How Ancient Romans Traveled Without Maps

In an age when many of us could hardly make our way to an unfamiliar grocery store without relying on a GPS navigation system, we might well wonder how the Romans could establish and sustain their mighty empire without so much as a proper map. That’s the question addressed by the … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 1 day ago

How to Potty Train Your Cat: A Handy Manual by Jazz Musician Charles Mingus

Charles Mingus, the innovative jazz musician, was known for having a bad temper. He once got so irritated with a heckler that he ended up trashing his $20,000 bass. Another time, when a pianist didn’t get things right, Mingus reached right inside the piano and ripped the strings … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 1 day ago

Google Creates a Career Certificate That Prepares Students for Cybersecurity Jobs in 6 Months

In 2023, Google launched several online certificate programs designed to help students land an entry-level job, without necessarily having a college degree. This includes a certificate program focused on Cybersecurity, a field that stands poised to grow as companies become more d … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 1 day ago

An Introduction to the Astonishing Book of Kells, the Iconic Illuminated Manuscript

Whatever set of religious or cultural traditions you come from, you’ve probably seen a Celtic cross before. Unlike a conventional cross, it has a circular ring, or “nimbus,” where its arms and stem intersect. The sole addition of that element gives it a highly distinctive look, a … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 2 days ago

Discover the CIA’s Simple Sabotage Field Manual: A Timeless Guide to Subverting Any Organization with “Purposeful Stupidity” (1944)

I’ve always admired people who can successfully navigate what I refer to as “Kafka’s Castle,” a term of dread for the many government and corporate agencies that have an inordinate amount of power over our permanent records, and that seem as inscrutable and chillingly absurd as t … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 2 days ago

Explore the World’s First 3D Replica of St. Peter’s Basilica, Made with AI

In the trailer below for the world’s first 3D replica of St. Peter’s Basilica, Yves Ubelmann speaks of using “AI for Good,” which isn’t just an ideal, but also the name of a lab at Microsoft. Microsoft and Ubelman’s digital-preservation company Iconem were two of the participants … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 3 days ago

The Final Days of Leo Tolstoy Captured in Rare Footage from 1910

114 years ago today (November 20, 1910), Leo Tolstoy—the author who gave us two major Russian classics Anna Karenina and War & Peace—died at Astapovo, a small, remote train station in the heart of Russia. Pneumonia was the official cause. His death came just weeks after Tolstoy, … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 3 days ago

Behold a Digital Restoration of 655 Plates of Roses & Lilies by Pierre-Joseph Redouté: The Greatest Botanical Illustrator of All Time

Pierre-Joseph Redouté made his name by painting flowers, an achievement impossible without a meticulousness that exceeds all bounds of normality. He published his three-volume collection Les Roses and his eight-volume collection Les Liliacées between 1802 and 1824, and a glance a … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 4 days ago

How Magician David Copperfield Made the Statue of Liberty Disappear (1983)

In April, 1983, 50 million television viewers watched the illusionist David Copperfield make the Statue of Liberty disappear, straight into thin air. If you’re north of 50, you perhaps remember the spectacle. How did he do it? 40 years later, the YouTube channel Mind Blown Magic … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 4 days ago

Join Us on Bluesky. We Will Have Fun Together

There’s an eXodus taking place, and millions are finding a new home on Bluesky. In recent days, the decentralized social media platform has been gaining 10,000 new users every 10–15 minutes, or about 1 million new users per day. Open Culture is already there, sharing the cultural … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 4 days ago

Bertrand Russell’s Ten Commandments for Living Virtuously (1930)

Image by J. F. Horrabin, via Wikimedia Commons Bertrand Russell may have lived his long life concerned with big topics in logic, mathematics, politics, and society, but that didn’t keep him from thinking seriously about how to handle his own day-to-day relationships. That hardly … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 5 days ago

Bambi Meets Godzilla: #38 on the List of The 50 Greatest Cartoons of All Time (1969)

In 1994, Jerry Beck edited the book, The 50 Greatest Cartoons: As Selected by 1,000 Animation Professionals, which challenged experts to create a ranking of the best short, cel animated cartoons ever made. To no one’s surprise, the experts chose 10 Warner Bros. animations crafted … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 5 days ago

What Victorian People Sounded Like: Hear Recordings of Florence Nightingale & Queen Victoria Herself

