Last fall, Banksy traveled to Ukraine and spray-painted a series of murals that offered a stinging commentary on the war launched by Vladimir Putin and Russia’s military forces. Now, to mark the first anniversary of the invasion, a defiant Ukraine has released an official postage … | Continue reading
When Venice was way under water a decade ago, we posted about it here on Open Culture. By that time, the City of Canals was supposed to have been protected by MOSE, a $7 billion flood-control system not actually completed until 2021. But a drought struck the following year, and w … | Continue reading
Image by Casa Buonarroti, via Wikimedia Commons I admit to having a hard time keeping grocery lists. Do I write them by hand? If so, do I do it in a dedicated notebook, on a refrigerator pad, or on any old scrap I find around? Do I compose them electronically, using some combinat … | Continue reading
Few American novelists of the twentieth century looked as professorial as Kurt Vonnegut, at least in a rumpled-fixture-of-the-English-department way. But though he did rack up some teaching experience, not least at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he could hardly have been a conventio … | Continue reading
Some real talk from retired geometry teacher Wendy Lichtman, above, the author of several math-themed YA novels: Not many 15-year-olds care that two parallel lines are crossed by a transversal. “But right here are two parallel lines,” she continues, pointing to a pink and orange … | Continue reading
Some good news: Maya Angelou’s 1969 memoir I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, a recounting of her first 17 years, including a rape at the age of 7 or 8 by her mother’s boyfriend, and her subsequent emotional trauma, no longer leads the American Library Association’s Office for Inte … | Continue reading
No art form is as subject to trend and fashion as the Hollywood film — except, perhaps, the Hollywood trailer. If you came of age as a moviegoer in the nineteen-nineties, as I did, you’ll remember hearing hundreds of gravelly-voiced promises of transportation to “a world where th … | Continue reading
Back in 1964, Shel Silverstein wrote The Giving Tree, a widely loved children’s book now translated into more than 30 languages. It’s a story about the human condition, about giving and receiving, using and getting used, neediness and greediness, although many finer points of the … | Continue reading
For the enthusiast of unidentified flying objects, we live in interesting times indeed. Back in 2021, as we previously featured here on Open Culture, the CIA declassified and published thousands of pages of UFO-related documents. In just the past few weeks, three UFOs were shot d … | Continue reading
Image by Eric Nagle, via Wikimedia Commons On the island of Crete, in the village of Vouves, stands an olive tree estimated to be 3,000 years old. Hearty and resilient, “the Olive Tree of Vouves” still bears fruit today. Because, yes, olives are apparently considered a fruit. Arc … | Continue reading
It would be clichéd to describe Leonardo da Vinci as a man ahead of his time. But in the case of the quintessential Renaissance polymath, it may well be one of those clichés firmly rooted in truth. In fact, that rooting has just grown even firmer with the discovery of a triangle … | Continue reading
We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to bring you this: John Water giving a tour of his 1980s apartment. Highlights of the tour include: his collection of portraits of murderesses (preferably murderesses who have since found religion), an electric chair, a witches’ br … | Continue reading
Perhaps, this past Valentine’s Day, you caught a screening of James Cameron’s Titanic, that nineteen-nineties blockbuster having been re-released for its 25th anniversary. You may have even found yourself feeling a renewed appreciation for the film’s precision-engineered mixture … | Continue reading
Page turning is to ASMR as the electric bass is to rock. The Victoria and Albert Museum’s popular Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response video series (find it here) has seen episodes devoted to iconic Second Wave feminist magazines and a couple of late 20th-century pop up artist’s … | Continue reading
Imagine two prisoners, each one placed in solitary confinement. The police offer a deal: if each betrays the other, they’ll both get five years in prison. If one betrays the other but the other keeps quiet, the betrayer will walk free and the betrayed will serve ten years. If nei … | Continue reading
The Austrian symbolist painter, Gustav Klimt, a driving force of the Vienna Secession, has joined the ranks of famous, dead artists being served up as pricey, super-sized, Instagram-friendly immersive experiences. Jane Kallir, author of Gustav Klimt: 25 Masterworks and co-founder … | Continue reading
