~openculture | Bookmarks (181)

In 1799, Napoleon’s army encountered a curious artifact in Egypt, a black stone that featured writing in three different languages: Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Demotic Egyptian, and Ancient Greek. Before long, English troops captured the stone and brought it to the British Museum in 1802—where it remains today. The animated video above, created by Egyptologist Franziska Naether, […]

Image by Anders Sandberg, via Wikimedia Commons Asked to imagine the character of everyday life in the Middle Ages, a young student in the twenty-twenties might well reply, before getting around to any other details, that it involved no smartphones. But even the flashiest new technologies have long evolutionary histories, and, in certain notable respects, […]

The Book of Colour Concepts will soon be published by Taschen in a multilingual edition, containing text in English, French, German, and Spanish. This choice makes its abundance of explanatory scholarship widely accessible at a stroke, but even those who read none of those four languages can enjoy the book. For it takes a deep […]

History remembers Henry Dunant (1828–1910) for two things–being the co-founder of the Red Cross movement and winning the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901. Less well known is his diagram of the Apocalypse. Between 1877 and 1890, notes the Red Cross Museum website, Henry Dunant “produced a series of diagrams reflecting his distinctive understanding of humanity’s past […]

A heads up on a deal: Between now and March 31, 2024, 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 7,000+ world-class courses for one all-inclusive subscription price. This includes Coursera’s Specializations and Professional Certificates, all […]

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who recognize the phrase “corny dialogue that would make the pope weep,” and those who don’t. If you fall into the former category, your mind is almost certainly filled with images of bleak Midwestern winters, modest trailer homes, hooded figures smashing an already-junkyard-worthy car, and […]

A beautiful early example of visualizing the flow of history, Sebastian C. Adams’ Synchronological Chart of Universal History outlines the evolution of mankind from Adam and Eve to 1871, the year of its first edition. A recreation can be found and closely examined at the David Rumsey Map Collection, which allows you to zoom in on […]

The story of Vincent van Gogh’s life tends to be defined by his psychological condition and the not-unrelated manner of his death. (It does if we set aside the episode with the mutilated ear and the brothel, anyway.) The figure of the impoverished, neglected artist whose work would revolutionize his medium, and whose descent into […]

In 1957, Salvador Dalí created a tableware set consisting of 1) a four-tooth fork with a fish handle, 2) an elephant fork with three teeth, 3) a snail knife with tears, 4) a leaf knife, 5) a small artichoke spoon, and 6) an artichoke spoon. When the set went on auction in 2012, it sold […]

The protagonist of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is a “fireman” tasked with incinerating what few books remain in a domestic-screen-dominated future society forced into illiteracy. Late in life, Ray Bradbury declared that he wrote the novel because he was “worried about people being turned into morons by TV.” This tinges with a certain irony given […]

?si=WxyK2XAukThVTpa7 Construction on the Tower of Pisa first began in the year 1173. By 1178, the architects knew they had a problem on their hands. Built on an unsteady foundation, the tower began to sink under its own weight and soon started to lean. Medieval architects tried to address the tilt. However, it persisted and […]

Above, actor Benedict Cumberbatch reads the final letter written by Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who died in a Siberian prison on February 16th. The letter gets at a question many have asked, even from afar. Why, after being poisoned with Novichok in 2020, did Navalny return to Russia, knowing he would face immediate […]

Since the J. Paul Getty Museum launched its Open Content program back in 2013, we’ve been featuring their efforts to make their vast collection of cultural artifacts freely accessible online. They’ve released not just digitized works of art, but also a great many art history texts and art books in general. Just this week, they announced […]

Sergei Bondarchuk directed an 8‑hour film adaptation of War and Peace (1966–67), which ended up winning an Oscar for Best Foreign Picture. When he was in Los Angeles as a guest of honor at a party, Hollywood royalty like John Wayne, John Ford, and Billy Wilder lined up to meet the Russian filmmaker. But the […]

Few of us grow up drinking coffee, but once we start drinking it, even fewer of us ever stop. According to legend, the earliest such case was a ninth-century Ethiopian goatherd named Kaldi, who noticed how much energy his ruminant charges seemed to draw from eating particular red berries. After chewing a few of them […]

Dune: Part Two has been playing in theaters for less than a week, but that’s more than enough time for its viewers to joke about the aptness of its title. For while it comes, of course, as the second half of Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s influential sci-fi novel, it also contains a great many […]

Seventeenth-century Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn may have more name recognition than nearly any other European artist, his popularity due in large part to what art historian Alison McQueen identifies in her book of the same name as “the rise of the cult of Rembrandt.” Popular Rembrandt veneration brought us in the 20th century such […]

By the early nineteen-nineties, at least in the United States, Latin instruction in schools wasn’t what it had once been. Students everywhere had long been showing impatience and irreverence about their having to study that “dead language,” of course. But surely it had never felt quite so irrelevant as it did in a world of […]

Historians have long thought that the decimal point first came into use in 1593, when the German mathematician Christopher Clavius wrote an astronomy text called Astrolabium. It turns out, however, that the history of the decimal point stretches back another 150 years–to the work of the Venetian merchant Giovanni Bianchini. In his text Tabulae primi […]

  When we’ve already heard about someone’s personal scandal in the news, do we need to also see it dramatized with A‑list actors? Your hosts Mark Linsenmayer, Lawrence Ware, Sarahlyn Bruck, and Al Baker discuss Todd Haynes’ 2023 film May December fictionalizing the long-aftermath of the much publicized Mary Kay Letourneau story. The main events […]

If you’re an even mildly enthusiastic filmgoer, these two short compilations from The Solomon Society will get your life flashing before your eyes. They transport me to my ninth birthday screening of The Nightmare Before Christmas; my VHS viewings of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off at home sick from school; the obsession with Blade Runner that […]

“To me, Lou stood out. The real deal! Something important to American music and to ALL MUSIC! I miss him and his dog.” — Keith Richards On what would have been Lou Reed’s 82nd birthday (March 2), Keith Richards released a cover of “I’m Waiting for the Man,” a track originally written by Reed in […]

Though Jane Austen hasn’t published a novel since 1817 — with her death that same year being a reasonable excuse — her appeal as a literary brand remains practically unparalleled in its class. This century has offered its own film and television versions of all her major novels from Sense and Sensibility to Persuasion, and […]

The US Postal Service will be classing up the joint, with the planned release of 16 stamps featuring the photography of Ansel Adams. They write: Ansel Adams made a career of crafting photographs in exquisitely sharp focus and nearly infinite tonality and detail. His ability to consistently visualize a subject — not how it looked […]