“Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28, 1986” first appeared in print in Tornado Alley, a chapbook published by William S. Burroughs in 1989. Two years later, Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting, My Own Private Idaho, Milk) shot a montage that brought the poem to film, making it at least the sec … | Continue reading
Alice’s Restaurant. It’s now a Thanksgiving classic, and something of a tradition around here. Recorded in 1967, the 18+ minute counterculture song recounts Arlo Guthrie’s real encounter with the law, starting on Thanksgiving Day 1965. As the long song unfolds, we hear all about … | Continue reading
A heads up on a deal: Between now and November 28 2022, Coursera is offering a $100 discount on its annual subscription plan called “Coursera Plus.” Normally priced at $399, Coursera Plus (now available for $299) gives you access to 7,000+ world-class courses for one all-inclusiv … | Continue reading
Americans today can acquire every element of their Thanksgiving dinner practically ready to eat, in need of little more than some heat before being set on the table. This very Thursday, in fact, many Americans will no doubt do just that. But it wasn’t an option two centuries ago, … | Continue reading
The Youtube channel GlamourDaze invites you to time travel back to a sunny beach in roaring 20s Biarritz France. And, to help you along, they’ve enhanced the original 1928 video with AI technology. Setting the stage, they write: By the 1920’s, the coastal resort of Biarritz on th … | Continue reading
FYI: Masterclass is getting an early jump on the holiday sales, running a Buy One, Share One Free deal. Here’s the gist: If you buy an All-Access pass to their 180+ courses, you will receive another All-Access Pass to give to someone else at no additional charge. An All-Access pa … | Continue reading
Every moving image we watch today descends, in a sense, from the work of Eadweard Muybridge. In the 1870s he devised a method of photographing the movements of animals, a study he expanded to humans in the 1880s. This constituted a leap toward the development of cinema, though yo … | Continue reading
The nineteen-seventies had its own distinctive aesthetics, questionable though that period’s styles have often looked to subsequent generations. So, in stark, jagged, neon contrast, did the eighties. Those of us who came of age in the nineties have, in recent years, come to appre … | Continue reading
We may not know for sure the identity of Banksy, the English street artist famous for his social-commentary graffiti murals inspired and integrated with their surroundings. But given his apparent interests, we might have suspected him to turn up in Ukraine sooner or later. Recent … | Continue reading
If you follow us on Twitter, and if you’re concerned about the mounting levels of chaos inside the company, then find us on Mastodon, where we now also share our daily posts, plus favorites from our archive. You can start following Open Culture on Mastodon here, or get our posts … | Continue reading
The B-52s‘ debut single “Rock Lobster” brought the party and a playful sense of the absurd to New Wave. The New York Times nailed the band’s appeal as “70s punks molded not from the syringes and leather of New York City, but from the campy detritus you might have found in the thr … | Continue reading
Historical research reveals psychoactive substances to have been in use longer than most of us would assume. But did Adam and Eve do mushrooms in the Garden of Eden? Unsurprisingly, that question is fraught on more than one level. But if you wish to believe that they did, spend s … | Continue reading
When you think “Jungleland,” you think of Clarence Clemons and his iconic sax solo, which stretches on over two glorious minutes. It’s hard to imagine anyone else playing that solo. But, after Clarence’s death in 2011, the honors went, fittingly, to his nephew Jake, who joined th … | Continue reading
Those who have only casually appreciated Brian Eno‘s music may not think of him as a singer. Given that his best-known solo recording Music for Airports not only has no lyrics but contains few recognizable instruments, that perception makes a certain amount of sense. Still, it’s … | Continue reading
Two and a half years ago, we featured the concept art for Studio Ghibli’s theme park here on Open Culture, and just two weeks ago it opened its doors. Located on the grounds of Expo 2005 in Japan’s Aichi Prefecture (a three- to four-hour train trip west from Tokyo, or a two-hour … | Continue reading
The first compact discs and players came out in October of 1982. That means the format is now 40 years old, which in turn means that most avid music-listeners have never known a world without it. In fact, all of today’s teenagers — that most musically avid demographic — were born … | Continue reading
When considering whether to buy yet another book, you might well ask yourself when you’ll get around to reading it. But perhaps there are other, even more important considerations, such as the intellectual value of the book in its still-unread state. In our personal libraries we … | Continue reading
“By the time of his death”—almost two years before, in fact—“Van Gogh’s work had begun to attract critical attention,” writes the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who point out that Van Gogh’s works shown “at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris between 1888 and 1890 and with Les XX in … | Continue reading
When Joni Mitchell heard the great cabaret artist Mabel Mercer in concert, she was so struck by the older woman’s rendition of “Both Sides Now,” the enduring ballad Mitchell wrote at the tender age of 23, that she went backstage to show her appreciation: … but I didn’t tell her t … | Continue reading
Big Think uploaded the video on how to argue above at the end of last month, just in time for the United States midterm election. Where politics — or rather, politically inflected conflicts — have become more or less another national sport, everyone is always looking for an edge. … | Continue reading
William Shakespeare’s plays have endured not just because of their inherent dramatic and linguistic qualities, but also because each era has found its own way of envisioning and re-envisioning them. The technology involved in stage productions has changed over the past four centu … | Continue reading
There’s a passage from Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions that crosses our desk a lot at this time of year. It’s the one in which he declares Armistice Day, which coincidentally falls on his birthday, sacred: What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance. And all mu … | Continue reading
