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How Thieves Stole Priceless Jewels at the Louvre in 8...

Open Culture ·

2025/10/21

On Sunday morning, some audacious thieves stole priceless jewels from the Louvre Museum. The heist took only eight minutes from start to finish. At 9:30 a.m., the robbers parked a truck with a portable ladder in front of the Parisian museum. They ascended the ladder, cut through a second-floor window, entered the museum, smashed through […]

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The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time, According to...

Open Culture ·

2025/10/20

In the eighteenth century, the readers of Europe went mad for epistolary novels. France had, to name the most sensational examples, Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes, Rousseau’s Julie, and Laclos’ Les Liaisons dangereuses; Germany, Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther and Hölderlin’s Hyperion. The English proved especially insatiable when it came to long-form stories composed entirely out of letters: […]

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The First Electric Guitar: Behold the 1931 “Frying Pan”

Open Culture ·

2025/10/20

The names Leo Fender and Les Paul will be forever associated with the explosion of the electric guitar into popular culture. And rightly so. Without engineer Fender and musician and studio wiz Paul’s timeless designs, it’s hard to imagine what the most iconic instruments of decades of popular music would look like. They just might look like […]

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The Surprising Power of Boredom: It Lets You Confront...

Open Culture ·

2025/10/17

The twenty-first century so far may seem light on major technological breakthroughs, at least when compared to the twentieth. An artificial intelligence boom (perhaps a bubble, perhaps not) has been taking place over the past few years, which at least gives us something to talk about. Before that, most of us would have named the […]

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The Genius Engineering of Roman Aqueducts

Open Culture ·

2025/10/16

We tend to think of the Roman Empire as having fallen around 476 AD, but had things gone a little differently, it could have come to its end much earlier — before it technically began, in fact. In the year 44 BC, for instance, the assassination of Julius Caesar and the civil wars raging across […]

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The Night When Bob Dylan Went Electric: Watch Him...

Open Culture ·

2025/10/16

The phrase “when Dylan went electric” once carried as much weight in pop culture history as “the fall of the Berlin Wall” carries in, well, history. Both events have receded into what feels like the distant past, but in the early 1960s, they likely seemed equally unlikely to many a serious Bob Dylan fan in […]

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78 Great Directors Who Shaped the History of Cinema:...

Open Culture ·

2025/10/15

When first we take an interest in movies, we must figure out our own method of deciding what to watch next. The central factor may be box office performance, the presence of a favorite performer, adherence to a favorite genre, or the use of a familiar story from other media. Such paths through cinema can […]

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Why Real Biblical Angels Are Creepy, Beastly, and...

Open Culture ·

2025/10/15

Nearly 70 percent of Americans believe in angels, at least according to a statistic often cited in recent years. But what, exactly, comes to their minds — or those of any other believers around the world — when they imagine one? Personal conceptions may vary, of course, but we can be fairly certain of one […]

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Hear What the Language Spoken by Our Ancestors 6,000...

Open Culture ·

2025/10/14

As scholars of ancient texts well know, the reconstruction of lost sources can be a matter of some controversy. In the ancient Hebrew and less ancient Christian Biblical texts, for example, critics find the remnants of many previous texts, seemingly stitched together by occasionally careless editors. Those source texts exist nowhere in any physical form, complete or […]

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Marc Maron Wraps Up the WTF Podcast: Watch His Final...

Open Culture ·

2025/10/14

Back in 2015, President Obama joined Marc Maron on the WTF podcast, marking the first time a sitting president took part in this new kind of broadcasting format. It was a watershed moment—a moment when podcasting went mainstream and became, soon enough, a big business. A decade later, and after nearly 1,700 episodes, Marc Maron […]

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The 1976 Synth Album That Promised to Help Your...

Open Culture ·

2025/10/13

In 1973, Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird’s The Secret Life of Plants became a bestseller. Drawing from the results of scientific studies about whose replicability we may now feel certain doubts, the book suggested that emotion, and indeed sentience, belong not just to humans and animals, but also to, say, the potted fern in your living […]

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Mark Twain Wrote the First Book Ever Written With a...

Open Culture ·

2025/10/13

My Penguin Classics copy of Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi sits alone atop an overfull shelf. There is a bookmark on page 204, exactly halfway through, torn from an in-flight duty-free catalog—whiskey and fancy pens. It tells me “hey, you forgot to finish this, you [various obscenities].” And I shrug. What can I say? […]

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What a Lack of Social Contact Does to Your Brain

Open Culture ·

2025/10/03

To many of us, the concept of solitary confinement may not sound all that bad: finally, a reprieve from the siege of social and professional requests. Finally, a chance to catch up on all the reading we’ve been meaning to do. Finally, an environment conducive to this meditation thing about whose benefits we’ve heard so […]

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The Foot-Licking Demons & Other Strange Things in a...

Open Culture ·

2025/10/03

Few modern writers so remind me of the famous Virginia Woolf quote about fiction as a “spider’s web” more than Argentine fabulist Jorge Luis Borges. But the life to which Borges attaches his labyrinths is a librarian’s life; the strands that anchor his fictions are the obscure scholarly references he weaves throughout his text. Borges […]

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See Beethoven’s Entire 9th Symphony Visualized in...

Open Culture ·

2025/10/02

While reporting on the Eurovision Song Contest, the New Yorker’s Anthony Lane “asked a man named Seppo, from the seven-hundred-strong Eurovision Fan Club of Norway, what he loved about Eurovision. ‘Brotherhood of man,’ he said — a slightly ambiguous answer, because that was the name of a British group that entered, and won, the contest […]

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Remembering Jane Goodall (RIP): Watch Jane, the...

Open Culture ·

2025/10/01

Jane Goodall, the revered conservationist, passed away today at age 91. In her honor, we’re featuring above a National Geographic documentary called Jane. Directed by Brett Morgen, the film draws “from over 100 hours of never-before-seen footage that has been tucked away in the National Geographic archives for over 50 years.” The documentary offers an […]

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Discover the Oldest, Weirdest Instrument On Earth:...

Open Culture ·

2025/10/01

Stalactites hang tight to the ceiling, and stalagmites push up with might from the floor: this is a mnemonic device you may once have learned, but chances are you haven’t had much occasion to remember it since. Still, it would surely be called to mind by a visit to Luray Caverns in the American state of […]

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The Night John Belushi Booked the Punk Band Fear on...

Open Culture ·

2025/10/01

Punk rock has a robust tradition of gross-out, offensive comedy—one carried into the present by bands like Fat White Family and Diarrhea Planet, who may not exist were it not for Fear, an unstable L.A. band led by an obnoxious provocateur who goes by the name Lee Ving. Like fellow L.A. punks the Germs, Circle […]

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An Introduction to Moebius, the Comic Artist Who...

Open Culture ·

2025/09/30

The work of the comic artist Jean Giraud, better known as Moebius (or, more stylishly, Mœbius), has often appeared on Open Culture over the years, but even if you’ve never seen it here, you know it. Granted, you may never have read a page of it, to say nothing of an entire graphic novel’s worth, […]

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Musician Plays the Last Stradivarius Guitar in the...

Open Culture ·

2025/09/30

Last night, while the home team lost the big game on TVs at a local dive bar, my noisy rock band opened for a chamber pop ensemble. Electric guitars and feedback gave way to classical acoustics, violin, piano, accordion, and even a saw. It was an interesting cultural juxtaposition in an evening of cultural juxtapositions. […]

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377 results