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Mary Tyler Moore Accidentally Nails a Perfect Pool...

Open Culture ·

2024/12/02

Let’s rewind the videotape and revisit a classic moment in The Dick Van Dyke Show. In the 1962 episode called “Hustling the Hustler,” Mary Tyler Moore (as Laura Petrie) plays pool and sinks three balls in a single shot. The original plan was to splice in footage of a professional pool player making the shot, […]

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Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Creative Process: A Look...

Open Culture ·

2024/11/29

The story of Jean-Michel Basquiat has its unfortunate aspects: not just his premature death, but also the aggressive marketing of his work and persona in the years leading up to it. He became a vogue artist of the eighties in part because he could be taken as an unfiltered voice of the street, crafting his […]

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The Most Iconic Hip-Hop Sample of Every Year (1973–2023)

Open Culture ·

2024/11/29

Hip-hop was once a subculture, but by now it’s long since been one of the unquestionably dominant forms of popular music — not just in America, and not just among young people. There are, of course, still a fair few hip-hop holdouts, but even they’ve come to know a thing or two about it through […]

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Get $160 Off a Year of Coursera Plus & Gain Unlimited...

Open Culture ·

2024/11/29

A heads-up on a Black Friday special: Between today and December 2, 2024, Coursera is offering a 40% discount on its annual subscription plan called “Coursera Plus.” Normally priced at $399, Coursera Plus (now available for $239.40) gives you access to 7,000+ courses for one all-inclusive subscription price. This includes Professional Certificates from leading companies. Take, […]

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The Illustrated Version of “Alice’s Restaurant”:...

Open Culture ·

2024/11/28

Alice’s Restaurant. It’s now a Thanksgiving classic, and something of a tradition around here. Recorded in 1967, the 18+ minute counterculture song recounts Arlo Guthrie’s real encounter with the law, starting on Thanksgiving Day 1965. As the long song unfolds, we hear all about how a hippie-bating police officer, by the name of William “Obie” Obanhein, arrested Arlo for […]

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William S. Burroughs’ Scathing “Thanksgiving Prayer,”...

Open Culture ·

2024/11/28

“Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28, 1986” first appeared in print in Tornado Alley, a chapbook published by William S. Burroughs in 1989. Two years later, Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting, My Own Private Idaho, Milk) shot a montage that brought the poem to film, making it at least the second time the director adapted the beat writer to film. […]

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Explore and Download 14,000+ Woodcuts from Antwerp’s...

Open Culture ·

2024/11/27

We appreciate illuminated manuscripts and historical books here on Open Culture, adhere though we do to a much more restrained aesthetic style in our own texts. But that’s not to deny the temptation to start this paragraph with one of those oversized initial letters that grew ever larger and more elaborate over centuries past. The online […]

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Ken Burns’ New Documentary on Leonardo da Vinci...

Open Culture ·

2024/11/27

A quick heads up: The filmmaker Ken Burns has just released his new documentary on Leonardo da Vinci. Running nearly four hours, the film offers what The New York Times calls a “thorough and engrossing biography” of the 15th-century polymath. Currently airing on PBS, the film can be streamed online through December 17th. If you […]

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How Georges Méliès A Trip to the Moon Became the...

Open Culture ·

2024/11/26

If you happen to visit the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, do take the time to see the Musée Méliès located inside it. Dedicated to la Magie du cinéma, it contains artifacts from throughout the history of film-as-spectacle, which includes such pictures as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner. Its focus on the evolution of visual effects […]

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Isaac Newton Creates a List of His 57 Sins (Circa 1662)

Open Culture ·

2024/11/26

Sir Isaac Newton, arguably the most important and influential scientist in history, discovered the laws of motion and the universal force of gravity. For the first time ever, the rules of the universe could be described with the supremely rational language of mathematics. Newton’s elegant equations proved to be one of the inspirations for the […]

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How Rasputin Inspired the “Fictitious Persons”...

Open Culture ·

2024/11/25

“This is a work of fiction,” declares the disclaimer we’ve all noticed during the end credits of movies. “Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.” In most cases, this may seem so trivial that it hardly merits a mention, but the very same disclaimer also rolls up after […]

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14 Self-Portraits by Pablo Picasso Show the Evolution...

Open Culture ·

2024/11/25

15 years old (1896) It’s possible to look at Pablo Picasso’s many formal experiments and periodic shifts of style as a kind of self-portraiture, an exercise in shifting consciousness and trying on of new aesthetic identities. The Spanish modernist made a career of sweeping dramatic gestures, announcements to the world that he was going to […]

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How the Ancient Romans Traveled Without Maps

Open Culture ·

2024/11/22

In an age when many of us could hardly make our way to an unfamiliar grocery store without relying on a GPS navigation system, we might well wonder how the Romans could establish and sustain their mighty empire without so much as a proper map. That’s the question addressed by the Historia Militum video above, […]

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How to Potty Train Your Cat: A Handy Manual by Jazz...

Open Culture ·

2024/11/22

Charles Mingus, the innovative jazz musician, was known for having a bad temper. He once got so irritated with a heckler that he ended up trashing his $20,000 bass. Another time, when a pianist didn’t get things right, Mingus reached right inside the piano and ripped the strings out with his bare hands — a true […]

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Google Creates a Career Certificate That Prepares...

Open Culture ·

2024/11/22

In 2023, Google launched several online certificate programs designed to help students land an entry-level job, without necessarily having a college degree. This includes a certificate program focused on Cybersecurity, a field that stands poised to grow as companies become more digital and face mounting cyberattacks. Offered on Coursera’s educational platform, the new Google Cybersecurity […]

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An Introduction to the Astonishing Book of Kells, the...

Open Culture ·

2024/11/21

Whatever set of religious or cultural traditions you come from, you’ve probably seen a Celtic cross before. Unlike a conventional cross, it has a circular ring, or “nimbus,” where its arms and stem intersect. The sole addition of that element gives it a highly distinctive look, and indeed makes it one of the representative examples […]

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Umberto Eco’s List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism

Open Culture ·

2024/11/01

Creative Commons image by Rob Bogaerts, via the National Archives in Holland One of the key questions facing both journalists and loyal oppositions these days is how do we stay honest as euphemisms and trivializations take over the discourse? Can we use words like “fascism,” for example, with fidelity to the meaning of that word in world history? The […]

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How the Influential Time-Travel Movie La Jetée Was...

Open Culture ·

2024/11/01

In a future where humanity has been driven underground by an apocalyptic event, a prisoner is haunted by the childhood memory of seeing a man gunned down at an airport. A group of scientists make him their time-traveling guinea pig, hoping that he’ll be able to find a way to restore the society they once knew. […]

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Launch Your Project Management Career with Google’s...

Open Culture ·

2024/11/01

?si=TMflasoogRfSD14h Back in 2021, Google released a series of certificate programs, including one focused on Project Management. Designed to give students “an immersive understanding of the practices and skills needed to succeed in an entry-level project management role,” the certificate program features six courses overall, including: Foundations of Project Management Project Initiation: Starting a Successful […]

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Hear Edgar Allan Poe’s Horror Stories Read by Vincent...

Open Culture ·

2024/10/31

Here on Halloween of 2024, we have a greater variety of scary stories — and arguably, a much scarier variety of scarier stories — to choose from than ever before. But whatever their relevance to the specific lives we may live and the specific dreads we may feel today, how many such current works stand […]

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377 results