The popularity of the phrase “style over substance” has encouraged us to assume an inherent and absolute divide between those concepts. But as the most ambitious works of man remind us, style pushed to its limits its substance, and vice versa. This truth has been expressed in var … | Continue reading
Few countries love cats as much as Japan does, and none expresses that love so clearly in its various forms of art. Though not eternal, the Japanese inclination toward all things feline does extend deeper into history than some of us might assume. “In the sixth century, Buddhist … | Continue reading
If you have a question about coffee, James Hoffmann probably has an answer. The author of The World Atlas of Coffee, Hoffmann has developed a robust YouTube channel where he explores the ins-and-outs of making coffee–from how to buy great coffee, to making excellent coffee with T … | Continue reading
The Sony Librie, the first e-reader to use a modern electronic-paper screen, came out in 2004. Old as that is in tech years, the basic idea of a handheld device that can store large amounts of text stretches at least eight decades farther back in history. Witness the Fiske Readin … | Continue reading
Even by the extreme standards of dystopian fiction, the premise of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 can seem a little absurd. Firemen whose job is to set fires? A society that bans all books? Written less than a decade after the fall of the Third Reich, which announced its evil inte … | Continue reading
During his final decade, Friedrich Nietzsche’s worsening constitution continued to plague the philosopher. In addition to having suffered from incapacitating indigestion, insomnia, and migraines for much of his life, the 1880s brought about a dramatic deterioration in Nietzsche’s … | Continue reading
Drink our coffee. Or else. That’s the message of these curiously sadistic TV commercials produced by Jim Henson between 1957 and 1961. Henson made 179 ten-second spots for Wilkins Coffee, a regional company with distribution in the Baltimore-Washington D.C. market, according to t … | Continue reading
No cultural tour of Glasgow could be complete without a visit to the Britannia Panopticon, the world’s oldest surviving music hall. “Converted from warehouse to music hall in 1857 and licensed in 1859, the Britannia Music Hall entertained Glasgow’s working classes for nearly 80 y … | Continue reading
Mushrooms have quietly become superstars of the global stage. Sure, not everyone likes them on pizza, but who cares? In the 21st-century, they are hailed as role models and potential planet savers (not to mention a wildly popular design motif…) Time-lapse cinematography pioneer L … | Continue reading
The danger of enjoying jazz is the possibility of letting ourselves slide into the assumption that we understand it. To do so would make no more sense than believing that, say, an enjoyment of listening to records automatically transmits an understanding of record players. One lo … | Continue reading
“Old paint on a canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent,” playwright Lillian Hellman observed in Pentimento, the second volume of her memoirs. “When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman's dress, a chi … | Continue reading
Nobody interested in comics can pass through Amsterdam without visiting Lambiek. Having opened in 1968 as the third comic-book shop in human history, it now survives as the oldest one still in existence. But even those without a trip to the Netherlands lined up can easily marvel … | Continue reading
The oldest known writing systems first emerged in Mesopotamia, between 3400 and 3100 BC, and Egypt, around 3250 BC. The Latin alphabet, which I'm using to write this post and you're using to read it, gradually took the shape we know between the seventh century BC and the Middle A … | Continue reading
Do you swoon at the sight of blood?Suffer paper cuts as major trauma?Cover your eyes when the knife comes out in the horror movie? | Continue reading
You can be forgiven for thinking the concept of “flow” was cooked up and popularized by yoga teachers. That word gets a lot of play when one is moving from Downward-Facing Dog on through Warrior One and Two. | Continue reading
Turbulent Indigo. “I was in a losing fight with a business that basically, you know, was treating me like an also-ran or a has-been, even though I was still doing good work,' she told an interviewer at the time. | Continue reading
Download 1,700 free courses from Stanford, Yale, MIT, Harvard, Berkeley and other great universities to your computer or mobile device. Over 45,000 hours of free audio & video lectures. | Continue reading
Earlier this week we featured Sergei Bondarchuk's four-part film adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. | Continue reading
Before our eyes, Japanese artist Kenichi Kanazawa creates crisp shapes and geometric patterns with no special tools but sand and sound, the kind of work that at first looks expressly designed to go viral on social media. But he's been at it much longer than that: | Continue reading
Regular readers of Open Culture know a thing or two about maps if they've paid attention to our posts on the history of cartography, the evolution of world maps (and why they are all wrong), and the many digital collections of historical maps from all over the world. | Continue reading
Hydrogen-powered cars. Biological, then quantum computing. Gene-therapy cancer treatments. An end to the War on Drugs. Reliable automatic translation. The impending end of the nation-state. Man setting foot on Mars. | Continue reading
Beksinski seems to believe art to be a forewarning about the fragility of the flesh -- whatever pleasures we know are doomed to perish -- thus, his paintings manage to evoke at once the process of decay and the ongoing struggle for life. | Continue reading
The subway is a marvel of engineering, and so is the modern subway map.For the first 25 years of its existence, London Underground riders relied on a map that reflected the actual distance between stations, as well as rivers, parks, and other aboveground phenomena. | Continue reading
Did Bram Stoker’s world-famous Dracula character—perhaps the most culturally unkillable of all horror monsters—derive from Irish folklore? | Continue reading
Image via The British Museum We marvel today at what we consider the wonders of ancient Egypt, but at some point, they all had to have been built by people more or less like ourselves. | Continue reading
Creative Commons image via Wikimedia CommonsArtist and music producer Brian Eno wrote one of my very favorite books: A Year with Swollen Appendices, which takes the form of his personal diary of the year 1995 with essayistic chapters (the 'swollen appendices') on topics like 'edg … | Continue reading