PODCAST

Open Culture

The best free cultural & educational media on the web

All Episodes

A Digital Archive Features Hundreds of Audio Cassette...

Open Culture ·

2024/09/04

Audio cassette tapes first appeared on the market in the early nineteen-sixties, but it would take about a decade before they came to dominate it. And when they did, they’d changed the lives of many a music-lover by having made it possible not just to listen to their albums of choice on the go, but […]

en-US

20 Mesmerizing Videos of Japanese Artisans Creating...

Open Culture ·

2024/09/04

In Japanese “tewaza” means “hand technique” or “handcraft” and, in this YouTube playlist of 20 short films, various artisanal techniques are explored and demonstrated by Japanese masters in the field. For those who are both obsessed with Japanese art and watching things get made, these videos are catnip. There’s very little spoken, except a few […]

en-US

Behold the First American Board Game, Travellers’...

Open Culture ·

2024/09/03

Asked to name a classic American board game, most of us would first think of Monopoly, whose imagery and verbiage — Park Place, Rich Uncle Pennybags, “Do not pass go” — has worked its way deep into the culture since Parker Brothers brought it to market in 1935. Despite that, it isn’t the oldest American […]

en-US

The Night Frank Zappa Jammed With Pink Floyd … and...

Open Culture ·

2024/09/03

Recently an older musician acquaintance told me he never “got into ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ and all that,” referring to the “first major space jam” of Pink Floyd’s career and the subsequent explosion of space rock bands. I found myself a little taken aback. Though I was born too late to be there, I’ve come to see […]

en-US

Download 1,000+ Digitized Tapes of Sounds from...

Open Culture ·

2024/09/02

Watch enough classic movies — especially classic movies from slightly downmarket studios — and you’ll swear you’ve been hearing the very same sound effects over and over again. That’s because you have been hearing the very same sound effects over and over again: once recorded or acquired for one film, they could, of course, be […]

en-US

The World’s First Mobile Phone Shown in 1922 Vintage...

Open Culture ·

2024/09/02

A number of years ago, British Pathé uncovered some striking footage from 1922 showing two women experimenting with the first mobile phone. A spokesman for the archive said: ”It’s amazing that 90 years ago mobile phone technology and music … was not only being thought of but being trialled.” “The phone even has a lid […]

en-US

Browse 64 Years of RadioShack Catalogs Free Online …...

Open Culture ·

2024/08/30

“I bet RadioShack was great once,” writes former employee Jon Bois in a much-circulated 2014 piece for SB Nation. “I can’t look through their decades-old catalogs and come away with any other impression. They sold giant walnut-wood speakers I’d kill to have today. They sold computers back when people were trying to understand what they […]

en-US

Maurice Sendak’s First Published Illustrations:...

Open Culture ·

2024/08/30

McGraw-Hill/public domain; copy from the Niels Bohr Library & Archives Once upon a time, long before Maurice Sendak illustrated Where The Wild Things Are (1963), he published, notes Ars Technica, “his first professional illustrations in a 1947 popular science book about nuclear physics, Atomics for the Millions.” Only 18 years old, Sendak provided the illustrations; […]

en-US

Solving a 2,500-Year-Old Puzzle: How a Cambridge...

Open Culture ·

2024/08/29

If you find yourself grappling with an intellectual problem that’s gone unsolved for millennia, try taking a few months off and spending them on activities like swimming and meditating. That very strategy worked for a Cambridge PhD student named Rishi Rajpopat, who, after a summer of non-research-related activities, returned to a text by the ancient […]

en-US

Frank Lloyd Wright Thought About Making the...

Open Culture ·

2024/08/28

Image via The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives Seen today, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, seems to occupy several time periods at once, looking both modern and somehow ancient. The latter quality surely has to do with its bright white color, which we associate (especially in such an institutional context) […]

en-US

Is Andrew Huberman Ruining Your Morning Coffee Routine?

