Very few of us have ever set foot near a genuine medieval castle, especially if we don’t happen to live in Europe. Yet practically all of us still, here in the twenty-first century, refer with some frequency to their components in our everyday speech. When we invoke moats, drawbr … | Continue reading
Among my works, the one I like best is the Home that I have had built in Milan for accommodating old singers not favored by fortune, or who, when they were young did not possess the virtue of saving. Poor and dear companions of my life! —Giuseppe Verdi Is there a remedy for the … | Continue reading
The dark arts of “Hollywood accounting” make it difficult to determine film budgets with precision. But according to reasonable reckonings, James Cameron may have directed not just one but several of the most expensive movies of all time. The underwater sci-fi spectacle that was … | Continue reading
From the 18th century onward, the genres of Gothic horror and fantasy have flourished, and with them the sensually visceral images now commonplace in film, TV, and comic books. These genres perhaps reached their aesthetic peak in the 19th century with writers like Edgar Allan Poe … | Continue reading
Whether or not we believe in any god, most of us here in the twenty-first century have the impression of divine rulers overlooking humanity with at least theoretical love and benevolence. They forgive us, they have plans for us, they never close a door without opening a window, a … | Continue reading
From Yale professor Paul North comes a chapter-by-chapter study of Karl Marx’s Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1. According to the description that accompanies the course on YouTube, this “book from 1872 is still the best guide to the predatory economic and social … | Continue reading
It takes about five hours to drive from Düsseldorf to Hamburg on the Autobahn. During that stretch, you can listen to Kraftwerk’s album Autobahn seven times — or if you prefer, you can loop its eponymous opening song thirteen times. For it was “Autobahn,” more so than Autobahn, t … | Continue reading
You can’t beat the market. That, at least, is the advice we all encounter early on when first we try our hand at investing. Homespun though it may sound, the idea has academic roots: the Efficient Market Hypothesis, as the economists call it, holds that the prices in any financia … | Continue reading
A catchy tribute to mid-century Soviet hipsters popped up a few years back in a song called “Stilyagi” by lo-fi L.A. hipsters Puro Instinct. The lyrics tell of a charismatic dude who impresses “all the girls in the neighborhood” with his “magnitizdat” and guitar. Wait, his what? … | Continue reading
The artificial language of Esperanto was conceived with high ideals in mind. In the eighteen-eighties, its creator L. L. Zamenhof envisioned it as the universal second language of humanity, and if it hasn’t achieved that status by now, it at least remains the world’s most widely … | Continue reading
Before the New Year, we brought you footage of Russian polymathic inventor Léon Theremin demonstrating the strange instrument that bears his surname, and we noted that the Theremin was the first electronic instrument. This is not strictly true, though it is the first electronic i … | Continue reading
With his last picture The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg told a story of his own. Given his long-held stature as more or less the personification of big-screen Hollywood entertainment, there’s only one such story he could have told: that of how he became a filmmaker. The most memora … | Continue reading
When it comes to tourist pilgrimage sites in the United States, the Hoover Dam may not quite rank up there with the Statue of Liberty, the Lincoln Memorial, Mount Rushmore, the Grand Canyon, or Disneyland. But that’s not due to a lack of importance, nor even a lack of impressiven … | Continue reading
The phone gives us a lot but it takes away three key elements of discovery: loneliness, uncertainty and boredom. Those have always been where creative ideas come from. — Lynda Barry In the spring of 2016, the great cartoonist and educator, Lynda Barry, did the unthinkable, prior … | Continue reading
When asked for their favorite Sesame Street segment, many children of the 70s and 80s point to Pinball Number Count. Psychedelic animation, the Pointer Sisters, odd time signatures—what’s not to love? But for the serious Sesame Street buff, the “Jazz Numbers” series above deserve … | Continue reading
Upon hearing the names of Arthur Dove or Marsden Hartley, the saturated colors and organically askew lines of those painters’ landscapes may appear before your mind’s eye. But unless you have a special interest in American modernists of the early twentieth century, they probably … | Continue reading
