Open Culture
A culture and education website that tries to make the web a more intelligent place.
Watch Accurate Recreations of Medieval Italian Longsword Fighting Techniques, All Based on a Manuscript from 1404www.openculture.com Given recent events, the prospect of hundreds of young men meeting on Facebook, then traveling from around the country to a central U.S. location might sound like reasonable cause for alarm. Open Cult...
Martin Scorsese Plays Vincent Van Gogh in a Short, Surreal Film by Akira Kurosawawww.openculture.com The idea of the auteur director has been a controversial one at times given the sheer number of people required at every stage to produce a film. Open Culture, openculture.com
2000-Year-Old Bottle of White Wine Found in a Roman Burial Sitewww.openculture.com Image via Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports
Back in 2017, we featured the oldest unopened bottle of wine in the world here on Open Culture. Open Culture, openculture.com
Hear the First Recording of the Human Voice (1860)www.openculture.com When inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville sang a nursery rhyme into his phonoautogram in 1860, he had no plans on ever playing this recording back. A precursor to the wax cylinder, the phonoauto...
Eno: The New “Generative Documentary” on Brian Eno That’s Never the Same Movie Twicewww.openculture.com That speculation comes from an essay on what he calls 'generative music,' which is automatically produced by digital systems in accordance with human-set rules and preferences: 'like live music, it is...
You Can Buy Historic Italian Houses for €1 — But What’s the Catch?www.openculture.com From Abruzzo to Vergemoli, small Italian towns and villages have recently been making their historic homes available for purchase for as low as €1. Open Culture, openculture.com
Watch Hardware Wars, the Original Star Wars Parody, in HD (1978)www.openculture.com This past May, YouTuber Jenny Nicholson set off waves of social-media discourse with 'The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel,' a four-hour-long video critique of Disney's hugely expensive, now...
An Introduction to Surrealism: The Big Aesthetic Ideas Presented in Three Videoswww.openculture.com Before surrealism became Merriam Webster's word of the year in 2016 for its useful description of reality, it applied to art that incorporates the bizarre juxtapositions of dream logic. We know it fro...
Honoré de Balzac Writes About “The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee,” and His Epic Coffee Addictionwww.openculture.com 174 years after his death, Honoré de Balzac remains an extremely modern-sounding wag. Were he alive today, he'd no doubt be pounding out his provocative observations in a coffice, a café whose free wi...
Andy Warhol Hosts Frank Zappa on His Cable TV Show, and Later Recalls, “I Hated Him More Than Ever” After the Showwww.openculture.com Had Andy Warhol lived to see the internet--especially social networking--he would have loved it, though it may not have loved him. Open Culture, openculture.com
David Lynch Being a Madman for a Relentless 8 Minutes and 30 Secondswww.openculture.com Madman or visionary? A little of both? A genius? A brand? A mensch? David Lynch is all these things and more, and this fan-made video above is a quick reminder of the career and the consistency of the...
Watch Tom Waits For No One, the Pioneering Animated Music Video from 1979www.openculture.com Tom Waits For No One, above, is surely the only film in history to have won an Oscar for Scientific and Technical Achievement for its creator and a first place award at the Hollywood Erotic Film and V...
Behold Gustave Doré’s Dramatic Illustrations of the Bible (1866)www.openculture.com One occasionally hears it said that, thanks to the internet, all the books truly worth reading are free: Shakespeare, Don Quixote, the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, the Divine Comedy, the Bible. Can it ...
The Psychedelic Animated Video for Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn” (1979)www.openculture.com Ah, yes, 'Autobahn.' From the moment the door slams and the ignition starts, prog rockers and pre-new wavers know a journey is afoot. Open Culture, openculture.com
2000-Year-Old Bottle of White Wine Found in a Roman Burial Sitewww.openculture.com Image via Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports
Back in 2017, we featured the oldest unopened bottle of wine in the world here on Open Culture. Open Culture, openculture.com
“Tsundoku,” the Japanese Word for the New Books That Pile Up on Our Shelves, Should Enter the English Languagewww.openculture.com There are some words out there that are brilliantly evocative and at the same time impossible to fully translate. Yiddish has the word shlimazl, which basically means a perpetually unlucky person. Ger...
The Internet Archive Rescues MTV News’ Web Site, Making 460,000+ of Its Pages Searchable Againwww.openculture.com Image via Internet Archive
Last month, MTV News' web site went missing. Or at least almost all of it did, including an archive of stories going back to 1997. Open Culture, openculture.com
A Close Look at Beowulf-Era Helmets & Swords, Courtesy of the British Museumwww.openculture.com Even if a student assigned Beowulf is, at first, dismayed by its language, that same student may well be captivated by its setting. Open Culture, openculture.com
2000-Year-Old Bottle of White Wine Found in a Roman Burial Sitewww.openculture.com Image via Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports
Back in 2017, we featured the oldest unopened bottle of wine in the world here on Open Culture. Open Culture, openculture.com
Frederick Douglass’s Fiery 1852 Speech, “The Meaning of July 4th for the Negro,” Read by James Earl Joneswww.openculture.com Every year on this day, Frederick Douglass’s fiery, uncompromising 1852 speech, “The Meaning of July 4th for the Negro,” gets a new hearing, and takes on added resonance in the context of contemporary...
Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa Now Appears on Japanese Banknoteswww.openculture.com If you've lived or traveled in Japan, you know full well how much of daily life in that cash-intensive society involves the use of thousand-yen bills. Open Culture, openculture.com
Kurt Vonnegut Urges Young People to Make Art and “Make Your Soul Grow”www.openculture.com New York City high school students who'd contacted him as part of a 2006 English assignment. (The identities of the other authors selected for this honor are lost to time, but not one had the courtes...
Watch 1970s Animations of Songs by Joni Mitchell, Jim Croce & The Kinks, Aired on The Sonny & Cher Showwww.openculture.com The Sonny and Cher Show aired in the years right before I was born. Not only do I have no memory of it, of course, but I don’t believe I’ve ever seen an entire episode, either in re-runs or on the int...
How a Steady Supply of Coffee Helped the Union Win the U.S. Civil Warwww.openculture.com Americans doing 'e-mail jobs' and working in the 'laptop class' tend to make much of the quantity of coffee they require to keep going, or even to get started. In that sense alone, they have something...
Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth: Watch the Six-Part Series with Bill Moyers (1988)www.openculture.com The twenty-first century encourages us to regard ourselves as having evolved beyond heroes, to say nothing of myths. Such things were only useful in the pre-modern world, as yet unblessed by the conve...
Thousands of Pablo Picasso’s Works Now Available in a New Digital Archivewww.openculture.com If you want to immerse yourself in the world of Pablo Picasso, you might start at the Museo Picasso Málaga, located in the artist's Spanish birthplace. Open Culture, openculture.com
Why You Do Your Best Thinking In The Shower: Creativity & the “Incubation Period”www.openculture.com Image via Wikimedia Commons
“The great Tao fades away.”
So begins one translation of the Tao Te Ching’s 18th Chapter. The sentence captures the frustration that comes with a lost epiphany. Open Cultu...
The Story of Lee Miller: From the Cover of Vogue to Hitler’s Bathtubwww.openculture.com In late-twenties Manhattan, a nineteen-year-old woman named Elizabeth 'Lee' Miller stepped off the curb and into the path of a car. She was pulled back to safety by none other than the magnate Condé N...
Martin Mull (RIP) Satirically Interviews a Young Tom Waits on Fernwood 2 Night (1977)www.openculture.com These days, references to seventies television increasingly require prefatory explanation. Open Culture, openculture.com