We give you two perspectives on what’s happening in the Middle East this week. Above, foreign affairs columnist Fareed Zakaria talks with Scott Galloway about the conflict in Israel, providing historical context and exploring what’s likely to come. And below Yuval Noah Harari (hi … | Continue reading
In the year 79, AD Mount Vesuvius erupted, burying both Pompeii and Herculaneum. In 1750, an Italian farmworker discovered an entombed seaside villa in Herculaneum while digging a well. When excavated, the residence yielded hundreds of scrolls, all of them turned into what looked … | Continue reading
Nature doesn’t care if you’re happy, but Yale psychology professor Laurie Santos does. As Dr. Santos points out during the above appearance on The Well, the goals of natural selection have been achieved as long as humans survive and reproduce, but most of us crave something more … | Continue reading
If you don’t live in a part of the world with a lot of hummingbirds, it’s easy to regard them as not quite of this earth. With their wide array of shimmering colors and frenetic yet eerily stable manner of flight, they can seem like quasi-fantastical creatures even to those who e … | Continue reading
All of us, across the world, know that Italy is shaped like a boot. But almost none of us know that, in the regions of Apulia and Calabria at the country’s “heel” and “toe,” live small communities who, among themselves, still speak not Italian but Greek. The word “still” applies … | Continue reading
Today, the name Judith hardly calls to mind a woman capable of great violence. Things seem to have been different in antiquity: “The Biblical story from the Book of Judith tells how the beautiful Israelite widow Judith bravely seduces and then kills the sexually aggressive Assyri … | Continue reading
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQmBsbt9blgIn the wake of Hamas' gruesome attack on Israeli civilians, political scientist Ian Bremmer explains 'the historical context of the conflict, how Israel might respond and what it means for Jews, Palestinians and the world at large.' The … | Continue reading
When André Breton, a leader of the Surrealist movement and author of its first manifesto, wrote that “the problem of woman is the most marvelous and disturbing problem in all the world,” he was not alluding to the unfair lack of recognition experienced by his female peers. Marque … | Continue reading
With his dark suit, neat haircut, and bowler hat, René Magritte embodied early-twentieth-century Belgian normality. Yet the feelings his work stirred in their viewers were very much the opposite of normal. He had various ways of accomplishing this. One was “to combine two familia … | Continue reading
A picture is worth 1000 words, especially when you are a late-19th or early-20th century horticulturist eager to protect intellectual property rights to newly cultivated varieties of fruit. Or an artistically gifted woman of the same era, looking for a steady, respectable source … | Continue reading
If you were to see Jean-Honoré Fragonard‘s L’Escarpolette, or The Swing, at the Wallace Collection, you might not think particularly hard about it. Though all the subtle light effects that make the young woman in pink pop out of the lush garden that surrounds her are impressive, … | Continue reading
Give it a chance, you won’t be disappointed. While the first 30 seconds of the video above may resemble an amateur iPhone prank, it soon becomes something unexpectedly enchanting—a visualization of the physics of music in real-time. The Youtuber places his phone inside an acousti … | Continue reading
If those who have read Cal Newport’s Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World — and even more so, those who’ve been meaning to read it — share any one desire, it’s surely the desire to read more books. And for those who have reading habits similar to Newport’s, … | Continue reading
It is generally accepted that the standard deck of playing cards we use for everything from three-card monte to high-stakes Vegas poker evolved from the Tarot. “Like our modern cards,” writes Sallie Nichols, “the Tarot deck has four suits with ten ‘pip’ or numbered cards in each… … | Continue reading
The Romans fashioned their buildings with concrete that has endured for 2,000 years. Their secret? Some researchers think it’s how the Romans heated lime. Others think it’s how they used pozzolanic material such as volcanic ash. Nowhere does coffee figure into the equation. Too b … | Continue reading
httvs://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpuV-kpXZRI In the fall of 1969, there were still a great many people who’d never heard a synthesizer. And even among those who had, few would have known how its unfamiliar sounds were actually made. Hence the importance of the segment from the BBC … | Continue reading