Incompetent people tend to see themselves as not just competent, but highly competent. So, at any rate, holds the theory of the “Dunning-Kruger effect,” previously featured here on Open Culture. But does the converse also hold: do highly competent people tend to see themselves as … | Continue reading
Just days ago, a game came out whose unlikely premise has already drawn a good deal of attention. “Manage your very own video store in the early 90s!” exclaims the description of Retro Rewind. “Rent, sell, decorate and expand your business from the ground up and relive the golden … | Continue reading
Above, you can watch a primer on the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passage between Iran and Oman through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply flows. Produced by Vox, the video explains why this chokepoint has long played a central role in tensions between the United States … | Continue reading
A huge treasure trove of songs and interviews recorded by the legendary folklorist Alan Lomax from the 1940s into the 1990s has been digitized and made available online for free listening. The Association for Cultural Equity, a nonprofit organization founded by Lomax in the 1980s … | Continue reading
Jim Jarmusch—the director of Stranger Than Paradise, Down by Law, and Dead Man—recently stepped into The Criterion Collection closet to share the films that shaped his aesthetic sensibility. In the next three minutes, Jarmusch pays tribute to a box set of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 19 … | Continue reading
For many of us, Jane Goodall was one of those cultural figures who seemed always to have been around, and on some level, made us feel like she always would be. But of course, no human being lives forever, no matter how widely admired. Goodall made her own departure last fall, in … | Continue reading
Leonard Muellner (Professor Emeritus of Classical Studies at Brandeis University) and Belisi Gillespie (who now teaches classics at Agnes Scott College) have posted 118 videos on YouTube, which, when taken together, “present all the content covered in two semesters of a college-l … | Continue reading
In 1967, a young Roger Ebert drew up a top-ten-films-of-the-year list including Bonnie and Clyde, Blow-Up, The Graduate, A Man for All Seasons, and Cool Hand Luke. Later, he added a few more pictures from this cinematic bumper crop that he remembered fondly, the first of which wa … | Continue reading
The first globe—a spherical representation of our planet Earth—dates back to the Age of Discovery. Or 1492, to be more precise, when Martin Behaim and painter Georg Glockendon created the “Nürnberg Terrestrial Globe,” otherwise known as the “Erdapfel.” It was made by hand. And th … | Continue reading
When many of us first learned of the RMS Titanic, it was presented first as one of history’s greatest ironies: the “unsinkable” ocean liner that went down on its maiden voyage. Of course, there’s a great deal more to the story, as anyone who becomes obsessed with the ill-fated sh … | Continue reading
If you’ve fallen out of the habit of reading books, you’re certainly not alone. Consider how often posts circulate on social media (itself a big part of the problem) about studies showing a rapid increase in the number of people who don’t even get one book read per year. How best … | Continue reading
Image via Wikimedia Commons A number of years ago, in a post on the pioneering composer of the original Doctor Who theme, we wrote that “the early era of experimental electronic music belonged to Delia Derbyshire.” Derbyshire—who almost gave Paul McCartney a version of “Yesterday … | Continue reading
Today, we’re revisiting a classic Monty Python skit. The scene is the 1972 Munich Olympics. The event is a football/soccer match, pitting German philosophers against Greek philosophers. On the one side, the Germans — Hegel, Nietzsche, Kant, Marx and, um, Franz Beckenbauer. On the … | Continue reading
Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Richard the Third begins with the eponymous character uttering the famous line “Now is the winter of our discontent.” It ends at the Battle of Bosworth Field, by which point his villainous schemes have come to ruin and his desertion by Lord Stanley se … | Continue reading
How to save those wet, damaged books? The question has to be asked. Above, you can watch a visual primer from the Syracuse University Libraries—people who know something about taking care of books. It contains a series of tips, some intuitive, some less so, that will give you a c … | Continue reading
We can go through most of our lives holding out hope of one day seeing in reality such works as van Gogh’s Sunflowers, Monet’s Haystacks, a clay tablet containing actual cuneiform writing with our own eyes, or the ancient Egyptian Temple of Dendur. We can actually come face to fa … | Continue reading
