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A New 20-Minute Supercut of David Letterman Slamming...

Open Culture ·

2025/07/22

The cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert—CBS insists it was purely a “financial decision,” the result of declining ad revenue in late night television. While some buy this argument, others see it as a different kind of “financial decision,” a decision by Paramount (the parent company of CBS) to sacrifice Colbert so that […]

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The Iconic Glass House Built by Ludwig Mies van der...

Open Culture ·

2025/07/22

It’s tempting, in telling the story of the Edith Farnsworth House, to break out clichés like “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.” For the residence in question is made predominantly of glass, or rather glass and steel, and its first owner turned out to have more than a few stones for its […]

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The Life & Death of an Espresso Shot in Super Slow...

Open Culture ·

2025/07/22

Some YouTuber posted online a pretty nice clip of an espresso shot being pulled from a La Marzocco FB80 espresso machine at 120 frames per second. They recommend muting the sound, then putting on your own music. I gave it a quick shot with the famous soundtrack for Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. And I’ll […]

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The Real Science Experiments That Inspired Frankenstein

Open Culture ·

2025/07/21

With the Halloween season mere months away, the time has come to start thinking about what frightening reads to line up for ourselves this year. Some of us may reach for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, a story we all think we know. But a look into its context reveals that what’s now […]

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The Devilish History of the 1980s Parental Advisory...

Open Culture ·

2025/07/21

Frank Zappa called them the “Mothers of Prevention,” the group of wives married to members of Congress who decided in the mid-80s to go to war against rock lyrics and whip up some good ol’ conservative hysteria. We’ve talked about this time before on this site, especially as Zappa himself testified in front of Congress […]

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Watch Queen’s Brilliant Live Aid Performance: It...

Open Culture ·

2025/07/13

“The last people anyone expected to come out of that gig as being the memorable ones was Queen,” said Bob Geldof in an interview, looking back at the band’s stunning 24 minute set at Live Aid on July 13, 1985. In front of 72,000 people in Wembley Stadium and millions watching worldwide, Queen resuscitated their […]

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Igor Stravinsky’s “Illegal” Arrangement of “The Star...

Open Culture ·

2025/07/04

In 1939, Igor Stravinsky emigrated to the United States, first arriving in New York City, before settling in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he delivered the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard during the 1939–40 academic year. While living in Boston, the composer conducted the Boston Symphony and, on one famous occasion, he decided to conduct his […]

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How Four Masters—Michelangelo, Donatello, Verrocchio...

Open Culture ·

2025/07/04

More than a few visitors to Florence make a beeline to the Galleria dell’Accademia, and once inside, to Michelangelo’s David, the most famous sculpture in the world. But how many of them, one wonders, then take the time to view the three other Davids in that city alone? At the Bargello, just ten minutes’ walk […]

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Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists 8 (Free) Books Every...

Open Culture ·

2025/07/03

Image via Wikimedia Commons A number of years ago, a Reddit user posed the question to Neil deGrasse Tyson: “Which books should be read by every single intelligent person on the planet?” Below, you will find the book list offered up by the astrophysicist, director of the Hayden Planetarium, and popularizer of science. Where possible, we […]

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Discover the Only Painting Van Gogh Ever Sold During...

Open Culture ·

2025/07/02

It may have crossed your mind, while beholding paintings of Vincent van Gogh, that you’d like to own one yourself someday. If so, you’ll have to get in line with more than a few billionaires, and even they may never see one go up on the auction block. This would probably come as a surprise […]

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How 16th-Century Artist Joris Hoefnagel Made Insects...

Open Culture ·

2025/07/02

In English, most of the words we’d use to refer to insects sound off-putting at best and fearsome at worst, at least to those without an entomological bent. Dutch, close a linguistic relation though it may be, offers a more endearing alternative in beestjes, which refers to all these “little beasts” in which the artists […]

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Iconic Animator Chuck Jones Creates an Oscar-Winning...

Open Culture ·

2025/07/01

While our country looks like it might be coming apart at the seams, it’s good to revisit, every once in a while, moments when it did work. And that’s not so that we can feel nostalgic about a lost time, but so that we can remind ourselves how, given the right conditions, things could work […]

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A Visualization of the History of Technology: 1,889...

Open Culture ·

2025/06/30

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” So holds the third and most famous of the “three laws” originally articulated by science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. Even when it was first published in the late nineteen-sixties, Clarke’s third law would have felt true to any resident of the developed world, surrounded by and […]

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Listen to Never-Before-Heard Works by Erik Satie,...

Open Culture ·

2025/06/30

If asked to name our favorite French composer of the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, most of us would reach straight for Erik Satie, being able to bring to mind only his most famous pieces, the Gymnopédies and perhaps the Gnossiennes. We may not know that those works all date from the same few […]

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Hear the World’s Oldest Instrument, the “Neanderthal...

Open Culture ·

2025/06/27

Several years ago, we brought you a transcription and a couple of audio interpretations of the oldest known song in the world, discovered in the ancient Syrian city of Ugarit and dating back to the 14th century B.C.E.. Likely performed on an instrument resembling an ancient lyre, the so-called “Hurrian Cult Song” or “Hurrian Hymn […]

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Watch the Very First YouTube Video, a Defining Moment...

Open Culture ·

2025/06/26

Given the dominance YouTube has achieved over large swaths of world culture, we’d all expect to remember the first video we watched there. Yet many or most of us don’t: rather, we simply realized, one day in the mid-to-late two-thousands, that we’d developed a daily YouTube habit. Like as not, your own introduction to the […]

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Hear Alan Watts’s 1960s Prediction That Automation...

Open Culture ·

2025/06/26

One of the most propulsive forces in our social and economic lives is the rate at which emerging technology transforms every sphere of human labor. Despite the political leverage obtained by fearmongering about immigrants and foreigners, it’s the robots who are actually taking our jobs. It is happening, as former SEIU president Andy Stern warns in his book […]

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Why Bob Dylan’s Unreleased “Blind Willie McTell” Is...

Open Culture ·

2025/06/25

Most Dylanologists disagree about which is the single greatest song in Bob Dylan’s catalog, but few would deny “Blind Willie McTell” a place high in the running. It may come as a surprise — or, to those with a certain idea of Dylan and his fan base, the exact opposite of a surprise — to […]

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The Very First Coloring Book, The Little Folks’...

Open Culture ·

2025/06/25

Funny how not that long ago coloring books were considered the exclusive domain of children. How times have changed. If you are the sort of adult who unwinds with a big box of Crayolas and pages of mandalas or outlines of Ryan Gosling, you owe a debt of gratitude to the McLoughlin Brothers and illustrator Kate […]

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How Scientists Recreated Ancient Egypt’s Long-Lost...

Open Culture ·

2025/06/24

Photo courtesy of Washington State University. It’s become fashionable, in recent years, to observe that we live in an increasingly beige-and-gray world from which all color is being drained. Whether or not that’s really the case, all of us still enjoy easy access to a range of colors that nobody in the ancient world could […]

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