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David Lynch’s Weird Espresso Maker Gets Taken for a...

Open Culture ·

2025/08/11

David Lynch loved his coffee. For decades, the filmmaker let coffee fuel his creativity, drinking five, six, even seven cups per day at Bob’s Big Boy. Famously, Lynch celebrated coffee in Twin Peaks (remember the line, “That’s a damn fine cup of coffee!”), and later directed a whole mini-season of Twin Peaks in the form […]

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One-in-70-Trillion: An Evolutionary Biologist...

Open Culture ·

2025/08/08

At a 1998 conference on technology and life, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams once proposed the notion of a sentient puddle. Imagine it “waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, […]

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Memento Mori: How Smiling Skeletons Have Reminded Us...

Open Culture ·

2025/08/08

The expression “YOLO” may now be just passé enough to require explanation. It stands, as only some of us would try to deny remembering, for “You only live once,” a sentiment that reflects an eternal truth. Some bodies of religious belief don’t strictly agree with it, of course, but that was also true 24 centuries […]

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A Page of Madness: The Lost, Avant Garde Masterpiece...

Open Culture ·

2025/08/07

It’s a sad fact that the vast majority of silent movies in Japan have been lost thanks to human carelessness, earthquakes and the grim efficiency of the United States Air Force. The first films of hugely important figures like Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu, and Hiroshi Shimizu have simply vanished. So we should consider ourselves fortunate […]

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The Spinal Tap Sequel Arrives Next Month: Watch the...

Open Culture ·

2025/08/07

This Is Spinal Tap came out more than 40 years ago. At the time, says director Rob Reiner in a recent interview at San Diego Comic-Con, “nobody got it. I mean, they thought I’d made a movie about a real band that wasn’t very good, and why wouldn’t I make a movie about the Beatles […]

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Watch Meshes of the Afternoon, the Experimental Short...

Open Culture ·

2025/08/06

It seems not to be documented whether the Santa Ana winds were blowing when Maya Deren and Alexander Hackenschmied shot Meshes of the Afternoon. But everything about the film itself suggests that they must have been, so vivid does its atmosphere of luxuriantly arid paranoia remain these 62 years later. Despite its runtime of less […]

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Revisit One of the Most Polarizing Albums in Rock...

Open Culture ·

2025/07/18

Fifty years ago this month, Lou Reed nearly destroyed his own career with one double album. Metal Machine Music sold 100,000 copies during the three weeks of summer 1975 between its release and its removal from the market. More than a few of the many buyers who promptly returned it would have been expecting something […]

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How Jackie Chan Filmed the Best Fight Scene in Cinema...

Open Culture ·

2025/07/17

Though now in his seventies, Jackie Chan continues to appear on the big screen with regularity. For most world-famous actors, that’s hardly notable, but it’s not as if Sir John Gielgud, say, had spent decades filming scenes of hand-to-hand combat and sustaining severe injuries in the performance of elaborate stunts. Viewers of New Police Story […]

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The First Photograph Ever Taken (1826)

Open Culture ·

2025/07/17

In histories of early photography, Louis Daguerre faithfully appears as one of the fathers of the medium. His patented process, the daguerreotype, in wide use for nearly twenty years in the early 19th century, produced so many of the images we associate with the period, including famous photographs of Abraham Lincoln, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily […]

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The Story Told on the Famous Bayeux Tapestry...

Open Culture ·

2025/07/16

They say that history is written by the victors, but that isn’t always true: sometimes it’s embroidered by the victors. Such was the case with the Bayeux Tapestry, which commemorates the build-up to and successful execution of the Norman conquest of England in 1066. Created not long after the events it depicts in what we […]

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A Behind-the-Scenes Tour of NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert

Open Culture ·

2025/07/16

Back in 2008, Bob Boilen (host of All Songs Considered) and NPR music critic Stephen Thompson attended a noisy concert where they struggled to hear Laura Gibson perform. Jokingly, Thompson suggested that Gibson perform at Boilen’s office desk instead. She did. And, with that, the NPR Tiny Desk Concert was born. Since then, more than […]

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The Entire History of English in 22 Minutes

Open Culture ·

2025/07/15

When we speak English, we might say we’re speaking the language of Samuel Johnson, the man who wrote its first dictionary. Or we could say we’re speaking the language of Shakespeare, who coined more English terms than any other individual in history. It would make just as much sense to describe ourselves as speaking the […]

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50+ Free Charlie Chaplin Films Online

Open Culture ·

2025/07/15

A few things to know about Charlie Chaplin. He starred in over 80 films, reeling off most during the silent film era. In 1914 alone, he acted in 40 films, then another 15 in 1915. By the 1920s, Chaplin had emerged as the first larger-than-life movie star and director, if not the most recognizable person […]

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How the Ancient Greeks Built Their Magnificent...

Open Culture ·

2025/07/14

Doric, Ionic, Corinthian: these, as practically everyone who went through school in the West somehow remembers, are the three varieties of classical column. We may still recall them, more specifically, as representing the three ancient Greek architectural styles. But as ancient-history YouTuber Garrett Ryan points out in the new Told in Stone video above, only […]

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Albert Einstein Tells His Son That the Key to...

Open Culture ·

2025/07/14

As one particularly astute observer of human emotions might put it, it is a truth universally acknowledged that we can’t all be Albert Einstein. In fact, none of us can. That unique experience was denied even Einstein’s son Hans Albert, though he did go on to his own distinguished career as an engineer and professor of hydraulics. […]

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The World’s Oldest Cookbook: Discover 4,000-Year-Old...

Open Culture ·

2025/07/11

If asked about your favorite dish, you’d do well to name something exotic. Gone are the days when a taste for the likes of Italian, Mexican, or Chinese cuisine could qualify you as an adventurous eater. Even expeditions to the very edges of the menus at Peruvian, Ethiopian, or Laotian restaurants, say, would be unlikely […]

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Tomorrow Never Knows: How The Beatles Invented the...

Open Culture ·

2025/07/10

“Tomorrow Never Knows” couldn’t be made today, and not just because the Beatles already made it in 1966. Marking perhaps the single biggest step in the group’s artistic evolution, that song is in every sense a product of its time. The use of psychedelic drugs like LSD was on the rise in the counterculture, as […]

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Stephen King’s Top 10 All-Time Favorite Books

Open Culture ·

2025/07/10

Image by The USO, via Flickr Commons So you might think that if Stephen King – the guy who wrote such horror classics like Carrie and The Stand – were to rattle off his top ten favorite books, it would feature works by the likes of Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft or maybe J. […]

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The Invisible Horror of The Shining: How Music Makes...

Open Culture ·

2025/07/09

Inexplicable as it may sound to readers of this site, there are movie-lovers who claim not to enjoy the work of Stanley Kubrick. But even his most steadfast non-appreciators have to hand it to him for The Shining, his 1980 Stephen King adaptation widely considered one of the scariest — quite possibly the scariest – […]

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A Rabbit Rides a Chariot Pulled by Geese in an...

Open Culture ·

2025/07/09

If you head to the Louvre, make sure you visit the Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, and Liberty Leading the People. But then swing by the Department of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman Antiquities. There you might find (no guarantee!) a Roman mosaic featuring a rabbit riding a chariot pulled by geese. Discovered at Hadrian’s villa […]

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376 results