More than 120 years after the end of the Victorian era, we might assume that we retain a more or less accurate cultural memory of the Victorians themselves: of their social mores, their aesthetic sensibilities, their ambitions great and small, their many and varied hang-ups. Some … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 8 days ago

Explore Burj Al Babas, Turkey’s Abandoned Town of 587 Disney-Style Castles

Burj Al Babas might have been constructed expressly to attract the attention of the internet. “Sitting near the Black Sea, the town is full of half-finished, fully abandoned mini castles — 587 of them to be exact,” write Architectural Digest’s Katherine McLaughlin and Jessica Che … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 9 days ago

Free: 356 Issues of Galaxy, the Groundbreaking 1950s Science Fiction Magazine

Along with Astounding Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Galaxy Magazine was one of the most important science fiction digests in 1950s America. Ray Bradbury wrote for it–including an early version of his masterpiece Fahrenheit 451–as did Robert A. H … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 9 days ago

Get Unlimited Access to Courses & Certificates: Coursera Is Offering 40% (or $159) Off of Coursera Plus Until December 2

A heads-up on a deal: Between today and December 2, 2024, Coursera is offering a 40% discount on its annual subscription plan called “Coursera Plus.” Normally priced at $399, Coursera Plus (now available for $239.40) gives you access to 7,000+ courses for one all-inclusive subscr … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 9 days ago

A New 3D Scan, Created from 25,000 High-Resolution Images, Reveals the Remarkably Well-Preserved Wreck of Shackleton’s Endurance

Photos on this page courtesy of the Falklands Maritime Heritage Few who hear the story of the Endurance could avoid reflecting on the aptness of the ship’s name. A year after setting out on the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition in 1914, it got stuck in a mass of drifting ice of … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 10 days ago

The Mushroom Color Atlas: An Interactive Web Site Lets You Explore the Incredible Spectrum of Colors Created from Fungi

Enter the Mushroom Color Atlas, and you can discover the “beautiful and subtle colors derived from dyeing with mushrooms.” Featuring 825 colors, each associated with different types of mushrooms, the interactive atlas lets you appreciate the broad spectrum of colors latent in the … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 10 days ago

Stanley Kubrick’s Annotated Copy of Stephen King’s The Shining

The web site Overlook Hotel has posted pictures of Stanley Kubrick’s personal copy of Stephen King’s novel The Shining. The book is filled with highlighted passages and largely illegible notes in the margin—tantalizing clues to Kubrick’s intentions for the movie. The site feature … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 11 days ago

How Upside-Down Models Revolutionized Architecture, Making Possible St. Paul’s Cathedral, Sagrada Família & More

For 142 years now, Sagrada Família has been growing toward the sky. Or at least that’s what it seems to be doing, as its ongoing construction realizes ever more fully a host of forms that look and feel not quite of this earth. It makes a kind of sense to learn that, in designing … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 11 days ago

Bertrand Russell’s 10 Commandments for Living in a Healthy Democracy

Image by J. F. Horrabin, via Wikimedia Commons Bertrand Russell saw the history of civilization as being shaped by an unfortunate oscillation between two opposing evils: tyranny and anarchy, each of which contains the seed of the other. The best course for steering clear of eithe … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 12 days ago

Watch the Original Nosferatu, the Classic German Expressionist Vampire Film, Before the New Remake Arrives This December

F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, far and away the most influential early vampire movie, came out 102 years ago. For about ten of those years, Robert Eggers has been trying to remake it. He wouldn’t be the first: Werner Herzog cast Klaus Kinski as the blood-sucking aristocrat at the cent … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 12 days ago

Behold the Oldest Written Text in the World: The Kish Tablet, Circa 3500 BC

Image by José-Manuel Benito, via Wikimedia Commons Some refer to the written Chinese language as ideographic: that is, structured according to a system in which each symbol represents a particular idea or concept, whether abstract or concrete. That’s true of certain Chinese chara … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 15 days ago

Hear the Isolated Vocals of Peter Gabriel & Kate Bush in “Don’t Give Up”: The Power of Perseverance

Just by chance, could you use a song about perseverance and overcoming adversity? Something to give you a little encouragement and reassurance? Then we submit to you “Don’t Give Up,” featuring the isolated vocals of Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush. When he released the song on his 19 … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 15 days ago

