Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon turned 50 earlier this year, which perhaps makes it seem easy to dismiss as an artifact of a bygone era. It belongs to a period in popular music history when musicians and bands were approaching their albums with ever-greater aesthetic and i … | Continue reading
Dance was as much a baked-in part of Prince’s allure, as his suggestive lyrics and mastery of multiple instruments. The public got its first taste of his affinity for the form at a John Hay elementary school talent show to which he contributed a tap routine, and again at a James … | Continue reading
Here’s a holiday season deal worth mentioning. The Great Courses (formerly The Teaching Company) has put every course on sale for Black Friday. DVD courses are on sale for $60, and online courses for $40. Shipping is free. And if you use the promo code displayed on their web site … | Continue reading
Alice’s Restaurant. It’s now a Thanksgiving classic, and something of a tradition around here. Recorded in 1967, the 18+ minute counterculture song recounts Arlo Guthrie’s real encounter with the law, starting on Thanksgiving Day 1965. As the long song unfolds, we hear all about … | Continue reading
FYI: Masterclass is getting an early jump on Black Friday, running a “Buy One, Gift One Free” deal. Here’s the gist: Masterclass’s annual plans are typically available at $120 a year for the Individual plan, which provides access to MasterClass classes on one device, $180 a year … | Continue reading
Observers have expressed a variety of reactions to the organizational drama unfolding even now at OpenAI, the non-profit behind the enormously popular ChatGPT. Some have already written speculative laments in case of OpenAI’s total dissolution, mourning the great strides in artif … | Continue reading
Above, we have the menu for an 1899 Thanksgiving dinner at the Plaza Hotel in New York. If you were a turkey, you had it relatively easy. But the ducks? Not so much. On the menu, you’ll find Mallard duck and Ruddy duck. But also Red-head duck, Long Island duckling, Teal duck and … | Continue reading
When it comes to maps, your first hit is always free. For you, maybe it was a Mercator projection of the world hung on the wall of an elementary-school classroom; maybe it was a road atlas in the glove box of your parents’ car. For Neil Sunderland, the earliest cartographic high … | Continue reading
“Modern architecture died in St Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972, at 3:32pm (or thereabouts).” This oft-quoted pronouncement by cultural and architectural theorist Charles Jencks refers to the demolition of the Wendell O. Pruitt Homes and William Igoe Apartments. The fate of that … | Continue reading
Earlier this year, Oxford professor of English literature Marion Turner published The Wife of Bath: A Biography. Even if you don’t know anything about that book’s subject, you’ve almost certainly heard of her, and perhaps also of her traveling companions like the Knight, the Summ … | Continue reading
As Lisa Simpson once memorably remarked, “I can see the music.” Pretty much anyone can these days. Just switch on your device’s audio visualizer. That wasn’t the case in the 1940s, when psychologist Cecil A. Stokes used chemistry and polarized light to invent soothing abstract mu … | Continue reading
A quick heads up on a deal: From now (November 2) until November 24, you can get the first month of Coursera Plus for just $1. (It normally costs $59 per month.) With a Coursera Plus plan, you will have unlimited access to 6,000 courses from top universities and companies. This i … | Continue reading
Yesterday a friend and I were standing on a New York City sidewalk, waiting for the light, when Stayin’ Alive began issuing at top volume from a nearby car. Pavlovian conditioning kicked in immediately. We’d been singing along with the Bee Gees for nearly a minute before realizi … | Continue reading
Bugs Bunny is a quick-thinking, fast-talking, wascally force of nature, and a preternaturally gifted physical comedian, too. But unlike such lasting greats as Charlie Chapin and Buster Keaton, it took him a while to find his iconic look. His first appearance, as “Happy Rabbit” in … | Continue reading
We’ve featured a variety of buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright here on Open Culture, from his personal home and studio Taliesin and the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, to a gas station and a doghouse. But if any single structure explains his enduring reputation as a genius of Amer … | Continue reading
In the observable universe, there are estimated to be between 200 billion to two trillion galaxies. By comparison to these super-Saganian numbers, the 383,620 galaxies captured by the Siena Galaxy Atlas may seem like small potatoes. But the SGA actually represents a landmark achi … | Continue reading
