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How Medieval Islamic Engineering Brought Water to the...

Open Culture ·

2024/12/13

Between 711 and 1492, much of the Iberian Peninsula, including modern-day Spain, was under Muslim rule. Not that it was easy to hold on to the place for that length of time: after the fall of Toledo in 1085, Al-Andalus, as the territory was called, continued to lose cities over the subsequent centuries. Córdoba and […]

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The Sinking of the Britannic: An Animated...

Open Culture ·

2024/12/13

We all know about the Titanic. Less often do we hear about the Britannic—the sister passenger liner that the British turned into a hospital ship during World War I. Launched in 1914, two years after the Titanic sank in the North Atlantic Ocean, the Britannic featured a number of safety improvements. It had enhanced watertight […]

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Binge-Watch Classic Television Programs Free: The...

Open Culture ·

2024/12/12

Earlier this week, we featured the 99-year-old Dick Van Dyke’s performance in Coldplay’s new music video, full of visual references to the sitcom that made him a household name in the early nineteen-sixties. And a household name he remains these six decades later, though one does wonder how many of those who appreciate his extreme […]

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Watch the Surrealist Glass Harmonica, the Only...

Open Culture ·

2024/12/12

The Soviet Union’s repressive state censorship went to absurd lengths to control what its citizens read, viewed, and listened to, such as the almost comical removal of purged former comrades from photographs during Stalin’s reign. When it came to aesthetics, Stalinism mostly purged more avant-garde tendencies from the arts and literature in favor of didactic […]

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The Engineering of the Strandbeest: How the...

Open Culture ·

2024/12/11

Life evolves, but machines are invented: this dichotomy hardly conflicts with what most of us have learned about biology and technology. But certain specimens roaming around in the world can blur that line — and in the curious case of the Strandbeesten, they really are roaming around. First assembled in 1990 by the Dutch artist […]

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When Christmas Was Legally Banned for 22 Years by the...

Open Culture ·

2024/12/11

Complaints about the commercial-age corruption of Christmas miss one critical fact: as a mass public celebration, the holiday is a rather recent invention. Whether we credit Charles Dickens, Bing Crosby, or Frank Capra—men not opposed to marketing—we must reckon with Christmas as a product of modernity. That includes the sacred ideas about family, piety, and […]

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Hear the Evolution of Electronic Music: A Sonic...

Open Culture ·

2024/12/10

It’s easy to get the impression that enthusiasts of electronic music listen to nothing else. (Not that it isn’t true for some of them, who tend to relegate themselves to smaller subgenres: consult Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music for a map of the sonic territory.) And it’s equally easy to believe that, if you aren’t […]

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99-Year-Old Dick Van Dyke Sings & Dances in a...

Open Culture ·

2024/12/10

There’s one thing right with our world, and it’s Dick Van Dyke. Appearing in a new Coldplay music video, Mr. Van Dyke dances barefoot and sings knowingly a little off-key—before reflecting on a century of life on this planet. What is love? Is he afraid of dying? What does luck look like? He knows the […]

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Sci-Fi Writer Arthur C. Clarke Predicted the Rise of...

Open Culture ·

2024/12/09

We now live in the midst of an artificial-intelligence boom, but it’s hardly the first of its kind. In fact, the field has been subject to a boom-and-bust cycle since at least the early nineteen-fifties. Eventually, those busts — which occurred when realizable AI technology failed to live up to the hype of the boom […]

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An Illustrator Creates a Kindle for Charles Dickens,...

Open Culture ·

2024/12/09

For a design class project, Rachel Walsh, a student at Cardiff School of Art and Design, set out to explain the concept of a Kindle to Charles Dickens. Recognizing that Dickens, a 19th-century author, wouldn’t understand modern terms like ebooks, downloads or the internet, she decided to take a metaphorical approach. She crafted a “book […]

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What Ancient Greek Music Sounded Like: Listen to a...

