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 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 w … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 1 month ago

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, 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 … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 1 month ago

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 “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 fin … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 1 month ago

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 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 answe … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 1 month ago

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

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 necessaril … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 1 month ago

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 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 “Pe … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 1 month ago

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 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 eigh … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 1 month ago

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 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 “moder … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 1 month ago

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

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 cultur … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 1 month ago

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 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 produc … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 1 month ago

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

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 t … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 1 month ago

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 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 writi … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 1 month ago

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 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 optim … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 1 month ago

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

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 ye … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 1 month ago

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 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 woul … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 1 month ago

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 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, a … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 1 month ago

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 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 … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 1 month ago

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. 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 … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 1 month ago

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 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 … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 1 month ago

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, 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 approac … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 1 month ago

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

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 Dan … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 1 month ago

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

“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 h … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 1 month ago

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 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 wh … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 1 month ago

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

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 ha … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 1 month ago

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

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 childre … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 1 month ago

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 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 … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 1 month ago

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 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 simp … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 1 month ago

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

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 … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 1 month ago

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 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 ad … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 1 month ago

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 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 t … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 1 month ago

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 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 … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 1 month ago

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

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 … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 1 month ago

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 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 purg … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 1 month ago

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

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 ar … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 1 month ago

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 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 … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 1 month ago

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 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 equa … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 2 months ago

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 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 lo … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 2 months ago

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

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 faile … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 2 months ago

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

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 de … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 2 months ago

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, 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) 1 … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 2 months ago

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 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 … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 2 months ago

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 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 … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 2 months ago

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 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 … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 2 months ago

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

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 … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 2 months ago

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 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 hell … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 2 months ago

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

Edgar Allan Poe achieved almost instant fame during his lifetime after the publication of The Raven (1845), but he never felt that he received the recognition he deserved. In some respects, he was right. He was, after all, paid only nine dollars for the poem, and he struggled bef … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 2 months ago

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

Even the least religious among us speak, at least on occasion, of the circles of hell. When we do so, we may or may not be thinking of where the concept originated: Dante’s Divina Commedia, or Divine Comedy. We each imagine the circles in our own way — usually filling them with s … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 2 months ago

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

I mean, the idea that you would give a psychedelic—in this case, magic mushrooms or the chemical called psilocybin that’s derived from magic mushrooms—to people dying of cancer, people with terminal diagnoses, to help them deal with their — what’s called existential distress. And … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 2 months ago