Ask around for what everyone knows about Istanbul (other than that it used to be called Constantinople), and you’ll find that the presence of Hagia Sophia there comes right to many a mind. Less likely to be mentioned is its proneness to earthquakes, though it tends to rank just b … | Continue reading
Admit it, your list of favorite Bowie songs is full of the big hits. Hell, maybe it’s all hits; there’s no shame in that. Digging deep into the crates will yield many an overlooked surprise, many a subtle sleeper, cut-up classic, and electronic experiment. But if all you’ve got i … | Continue reading
In 2025, Harvard once again began asking applicants to submit an SAT or ACT score. This was a reversal of the no-test-necessary policy that it and quite a few other American colleges and universities adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic. To some observers of higher education, the … | Continue reading
As we’ve noted before, the English coffeehouse has served as a staging ground for radical, sometimes revolutionary social change. Certainly this was the case during the Enlightenment, as it was with the salons in France. And yet, by the early 20th century it seems, coffee shops i … | Continue reading
Though seldom heard these days, the term “desktop publishing” once opened a great many eyes to the promise of the personal computer. It meant that one could create a publication without owning a press or contracting with an outfit that did. Indeed, the whole process of writing, d … | Continue reading
Coverage of the refugee crisis peaked in 2015. By the end of the year, note researchers at the University of Bergen, “this was one of the hottest topics, not only for politicians, but for participants in the public debate,” including far-right xenophobes given megaphones. Whateve … | Continue reading
A great many, and perhaps the majority of Americans now between their late twenties and early sixties, have spent time in Mister Rogers’ neighborhood. My own period of regular visitation would have been in the nineteen-eighties, a decade when Fred Rogers introduced his preschool- … | Continue reading
In 1999, Volkswagen aired a television commercial for the Golf Mk3 Cabrio. Dealerships were soon inundated with calls, as popular culture history remembers it, but not from people inquiring about the car. Rather, they were desperate to know the name of the song soundtracking the … | Continue reading
In the nineteen-nineties, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez first collaborated on a movie. No, it wasn’t From Dusk Till Dawn, the Rodriguez-directed crime-picture-turned-horror-comedy in which Tarantino plays George Clooney’s psychotic brother. It was an anthology picture ca … | Continue reading
You can, of course, learn the Greek language as it’s spoken today. You can also learn Greek as it was spoken in antiquity — and as it was, until fairly recently in historical time, taught to students in the modern West. But it’s a fairly different endeavor again to learn Greek as … | Continue reading
Even among the most acclaimed albums ever recorded, not a single one is perfect. That goes more so for the releases of what I call the “heroic age of the album,” which enjoyed its zenith around the late seventies. Not coincidentally, 1979 was the year that Pink Floyd put out The … | Continue reading
“What has been my prettiest contribution to the culture?” asked Kurt Vonnegut in his autobiography Palm Sunday. His answer? His master’s thesis in anthropology for the University of Chicago, “which was rejected because it was so simple and looked like too much fun.” The elegant s … | Continue reading
References to Islam in major media can make it sound monolithic and eternal. But it’s actually a much younger and less unified phenomenon than many of us imagine, especially if we happen to live outside the Middle East. As a religion, it dates back “only” to the seventh century, … | Continue reading
It’s almost 35 years ago now that Nirvana’s video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” debuted on MTV’s 120 Minutes and, for better or worse, inaugurated the grunge era. The video (below) arrived as a shock and a thrill to a generation too young to remember punk and sick of the steady s … | Continue reading
If you grew up in the last few generations, chances are you didn’t get much of an education, if any, in Latin or ancient Greek. One long-made argument for phasing them out of curricula in English-speaking countries holds that room must be made for Spanish, Mandarin, and other lan … | Continue reading
I’ve interacted with many entertaining language-learning resources in various classes—from miniseries in Spanish to comic books in French—all geared toward making the unfamiliar language relevant to daily life. Learning counterintuitive pronunciations, parsing a new system of gra … | Continue reading
