~openculture | Bookmarks (170)
-
Meet Jesse Welles, the Folk Singer Who Turns News into Folk Music, Writing Songs on Elections, Plane Crashes, Ozempic & More
At first glance, Jesse Welles resembles nothing so much as a time traveler from the year...
-
Flannery O’Connor: Friends Don’t Let Friends Read Ayn Rand
In a letter dated May 31, 1960, Flannery O’Connor, the author best known for her classic...
-
How the Fairlight CMI Synthesizer Revolutionized Music
In the credits of Phil Collins’ No Jacket Required appears the disclaimer that “there is no...
-
Jane Austen Used Pins to Edit Her Manuscripts: Before the Word Processor & White-Out
Before the word processor, before White-Out, before Post-It Notes, there were straight pins. Or, at least...
-
What It Was Like to Get a Meal at a Medieval Tavern
At least since The Canterbury Tales, the setting of the medieval tavern has held out the...
-
Watch 10 Great German Expressionist Films: Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari & More
In 1913, Germany, flush with a new nation’s patriotic zeal, looked like it might become the...
-
Horrifying 1906 Illustrations of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds: Discover the Art of Henrique Alvim Corrêa
H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds has terrified and fascinated readers and writers for decades since...
-
Tracing English Back to Its Oldest Known Ancestor: An Introduction to Proto-Indo-European
People understand evolution in all sorts of different ways. We’ve all heard a variety of folk...
-
Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains Who Was the Greatest Scientific Mind in History
Neil deGrasse Tyson has spent his career talking up not just science itself, but also its...
-
Hear an AI Chatbot, Masquerading as a Clueless Grandmother, Waste the Time of an Internet Scam Artist
And now for a good use of AI. The UK-based telecom company O2 has developed a...
-
Warner Bros. Lets You Watch 31 Films Free Online: David Byrne’s True Stories, Christopher Guest’s Waiting for Guffman, Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep & More
It’s Friday, which means that tonight, many of us will sit down to watch a movie...
-
See Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Visualized in Colorfully Animated Scores
Music is often described as the most abstract of all the arts, and arguably the least...
-
Behold Harry Clarke’s Hallucinatory Illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe’s Story Collection, Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1923)
As you’ve probably noticed if you’re a regular reader of this site, we’re big fans of...
-
How Japanese Masters Turn Sand Into Swords: The Art of Traditional Sword Making from Start to Finish
We made sand think: this phrase is used from time to time to evoke the particular...
-
When Charlie Chaplin Entered a Chaplin Look-Alike Contest & Came in 20th Place
Charlie Chaplin started appearing in his first films in 1914—40 films, to be precise—and, by 1915, the...
-
How Wearing Ridiculously Long Pointed Shoes Became a Medieval Fashion Trend
We can all remember seeing images of medieval Europeans wearing pointy shoes, but most of us...
-
Carl Sagan Predicts the Decline of America: Unable to Know “What’s True,” We Will Slide, “Without Noticing, Back into Superstition & Darkness” (1995)
Image by Kenneth Zirkel, via Wikimedia Commons There have been many theories of how human history...
-
Has SpaceX Done Anything NASA Hasn’t? Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains His “Feud” with Elon Musk
One would count neither Elon Musk nor Neil deGrasse Tyson among the most reserved public figures...
-
Watch the First 2+ Hours of MTV’s Inaugural Broadcast (August 1, 1981)
Not everyone on August 1, 1981 had a VCR at their disposal, and not everybody stayed...
-
The Nature of Human Stupidity Explained by The 48 Laws of Power Author Robert Greene
It’s practically guaranteed that we now have more stupid people on the planet than ever before....
-
Jean-Luc Godard Shoots Marianne Faithfull (RIP) Singing “As Tears Go By” in 1966
Note: Yesterday, Marianne Faithfull passed away at age 78. In her memory, we’re bringing back a...
-
Google Unveils a Digital Marketing & E‑Commerce Certificate: 7 Courses Will Help Prepare Students for an Entry-Level Job in 6 Months
Several years ago, Google launched a series of Career Certificates that will “prepare learners for an...
-
Explore a Digitized Edition of the Voynich Manuscript, “the World’s Most Mysterious Book”
A 600-year-old manuscript—written in a script no one has ever decoded, filled with cryptic illustrations, its...
-
How Robert Frost Wrote One of His Most Famous Poems, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”
Several generations of American students have now had the experience of being told by an English...