Image by The Wellcome Trust When researching a famous historical figure, access to their work and materials usually proves to be one of the biggest obstacles. But things are much more difficult for those writing about the life of Marie Curie, the scientist who, along her with hus … | Continue reading
On the strength of a few quotations and the popular lecture Why I am Not a Christian, philosopher Bertrand Russell has been characterized as a so-called “positive atheist,” a phrase that implies a high degree of certainty. While it is true that Russell saw “no reason to believe a … | Continue reading
Generations of foreign tourists in Europe have heard advice about traveling in groups, haggling prices, avoiding pickpockets, and being able to communicate in, if not the local language, then at least the lingua franca. It turns out that very similar guidance applies to time trav … | Continue reading
Half a century after it was birthed in New York’s black, Latino and gay underground club scene–and nearly 45 years after the infamous Disco Demolition in Chicago’s Comiskey Park–disco is finally being accorded some respect in the annals of music history. Even those who remain imp … | Continue reading
Who’s that bearded man on the cover of Led Zeppelin IV, the one hunched over, carrying a large bundle of sticks? Brian Edwards, a researcher from the University of the West of England, has solved the 52-year-old mystery. Looking through a photo album while conducting research, Ed … | Continue reading
A few years ago here on Open Culture, we featured a re-creation of The Great Wave off Kanazawa made entirely out of LEGO by a serious enthusiast named Jumpei Mitsui. Though the work’s depth does come across to some extent in still photos, it bears repeating that Mitsui assembled … | Continue reading
Ian Bremmer, a political scientist and president of Eurasia Group, has an intelligent, fair, and humane way of explaining crises around the world. That includes the current crisis in the Middle East. Above, he spends an hour discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its geo … | Continue reading
At this point, there’s no need to point out the dangers posed by smoking. Those who do it these days do it in full knowledge of the health risks involved, for reasons of their own. Sometimes those reasons are artistic ones: “I had this idea that you drink coffee, you smoke cigare … | Continue reading
Image courtesy of The Victoria and Albert Museum On any given weekend, in any part of the state where I live, you can find yourself standing in a hall full of knives, if that’s the kind of thing you like to do. It is a very niche kind of experience. Not so in some other […] | Continue reading
Many Americans receive their introduction to the style known as Brutalism in college. This owes less to courses in twentieth-century architecture than to university campuses themselves, which tend to have been expanded or even wholly constructed in the decades immediately followi … | Continue reading
Call us old fashioned but invoking pumpkin spice and The Rocky Horror Picture Show in the same breath feels transgressive to the point of sacrilege. The creator of the Polyphonic video, above, is on much firmer footing tying the film to queer liberation. Prior to its now famous c … | Continue reading
Images on this page come courtesy of the Musei del Bargello In the year 1530, Michelangelo was sentenced to death by Pope Clement VII — who, not coincidentally, was born Giulio de’ Medici. That famous dynasty, which once seemed to hold absolute economic and political power in Flo … | Continue reading
The Beatles were made for black-and-white television, as evidenced by the immediacy with which their 1964 performance on The Ed Sullivan Show launched them into permanent international superstardom. Though only a few years younger than the Fab Four, their countryman David Bowie a … | Continue reading
As Great Art Explained‘s James Payne notes in the above profile of Surrealist Dorothea Tanning, the emotional and psychological complexity of her work invites interpretation, particularly when it comes to one of best known paintings, 1943’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. Its doors, youn … | Continue reading
On October 7th, Hamas invaded Israel and brutally massacred 1,400 Israelis, mostly civilians. On a per capita basis, the attack amounted to twelve 9/11s (per The Economist). It also marked the single bloodiest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. Faced with an existential threat, … | Continue reading
The average music fan of the nineteen-sixties would surely have found it hard to believe that the Rolling Stones would put out a new album in 2023, let alone an album including a performance by Paul McCartney. Here in the twenty-twenties, of course, we’ve long since known that th … | Continue reading
