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The Gnostic Gospels: An Introduction to the Forbidden...

Open Culture ·

2025/12/05

It would be impossible to understand Western civilization without understanding the history of Christianity. But in order to do that, it may serve us well to think of it as the history of Christianities, plural. So suggests Hochelaga creator Tommie Trelawny in the new video above, which explains the Gnostic Gospels, the “forbidden teachings of […]

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George Orwell’s Six Rules for Writing Clear and Tight...

Open Culture ·

2025/12/04

Image via Wikimedia Commons Most everyone who knows the work of George Orwell knows his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” (published here), in which he rails against careless, confusing, and unclear prose. “Our civilization is decadent,” he argues, “and our language… must inevitably share in the general collapse.” The examples Orwell quotes are all […]

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Did Tintin Creator Hergé Collaborate with the Nazis?...

Open Culture ·

2025/12/04

The Adventures of Tintin may be a children’s comic series from mid-twentieth-century Europe, but its appeal has long since transcended the boundaries of form, culture, and generation. In fact, many if not most seriously dedicated fans of Tintin are in middle age and beyond, and few of them can have avoided ever considering the question […]

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Why Do Filmmakers Call The Battle of Algiers the...

Open Culture ·

2025/12/03

Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film, the loose Thomas Pynchon adaptation One Battle After Another, serves up many a memorable scene. But for a certain kind of cinephile, nothing — not the terrorist attacks, not the chases, not the swerves into askew comedy — sticks in the mind quite so much as the moment in which […]

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The Oldest Known Depiction of Human Sexuality: The...

Open Culture ·

2025/12/03

Image via Wikimedia Commons With the old joke about every generation thinking they invented sex, Listverse brings us the papyrus above, the oldest depiction of sex on record. Painted sometime in the Ramesside Period (1292–1075 B.C.E.), the fragments above—called the “Turin Erotic Papyrus” because of their “discovery” in the Egyptian Museum of Turin, Italy—only hint […]

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The Unlikely Friendship of Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla

Open Culture ·

2025/12/02

Mark Twain was, in the estimation of many, the United States of America’s first truly homegrown man of letters. And in keeping with what would be recognized as the can-do American spirit, he couldn’t resist putting himself forth now and again as a man of science — or, more practically, a man of technology. Here […]

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Talking Heads’ David Byrne Performs a Tiny Desk Concert

Open Culture ·

2025/12/02

If you’ve seen a David Byrne concert in recent years, you know that he performs with a large ensemble of musicians, each carrying their own instruments across the stage, all while moving in intricately choreographed patterns. On his current tour, Byrne and his band stopped by NPR’s studio and played a very different kind of […]

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How the “Marvelization” of Cinema Accelerates the...

Open Culture ·

2025/11/28

As hard as it may be to believe, some of us have never seen a movie belonging to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. If you’re one of those uninitiated, none of the countless clips incorporated into the Like Stories of Old video essay above will tempt you to get initiated. Nor will the laments aired by […]

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The Illustrated Version of “Alice’s Restaurant”:...

Open Culture ·

2025/11/27

Alice’s Restaurant. It’s now a Thanksgiving classic, and something of a tradition around here. Recorded in 1967, the 18+ minute counterculture song recounts Arlo Guthrie’s real encounter with the law, starting on Thanksgiving Day 1965. As the long song unfolds, we hear all about how a hippie-bating police officer, by the name of William “Obie” Obanhein, arrested Arlo for […]

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What Was the Most Revolutionary Painting of the 20th...

Open Culture ·

2025/11/26

Practically anyone could take one glance at Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and identify it as a Picasso, even if they’ve never seen it before and couldn’t say anything else about it. That alone goes some way to explaining why the painting would end up ranked as the most important artwork of the twentieth century, at least according […]

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Thanksgiving Menu at the Plaza Hotel in New York City...

Open Culture ·

2025/11/26

Above, we have the menu for an 1899 Thanksgiving dinner at the Plaza Hotel in New York. If you were a turkey, you had it relatively easy. But the ducks? Not so much. On the menu, you’ll find Mallard duck and Ruddy duck. But also Red-head duck, Long Island duckling, Teal duck and Canvas-back duck, […]

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How to Improve Your Attention Span: Daniel Pink’s...

Open Culture ·

2025/11/25

In his new video above, the writer Daniel Pink proposes the following exercise: “Grab a book and time yourself. How long can you read without getting up or checking your phone? Really try to push yourself, but don’t judge yourself if it’s only a few minutes. Write down your time; that’s your baseline.” From there, […]

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Watch Winsor McCay’s The Sinking of the Lusitania,...

Open Culture ·

2025/11/25

You might know Winsor McCay (1867? ‑1934) for the gorgeously surreal Little Nemo comic strip or for his early animated short Gertie the Dinosaur (1914). But did you know that he also created some of the earliest examples of animated propaganda ever? On May 7, 1915, the RMS Lusitania was just off the coast of Ireland, […]

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200 Ansel Adams Photographs Expose the Rigors of Life...

Open Culture ·

2025/11/24

Images courtesy of the Library of Congress. Actor George Takei was once best known as Star Trek’s Mr. Sulu. He still is, of course, but over the last couple decades his friendly, intelligent, and wickedly funny presence on social media has landed him a new popular role as a civil liberties advocate. Takei’s activist passion […]

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Take a 2‑Hour Walking Tour Through New York City:...

Open Culture ·

2025/11/24

New York isn’t the oldest city in the United States of America, and it certainly isn’t the newest. But it is, quite possibly, the American city where more layers of history coexist than any other, a quality that manifests most vividly in its built environment. Even the most casual tourist can sense the sheer variety […]

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How IKEA Revolutionized Furniture-Making

Open Culture ·

2025/11/21

The humorist Sandra Tsing Loh once described her generational cohort as “today’s young, highly trained, downwardly mobile professionals: ‘dumpies.’ We’re just emerging from years of college only to learn that there are no jobs available for people with our advanced qualifications,” and thus no route to ownership of all their hoped-for lifestyle accoutrements. No, she’s […]

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Why Movies Don’t Feel Real Anymore: A Close Look at...

Open Culture ·

2025/11/20

Anyone who keeps an eye on Hollywood knows — indeed, has been ever more frequently and anxiously informed — that the theater business is in trouble. If fewer of us than ever have been going out to the movies, one reason must have to do with the easy availability of home streaming, to say nothing […]

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J.R.R. Tolkien Expressed a “Heartfelt Loathing” for...

Open Culture ·

2025/11/20

Image via Wikimedia Commons I’ve just started reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit to my daughter. While much of the nuance and the references to Tolkienian deep time are lost on her, she easily grasps the distinctive charms of the characters, the nature of their journey, and the perils, wonders, and Elven friends they have met along […]

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An Introduction to Hilma af Klint: Once a Forgotten...

Open Culture ·

2025/11/19

If pressed to pick the most international art figure of the past dozen years, one could do much worse than the Swedish artist-mystic Hilma af Klint, despite her having been dead for more than 80 years now. As evidenced by the links at the bottom of the post, we’ve been featuring her here on Open […]

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The Great Wave Off Kanagawa by Hokusai: An...

Open Culture ·

2025/11/19

When woodcut artist Katsushika Hokusai made his famous print The Great Wave off Kanagawa in 1830 — part of the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji — he was 70 years old and had lived his entire life in a Japan closed off from the rest of the world. In the 19th century, however, “the […]

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377 results