How Car Chase Scenes Have Evolved Over 100 Years: The Technology Behind Bullitt, The French Connection, Driver, and Other Action Movies

For many a classic action-movie enthusiast, no car chase will ever top the one in Bullitt. The narrator of the Insider video above describes it as “the scene that set the standard for all modern car chases,” one made “iconic partly because of the characters, but also because of t … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 16 days ago

Carl Jung Psychoanalyzes Hitler: “He’s the Unconscious of 78 Million Germans.” “Without the German People He’d Be Nothing” (1938)

Were you to google “Carl Jung and Nazism”—and I’m not suggesting that you do—you would find yourself hip-deep in the charges that Jung was an anti-Semite and a Nazi sympathizer. Many sites condemn or exonerate him; many others celebrate him as a blood and soil Aryan hero. It can … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 16 days ago

Watch 70+ Classic Literary Films Free Online: The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Gulliver’s Travels, Jane Eyre, and More

The term gaslight has gained so much traction in popular discourse so recently that you’d swear it was coined around 2010. In fact, that particular usage goes at least as far back as 1938, when British novelist and playwright Patrick Hamilton wrote a stage thriller about a husban … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 17 days ago

Download 1,600+ Publications from the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Books, Guides, Magazines & More

Many of us in these past few generations first heard of the Metropolitan Museum of Art while reading E. L. Konigsburg’s novel From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. More than a few of us also fantasized about running away to live in that vast cultural institution l … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 18 days ago

Watch The Cure Perform a Three-Hour Concert in London, Celebrating the Release of Their New Album

httpv://www.youtube.com/live/_aWDlaxvEZo Last Friday, The Cure celebrated the release of their new album, Songs of a Lost World, with a three-hour set at the Troxy in London. The band kicked off the show by performing all eight tracks from the album, before then playing another 2 … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 18 days ago

Discover Paul Éluard and Max Ernst’s Still-Bizarre Proto-Surrealist Book Les Malheurs des immortels (1922)

When the names of French poet Paul Éluard and German artist Max Ernst arise, one subject always follows: that of their years-long ménage à trois — or rather, “marriage à trois,” as a New York Times article by Annette Grant once put it. It started in 1921, Grant writes, when the S … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 19 days ago

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Puts 490,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use

Update: The Metropolitan Museum of Art has put online 492,000 high-resolution images of artistic works. Even better, the museum has placed the vast majority of these images into the public domain, meaning they can be downloaded directly from the museum’s website for non-commercia … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 19 days ago

Umberto Eco’s List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism

Creative Commons image by Rob Bogaerts, via the National Archives in Holland One of the key questions facing both journalists and loyal oppositions these days is how do we stay honest as euphemisms and trivializations take over the discourse? Can we use words like “fascism,” for … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 22 days ago

How the Influential Time-Travel Movie La Jetée Was Made (Almost) Entirely out of Still Photographs

In a future where humanity has been driven underground by an apocalyptic event, a prisoner is haunted by the childhood memory of seeing a man gunned down at an airport. A group of scientists make him their time-traveling guinea pig, hoping that he’ll be able to find a way to rest … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 22 days ago

Launch Your Project Management Career with Google’s AI-Enhanced Professional Certificate

?si=TMflasoogRfSD14h Back in 2021, Google released a series of certificate programs, including one focused on Project Management. Designed to give students “an immersive understanding of the practices and skills needed to succeed in an entry-level project management role,” the ce … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 22 days ago

Hear Edgar Allan Poe’s Horror Stories Read by Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, James Earl Jones, William S. Burroughs & Others

Here on Halloween of 2024, we have a greater variety of scary stories — and arguably, a much scarier variety of scarier stories — to choose from than ever before. But whatever their relevance to the specific lives we may live and the specific dreads we may feel today, how many su … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 23 days ago

Watch The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the Influential German Expressionist Horror Film (1920)

In early 1920, posters began appearing all over Berlin with a hypnotic spiral and the mysterious command Du musst Caligari werden — “You must become Caligari.” The posters were part of an innovative advertising campaign for an upcoming movie by Robert Wiene called The Cabinet of … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 23 days ago

Mythology Expert Reviews Depictions of Greek & Roman Myths in Popular Movies and TV Shows

