In the later decades of his 50-year-long career as a novelist, the late Martin Amis had a reputation as something of a controversialist. This made more sense in his native England than in the America to which he later relocated, and whose largely non-literary provocateurs tend to … | Continue reading
Vacationing in New York City last summer, Anna Cramling, an International Chess Federation master swung by Washington Square Park, to see about scoring a pickup game with one of the regulars. Her opponent, Jonny O’Leary, a native New Yorker who learned the rules of the game from … | Continue reading
Though Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band holds something of an honorary cultural position as “the first concept album,” the Beatles themselves didn’t hear it that way. The term “concept album,” as defined by Polyphonic host Noah Lefevre in his new video above, denotes “a set … | Continue reading
Even the most ardent shipwreck enthusiasts among us must make peace with the fact that, in all probability, we’ll never get to see the Titanic for ourselves. But now, at least, we have a substitute in the form of the ship’s “digital twin,” based on more than 700,000 images collec … | Continue reading
Back in 2021, Google launched a series of online courses designed to help students earn a professional certificate in six months and also land an entry-level job. In its original offering, Google developed certificate programs in five professional areas: User Experience (UX) Desi … | Continue reading
Late though it may be in the age of print, we still envision ransom or other threatening notes in the same way we have for generations, with their demands incongruously spelled out with individual letters, each one a different size and font, taken from the pages of newspapers and … | Continue reading
Ryuichi Sakamoto died last March, three months after his final live performance, and two months after the release of his final album 12. It’s safe to say that life, for him, was more or less synonymous with music, and indeed he prepared music to extend even beyond his life’s end. … | Continue reading
We’ve all, at one time or another, been asked to say the first thing that pops into our heads in response to a certain word or phrase. It may have happened to us in school, in a market research group, or perhaps in a job interview at a company that regards itself as somewhat outs … | Continue reading
Experience long ago conferred the mantle of authority on broadcaster, biologist, natural historian and author David Attenborough, age 97. In his late 20s, he landed at the BBC, producing live studio broadcasts that ran the gamut from children’s shows, ballet performances and arch … | Continue reading
Thanks to James Brown’s official YouTube channel, you can now watch a remastered and restored version of a historic concert. The channel prefaces the concert with these words: On April 5th 1968, James Brown gave a free concert at The Boston Garden which became a thing of legend. … | Continue reading
In his role as a kind of classical music professor to the television audiences of America, Leonard Bernstein came across as supremely genial and patient. But that doesn’t mean he dedicated his own career as a conductor to agreeableness above all. Here on Open Culture, we’ve previ … | Continue reading
On September 5, 1980, David Bowie performed for a delighted studio audience on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. First came “Life on Mars?”, and then his newly-released song, “Ashes to Ashes.” As his website (DavidBowie.com) describes it, the musician cobbled together a on … | Continue reading
As children’s television has demonstrated since the beginning of the medium, sometimes the best way to make an unfamiliar concept understandable is to articulate it through the mouth — and the body — of a puppet. Most all of us alive today had some experience with that back when … | Continue reading
An Italian tourist went to Paris in search of the best croissant. A natural thing to do. Except he did it amidst a city-wide strike, one precipitated by Emmanuel Macron’s attempt to raise the minimum retirement age in France. It all makes for a unique kind of food/travel video. S … | Continue reading
Once lost, this 8-minute, very damaged, but very delightful silent version of Alice in Wonderland was restored several years ago by the British Film Institute. It is the first film adaptation of the 1865 Lewis Carroll classic. And, at the time, the original length of 12 minutes ( … | Continue reading
Few outside New York know the Flatiron Building by name, but people everywhere associate it with the city. That owes in part to its tendency to appear in the vintage imagery of New York that adorns the walls of cafés, hotel rooms, and dentists’ offices across the world. And that, … | Continue reading
