Back in September, we mentioned that Yale historian Timothy Snyder had started teaching a course, The Making of Modern Ukraine, and putting the lectures online. With the fall semester now over, you can watch 23 lectures on YouTube. All of the lectures appear above, or on this pla … | Continue reading
The exalted status of Isaac Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica is reflected by the fact that everybody knows it as, simply, the Principia. Very few of us, by contrast, speak of the Historia when we mean to refer to John Ray and Francis Willughby's De Historia Pi … | Continue reading
Once again, Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl and producer Greg Kurstin have teamed up to celebrate Hanukkah by performing songs created by musicians with Jewish roots. Above, they perform--along with Jack Black--Rush's “The Spirit Of Radio.” (Geddy Lee's parents were both Jews wh … | Continue reading
Christmas cards aren’t just an anachronism. They’re almost an endangered species, the victim of the Internet, postal rate increases, and the jettisoning of any time consuming tradition whose execution has been found to bring the opposite of joy. Above, Victoria and Albert Museum … | Continue reading
As Christmas approaches, we reach for our bookshelves and pull down Charles Dickens’ beloved tale of hardship, revelation, and a miser’s redemption in the holiday season. I speak, of course, of The Cricket on the Hearth, published in 1845 as the third of what would be Dickens’ fi … | Continue reading
“Christmas time is here, by golly / Disapproval would be folly / Deck the halls with hunks of holly / Fill the cup and don’t say ‘when.'” So sings musical satirist Tom Lehrer on his hit 1959 album An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer — which was recorded in March of that year, not t … | Continue reading
If you’re looking for free outdoor activities to pull you from the digital realm, may we recommend mudlarking? Lara Maiklem, author of Mudlarking: Lost and Found on the River Thames and A Field Guide to Larking, has developed a keen eye in the 20 years she’s been scavenging histo … | Continue reading
Bruce is best known as Elvis Costello’s bassist on about a dozen albums as The Attractions, but Bruce has been in bands since 1970 and has done numerous session gigs, most notably for Al Stewart’s early albums, plus The Pretenders, John Wesley Harding, Billy Bragg, and many more. … | Continue reading
Rare indeed is the ancient-history buff who has never dreamed of walking the roads of the Roman Empire. But unlike many longings stoked by interest in the distant past, that one can actually be fulfilled. As explained in the video above from Youtube channel Intrigued Mind, a fair … | Continue reading
The holidays can be hard, starting in October when the red and green decorations begin muscling in on the Halloween aisle. Most Wonderful Time of the Year, you say? Oh, go stuff a stocking in it, Andy Williams! The majority of us have more in common with the Grinch, Scrooge, and/ … | Continue reading
Among the ranks of Open Culture readers, there are no doubt more than a few art-history majors. Perhaps you’ve studied the subject yourself, at one time or another — and perhaps you find that by now, you remember only certain scattered artists, works, and movements. What you need … | Continue reading
Back in 1993, the Beat writer William S. Burroughs wrote and narrated a 21 minute claymation Christmas film. And, as you can well imagine, it’s not your normal happy Christmas flick. Nope, this film – The Junky’s Christmas – is all about Danny the Carwiper, a junkie, who spends C … | Continue reading
Attention young artists: don’t let your day job kill your dream. In the mid-70s, David Godlis kept body and soul together by working as an assistant in a photography studio, but his ambition was to join the ranks of his street photographer idols – Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Garry … | Continue reading
Though regarded by many as near-impossibly difficult to judge, avant-garde art can be put to its own test of time: does it still feel new ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred years later? Now that most of Walter Ruttmann’s short animated films have passed the century mark, we can with s … | Continue reading
Of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, the critic Siegfried Kracauer wrote that 'the Americans relished its technical excellence; the English remained aloof; the French were stirred by a film which seemed to them a blend of Wagner and Krupp, and on the whole an alarming sign of Germany's vi … | Continue reading
The late Angelo Badalamenti composed music for singers like Marianne Faithfull and Nina Simone, for movies like The City of Lost Children and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, and even for the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona. But of all his musical work, no piece is more likely t … | Continue reading
