New Yorkers can be a maddeningly closed-mouth bunch, selfishly guarding our secret haunts lest they be overrun with newcomers and tourists… But there’s not much we can do to deflect interest from Grand Central Teminal’s whispering gallery, a wildly popular acoustic anomaly in the … | Continue reading
We may have yet to develop the technology of time travel, but recorded music comes pretty close. Those who listen to it have experienced how a song or an album can, in some sense, transport them right back to the time they first heard it. But older records also have the much stra … | Continue reading
Behold the new trailer for Marlowe, a new film directed by Neil Jordan. As the title suggests, the film centers around Philip Marlowe, the gumshoe detective that Raymond Chandler first unveiled in The Big Sleep in 1939. Between then and now, Marlowe has been portrayed in films by … | Continue reading
As we’ve previously noted here on Open Culture, Orson Welles was not given to mincing words about his colleagues. And the older he got, the fewer words he minced, as evidenced by the clip above from a talk he gave at a Paris film school in 1982. During the Q&A, he took a question … | Continue reading
Three minutes with the minstrels / Arthur Collins, S. H. Dudley & Ancient City. Edison Record. 1899. Long before vinyl records, cassette tapes, CDs and MP3s came along, people first experienced audio recordings through another medium — through cylinders made of tin foil, wax and … | Continue reading
“Here comes a trailer truck out on the open highway, miles from the nearest town,” says the narrator of the short film above. Suddenly, it becomes “important for someone to get in touch with the drivers of this outfit. How can it be done?” Any modern-day viewer would respond to t … | Continue reading
Art forgery is a sturdy trope of film and fiction. We’re all familiar with the spectacle of a rarified expert examining a work, while a wealthy collector anxiously wrings their hands nearby. As Maggie Cao observes in the Guardian: Forgeries expose some of the art world’s most psy … | Continue reading
We know what Mark Twain looked like, and we think we know what he sounded like. Just above see what he looked like in motion, strolling around Stormfield, his house in Redding, Connecticut—signature white suit draped loosely around his frame, signature cigar puffing white smoke b … | Continue reading
Music changes when technology changes. Few musicians have demonstrated as keen an awareness of that fact as Haruomi Hosono, Yukihiro Takahashi, and Ryuichi Sakamoto, who together as Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO) burst onto the scene making sounds that most listeners of the late ni … | Continue reading
Image by Benjaminec, via Wikimedia Commons Rome may not have been built in a day, but it was built to last — or at least its concrete was, given that the pieces of the Roman Empire that have stood to our time, in one form or another, tend to have been built with it. That […] | Continue reading
We recognize that Open Culture readers are a creative bunch. As proof, we point to your Getty Museum Challenge entries and the fact that one of your number won Yale University Press’s Kafka Caption Contest. We’ve identified another opportunity to show off your creative streak, co … | Continue reading
If we seek to understand Western civilization, we must look back not just to Rome, but also to Athens. And today, thanks to computer-generated imagery informed by historical research, we can look not just to those cities, but at them — or at least at convincing digital reconstruc … | Continue reading
Image by the USO, via Flickr CommonsIn one of my favorite Stephen King interviews, for The Atlantic, he talks at length about the vital importance of a good opening line. “There are all sorts of theories,” he says, “it’s a tricky thing.” “But there’s one thing” he’s sure about: “ … | Continue reading
Photo by Bleddyn Butcher via Wikimedia Commons Last year, not long before Christmas, everyone on the internet received a shiny new toy in the form of ChatGPT, which by the power of artificial intelligence can near-instantaneously generate most any text one asks it to. And after a … | Continue reading
The USGS Astrogeology Science Center has recently released a series of colorful and intricately-detailed maps of Mars. These colorful maps, notes USGS, “provide highly detailed views of the [plantet’s] surface and allow scientists to investigate complex geologic relationships bot … | Continue reading
At the height of his fame, Charles Dickens could have commanded any illustrator he liked for his novels. But at the beginning of his literary career, it was he who was charged with accompanying the artist, not the other way around. His first serialized novel The Posthumous Papers … | Continue reading