It’s safe to say that we no longer believe in the gods of the ancient world — or rather, that most of us no longer believe in their literal existence, but some of us have faith in their box-office potential. This two-part video series from Vanity Fair examines a variety of movies … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 24 days ago

The Story of Fascism: Rick Steves’ Documentary Helps Us Learn from the Painful Lessons of the 20th Century

From Rick Steves comes a thought-provoking documentary that revisits the rise of fascism in Europe, reminding us of how charismatic figures like Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler came to power by promising to create a better future for their frustrated, economically depressed cou … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 24 days ago

Marcus Aurelius’ 9 Rules for Living a Stoic Life: Presented by Ryan Holiday

This week, the Guardian’s Zoe Williams profiled Ryan Holiday, a one-time public-relations whiz-kid who’s reinvented himself over the past decade as a speaker for the dead: specifically Epictetus, Seneca, and above all Marcus Aurelius, the figureheads of the ancient school of phil … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 25 days ago

Destino: The Salvador Dalí — Disney Collaboration 57 Years in the Making

In 2003, Disney released a six minute animated short called Destino, finally bringing closure to a project that began 57 years earlier. The story of Destino goes way back to 1946 when two very different cultural icons, Walt Disney and Salvador Dalí, decided to work together on a … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 25 days ago

The Hand: An Anti-Totalitarian Animation, Banned for Two Decades & Now Considered One of the Greatest Animations (1965)

For obvious reasons, most art produced under oppressive regimes comes off as painstakingly inoffensive. For equally obvious reasons, the rare works that criticize the regime tend to do so rather obliquely. This wasn’t so much the case with The Hand, the most famous short by Czech … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 26 days ago

The Isolated Bass Grooves of The Grateful Dead’s Phil Lesh (RIP)

This past Friday, the bassist of The Grateful Dead, Phil Lesh, passed away at age 84. Almost immediately the tributes poured in, most recognizing that Lesh wasn’t your ordinary bassist. As Jon Pareles wrote in the New York Times, Phil Lesh held songs “aloft.” His “bass lines hopp … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 26 days ago

When 20,000 Americans Held a Pro-Nazi Rally in Madison Square Garden in 1939

Above, two-time Academy Award nominee Marshall Curry presents A Night at The Garden, a film that revisits a night in February 1939 when “20,000 Americans rallied in New York’s Madison Square Garden to celebrate the rise of Nazism — an event largely forgotten from U.S. history.” A … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 26 days ago

Hear 2.5 Hours of the Classical Music in Haruki Murakami’s Novels: Liszt, Beethoven, Janáček, and More

Haruki Murakami’s hit novel 1Q84 features a memorable scene in a taxicab on a gridlocked freeway whose radio is playing Leoš Janáček’s Sinfonietta. “It is, as the book suggests, truly the worst possible music for a traffic jam,” writes Sam Anderson in a New York Times Magazine pr … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 29 days ago

A Short Visual History of America, According to the Irreverent Comic Artist R. Crumb

As a founder of the “underground comix” movement in the 1960s, R. Crumb is either revered as a pioneering satirist of American culture and its excesses or reviled as a juvenile purveyor of painfully outmoded sexist and racist stereotypes. Crumb doesn’t apologize. He keeps working … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 29 days ago

The Evolution of Cinema: Watch Nearly 140 Years of Film History Unfold in 80 Minutes

The video above from YouTuber Alex Day includes clips from about 500 movies, and you’ve almost certainly seen more than a few of them. Battleship Potemkin, Dumbo, Rear Window, Dr. No, The Godfather, E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Top Gun, Braveheart, Gladiator, Inception: we’re not … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 1 month ago

B.B. King Changes a Broken Guitar String Mid-Song at Farm Aid, and Doesn’t Miss a Beat (1985)

The scene is Farm Aid, 1985, attended by a crowd of 80,000 people. The song is “How Blue Can You Get.” And the key moment comes at the 3:10 mark, when the blues legend B.B. King breaks a guitar string, then manages to replace it before the song finishes minutes later. All the whi … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 1 month ago

Spin the 17th-Century Death Roulette Wheel & Find Out What Would Have Killed You in 1665

A common historical misconception holds that, up until a few centuries ago, everyone died when they were about 40. In fact, even in antiquity, one could well make it to what would be considered an advanced age today — assuming one survived the great mortal peril of childhood, and … | Continue reading


@openculture.com | 1 month ago