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The Earliest Known Appearance of the F‑Word (1310)

Open Culture ·

2025/09/11

Photo by Paul Booth You value decorum, propriety, eloquence, you treasure le mot juste and agonize over diction as you compose polite but strongly-worded letters to the editor. But alas, my literate friend, you have the misfortune of living in the age of Twitter, Tumblr, et al., where the favored means of communication consists of […]

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The Technology That Brought Down Medieval Castles and...

Open Culture ·

2025/09/11

Civilization moved past the use of castles long ago, but their imagery endures in popular culture. Even young children here in the twenty-twenties have an idea of what castles look like. But why do they look like that? Admittedly, that’s a bit of a trick question: the popular concept of castles tends to be inspired […]

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How Erik Satie Invented Modern Music: A Visual...

Open Culture ·

2025/09/10

Once you hear Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1, you never forget it. Not that popular culture would let you forget it: the piece has been, and continues to be, reinterpreted and sampled by musicians working in a variety of genres from pop to electronic to metal. In versions that sound close to what Satie would […]

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Browse Thousands of Free Vintage Cocktail Recipes...

Open Culture ·

2025/09/10

Where do the hipster mixologists of Tokyo, Mexico City and Brooklyn take their inspiration? If not from the Exposition Universelle des Vins et Spiritueux’ free collection of digitized vintage cocktail recipe books, perhaps they should start. An initiative of the Museum of Wine and Spirits on the Ile de Bendor in Southeastern France, the collection is a boon to anyone with an interest […]

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The Advanced Technology of Ancient Rome: Automatic...

Open Culture ·

2025/09/09

Ancient Rome never had an industrial revolution. Granted, certain historians have objected now and again to that once-settled claim, gesturing toward large heaps of pottery discovered in garbage dumps and other such artifacts clearly produced in large numbers. Still, the fact remains that Ancient Rome never had an industrial revolution of the kind that fired […]

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Discover the 100-Year-Old Self-Playing Violin, One of...

Open Culture ·

2025/09/09

At the 1910 World’s Exhibition in Brussels, Ludwig Hupfeld unveiled the Phonoliszt-Violina, an instrument once dubbed “the eighth wonder of the world.” A leading maker of automated instruments in Germany, Hupfeld built a company that produced everything from phonola push-up players to player pianos. In 1907 he created his most famous invention, the Phonoliszt-Violina. It […]

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What an 85-Year-Long Harvard Study Says Is the Real...

Open Culture ·

2025/09/08

We’ve long used the French word milieu in English, but not with quite the same range of meanings it has back in France. For example, French society (and especially the members of its older generations) explicitly recognizes the value of a milieu in the sense of the collected friends, acquaintances, and relations with whom one has […]

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Why You Should Only Work 3–4 Hours a Day, Like...

Open Culture ·

2025/09/08

These days, we hear much said on social media — surely too much — in favor of the “hustle culture” and the “grind mindset” (or, abbreviated for maximum efficiency, the “grindset”). Dedication to your work is to be admired, provided that the work itself is of value, but the more of a day’s hours you […]

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Explore an Online Archive of 12,700 Vintage Cookbooks

Open Culture ·

2025/09/05

“Early cookbooks were fit for kings,” writes Henry Notaker at The Atlantic. “The oldest published recipe collections” in the 15th and 16th centuries in Western Europe “emanated from the palaces of monarchs, princes, and grand señores.” Cookbooks were more than recipe collections—they were guides to court etiquette and sumptuous records of luxurious living. In ancient […]

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How Egon Schiele Made Enduring Art from His Troubled...

Open Culture ·

2025/09/04

“May you live in interesting times,” goes the apocryphal but nevertheless much-invoked “Chinese curse.” Egon Schiele, born in the Austria-Hungary of 1890, certainly did live in interesting times, and his work, as featured in the new Great Art Explained video above, can look like the creations of a cursed man. That’s especially true of those […]

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Behold an Anatomically Correct Replica of the Human...

Open Culture ·

2025/09/04

Our brains dictate our every move. They’re the ones who spur us to study hard, so we can make something of ourselves, in order to better our communities. They name our babies, choose our clothes, decide what we’re hungry for. They make and break laws, organize protests, fritter away hours on social media, and give […]

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Hear the First Masterpiece of Electronic Music,...

Open Culture ·

2025/09/03

Karlheinz Stockhausen appears, among many other cultural figures, on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. His inclusion was more than a trendy gesture toward the European avant-garde; anyone who knows that pathbreaking electronic composer’s work will notice its influence on the album at first listen. Paul McCartney himself went on record with […]

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The World’s Most Famous Organ Piece Played on the...

Open Culture ·

2025/09/03

The world’s most famous organ piece, played on the world’s largest fully functioning pipe organ. That’s what you have above. Here, organist Dylan David Shaw performs Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor on the famous Wanamaker organ. Originally built for the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, the organ ended up in Philadelphia’s Wanamaker’s […]

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How Raphael Became A Master: Watch the Evolution of...

Open Culture ·

2025/09/02

No artist became a Renaissance master through a single piece of work, though now, half a millennium later, that may be how most of us identify them. Leonardo? Painter of the Mona Lisa. Michelangelo? Painter of the Sistine Chapel ceiling (or, perhaps, the sculptor of the most famous David, depending on your medium of choice). […]

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Empire Without Limit: Watch Mary Beard’s TV Series on...

Open Culture ·

2025/09/01

As the founding myth has it, the city of Rome was established by a man named Romulus, one of two orphaned twin brothers raised by a she-wolf on the banks of the Tiber river. The legend of Romulus and Remus, which involves the former’s fratricidal slaying of the latter, lends itself to striking imagery, though […]

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How Disney Fought Fascism with Propaganda Cartoons...

Open Culture ·

2025/07/25

Today, the Walt Disney Company seems like one of those entities that’s “too big to fail” — but during the Second World War, fail it nearly did. Like the big-thinking entertainer-businessman he was, Walt Disney himself had been re-investing the company’s profits into ever more ambitious animated films. This practice took an unfortunate turn with […]

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The Nazis’ 10 Control-Freak Rules for Jazz...

Open Culture ·

2025/07/24

Like the rock and roll revolution of the 1950s, which shocked staid white audiences with translations of black rhythm and blues, the popularity of jazz caused all kinds of racial panic and social anxiety in the early part of the twentieth century. Long before the rise of European fascism, many American groups expressed extreme fear […]

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Plato, Aristotle & Other Greek Philosophers in...

Open Culture ·

2025/07/24

Among the wonders to behold at the Vatican Museums are the larger-than-life forms of the titans of Greek philosophy. It’s widely known that at the center of Raphael’s fresco The School of Athens, which dominates one wall of the twelve Stanze di Raffaello in the Apostolic Palace, stand Plato and Aristotle. In reality, of course, […]

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Watch The Nine Lives of Ozzy Osbourne: A Free...

Open Culture ·

2025/07/23

“This is supposed to be my farewell tour,” says Ozzy Osbourne in a clip included in the Biography television documentary above. He then gives the finger and adds, “We’ll see.” The year was 1993, and indeed, there turned out to have been much more to come for the former frontman of Black Sabbath, the band […]

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Salvador Dalí Goes to Hollywood & Creates a Wild...

Open Culture ·

2025/07/23

Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel reportedly carried rocks in their pockets during the premiere of their first film Un Chien Andalou, anticipating a violent reaction from the audience. It was a fair concern. The movie might be almost 90 years old but it still has the power to provoke – the film features a shot of […]

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377 results