reveals the Beauty of Classic Hollywood Cinema

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6 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...
6 months ago
81

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

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6 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,...
6 months ago
89

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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6 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...
6 months ago
54

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

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6 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...
6 months ago
56

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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6 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...
6 months ago
96

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

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6 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...
6 months ago
102

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

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6 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...
6 months ago
128

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

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6 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...
6 months ago
109

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

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6 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...
6 months ago
71

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

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6 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...
6 months ago
75

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

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6 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....
6 months ago
94

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

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6 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...
6 months ago
101

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

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6 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,...
6 months ago
54

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

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6 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...
6 months ago
72

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

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6 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...
6 months ago
53

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

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6 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...
6 months ago
59

John Coltrane Draws a Picture Illustrating the Mathematics of Music

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6 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...
6 months ago
48

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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6 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...
6 months ago
57

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

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6 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...
6 months ago
55

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

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6 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...
6 months ago
75

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

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6 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...
6 months ago
71

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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6 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...
6 months ago
66

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

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6 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...
7 months ago
81

How Medieval Islamic Engineering Brought Water to the Alhambra

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7 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...
7 months ago
88

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

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

7 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...
7 months ago
140

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

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

7 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...
7 months ago
72

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

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

7 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...
7 months ago
74

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

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

7 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...
7 months ago
40

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

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7 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...
7 months ago
45

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

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

7 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...
7 months ago
97

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

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

7 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....
7 months ago
68

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

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7 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...
7 months ago
69

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

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

7 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,...
7 months ago
45

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

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

7 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...
7 months ago
44

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

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

7 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...
7 months ago
37

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

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

7 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...
7 months ago
64

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

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

7 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...
7 months ago
31

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

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

7 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...
7 months ago
52

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

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

7 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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