PODCAST

Open Culture

The best free cultural & educational media on the web

All Episodes

The Fascinating History of Tarot Card Decks: From the...

Open Culture ·

2025/11/18

Whether or not we believe that the cards of the tarot have supernatural powers, we all think of them primarily as tools for divination. It might seem as if they’ve played that cultural role since time immemorial, but in fact, that particular use only goes back to the eighteenth century. They were, at first, playing […]

en-US

How a Dutch “Dementia Village” Improves Quality of...

Open Culture ·

2025/11/18

People suffering from dementia lose their ability to take an active part in conversations, everyday activities, and their own physical upkeep. They are prone to sudden mood swings, irritability, depression, and anxiety. They may be stricken with delusions and wild hallucinations. All of these things can be understandably upsetting to friends and families. There’s a […]

en-US

Why Overconfidence Is Our Most Dangerous Cognitive Bias

Open Culture ·

2025/11/17

In the two-thousands, the magician-comedians Penn and Teller hosted a television series called Bullshit! In it, they took on a variety of cultural phenomena they regarded as worthy of the titular epithet, from ESP to Area 51, exorcism to creationism, feng shui to haute cuisine. Their sardonic arguments were enriched by clips of assorted interviewees —speaking […]

en-US

AC/DC Plays a Short Gig at CBGB in 1977: Hear Metal...

Open Culture ·

2025/11/17

Punk rock and heavy metal were two genres that evolved over the ‘70s, but seemed to run parallel to each other, despite sharing common fashion, sounds, and attitudes. But then there are moments in history, where everybody plays together in the same sandbox. For example, the above remastered audio, which captures the Australian band AC/DC […]

en-US

Why Your Vision of Ancient Rome Is All Wrong,...

Open Culture ·

2025/11/14

Everyone in ancient Rome wore togas, surrounded themselves with pure-white marble statues, bayed for blood as gladiators fought to the death in the Colosseum, programmatically imitated the Greeks, and, after each and every debaucherous feast, excused themselves to the vomitoria, where they ritually vacated their stomachs. Or at least that’s the picture any of us […]

en-US

How Paris Became Paris: The Story Behind Its Iconic...

Open Culture ·

2025/11/13

Even today, the Paris of the popular imagination is, for the most part, the Paris envisioned by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann and made a reality in the eighteen-fifties and sixties. Not that he could order the city built whole: as explained by Manuel Bravo in the new video above, Paris had already existed for about two […]

en-US

Aleister Crowley Reads Occult Poetry in the Only...

Open Culture ·

2025/11/13

Image by Jules Jacot Guillarmod, via Wikimedia Commons In 2016, we brought you a rather strange story about the rivalry between poet William Butler Yeats and magician Aleister Crowley. Theirs was a feud over the practices of occult society the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; but it was also—at least for Crowley—over poetry. Crowley […]

en-US

Watch 50 David Bowie Music Videos Spanning Five...

Open Culture ·

2025/11/12

Each of us has a different idea of when, exactly, the sixties ended, not as a decade, but as a distinct cultural period. Some have a notion of the “long sixties” that extends well into the seventies; if pressed for a specific final year, they could do worse than pointing to 1972, when David Bowie […]

en-US

The First Photograph of a Human Being: A Photo Taken...

Open Culture ·

2025/11/12

You’ve likely heard the reason people never smile in very old photographs. Early photography could be an excruciatingly slow process. With exposure times of up to 15 minutes, portrait subjects found it impossible to hold a grin, which could easily slip into a pained grimace and ruin the picture. A few minutes represented a marked […]

en-US

Beautiful, Color Photographs of Paris Taken a Century...

Open Culture ·

2025/11/11

It may well be that the major pivot points of history are only visible to those around the bend. For those of us immersed in the present—for all of its deafening sirens of violent upheaval—the exact years future generations will use to mark our epoch remain unclear. But when we look back, certain years stand out above all […]

en-US

The Groundbreaking Animation That Defined Pink...

