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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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Revisit Episodes of Liquid Television, MTV’s 90s...

Open Culture ·

2024/10/01

MTV stands for Music Television, and when the network launched in 1981, its almost entirely music video-based programming was true to its name. Within a decade, however, its mandate had widened to the point that it had become the natural home for practically any exciting development in American youth culture. And for many MTV viewers […]

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Free: Download Over 33,000 Sounds from the BBC Sound...

Open Culture ·

2024/09/30

There may be a few young people in Britain today who recognize the name Ludwig Koch, but in the nineteen-forties, he constituted something of a cultural phenomenon unto himself. He “started recording sounds and voices in the 1880s when he was still a child” in his native Germany, says the website of the BBC. After […]

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David Bowie’s Fashionable Mug Shot From His 1976...

Open Culture ·

2024/09/30

David Bowie always managed to look cool, even when he was being booked for a felony. In early 1976, Bowie was on his “Isolar” tour, performing as the Thin White Duke, a persona he would describe as “a very Aryan fascist type — a would-be romantic with no emotions at all.” Bowie invited his friend […]

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How Kodak Invented the Snapshot in the 1800s, Making...

Open Culture ·

2024/09/27

We still occasionally speak of “Kodak moments,” making conscious or unconscious reference to the slogan of the Eastman Kodak Company in the nineteen-eighties. Even by that time, Kodak had already been a going concern for nearly a century, furnishing photographers around the world with the film they needed to capture images. Its very first slogan, […]

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How Filmmakers Make Cameras Disappear: Mirrors in Movies

Open Culture ·

2024/09/26

If you’ve never tried your hand at filmmaking, you might assume that its hardest visual challenges are the creation of effects-laden spectacles: starships duking it out in space, monsters stomping through major cities, animals speaking and dancing like Broadway stars, that sort of thing. But consider the challenge posed by simply capturing a scene set […]

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The Medieval Masterpiece, the Book of Kells, Is Now...

Open Culture ·

2024/09/26

If you know nothing else about medieval European illuminated manuscripts, you surely know the Book of Kells. “One of Ireland’s greatest cultural treasures” comments Medievalists.net, “it is set apart from other manuscripts of the same period by the quality of its artwork and the sheer number of illustrations that run throughout the 680 pages of the […]

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Watch the First Performance of a Mozart Composition...

Open Culture ·

2024/09/25

For most musicians, a long-lost song written in their teenage years would be of interest only to serious fans — and even then, probably more for biographical reasons than as a standalone piece of work. But that’s hardly the case for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who was composing advanced music at the age of five, and […]

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Hear Moby Dick Read in Its Entirety by Benedict...

Open Culture ·

2024/09/25

Image of Moby Dick by David Austen. In 2013, Plymouth University kicked off Moby Dick The Big Read, promising a full audiobook of Herman Melville’s influential novel, with famous (and not so famous) voices taking on a chapter each. When we first wrote about it here, only six chapters had been unveiled, but boasted actors […]

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How 2001: A Space Odyssey Became “the Hardest Film...

Open Culture ·

2024/09/06

Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey has been praised in all manner of terms since it came out more than half a century ago. An early advertising campaign, tapping into the enthusiasm of the contemporary counterculture, called it “the ultimate trip”; in the equivalently trendy parlance of the twenty-twenties, one could say that it “goes […]

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Bringing Tsarist Russia to Life: Vivid Color Images...

Open Culture ·

2024/09/06

History escapes us. Events that changed the world forever, or should have, slide out of collective memory. If we’re pointing fingers, we might point at educational systems that fail to educate, or at huge historical blind spots in mass media. Maybe another reason the recent past fades like old photographs may have to do with […]

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Every Frame a Painting Returns to YouTube & Explores...

Open Culture ·

2024/09/05

Video essayists don’t normally retire; in most cases, they just drift into inactivity. Hence the surprise and even dismay of the internet’s cinephiles when Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos declared the end of their respected channel Every Frame a Painting in 2016. We here at Open Culture had featured their analyses of everything from the […]

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Watch Fantasmagorie, the World’s First Animated...

Open Culture ·

2024/09/05

Trying to describe the plot of Fantasmagorie, the world’s first animated cartoon, is a folly akin to putting last night’s dream into words: I was dressed as a clown and then I was in a theater, except I was also hiding under this lady’s hat, and the guy behind us was plucking out the feathers, […]

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Coursera Offers 30% Off of Coursera Plus (Until...

Open Culture ·

2024/09/05

As the new school year gets underway, millions of students are heading back to classrooms. And you can too. From now until September 30, 2024, Coursera is offering a 30% discount on its annual subscription plan called “Coursera Plus.” Normally priced at $399, Coursera Plus (currently available for $279.30) gives you access to 7,000+ courses […]

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386 results