PODCAST

Open Culture

The best free cultural & educational media on the web

All Episodes

An Animated Introduction to the Rosetta Stone, and...

Open Culture ·

2024/03/18

In 1799, Napoleon’s army encountered a curious artifact in Egypt, a black stone that featured writing in three different languages: Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Demotic Egyptian, and Ancient Greek. Before long, English troops captured the stone and brought it to the British Museum in 1802—where it remains today. The animated video above, created by Egyptologist Franziska Naether, […]

en-US

Benedict Cumberbatch Reads Alexei Navalny’s Final...

Open Culture ·

2024/03/08

Above, actor Benedict Cumberbatch reads the final letter written by Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who died in a Siberian prison on February 16th. The letter gets at a question many have asked, even from afar. Why, after being poisoned with Novichok in 2020, did Navalny return to Russia, knowing he would face immediate […]

en-US

The Getty Makes Nearly 88,000 Art Images Free to Use...

Open Culture ·

2024/03/08

Since the J. Paul Getty Museum launched its Open Content program back in 2013, we’ve been featuring their efforts to make their vast collection of cultural artifacts freely accessible online. They’ve released not just digitized works of art, but also a great many art history texts and art books in general. Just this week, they announced […]

en-US

Behold Soviet Animations of Ray Bradbury Stories

Open Culture ·

2024/03/07

Sergei Bondarchuk directed an 8‑hour film adaptation of War and Peace (1966–67), which ended up winning an Oscar for Best Foreign Picture. When he was in Los Angeles as a guest of honor at a party, Hollywood royalty like John Wayne, John Ford, and Billy Wilder lined up to meet the Russian filmmaker. But the […]

en-US

How Humanity Got Hooked on Coffee: An Animated History

Open Culture ·

2024/03/07

Few of us grow up drinking coffee, but once we start drinking it, even fewer of us ever stop. According to legend, the earliest such case was a ninth-century Ethiopian goatherd named Kaldi, who noticed how much energy his ruminant charges seemed to draw from eating particular red berries. After chewing a few of them […]

en-US

Frank Herbert Explains the Origins of Dune (1969)

Open Culture ·

2024/03/06

Dune: Part Two has been playing in theaters for less than a week, but that’s more than enough time for its viewers to joke about the aptness of its title. For while it comes, of course, as the second half of Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s influential sci-fi novel, it also contains a great many […]

en-US

Almost 500 Etchings by Rembrandt Now Free Online,...

Open Culture ·

2024/03/06

Seventeenth-century Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn may have more name recognition than nearly any other European artist, his popularity due in large part to what art historian Alison McQueen identifies in her book of the same name as “the rise of the cult of Rembrandt.” Popular Rembrandt veneration brought us in the 20th century such […]

en-US

Hear Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” Performed in...

Open Culture ·

2024/03/05

By the early nineteen-nineties, at least in the United States, Latin instruction in schools wasn’t what it had once been. Students everywhere had long been showing impatience and irreverence about their having to study that “dead language,” of course. But surely it had never felt quite so irrelevant as it did in a world of […]

en-US

The Decimal Point Is 150 Years Older Than We Thought,...

Open Culture ·

2024/03/05

Historians have long thought that the decimal point first came into use in 1593, when the German mathematician Christopher Clavius wrote an astronomy text called Astrolabium. It turns out, however, that the history of the decimal point stretches back another 150 years–to the work of the Venetian merchant Giovanni Bianchini. In his text Tabulae primi […]

en-US

The Puzzle of Docudramas — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture...

Open Culture ·

2024/03/05

When we’ve already heard about someone’s personal scandal in the news, do we need to also see it dramatized with A‑list actors? Your hosts Mark Linsenmayer, Lawrence Ware, Sarahlyn Bruck, and Al Baker discuss Todd Haynes’ 2023 film May December fictionalizing the long-aftermath of the much publicized Mary Kay Letourneau story. The main events […]

en-US

The Most Beautiful Shots in Cinema History: Scenes...

Open Culture ·

2024/03/04

If you’re an even mildly enthusiastic filmgoer, these two short compilations from The Solomon Society will get your life flashing before your eyes. They transport me to my ninth birthday screening of The Nightmare Before Christmas; my VHS viewings of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off at home sick from school; the obsession with Blade Runner that […]

en-US

Keith Richards Performs “I’m Waiting For The Man”: A...

Open Culture ·

2024/03/04

“To me, Lou stood out. The real deal! Something important to American music and to ALL MUSIC! I miss him and his dog.” — Keith Richards On what would have been Lou Reed’s 82nd birthday (March 2), Keith Richards released a cover of “I’m Waiting for the Man,” a track originally written by Reed in […]

en-US

The Armored-Knight “Robot” Designed by Leonardo da...

Open Culture ·

2024/02/28

Image by Erik Möller, via Wikimedia Commons Those of us who were playing video games in the nineteen-nineties may remember a fun little platformer, not technically unimpressive for its time, called Clockwork Knight. The concept of a clockwork knight turns out to have had some historical validity, or at least it could potentially have been […]

en-US

When the Berlin Philharmonic Performed John Cage’s...

Open Culture ·

2024/02/28

In late October 2020, amidst another surge of the COVID-19 virus, the German government asked the Berlin Philharmonic to close down for a month. On the eve of their closure, the Philharmonic performed John Cage’s modernist composition, 4′33″, which asks performers not to play their instruments throughout the entire duration of the piece, allowing the […]

en-US

The Life & Work of Richard Feynman Explored in a...

Open Culture ·

2024/02/27

Here at Open Culture, Richard Feynman is never far from our minds. Though he distinguished himself with his work on the development of the atomic bomb and his Nobel Prize-winning research on quantum electrodynamics, you need no special interest in either World War II or theoretical physics to look to him as an intellectual model. […]

en-US

How French Artists in 1899 Envisioned What Life Would...

Open Culture ·

2024/02/27

Atomic physicist Niels Bohr is famously quoted as saying, “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.” Yet despite years of getting things wrong, magazines love think pieces on where we’ll be in several decades, even centuries in time. It gives us comfort to think great things await us, even though we’re long […]

en-US

A Preview of Sora, the New OpenAI Tool That Creates...

Open Culture ·

2024/02/26

A little over four years ago, we featured here on Open Culture a set of realistic images of people who don’t actually exist. They were, as we would now assume, wholly generated by an artificial-intelligence system, but back in 2018, there were still those who doubted that such a thing could be done without furtive […]

en-US

A Walking Tour of Los Angeles Architecture: From Art...

Open Culture ·

2024/02/26

When architectural historian Reyner Banham wrote Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971), quite possibly the most influential book published about the Southern Californian metropolis, he saw fit to dismiss the center of the city with what he called “a note on downtown.” He concedes that it has its landmarks, like the Cathedral of […]

en-US

“Hello Vincent”: A Generative AI Project Brings...

Open Culture ·

2024/02/23

?si=aoRK422gthc62UZE If you attend the “Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise” exhibition at the Musée D’Orsay, in Paris, you can spend time with “Hello Vincent,” a generative Artificial Intelligence project that allows visitors to have “a unique, personalized encounter” with Vincent van Gogh. According to CBS Sunday Morning, whose report we’ve included above, “Hello Vincent” allows museum […]

en-US

Discover the World’s Oldest University, Which Opened...

Open Culture ·

2024/02/22

In the Buddhist Asia of a dozen centuries ago, the equivalent of going off to study at an Ivy League school was going off to study at Nalanda. It was founded in the year 427 in what’s now the Indian state of Bihar, making it “the world’s first residential university,” as Sugato Mukherjee writes at […]

en-US

387 results