~openculture | Bookmarks (176)

“Steady Pushkin, matter-of-fact Tolstoy, restrained Chekhov have all had their moments of irrational insight which simultaneously blurred the sentence and disclosed a secret meaning worth the sudden focal shift,” writes Vladimir Nabokov in his Lectures on Russian Literature. “But with Gogol this shifting is the very basis of his art.” When, “as in the immortal […]

It’s difficult to imagine Iman and David Bowie inviting Vogue readers to join them on the above virtual tour of their mountaintop home near Woodstock, New York when the rock legend was alive. Granted, shortly after their 1992 wedding, he gave Architectural Digest a peek at their ultra-luxurious, Indonesian-style holiday digs on the Caribbean island […]

Donald Duck first appeared in Disney’s 1934 cartoon The Wise Little Hen (below). In his subsequent roles, he quickly developed into that still-familiar figure the New Yorker once described as “personified irritability.” But it would take him another decade or so to become more than an incompetent, quick-to-anger foil for Mickey Mouse. It would also […]

Evan Puschak, the video essayist better known as the Nerdwriter, has seen a lot of movies. Here on Open Culture, we’ve previously featured his analyses of a range of pictures including Blade Runner, Reservoir Dogs, Parasite, La Dolce Vita, Nostalghia, and You’ve Got Mail. When he notices something special about the films coming out of […]

From Letters Live comes a letter read by Gillian Anderson. They preface it with this: “In 1932, Cuban diarist Anaïs Nin and American novelist Henry Miller began an incredibly intense love affair that would last for many years. In the 1940s, at which point she, Miller, and a collective of other writers were earning $1 […]

Jazz pianist and composer Charles Cornell is not alone in his contempt for the sort of dumbed down musical fare typical of children’s programming. The late Johnny Costa, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood’s long-time musical director and a self-described “real jazzer,” was of like mind: Children have ears, and they’re people, and they can hear good music […]

The nature documentary series Our Planet opens with a startlingly stark observation courtesy of broadcaster, biologist, natural historian, and author Sir David Attenborough: Just 50 years ago, we finally ventured to the moon… Since then, the human population has more than doubled… (and) In the last 50 years, wildlife populations have, on average, declined by […]

Westerners tend to think of Japan as a land of high-speed trains, expertly prepared sushi and ramen, auteur films, brilliant animation, elegant woodblock prints, glorious old hotels, sought-after jazz-records, cat islands, and ghost towns. The last of those has, of course, not been shown to harbor literal wraiths and spirits. But if that sort of […]

?si=RFbzFSzSNWzua3‑7 Could you use a mental escape? Maybe a trip to Mars will do the trick. Above, you can find high definition footage captured by NASA’s three Mars rovers–Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity. The footage (also contributed by JPL-Caltech, MSSS, Cornell University and ASU) was stitched together by ElderFox Documentaries, creating what they call the most lifelike experience of being […]

The word sophisticated may sound like praise today, but it originated as more of an accusation. Trace its etymology back far enough and you’ll encounter the sophists, itinerant lecturers in ancient Greece who taught subjects like philosophy, mathematics, music, and rhetoric — the last of which they mastered no matter their ostensible subject area. Their […]

A quick final heads up: Coursera’s deal, which offers $200 off of Coursera Plus, ends in two days–February 1. If you’re interested in the discount, you have a couple days to make a call… Coursera has announced that it’s extending (until February 1) a special deal that will let you get a $200 discount on […]

One needn’t think too hard to come up with a list of celebrated children who seem somehow less exceptional when their baby fat comes off and their permanent teeth come in. We’ll eat Werner Herzog’s shoe if Alma Deutscher’s name is on it. When she was 11, conductor Johannes Wildner told the New York Times […]

There was a time in America, not so very long ago, when conventional wisdom discouraged immigrants from speaking the language of the old country at home. In fact, “it used to be thought that being bilingual was a bad thing, that it would confuse or hold people back, especially children. Turns out we couldn’t have […]

Things change… Especially when you’re tracking the continental movement from Pangea to the present day in 5 million years increments at the rate of 2.5 million years per second. Wherever you are, 350 million years ago, your address would’ve been located on the mega-continent of Pangea. Early humans debuted around 200 million years ago, which […]

The Codex Seraphinianus is not a medieval book; nor does it date from the Renaissance along with the codices of Leonardo. In fact, it was published only in 1981, but in the intervening decades it has gained recognition as “the strangest book ever published,” as we described it when we previously featured it here on […]

With the rise of AI tools like ChatGPT, which can generate essay after essay near-instantaneously from even the simplest prompt, surely the skill of writing will soon go the way of arrowhead-sharpening. That would be easy to believe, anyway, amid the current technological buzz. But venture capitalist Paul Graham, a man as well-placed as any […]

Late last year, Amazon announced AI Ready, a new initiative “designed to provide free AI skills training to 2 million people globally by 2025.” This includes eight free AI and generative AI courses, some designed for beginners, and others designed for more advanced students. As the Wall Street Journal podcast notes above, Amazon created the […]

Bruce Hornsby is best known for his first album The Way It Is (1986), but has come light years since then through 18+ albums, experimenting with different styles, playing over 100 shows with the Grateful Dead, and scoring numerous projects for Spike Lee. He’s won three Grammys and recorded with music royalty including Elton John, Ornette […]

Oliver Hermanus’ latest film Living transplants the story of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru to postwar London. Apart from its own considerable merits, it has given viewers across the world reason to revisit the 1952 original, a standout work even in a golden decade of Japanese cinema — the decade The Cinema Cartography co-creator Lewis Bond (previously […]

Everybody who’s been to a Tom Waits concert has stories to tell about it — no few of them heard straight from the mouth of Waits himself. The official live album for his 2008 Glitter and Doom tour actually devotes its entire second disc to “a selection of the comic bromides, strange musings, and unusual […]

For a variety of reasons, science fiction has long been regarded as a mostly male-oriented realm of literature. This is evidenced, in part, by the eagerness to celebrate particular works of sci-fi written by women, like Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea saga, Octavia Butler’s Parable novels, Joanna Russ’ The Female Man, or Margaret Attwood’s The Handmaid’s […]

From the Triton Fountain in the Piazza Barberini to the Fountain of the Four Rivers in Piazza Navona, sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s glorious public fountains have impressed visitors to Rome for centuries. Bernini angled for immorality when carving his Baroque masterpieces from marble. Image by Trdinfl, via Wikimedia Commons Eternity occupied artist James Grashow’s mind, […]

It’s winter, and we still have a ways to go. So maybe we could interest you in a free knitting pattern that depicts a vintage Penguin Classics cover of George Orwell’s <i>1984</i>. A college student gave it a go and posted the results on Reddit. It’s pretty swellegant. You can download the pattern here. Please note, […]

Imagine, if you will, an evening’s entertainment consisting of an episode of Portlandia, a spin of Nirvana’s In Utero, and a screening of Koyaanisqatsi. Perhaps these works would, at first glance, seem to have little in common. But if you end the night by watching the above episode of Big Think’s series Dispatches from the […]