Shows / Open Culture
Episodes
- Open Culture
The Early Years of Electronic Pop: The Moog Craze, Psychedelic Experiments, and More
There’s a decent chance you’ve heard at least a couple of tracks from Wendy Carlos’ Switched-On Bach. But when was the last time you put on Switched-On Rock…
- Open Culture
Surreal Pinscreen Animations Bring Kafka, Gogol & Mussorgsky to Life (1933–1972)
What do Franz Kafka, Nikolai Gogol, and Modest Mussorgsky have in common? They stand alone among their peers for their darkly humorous sensibilities…
- Open Culture
Inside the Making of the Sagrada Família, Barcelona’s 144-Year Megaproject
To get a sense of Sagrada Família’s popularity with YouTubers, you have only to take a look at the related Open Culture posts linked below. As will hardly…
- Open Culture
The Vibrant Color Wheels Designed by Goethe, Newton & Other Theorists of Color (1665–1810)
Maybe it’s the cloistered headiness of Rene Descartes, or the rigorous austerity of Isaac Newton; maybe it’s all the leathern breeches, gray waistcoats, sallow…
- Open Culture
How Balzac’s Extreme Coffee Habit Fueled His Productive Writing Routine
Even now, in this age when the very reading of literature is endangered — or so the articles tell us — Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) retains a notable ability…
- Open Culture
A Soviet Animation of Stephen King’s Short Story “Battleground” (1986)
Stephen King has that rare, and spectacularly profitable, skill to suck you into his world and compel you to flip to the next page. And when you’re hooked, his…
- Open Culture
Harry Houdini Died 100 Years Ago This Halloween: Was He Really Killed by a Punch to the Stomach?
This Halloween marks the 100th anniversary of the death of famed escape artist Harry Houdini. Today, most of us know more about the manner of that death than…
- Open Culture
Hear an Hour of the Jazzy Background Music from the Original 1967 Spider-Man Cartoon
Ray Ellis had a six-decade career as a producer, arranger, and jazz composer. And while he’s best known for arranging music for Billie Holiday’s Lady in Satin…
- Open Culture
Watch Rome Rise, Fall, and Rise Again in a Three-Minute 3D Timelapse
Scholars disagree on when, exactly, Rome fell. But if you watch the new video from City 3D Timelapse above, you’ll understand the lack of debate on the…
- Open Culture
Christopher Lee Reads Edgar Allan Poe: “The Raven,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” & More
Sir Christopher Lee and Edgar Allan Poe went way back. Or at least they went as far back as 1969, the year of The Oblong Box, a loose and lurid film adaptation…
- Open Culture
What Ancient Latin Sounded Like, And How We Know It
Latin is a language As dead as dead can be; It killed the Romans long ago, And now it’s killing me. That famed ditty isn’t likely to resonate with many modern…
- Open Culture
In 1897, London’s Lampposts Dispensed Hot Coffee, Tea, and “Fluid Beef”
Any reader of Victorian literature will wonder how much a ha’penny was actually worth in those days. For a little more than a year at the very end of that…
- Open Culture
Sears Sold 75,000 DIY Mail Order Homes Between 1908 and 1939, and Transformed American Life
Two of the books that most shaped American culture both happened to bear the nickname “The Big Book.” While the second of these, the A.A. Manual, published in…
- Open Culture
Doctor Who’s Tom Baker Plays Douglas Adams’ Digital “Agent” in the AI-Predicting Hyperland (1990)
Cast your mind, if you will, back to the year 2020. It now feels like a different time, what with the spreading COVID-19 pandemic and the heated sociopolitical…
- Open Culture
Hear How Clare Torry’s Vocals on Pink Floyd’s “The Great Gig in the Sky” Made the Song Go from Pretty Good to Downright Great
Smack in the middle of Pink Floyd’s classic Dark Side of the Moon sits a song many listeners may hear as an extended bridge between the two true centerpieces…
- Open Culture
The Dark Story Behind Edgar Allan Poe’s Most Famous Photograph, Taken Four Days After a Laudanum Overdose
In the Halloween season, one American writer comes to mind more often than any other: Edgar Allan Poe. That owes in large part to his famously macabre tales…
- Open Culture
When a Cat Co-Authored a Paper in a Leading Physics Journal (1975)
Back in 1975, Jack H. Hetherington, a physics professor at Michigan State University, wrote a research paper on low–temperature physics for the…
- Open Culture
How Vincent van Gogh’s Sister-in-Law Worked Tirelessly to Make Him Famous
No artist, no matter how solitary by nature, becomes a cultural phenomenon alone. That’s even true of such an isolated figure as Vincent van Gogh, whose death…
- Open Culture
The Megaprojects That Even the Ancient Romans Couldn’t Pull Off: Rerouting the Tiber, Digging a Canal, and More
Some would call the United States of America the mightiest empire the world has ever known. Yet over the past half-century or so, it has shown a strange…
- Open Culture
Watch “The Midnight Parasites,” a Surreal Japanese Animation Set in the World of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (1972)
Hieronymus Bosch’s bizarre paintings might have looked perfectly ordinary to his contemporaries, argues Stanley Meisler in “The World of Bosch.” Modern viewers…
- Open Culture
Why Cleopatra, Lawrence of Arabia, Ben-Hur & Other Hollywood Classics Still Look So Good
Cleopatra cost Twentieth Century Fox $44 million, by the studio’s own estimate. That may sound like the budget of one of those genre pictures that winds up…
- Open Culture
Soviet-Era Illustrations of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1976)
Until I read J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, my favorite book growing up was, by far, The Hobbit. Growing up in Russia, however, meant that instead…
- Open Culture
The Names of Nearly 4 Million Enslaved People in Former British Colonies Are Now Searchable Online, Helping Descendants Find Lost Ancestors
A few years ago, we featured here on Open Culture the Freedmen’s Bureau Project database, which contains searchable information on formerly enslaved people in…
- Open Culture
The Bialetti Moka Express: The History of Italy’s Iconic Coffee Maker, and How to Use It the Right Way
I am sure that many an Open Culture reader has a Bialetti Moka Express in their kitchen. I know I do, but I must add that I knew little about its history and…
- Open Culture
The Biggest Ship in History Was Built in China 600 Years Ago—Or Was It?