Images via JustSayGnome The Noam Chomsky Garden Gnome. That’s right, I said it, the Noam Chomsky Garden Gnome. Over at justsaygnome.net, you can buy “Gnome Chomsky the Garden Noam.” Here’s is how it’s generally described: Just over one foot in height, the fully painted Gnome Chom … | Continue reading
Nearly two centuries after his death, the eighteenth-century utilitarian philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham — or most of him, anyway — still sits in state in the main building of University College London. For a time in the mid-twenty-tens, he was equipped with the Pa … | Continue reading
If a painter is ahead of his time, his work won’t sell particularly well while he’s alive. If an architect is ahead of his time, his work probably won’t exist at all — not in built form, at least. Such was the case with Étienne-Louis Boullée, who constructed few projects in the e … | Continue reading
Before Super Bowl LVII fades too far into the background (being an Eagles fan, it can’t fade fast enough for me), it’s worth flagging this great ASL performance of Rihanna’s Super Bowl Halftime Show. Above, you can watch Justina Miles, a nursing student at HBCU Bowie State Univer … | Continue reading
A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times published an article headlined “How to Stop Ruminating.” If your social media feeds are anything like mine, you’ve seen it pop up with some frequency since then. “Perhaps you spend hours replaying a tense conversation you had with your bo … | Continue reading
Care to take a guess what your smart phone has in common with Paleolithic cave paintings of Lascaux, Chauvet and Altamira? Both can be used to track fertility. Admittedly, you’re probably not using your phone to stay atop the reproductive cycles of reindeer, salmon, and birds, bu … | Continue reading
Your Pretty Much Pop hosts Mark Linsenmayer, Lawrence Ware, Sarahlyn Bruck, and Al Baker talk through various ethical and narrative problems having to do with the creation of artificial life. We all watched M3GAN and Steve Spielberg’s A.I., and also touch on After Yang, Ex Machin … | Continue reading
Punk is not only not dead, it’s getting a fresh burst of energy, thanks to The Unglamorous Music Project, a female collective in Leicester. In accordance with punk tradition, musical ability is not a primary concern. Shockingly, life experience is. With five, six, and seven decad … | Continue reading
Zaha Hadid won the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s most prestigious award, in 2004. She was then in her early fifties — practically a schoolgirl by the standards of her profession — and had only completed four buildings. Yet the Pritzker committee already suspected that she saw po … | Continue reading
Many of us built our first LEGO models in childhood and, a few years thereafter in adolescence, read our first Lord of the Rings novel. We continue to look fondly back on such formative cultural experiences in adulthood, and indeed, some of us retain a genuine appreciation for th … | Continue reading
The vinyl record–we’ve shown you how they were made way back in 1937, and also in 1956. But how about nowadays, during the renaissance of vinyl? Above, Wired visits Jack White’s Third Man Records vinyl pressing plant in Detroit, Michigan to “find out exactly what goes into the cr … | Continue reading
ChatGPT, the system that understands natural language and responds in kind, has caused a sensation since its launch less than three months ago. If you’ve tried it out, you’ll surely have wondered what it will soon revolutionize — or, as the case may be, what it will destroy. Amon … | Continue reading
In the year 1966, “it seemed to Western youth that The Beatles knew — that they had the key to current events and were somehow orchestrating them through their records.” So writes Ian McDonald in the critical study Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties. But … | Continue reading
Back in 2016, we showed you Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” getting played on a 1905 fairground organ. But now we’re stepping it up a level, and letting you behold this: organist Joshua Stafford performing the same Queen classic on a Midmer-Losh pipe organ. Built with 33,112 pipes, i … | Continue reading
No matter how much coffee you drink, you never drink the same coffee twice. Coffee-drinkers understand this instinctively, even those who only drink their coffee at home using the same beans and the same brewing process day in and day out. For even in the most controlled coffee-m … | Continue reading
All images here by David Romero From the humblest home renovator to the mightiest auteur of skyscrapers, every architect shares the common experience of not building their projects. This is true even of Frank Lloyd Wright himself: in his lifetime he created 1,171 architectural wo … | Continue reading
