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“The Vertue of the COFFEE Drink”: An Ad for London’s...

Open Culture ·

2025/06/24

The story of coffee goes back to the 13th century, when it came out of Ethiopia, then spread to Egypt and Yemen. It reached the Middle East, Turkey, and Persia during the 16th century, and then Europe during the early 17th, though not without controversy. In Venice, some called it the ‘bitter invention of Satan,’ […]

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When the Dutch Tried to Live in Concrete Spheres: An...

Open Culture ·

2025/06/20

In the decades after the Second World War, many countries faced the challenge of rebuilding their housing and infrastructure while also having to accommodate a fast-arriving baby boom. The government of the Netherlands got more creative than most, putting money toward experimental housing projects starting in the late nineteen-sixties. Hoping to happen upon the next […]

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Elementary School Kids Sing David Bowie’s “Space...

Open Culture ·

2025/06/20

In 1976 and 1977 an inspired music teacher in the small school district of Langley Township, British Columbia, a suburb of Vancouver, recorded his elementary school students singing popular songs in a school gym. Two vinyl records were produced over the two years, and families were invited to pay $7 for a copy. The recordings […]

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Enter an Archive of 10,000+ Historical Children’s...

Open Culture ·

2025/06/19

We can learn much about how a historical period viewed the abilities of its children by studying its children’s literature. Occupying a space somewhere between the purely didactic and the nonsensical, most children’s books published in the past few hundred years have attempted to find a line between the two poles, seeking a balance between […]

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Hear the Letter of Gratitude That Albert Camus Wrote...

Open Culture ·

2025/06/19

When Albert Camus won the Nobel Prize, he wrote a letter to one of his old schoolteachers. “I let the commotion around me these days subside a bit before speaking to you from the bottom of my heart,” the letter begins. “I have just been given far too great an honor, one I neither sought […]

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Watch Bob Dylan Play “Mr. Tambourine Man” in Color at...

Open Culture ·

2025/06/18

It was at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival that Bob Dylan famously “went electric,” alienating certain adherents to the folk scene through which he’d come up, but also setting a precedent for the kind of quick-change musical adaptation that he’s kept up into his eighties. At the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, however, all that lay […]

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Tibetan Musical Notation Is Beautiful

Open Culture ·

2025/06/18

Religions take the cast and hue of the cultures in which they find root. This was certainly true in Tibet when Buddhism arrived in the 7th century. It transformed and was transformed by the native religion of Bon. Of the many creative practices that arose from this synthesis, Tibetan Buddhist music ranks very highly in […]

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A Grad Student Asks Carl Sagan If He Believes in God...

Open Culture ·

2025/06/17

?si=yeo1Xsu2ZLuCpQbC Most scientists are prepared to answer questions about their research from other members of their field; rather fewer have equipped themselves to answer questions from the general public about what Douglas Adams called life, the universe, and everything. Carl Sagan was one of that minority, an expert “science communicator” before science communication was recognized […]

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A Free Yale Course on Medieval History: 700 Years in...

Open Culture ·

2025/06/17

In 22 lectures, Yale historian Paul Freedman takes you on a 700-year tour of medieval history. Moving from 284‑1000 AD, this free online course covers “the conversion of Europe to Christianity, the fall of the Roman Empire, the rise of Islam and the Arabs, the ‘Dark Ages,’ Charlemagne and the Carolingian renaissance, and the […]

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How Jackson Pollock Redefined Modern Art: An...

Open Culture ·

2025/06/16

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sQ_cfZ8q9kVideo can’t be loaded because JavaScript is disabled: Jackson Pollock: the Myth of the Modern Artist (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sQ_cfZ8q9k) In his lifetime, Jackson Pollock had only one successful art show. It took place at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York in November 1949, and afterward, his fellow abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning declared that “Jackson has […]

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The Soviet Union Creates a List of 38 Dangerous Rock...

Open Culture ·

2025/06/16

Image by Mario Casciano via Wikimedia Commons Music is dangerous and powerful, and can be, without intending to, a political weapon. All authoritarian regimes have understood this, including repressive elements in the U.S. throughout the Cold War. I remember having books handed to me before the Berlin Wall came down, by family friends fearful of […]

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Harvard Lets You Take 133 Free Online Courses:...

Open Culture ·

2025/05/30

Image by Rizka, via Wikimedia Commons In South Korea, where I live, there may be no brand as respected as Habodeu. Children dream of it; adults seemingly do anything to play up their own connections to it, however tenuous those connections may be. But what is Habodeu? An electronics company? A line of clothing? Some […]

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Will Machines Ever Truly Think? Richard Feynman...

Open Culture ·

2025/05/29

Though its answer has grown more complicated in recent years, the question of whether computers will ever truly think has been around for quite some time. Richard Feynman was being asked about it 40 years ago, as evidenced by the lecture clip above. As his fans would expect, he approaches the matter of artificial intelligence […]

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Leonardo da Vinci’s Elegant Design for a Perpetual...

Open Culture ·

2025/05/29

Is perpetual motion possible? In theory… I have no idea…. In practice, so far at least, the answer has been a perpetual no. As Nicholas Barrial writes at Makery, “in order to succeed,” a perpetual motion machine “should be free of friction, run in a vacuum chamber and be totally silent” since “sound equates to […]

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Ridley Scott’s Cinematic TV Commercials: An 80-Minute...

Open Culture ·

2025/05/28

“In the future, e‑mail will make the written word a thing of the past,” declares the narration of a 1999 television commercial for Orange, the French telecom giant. “In the future, we won’t have to travel; we’ll meet on video. In the future, we won’t need to play in the wind and rain; computer games […]

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A Young Jim Henson Teaches You How to Make Puppets...

Open Culture ·

2025/05/28

By the time he filmed this video archived on Iowa Public Television’s YouTube channel, Jim Henson was just about to strike gold with a new children’s show called Sesame Street. The year was 1969, and he already had 15 years of puppetry experience under his belt, from children’s shows to commercials and experimental films. On the cusp […]

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The World’s Oldest Homework: A Look at Babylonian...

Open Culture ·

2025/05/27

Homework has lately become unfashionable, at least according to what I’ve heard from teachers in certain parts of the United States. That may complicate various fairly long-standing educational practices, but it doesn’t necessarily reflect an absolute drop in standards and expectations. Those of us who went to school around the turn of the millennium may […]

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They Study Authoritarianism. And They’re Leaving the...

Open Culture ·

2025/05/27

Three Yale professors—Timothy Snyder, Jason Stanley and Marci Shore–have spent their careers studying fascism and authoritarianism. They know the signs of emerging authoritarianism when they see it. Now, they’re seeing those signs here in the United States, and they’re not sitting by idly. They’ve moved to the University of Toronto where they can speak freely, […]

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How Bob Dylan Kept Reinventing His Songwriting...

Open Culture ·

2025/05/26

On his 84th birthday this past Saturday, Bob Dylan played a show. That was in keeping with not only his still-serious touring schedule, but also his apparently irrepressible instinct to work: on music, on writing, on painting, on sculpture. Even his occasional tweeting draws an appreciative audience every time. The Bob Dylan of 2025 is […]

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George Orwell Reviews Salvador Dali’s Autobiography:...

Open Culture ·

2025/05/26

Images or Orwell and Dali via Wikimedia Commons Should we hold artists to the same standards of human decency that we expect of everyone else? Should talented people be exempt from ordinary morality? Should artists of questionable character have their work consigned to the trash along with their personal reputations? These questions, for all their […]

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