In 2002, the retired British submarine lieutenant-commander turned amateur historian Gavin Menzies created a stir with a book about Chinese seafaring in the…
- Open Culture
A 900-Page Pre-Pantone Guide to Color from 1692: A Complete High-Resolution Digital Scan
There’s ahead of its time, then there’s Traité des couleurs servant à la peinture à l’eau — or, in its original Dutch title, Klaer Lightende…
- Open Culture
David Byrne’s New Book Explores the Strange Afterlife of Good Ideas: From Vermeer’s Paintings to Roman Concrete & Dark Matter
David Byrne will always be most widely known as the co-founder and frontman of Talking Heads. That may count among the greatest possible achievements for any…
- Open Culture
The Strange and Brilliant Inventions of Nikola Tesla
Even before the success of the electric car company that now bears his name, Nikola Tesla was a widely respected historical figure. Often, that respect could…
- Open Culture
7 Tips from Edgar Allan Poe on How to Write Vivid Stories & Poems
There may be no more a macabrely misogynistic sentence in English literature than Edgar Allan Poe’s contention that “the death… of a beautiful woman” is…
- Open Culture
Why the Maps of London, Tokyo, New York, and Other Major Cities Look the Way They Do
If you’re trying to understand a city, its map isn’t a bad place to start. Today, of course, we can call up an accurate map of practically any part of any city…
- Open Culture
It’s the End of the World as We Know It: The Apocalypse Gets Visualized in an Inventive Map from 1486
When will the world end? We can find serious scientific answers to this question, depending on what we mean by “world” and “end.” If we mean the end of…
- Open Culture
Discover the Lost Horror Series Deemed Too Shocking for BBC Television (1967)
High culture and new technology have never been a natural pairing. As our digital era has often underscored, media innovations tend to be adopted earliest to…
- Open Culture
In 1704, Isaac Newton Predicted That the World Will End in 2060
We have become quite used to pronouncements of doom, from scientists predicting the sixth mass extinction due to the measurable effects of climate change, and…
- Open Culture
300 Years Before ChatGPT, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels Imagined Machines Writing Books and Producing Knowledge (1726)
The printing press was invented in the middle of the fifteenth century, and it’s been downhill for the written word ever since. Even before then, arguments…
- Open Culture
Artists Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera Visit Leon Trotsky in Mexico: Vintage Footage from 1938
Here’s some rare footage of the great Mexican painters Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo paying a visit to exiled Soviet revolutionary Leon…
- Open Culture
When Buckminster Fuller Proposed Putting a Dome Over Manhattan (1960)
Image via Buckminster Fuller Estate The novels of John Brunner have become a niche taste, even within his genre of science fiction. A more sociologically…
- Open Culture
LEGO Lets You Build Gaudí’s Sagrada Família in Its Largest Set Ever
When work on the Sagrada Família first began in 1882, the original architect could hardly have imagined that, 144 years later, the ambitious undertaking would…
- Open Culture
The Cable that Changed the World: How Instant Global Communication Began in 1858
The word wireless is going the way of computerized and portable, and for much the same reasons. We no longer regard wireless devices that require no…
- Open Culture
The Oldest Book Printed with Movable Type is Not The Gutenberg Bible: Jikji, a Collection of Korean Buddhist Teachings, Predated It By 78 Years and It’s Now Digitized Online
The history of the printed word is full of bibliographic twists and turns, major historical moments, and the significant printing of books now so obscure no…
- Open Culture
How to Explain Complicated Things
You may remember a time when it was difficult to make it through the day without hearing someone cite a TED Talk. A major technological reason for that was…
- Open Culture
Mick Jagger Tells the Story Behind ‘Gimme Shelter’ and Merry Clayton’s Haunting Background Vocals
In the fall of 1969 the Rolling Stones were in a Los Angeles recording studio, putting the final touches on their album Let It Bleed. It was a tumultuous…
- Open Culture
Read the CIA’s Manual of Trickery and Deception, Written by a Professional Stage Magician
The idea of a youngster vacillating between whether to become a magician or join the Central Intelligence Agency may sound implausible, but those two working…
- Open Culture