In Christmases past, we featured Charles Dickens’ hand-edited copy of his beloved 1843 novella A Christmas Carol. He did that hand editing for the purposes of giving public readings, a practice that, in his time, “was considered a desecration of one’s art and a lowering of one’s … | Continue reading
I got hooked on Duolingo a few years ago. Since then, I’ve used it daily to practice languages like French, Spanish, Finnish, Chinese, and Japanese. But none of those courses is quite as popular with as many users as the one for English, which is widely spoken around the world — … | Continue reading
For a medieval knight, physical combat in a full suit of armor could hardly have been a simple matter — but then, nor could the task of putting it on in the first place. You can see the latter depicted in the video above from Norwegian history buff Ola Onsrud. He describes the ar … | Continue reading
Many of us can remember a time when artificial intelligence was widely dismissed as a science-fictional pipe dream unworthy of serious research and investment. That time, safe to say, has gone. “Within a decade,” writes blogger Samuel Hammond, the development of artificial intell … | Continue reading
Most casual viewers of Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings must acknowledge his artistic skill, and many must also wonder whether he was completely out of his mind. But insanity, however vividly suggested by his imagery, isn’t an especially compelling explanation for that imagery. Bosch … | Continue reading
No matter where you may stand on herbal medicine as a viable 21st-century option, it’s not hard to imagine we’d have all been true believers back in the 15th-century. In an article for Heart Views, cardiologist Rachel Hajar lists some common herbal treatments of the Middle Ages: … | Continue reading
In Italy, roughly 70% of households have a Bialetti Moka Pot. And chances are you have one too. But are you using it the right way? Probably not, says James Hoffmann, the author of The World Atlas of Coffee. Above, he sets the record straight, demonstrating the best technique for … | Continue reading
A decade ago, in Tokyo, 167 musicians performed a Beethoven classic with the “Matryomin,” a new-fangled instrument that lodges a theremin inside a matryoshka. A matryoshka, of course, is one of those Russian nested dolls where you find wooden dolls of decreasing size placed one i … | Continue reading
Trombone may be Sweden’s Queen of Swing Gunhild Carling’s favorite instrument, but she blows some mean bagpipes too, as evidenced by her smoking hot performance of her late father, trumpeter Hans Carlings’ Bagpipe Blues, above. A devotee of such early jazz greats as Freddie Keppa … | Continue reading
Nobody knows more about cinema than critics. But in an entirely different way, nobody knows more about cinema than directors. That, perhaps, is one of the reasons that Sight and Sound magazine has, for the past thirty years, conducted two separate once-in-a-decade polls to determ … | Continue reading
I will let Vox preface the video above: Ever since Qatar won the rights to host the FIFA World Cup in 2010, its treatment of migrant workers has made international headlines. News stories and human rights organizations revealed migrant workers who built the stadiums, hotels, and … | Continue reading
Is there really a division in today’s culture between those who create and the merely receptive masses? Your Pretty Much Pop host gathers three artists in different media about the place of the artist in society: sci-fi author Brian Hirt, art photographer and academic Amir Zaki, … | Continue reading
Last week, we featured the results of this decade’s Sight and Sound poll to determine the greatest films of all time. Nobody could possibly agree with every single one of its rankings, but then, some of the joy of cinephilia lies in disagreement — and even more of it in doing a f … | Continue reading
Here’s a vintage football [aka soccer] post in celebration of the World Cup… Albert Camus once said, “After many years in which the world has afforded me many experiences, what I know most surely in the long run about morality and obligations, I owe to football.” He was referring … | Continue reading
At 8:15 on the morning of August 6, 1945, a person sat on a flight of stone stairs leading up to the entrance of the Sumitomo Bank in Hiroshima, Japan. Seconds later, an atomic bomb detonated just 800 feet away, and the person sitting on the stairs was instantly incinerated. Gone … | Continue reading
If you want to learn to read hieroglyphics, you must first learn that (with apologies to the artists behind “You Never Knew”) there are no such things as hieroglyphics. There are only hieroglyphs, as the British Museum’s curator of ancient writing Ilona Regulski explains in the v … | Continue reading
