Jimmy Buffett wrote “Margaritaville” in 1977. It ended up being his only song to reach the pop Top 10. But the song carried him for the next 45 years. When you think Margaritaville, you think of an easy-breezy way of life. And that simple idea infused the brand of Buffett’s Marg … | Continue reading
“We lunched up-stairs at Botin’s,” writes Ernest Hemingway near the end of The Sun Also Rises (1926). “It is one of the best restaurants in the world. We had roast suckling pig and drank rioja alta.” You can do the very same thing today, a century after the period of that novel — … | Continue reading
Another chapter from the Annals of Unlikely Performances… Last week, we highlighted Chuck Berry performing with the Bee Gees on a 1973 episode of the Midnight Special. It’s a pairing that doesn’t work on paper. But, on stage, it’s magic. The same goes for when Berry sang with Tom … | Continue reading
?si=N6JQU7bXNRhsFgOq Though it enjoys a particular popularity here in the twenty-first century, the rigorously equanimous Stoic worldview comes to us through the work of three figures from antiquity: Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius. Epictetus was born and raised a slave. S … | Continue reading
?si=Kq5T7I10zGKJa-bE These days, psychedelic research is experiencing a renaissance of sorts. And Matt Johnson, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, is leading the way. One of “the world’s most published scientists on the human effects of psychedelics,” his research focuse … | Continue reading
Brian Eno turned 75 years old this past spring, but if he has any thoughts of retirement, they haven’t slowed his creation of new art and music. Just last year he put out his latest solo album FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE, videos from whose songs we featured here on Open Culture. However … | Continue reading
Too often those in power lump thousands of years of Middle Eastern religion and culture into monolithic entities to be feared or persecuted. But at least one government institution is doing exactly the opposite. For Nowruz, the Persian New Year, the Library of Congress has releas … | Continue reading
There may not yet be civilization on the moon, but that doesn’t mean there’s no culture up there. We’ve previously featured the tiny ceramic tile, smuggled onto the Apollo 12 lunar lander, that bears art by the likes of Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol. “Fall … | Continue reading
The Brooklyn Bridge ignites the passions of tourists and locals alike. For every 10,000 visitors who pause in its bike lanes to snap selfies, there’s an alum of nearby PS 261 who celebrated its birthday with a song that mentions the fates of its engineers John and Washington Roeb … | Continue reading
Humanity has few fascinations as enduring as that with apocalypse. We’ve been telling ourselves stories of civilization’s destruction as long as we’ve had civilization to destroy. But those stories haven’t all been the same: each era envisions the end of the world in a way that r … | Continue reading
The YouTube channel There I Ruined It creates new versions of songs using AI-generated voices. For Dustin Ballard, the channel’s creator, the point is to “lovingly destroy your favorite songs.” Take the example above. Here, an AI version of Johnny Cash’s voice sings the lyrics of … | Continue reading
When we start learning a language, we soon find ourselves practicing how to ask for the time. This can feel like a pointless exercise today, when each glance at our phone tells us the hour and minute with precision, but it can be justified as a practical way of getting the langua … | Continue reading
Every now and then, we check in on the fascinating musical world of Luna Lee–a musician who performs Western music on the Gayageum, a traditional Korean stringed instrument which dates back to the 6th century. Over the years, we’ve shown you her adaptations of Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Voo … | Continue reading
Having come out less than two weeks ago, the American Museum of Natural History video above incorporates up-to-date information on the number of human beings on planet Earth. But what’s interesting here isn’t so much the current global-population figure (eight billion, incidental … | Continue reading
In music, as in film, we have reached a point where every element of every composition can be fully produced and automated by computers. This is a breakthrough that allows producers with little or no musical training the ability to rapidly turn out hits. It also allows talented m … | Continue reading
The band performing in the video above is Steely Dan. Yet it doesn’t sound quite like Steely Dan, an impression partially explained by it being a live show rather than the kind of perfectionist studio recordings for whose meticulous construction (and repeated reconstruction) the … | Continue reading
