We know more or less everything we could possibly know about ancient Egyptian civilization. That owes in large part to the advanced state of record-keeping it achieved, and how many of its writings have survived, up to and including — as previously featured here on Open Culture — … | Continue reading
In 1964—a year before the release of A Charlie Brown Christmas—Vince Guaraldi gave the first televised performance of “Linus and Lucy.” Filmed for public television, the performance featured Guaraldi on piano, Tom Beeson on bass, and John Rae on drums. Long unseen, this 1964 perf … | Continue reading
The age of social media has shown humanity a fair few truths about itself, not all of them flattering. But once in a while, one of the waves of discourse that roll through the internet really does help us better understand one another. Take the surprise some have expressed in rec … | Continue reading
Few professionals tend to live as long, or mature as slowly, as architects. Frank Gehry died late last year at the formidable age of 96, with several projects still under construction. But he’d only really been Frank Gehry for the past half-century or so: not in the sense of havi … | Continue reading
Khipus, the portable information archives created by the Inca, may stir up memories of 1970s macrame with their long strands of intricately knotted, earth-toned fibers, but their function more closely resembled that of a densely plotted computerized spreadsheet. As Cecilia Pardo- … | Continue reading
“The three volumes of Green’s Dictionary of Slang demonstrate the sheer scope of a lifetime of research by Jonathon Green, the leading slang lexicographer of our time. A remarkable collection of this often reviled but endlessly fascinating area of the English language, it covers … | Continue reading
Image by Klaus Schmeh, via Wikimedia Commons Magyar, which is spoken and written in Hungary, ranks among the hardest European languages to learn. (The U.S. Foreign Service Institute puts it in the second-to-highest level, accompanied by the dreaded asterisk labeling it as “usuall … | Continue reading
Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) never saw a rhino himself, but by relying on eyewitness descriptions of the one King Manuel I of Portugal intended as a gift to the Pope, he managed to render a fairly realistic one, all things considered. Medieval artists’ rendering … | Continue reading
More than a few of us can claim, with some confidence, to know every Beatles song. And indeed it may be true, in that we’ve heard every track of all their studio albums. But as decade after decade of Beatles scholarship has demonstrated, there’s knowing their songs, and then ther … | Continue reading
Image via Wikimedia Commons On the off chance Lin-Manuel Miranda is casting around for source material for his next American history-based blockbuster musical, may we suggest American Cookery by “poor solitary orphan” Amelia Simmons? First published in 1796, at 47 pages (nearly t … | Continue reading
Last year, we featured here on Open Culture the story of how a samurai ended up in the unlikely setting of seventeenth-century Venice. But as compellingly told as it was in video essay form by Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter, it ended just as things were getting inte … | Continue reading
Photo by Al Aumuller, via Wikimedia Commons Like another famous Okie from Muskogee, Woody Guthrie came from a part of Oklahoma that the U.S. government sold during the 1889 land rush away from the Quapaw and Osage nations, as well as the Muscogee, a people who had been forcibly r … | Continue reading
Though his movies may have benefited greatly from foreign audiences and backers, David Lynch was one of the most thoroughly American of all filmmakers. “Born Missoula, MT,” declared his Twitter bio, yet one never really associates him with a particular place in the United States … | Continue reading
When the history books are written, we’ll remember the politicians, law firms, and CEOs who quickly bent the knee to Donald Trump. We’ll also remember the scant few American figures who refused to back down. Bruce Springsteen will be high on that short list. Touring in Europe las … | Continue reading
As mentioned here last week, Scott Galloway argued that Americans have one way to reverse the violent overreach of the federal government: launch a one-month economic strike aimed at major tech and AI companies, with the goal of reducing America’s GDP and making the markets wobbl … | Continue reading
Granted access to a time machine, few of us would presumably opt first for the experience of skull surgery by the Incas. Yet our chances of survival would be better than if we underwent the same procedure 400 years later, at least if it took place on a Civil War battlefield. In b … | Continue reading
