The YouTube channel Lost in Time has taken footage from the legendary Lumière brothers, originally shot in 1896, then upscaled and colorized it, giving us a chance to see a distant world through a modern lens. Nearing the end of the 19th century, the film pioneers (and their empl … | Continue reading
Lawrence Fishburne brings a degree of gravity to his roles offered by few other living actors. That has secured his place in pop culture as Morpheus from The Matrix, for example. But he could even marshal it early in his career, as evidenced by his role as Apocalypse Now’s “Mr. C … | Continue reading
During World War II, Tokyo sustained heavy damage, especially with the bombings conducted by the U.S. military in March 1945. Known as Operation Meetinghouse, US air raids destroyed 16 square miles in central Tokyo, leaving 100,000 civilians dead and one million homeless. Tokyo d … | Continue reading
Launched by The New York Academy of Medicine Library in 2016, Color Our Collections is “an annual coloring festival on social media during which libraries, museums, archives and other cultural institutions around the world share free coloring content featuring images from their c … | Continue reading
For many, even most of us moderns, the central religious choice is a simple one: adhere to the belief system in which you grew up, or stop adhering to it. But if you survey the variety of religions in the world, the situation no longer seems quite so binary; if you then add the v … | Continue reading
The very words “Ellis Island” bring to mind a host of sepia-toned images, shaped by both American historical fact and national myth. Officers employed there really did inspect the eyelids of new arrivals with buttonhooks, for example, but they didn’t actually make a policy of cha … | Continue reading
From The Florida Museum of Natural History comes the openVertebrate project, a new initiative to “provide free, digital 3D vertebrate anatomy models and data to researchers, educators, students and the public.” Introducing the new project (otherwise known as oVert), the museum wr … | Continue reading
In less than a year and a half, the centenary of Antoni Gaudí’s death will be here. Faced with this fact, especially dedicated enthusiasts of Catalan architecture may already be planning their festivities. But we can be sure where the real pressure is felt: the Basílica i Temple … | Continue reading
In 1799, Napoleon’s army encountered a curious artifact in Egypt, a black stone that featured writing in three different languages: Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Demotic Egyptian, and Ancient Greek. Before long, English troops captured the stone and brought it to the British Museum in 18 … | Continue reading
Image by Anders Sandberg, via Wikimedia Commons Asked to imagine the character of everyday life in the Middle Ages, a young student in the twenty-twenties might well reply, before getting around to any other details, that it involved no smartphones. But even the flashiest new tec … | Continue reading
The Book of Colour Concepts will soon be published by Taschen in a multilingual edition, containing text in English, French, German, and Spanish. This choice makes its abundance of explanatory scholarship widely accessible at a stroke, but even those who read none of those four l … | Continue reading
History remembers Henry Dunant (1828–1910) for two things–being the co-founder of the Red Cross movement and winning the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901. Less well known is his diagram of the Apocalypse. Between 1877 and 1890, notes the Red Cross Museum website, Henry Dunant “pro … | Continue reading
A heads up on a deal: Between now and March 31, 2024, 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-inclusive … | Continue reading
There are two kinds of people in this world: those who recognize the phrase “corny dialogue that would make the pope weep,” and those who don’t. If you fall into the former category, your mind is almost certainly filled with images of bleak Midwestern winters, modest trailer home … | Continue reading
A beautiful early example of visualizing the flow of history, Sebastian C. Adams’ Synchronological Chart of Universal History outlines the evolution of mankind from Adam and Eve to 1871, the year of its first edition. A recreation can be found and closely examined at the David Ru … | Continue reading
The story of Vincent van Gogh’s life tends to be defined by his psychological condition and the not-unrelated manner of his death. (It does if we set aside the episode with the mutilated ear and the brothel, anyway.) The figure of the impoverished, neglected artist whose work wou … | Continue reading
