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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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Watch The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the Influential...

Open Culture ·

2024/10/31

In early 1920, posters began appearing all over Berlin with a hypnotic spiral and the mysterious command Du musst Caligari werden — “You must become Caligari.” The posters were part of an innovative advertising campaign for an upcoming movie by Robert Wiene called The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. When the film appeared, audiences were mesmerized […]

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Mythology Expert Reviews Depictions of Greek & Roman...

Open Culture ·

2024/10/30

It’s safe to say that we no longer believe in the gods of the ancient world — or rather, that most of us no longer believe in their literal existence, but some of us have faith in their box-office potential. This two-part video series from Vanity Fair examines a variety of movies and television shows that […]

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The Story of Fascism: Rick Steves’ Documentary Helps...

Open Culture ·

2024/10/30

From Rick Steves comes a thought-provoking documentary that revisits the rise of fascism in Europe, reminding us of how charismatic figures like Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler came to power by promising to create a better future for their frustrated, economically depressed countries–a future that recaptured the glory of some mythologized past. Once in power, […]

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Marcus Aurelius’ 9 Rules for Living a Stoic Life

Open Culture ·

2024/10/29

This week, the Guardian’s Zoe Williams profiled Ryan Holiday, a one-time public-relations whiz-kid who’s reinvented himself over the past decade as a speaker for the dead: specifically Epictetus, Seneca, and above all Marcus Aurelius, the figureheads of the ancient school of philosophy we now know as Stoicism. It “centers on four virtues: courage, temperance, justice and wisdom,” […]

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Destino: The Salvador Dalí — Walt Disney Animation...

Open Culture ·

2024/10/29

In 2003, Disney released a six minute animated short called Destino, finally bringing closure to a project that began 57 years earlier. The story of Destino goes way back to 1946 when two very different cultural icons, Walt Disney and Salvador Dalí, decided to work together on a cartoon. The film was storyboarded by Dalí […]

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The Hand: An Anti-Totalitarian Animation, Banned for...

Open Culture ·

2024/10/28

For obvious reasons, most art produced under oppressive regimes comes off as painstakingly inoffensive. For equally obvious reasons, the rare works that criticize the regime tend to do so rather obliquely. This wasn’t so much the case with The Hand, the most famous short by Czech artist and stop-motion animator Jiří Trnka, “the Walt Disney of […]

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The Isolated Bass Grooves of The Grateful Dead’s Phil...

Open Culture ·

2024/10/28

This past Friday, the bassist of The Grateful Dead, Phil Lesh, passed away at age 84. Almost immediately the tributes poured in, most recognizing that Lesh wasn’t your ordinary bassist. As Jon Pareles wrote in the New York Times, Phil Lesh held songs “aloft.” His “bass lines hopped and bubbled and constantly conversed with the […]

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When 20,000 Americans Held a Pro-Nazi Rally in...

Open Culture ·

2024/10/27

Above, two-time Academy Award nominee Marshall Curry presents A Night at The Garden, a film that revisits a night in February 1939 when “20,000 Americans rallied in New York’s Madison Square Garden to celebrate the rise of Nazism — an event largely forgotten from U.S. history.” As we described it back in 2017, the film […]

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Hear 2.5 Hours of the Classical Music in Haruki...

Open Culture ·

2024/10/25

Haruki Murakami’s hit novel 1Q84 features a memorable scene in a taxicab on a gridlocked freeway whose radio is playing Leoš Janáček’s Sinfonietta. “It is, as the book suggests, truly the worst possible music for a traffic jam,” writes Sam Anderson in a New York Times Magazine profile of the novelist: “busy, upbeat, dramatic — like five normal […]

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A Short Visual History of America, According to the...

Open Culture ·

2024/10/25

As a founder of the “underground comix” movement in the 1960s, R. Crumb is either revered as a pioneering satirist of American culture and its excesses or reviled as a juvenile purveyor of painfully outmoded sexist and racist stereotypes. Crumb doesn’t apologize. He keeps working, and his fans are grateful. He has parlayed his sexual […]

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The Evolution of Cinema: Watch Nearly 140 Years of...

Open Culture ·

2024/10/24

The video above from YouTuber Alex Day includes clips from about 500 movies, and you’ve almost certainly seen more than a few of them. Battleship Potemkin, Dumbo, Rear Window, Dr. No, The Godfather, E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Top Gun, Braveheart, Gladiator, Inception: we’re not talking about obscurities here. Whether or not you count them among your personal favorites, these motion pictures have all become near-universally […]

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The Greatest Shot in Television: Science Historian...

Open Culture ·

2024/10/04

The 80-second clip above captures a rocket launch, something of which we’ve all seen footage at one time or another. What makes its viewers call it “the greatest shot in television” still today, 45 years after it first aired, may take more than one viewing to notice. In it, science historian James Burke speaks about […]

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Bruce Springsteen Endorses Kamala Harris & Makes the...

Open Culture ·

2024/10/04

The Boss speaks the truth in a diner. Find it on Instagram.

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When Kris Kristofferson (RIP) Stood by Sinéad...

Open Culture ·

2024/10/03

One would have imagined Sinéad O’Connor impervious to any reaction from a hostile audience, no matter how vitriolic. But even for a public figure as outspoken and unapologetic as her, it could all get to be a bit much at times. Take the 1992 concert Columbia Records put on for the 30th anniversary of Bob […]

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The Rocky Horror Picture Show Is Now a Retro Video Game

Open Culture ·

2024/10/03

The Rocky Horror Picture Show–it started first as a musical stage production in 1973, then became a cult classic film in 1975. Now, a half-century later, it gets reborn as a retro video game. Scheduled to be released by Halloween, the game features “8‑bit chiptune renditions of Rocky Horror’s legendary songs,” including the “Time Warp” […]

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Artificial Intelligence & Drones Uncover 303 New...

Open Culture ·

2024/10/02

If you visit one tourist site in Peru, it will almost certainly be the ruined Incan city of Machu Picchu. If you visit another, it’ll probably be the Nazca Desert, home to many large-scale geoglyphs made by pre-Inca peoples between 500 BC and 500 AD. Many of these “Nazca lines” are literally that, running across […]

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Joan Jett and the Blackhearts Perform a Rollicking...

Open Culture ·

2024/10/02

?si=Pblv5Tzpi_F-a6cu Originally written by Sonny Curtis and released in 1970, “Love Is All Around”–otherwise known as the Mary Tyler Moore theme song–has been covered by many acts: Sammy Davis Jr, Hüsker Dü, and Joan Jett & the Blackhearts, to name a few. After releasing a studio version in 1996, Jett performed the song live on the Late […]

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How Henri Matisse Scandalized the Art Establishment...

Open Culture ·

2024/10/01

Even those of us not particularly well-versed in art history have heard of a painting style called fauvism — and probably have never considered what it has to do with fauve, the French word for a wild beast. In fact, the two have everything to do with one another, at least in the sense of […]

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