Open Culture ·

2024/12/06

Between 750 BC and 400 BC, the Ancient Greeks composed songs meant to be accompanied by the lyre, reed-pipes, and various percussion instruments. More than 2,000 years later, modern scholars have finally figured out how to reconstruct and perform these songs with (it’s claimed) 100% accuracy. Writing on the BBC website, Armand D’Angour, a musician and […]

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The 63 Cuisines of China Explained in 40 Minutes: A...

Open Culture ·

2024/12/06

Wherever in the world you grew up, you probably grew up with an inaccurate idea of Chinese food. For Americans, it can come as a shock to hear that such familiar dishes as chop suey and General Tso’s chicken are unknown in China itself. By the same token, almost every country in the world has […]

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Unlock AI’s Potential in Your Work and Daily Life:...

Open Culture ·

2024/12/06

Generative AI is rapidly becoming an essential tool for streamlining work and solving complex challenges. However, knowing how to use GenAI effectively isn’t always obvious. That’s where Google Prompting Essentials comes in. This course will teach you to write clear and specific instructions—known as prompts—for AI. Once you can prompt well, you can unlock generative […]

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Explore an Online Archive of 2,100+ Rare...

Open Culture ·

2024/12/05

As Christmastime approaches, few novelists come to mind as readily as Charles Dickens. This owes mainly, of course, to A Christmas Carol, and even more so to its many adaptations, most of which draw inspiration from not just its text but also its illustrations. That 1843 novella was just the first of five books he […]

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The BBC Creates Step-by-Step Instructions for...

Open Culture ·

2024/12/05

When Jon Pertwee reincarnated into Tom Baker in 1974, the Fourth Doctor of the popular sci-fi show Doctor Who ditched the foppish look of velvet jackets and frilly shirts, and went for the “Romantic adventurer” style, with floppy felt hat, long overcoats and, most iconically, his multicolored scarf. Fan legend has it that costume designer […]

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Scientists Discover that Ancient Egyptians Drank...

Open Culture ·

2024/12/04

Bes mug by USF Institute for Digital Exploration (IDEx) on Sketchfab If ZZ Top have a favorite ancient Egyptian deity, that deity is surely Bes, whom the New York Times’ Alexander Nazaryan quotes curator and scholar Branko van Oppen de Ruiter as calling “a beer drinker and a hell-raiser.” In a paper published last month […]

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Édouard Manet Illustrates Edgar Allan Poe’s The...

Open Culture ·

2024/12/04

Edgar Allan Poe achieved almost instant fame during his lifetime after the publication of The Raven (1845), but he never felt that he received the recognition he deserved. In some respects, he was right. He was, after all, paid only nine dollars for the poem, and he struggled before and after its publication to make a […]

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Beautiful 19th Century Maps of Dante’s Divine Comedy:...

Open Culture ·

2024/12/03

Even the least religious among us speak, at least on occasion, of the circles of hell. When we do so, we may or may not be thinking of where the concept originated: Dante’s Divina Commedia, or Divine Comedy. We each imagine the circles in our own way — usually filling them with sinners and punishments inspired […]

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The Golden Guide to Hallucinogenic Plants: Explore...

Open Culture ·

2024/12/03

I mean, the idea that you would give a psychedelic—in this case, magic mushrooms or the chemical called psilocybin that’s derived from magic mushrooms—to people dying of cancer, people with terminal diagnoses, to help them deal with their — what’s called existential distress. And this seemed like such a crazy idea that I began looking […]

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Discover Hannah Arendt’s Syllabus for Her 1974 Course...

Open Culture ·

2024/12/02

If you’ve read one work of Hannah Arendt’s, it’s probably Eichmann in Jerusalem, her account of the trial of the eponymous Nazi official — and the source of her much-quoted phrase “the banality of evil.” That book came out in 1963, at which time Arendt still had a dozen productive years left. In fact, at […]

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