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Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa Now Appears on...

Open Culture ·

2024/07/04

If you’ve lived or traveled in Japan, you know full well how much of daily life in that cash-intensive society involves the use of thousand-yen bills. Once considered the equivalent of the American ten-spot, the yen’s lately having fallen to its lowest value in decades means that it’s now worth closer to six U.S. dollars. […]

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How a Steady Supply of Coffee Helped the Union Win...

Open Culture ·

2024/07/03

Americans doing “e‑mail jobs” and working in the “laptop class” tend to make much of the quantity of coffee they require to keep going, or even to get started. In that sense alone, they have something in common with Civil War soldiers. “Union soldiers were given 36 pounds of coffee a year by the government, […]

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Ernest Hemingway’s Favorite Hamburger Recipe

Open Culture ·

2024/07/03

Image via Wikimedia Commons In 2013, the food writer Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan stumbled across an article in the Boston Globe describing a trove of digitized documents from Ernest Hemingway’s home in Cuba that had been recently donated to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, home of Hemingway’s personal archives. One line in the […]

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The Story of Lee Miller: From the Cover of Vogue to...

Open Culture ·

2024/07/02

In late-twenties Manhattan, a nineteen-year-old woman named Elizabeth “Lee” Miller stepped off the curb and into the path of a car. She was pulled back to safety by none other than the magnate Condé Nast, founder of the eponymous publishing company. Not long thereafter, Miller, who’d been studying at the Art Students League of New […]

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The Original Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland...

Open Culture ·

2024/07/02

On a summer day in 1862, a tall, stammering Oxford University mathematician named Charles Lutwidge Dodgson took a boat trip up the River Thames, accompanied by a colleague and the three young daughters of university chancellor Henry Liddell. To stave off tedium during the five-mile journey, Dodgson regaled the group with a story of a […]

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Martin Mull (RIP) Satirically Interviews a Young Tom...

Open Culture ·

2024/07/01

These days, references to seventies television increasingly require prefatory explanation. Who under the age of 60 recalls, for example, the cultural phenomenon that was Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, an absurdist satire so faithful to the soap-opera form it parodied that it aired every weeknight, putting out 325 episodes between early 1976 and mid-1977? And even […]

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Why You Do Your Best Thinking In The Shower:...

Open Culture ·

2024/07/01

Image via Wikimedia Commons “The great Tao fades away.” So begins one translation of the Tao Te Ching’s 18th Chapter. The sentence captures the frustration that comes with a lost epiphany. Whether it’s a profound realization when you just wake up, or moment of clarity in the shower, by the time your mind’s gears start […]

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Ray Bradbury Wrote the First Draft of Fahrenheit 451...

Open Culture ·

2024/05/31

Image by Alan Light, via Wikimedia Commons It sounds like a third grade math problem: “If Ray Bradbury wrote the first draft of Fahrenheit 451 (1953) on a coin-operated typewriter that charged 10 cents for every 30 minutes, and he spent a total of $9.80, how many hours did it take Ray to write his […]

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How Well Does Medieval Armor Actually Stand Up to...

Open Culture ·

2024/05/30

The popular image of the medieval suit of armor looks formidable enough that any of us could be forgiven for assuming that, with its steel-plated protection, we’d emerge from even the most harrowing battle without a scratch. Yet if we really found ourselves transported to, say, the French side in the Battle of Agincourt, we’d […]

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Sci-Fi Author J.G. Ballard Predicts the Rise of...

Open Culture ·

2024/05/30

Say you were a fan of Steven Spielberg’s moving coming-of-age drama Empire of the Sun, set in a Japanese internment camp during World War II and starring a young Christian Bale. Say you read the autobiographical novel on which that film is based, written by one J.G. Ballard. Say you enjoyed it so much, you […]

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When the CIA Studied Psychic Techniques to Alter...

Open Culture ·

2024/05/29

By now, it’s widely known that the Central Intelligence Agency ran a decades-long program of experiments involving LSD and other psychoactive drugs called MKUltra from the nineteen-fifties to the seventies. As one might suspect, that wasn’t the only research project into the manipulation of human consciousness the CIA had going on in the twentieth century. […]

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This 392-Year-Old Bonsai Tree Survived the Hiroshima...

Open Culture ·

2024/05/29

Image by Sage Ross, via Wikimedia Commons The beautiful bonsai tree pictured above–let’s call it the Yamaki Pine Bonsai–began its journey through the world back in 1625. That’s when the Yamaki family first began to train the tree, working patiently, generation after generation, to prune the tree into the majestic thing it is today. No […]

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Ancient Greek Armor Gets Tested in an 11-Hour Battle...

Open Culture ·

2024/05/28

By Greek law, every male citizen over the age of eighteen must spend from nine months to a year in the Hellenic Armed Forces. As in every country with such a policy of mandatory conscription, this is surely not a prospect relished by most conscripts-to-be. But then, it can’t be all bad, at least for […]

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Philip K. Dick Theorizes The Matrix in 1977, Declares...

Open Culture ·

2024/05/28

In 1963, Philip K. Dick won the coveted Hugo Award for his novel The Man in the High Castle, beating out such sci-fi luminaries as Marion Zimmer Bradley and Arthur C. Clarke. Of the novel, The Guardian writes, “Nothing in the book is as it seems. Most characters are not what they say they are, most […]

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Watch Philosophy Lectures That Became a Hit During...

Open Culture ·

2024/05/27

If we ask which philosophy professor has made the greatest impact in this decade, there’s a solid case to be made for the late Michael Sugrue. Yet in the nearly four-decade-long career that followed his studies at the University of Chicago under Allan Bloom (author of The Closing of the American Mind, later immortalized in […]

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Hunter S. Thompson’s Harrowing, Chemical-Filled Daily...

Open Culture ·

2024/05/27

E. Jean Carroll’s 1993 memoir of Hunter S. Thompson opens like this: I have heard the biographers of Harry S. Truman, Catherine the Great, etc., etc., say they would give anything if their subjects were alive so they could ask them some questions. I, on the other hand, would give anything if my subject were […]

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A 6‑Step Guide to Zen Buddhism, Presented by...

Open Culture ·

2024/05/24

Robert Waldinger works as a part-time professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, but he also describes himself as a “Zen master.” This may strike some listeners as a presumptuous claim, but he has indeed been officially accepted as a rōshi in two different Zen lineages in the West. With one foot in psychiatry and […]

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Hear the Song Written on a Sinner’s Buttock in...

Open Culture ·

2024/05/24

There’s something unusually exciting about finding a hidden or discreetly placed element in a well-known painting. I can only imagine the thrill of the physician who first noticed the curious presence of a human brain in Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam: God, his retinue of angels, and their cloak map neatly onto some of the […]

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Fritz Lang First Depicted Artificial Intelligence on...

Open Culture ·

2024/05/23

Artificial intelligence seems to have become, as Michael Lewis labeled a previous chapter in the recent history of technology, the new new thing. But human anxieties about it are, if not an old old thing, then at least part of a tradition longer than we may expect. For vivid evidence, look no further than Fritz […]

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9‑Year-Old Edward Hopper Draws a Picture on the Back...

Open Culture ·

2024/05/23

In a 2017 press release, the Edward Hopper House announced that it would receive over 1,000 artifacts and memorabilia documenting Edward Hopper’s family life and early years. The collection “consists of juvenilia and other materials from the formative years of Hopper’s life and includes original letters, drawings from his school years … photographs, original newspaper […]

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