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
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland predates the invention of cinema by a couple of decades. Nevertheless, much like the “Drink me” bottle and “Eat me” presented to its young protagonist, Lewis Carroll’s fantastical tale has called out the same message to generations of filmmakers a … | Continue reading
A cool tool. Software engineer Ian Webster has created a website that lets you see how the land masses on planet Earth have changed over the course of 750 million years. And it has the added bonus of letting you plot modern addresses on these ancient land formations. Ergo, you ca … | Continue reading
We just had the chance to see the Red Hot Chili Peppers kick off a new tour, and so had to bring you this–Luna Lee performing RHCP’s “Californication” on the Gayageum, a traditional Korean stringed instrument dating back to the 6th century. Over the years, we’ve shown you her ada … | Continue reading
Context may not count for everything in art. But as underscored by everyone from Marcel Duchamp (or Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven) to the journalists who occasionally convince virtuoso musicians to busk in dingy public spaces, it certainly counts for something. Whether or not you … | Continue reading
When we think of Brian Eno’s work, we first think of his records. These include not just his own classics of “ambient music” — a term he popularized — like Discreet Music and Music for Airports, but also the albums he’s produced: Devo’s Q. Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!, Talking … | Continue reading
Sam Edelston can rock the duclimer. On his YouTube channel, he writes: “Dulcimers are natural rock instruments. In fact, I even say that dulcimers are among the world’s coolest musical instruments, and they deserve to be known by the general public — the way that everybody knows … | Continue reading
Nearly two and a half centuries after its founding, the United States of America is still both celebrated and derided as a young country. Examined on the whole, the US may or may not seem less mature than other lands in any obvious way, but the difference manifests much more clea … | Continue reading
In 2013, Penguin released in the UK a series of new covers for five works by George Orwell, including a particularly bold cover design for Orwell’s best-known work, 1984. According to Creative Review, the designer, David Pearson, made it so that the book’s title and Orwell’s name … | Continue reading
At the start of each year, Ian Bremmer, a political scientist and president of Eurasia Group, creates a list that ranks the greatest threats to our world. In 2024, Bremmer puts his finger on Ungoverned AI, a Partitioned Ukraine, a volatile Middle East, and a sputtering Chinese ec … | Continue reading
We’re nearly halfway through February, which the United States of America also knows as Black History Month. Perhaps there are relevant subjects on which you’ve been meaning to catch up, but you haven’t quite got around to it yet. If so, never fear: in the next couple of weeks, y … | Continue reading
When surveyed, eighty to ninety percent of Americans consider themselves possessed of above-average driving skills. Most of them are, of course, wrong by statistical definition, but the result itself reveals something important about human nature. So does another, lesser-known st … | Continue reading
A few years ago, we featured a $32,000 pair of bonsai scissors here on Open Culture. More recently, their maker Yasuhiro Hiraka appeared in the Business Insider video above, a detailed 80-minute introduction to ten of the most expensive arts and art supplies around the world. It … | Continue reading
And the award for the first Black songwriter to win Song of the Year at the Country Music Awards goes to Tracy Chapman …for a tune that transfixed millions of rowdy concertgoers when she sang it at Wembley Stadium 35 years earlier (see above.) At the time of that performance, Cha … | Continue reading
Even among non-neuroscientists, determining the origin and purpose of consciousness is widely known as “the hard problem.” Since its coinage by philosopher David Chalmers thirty years ago, that label has worked its way into a variety of contexts; about a decade ago, Tom Stoppard … | Continue reading
Of the three collaborations jazz singer Cab Calloway made with cute cartoon legend Betty Boop, this 1933 Dave Fleischer-directed “Snow White” is probably the most successful. It certainly is the most strange—more hallucinatory than the first in the series “Minnie the Moocher”, an … | Continue reading
Stephen Malinowski is a self-described “Music Animation Machine,” with a penchant for creating animated graphical scores. Above, he does his thing with the first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony 5. How does he make this magic? Malinowski writes: “There were a lot of steps; here’s … | Continue reading
Dziga Vertov is best known for his dazzling city symphony A Man with a Movie Camera, which was ranked by Sight and Sound magazine as the 8th best movie ever made. Yet what you might not know is that Vertov also made the Soviet Union’s first ever animated movie, Soviet Toys. Consi … | Continue reading
