No matter how little we know of the Hindu religion, a line from one of its holy scriptures lives within us all: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” This is one facet of the legacy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, an American theoretical physicist who left an outsized mark … | Continue reading
Wes Anderson’s latest picture Asteroid City is named for the small Arizona town (population: 87) in which its central story takes place. That town, in turn, is named for the incident that made it (modestly) famous: the impact of an asteroid that left behind a large crater. That c … | Continue reading
It should go without saying that one should drink responsibly, for reasons pertaining to life and limb as well as reputation. The ubiquity of still and video cameras means potentially embarrassing moments can end up on millions of screens in an instant, copied, downloaded, and sa … | Continue reading
The City of London has exploded like Blade Runner in the last couple of decades with glass and concrete and shrines to global capitalism like St. Mary Axe (aka the Gherkin) and the Shard (aka the Shard). But has the view from the ground stayed the same? According to this charming … | Continue reading
Seven decades after his death, George Bernard Shaw is remembered for his prodigious body of work as a playwright, but also — and at least as much — for his personal eccentricities: the then-unfashionable teetotaling vegetarianism, the rejection of vaccines and even the germ theor … | Continue reading
We’ve all come across a LEGO set from childhood and felt the temptation to try building it one more time — making the generous assumption, of course, that all the pieces are in the box, to say nothing of the instructions. If you’re missing a few bricks, you can always turn to the … | Continue reading
If you think cannabis possesses a broad range of applications, olive oil is going to blow your mind! Humans have been hip to this miracle elixir since approximately 2500 BCE, when Mediterranean dwellers used it as lamp fuel and to anoint royalty, warriors, and other VIPs. (Not fo … | Continue reading
Ridley Scott’s 1977 film The Duellists stars Harvey Keitel and Keith Carradine as Frenchmen in the early nineteenth century. Both of their characters are military officers, Keitel’s a Bonapartist and Carradine’s an anti-Bonapartist, and their relationship plays out over a duel-pu … | Continue reading
The art of Keith Haring emerged in the highly specific place and time of early-eighties New York City. Four decades later, it’s visible all around the world, yet hasn’t lost its associations with its origins. Just the other day, I was walking down a street in my neighborhood in S … | Continue reading
We dare not speculate as to what Leonardo DaVinci would make of artificial intelligence. We are, however, fairly confident that he would love the Internet. The Renaissance-era genius applied his sophisticated understanding of the human body and the natural world to other types of … | Continue reading
Of all the Romance languages, none is more Romantic than Italian, at least in the sense that it has changed the least in its long descent from Latin to its current form. Whether the Italian spoken in recent centuries has a particularly close resemblance to Latin is another questi … | Continue reading
To raise awareness of her native language, 16-year-old Emma Stevens sang a version of The Beatles’ 1968 classic “Blackbird” in the Mi’kmaq language, an Eastern Algonquian language spoken by nearly 11,000 in Canada and the United States. A member of the Eskasoni First Nation, the … | Continue reading
As Twitter decays, we want to remind you that you can find posts from Open Culture on other social media platforms. Find us now on Threads, where have 900+ followers in the first 24 hours. We’re also on Mastodon, Post, Blue Sky, and Facebook. Or get our daily email newsletter. Pi … | Continue reading
Wes Anderson lives at least part-time in Paris, a situation whose advantages include the ability to frequent JM Vidéo, one of the very few cinephile-oriented video-rental shops still in business. His apartment is on rue Daguerre, which would make it a bit of a trek — across the S … | Continue reading
Japan’s 19th-century kimonos blur the lines between art and fashion. Meiji era customers could browse hinagata-bon, traditionally bound pattern books, on visits to drapers and fabric merchants. These colorful volumes offered a glamorous update of the Edo period’s black-and-white … | Continue reading
The standard tour of Paris feels like a journey back through time: the Eiffel Tower stands for the eighteen-eighties, the Arc de Triomphe for the turn of the nineteenth century, Les Invalides for the turn of the eighteenth century, Notre-Dame for the mid-fourteenth century, Saint … | Continue reading