“If you’re in Venice, you might not enjoy it so much if you follow a tour-guide route that gets you to the main attractions.” So says Youtuber Manuel Bravo — whom we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture for his videos on Pompeii, the Duomo di Firenze, and the Great Pyramid … | Continue reading
We know that Michelangelo wrote grocery lists; now we have evidence that Leonardo wrote resumes. “Before he was famous, before he painted the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper, before he invented the helicopter, before he drew the most famous image of man, before he was all of these … | Continue reading
Who created the first work of abstract art has long been a fraught question indeed. Better, perhaps, to ask who first said of a work of art that a kid could have made it. A strong contender in that division is the Russian artist Véra Pestel, whom history remembers as having react … | Continue reading
During the 15th and 16th centuries, fashionable men sported a codpiece. Originally a garment designed to protect and support the proverbial “Willy” (especially when men wore tights), the codpiece morphed into something else–a sign of virility, “a bulging and absurd representation … | Continue reading
A few years ago, we featured here on Open Culture the Japanese art of kintsugi, whose practitioners repair broken pottery with gold in a manner that emphasizes rather than hides the cracks. Since then, the idea seems to have captured the Western imagination, inspiring no few onli … | Continue reading
It makes sense that Sofia Coppola and Zoe Cassavetes would be friends. Not only are they both respected filmmakers of Generation X, they’re both daughters of maverick American auteurs, a condition with its advantages as well as its disadvantages. The advantages, in Coppola’s case … | Continue reading
Some people talk to plants. The Carnegie Museum of Art‘s chief conservator Ellen Baxter talks to the paintings she’s restoring. “You have to …tell her she’s going to look lovely,” she says, above, spreading varnish over a 16th-century portrait of Isabella de’ Medici prior to star … | Continue reading
Noam Chomsky made his name as a linguist, which is easy to forget amid the wide range of subjects he has addressed, and continues to address, in his long career as a public intellectual. But on a deeper level, his commentary on politics, society, media, and a host of other broad … | Continue reading
“Did Scorsese make the best movie of each decade since the ’70s?” asks GQ‘s Zach Baron in a recent profile of that long-lived auteur. “Probably not (I think his case is weakest in the first decade of this century), but you could argue it, and many people have.” And indeed, you ma … | Continue reading
Image courtesy of the University at Leeds In the striking image above, you can see an early experiment in making books portable–a 17th century precursor, if you will, to the modern day Kindle. According to the library at the University of Leeds, this “Jacobean Travelling Library” … | Continue reading
The Boy and the Heron, the latest feature from master animator Hayao Miyazaki, opened in Japan this past summer. In that it marks his latest emergence from his supposed “retirement,” we could label it not just as late Miyazaki, but perhaps even “post-late” Miyazaki. But the film … | Continue reading
Its name can be squeezed onto a tea towel, a decorative plate, a magnet, a mug, and other touristic souvenirs, but has the northern Welsh town of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoc been celebrated in song? Indeed it has. The Great Big Story‘s Human Conditio … | Continue reading
A heads up on a deal: Between now and September 30, 2023, 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 6,000+ world-class courses for one all-inclus … | Continue reading
This month, more than a few TikTok-using women have asked the men in their lives how often they think about the Roman Empire. And to the astonishment of these women, more than a few of these men have responded that they think about it on a daily basis, or even more often than tha … | Continue reading
Today it would be viewed as cultural appropriation writ large, but when Louis XIV ordered the construction of a 5-building pleasure pavilion inspired by the Porcelain Tower of Nanjing (a 7th Wonder of the World few French citizens had viewed in person) as an escape from Versaille … | Continue reading
If asked to name the best-known tower in London, one could, perhaps, make a fair case for the likes of the Shard or the Gherkin. But whatever their current prominence on the skyline, those works of twenty-first-century starchitecture have yet to develop much value as symbols of t … | Continue reading