Ask anyone who’s traveled to the Great Pyramids of Giza: no matter how many times you’ve seen them in photographs or on television, you’re never really prepared to come face-to-face with them in real life. But you can get fairly close to at least the appearance of real life by se … | Continue reading
The animals were imperfect, long-tailed, unfortunate in their heads. Little by little they put themselves together, making themselves a landscape, acquiring spots, grace, flight. The cat, only the cat appeared complete and proud: he was born completely finished, walking alone and … | Continue reading
Summer’s lease may have all too short a date, but every year, it’s time enough for dozens, nay, hundreds of free Shakespeare productions to pop up in the parks and parking lots. We owe these pleasures in part to the First Folio, a fat collection of Shakespeare’s plays, compiled i … | Continue reading
It’s a rare young Star Trek fan indeed who doesn’t fantasize about sitting on the bridge of the starship Enterprise. That has gone for every generation of fan, every Star Trek series, and every Enterprise, whose bridges you can see in the new video above from the Roddenberry Arch … | Continue reading
The phrase “to throw down the gauntlet” means to issue a challenge, and this is understood all over the English-speaking world — even by those who have no idea what, exactly, a gauntlet is. “The word itself comes from the French word gantelet, and referred to the heavy, armored g … | Continue reading
According to a new report published by PEN America, the '2022-23 school year has been marked to date by an escalation of book bans and censorship in classrooms and school libraries across the United States.' PEN America has tracked '1,477 instances of individual books banned, aff … | Continue reading
“If you see a pie chart projected twelve feet high in front of you, you know you’re in the hands of an idiot.” These words have stuck with me since I heard them spoken by Edward Tufte, one of the most respected living authorities on data visualization. The latter-day sins of pie- … | Continue reading
Above, you can watch the Galactic Menagerie, “a whimsical and visually stunning fan-made fake trailer that reimagines the classic Star Wars universe through the eccentric lens of Wes Anderson. This enchanting mashup brings together iconic Star Wars characters with Anderson’s trad … | Continue reading
Before the internet, it would have been hard to imagine that people around the world would one day be unable to get enough of traditional Japanese carpentry, and specifically traditional Japanese joinery. And before Youtube, who could have predicted that videos showing each and e … | Continue reading
In March, a Florida school principal lost her job when 6th graders encountered Michelangelo’s “David” during an art history lesson--even though the school ostensibly specializes in offering students 'a content-rich classical education in the liberal arts and sciences.' Parents ap … | Continue reading
Today we think of the Renaissance as one of those periods when everything changed, and if the best-known artifacts of the time are anything to go by, nothing changed quite so much as art. This is reflected in obvious aesthetic differences between the works of the Renaissance and … | Continue reading
To find a visual definition of the nineteen-eighties, you need look no further than the windows of the nearest run-down hair or nail salon. There, “faded by time and years of sun damage,” remain on makeshift display the most widely recognized works of — or imitations of the works … | Continue reading
With the exception of Kara Walker’s provocative cut paper narratives, silhouettes haven’t struck us as a particularly revealing art form. Perhaps we would have felt differently in the early 19th-century, when silhouettes offered a quick and affordable alternative to oil portraits … | Continue reading
It’s telling that the avian participants in a recent study wherein pet parrots, assisted by their owners, learned to make video calls to others of their kind were recruited from the online educational forum Parrot Kindergarten. In the above footage, the humans’ hopeful, high-pitc … | Continue reading
At the moment, I happen to be planning some time in France, with a side trip to Belgium included. Modern intra-European train travel makes arranging the latter quite convenient: Thalys, the high-speed rail service connecting those two countries, can get you from Paris to Brussels … | Continue reading
So you think you know your way around a potato, eh? No doubt you excel at boiling, mashing, roasting, baking and twice baking … You may make a mean potato chip or pomme frite… Perhaps you’ve perfected some tricks with a microwave or air fryer. But before you’re puffed too full of … | Continue reading