Nearly 15 years ago, US Airways Flight 1549 took off from New York City’s LaGuardia Airport, bound for Seattle by way of Charlotte, North Carolina. Shortly after takeoff, the aircraft plowed into a flock of migrating birds, and its engines failed. In less than four minutes, Capta … | Continue reading
Katsushika Hokusai created his best-known woodblock print The Great Wave Off Kanagawa — or rather he finished its definitive version — when he was in his early sixties. That may sound somewhat late in the day by the standards of visual artists, but as Hokusai himself saw it, he w … | Continue reading
Ah, yes, “Autobahn.” From the moment the door slams and the ignition starts, prog rockers and pre-new wavers know a journey is afoot. Though the members of Kraftwerk made three albums before this, the members still looking like well meaning bookish hippies, 1974’s “Autobahn” is c … | Continue reading
One occasionally hears it insisted that, outside certain culturally distinct regions of the country, Americans “don’t have an accent.” This notion is exposed as nonsense the moment one of those Americans starts speaking a foreign language, sometimes at the very first word. “Hold … | Continue reading
During the 1970s, Burt Sugarman produced The Midnight Special, a late-night musical variety show that featured great rock and pop music performances. In recent months, Sugarman has started bringing the show’s archive to YouTube, allowing you to revisit vintage performances by Dav … | Continue reading
It may give you pause, at least if you’re past a certain age, to consider the disappearance of the word computerized. Like portable, it has fallen out of use due to the sheer commonness of the concept to which it refers: in an age when we all carry portable computers in our pocke … | Continue reading
Mushrooms are justly celebrated as virtuous multitaskers. They’re food, teachers, movie stars, design inspiration… …and some, as anyone who’s spent time playing or watching The Last of Us can readily attest, are killers. Hopefully we’ve got some time before civilization is conque … | Continue reading
Once the Secretary of Labor under the Clinton Administration, Robert Reich spent 17 years teaching at UC Berkeley. This past spring, he taught his final course there, and it’s now available online. Above, you can stream 14 lectures from “Wealth and Poverty,” a course “designed … | Continue reading
Anyone who’s worked in an operating room knows that many surgeons like to put on music while they do their job, and that their working soundtracks often include surprising artists. It hardly requires a leap of imagination to assume that there are more than a few scalpel-wielding … | Continue reading
It’s hard to imagine one of today’s nationally known singer-songwriters voluntarily sharing an unfinished composition on late night TV, then asking for advice on how to wrap things up. That’s exactly what Paul Simon did on The Dick Cavett Show on September 5, 1974, when he shared … | Continue reading
To anyone unfamiliar with the history of Islam, it comes as something of a shock that it got started less than a millennium and a half ago. In that relatively short span of time, Islam has become the world’s second-largest religion, a fact that becomes more understandable when yo … | Continue reading
We lived in one world before August 6, 1945, and have lived in another ever since. Nobody understood this more clearly than Albert Einstein, who had advocated for the research that culminated in that day. “A letter from Dr. Einstein in 1939 informed President Roosevelt that the G … | Continue reading
On paper, the Nazis shouldn’t have liked Gustav Klimt. As gallerist and Youtuber James Payne says in his new Great Art Explained video above, their denunciatory “Degenerate Art Exhibition” of 1937 included the work of “Paul Klee, Otto Dix, Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, and Piet Mo … | Continue reading
Jan Morris visited Hiroshima in 1959, fourteen years after its devastation by the United States’ atomic bomb. “The city has long been rebuilt, and a new population has flooded in to replace the victims of the holocaust,” she wrote, “but for all the bright new buildings and the br … | Continue reading
To a viewer on the internet, TED Talks and TEDx talks may seem more or less the same. That makes sense, since the main difference between them isn’t of format, but physical location: TED talks take place at official TED conferences, and TEDx talks at TED-licensed but independentl … | Continue reading
Some 80 years ago, in a small North Carolina town, Eunice Waymon, a musically gifted, nine-year-old black girl, began taking piano lessons in the home of an exacting Englishwoman named Muriel Mazzanovich. At first, young Eunice – the given name of jazz superstar Nina Simone – fel … | Continue reading
