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The Origins of Satan: The Evolution of the Devil in...

Open Culture ·

2025/08/25

The Devil, the Beast, Beelzebub, Lucifer, Satan: whichever name we happen to call him, we know full well who the guy is — or at least, we think we do. In fact, the images and evocations of that embodiment of (or perhaps metaphor for) sin, deceit, and temptation that many of us have encountered in […]

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Gustave Doré’s Haunting Illustrations of Dante’s...

Open Culture ·

2025/08/22

Inferno, Canto X: Many artists have attempted to illustrate Dante Alighieri’s epic poem the Divine Comedy, but none have made such an indelible stamp on our collective imagination as the Frenchman Gustave Doré. Doré was 23 years old in 1855, when he first decided to create a series of engravings for a deluxe edition of […]

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Did Paul McCartney Really Die in 1966? How the...

Open Culture ·

2025/08/22

No pop music can have inspired more scrutiny than that of the Beatles. Of course, intense and sustained attention has been paid to every aspect of the band’s existence — and, in the case of Paul McCartney, his purported non-existence as well. The theory that he actually died in the nineteen-sixties and was thereafter secretly […]

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The Ancient Roman Dodecahedron: The Mysterious Object...

Open Culture ·

2025/08/21

There isn’t much place for dodecahedra in modern life, at least in those modern lives with tabletop role-playing. In the ancient Roman Empire, however, those shapes seem to have been practically household objects — not that we know what the household would have done with them. Thus far, well over 100 similarly designed copper-alloy second-to-fourth-century […]

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Hear Joey Ramone Sing a Piece by John Cage Adapted...

Open Culture ·

2025/08/21

In 1942, John Cage composed a short piece of music adapted from the text of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Titled “The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs,” the piece was originally commissioned and performed by amateur soprano and socialite Justine Fairbank, and while we don’t have a recording of her performance, we do have Cage’s sheet […]

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21 Rules for Living from Miyamoto Musashi, Japan’s...

Open Culture ·

2025/08/20

Browse the ever-vaster selection of self-help books, videos, podcasts, and social-media accounts on offer today, and you’ll find no shortage of prescriptions for how to live. Much of what the gurus of the twenty-twenties have to say sounds awfully similar, and almost as much may seem contradictory. As in so many fields of human endeavor, […]

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75 Post-Punk and Hardcore Concerts from the 1980s...

Open Culture ·

2025/08/20

Between 1985 and 1988, a teenager by the name of Sohrab Habibion was attending punk and post-punk shows around the Washington, DC area. What set him apart was the bulky video camera he’d bring to the show and let roll, documenting entire gigs in all their low-rez, lo-fi glory. Just a kid trying to document […]

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Yuval Noah Harari Explains How to Protect Your Mind...

Open Culture ·

2025/08/19

You could say that we live in the age of artificial intelligence, although it feels truer about no aspect of our lives than it does of advertising. “If you want to sell something to people today, you call it AI,” says Yuval Noah Harari in the new Big Think video above, even if the product […]

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The Oldest Unopened Bottle of Wine in the World...

Open Culture ·

2025/08/19

Image by Immanuel Giel, via Wikimedia Commons It’s an old TV and movie trope: the man of wealth and taste, often but not always a supervillain, offers his distinguished guest a bottle of wine, his finest, an ancient vintage from one of the most venerable vineyards. We might follow the motif back at least to […]

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Discover the World’s Oldest Surviving Cookbook, De Re...

Open Culture ·

2025/08/18

Western scholarship has had “a bias against studying sensual experience,” writes Reina Gattuso at Atlas Obscura, “the relic of an Enlightenment-era hierarchy that considered taste, touch, and flavor taboo topics for sober academic inquiry.” This does not mean, however, that cooking has been ignored by historians. Many a scholar has taken European cooking seriously, before […]

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Why Knights Fought Snails in Medieval Illuminated...

Open Culture ·

2025/08/18

The snail may leave a trail of slime behind him, but a little slime will do a man no harm… whilst if you dance with dragons, you must expect to burn. - George R. R. Martin, The Mystery Knight As any Game of Thrones fan knows, being a knight has its downsides. It isn’t all […]

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Watch Joan Baez Endearingly Imitate Bob Dylan (1972)

Open Culture ·

2025/08/15

Joan Baez was already heralded as the “Queen of Folk” by the time Robert Zimmerman aka Bob Dylan arrived in New York City. Many things brought him to the burgeoning folk scene there, but Baez was the siren who called to a young Dylan through his television set long before he met her. He was […]

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What Is Kabbalah? An Introduction to the Jewish...

Open Culture ·

2025/08/15

Though the pop-cultural moment that gave rise to the association has passed, when many of us hear about Kabbalah, we still think of Madonna. Her study of that Jewish-mystic school of thought in the nineteen-nineties has been credited, at least in part, with the sonic transformation that led to her hit album Ray of Light. […]

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2,178 Occult Books Now Digitized & Put Online, Thanks...

Open Culture ·

2025/08/14

In 2018 we brought you some exciting news. Thanks to a generous donation from Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown, Amsterdam’s Ritman Library—a sizable collection of pre-1900 books on alchemy, astrology, magic, and other occult subjects—has been digitizing thousands of its rare texts under a digital education project cheekily called “Hermetically Open.” We are now […]

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The Stunt That Ended Buster Keaton’s Brilliant Career

Open Culture ·

2025/08/14

Buster Keaton’s penchant and skill for comedic stunts made him one of the biggest stars of the silent-film era. Nobody at the time imagined that he would still be engaging in dangerous-looking pratfalls 40 years later in his seventies, especially since his career seemed to have come to an end in 1926. That was the […]

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Tim Burton Visits a Paris Video Store & Talks About...

Open Culture ·

2025/08/13

Tim Burton grew up watching Japanese monster movies in Burbank, which must explain a good deal about his artistic sensibility. It seems to be for that reason, in any case, that the new Konbini “Vidéo Club” episode above takes him first to the Asian cinema section of JM Vidéo, one of Paris’ last two DVD […]

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Behold the Very First Color Photograph (1861): Taken...

Open Culture ·

2025/08/13

Since its ancient origins as the camera obscura, the photographic camera has always mimicked the human eye, allowing light to enter an aperture, then projecting an image upside down. Renaissance artists relied on the camera obscura to sharpen their own visual perspectives. But it wasn’t until photography—the ability to reproduce the obscura’s images—that the rudimentary […]

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The Only Time Prince & Miles Davis Jammed Together...

Open Culture ·

2025/08/12

A too-precious genre of internet meme depicts departed public figures who did not know each other in life meeting in heaven with hugs, high-fives, and wincingly earnest exchanges. These sentimental vignettes are almost too easy to parody, a kitschy version of the “what if” game, as in: what if two creative geniuses could collaborate in […]

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How Ancient Greek Technology Was Used to Sculpt Mount...

Open Culture ·

2025/08/12

Designing their new republic, the Founding Fathers of the United States of America looked back to reference points in classical antiquity. That instinct continued to shape American endeavors long thereafter, and not just political ones. Take the example of Mount Rushmore, one of the country’s most popular tourist attractions. Originally conceived in the early nineteen-twenties […]

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Why Ancient Romans Paid a Fortune for the Color...

Open Culture ·

2025/08/11

Purple may not be one of the most popular colors in the apparel of our age, but if you want it — as certain cultural figures have amply demonstrated — you can get as much of it as you like, even if you don’t belong to the aristocracy. That wasn’t the case in antiquity, as […]

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376 results