Since it was first built as a Mycenaean fortress in the thirteenth century BC, what we now know as the Acropolis has been used to worship not just Greek gods, but also, in later periods, the Virgin Mary and Allah. Now, of course, with its days of military and religious functions … | Continue reading
If you’ve taken a good art history course on the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, you’ve inevitably encountered Vincent van Gogh’s 1889 masterpiece “Starry Night,” which now hangs in the MoMA in New York City. The painting, the museum writes on its website, “is a symbolic … | Continue reading
Officially, the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989. Demolition would take more than four years, and a few sections remain for memorial purposes, but it was on that date that passage between East and West Berlin — and thus East and West Germany — opened to all citizens of both c … | Continue reading
In 1704, Isaac Newton predicted the end of the world sometime around (or after, “but not before”) the year 2060, using a strange series of mathematical calculations. Rather than study what he called the “book of nature,” he took as his source the supposed prophecies of the Book o … | Continue reading
Robert Johnson died at just 27 years old, some say as a consequence of selling his soul to the devil at a crossroads. But before his time came, he managed to record 29 songs, a scant body of work that nevertheless secured his artistic immortality as one of the most influential bl … | Continue reading
Even if you don’t know the myth by name, you know the story. In Greek mythology, Sisyphus, King of Corinth, was punished “for his self-aggrandizing craftiness and deceitfulness by being forced to roll an immense boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, repeating this a … | Continue reading
Even for Americans, keeping up with the geopolitical entanglements of the United States has never been an easy task. More than a century ago, just a few months after their country got involved in what’s now known as World War I, they got word that the military of a distant nation … | Continue reading
The young George Washington may never have hacked up his father’s cherry tree and refused to lie about it, but his life nevertheless offers plenty of deeds both virtuous and adequately documented. It was no small thing, for instance, to refuse to seek a third term as the first Pr … | Continue reading
For your weekend viewing pleasure, enjoy three hours of David Attenborough narrating free nature videos from the BBC. Attenborough just turned 100 this month, and he’s still going strong! via Kottke | Continue reading
Christianity has long been closely identified with Western civilization. The association is especially strong, in modern times, with the United States of America, that source of derisively quoted, quite possibly apocryphal arguments that “if English was good enough for Jesus Chri … | Continue reading
It can be frustrating for Led Zeppelin fans to hear the band reduced to plagiarism lawsuits or the quintessence of sexually-aggressive rock-star entitlement (though much of that is deserved). For one thing, Zeppelin’s occult songwriting tendencies, courtesy of both Page and Plant … | Continue reading
When television mogul Ted Turner died earlier this month, it gave cinephiles occasion to remember his brief but high-profile foray into colorization. In the mid-nineteen-eighties, he commissioned for broadcast colorized versions of more than 100 classic movies, from The Treasure … | Continue reading
What we euphemistically refer to as the “Opening of Japan” catalyzed a period of seismic upheaval for the proud formerly closed country. Between the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1853 and the Meiji restoration in 1868, Japanese society changed rapidly due to the sudden forced … | Continue reading
Whether we’re religious or not, we can all agree that the Bible isn’t just a book. In fact, it’s at least 66 of them, 39 Old Testament and 27 in the New, and that’s just in the Protestant tradition. Even if you’ve never read a single page of the Bible, you may well have a […] | Continue reading
There’s a maxim that says, “It’s not the guitar, it’s the player.” And the video above bears it out. In this clip, musician Clay Shelburn and his pal Zac Stokes visit a Walmart at 3 a.m. and pick up a Disney Cars 2 toy guitar. Next, they proceed to play Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Prid … | Continue reading
Renaissance Europe admired ancient Rome, ancient Rome admired ancient Greece, and ancient Greece admired ancient Egypt. But the admiration could actually go both ways in that last case, since the two civilizations’ periods of existence overlapped. The Greeks made no secret of the … | Continue reading