And now for something entirely random. As noted on Metafilter, “Peter Tork from the Monkees had a strange little quirk. Sometimes, when other actors … were delivering their lines Tork would unthinkingly mouth their dialogue along with them, as seen in this YouTube compilation. On … | Continue reading
During Wimbledon a few years ago, a thread about King Felipe VI of Spain went viral. It was posted to the social media platform formerly known as Twitter by Derek Guy, author of the menswear blog Die, Workwear! “Very rare to see this level of tailoring nowadays, even on the wealt … | Continue reading
With the savage cuts in arts funding, perhaps we’ll return to a system of noblesse oblige familiar to students of The Gilded Age, when artists needed independent wealth or patronage, and wealthy industrialists often decided what was art, and what wasn’t. Unlike fine art, however, … | Continue reading
Image by Walter Crist As far as enthusiasm for board games goes, no continent has yet outdone Europe. Its advantage could lie in the highly developed culture of low-cost leisure evident in quite a few of its societies; it could also owe to the fact that board games seem to have b … | Continue reading
“Good evening,” said Alfred Hitchcock to the television viewers of America on March 25, 1959. “Tonight I’m dining at my favorite club. There are many advantages here. As you can see, informality is the rule. There is also the stimulation of intellectual companionship without the … | Continue reading
The idea of the classical period—the time of ancient Greece and Rome—as an elegantly unified collection of superior aesthetic and philosophical cultural traits has its own history, one that comes in large part from the era of the Neoclassical. The rediscovery of antiquity took so … | Continue reading
You may not be able to name all, or even most, of the seven wonders of the ancient world. But you almost certainly know that there were seven of them. In a way, that aligns well enough with the worldview of the Greeks who first made reference to such a list, given their near-reve … | Continue reading
Image by National Portrait Gallery, via Wikimedia Commons Advice on how to grow old frequently comes from such banal or bloodless sources that we can be forgiven for ignoring it. Public health officials who dispense wisdom may have good intentions; pharmaceutical companies who do … | Continue reading
Metropolis, Forbidden Planet, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, Blade Runner, The Terminator, Short Circuit, RoboCop, Ghost in the Shell, The Iron Giant, WALL‑E, Ex Machina: there is a parallel history of cinema to be told entirely through its robots. That such a history must beg … | Continue reading
As a young amateur painter and future art school dropout, I frequently found myself haunted by the faces of two artists, that famously odd couple from my favorite art history novelization—and Kirk Douglas role and Iggy Pop song—Lust for Life. Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, ab … | Continue reading
Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed, or The Adventures of Prince Achmed, lays fair claim to being the earliest animated feature film in existence. If we do grant it that title, it beats the next contender by more than a decade. While Prince Achmed came out a century ago, in 1926, Sn … | Continue reading
For almost two hundred years, English gentlemen could not consider their education complete until they had taken the “Grand Tour” of Europe, usually culminating in Naples, “ragamuffin capital of the Italian south,” writes Ian Thomson at The Spectator. Italy was usually the primar … | Continue reading
?si=HOvgnTtB4xSNqpNE In 1894, archaeologist Édouard Piette discovered the “Venus of Brassempouy,” otherwise known as the “Lady with the Hood.” Unearthed in southwestern France and dating to around 25,000 BCE, this carving represents the earliest realistic depiction of a human fac … | Continue reading
Juan Pujol García was one of the rare individuals whose participation in World War II made him a Member of the Order of the British Empire and earned him the Iron Cross. He gained that unlikely distinction in perhaps the riskiest of all roles in espionage, that of a double agent. … | Continue reading
A vast, miserable proletariat squanders its days in meaningless toil. Society is under the control of ultra-wealthy business magnates. In order to pacify the underclass, the ruling class pins its hopes on a technological solution: artificial intelligence. Welcome to the year 2026 … | Continue reading
Welcome to The Garden of Earthly Delights. You’ll find no angelic strings here. Those are reserved for first-class citizens whose virtuous lives earned them passage to the uppermost heights. Down below, stringed instruments produce the most hellish sort of cacophony, a fitting ac … | Continue reading