All of us have, at one time or another, been accused of not seeing what’s right in front of us. But as a close examination of our biological visual system reveals, none of us can see what’s right in front of us. “Our eyes have blind spots where the optic nerve blocks part of the … | Continue reading
Every year on this day, Frederick Douglass’s fiery, uncompromising 1852 speech, “The Meaning of July 4th for the Negro,” gets a new hearing, and takes on added resonance in the context of contemporary politics. It has never ceased to speak directly to those for whom the celebrati … | Continue reading
In 1939, Igor Stravinsky emigrated to the United States, first arriving in New York City, before settling in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he delivered the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard during the 1939-40 academic year. While living in Boston, the composer conducted … | Continue reading
For most of us, the title The Shining first calls to mind the Stanley Kubrick film, not the Stephen King novel from which it was adapted. Though it would be an exaggeration to say that the former has entirely eclipsed the latter, the enormous difference between the works’ relativ … | Continue reading
The forecasted rain held off, the poor air quality caused by Canadian wildfires had abated, and the world’s largest Pride parade stepped off without incident in New York City on the final Sunday in June. It’s grown quite a bit since the last Sunday of June 1970, when Christopher … | Continue reading
Paul Klee led an artistic life that spanned the 19th and 20th centuries, but he kept his aesthetic sensibility tuned to the future. Because of that, much of the Swiss-German Bauhaus-associated painter’s work, which at its most distinctive defines its own category of abstraction, … | Continue reading
When first we start learning a new foreign language, any number of its elements rise up to frustrate us, even to dissuade us from going any further: the mountain of vocabulary to be acquired, the grammar in which to orient ourselves, the details of pronunciation to get our mouths … | Continue reading
The earliest known works of Japanese art date from the Jōmon period, which lasted from 10,500 to 300 BC. In fact, the period’s very name comes from the patterns its potters created by pressing twisted cords into clay, resulting in a predecessor of the “wave patterns” that have be … | Continue reading
Archaeologists digging in Pompeii have unearthed a fresco containing what may be a “distant ancestor” of the modern pizza. The fresco features a platter with wine, fruit, and a piece of flat focaccia. According to Pompeii archaeologists, the focaccia doesn’t have tomatoes and moz … | Continue reading
Every artist explores dimensions of space and place, orienting themselves and their works in the world, and orienting their audiences. Then there are artists like Vincent van Gogh, who make space and place a primary subject. In his early paintings of peasant homes and fields, his … | Continue reading
If you haven’t yet seen Wes Anderson’s new movie Asteroid City, I recommend doing so not just in the theater, but in a seat as close to the screen as you can handle. You’ll feel more enveloped by the desert landscapes (the Spanish desert, standing in for Arizona), but you’ll also … | Continue reading
In Rome, one doesn’t have to look terribly hard to find ancient buildings. But even in the Eternal City, not all ancient buildings have come down to us in equally good shape, and practically none of them have held up as well as the Pantheon. Once a Roman temple and now a Catholic … | Continue reading
A funny thing happened on the way to the 15th century… Dr. James Wade, a specialist in early English literature at the University of Cambridge, was doing research at the National Library of Scotland when he noticed something extraordinary about the first of the nine miscellaneous … | Continue reading
What could be more charmingly idyllic than a glimpse of snowy-bearded Impressionist Claude Monet calmly painting en plein-air in his garden at Giverny? A wide-brimmed hat and two luxuriously large patio-type umbrellas provide shade, while the artist stays cool in a pristine white … | Continue reading
We all know music when we hear it — or at least we think we do — but how, exactly, do we define it? “Imagine you’re in a jazz club, listening to the rhythmic honking of horns,” says the narrator of the animated TED-Ed video above. “Most people would agree that this is music. But … | Continue reading
According to NPR, “Caffeine is the most widely consumed drug in the world. Here in the U.S., according to a 2022 survey, more than 93% of adults consume caffeine, and of those, 75% consume caffeine at least once a day.” Given the prevalence of coffee worldwide, it pays to ask a s … | Continue reading
