PODCAST

Open Culture

The best free cultural & educational media on the web

All Episodes

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 […]

en-US

The First Professional Footage of Pink Floyd Gets...

Open Culture ·

2024/05/22

British filmmaker and novelist Peter Whitehead has been credited with inventing the music video with his promo films for the Rolling Stones in the mid-60s. According to Ali Catterall and Simon Wells, authors of Your Face Here, a study of “British Cult Film since the Sixties,” Whitehead was “a trusted confidant of the Rolling Stones… […]

en-US

Monty Python’s Michael Palin Presents His Favorite...

Open Culture ·

2024/05/22

Of all the English comedians to have attained worldwide fame over the past half-century, Sir Michael Palin may be the most English of them all. It thus comes as no surprise that the National Gallery would ring him up and invite him to make a video about his favorite painting, nor that his favorite painting […]

en-US

Medieval Cats Behaving Badly: Kitties That Left Paw...

Open Culture ·

2024/05/21

“The more things change, the more they stay the same.” –Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr (1808–90) When Emir O. Filipovic, a medievalist at the University of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, visited the State Archives of Dubrovnik, he stumbled upon something that will hardly surprise anyone who lives with cats today: a 15th-century manuscript with inky paw prints […]

en-US

Why Medieval Bologna Was Full of Tall Towers, and...

Open Culture ·

2024/05/21

Image by Toni Pecoraro, via Wikimedia Commons Go to practically any major city today, and you’ll notice that the buildings in certain areas are much taller than in others. That may sound trivially true, but what’s less obvious is that the height of those buildings tends to correspond to the value of the land on […]

en-US

Isaac Asimov Predicts the Future of Online Education...

Open Culture ·

2024/05/20

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” Though that line probably originated with a Canadian novelist called Grant Allen, it’s long been popularly attributed to his more colorful nineteenth-century contemporary Mark Twain. It isn’t hard to understand why it now has so much traction as a social media-ready quote, though during much […]

en-US

Hear Leo Tolstoy Read From His Last Major Work in...

Open Culture ·

2024/05/20

In years past, we’ve brought you rare recordings of Sigmund Freud and Jorge Luis Borges speaking in English. Today we present a remarkable series of recordings of the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy reading a passage from his book, Wise Thoughts for Every Day, in four languages: English, German, French and Russian. Wise Thoughts For Every […]

en-US

“The Virtues of Coffee” Explained in 1690 Ad: The...

Open Culture ·

2024/05/17

According to many historians, the English Enlightenment may never have happened were it not for coffeehouses, the public sphere where poets, critics, philosophers, legal minds, and other intellectual gadflies regularly met to chatter about the pressing concerns of the day. And yet, writes scholar Bonnie Calhoun, “it was not for the taste of coffee that […]

en-US

RIP David Sanborn: See Him Play Alongside Miles...

Open Culture ·

2024/05/17

It’s late in the evening of Saturday, October 28th, 1989. You flip on the television and the saxophonist David Sanborn appears onscreen, instrument in hand, introducing the eclectic blues icon Taj Mahal, who in turn declares his intent to play a number with “rural humor” and “world proportions.” And so he does, which leads into […]

en-US

A Playlist of the 3,300 Best Films & Documentaries on...

Open Culture ·

2024/05/16

?si=yCx1pqpcATHND90L Once upon a time, the most convenient means of discovering movies was cable television. This held especially true for those of us who happened to be adolescents on a break from school, ready and willing morning, midday, or night to sit through the commercial-laden likes of Corvette Summer, Transylvania 6–5000, BMX Bandits, or Freejack. […]

en-US

Meet Fanny, the First Female Rock Band to Top the...

Open Culture ·

2024/05/16

When the Beatles upended popular music, thousands of wannabe beat groups were born all over the world, and many of them–for the first time ever, really–were all-female groups. This Amoeba Records article has a fairly exhaustive list of these girl bands, with names like The Daughters of Eve, The Freudian Slips, The Moppets, The Bombshells, […]

en-US

Read 20 Short Stories From Nobel Prize-Winning Writer...

Open Culture ·

2024/05/15

Note: Back in 2013, when Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature, we published a post featuring 20 short stories written by Munro. Today, with the sad news that Alice Munro has passed away, at the age of 92, we’re bringing the original post (from October 10, 2013) back to the surface–in part because […]

en-US

Around The World in 1896: See Colorized & Upscaled...

Open Culture ·

2024/03/22

The YouTube channel Lost in Time has taken footage from the legendary Lumière brothers, originally shot in 1896, then upscaled and colorized it, giving us a chance to see a distant world through a modern lens. Nearing the end of the 19th century, the film pioneers (and their employees) visited different parts of the world […]

en-US

Laurence Fishburne Reads a Former Slave’s Incredible...

Open Culture ·

2024/03/21

Lawrence Fishburne brings a degree of gravity to his roles offered by few other living actors. That has secured his place in pop culture as Morpheus from The Matrix, for example. But he could even marshal it early in his career, as evidenced by his role as Apocalypse Now’s “Mr. Clean,” which he took on […]

en-US

A Day in Tokyo: A 1968 Film Captures a City Reborn 23...

Open Culture ·

2024/03/21

During World War II, Tokyo sustained heavy damage, especially with the bombings conducted by the U.S. military in March 1945. Known as Operation Meetinghouse, US air raids destroyed 16 square miles in central Tokyo, leaving 100,000 civilians dead and one million homeless. Tokyo didn’t recover quickly. It took until the 1950s for reconstruction to really […]

en-US

Free Coloring Books from Libraries & Museums:...

Open Culture ·

2024/03/20

Launched by The New York Academy of Medicine Library in 2016, Color Our Collections is “an annual coloring festival on social media during which libraries, museums, archives and other cultural institutions around the world share free coloring content featuring images from their collections.” In February, the project released its 2024 archive of coloring books, allowing […]

en-US

180,000 Years of Religion Charted on a “Histomap” in...

Open Culture ·

2024/03/20

For many, even most of us moderns, the central religious choice is a simple one: adhere to the belief system in which you grew up, or stop adhering to it. But if you survey the variety of religions in the world, the situation no longer seems quite so binary; if you then add the variety […]

en-US

When Frank Lloyd Wright Designed a Plan to Turn Ellis...

Open Culture ·

2024/03/19

The very words “Ellis Island” bring to mind a host of sepia-toned images, shaped by both American historical fact and national myth. Officers employed there really did inspect the eyelids of new arrivals with buttonhooks, for example, but they didn’t actually make a policy of changing their names, however foreign they sounded. You can learn […]

en-US

OpenVertebrate Presents a Massive Database of 13,000...

Open Culture ·

2024/03/19

From The Florida Museum of Natural History comes the openVertebrate project, a new initiative to “provide free, digital 3D vertebrate anatomy models and data to researchers, educators, students and the public.” Introducing the new project (otherwise known as oVert), the museum writes: Between 2017 and 2023, oVert project members took CT scans of more than […]

en-US

An Architectural Tour of Sagrada Família, Antoni...

Open Culture ·

2024/03/18

In less than a year and a half, the centenary of Antoni Gaudí’s death will be here. Faced with this fact, especially dedicated enthusiasts of Catalan architecture may already be planning their festivities. But we can be sure where the real pressure is felt: the Basílica i Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família, Gaudí’s most […]

en-US

387 results