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A Tour of the Final Home Designed By Frank Lloyd...

Open Culture ·

2025/03/07

Some remember the nineteen-nineties in America as the second coming of the nineteen-fifties. Whatever holes one can poke in that historical framing, it does feel strangely plausible inside Frank Lloyd Wright’s Circular Sun House. Though not actually built until 1967, it was commissioned from Wright by shipping magnate Norman Lykes in 1959, the last year […]

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Watch the Sci-Fi Short Film “I’m Not a Robot”: Winner...

Open Culture ·

2025/03/07

Victoria Warmerdam, the writer and director of the short film, “I’m Not a Robot,” summarizes the plot of her 22-minute film as follows: The film “tells the story of Lara, a music producer who spirals into an existential crisis after repeatedly failing a CAPTCHA test—leading her to question whether she might actually be a robot. […]

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Get 40% Off 3 Months of Coursera Plus & Access...

Open Culture ·

2025/03/07

Now through March 9, 2025, Coursera is offering 40% off a three-month subscription to Coursera Plus. This plan provides access to 7,000+ courses for one all-inclusive price, including programs from 350 universities (e.g., Duke and the University of Michigan) and companies like Google and IBM. It’s a great opportunity for anyone looking to learn new […]

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The Classic 1972 Concert Film Pink Floyd: Live at...

Open Culture ·

2025/03/06

Today, when we watch genre-defining concert films like Monterey Pop, Woodstock, Gimme Shelter, or Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, we look upon the audience with nearly as much interest as we do the performers. But Pink Floyd never did things in quite the same way as other rock bands of that era. In […]

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Historian Answers Burning Questions About The...

Open Culture ·

2025/03/06

Courtesy of Wired, historian Alexander Bevilacqua (Williams College) answers the internet’s burning questions about the cultural rebirth that came to be known as The Renaissance. In 30+ minutes, Bevilacqua covers an array of questions, including: When did The Renaissance begin? What exactly was the Renaissance? Why do paintings like the Mona Lisa and The Birth […]

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How Stephen King Foretold the Rise of Trump in a 1979...

Open Culture ·

2025/03/05

Nobody opens a Stephen King novel expecting to see a reflection of the real world. Then again, as those who get hooked on his books can attest, never is his work ever wholly detached from reality. Time and time again, he delivers lurid visions of the macabre, grotesque, and bizarre, but they always work most […]

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Carl Jung’s Hand-Drawn, Rarely-Seen Manuscript The...

Open Culture ·

2025/03/05

Despite his one-time friend and mentor Sigmund Freud’s enormous impact on Western self-understanding, I would argue it is Carl Jung who is still most with us in our communal practices: from his focus on introversion and extroversion to his view of syncretic, intuitive forms of spirituality and his indirect influence on 12-Step programs. But Jung’s journey to […]

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How the Nazis Waged War on Modern Art: Inside the...

Open Culture ·

2025/03/04

Before his fateful entry into politics, Adolf Hitler wanted to be an artist. Even to the most neutral imaginable observer, the known examples of the estimated 2,000 to 3,000 paintings and other works of art he produced in his early adulthood would hardly evidence astonishing genius. They do show a certain technical competence, especially where […]

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Andrei Tarkovsky’s Message to Young People: “Learn to...

Open Culture ·

2025/03/04

I remember the first time I sat down and watched Andrei Tarkovsky’s lyrical, meandering sci-fi epic Stalker. It was a long time ago, before the advent of smartphones and tablets. I watched a beat-up VHS copy on a non-“smart” TV, and had no ability to pause every few minutes and swing by Facebook, Twitter, or […]

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Where The Simpsons Began: Discover the Original...

Open Culture ·

2025/03/03

When it first went on air in the late nineteen-eighties, Fox had to prove itself capable of playing in a televisual league with the likes of NBC, CBS, and ABC. To that end, it began building its prime-time lineup with two original programs more thematically and aesthetically daring than anything on those staid networks: the […]

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The Story Of Menstruation: Watch Walt Disney’s Sex Ed...

