As Helen Reddy sang in the 70s: You live your life in the songs you hear On the rock n’ roll radio… The 80s ushered in a new era, leaving the music industry forever changed, though the songs themselves retained their power to speak to us on a deeply personal level. In 1979, the E … | Continue reading
Wes Anderson has been making feature films for 27 years now, and in that time his work has grown more temporally and geographically specific. Though shot in his native Texas in the late nineteen-nineties, his breakout picture Rushmore seemed to take place in no one part of the Un … | Continue reading
The denial of science suffuses American society, and no matter what the data says, some conservative forces refuse efforts to curtail, or even study, climate change. Astrophysicist Katie Mack calls this retrenchment a form of “data nihilism,” writing in an exasperated tweet, “Wha … | Continue reading
In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, the name of David Byrne’s band was Talking Heads — as the title of their 1982 live album perpetually reminds us. But their overall artistic project arguably had less to do with the head than the body, a proposition memorably underscored in … | Continue reading
Let me quote myself: “From 2010 to 2012, filmmaker Kirby Ferguson released Everything is a Remix, a four-part series that explored art and creativity, and particularly how artists inevitably borrow from one another, draw on past ideas and conventions, and then turn these material … | Continue reading
A heads up for Open Culture readers: This spring, Stanford Continuing Studies has a rich lineup of online courses, and they’re offering a special 15% discount to our readers. Just use the promo code CULTURE during checkout. Serving lifelong learners everywhere, Stanford Continuin … | Continue reading
“Enable subtitles,” says the notification that appears before The Poor Man of Nippur — and you will need them, unless, of course, you happen to hail from the cradle of civilization. The short film is adapted from “a folktale based on a 2,700-year-old poem about a pauper,” says th … | Continue reading
When you picture modern day Tokyo, what comes to mind? The electronic billboards of Shibuya and Shinjuku? The teeming streets? The maid cafes? The robot hotel? A 97 square foot micro apartment? Bernard Guerrini‘s documentary Naturopolis – Tokyo, from megalopolis to garden-city de … | Continue reading
It doesn’t take long to learn how to pull a shot of espresso. Search for that phrase on Youtube, and you’ll find hours’ worth of sound instruction, most of it in the form of brief and easily digestible videos. All of them cover the same basic stages of the process: grinding, dosi … | Continue reading
Creative Commons image by Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin Long ago, in the ancient civilization of Mesopotamia, Akkadian was the dominant language. And, for centuries, it remained the lingua franca in the Ancient Near East. But then it was gradually squeezed out by Aramaic, and it fad … | Continue reading
In the late twelfth and early thirteenth century there lived a mechanically inclined polymath named Badi’ al-Zaman Abu-‘l-‘Izz Ibn Isma’il Ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari, whom we might prefer simply to call Al-Jazari. A resident of Diyar-Bakir, in modern-day Turkey, he was employed as a … | Continue reading
Pulp Fiction will likely hold up generations from now, but the resonance of its title may already be lost to history. Pulp magazines, or “the pulps,” as they were called, once held special significance for lovers of adventure stories, detective and science fiction, and horror and … | Continue reading
Ludwig van Beethoven died in 1827, a bit early to be subjected to the kinds of DNA analysis that have become so prevalent today. Luckily, the German-speaking world of the early nineteenth century still adhered to the custom of saving locks of hair from the deceased — particularly … | Continue reading
CBGB is a state of mind – Patti Smith All good things must come to an end, but it hurt when CBGB’s, New York City’s celebrated – and famously filthy – music club shuttered for good on October 15th, 2006, a victim of skyrocketing Lower East Side rents. While plenty of punk and New … | Continue reading
Nearly a century after Claude Monet painted them, the Nymphéas, or Water Lilies, still impress as a vision of a seemingly minor subject realized at a grand scale. The paintings installed in a dedicated room at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris make an especially strong impact on … | Continue reading
In the early 1950s, archaeologists unearthed several clay tablets from the 14th century BCE. Found, WFMU tells us, “in the ancient Syrian city of Ugarit,” these tablets “contained cuneiform signs in the hurrian language,” which turned out to be the oldest known piece of music eve … | Continue reading