Back in October, we featured the first of a planned series of videos on the “Black Paintings” created at the end of Francisco Goya’s life. Last week, the YouTube channel Great Art Explained completed the series and rolled them up into a 51-minute documentary, which you can watch … | Continue reading
Many of us now in adulthood first came to know the nineteen-twenties as the decade our grandparents were born. It may thus give us pause to consider that it began over a century ago — and even more pause to consider the question of why its visions of the future seem more exciting … | Continue reading
By now, we’ve all heard of the recent technological advances that allow us to have plausible-sounding conversations with artificial-intelligence systems. Though near-science-fictionally impressive, such developments have yet to hone in on one particular world-changing application … | Continue reading
Robespierre is an immortal figure not because he reigned supreme over the Revolution for a few months, but because he was the mouthpiece of its purest and most tragic discourse. – François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution Cal […] | Continue reading
Note: With the passing of Jeff Beck, we’re bringing back a vintage post from our archive featuring the early years of the legendary guitarist. You can read his obituary here. Art film and rock and roll have, since the 60s, been soulmates of a kind, with many an acclaimed director … | Continue reading
The Chrysler Building was once the tallest structure in the world — a heyday that ended up lasting less than a year. The loss of that glorious title owed to the completion of the Empire State Building, twelve blocks away, in 1931. But it was all in the spirit of the game, the Chr … | Continue reading
Images courtesy of University of Tuebingen That people wore clothes back in the Stone Age will hardly come as a surprise to anyone who grew up watching The Flintstones. That show, never wholly reliant on established archaeological fact, didn’t get too specific about its time peri … | Continue reading
Robert van Embricqs, a designer based in Amsterdam, has created The Flow Wall Desk–a wooden decoration that “transforms from a piece of art on the wall into a functional desk by showing off its unique aesthetic.” On his site, he writes: The Flow Wall Desk acknowledges the potenti … | Continue reading
Image by Dafna Gazit, Israel Antiquities Authority I don’t recall any of my elementary-school classmates looking forward to head-lice inspection day. But had archaeological progress been a few decades more advanced at the time, the teachers might have turned it into a major histo … | Continue reading
You need not be a student of Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints to recognize artist Katsushika Hokusai’s Under the Wave Off Kanagawa – or the Great Wave, as it has come to be known. Like Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, it’s been reproduced on all … | Continue reading
Cher, the mononymous Goddess of Pop, gifted the small screens of the 70s with a lot of over-the-top glamour. Her work ethic, comedic flair and unapologetic embrace of camp helped her stand out from the crowd, conferring the fame she had longed for since childhood, when she comman … | Continue reading
The world has heard much about the aging and shrinking of Japanese society, a process that has created ghost towns like those we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture. But however seriously Japan’s population may be contracting, its love of cats abides undiminished. Hence t … | Continue reading
We lived in the age of movie theaters, then we lived in the age of home video, and now we live in the age of streaming. Like every period in the history of cinema, ours has its advantages and its disadvantages. The quasi-religiosity of the cinephile viewing experience is, arguabl … | Continue reading
In a special episode of My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman, the iconic TV host traveled to Kyiv to interview President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The conversation took place in a protected subway station, in front of a small live audience. About Zelenskyy, Letterm … | Continue reading
The philosopher Giambattista Vico had quite a few ideas, but we remember him for one above all: Verum esse ipsum factum, often shortened to the principle of verum factum. It means, in essence, that we understand what we make. In accordance with verum factum, then, if you want to … | Continue reading
In his latest animation, physicist and science writer Dominic Walliman maps out the entire field of engineering and all of its subdisciplines. Civil engineering, chemical engineering, bio engineering, biomedical engineering, mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering, marine e … | Continue reading