As a white Midwestern child of the ‘70s, I received two messages loud and clear: disco was a breathtakingly glamorous, sexy urban scene, and “disco sucks.” Culturally, the latter prevailed. It was the opinion voiced most loudly by the popular boys. Dissenters pushed back at their … | Continue reading
Image by Grete Stern, via Wikimedia CommonsI will admit it: I’m one of those oft-maligned non-sports people who becomes a football (okay, soccer) enthusiast every four years, seduced by the colorful pageantry, cosmopolitan air, nostalgia for a game I played as a kid, and an embar … | Continue reading
Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is a three-and-a-half hour film in which nothing happens. That, in any case, will be the description offered by many who will view it for the first time in the coming months. Their curiosity will have been piqu … | Continue reading
It’s bittersweet whenever a pioneering, long overlooked female scientist is finally given the recognition she deserves, especially so when the scientist in question is a person of color. Chemist Alice Ball’s youth and drive – just 23 in 1915, when she discovered a gentle, but eff … | Continue reading
“Chevrolet,” a new track on Neil Young’s 42nd studio album World Record, takes you on a long, rambling road trip, covering a lot of different terrain over 15 minutes, with some verses lasting more than two minutes. Above, you can watch Neil Young and Crazy Horse (Nils Lofgren, Bi … | Continue reading
There are many reasons to look down on art forgery, from its illegality to its lack of originality. But much like any other human endeavor, you need a great deal of skill and stamina to do it well. Certain individual forgers have lived on in history: Han Van Meegeren, say, who tr … | Continue reading
Perhaps you’ve seen Scottish actor Brian Cox perform with the Royal Shakespeare Company in critically-acclaimed performances of The Taming of The Shrew and Titus Andronicus. Or, more likely, you’ve seen him in the blockbuster HBO series, Succession. But there’s perhaps another ro … | Continue reading
Auguste and Louis Lumière thought that cinema didn’t have a future. Fortunately, they came to that conclusion only after producing a body of work that comprises some of the earliest films ever made, as well as invaluable glimpses of the end of the nineteenth century and the dawn … | Continue reading
Deep fried coffee. Yes, it’s a thing, and coffee connoisseur James Hoffmann decided to give it a go. How did it turn out? We won’t spoil it for you–other than to say, don’t be surprised if deep fried coffee makes its way into a future edition of Hoffmann’s book, The World Atlas o … | Continue reading
It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child. – Pablo Picasso We think it’s safe to say that most of us have a preconceived notion of Picasso’s style, and The First Communion, above, isn’t it. Picasso was just 15 when he completed this large … | Continue reading
Most of us have doodled in the margins of our books at one time or another, and some of us have even dared to write our own names. But very of few us, presumably, would have expected our handiwork to be marveled at twelve centuries hence. Yet that’s just what has happened to the … | Continue reading
Image by Paul Pearson, University College London You may think you know your Roman emperors, but do you recognize the face on the coin above? His name was Sponsian, or Sponsianus, and he lived in the middle of the third century. Or at least he did according to certain theories: v … | Continue reading
Quick, who’s your favorite female drummer? Hardly a strange question! (Yes, you are allowed to pick more than one favorite.) Things were decidedly different when drummer Honey Lantree, the only female member of the 60s British Invasion group the Honeycombs, took up the sticks. Dr … | Continue reading
A quick FYI. If you want to follow Open Culture on social media, we would encourage you to find us on Mastodon and now also Post. Right now, Mastodon feels like the early days of Twitter, when the discourse was more edifying and the mood less toxic. Meanwhile, Post is a new servi … | Continue reading
The Rovers, Fidos, and Spots of the world have been regarded since time immemorial as man’s best friends. But they haven’t always been named Rover, Fido, and Spot: early fifteenth-century English dog owners preferred to give their pets names like Nosewise, Garlik, Pretyman, and G … | Continue reading
If you want to understand the history of art in twentieth-century America, you can’t overlook the corner of Fifth Avenue and 56th Street in New York City. No, not Trump Tower, but the building it replaced: Bonwit Teller, the luxury department store that had stood on the site sinc … | Continue reading