Almost two and a half centuries after its first publication, Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations is much better known as simply The Wealth of Nations. Had he written it today, the text itself, which runs between a formidable 500-700 pages i … | Continue reading
We here at Open Culture heartily endorse the practice of viewing art, whether in a physical museum, in the pages of a book, or online. For some, however, it tends to have one serious shortcoming: all the colors are already filled in. If you’re itching to use your own colored penc … | Continue reading
Note: Yesterday Harry Belafonte, the civil rights activist, singer and actor, passed away at age 96. In his memory, we’re bringing back a post from our archive, one that features Belafonte and other legends discussing the March on Washington, back in August, 1963. The film above … | Continue reading
If you went to the doctor in late medieval Europe hoping to get a health complaint checked out, you could be sure of one thing: you’d have to hand over a urine sample. Though it dates back at least as far as the fourth millennium BC, the practice of uroscopy, as it’s called, seem … | Continue reading
Image by The USO, via Flickr Commons I first discovered Stephen King at age 11, indirectly through a babysitter who would plop me down in front of daytime soaps and disappear. Bored with One Life to Live, I read the stacks of mass-market paperbacks my absentee guardian left aroun … | Continue reading
Of the original members of the Stooges, only Iggy Pop still lives. He has by now survived a great many other cultural figures who came up from the underground and into prominence through rock music in the nineteen-seventies. And not only is he still alive, he’s still putting out … | Continue reading
Who’s up for a good dictionary on film? Colin Browning, assistant editor of The Bluff, a Loyola Marymount University student newspaper, has some kopasetic casting suggestions for a hypothetical feature adaptation of the “Merriam-Webster classic.” He’s just muggin’, of course. Sti … | Continue reading
The cases for traveling back in time and living in a past era are many and varied, but the case against doing so is always the same: dentistry. In every chapter of human history before this one, so we’re often told, everyone lived in at least a low-level state of agony inflicted … | Continue reading
Playbill writes: “Nathan Lane is currently starring on Broadway in ‘Pictures From Home,’ opposite Zoë Wanamaker (who plays his wife) and Danny Burstein (who plays his son). In the inaugural entry to Playbill’s new video series, ‘My Life in the Theatre,’ Lane sits down with a Play … | Continue reading
Spoiler alert: The death of Logan Roy the weekend before last marked the end of an era. Or at the very least, it was notable for occasioning, in the Los Angeles Times, perhaps the first newspaper obituary of a fictional character. Roy was the mogul-patriarch at the center of the … | Continue reading
Even if you don’t think you know “Enter Sandman,” you know “Enter Sandman.” For more than thirty years it’s been the signature song of Metallica, the best-known heavy metal band in the world, and as such practically unavoidable — unavoidable, that is, unless you’re jazz drummer L … | Continue reading
Once upon a time, books served as the de facto refuge of the “physically weak” child. For animation legend, Hayao Miyazaki, above, they offered an escape from the grimmer realities of post-World War II Japan. Many of the 50 favorites he selected for a 2010 exhibition honoring pub … | Continue reading
When Yayoi Kusama first arrived in New York, in the late nineteen-fifties, she must have sensed that she was in a practically ideal time and place to make abstract art. That would explain why she subsequently began creating a series of large paintings we now know as Infinity Nets … | Continue reading
Nominees of the 1999 MTV Movie Awards included Adam Sandler, Liv Tyler, Chris Tucker, and Jennifer Love Hewitt to mention just a few of the names in a veritable who’s-who of turn-of-the-millennium American pop culture. But for the teenage cinephiles watching that night, the highl … | Continue reading
Public recognition is an all too rare reward for many artists, but it carries with it a risk of being widely misunderstood. Georgia O’Keeffe gained renown for her large-scale flower paintings in the 1920s, selling six images of calla lilies for $25,000. Her husband Alfred Stiegli … | Continue reading
We don’t hear the phrase “very rich hours” as much as we used to, back when it was occasionally employed in the headlines of magazine articles or the titles of novels. Today, it’s much to be doubted whether even one in a hundred thousand of us could begin to identify its referent … | Continue reading