In 1981, the philosopher Mary Midgley argued against cultural relativism in an article titled “Trying Out One’s New Sword.” In it, she makes reference to “a verb in classical Japanese which means ‘to try out one’s new sword on a chance wayfarer.’ (The word is tsujigiri, literally … | Continue reading
Joseph Merrick, one of the most severely deformed individuals recorded in medical history, would hardly seem like the role David Bowie was born to play. The latter looked and acted as if destined for nineteen-seventies rock stardom; the former so horrified his fellow Victorians t … | Continue reading
Since 2021, Google has released a steady stream of online courses designed to help students earn a professional certificate in six months and land an entry-level job. Early on, Google developed certificate programs in five professional areas: User Experience (UX) Design, Data Ana … | Continue reading
The Tarot has long been a tool of charlatans. But it has also long been embraced by brilliant, unconventional thinkers, many of whom themselves have a touch of the charlatan about them (and who would just as likely admit it with a smile). William Butler Yeats was a fan, as is vis … | Continue reading
Ecce panis—try your hand at the kind of loaf that Mel Brooks’ 2000-year-old man might have sunk his teeth into. Literally. In 1930 a loaf of bread dating to AD 79 (the year Vesuvius claimed two prosperous Roman towns) was excavated from the site of a bakery in Herculaneum. Eighty … | Continue reading
Here on Open Culture, we’ve featured ancient wind instruments going back 9,000, 18,000, even 43,000 years. Just this month, archaeological research has just added a new item to this venerable lineup: a set of 12,000-year-old flutes made from the bones of birds. “The instruments a … | Continue reading
In 1835, the New England Institution for Education of the Blind (now known as Perkins School for the Blind) acquired a printing press. Under the leadership of its first director, Samuel Gridley Howe, the press was customized in order to print in raised text that allowed blind and … | Continue reading
I will die from the heat, take me home. I will make my own Pool. – Henri Matisse Representing water is an elusive proposition for many artists, especially when it’s not posing placidly on a windless, moonlit evening. In the summer of 1952, Henri Matisse headed to a favorite Canne … | Continue reading
Nobody who keeps up with current discourse could fail to notice that gender has become a fraught topic in recent years. This condition can hardly have gone unforeseen by the theorist Judith Butler, who published the now-well-known volume Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversio … | Continue reading
Brian Eno famously said of the Velvet Underground that, though their debut album didn’t sell well, everyone who bought a copy started a band. One could, perhaps, make a similar remark about a new wave band called The Plastics, who formed a decade or so later on the other side of … | Continue reading
Almost all of ancient literature is lost to us, as classical-history Youtuber Garrett Ryan explains in a video previously featured here on Open Culture. But we have even less ancient music, given that form’s essential ephemerality as well as the not-inconsiderable fact that the a … | Continue reading
In 1960, The Shirelles became the first Black female group to have a #1 US hit with “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?“. The song also represented a big break for its composer, 17-year-old Carole King, and her then-husband, lyricist Gerry Goffin. The two set up shop in New York City’s … | Continue reading
Beginning in the late seventeenth century, aristocratic Englishmen or continental Europeans came of age and went on a Grand Tour. Lasting anything from few a months to a few years, such trips were meant directly to expose their young takers to the legacy of the Renaissance and an … | Continue reading
Note: Today novelist Cormac McCarthy (All the Pretty Horses, The Road and No Country for Old Men) passed away at the age of 89. Below, we’re revisiting a favorite post from our archive that focuses on punctuation, a distinctive element of McCarthy’s writing. Cormac McCarthy has b … | Continue reading
The narrow “toothbrush mustache” caught on in the late nineteenth century, first in the United States and soon thereafter across the Atlantic. When Charlie Chaplin put one on for a film in 1914, he became its most famous wearer — at least until Adolf Hitler rose to prominence a c … | Continue reading
In the New York of old, “one entered the city like a god. One scuttles in now like a rat.” When he wrote those words, architectural historian Vincent Scully issued what has ended up as the definitive judgment of Pennsylvania Station. Or rather, of the Pennsylvania Stations: the m … | Continue reading