A new deal to start a new year: Between now and January 14, 2023, Coursera is offering a $200 discount on its annual subscription plan called “Coursera Plus.” Normally priced at $399, Coursera Plus (now available for $199) gives you access to 90% of Coursera’s courses, Guided Pro … | Continue reading
It’s safe to say that few, if any, of us alive today were doing any movie-going in 1927. But that shouldn’t stop us from recognizing the importance of that year to cinema itself. It saw the release of, among other pictures, The Lodger, with which the young Alfred Hitchcock first … | Continue reading
2022 – another difficult year for so many – has drawn to a close. While not a remedy for all the hardships and privations we’ve been privy to, Joni Mitchell’s music remains good medicine. Listening to her always makes us feel more connected, reflective and calm for at least an ho … | Continue reading
Few things could have been more amusing to a twelve-year-old in 1996 than an Amish-themed parody of the late Coolio’s portentously grim life-in-the-hood anthem “Gangsta’s Paradise.” As luck would have it, “Weird Al” Yankovic released just such a song in 1996, when I happened to b … | Continue reading
At its peak in the second century, the Roman Empire dominated nearly two million square miles of the world. As with most such grand achievements, it couldn't have happened without the development of certain technologies. The long reach of the Eternal City was made possible in lar … | Continue reading
If you’re going to steal, steal from the best. For most of humanity, this might mean nabbing a lick or two from Paul McCartney’s playbook. For Paul McCartney, it meant borrowing from Bach - the fifth movement from Suite in E minor for Lute, to be specific. As he explained during … | Continue reading
Last night, Miley Cyrus and David Byrne performed David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” on the NBC holiday special Miley’s New Year’s Eve Party. And they also treated viewers to a performance of “Everybody’s Coming to My House,” from Byrne’s 2018 album American Utopia. Not a bad way to sen … | Continue reading
Back in 1971, Isaac Asimov sent a letter to celebrate the opening of a new library in Troy, Michigan. Thoughtful as always, his letter addressed the children of the Troy community as follows: “Congratulations on the new library, because it isn’t just a library. It is a space ship … | Continue reading
Quite a few generations of American children have by now grown up knowing the names of Max and Dave Fleischer — albeit knowing even better the names of the characters they animated, like Betty Boop, Popeye the Sailor, and Superman. The kids who first thrilled to Max Fleischer’s e … | Continue reading
Today, the soccer legend, Pelé, passed away at age 82. The most dominant player of his generation, Pelé turned professional at age 15, won the World Cup at age 17 in 1958 (before winning two more World Cups in 1962 and 1970), and ultimately scored 1,283 goals in 1,367 professiona … | Continue reading
Brett Foxwell meticulously collected over 12,000 leaves while walking through forests and parks. Then he carefully arranged the leaves, many at different stage of development, into a stop motion sequence. He says: While collecting leaves, I conceived that the leaf shape [of] ever … | Continue reading
Is it just us, or did half of Gen Z teach themselves how to cook on TikTok during the height of the pandemic? The recipes that go viral have more in common with gonzo science experiments than Julia Child’s Coq au Vin. Hacks are golden in this forum – whether or not they actually … | Continue reading
More than a millennium and a half after its fall, we still look back with wonder on the accomplishments of the ancient Roman Empire. Few elements of its legacy impress us as much as its built environment — or in any case, what's left of its built environment. Still, the fact that … | Continue reading
What is the most American institution of all? The mind first goes in the directions of church, of the military, of football. But if we consider only the systems of modern life developed on United States soil, the most influential must surely be fast food. That influence manifests … | Continue reading
A new deal to start a new year: Between now and January 14, 2023, Coursera is offering a $200 discount on its annual subscription plan called “Coursera Plus.” Normally priced at $399, Coursera Plus (now available for $199) gives you access to 90% of Coursera’s courses, Guided Pro … | Continue reading
“We should fear Grant Wood. Every artist and every school of artists should be afraid of him, for his devastating satire.” Gertrude Stein wrote those words after seeing American Gothic, the 1930 painting that would become one of the most iconic images created in the United States … | Continue reading