Before the Industrial Revolution, few had occasion to consider the impact of technology on their lives. A few decades in, however, certain segments of society thought about little else. That, in any case, is the impression given by the debate over what the English press of the ea … | Continue reading
Above, Snarky Puppy drummer Larnell Lewis explains drumming in 13 levels of difficulty, from easy to complex, showing how “drum techniques build upon each other as the easiest levels incorporate the hi-hat, bass and snare drums, and more difficult levels include polyrhythms, the … | Continue reading
No French film of this century is more beloved than Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie. Or rather, no protagonist of a French film in this century is more beloved than Audrey Tautou’s eponymous Amélie. Hence, no doubt, why the movie is best known by that short version of its title rathe … | Continue reading
Extreme weather conditions have become a topic of grave concern. Are floods, earthquakes, tornadoes and catastrophic storms the new normal? Just for a moment, let’s travel to a place where extreme weather has always been the norm: Lake Maracaibo in northwestern Venezuela. Accordi … | Continue reading
If you wanted to see a map of the world in the fourteenth century, you could hardly just pull up Google Earth. But you could, provided you lived somewhere in or near the British Isles, make a pilgrimage to Hereford Cathedral. There you would find the shrine of St. Thomas Cantilup … | Continue reading
First released in 1984, Jonathan Demme’s acclaimed concert film Stop Making Sense featured the Talking Heads at the height of their creative and musical powers. The film starts with David Byrne, alone on a bare stage, with a boombox and his big white suit, performing “Psycho Kill … | Continue reading
Released 40 years ago this week, New Order’s “Blue Monday” (hear the original EP version here) became, according to the BBC, “a crucial link between Seventies disco and the dance/house boom that took off at the end of the Eighties.” If you frequented a dance club during the 1980s … | Continue reading
Barnaby Dixon‘s incredible two-piece creations redefine the notion of hand puppets, by moving and responding in highly nuanced, realistic ways. The pinkie and index finger of one hand slip into the creature’s arms, leaving the thumb free to operate the tiny controls that tilt hea … | Continue reading
Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan, a hot-spring hotel in the mountains of Japan’s Yamanashi Prefecture, has been in business for over 1,300 years, more than five times as long as the United States has existed. Nevertheless, it feels considerably more modern than the average American motel … | Continue reading
The documentary filmmaker and sports editor Paul Devlin has won five Emmy awards, but he may well be better known for not getting into Harvard — or rather, for not getting into Harvard, then rejecting Harvard’s rejection. “I noticed that the rejection letter I received from Harva … | Continue reading
From 2010 to 2012, filmmaker Kirby Ferguson released “Everything is a Remix,” a four-part series (watch here) that explored art and creativity, and particularly how artists inevitably borrow from one another, drawing on past ideas and conventions, and then turn these materials in … | Continue reading
Even if Florence didn’t represent the absolute pinnacle of human civilization at the end of the thirteenth century, it had to have been a strong contender for the position. What the city lacked, however, was a cathedral befitting its status. Hence the construction, which commence … | Continue reading
“The word ‘connoisseur’ is not an attractive one,” writes Jancis Robinson in her memoir Tasting Pleasure: Confessions of a Wine Lover. “It smacks of exclusivity, preciousness and elitism.” Indeed, “connoisseurship is not a necessary state for wine appreciation. It is perfectly po … | Continue reading
Everyone knows that Georges Seurat’s Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte, or A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, resides at the Art Institute of Chicago. Or at least everyone who’s seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off knows it. The Art Institute appears as … | Continue reading
“A brush makes watercolors appear on a white sheet of paper. An everyday object takes shape, drawn with precision by an artist’s hand. Then two, then three, then four… Superimposed, condensed, multiplied, thousands of documentary drawings in successive series come to life on the … | Continue reading
Ancient Greece and Rome had plenty of literature, but practically none of it survives today. What exactly became of almost everything written down in Western antiquity is the subject of the video above by ancient-history Youtube channel Told in Stone, previously featured here on … | Continue reading