If there’s a silver lining to our tumultuous times, it’s that musicians are reviving the protest song, a tradition that has withered since the end of the Vietnam War. Credence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son,” Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant,” Jimi Hendrix’s “Machine Gun”— … | Continue reading
Having previously considered whether comedians are the philosophers of our time, we must now ask whether they, too, build upon the work of other philosophers. Few of today’s most prominent funny men and women live a philosophical life — or have cultivated the temperament necessar … | Continue reading
Gladys Mae West was born in rural Virginia in 1930, grew up working on a tobacco farm, and died earlier this month a celebrated mathematician whose work made possible the GPS technology most of us use each and every day. Hers was a distinctively American life, in more ways than o … | Continue reading
Image via Wikimedia Commons In his 1935 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility,” influential German-Jewish critic Walter Benjamin introduced the term “aura” to describe an authentic experience of art. Aura relates to the physical proximity between object … | Continue reading
If you’ve heard Run‑D.M.C.‘s Raising Hell, Rage Against the Machine’s self-titled debut, Johnny Cash’s American Recordings, or Adele’s 21, you’ve heard the work of Rick Rubin. Yet even if you’ve listened closely to every song on which he’s been credited as a producer over the pas … | Continue reading
?si=2xjPU8WlS7Yk5tRI During her lifetime, the medieval abbess Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179) composed roughly 77 songs and hymns. She remains the earliest known woman composer in Western classical music and one of the most important composers of the High Middle Ages. In her hon … | Continue reading
Above, Scott Galloway and Kara Swisher explain how everyday Americans can push back against government overreach—by focusing on the economic decisions they make each day. “Trump does not respond to outrage. He responds to markets,” says Galloway. Ergo, it’s time for an “economic … | Continue reading
Image by Ahdi Agus Oktaviana Over the centuries, a variety of places have laid credible claim to being the world’s art center: Constantinople, Florence, Paris, New York. But on the scale of, say, ten millennia, the hot spots become rather less recognizable. Up until about 20,000 … | Continue reading
Image by Bernd Schwabe, via Wikimedia Commons At least when I was in grade school, we learned the very basics of how the Third Reich came to power in the early 1930s. Paramilitary gangs terrorizing the opposition, the incompetence and opportunism of German conservatives, the Reic … | Continue reading
The Renaissance did not, strictly speaking, occur in China. Yet it seems that the Middle Kingdom did have its Renaissance men, so to speak, and in much earlier times at that. We find one such illustrious figure in the Han dynasty of the first and second centuries: a statesman nam … | Continue reading
Un Chien Andalou means “an Andalusian dog,” though the much-studied 1929 short film of that title contains no dogs at all, from Andalusia or anywhere else. In fact, it alludes to a Spanish expression about how the howling of an Andalusian signals that someone has died. And indeed … | Continue reading
In 2004, the Brazilian musician Seu Jorge recorded a series of Portuguese covers of David Bowie songs for Wes Anderson’s film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. The next year, he released a full album of 13 Bowie classics, and in 2016–2017, he even took the songs on tour. Now, i … | Continue reading
Buckminster Fuller was, in many ways, a twenty-first century man: an achievement in itself, considering he was born in the nineteenth century and died in the twentieth. In fact, it may actually count as his defining achievement. For all the inventions presented as revolutionary t … | Continue reading
?si=4AEj95O5wdpShG3I FYI: Sesame Street has released on YouTube more than 140 full episodes from past seasons. On the Sesame Street Classics channel, you’ll find some iconic episodes, starting with the very first 1969 broadcast. Watch it above. Also on that same channel you can r … | Continue reading
Though it’s easily forgotten in our age of air travel and instantaneous global communication, many a great city is located where it is because of a river. That holds true everywhere from London to Buenos Aires to Tokyo to New York — and even to Los Angeles, despite its own once-u … | Continue reading
The story, the many stories, of Miles Davis as an opening act for several rock bands in the 1970s makes for fascinating reading. Before he blew the Grateful Dead’s minds as their opening act at the Fillmore West in April 1970 (hear both bands’ sets here), Davis and his all-star Q … | Continue reading