The Little Albert Experiment: The Perverse 1920 Study That Made a Baby Afraid of Santa Claus & Bunnies
The field of psychology is very different than it used to be. Nowadays, the American Psychological Association has a code of conduct for experiments that…
- Open Culture
How Else Marie Pade, a Prisoner in World War II, Became Denmark’s First Female Electronic Composer
Before she became a composer of electronic music, Else Marie Pade was a sick child listening to the radio. Frequent kidney inflammations consigned her to bed…
- Open Culture
The Long, Strange History of Tarot Cards: From the 14th Century to Modern Times
We have any number of reasons for difficulty getting to sleep, not least worries about the future. This is hardly a recent phenomenon, and indeed practices…
- Open Culture
How to Memorize an Entire Chapter from “Moby Dick”: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I mentally revisit the various homes of my childhood, wandering from room to room, turning on lights and peering in closets…
- Open Culture
When Salvador Dalí Gave a Surrealist Lecture in a Diving Suit … and Almost Suffocated (1936)
Image by Library of Congress/Carl Van Vechten, via Wikimedia Commons Many a foreigner has visited England and found it an unexpectedly surreal place. Some of…
- Open Culture
Watch Interplanetary Revolution (1924): The Most Bizarre Soviet Animated Propaganda Film You’ll Ever See
In 1924, Zenon Komissarenko, Youry Merkulov and Nikolai Khodataev produced Interplanetary Revolution, which might just be one of the strangest Soviet…
- Open Culture
How Alan Turing and His Fellow Codebreakers Broke the Nazis’ “Unbreakable” Enigma Code
There was a time when you could just go out and buy an Enigma machine. In the early nineteen-twenties, any organization with a need to keep its communications…
- Open Culture
The Digital Dada Library: Discover the Archive That Preserves the Original Publications of the Experimental Anti-Art Movement Online
Critical theorists like Theodor Adorno may have overreached in claiming that all mass culture is mediocre, mechanized propaganda made to justify the status…
- Open Culture
When Galileo Calculated the Precise Dimensions of Hell in Dante’s Inferno
We venerate Galileo Galilei for daring to speak the scientific truth in the face of severe institutional opposition. He publicly acknowledged that the Earth…
- Open Culture
Listen to 4+ Hours of Jazz & Classical Music from Haruki Murakami’s Novels
Before he became a novelist, Haruki Murakami ran a jazz bar in Tokyo, and music has filled his novels ever since. For your listening pleasure, NTS Radio has…
- Open Culture
Rage Against the Machines: From the Luddites to the AI Data Center Backlash
One often-repeated anecdote about Milton Friedman has the famous economist visiting a canal under construction in nineteen-sixties China. Noticing the sheer…
- Open Culture
How Reading Changes the Way Your Brain Works
Reading is unnatural. This will hardly come as a surprise to any child trying to put off his homework for just one more hour of watching other kids play…
- Open Culture
An In-Depth, Immersive Journey Through the Bayeux Tapestry
With the Bayeux Tapestry now on display at the British Museum, Deep Down History presents a deep dive into the embroidery’s full story: “The Bayeux Tapestry is…
- Open Culture
The Genius Logic of the NATO Phonetic Alphabet: How It Was Created & How It Works
Most of us can rattle off the first few words-that-stand-for-letters of the NATO phonetic alphabet. Alfa, Bravo, and Charlie no doubt come right to mind, and…
- Open Culture
Watch Footage from the Psychology Experiment That Shocked the World: Milgram’s Obedience Study (1961)
For decades following World War II,  the world was left wondering how the atrocities of the Holocaust could have been perpetrated in the midst of—and…
- Open Culture
The Radical Ideas of Plato’s Republic: An In-Depth Introduction
We no longer live in a time when college freshmen get shocked by much of the reading material assigned to them. Counterintuitively, the texts that do retain…
- Open Culture
Why Incompetent People Think They’re Amazing: An Animated Lesson from David Dunning (of the Famous “Dunning-Kruger Effect”)
The business world has long had special jargon for the Kafkaesque incompetence bedeviling the ranks of upper management. There is “the Peter principle,” first…
- Open Culture
How the Silk Road Actually Worked (and What Could Go Terribly Wrong On It)
You don’t have to spend a long time reading up on the Silk Road before you see the term itself (“Silk Road”) called a misnomer. In fact, what we refer to by…