Marcel Proust wrote Remembrance of Things Past (À la recherche du temps perdu) over many years. The first volume, Swann’s Way (Du côté de chez Swann), came out in 1913, and the last volume, Time Regained (Le Temps retrouvé), was published posthumously in 1927. A monumental explor … | Continue reading
A quick heads up on a deal: From now (November 2) until November 24, you can get the first month of Coursera Plus for just $1. (It normally costs $59 per month.) With a Coursera Plus plan, you will have unlimited access to 6,000 courses from top universities and companies. This i … | Continue reading
During the pandemic, Peter Jackson’s documentary, Get Back, used cutting-edge software to restore footage from the Beatles’ Let It Be recording sessions. If you watched the film, you know it was magic. Now, his technology offers us another gift–the final Beatles song. As the shor … | Continue reading
Despite being a perennial contender for the title of the Great American Novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has eluded a wholly satisfying cinematic adaptation. The most recent such attempt, now a decade old, was primarily a Baz Lurhmann kitsch extravaganza showcasing L … | Continue reading
“A Man, a Plan, a Canal — Panama”: we all know the piece of infrastructure to which this famous palindrome refers. But who, exactly, is the man? Some might imagine President Theodore Roosevelt in the role, given his oversight of the project’s acquisition by the United States of A … | Continue reading
This is the first era of human history when more of us live in cities than not. That’s what we’ve often been told in recent years, at least, though the specifics do depend on what kinds of urbanized areas you count as proper cities. Still, this would seem to mark an important in … | Continue reading
It can seem that the writing of literature and the theory of literature occupy separate great houses, Game of Thrones-style, or even separate countries held apart by a great sea. Perhaps they war with each other, perhaps they studiously ignore each other or obliquely interact at … | Continue reading
Odds are you’re acquainted with the lady pictured above. She’s called La Catrina, and her likeness adorns countless t-shirts and tote bags. She is a popular Halloween costume and a mainstay of Day of the Dead celebrations. She pops up in the animated family feature, Coco, to guid … | Continue reading
If you’re looking for a classic monster movie to watch this Halloween, and one that will also give you a few non-ironic laughs along the way, you’d do well to put on Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. But don’t take this recommendation from me: take it from the Grateful Dead’ … | Continue reading
The Korean alphabet, hangul, is “the most scientific writing system.” One often hears that in South Korea, a society that has taken to heart Asia scholar Edwin O. Reischauer’s description of hangul as “perhaps the most scientific system of writing in general use in any country.” … | Continue reading
In 1999, Stephen King found himself confined to a hospital room “after a careless driver in a minivan smashed the shit out of me on a country road.” There, “roaring with pain from top to bottom, high on painkillers,” and surely more than a little bored, he popped a movie into the … | Continue reading
What’s the difference between the United States of America and a cup of yogurt? If you leave the cup of yogurt alone for 200 years, it develops a culture. So goes one of many jokes long in circulation about the supposed American tendency toward low-minded, expedient philistinism. … | Continue reading
Late this summer, the Talking Heads released a remastered version of their concert film, Stop Making Sense. Although the film has already left some theaters, the band hasn’t stopped promoting it. Above, David Byrne, Jerry Harrison, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth join Stephen Colb … | Continue reading
The building that houses Dublin’s 3Olympia Theatre began life as Dan Lowrey’s Star of Erin Music Hall. It has undergone several name changes over the course of its 145 years, and played host to drama, opera, ballet, films, oratorio, pantomime, variety shows, and world-famous popu … | Continue reading
When François Rabelais came up with a couple of giants to put at the center of a series of inventive and ribald works of satirical fiction, he named one of them Gargantua. That may not sound particularly clever today, gargantuan being a fairly common adjective to describe anythin … | Continue reading
We’ve got a thing for creative problem solvers here at Open Culture. We also love a good community-spirited project. Graphic designer Valery Marier ticks both boxes with archives.design, a free graphic design archive that was born of her frustrations with online research at a tim … | Continue reading