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Carl Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit: Tools for...

Open Culture ·

2025/09/29

Though he died too young, Carl Sagan left behind an impressively large body of work, including more than 600 scientific papers and more than 20 books. Of those books, none is more widely known to the public — or, still, more widely read by the public — than Cosmos, accompanied as it was by Cosmos: […]

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Meryl Streep’s First Film Role Was in an Animated...

Open Culture ·

2025/09/29

Difficult as it may be to remember now, there was a time when Meryl Streep was not yet synonymous with silver-screen stardom — a time, in fact, when she had yet to appear on the silver screen at all. Half a century ago, she was just another young stage actress in New York, albeit one […]

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The Gilded Age: A Free Historical Documentary That...

Open Culture ·

2025/09/25

Ever-increasing economic inequality, rapid technological change, the creation of dominant corporations controlled by a small business elite, politicians in the pocket of big business leaders, and the rise of populism and nativism. These are all features of American life in 2025. But our nation has also seen this movie play before, most notably back in […]

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A Tour of the New David Bowie Archive Featuring...

Open Culture ·

2025/09/25

With the tenth anniversary of David Bowie’s death coming up early next year, more than a few fans will have their minds on a pilgrimage to mark the occasion. Perhaps with that very time frame in mind, the V&A East Storehouse in London has just opened the David Bowie Center. Run by the Victoria and […]

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Ernst Haeckel’s Sublime Drawings of Flora & Fauna:...

Open Culture ·

2025/09/24

If you follow the ongoing beef many popular scientists have with philosophy, you’d be forgiven for thinking the two disciplines have nothing to say to each other. That’s a sadly false impression, though they have become almost entirely separate professional institutions. But during the first, say, 200 years of modern science, scientists were “natural philosophers”—often […]

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Explore a New Digital Edition of Printing Types, the...

Open Culture ·

2025/09/24

Times New Roman has been around since 1931, longer than most of us have been alive — and for longer than many of us have been alive, word-processing applications have come with it as the default font. We tend, therefore, to regard it less as something created than as something for all intents and purposes […]

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A Trip Around the World in 1900: See Restored Footage...

Open Culture ·

2025/09/23

From today’s vantage, the first decade of the twentieth century can look like an even more distant period of history than it is. In many corners of urban civilization, the cabarets, tearooms, and other near-paralytically mannered institutions of the Belle Époque were very much going concerns. To those who lived in that era, it must […]

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Hermann Rorschach’s Original Rorschach Test: What Do...

Open Culture ·

2025/09/23

There is a well-known scene in Woody Allen’s Take The Money And Run (1969) when Virgil Starkwell (Allen) takes a psychological test to join the Navy, but is thwarted by his lascivious unconscious. The psychological measure that proves to be Starkwell’s undoing—rejected, he turns to a life of crime—is the Rorschach inkblot test, devised a […]

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When CBS Canceled The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour...

Open Culture ·

2025/09/22

Rigorously clean-cut, competent on the acoustic guitar and double bass, and seldom dressed in anything more daring than cherry-red blazers, Tom and Dick Smothers looked like the antithesis of nineteen-sixties rebellion. When they first gained national recognition with their variety show The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, they must have come off to many young viewers […]

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Explore the Fascinating Map of Fungi: An Introduction...

Open Culture ·

2025/09/22

Here on Open Culture, we’ve previously featured Domain of Science’s elaborate infographic maps of such vast fields of intellectual endeavor as mathematics, physics, computer science, quantum physics, quantum computing, chemistry, biology, and medicine. Over time, the series’ creator Dominic Walliman has branched out, as it were, even to kingdoms of the natural world, like plants. […]

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How to Write in Cuneiform, the Oldest Writing System...

Open Culture ·

2025/09/19

Teaching child visitors how to write their names using an unfamiliar or antique alphabet is a favorite activity of museum educators, but Dr. Irving Finkel, a cuneiform expert who specializes in ancient Mesopotamian medicine and magic, has grander designs. His employer, the British Museum, has over 130,000 tablets spanning Mesopotamia’s Early Dynastic period to the […]

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A 107-Year-Old Irish Farmer Reflects on the Changes...

Open Culture ·

2025/09/18

Talk to a clear-headed 107-year-old today, and you could expect to hear stories of adolescence in the Great Depression, or — if you’re lucky — the Jazz Age seen through a child’s eyes. It’s no common experience to have been formed by the age of radio and live deep into the age of the smartphone, […]

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An Art Conservator Restores a Painting of the Doomed...

Open Culture ·

2025/09/18

Some people talk to plants. The Carnegie Museum of Art’s chief conservator Ellen Baxter talks to the paintings she’s restoring. “You have to … tell her she’s going to look lovely,” she says, above, spreading varnish over a 16th-century portrait of Isabella de’ Medici prior to starting the laborious process of restoring years of wear […]

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40,000-Year-Old Symbols Found in Caves Worldwide May...

Open Culture ·

2025/09/17

We may take it for granted that the earliest writing systems developed with the Sumerians around 3400 B.C.E. The archaeological evidence so far supports the theory. But it may also be possible that the earliest writing systems predate 5000-year-old cuneiform tablets by several thousand years. And what’s more, it may be possible, suggests paleoanthropologist Genevieve […]

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How a 19th Century Scientist Created Incredibly...

Open Culture ·

2025/09/17

At the moment, there’s no better way to see anything in space than through the lens of the James Webb Space Telescope. Previously featured here on Open Culture, that ten-billion-dollar successor to the Hubble Space Telescope can see unprecedentedly far out into space, which, in effect, means it can see unprecedentedly far back in time: […]

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When Michelangelo Created Artistic Designs for...

Open Culture ·

2025/09/16

Michelangelo was born in the Republic of Florence, with the talent of… well, Michelangelo. Given those beginnings, it would have been practically impossible for him to avoid entanglement with the House of Medici, the banking family and political dynasty that ruled over Florence for the better part of three centuries. By the time of Michelangelo’s […]

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Albert Einstein Gives a Speech Praising Immigrants’...

Open Culture ·

2025/09/16

There have been many times in American history when celebrations of the country’s multi-ethnic, ever-changing demography served as powerful counterweights to narrow, exclusionary, nationalisms. In 1855, for example, the publication of Brooklyn native Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself offered a “passionate embrace of equality,” writes Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, “the soul of democracy.” We can contrast […]

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Everything That Went Wrong During The Wizard of Oz’s...

Open Culture ·

2025/09/15

The Wizard of Oz is now showing at Las Vegas’ Sphere. Or a version of it is, at any rate, and not one that meets with the approval of all the picture’s countless fans. “The beloved 1939 film starring Judy Garland, widely considered one of the greatest Hollywood classics, has been stretched and morphed and […]

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Leonardo Da Vinci’s To-Do List from 1490: The Plan of...

Open Culture ·

2025/09/15

Most people’s to-do lists are, almost by definition, pretty dull, filled with those quotidian little tasks that tend to slip out of our minds. Pick up the laundry. Get that thing for the kid. Buy milk, canned yams and kumquats at the local market. Leonardo Da Vinci was, however, no ordinary person. And his to-do […]

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The Horrifying Paintings of Francis Bacon

Open Culture ·

2025/09/12

Mention Francis Bacon, and you sometimes have to clarify which one you mean: the twentieth-century painter, or the seventeenth-century philosopher? Despite how much time separated their lives, the two men aren’t without their connections. One may actually have been a descendant of the other, if you credit the artist’s father’s claim of relation to the […]

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377 results