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Throughout the past week, we’ve read many tributes to Eddie Van Halen and his endless capacity for innovation. Stylistically, EVH changed the sound of rock with tapping, a technique that let him play rapid arpeggios with two hands on the guitar’s fretboard. (Exhibit A is here.) Technically, he created a unique sound by fashioning his […] The Great Illustration That Accompanied Eddie Van Halen’s...

What is the musical instrument most thoroughly of the 1980s? Many would say the "keytar," a class of synthesizer keyboards shaped and worn like a guitar. Their relatively light weights and affordable prices, even when first brought to market, put keytars within the reach of musicians who wanted to possess both the wide sonic palette […] The Story of the SynthAxe, the Astonishing 1980s...

Is this what we want? A post-truth world where toxicity and tribalism trump bridge building and consensus seeking? —Yaël Eisenstat It’s an increasingly familiar occurrence. A friend you’ve enjoyed reconnecting with in the digital realm makes a dramatic announcement on their social media page. They’re deleting their Facebook account within the next 24 hours, so […] Dear Facebook, This is How You’re Breaking Democracy:...

We track sharks, rhino, and bears, so why not Boo Boo Kitty, Peanut, and Pumpkin? The Long Island feline residents volunteered—or more accurately, were volunteered—by their human companions to participate in a domestic cat movement study as part of the international Cat Tracker project. Each beast was outfitted with a GPS tracker-enhanced harness, which they wore for a week. (Many cat […] GPS Tracking Reveals the Secret Lives of Outdoor...

I used to make a point of asking every college-applying teenager I encountered why they wanted to go to college in the first place. Few had a ready answer; most, after a deer-in-the-headlights moment, said they wanted to be able to get a job — and in a tone implying it was too obvious to […] Google Introduces 6-Month Career Certificates, Threatening to Disrupt...

We can spend a lifetime reading histories of ancient Rome without knowing what any of its emperors looked like. Or rather, without knowing exactly what they looked like: being the leaders of the mightiest political entity in the Western world, they had their likenesses stamped onto coins and carved into busts as a matter of […] What Did the Roman Emperors Look Like?: See...

From England's Daily Mirror (January 23, 1923). Find more timely predictions in the Relateds below. via Neil Gaiman Related Content: A 1947 French Film Accurately Predicted Our 21st-Century Addiction to Smartphones Nikola Tesla’s Predictions for the 21st Century: The Rise of Smart Phones & Wireless, The Demise of Coffee, The Rule of Eugenics (1926/35) In […] When We All Have Pocket Telephones (1923) is...

If you’re a regular reader of this site, you’re likely familiar with the simulation hypothesis, the idea that conscious experience is nothing more than a computer program. This concept has many sci-fi implications, from Matrix-like scenarios to the radical idea that everything in the universe is software, run by incomprehensible beings who might as well […] A Virtual Tour of Ancient Rome, Circa 320...

Welkom in Amsterdam… 1922. Neural network artist Denis Shiryaev describes himself as “an artistic machine-learning person with a soul.” For the last six months, he’s been applying himself to re-rendering documentary footage of city life—Belle Epoque Paris, Tokyo at the start of the the Taishō era, and New York City in 1911—the year of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. It’s possible you’ve seen […] Revisit Scenes of Daily Life in Amsterdam in...

For more than 200 years, the rulers of Japan kept the country all but closed to the outside world. In 1854, the "Black Ships" of American commander Matthew Perry arrived to demand an end to Japanese isolation — and a commencement of Japanese world trade. Within decades, many fashion-forward Europeans and even Americans couldn't get […] Watch Vintage Footage of Tokyo, Circa 1910, Get...

Most of us, through our computers or our even our phones, have access to more books than we could ever read in one lifetime. That certainly wouldn't have been the case in, say, the middle ages, when books — assuming you belonged to the elite who could read them in the first place — were […] 16th Century Bookwheels, the E-Readers of the Renaissance,...

This is usually what happens when I write a piece for Open Culture: As I drink an overpriced coffee at my local coffee shop, I research a topic on the internet, write and edit an article on Microsoft Word and then copy and paste the whole thing into WordPress. My editor in Open Culture’s gleaming international […] The End of an Era: A Short Film...

Denis Shiryaev is an AI wizard who has liberally applied his magic to old film—upscaling, colorizing, and otherwise modernizing scenes from Victorian England, late Tsarist Russia, and Belle Époque Paris. He trained machines to restore the earliest known motion picture, 1888’s Roundhay Garden Scene and one of the most mythologized works of early cinema, the Lumière […] Artificial Intelligence Brings to Life Figures from 7...

When times are hard, it often helps to zoom out for a moment—in search of a wider perspective, historical context, the forest full of trees… Astronaut.io, an algorithmic YouTube-based project by Andrew Wong and James Thompson, offers a big picture that’s as restorative as it is odd: Today, you are an Astronaut. You are floating […] Watch a Mesmerizing Stream of Unwatched YouTube Videos:...

Those of us who saw the The Matrix in the theater felt we were witness to the beginning of a new era of cinematically and philosophically ambitious action movies. Whether that era delivered on its promise — and indeed, whether The Matrix's own sequels delivered on the franchise's promise — remains a matter of debate. More […] This Is What <i>The Matrix</i> Looks Like Without...

I live in Seoul, and whenever I'm back in the West, I hear the same question over and over: what's Gangnam like? Presumably Westerners wouldn't have had anything to ask me before the virality of "Gangnam Style," and specifically of the music video satirizing the image of that part of the Korean capital. In Korean, […] This Huge Crashing Wave in a Seoul Aquarium...

The Deutsches Uhrensmuseum introduces the French-made Peter Pan clock above as follows: Even as early as 1930, people were trying to find a way to replace the unpleasant sound of the alarm clock. The inventor of this gramophone alarm clock had a brilliant idea. The gramophone works like the standard alarm clock of those days; […] 1930s Phonograph Doubled as an Alarm Clock, Letting...

Enthusiasm for British television is a force of nature. That goes even more so for British television fandom outside Britain. All of us have known someone, or indeed been someone, who shifted their cultural allegiances wholesale after watching a single episode of, say, Monty Python's Flying Circus. But even that hugely influential comedy series commands […] Download Free <i>Doctor Who</i> Backgrounds for Virtual Meetings...