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Jimi Hendrix Arrives in London in 1966, Asks to Get...

Open Culture ·

2024/08/21

Jimi Hendrix arrived on the London scene like a ton of bricks in 1966, smashing every British blues guitarist to pieces the instant they saw him play. As vocalist Terry Reid tells it, when Hendrix played his first showcase at the Bag O’Nails, arranged by Animals’ bassist Chas Chandler, “there were guitar players weeping. They […]

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Soviet Inventor Léon Theremin Shows Off the Theremin,...

Open Culture ·

2024/08/20

You know the sound of the theremin, that weird, warbly whine that signals mystery, danger, and otherworldly portent in many classic sci-fi films. It has the distinction of being not only the very first electronic instrument but also the only instrument in history one plays without ever touching any part of it. Instead, the theremin player […]

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The Alphabet Explained: The Origin of Every Letter

Open Culture ·

2024/08/20

Think back, if you will, to the climactic scenes of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which take place in the hidden temple that contains the Holy Grail. His father having been shot by the dastardly Nazi-sympathizing immortality-seeker Walter Donovan, Indy has no choice but to retrieve the legendary cup to make use of its […]

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Jack Kerouac’s Hand-Drawn Cover for On the Road (1952)

Open Culture ·

2024/08/19

This falls under the category, “If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself.” In 1950, when Jack Kerouac released his first novel, The Town and the City, he was less than impressed by the book cover produced by his publisher, Harcourt Brace. (Click here to see why.) So, in 1952, when he began shopping […]

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An Architect Breaks Down the 5 Most Common Styles of...

Open Culture ·

2024/08/19

Every now and again on social media, the observation circulates that Americans look back so fondly on their college years because never again do they get to live in a well-designed walkable community. The organization of college campuses does much to shape that experience, but so do the buildings themselves. “People often say that college […]

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How Editing Saved Ferris Bueller’s Day Off & Made It...

Open Culture ·

2024/08/16

“In our salad days, we are ripe for a particular movie that will linger, deathlessly, long after the greenness has gone,” writes the New Yorker’s Anthony Lane in a recent piece on movies in the eighties. “When a friend turned to me after the first twenty minutes of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, in 1986, and […]

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Hear the Very First Adaptation of George Orwell’s...

Open Culture ·

2024/08/16

Since George Orwell published his landmark political fable 1984, each generation has found ample reason to make reference to the grim near-future envisioned by the novel. Whether Orwell had some prophetic vision or was simply a very astute reader of the institutions of his day—all still with us in mutated form—hardly matters. His book set the […]

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What is Electronic Music?: Pioneering Electronic...

Open Culture ·

2024/08/15

Survey the British public about the most important institution to arise in their country after World War II, and a lot of respondents are going to say the National Health Service. But keep asking around, and you’ll sooner or later encounter a few serious electronic-music enthusiasts who name the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Established in 1958 […]

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Ray Bradbury Explains Why Literature is the Safety...

Open Culture ·

2024/08/15

Ray Bradbury had it all thought out. Behind his captivating works of science fiction, there were subtle theories about what literature was meant to do. The retro clip above takes you back to the 1970s and it shows Bradbury giving a rather intriguing take on the role of literature and art. For the author of Fahrenheit 451 and The […]

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J. G. Ballard Demystifies Surrealist Paintings by...

Open Culture ·

2024/08/14

Before his signature works like The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash, and High-Rise, J. G. Ballard published three apocalyptic novels, The Drowned World, The Burning World, and The Crystal World. Each of those books offers a different vision of large-scale environmental disaster, and the last even provides a clue as to its inspiration. Or rather, its original […]

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Stephen Fry Explains Why Artificial Intelligence Has...

Open Culture ·

2024/07/26

Apart from his comedic, dramatic, and literary endeavors, Stephen Fry is widely known for his avowed technophilia. He once wrote a column on that theme, “Dork Talk,” for the Guardian, in whose inaugural dispatch he laid out his credentials by claiming to have been the owner of only the second Macintosh computer sold in Europe […]

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Watch the 1896 Film The Pistol Duel, a Startling...

Open Culture ·

2024/07/25

One sometimes hears lamented the tendency of movies to depict Mexico — and in particular, its capital Mexico City — as a threatening, rough-and-tumble place where human life has no value. Such concerns turn out to be nearly as old as cinema itself, having first been raised in response to a roughly thirty-second-long film called […]

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37 Hitchcock Cameo Appearances Over 50 Years: All in...

Open Culture ·

2024/07/25

Early in his career, Alfred Hitchcock began making small appearances in his own films. The cameos sometimes lasted just a few brief seconds, and sometimes a little while longer. Either way, they became a signature of Hitchcock’s filmmaking, and fans made a sport of seeing whether they could spot the elusive director. From 1927 to 1976, […]

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Sex and Alcohol in Medieval Times: A Look into the...

Open Culture ·

2024/07/24

Playing video games, road-tripping across America, binge-listening to podcasts, chatting with artificial intelligence: these are a few of our modern pleasures not just unknown to, but unimaginable by, humanity in the Middle Ages. Yet medieval people were, after all, people, and as Terence put it more than a millennium before their time, humani nil a […]

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Buckminster Fuller Tells the World “Everything He...

Open Culture ·

2024/07/24

History seems to have settled Buckminster Fuller’s reputation as a man ahead of his time. He inspires short, witty popular videos like YouTuber Joe Scott’s “The Man Who Saw The Future,” and the ongoing legacy of the Buckminster Fuller Institute (BFI), who note that “Fuller’s ideas and work continue to influence new generations of designers, […]

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Meet Madame Inès Decourcelle, One of the Very First...

Open Culture ·

2024/07/23

If you can read this, you almost certainly know the French word for a professional automobile driver. That’s because we use the same word in English: chauffeur. French nouns, unlike English ones, come in masculine and feminine varieties, and that -eur ending unmistakably indicates one of the former. What, then, to call a woman who […]

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When the Grateful Dead Played at the Egyptian...

Open Culture ·

2024/07/23

In September of 1978, the Grateful Dead traveled to Egypt and played three shows at the Great Pyramid of Giza, with the Great Sphinx looking over their shoulders. It wasn’t the first time a rock band played in an ancient setting. Pink Floyd performed songs in the middle of the Amphitheatre of Pompeii in October 1971. But Floyd […]

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The Page That Changed Comics Forever: Discover the...

Open Culture ·

2024/07/22

If you grew up reading American comic books during the second half of the twentieth century, you’ll be familiar with the seal of the Comics Code Authority. I remember seeing it stamped onto the upper-right corner of issues of titles from The Amazing Spider-Man to reprints of Carl Barks’ Scrooge McDuck stories to Jughead Double […]

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When Slavoj Žižek and Jordan Peterson Debated...

Open Culture ·

2024/07/22

Karl Marx was a German philosopher-historian (with a few other pursuits besides) who wrote in pursuit of an understanding of industrial society as he knew it in the nineteenth century and what its future evolution held in store. There are good reasons to read his work still today, especially if you have an interest in […]

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2000-Year-Old Bottle of White Wine Found in a Roman...

Open Culture ·

2024/07/05

Image via Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports Back in 2017, we featured the oldest unopened bottle of wine in the world here on Open Culture. Found in Speyer, Germany, in 1867, it dates from 350 AD, making it a venerable vintage indeed, but one recently outdone by a bottle first discovered five years ago in […]

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386 results