Imagine a grand tour of European museums, and a fair few destinations come right to mind: the Rijksmuseum, the Prado, the Uffizi Gallery, the Louvre. These institutions alone could take years to experience fully, but it would be an incomplete journey that didn’t venture farther e … | Continue reading
“Steady Pushkin, matter-of-fact Tolstoy, restrained Chekhov have all had their moments of irrational insight which simultaneously blurred the sentence and disclosed a secret meaning worth the sudden focal shift,” writes Vladimir Nabokov in his Lectures on Russian Literature. “But … | Continue reading
It’s difficult to imagine Iman and David Bowie inviting Vogue readers to join them on the above virtual tour of their mountaintop home near Woodstock, New York when the rock legend was alive. Granted, shortly after their 1992 wedding, he gave Architectural Digest a peek at their … | Continue reading
Donald Duck first appeared in Disney’s 1934 cartoon The Wise Little Hen (below). In his subsequent roles, he quickly developed into that still-familiar figure the New Yorker once described as “personified irritability.” But it would take him another decade or so to become more th … | Continue reading
Evan Puschak, the video essayist better known as the Nerdwriter, has seen a lot of movies. Here on Open Culture, we’ve previously featured his analyses of a range of pictures including Blade Runner, Reservoir Dogs, Parasite, La Dolce Vita, Nostalghia, and You’ve Got Mail. When he … | Continue reading
Jazz pianist and composer Charles Cornell is not alone in his contempt for the sort of dumbed down musical fare typical of children’s programming. The late Johnny Costa, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood’s long-time musical director and a self-described “real jazzer,” was of like mind: … | Continue reading
Westerners tend to think of Japan as a land of high-speed trains, expertly prepared sushi and ramen, auteur films, brilliant animation, elegant woodblock prints, glorious old hotels, sought-after jazz-records, cat islands, and ghost towns. The last of those has, of course, not be … | Continue reading
?si=RFbzFSzSNWzua3‑7 Could you use a mental escape? Maybe a trip to Mars will do the trick. Above, you can find high definition footage captured by NASA’s three Mars rovers–Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity. The footage (also contributed by JPL-Caltech, MSSS, Cornell University a … | Continue reading
The word sophisticated may sound like praise today, but it originated as more of an accusation. Trace its etymology back far enough and you’ll encounter the sophists, itinerant lecturers in ancient Greece who taught subjects like philosophy, mathematics, music, and rhetoric — the … | Continue reading
A quick final heads up: Coursera’s deal, which offers $200 off of Coursera Plus, ends in two days–February 1. If you’re interested in the discount, you have a couple days to make a call… Coursera has announced that it’s extending (until February 1) a special deal that will let yo … | Continue reading
One needn’t think too hard to come up with a list of celebrated children who seem somehow less exceptional when their baby fat comes off and their permanent teeth come in. We’ll eat Werner Herzog’s shoe if Alma Deutscher’s name is on it. When she was 11, conductor Johannes Wildne … | Continue reading
There was a time in America, not so very long ago, when conventional wisdom discouraged immigrants from speaking the language of the old country at home. In fact, “it used to be thought that being bilingual was a bad thing, that it would confuse or hold people back, especially ch … | Continue reading
Things change… Especially when you’re tracking the continental movement from Pangea to the present day in 5 million years increments at the rate of 2.5 million years per second. Wherever you are, 350 million years ago, your address would’ve been located on the mega-continent of P … | Continue reading
The Codex Seraphinianus is not a medieval book; nor does it date from the Renaissance along with the codices of Leonardo. In fact, it was published only in 1981, but in the intervening decades it has gained recognition as “the strangest book ever published,” as we described it wh … | Continue reading
With the rise of AI tools like ChatGPT, which can generate essay after essay near-instantaneously from even the simplest prompt, surely the skill of writing will soon go the way of arrowhead-sharpening. That would be easy to believe, anyway, amid the current technological buzz. B … | Continue reading
Late last year, Amazon announced AI Ready, a new initiative “designed to provide free AI skills training to 2 million people globally by 2025.” This includes eight free AI and generative AI courses, some designed for beginners, and others designed for more advanced students. As t … | Continue reading
Bruce Hornsby is best known for his first album The Way It Is (1986), but has come light years since then through 18+ albums, experimenting with different styles, playing over 100 shows with the Grateful Dead, and scoring numerous projects for Spike Lee. He’s won three Grammys an … | Continue reading
?si=k7NS-uM-GjVkL0dP Oliver Hermanus’ latest film Living transplants the story of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru to postwar London. Apart from its own considerable merits, it has given viewers across the world reason to revisit the 1952 original, a standout work even in a golden decade o … | Continue reading