Open Culture ·

2025/11/11

You could argue that, of all rock bands, that Pink Floyd had the least need for visual accompaniment. Sonically rich and evocatively structured, their albums evolved to offer listening experiences that verge on the cinematic in themselves. Yet from fairly early in the Floyd’s history, their artistic ambitions extended to that which could not be […]

en-US

The Ambitious Engineering Behind the Golden Gate Bridge

Open Culture ·

2025/11/10

As many as a million people crossed the Golden Gate Bridge on foot to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its construction in 1987. More than a few of them would have remembered San Francisco as it was before it had its most iconic structure — and indeed, some would even remember walking across it once […]

en-US

Dozens of M.C. Escher Prints Have Been Digitized &...

Open Culture ·

2025/11/10

In addition to the iconic scene in Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, or appearances in animated TV shows and video games, M.C. Escher’s work has adorned the covers of albums like Mott the Hoople’s 1969 debut and the speculative fiction of Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges. A big hit with hippies and 1960s college students, writes […]

en-US

Skiing Down Mount Everest with No Oxygen: It’s a Wild...

Open Culture ·

2025/11/10

From Red Bull’s YouTube Channel: “Ski mountaineer Andrzej Bargiel becomes the first person to climb Mount Everest and ski back to Everest Base Camp without supplementary oxygen. After nearly 16 hours climbing in the high altitude “death zone” (above 8,000m where oxygen levels are dangerously low), Bargiel clipped into his skis on the summit of […]

en-US

The Roman Empire’s Vast Road Network—186,000 Miles of...

Open Culture ·

2025/11/07

Everywhere you look, you can find traces of the ancient Roman civilization from which the modern West descends. That’s especially true if you happen to be looking in Europe, though echoes of Latin make themselves heard in major languages used all over the world. Take, for example, the common English word itinerary, meaning a planned […]

en-US

Leonardo da Vinci’s Visionary Inventions Rendered in...

Open Culture ·

2025/11/06

To imagine ourselves into the time of Leonardo da Vinci, we must first imagine a world without such things as helicopters, parachutes, tanks, diving suits, robots. Yet those all existed for Leonardo himself — or rather, they existed in his imagination. What he didn’t build in real life, he documented in his notebooks, leaving behind […]

en-US

A 400-Year-Old Ring that Unfolds to Track the...

Open Culture ·

2025/11/06

Rings with a discreet dual purpose have been in use since before the common era, when Hannibal, facing extradition, allegedly ingested the poison he kept secreted behind a gemstone on his finger. (More recently, poison rings gave rise to a popular Game of Thrones fan theory…) Victorians prevented their most closely kept secrets—illicit love letters, perhaps? Last wills and testaments?—from […]

en-US

Discover the Oldest Book of the Americas: A Close...

Open Culture ·

2025/11/05

From the mighty Maya civilization, which dominated Mesoamerica for more than three and a half millennia, we have exactly four books. Only one of them predates the arrival of Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth century: the Códice Maya de México, or Maya Codex of Mexico, which was created between 1021 and 1152. Though incomplete, and […]

en-US

Inside the Making of the Alien Suit: How H. R....

Open Culture ·

2025/11/05

In the whole of Alien, the titular entity only appears on screen for about three minutes. That’s one reason the movie holds up so well against the other creature features of its era: in glimpses, you never get a chance to register signs of the alien’s being an artificial construction. That’s not to say it […]

en-US

How Marlon Brando Changed Acting: Inside a Scene from...

Open Culture ·

2025/11/04

Marlon Brando has now been gone for more than two decades, and so thoroughgoing was his impact on the art of film acting that younger generations of movie-lovers may have trouble pinning down what, exactly, he did so differently on screen. In the new video above, Evan “Nerdwriter” Puschak shows them — and reminds us […]

en-US

377 results