Back in April 2020, animator Henning M. Lederer launched his “Books & Sleeves” project where he turns abstract geometric patterns, all featured on vintage book and record covers, into mesmerizing moving images. Above, you can watch the second installment of the project, which doe … | Continue reading
It doesn’t take particularly long to be impressed by the paintings of Johannes Vermeer even today, three and a half centuries after he painted him. But an understanding of how he achieved the particular visual effects that still inspire appreciation around the world comes only af … | Continue reading
Raise a glass to the city of Dion on the Eastern slopes of Mount Olympus, considered by the ancient Greeks a divine location, where Zeus held sway. And while we’re at it, raise a glass to Zeus’ son, Dionysus the god of fertility and theater, and most famously, wine: …hail to you, … | Continue reading
Last month, we delved into a proposal to use digital technology to clone the 2,500-year-old Parthenon Marbles currently housed in the British Museum. The hope is that such uncanny facsimiles might finally convince museum Trustees and the British government to return the originals … | Continue reading
We know that Neil deGrasse Tyson was something of a wunderkind during his high school years. If you’re an OC regular, you’ve read all about how Carl Sagan personally recruited Tyson to study with him at Cornell. Deftly, politely, the young Tyson declined and went to Harvard. Ther … | Continue reading
A recent Pew Research Center survey found that nearly one in five American teenagers is on Youtube “almost constantly.” Ten years ago, the figure surely wouldn’t have been that high, and twenty years ago, of course, Youtube didn’t exist at all. But today, no enterprise directed a … | Continue reading
Great news for Open Culture readers. Taschen, the publisher of beautiful art books, is running its biannual warehouse sale. It starts today and runs through Sunday, February 5. This sale gives you the chance to buy art books at nicely discounted prices–anywhere from 25% to 75% of … | Continue reading
“The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,” declares the opening poem in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot. But the possibilities are many and varied: “Peter, Augustus, Alonzo or James”; “Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter”; “Munkustrap, Quaxo, or Coricopat.” Thing … | Continue reading
The Youtuber “EmperorTigerstar” specializes in documenting the unfolding of world historical events by stitching together hundreds of maps into timelapse films. In years past, we’ve featured his “map animations” of the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865), World War I (1914-1918), and Worl … | Continue reading
We have covered it before: school districts across the United States are increasingly censoring books that don’t align with conservative, white-washed visions of the world. Art Spiegelman’s Maus, The Illustrated Diary of Anne Frank, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Toni Morrison’ … | Continue reading
We live in an age of subtitles. On some level this is a vindication of the cinephiles who spent so much of the twentieth century complaining about shoddy dubbing of foreign films and public unwillingness to “read movies.” Today we think nothing of reading not just movies but tele … | Continue reading
Your Pretty Much Pop A-Team Mark Linsenmayer, Lawrence Ware, Sarahlyn Bruck, and Al Baker discuss the original 1883 freaky children's story by Carlo Collodi and consider the recent rush of film versions, from a new Disney/Robert Zemikis CGI take to Guillermo del Toro's stop-motio … | Continue reading
Welcome to Medieval Mixed-Gender Fight Club. The first rule of Medieval Mixed-Gender Fight Club is: you do not talk about Medieval Mixed-Gender Fight Club. The second rule of Medieval Mixed-Gender Fight Club is: you DO NOT talk about Medieval Mixed-Gender Fight Club! Why? The Pub … | Continue reading
The seventeen-fifties found Western civilization in the middle of its Age of Enlightenment. That long era introduced on a large scale the notion that, through the use of rationality and scientific knowledge, humanity could make progress. For the Enlightenment’s true believers, it … | Continue reading
Note: Just a quick heads up, Coursera’s $200 discount on Coursera Plus ends on January 31, 2023. If you want to take advantage of the deal, you should act soon. A new deal to start a new year: Between now and January 31, 2023, Coursera is offering a $200 discount on its annual su … | Continue reading
One can appreciate the art of Frida Kahlo while knowing nothing of the art of her onetime husband, the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. But the experience of certain of her paintings can be greatly enriched by some knowledge of their relationship, the clearest example being The Two … | Continue reading