With 26 lines and 472 stations, the New York City subway system is practically a living organism, and way too big a topic to tackle in a short video. Architect Michael Wyetzner may not have time to touch on rats, crime track fires, flooding, night and weekend service disruptions, … | Continue reading
“I have invented a new way of imitating flowers,” Mary Delany, a 72-year-old widow wrote to her niece in 1772 from the grand home where she was a frequent guest, having just captured her hostess’ geranium’s likeness, by collaging cut paper in a nearly identical shade. Novelty rek … | Continue reading
Jokes about “reality television” being a contradiction in terms go as far back in pop-culture history as the format itself. But the fact remains that, deliberately or otherwise, its programs do reflect certain characteristics of the societies that produce them. Before turning int … | Continue reading
If you’re a regular Open Culture reader, you have hopefully thoroughly immersed yourself in The Map of Physics, an animated video–a visual aid for the modern age–that mapped out the field of physics, explaining all the connections between classical physics, quantum physics, and r … | Continue reading
We’ve featured the work of Spanish filmmaker Cristóbal Vila before: His short film “Inspirations” celebrated the mathematical art of M.C. Escher. “Fallingwater” animated one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s finest creations. And “Nature by Numbers” showed us geometrical and mathematical f … | Continue reading
That we spend much, if not most, of our lives working is, in itself, not necessarily a bad thing — unless, that is, we’re bored doing it. In the Big Think video above, London Business School Professor of Organizational Behavior Dan Cable cites Gallup polls showing that “about 70 … | Continue reading
In 2018, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. The award itself came as less of a surprise than did the fact that Shoplifters was the first of Kore-eda’s films to win it, given how long he’d been the most widely acclaimed Japanese filmmaker alive. And thou … | Continue reading
Sandro Botticelli painted it, how many of us whose tastes run to the female form really see it that way? 'I've always been struck by how Venus is strangely asexual, and her nudity is clinical,' says gallerist James Payne, creator of the Youtube channel Great Art Explained. | Continue reading
If you don’t listen to rap, you’ve heard the same questions over and over in response to that confession. One of the most common is “But have you heard De La Soul?” — which in recent years was easier said than done, at least on streaming platforms. “What kept De La’s tunes out of … | Continue reading
Composed of over 1000 engravings from the 19th century, the short animation Still Life (above) is “a meditation on subject/object dualism,” exploring “the idea that we live in a world of objects and a world of objects lives within us.” It’s created by Conner Griffith, an experime … | Continue reading
As generations have come of age with few or no memories of the existence of the Soviet Union, a common misconception about Berlin has become more common. Because the German capital was divided between the former East and West Germany, it’s easy to assume that it must have lay on … | Continue reading
Our definition of budget cookery may differ from celebrity chef Gordon Ramsey‘s. True, the world famous restauranteur and cookbook author speaks of cheap cuts with messianic zeal, but the episode of Gordon Ramsey’s Ultimate Cookery Course dedicated to Food on a Budget, above, als … | Continue reading
Outdoor enthusiasts of a non-vegetarian stripe, do you weary of garden variety energy bars and trail mix? Perhaps you’re feeling adventurous enough to make your own pemmican, variously described by Tasting History’s Max Miller, above, as “history’s Power Bar” and “a meaty version … | Continue reading
To commemorate the 50th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon we bring you this: a busker fittingly playing “Time” in front of the nearly 2000-year-old Pantheon in Rome. That the police try to break up the show hardly matters. The busker continues, and returns on othe … | Continue reading
Coming after the maturation of the market for high-fidelity stereo systems but before the advent of home video, the nineteen-seventies provided just the right cultural and economic conditions for a heroic age of the record album. What’s Going On, Blue, Blood on the Tracks, Exile … | Continue reading
Monty Python icon John Cleese had this to say about Marjorie Taylor Greene yesterday: “She is the perfect example of someone who is not intelligent enough to realise that she’s not very intelligent. Hence her enormous self-confidence. Sadly, her supporters are even less intellige … | Continue reading