Without wanting to make too broad a generalization, it’s safe to say that Saturday Evening Post readers probably didn’t understand much about what was going on in San Francisco during the Summer of Love. Or they didn’t, at least, until the magazine ran “Slouching Towards Bethlehe … | Continue reading
It makes sense that Superman would take a tolerant view of immigrants and other minorities, given that he himself arrived on Earth as a refugee from the planet Krypton. The Man of Steel may strike you as an unlikely mouthpiece for progressive ideals, but 1950 found him on a book … | Continue reading
The question of who are the fifteen most influential philosophers of all time may not arise at every conversation down at the pub — not outside the circle of Open Culture readers, in any case. But even among non-specialists, it could spark a livelier debate than you might imagine … | Continue reading
The Tarot has long been a tool of charlatans. But it has also long been embraced by brilliant, unconventional thinkers, many of whom themselves have a touch of the charlatan about them (and who would just as likely admit it with a smile). William Butler Yeats was a fan, as is vis … | Continue reading
The wreck of the RMS Titanic has never ceased to command attention, from pop-cultural fascination to scientific scrutiny and everything in between. That can make it seem, especially to the younger generations, as if humanity has been gazing upon its remains since they first settl … | Continue reading
The stories in the Bible have been told in many ways, not least through film. Among the many cinematic adaptations of Christianity’s holy book, none comes to mind that ends with freeze-frame title cards explaining the later fate of each character, in the manner of Animal House, A … | Continue reading
When J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books appeared in the mid-1950s, they were met with very mixed reviews, an unsurprising reception given that nothing like them had been written for adult readers since Edmund Spenser’s epic 16th century English poem The Faerie Queene, perha … | Continue reading
John Coltrane released “more significant works” than his 1960 “My Favorite Things,” says Robin Washington in a PRX documentary on the classic reworking of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway hit. “A Love Supreme” is often cited as the zenith of the saxophonist’s career. “But if yo … | Continue reading
The writings of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America include many a reference to the likes of Cicero, Montesquieu, and John Locke. That the names Hyder Ali and his son Tipu Sultan never appear may not sound like much of a surprise, even if you happen to know that … | Continue reading
It took nearly 50 years. WKRP in Cincinnati is no longer just a TV sitcom. It’s now a real radio station in Cincinnati. A Cincy-area FM station, known as “The Oasis,” has adopted the WKRP call letters after acquiring them from a nonprofit radio station in North Carolina. The Rale … | Continue reading
The flap of a butterfly’s wings on one side of the world can cause a hurricane on the other, or so they say. If we take it a bit too literally, that old observation may make us wonder what a hurricane can cause. Or if not a hurricane, how about another kind of large-scale natural … | Continue reading
Sit back, relax, put on some music (I’ve found Chopin’s Nocturne in B major well-suited), and watch the video above, a silent data visualization by visionary architect and systems theorist Buckminster Fuller, “the James Brown of industrial design.” The short film from 1965 combin … | Continue reading
Yasujirō Ozu was born in 1903, and made films from the late nineteen-twenties up until his death in 1963. Though not an especially long life, it spanned Japan’s pre- and postwar eras, meaning that in many ways, it ended in a very different country than it began. Not that you’d kn … | Continue reading
More than a few medievalists object to the term “Dark Ages” as applied to the period in which they specialize. That can seem wishful in light of most comparisons between medieval times and the Renaissance that came afterward, or indeed, the era of the Roman Empire that came befor … | Continue reading
No more bummin’, let’s all get to work… Actually, hold up a sec. We’ll all be happier and more productive if we take a moment to start our work day with Confidence, a peppy musical animation from 1933, starring newly elected President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Mickey Mouse pr … | Continue reading
The global bee population comes up in the news every now and again. Sometimes we’re assured that the number is stable or rising; more often, we’re warned about collapsing colonies and the large-scale ecological disaster that could result. As with most high-stakes issues, it can b … | Continue reading