The history of the printed word is full of bibliographic twists and turns, major historical moments, and the significant printing of books now so obscure no one has read them since their publication. | Continue reading
According to Freud, neurotics never know what they want, and so never know when they’ve got it. So it is with the seeker after fluent cultural literacy, who must always play catch-up to an impossible ideal. | Continue reading
Poor Kafka, born too early to blame his writer’s block on 21st-century digital excuses: social media addiction, cell phone addiction, streaming video | Continue reading
To be a non-believer in some parts of the world, and in much of Europe for many centuries, means to commit a crime against the state. | Continue reading
We all have bodies, but how many of us truly know our way around them? | Continue reading
Too often those in power lump thousands of years of Middle Eastern religion and culture into monolithic entities to be feared or persecuted. But at least one government institution is doing exactly the opposite. | Continue reading
Another man insults your honor, leaving you no choice but to challenge him to a highly formalized fight to the death: in the 21st century, the very idea strikes us as almost incomprehensibly of the past. | Continue reading
In all the kingdom of nature, does any creature threaten us less than the gentle rabbit? | Continue reading
Alien came out 40 years ago this month, not that its age shows in the least. | Continue reading
Religions take the cast and hue of the cultures in which they find root. This was certainly true in Tibet when Buddhism arrived in the 7th century. It transformed and was transformed by the native religion of Bon. | Continue reading
In the image above, we see a slice of an impressive pre-internet macro-infographic called a “Histomap.' Its creator John B. Sparks (who later created “histomaps” of religion and evolution) published the graphic in 1931 with Rand McNally. | 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
During the 1950s, a researcher gave an artist two 50-microgram doses of LSD (each dose separated by about an hour), and then the artist was encouraged to draw pictures of the doctor who administered the drugs. Nine portraits were drawn over the space of eight hours. | Continue reading
Burroughs met John and Mary Cooke, two founding members of the church who had been trying to recruit Burroughs’ friend and frequent artistic partner Brion Gysin. | Continue reading
We can learn much about how a historical period viewed the abilities of its children by studying its children's literature. | Continue reading
Zack Graham at GQ did not recommend Giant Steps nor A Love Supreme nor Blue Train nor My Favorite Things as the most important album in the artist’s career, but a record most casual jazz fans may never encounter, and which even the hardest-core Coltrane fans never heard in his li … | Continue reading
Discover 800+ Fee MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) by great universities -- Harvard, Stanford. MIT, etc. Most offer | Continue reading
Image by Thierry Ehrmann via Flickr CommonsSometimes when confronted with strange new ideas, people will exclaim, “you must be on drugs!”—a charge often levied at philosophers by those who would rather dismiss their ideas as hallucinations than take them seriously. | Continue reading
In many an audio engineering course, I’ve come across the Fourier Transform, an idea so fundamental in sound production that it seems essential for everyone to know it. My limited understanding was, you might say, functional. | Continue reading
In 1919, German architect Walter Gropius founded Bauhaus, the most influential art school of the 20th century. Bauhaus defined modernist design and radically changed our relationship with everyday objects. | Continue reading
Whether your interest is in winning arguments online or considerably deepening your knowledge of world cultural and intellectual history, you will be very well-served by at least one government agency from now into the foreseeable future. | Continue reading
Earlier this year we informed readers that thousands of works of art and entertainment would soon enter the public domain—to be followed every year by thousands more. That day is nigh upon us: Public Domain Day, January 1, 2019. | Continue reading
If you wanted to know what life was really like in the Cold War Soviet Union, you might take the word of an émigré Russian writer. | Continue reading
Each day in the 2010s, it seems, brings another startling development in the field of artificial intelligence — a field widely written off not all that long ago as a dead end. | Continue reading
To what writer, besides Ayn Rand, do the business-minded techies and tech-minded businessmen of 21st-century Silicon Valley look for their inspiration? | Continue reading