Open Culture ·

2024/08/28

Andrew Huberman–the host of the influential Huberman Lab podcast–has gotten a lot of mileage out of his recommended morning routine. His routine emphasizes the importance of getting sunlight within 30–60 minutes of waking; also engaging in light physical activity; hydrating well; and avoiding coffee for the first 90–120 minutes. In his words: I highly recommend […]

en-US

The 11 Censored Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies...

Open Culture ·

2024/08/27

For decades and decades, Warner Bros.’ Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons have served as a kind of default children’s entertainment. Originally conceived for theatrical exhibition in the nineteen-thirties, they were animated to a standard that held its own against the subsequent generations of television productions alongside which they would later be broadcast. Even their […]

en-US

The Enchanting Opera Performances of Klaus Nomi

Open Culture ·

2024/08/27

After making one of the grandest entrances in music history on the stages of East Village clubs, the BBC’s The Old Grey Whistle Test, and Saturday Night Live, theatrical German new wave space alien Klaus Nomi died alone in 1983, a victim of the “first beachhead of the AIDS epidemic.” The disease frightened Nomi’s friends […]

en-US

How Marcel Duchamp Signed a Urinal in 1917 &...

Open Culture ·

2024/08/26

Marcel Duchamp didn’t sign his name on a urinal for lack of ability to create “real” art. In fact, as explained by gallerist-Youtuber James Payne in the new Great Art Explained video above, Duchamp’s grandfather was an artist, as were three of his siblings; he himself attained impressive technical proficiency in painting by his teen […]

en-US

Richard Feynman Creates a Simple Method for Telling...

Open Culture ·

2024/08/26

Photo by Tamiko Thiel via Wikimedia Commons How can we know whether a claim someone makes is scientific or not? The question is of the utmost consequence, as we are surrounded on all sides by claims that sound credible, that use the language of science—and often do so in attempts to refute scientific consensus. As […]

en-US

Hear the Evolution of the London Accent Over 660...

Open Culture ·

2024/08/23

Read a novel by Charles Dickens, and you’ll still today feel transported back to the London of the eighteen-twenties. Some of that experience owes to his lavishly reportorial descriptive skills, but even more to his way with dialogue. Dickens faithfully captured the vocabulary of the times and places in which he set his stories, and […]

en-US

George Orwell Reviews Mein Kampf: “He Envisages a...

Open Culture ·

2024/08/23

Christopher Hitchens once wrote that there were three major issues of the twentieth century — imperialism, fascism, and Stalinism — and George Orwell proved to be right about all of them. Orwell displays his remarkable foresight in a fascinating book review, published in March 1940, of Adolf Hitler’s notorious autobiography Mein Kampf. In the review, […]

en-US

How the Oldest Company in the World, Japan’s...

Open Culture ·

2024/08/22

Image from New York Public Library, via Wikimedia Commons If you visit Osaka, you’ll be urged to see two old buildings in particular: Osaka Castle and Shitennō-ji (above), Japan’s first Buddhist temple. In beholding both, you’ll behold the work of construction firm Kongō Gumi (金剛組), the oldest continuously run company in the world. It was […]

en-US

When Samuel Beckett Drove Young André the Giant to...

Open Culture ·

2024/08/21

Are your idle moments spent inventing imaginary conversations between strange bedfellows? The sort of conversation that might transpire in a pickup truck belonging to Samuel Beckett, say, were the Irish playwright to chauffeur the child André Rene Roussimoff—aka pro wrestler André the Giant—to school? Too silly, you say? Nonsense. This isn’t some wackadoo random pairing, […]

en-US

How an Ancient Roman Shipwreck Could Explain the...

Open Culture ·

2024/08/21

In a 1956 New Statesman piece, the British scientist-novelist C. P. Snow first sounded the alarm about the increasingly chasm-like divide between what he called the “scientific” and “traditional” cultures. We would today refer to them as the sciences and the humanities, while still wringing our hands over the inability of each side to learn […]

en-US

386 results