Despite the dourest demeanor in literary history and a series of plays and novels set in the bleakest of conditions, there’s no doubt that Samuel Beckett was foremost a comic writer. Indeed, it is because of these things that he remains a singularly great comic writer. | Continue reading
The science of optics and the fine art of science illustration arose together in Europe, from the early black-and-white color wheel drawn by Isaac Newton in 1704 to the brilliantly hand-colored charts and diagrams of Goethe in 1810. | Continue reading
If Charles Bukowski were alive today, what would you ask him? | Continue reading
We might think we have a general grasp of the period in European history immortalized in theme restaurant form as 'Medieval Times.' After all, writes Amy White at Medievalists.net, “from tattoos to video games to Game of Thrones, medieval iconography has long inspired fascination … | Continue reading
Presenting a keynote address at an ADL conference, comedian Sacha Baron Cohen wasn't kidding around when he painted a bleak picture of our emerging world: 'Today ... demagogues appeal to our worst instincts. Conspiracy theories once confined to the fringe are going mainstream. | Continue reading
You can create music with Tesla coils if you know how to modulate their 'break rate' with MIDI data and a control unit. Case in point. | Continue reading
You'll get a charge out this picture taken long ago. It captures Mark Twain, a literary giant of the 19th century, tinkering in the laboratory of the great inventor, Nikola Tesla. | Continue reading
Peter Thiel has many claims to fame in Silicon Valley. He co-founded PayPal in 1998, before selling it to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. He later launched various hedge funds, and made early investments in Facebook. | Continue reading
Download 1,300 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
Cormac McCarthy has been—as one 1965 reviewer of his first novel, The Orchard Tree, dubbed him—a “disciple of William Faulkner.' He makes admirable use of Faulknerian traits in his prose, and I'd always assumed he inherited his punctuation style from Faulkner as well. | Continue reading
Perhaps the most well-read writer on his time, English poet John Milton “knew the biblical languages, along with Homer’s Greek and Vergil’s Latin,” notes the NYPL. He likely had Dante’s Divine Comedy in mind when he wrote Paradise Lost. | Continue reading
Despite his respected facility with the English language, Argentine master craftsman of short fiction Jorge Luis Borges did his best work in his native Spanish. Though we remember prolific interviewer and even more prolific writer William F. | Continue reading
Lawrence of Arabia, they don't talk about the details of the plot,' writes Roger Ebert in his 'Great Movies' column on the 1962 David Lean epic. | Continue reading
Katy Waldman in a recent New York Times Magazine piece. 'Think of T.S. | Continue reading
No amount of continuous repeats in coffeeshops around the world can dull the crystalline brilliance of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue one bit. | Continue reading
Many of us grade the books we read, but Kurt Vonnegut graded the books he wrote. | Continue reading
For some of us, it’s been a little while since college days. For others of us, it’s been a little while longer. | Continue reading
Think of the name Buckminster Fuller, and you may think of a few oddities of mid-twentieth-century design for living: the Dymaxion House, the Dymaxion Car, the geodesic dome. | Continue reading
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