It isn’t easy to say which book is the oldest in the world, because the answer depends on what, exactly qualifies as a book. Dating from the year 868, the Chinese Diamond Sūtra is known as “the world’s earliest dated, printed book,” the words used on the web site of the British L … | Continue reading
Yesterday Robbie Robertson, the Canadian songwriter and guitarist for The Band, passed away at age 80 after a long illness. As a tribute, we’re bringing back a video that pays homage to “The Weight,” a song Robertson wrote for The Band’s influential 1968 album, “Music from Big Pi … | Continue reading
The ravages of COVID-19 have been followed by the ravages of the post-pandemic tourism boom. If you’ve been reading recent coverage of aggressive travel and its discontents, you may well assume that it’s too late to have a genuine experience of, say, the great cities of Europe. P … | Continue reading
From sound artist Tomer Baruch and drummer Alex Brajković comes a new electronic soundtrack for Fritz Lang’s century-old classic film, Metropolis. The new score comes with this preface: One of the most significant themes in the dystopian feature is the blurred-to-nonexistent line … | Continue reading
The skating scene that opens A Charlie Brown Christmas is such an evocative, archetypical winter vision, it’s likely to stir nostalgia even in those whose childhoods didn’t involve gliding across frozen ponds. Pieter Bruegel the Elder created a similar scene in the 16th-century. … | Continue reading
William Friedkin, who died yesterday, will be most widely remembered as the director of nineteen-seventies genre hits like The French Connection and The Exorcist. But it was in the subsequent decade that he made his most impressive picture, at least according to the Paper Starshi … | Continue reading
On November 10, 1969, Sesame Street made its broadcast debut. The very first lines were spoken by Gordon (Matt Robinson), a Black schoolteacher who’s showing a new kid around the neighborhood, introducing her to a couple of other kids, along with Sesame Street adult mainstays Bob … | Continue reading
One needs hardly state that human beings desire things like wealth, power, and love. But it does bear repeating that, on a deeper level, we all desire flow. To say this is to repeat, in one form or another, the theories of the late psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of … | Continue reading
Michael Chabon was born in 1963, which placed him well to be influenced by the unpredictable, indiscriminate, and often lurid cultural cross-currents of the nineteen-seventies. He seemed to have received much of that influence at Page One, the local bookstore in his hometown of C … | Continue reading
The history of the printed book stretches back well over a millennium, the title of the oldest known book currently being held by a Tang Dynasty work of the Diamond Sutra. But what about the most beautiful book? As a contender for that spot, Michael Goodman (previously featured h … | Continue reading
Released in November 2022, ChatGPT gave us all a glimpse into the future world of AI–a sense of what the world will look like when chatbots can think and execute tasks on our behalf. There’s a good chance that you’ve already experimented loosely with ChatGPT, trying to test its s … | Continue reading
The Internet Archive maintains an enormous Live Music Archive of concert recordings, not all of them by the Grateful Dead. There are more than 17,000 such recordings in its Grateful Dead collection — 2,000 more than when last we featured it here on Open Culture — but one must com … | Continue reading
Prince first recorded a demo of “Nothing Compares 2 U” in 1984. Then Sinéad O’Connor made the song her own … and made it famous. Chris Birkett, who co-produced and engineered the 1990 track, remembers the circumstances behind the recording: Speaking to Sound on Sound, he recalls: … | Continue reading
How’s this for fusion? Here we have The Sachal Studios Orchestra, based in Lahore, Pakistan, playing an innovative cover of “Take Five,” the jazz standard written by Paul Desmond and performed by The Dave Brubeck Quartet in 1959. (Watch them perform it here.) Before he died in 20 … | Continue reading
Genius sells. Publishers of biographies and studios behind Oscar-winning dramas can tell you that. So can network scientist Albert-László Barabási, who has actually conducted research into the nature of genius. “What really determines the ‘genius’ label?” he asks in the Big Think … | Continue reading
On September 7, 1988, a skinny, near bald, 21-year-old mother took the mic midway through Late Night with David Letterman and blew the socks off both the live studio audience and the folks viewing at home. She also appeared as an unwilling participant in a cheesy greenroom sketch … | Continue reading