When Netflix launched around the turn of the millennium, it was received as a godsend by many American cinephiles, especially those who lived nowhere near diversely programmed revival houses or well-curated video stores. A quarter-century later, it’s safe to say that those days h … | Continue reading
I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me. — Winston Churchill Winston Churchill had a reputation as a brilliant statesman and a prodigious drinker. The former prime minister imbibed throughout the day, every day. He also burned through 10 daily cigars, a … | Continue reading
MTV still exists. At least, it still exists in the United States, or in certain of that country’s markets, for the time being. A flurry of premature obituaries recently blew through the internet after the announcement that the network had shut down in other parts of the world, Eu … | Continue reading
Think back, if you will, to the works of art you created at age twelve or thirteen. For many, perhaps most of us, our output at that stage of adolescence amounted to directionless doodles, chaotic comics, and a few unsteady-at-best school projects. But then, most of us didn’t gro … | Continue reading
In our experience, bird lovers fall into two general categories: Keenly observant cataloguers like John James Audubon … And those of us who cannot resist assigning anthropomorphic personalities and behaviors to the 435 stars of Audubon’s The Birds of America, a stunning collectio … | Continue reading
Imagine, if you will, taking a seat at the piano before a full house of 2,000 music lovers ready to hear Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor — and, more importantly, on stage with an orchestra and conductor more than ready to play it. That would be difficult enough, but now … | Continue reading
Formed in 1965, the Doors burned hot until Jim Morrison died in 1971, and the band finally broke up in 1973. The group left behind more than a few fine songs—“Light My Fire,” “Break On Through (To the Other Side),” “L.A. Woman,” and “Roadhouse Blues,” to name a few. Above, the mu … | Continue reading
Humanity was already enjoying motion pictures a century ago. But the ability to do so at home still lay a few decades in the future, and the ability to pull up a movie on demand through a streaming service much further still. Young people in the twenty-twenties may be unable to f … | Continue reading
One potential drawback of genius, it seems, is restlessness, a mind perpetually on the move. Of course, this is what makes many celebrated thinkers and artists so productive. That and the extra hours some gain by sacrificing sleep. Voltaire reportedly drank up to 50 cups of coffe … | Continue reading
The term surrealism — or rather, surréalisme — originates from the French words for “beyond reality.” That’s a zone, we may assume, reachable by only daring, and possibly unhinged, artistic minds. But in fact, even the most down-to-earth among us go beyond reality on a nightly ba … | Continue reading
?si=euaFB6jMJ_TPxRmf Down in Austin, Texas, music teacher Gavin Tabone leads the Barton Hills Choir, made up of 3rd- through 6th-grade students. Backed by professional musicians, the choir performs a wide-ranging mix of music, from classic pop and rock to indie songs by artists l … | Continue reading
Trevor Noah ended his stint as the host of The Daily Show a little over three years ago, but he’s made himself into another kind of pop-cultural presence since then. In evidence, we have his appearance above on the popular podcast and YouTube show Diary of a CEO. For more than tw … | Continue reading
As any new parent soon finds out, there exists a robust market for products, services, and media that promise to boost a child’s intelligence. Some of these offerings come as close as legally possible to holding out the promise of putting any tot on the path to genius, brazenly b … | Continue reading
As much as it is about every part of Dublin that ever passed by James Joyce’s once-young eyes, Ulysses is also a book about books, and about writing and speech—as mythic invocation, as seduction, chatter, and rhetoric, fulsome and empty. Words—two-faced, like open books—carry wit … | Continue reading
William Gibson famously observed that the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. That line is often thought to have been inspired by Japan, which was already projecting a thoroughly futuristic image, at least in popular culture, by the time he made his debut wi … | Continue reading
It took 90 years to complete. But, in 2011, scholars at the University of Chicago finally published a 21-volume dictionary of Akkadian, the language used in ancient Mesopotamia. Unspoken for 2,000 years, Akkadian was preserved on clay tablets and in stone inscriptions until schol … | Continue reading