Image by Arielle Fragassi, via Flickr CommonsIn May of 1967,” writes Patrick Iber at The Awl, “a former CIA officer named Tom Braden published a confession in the Saturday Evening Post under the headline, ‘I’m glad the CIA is ‘immoral.’” With the hard-boiled tone one might expect … | Continue reading
When you hear the words “protest song,” what do you see? Is it a folkie like Bob Dylan or Joan Baez delivering songs about injustice? Is it an earnest young thing with a guitar? Is it trapped in 1960s amber, while time has moved on to more ambiguity, more nihilism, more solipsism … | Continue reading
The Nazis may not have known art, but they knew what they liked, and much more so what they didn't. We've previously featured here on Open Culture the “Degenerate Art Exhibition” of 1937, put on by Hitler's party four years after it rose to power. | Continue reading
When we think of the Apollo missions, we tend to think of images, especially those broadcast on television during the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. | Continue reading
According to Leonard Cohen, songwriting is a lonely business, but there’s nothing for it, he sings in “Tower of Song,” when you’re “born with the gift of a golden voice' and when “twenty-seven angels from the Great Beyond” tie you to a table and make you write. | Continue reading
Somewhere in the annals of the internet--if this sprawling, near-sentient thing we call the internet actually has annals--there is a fine, fine quote by filmmaker John Waters. | Continue reading
The Big Lebowski came out 20 years ago. | Continue reading
Japanese animation, AKA anime, might be filled with large-eyed maidens, way cool robots, and large-eyed, way cool maiden/robot hybrids, but it often shows a level of daring, complexity and creativity not typically found in American mainstream animation. | Continue reading
For most of us, making a list of our favorite albums involves no small amount of nostalgia. We remember highlights from high school and college: songs on constant rotation after breakups and during summers of bliss. | Continue reading
As an English major undergrad in the 90s, I had a keen side interest in reading philosophy of all kinds. But I had little sense of what I should be reading. I browsed the library shelves, picking out what caught my attention. | Continue reading
We all learn the names, locations, and even characteristics of the oceans in school. But unless we go into oceanography or some other body-of-water-centric profession, few of us keep them at our command. | Continue reading
The connections we make between various philosophers and philosophical schools are often connections that have already been made for us by teachers and scholars on our paths through higher education. | Continue reading
Back in the 1990s I'd often run across volumes of the Unuseless Japanese Inventions series at bookstores. | Continue reading
We've had hundreds and hundreds of years to get used to money in the form of coins and bills, though exactly how long we've used them varies quite a bit from region to region. | Continue reading
Photo via the British LibraryIf you’re a British history buff, next month is an ideal time to be in London for the British Library’s “once-in-a-generation exhibition” Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: | Continue reading
In South Korea, where I live, the Talmud is a bestseller. | Continue reading
There are only two kinds of story, holds a quote often attributed to Leo Tolstoy: a man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. | Continue reading
Most people’s to-do lists are, almost by definition, pretty dull, filled with those quotidian little tasks that tend to slip out of our minds. Pick up the laundry. Get that thing for the kid. Buy milk, canned yams and kumquats at the local market. | Continue reading
In high school, the language I most fell in love with happened to be a dead one: Latin. Sure, it’s spoken at the Vatican, and when I first began to study the tongue of Virgil and Catullus, friends joked that I could only use it if I moved to Rome. | Continue reading
Many of us now use the word hobo to refer to any homeless individual, but back in the America of the late 19th and early 20th century, to be a hobo meant something more. | Continue reading
“Cartography was not born full-fledged as a science or even an art,” wrote map historian Lloyd Brown in 1949. “It evolved slowly and painfully from obscure origins.” Many ancient maps made no attempt to reproduce actual geography but served as abstract visual representations of p … | Continue reading
“Jorge Luis Borges 1951, by Grete Stern” by Grete Stern (1904-1999). Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.Jorge Luis Borges’ terse, mind-expanding stories reshaped modern fiction. | Continue reading
We know that depression affects people from all walks of life. Rich. Poor. Celebs. Ordinary Joes. Young. Old. But, somehow after the death of Robin Williams, there's a renewed focus on depression, and my mind turned immediately to a lecture we featured on the site way back in 200 … | Continue reading