In 1957, Salvador Dalí created a tableware set consisting of 1) a four-tooth fork with a fish handle, 2) an elephant fork with three teeth, 3) a snail knife with tears, 4) a leaf knife, 5) a small artichoke spoon, and 6) an artichoke spoon. When the set went on auction in 2012, i … | Continue reading
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUQthEm1G3M The protagonist of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is a “fireman” tasked with incinerating what few books remain in a domestic-screen-dominated future society forced into illiteracy. Late in life, Ray Bradbury declared that he wrote the n … | Continue reading
?si=WxyK2XAukThVTpa7 Construction on the Tower of Pisa first began in the year 1173. By 1178, the architects knew they had a problem on their hands. Built on an unsteady foundation, the tower began to sink under its own weight and soon started to lean. Medieval architects tried t … | Continue reading
Above, actor Benedict Cumberbatch reads the final letter written by Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who died in a Siberian prison on February 16th. The letter gets at a question many have asked, even from afar. Why, after being poisoned with Novichok in 2020, did Na … | Continue reading
Since the J. Paul Getty Museum launched its Open Content program back in 2013, we’ve been featuring their efforts to make their vast collection of cultural artifacts freely accessible online. They’ve released not just digitized works of art, but also a great many art history text … | Continue reading
Sergei Bondarchuk directed an 8‑hour film adaptation of War and Peace (1966–67), which ended up winning an Oscar for Best Foreign Picture. When he was in Los Angeles as a guest of honor at a party, Hollywood royalty like John Wayne, John Ford, and Billy Wilder lined up to meet th … | Continue reading
Few of us grow up drinking coffee, but once we start drinking it, even fewer of us ever stop. According to legend, the earliest such case was a ninth-century Ethiopian goatherd named Kaldi, who noticed how much energy his ruminant charges seemed to draw from eating particular red … | Continue reading
Dune: Part Two has been playing in theaters for less than a week, but that’s more than enough time for its viewers to joke about the aptness of its title. For while it comes, of course, as the second half of Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s influential sci-fi nove … | Continue reading
Seventeenth-century Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn may have more name recognition than nearly any other European artist, his popularity due in large part to what art historian Alison McQueen identifies in her book of the same name as “the rise of the cult of Rembrandt.” Popular … | Continue reading
By the early nineteen-nineties, at least in the United States, Latin instruction in schools wasn’t what it had once been. Students everywhere had long been showing impatience and irreverence about their having to study that “dead language,” of course. But surely it had never felt … | Continue reading
Historians have long thought that the decimal point first came into use in 1593, when the German mathematician Christopher Clavius wrote an astronomy text called Astrolabium. It turns out, however, that the history of the decimal point stretches back another 150 years–to the work … | Continue reading
When we’ve already heard about someone’s personal scandal in the news, do we need to also see it dramatized with A‑list actors? Your hosts Mark Linsenmayer, Lawrence Ware, Sarahlyn Bruck, and Al Baker discuss Todd Haynes’ 2023 film May December fictionalizing the long-aftermath … | Continue reading
If you’re an even mildly enthusiastic filmgoer, these two short compilations from The Solomon Society will get your life flashing before your eyes. They transport me to my ninth birthday screening of The Nightmare Before Christmas; my VHS viewings of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off at h … | Continue reading
“To me, Lou stood out. The real deal! Something important to American music and to ALL MUSIC! I miss him and his dog.” — Keith Richards On what would have been Lou Reed’s 82nd birthday (March 2), Keith Richards released a cover of “I’m Waiting for the Man,” a track originally wri … | Continue reading
Though Jane Austen hasn’t published a novel since 1817 — with her death that same year being a reasonable excuse — her appeal as a literary brand remains practically unparalleled in its class. This century has offered its own film and television versions of all her major novels f … | Continue reading
The US Postal Service will be classing up the joint, with the planned release of 16 stamps featuring the photography of Ansel Adams. They write: Ansel Adams made a career of crafting photographs in exquisitely sharp focus and nearly infinite tonality and detail. His ability to co … | Continue reading
The brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière are often referred to as pioneers of cinema, and their 45-second La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon, or Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon (1895), is often referred to as the first film. But history turns out to present a more comp … | Continue reading
The film distribution company Kino Lorber now allows you to stream complete films on YouTube for free. Since we first mentioned this initiative back in 2022, the list of streamable films has grown. Among the now 146 films, you will find a mixture of documentaries and cinematic wo … | Continue reading
Unilever, the consumer goods company headquartered in London, owns over 400 brands. Dove, Lipton, Ben & Jerry’s, Hellmann’s and Knorr–you know and use many of Unilever’s products. The same goes for many people living across the globe. An estimated 3.4 billion people use Unilever … | Continue reading
Image by Erik Möller, via Wikimedia Commons Those of us who were playing video games in the nineteen-nineties may remember a fun little platformer, not technically unimpressive for its time, called Clockwork Knight. The concept of a clockwork knight turns out to have had some his … | Continue reading
In late October 2020, amidst another surge of the COVID-19 virus, the German government asked the Berlin Philharmonic to close down for a month. On the eve of their closure, the Philharmonic performed John Cage’s modernist composition, 4′33″, which asks performers not to play the … | Continue reading
Here at Open Culture, Richard Feynman is never far from our minds. Though he distinguished himself with his work on the development of the atomic bomb and his Nobel Prize-winning research on quantum electrodynamics, you need no special interest in either World War II or theoretic … | Continue reading
In a letter dated May 31, 1960, Flannery O’Connor, the author best known for her classic story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (listen to her read the story here) penned a letter to her friend, the playwright Maryat Lee. It begins rather abruptly, likely because it’s responding to … | Continue reading
Atomic physicist Niels Bohr is famously quoted as saying, “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.” Yet despite years of getting things wrong, magazines love think pieces on where we’ll be in several decades, even centuries in time. It gives us comfort … | Continue reading
A little over four years ago, we featured here on Open Culture a set of realistic images of people who don’t actually exist. They were, as we would now assume, wholly generated by an artificial-intelligence system, but back in 2018, there were still those who doubted that such a … | Continue reading
When architectural historian Reyner Banham wrote Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971), quite possibly the most influential book published about the Southern Californian metropolis, he saw fit to dismiss the center of the city with what he called “a note on downt … | Continue reading
?si=aoRK422gthc62UZE If you attend the “Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise” exhibition at the Musée D’Orsay, in Paris, you can spend time with “Hello Vincent,” a generative Artificial Intelligence project that allows visitors to have “a unique, personalized encounter” with Vincent van G … | Continue reading
In the Buddhist Asia of a dozen centuries ago, the equivalent of going off to study at an Ivy League school was going off to study at Nalanda. It was founded in the year 427 in what’s now the Indian state of Bihar, making it “the world’s first residential university,” as Sugato M … | Continue reading
“One pill makes you larger and one pill makes you small…” Sometime in the summer of 2016, this isolated track of Grace Slick’s vocals for “White Rabbit”–probably the most famous Jefferson Airplane song and definitely one of the top ten psychedelic songs of the late ‘60s–popped up … | Continue reading
Four decades ago, our civilization seemed to stand on the brink of a great transformation. The Cold War had stoked around 35 years of every-intensifying developments, including but not limited to the Space Race. The personal computer had been on the market just long enough for mo … | Continue reading
Above we have George Sakellariou performing Paul Desmond’s jazz classic, “Take Five,” on a vintage 1959 Viuda y Sobrinos de Domingo Esteso (Conde Hermanos) classical guitar. First recorded in 1959 by the Dave Brubeck Quartet, the track eventually became the best-selling jazz song … | Continue reading
Few cities have been as romanticized as Paris, and few eras in Paris have been as romanticized as the nineteen-twenties. This owes much to the famous expatriate artistic and literary figures residing there in that decade: Ernest Hemingway, Salvador Dalí, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzge … | Continue reading