Open Culture ·

2025/03/03

From 1945 to 1951, Disney produced a series of educational films to be shown in American schools. How to bathe an infant. How not to catch a cold. Why you shouldn’t drive fast. Disney covered these subjects in its educational shorts, and then eventually got to the touchy subject of biology and sexuality. If there was […]

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Warner Bros. Lets You Watch 31 Films Free Online:...

Open Culture ·

2025/02/07

It’s Friday, which means that tonight, many of us will sit down to watch a movie with our family, our friends, our significant other, or — for some cinephiles, best of all — by ourselves. If you haven’t yet lined up any home-cinematic experience in particular, consider taking a look at this playlist of 31 […]

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See Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Visualized in Colorfully...

Open Culture ·

2025/02/06

Music is often described as the most abstract of all the arts, and arguably the least visual as well. But these qualities, which seem so basic to the nature of the form, have been challenged for at least three centuries, not least by composers themselves. Take Antonio Vivaldi, whose Le quattro stagioni, or The Four […]

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Behold Harry Clarke’s Hallucinatory Illustrations for...

Open Culture ·

2025/02/06

As you’ve probably noticed if you’re a regular reader of this site, we’re big fans of book illustration, particularly that from the form’s golden age—the late 18th and 19th century—before photography took over as the dominant visual medium. But while photographs largely supplanted illustrations in textbooks, magazines, and newspapers over the course of the 20th century, […]

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How Japanese Masters Turn Sand Into Swords: The Art...

Open Culture ·

2025/02/05

We made sand think: this phrase is used from time to time to evoke the particular technological wonders of our age, especially since artificial intelligence seems to be back on the slate of possibilities. While there would be no Silicon Valley without silica sand, semiconductors are hardly the first marvel humanity has forged out of […]

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When Charlie Chaplin Entered a Chaplin Look-Alike...

Open Culture ·

2025/02/05

Charlie Chaplin started appearing in his first films in 1914—40 films, to be precise—and, by 1915, the United States had a major case of “Chaplinitis.” Chaplin mustaches were suddenly popping up everywhere–as were Chaplin imitators and Chaplin look-alike contests. A young Bob Hope apparently won one such contest in Cleveland. Chaplin Fever continued burning hot through 1921, the year […]

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How Wearing Ridiculously Long Pointed Shoes Became a...

Open Culture ·

2025/02/04

We can all remember seeing images of medieval Europeans wearing pointy shoes, but most of us have paid scant attention to the shoes themselves. That may be for the best, since the more we dwell on one fact of life in the Middle Ages or another, the more we imagine how uncomfortable or even painful […]

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Carl Sagan Predicts the Decline of America: Unable to...

Open Culture ·

2025/02/04

Image by Kenneth Zirkel, via Wikimedia Commons There have been many theories of how human history works. Some, like German thinker G.W.F. Hegel, have thought of progress as inevitable. Others have embraced a more static view, full of “Great Men” and an immutable natural order. Then we have the counter-Enlightenment thinker Giambattista Vico. The 18th century Neapolitan […]

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Has SpaceX Done Anything NASA Hasn’t? Neil deGrasse...

Open Culture ·

2025/02/03

One would count neither Elon Musk nor Neil deGrasse Tyson among the most reserved public figures of the twenty-first century. Given the efforts Musk has been making to push into the business of outer space, which has long been Tyson’s intellectual domain, it’s only natural that the two would come into conflict. Not long ago, […]

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Watch the First 2+ Hours of MTV’s Inaugural Broadcast...

Open Culture ·

2025/02/03

Not everyone on August 1, 1981 had a VCR at their disposal, and not everybody stayed up until midnight. But fortunately at least one person did, in order to tape the first two hours of a new cable channel called MTV: Music Television. Did they know it would be historic? MTV certainly hoped it would […]

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377 results