Before her literary fame, her stormy relationship with Ted Hughes and her crippling battles with depression, Sylvia Plath was an enthusiastic student at Smith College. “The world is splitting open at my feet like a ripe, juicy watermelon,” she wrote to her mother. “If only I can … | Continue reading
In the small town of Cloquet, Minnesota stands a piece of urban utopia. It takes the surprising form of a gas station, albeit one designed by no less a visionary of American architecture than Frank Lloyd Wright. He originally conceived it as an element of Broadacre City, a form o … | Continue reading
In high school, the language I most fell in love with happened to be a dead one: Latin. Sure, it’s spoken at the Vatican, and when I first began to study the tongue of Virgil and Catullus, friends joked that I could only use it if I moved to Rome. Tempting, but church Latin barel … | Continue reading
The distinctiveness of the accent heard in a place reflects that place’s isolation. It’s probably no coincidence that, as almost every place in the world has become less isolated, accents have become less distinctive. In these days of vanishing forms of regional speech, if you wa … | Continue reading
As a general rule, you can gain a decent understanding of any part of the world by eating its regional specialties. This holds especially true in a country like China, with its great size and deep history. Travel to the southeastern province of Fujian, for instance, and you’ve go … | Continue reading
The Leaning Tower of Pisa has stood, in its distinctive fashion, for six and a half centuries now. But it hasn’t always leaned at the same angle: to get the most dramatic view, the best time to go see it was the early nineteen-nineties, when its tilt had reached a full 5.5 degree … | Continue reading
What do Tiffany lamps have in common with Kleenex? A brand name so mighty, it’s become an umbrella term. Of course, Kleenex is still manufacturing tissues, whereas authentic lamps from Louis Comfort Tiffany’s New York studio were produced between 1890 and 1930. Handcrafted of coi … | Continue reading
The photo above depicts Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, better known in the English-speaking world as Leo Tolstoy. It dates from 1908, when he had nearly all his work behind him: the major novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, of course, but also the acclaimed late book The Death of … | Continue reading
?si=n8hyTDl7Wn6FLq3a Discovered amidst the wreckage of a sunken ship off the coast of Greece in 1901, the Antikythera Mechanism (previously featured here on Open Culture) is often considered the world’s oldest known analog computer. Dating back to approximately 150-100 BCE, the d … | Continue reading
Court Green, the rural Devon property Sylvia Plath called home for sixteen months toward the end of her life is a popular pilgrimage for Plathophiles, seeking to worship at the wellspring of some of her best known poems – The Bee Meeting, Daddy, Lady Lazarus, and many other works … | Continue reading
It’s not an especially straightforward matter to pin down when music videos first emerged. In a sense, the Beatles were already making them back in the late sixties, but then, MTV, where the music video as we know it rapidly took shape, didn’t start broadcasting until 1981. The v … | Continue reading
The music collective Playing for Change is back. This time, they have Jackson Browne performing his 1970s hit, “Doctor, My Eyes,” supported by musicians from Brazil, Jamaica, India, Puerto Rico, France and beyond. Browne is also joined by Leland Sklar and Russ Kunkel, who played … | Continue reading
The technology and art of photography emerged in nineteenth-century Europe. And so, when a part of the world outside Europe was well-photographed in those days, it tended to be a traveling European behind the camera. Take John Thomson, previously featured here on Open Culture, fo … | Continue reading
It costs roughly $20,000, weighs nearly 100 pounds, and looks like a high-end microscope. Handmade in Switzerland, the MANUMENT Leva Machine makes espresso. How well does it make espresso? How do the shots taste?: According to coffee expert James Hoffmann–he’s the author of The W … | Continue reading
Read a story set in the Middle Ages, Beowulf or anything more recently written, and you’re likely to run across a reference to mead, which seems often to have been imbibed heartily in halls dedicated to that very activity. The same goes for medieval-themed plays, movies, and ev … | Continue reading
The Internet Movie Database credits Shakespeare as the writer on 1787 films, 42 of which have yet to be released. The Shakespeare Network has compiled a chronological playlist of trailers for 45 of them. First up is 1935’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, featuring Olivia de Havilland, … | Continue reading