PODCAST

Open Culture

The best free cultural & educational media on the web

All Episodes

Inside Disney’s Long, Frustrated Quest to Create...

Open Culture ·

2025/12/01

For young children today, just as it was for generations of their predecessors, nothing is quite so thrilling about their first visit to a Disney theme park as catching a glimpse of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, or another beloved character greeting them in real life. Creating this memorable experience requires nothing more advanced than a […]

en-US

An Immersive, ASMR-Style Look at Japanese Woodblock...

Open Culture ·

2025/12/01

While not every Open Culture reader dreams of moving to Japan and becoming a woodblock printmaker, it’s a safe bet that at least a few of you entertain just such a fantasy from time to time. David Bull, a British-Born Canadian who got his first exposure to the art of ukiyo‑e in his late twenties, […]

en-US

Every Filmed and Televised Performance by Joy...

Open Culture ·

2025/10/10

Brian Eno once said of the Velvet Underground that their first album sold only 30,000 copies, but everyone who bought one started a band. Joy Division’s debut Unknown Pleasures sold only 20,000 copies in its initial period of release, but the T‑shirt emblazoned with its cover art — an image of radio waves emanating from a […]

en-US

The Aberdeen Bestiary, One of the Great Medieval...

Open Culture ·

2025/10/09

For thousands of years, ordinary people all over the world not only worked side-by-side with domestic animals on a daily basis, they also observed the wild fauna around them to learn how to navigate and survive nature. The closeness produced a keen appreciation for animal behavior that informs the folk tales of every continent and […]

en-US

Mark Twain Makes a List of 60 American Comfort Foods...

Open Culture ·

2025/10/09

Thinking of taking a trip abroad? Or maybe relocating for good? Americans would do well, even 150 years hence, to attend to Mark Twain’s satirical account of U.S. travelers journeying through Europe and Palestine, The Innocents Abroad. The “Americans who are painted to peculiar advantage by Mr. Clements” (sic), as fellow American satirist William Dean […]

en-US

When David Bowie Starred in—and Created Music for—a...

Open Culture ·

2025/10/08

When it was announced that SARS-CoV‑2, the virus at the center of the COVID-19 pandemic, had evolved into an even more contagious variant called Omicron, public reactions varied. For those of us with long memories of computer and video gaming, it brought to mind a title we hadn’t thought about in quite some time: Omikron: […]

en-US

Dr. Weil’s 60-Second Technique for Falling Asleep

Open Culture ·

2025/10/08

Give Dr. Andrew Weil three minutes, and he can teach you a 60-second technique for falling asleep. Above, the alternative medicine guru walks you through the 4–7‑8 breathing method. As he demonstrates, it “takes almost no time, requires no equipment and can be done anywhere.” And once you master it, you can use the 4–7‑8 breathing technique (explained and demonstrated […]

en-US

Einstein’s Divorce Letters and the Cruel List of...

Open Culture ·

2025/10/07

Albert Einstein is the rare figure who’s universally known, but almost entirely for his professional achievements. Few of us who can explain the theory of relativity can also say much about the personal life of the man who came up with it, though that doesn’t owe to a lack of documentation. Thanks to science YouTuber […]

en-US

What’s the Most Banned Book of the 2024–25 School...

Open Culture ·

2025/10/07

If you happen to be a high school student in Florida who’s eager to read A Clockwork Orange, that urge may turn out to be harder to satisfy than you imagine. Anthony Burgess’ harrowing, linguistically inventive novel of a grim near future has come out on top in PEN America’s latest ranking of banned books: […]

en-US

A Complete Digitization of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Codex...

Open Culture ·

2025/10/06

No historical figure better fits the definition of “Renaissance man” than Leonardo da Vinci, but that term has become so overused as to become misleading. We use it to express mild surprise that one person could use both their left and right hemispheres equally well. But in Leonardo’s day, people did not think of themselves […]

en-US

The Fascinating Story of How the Electric Music...

Open Culture ·

2025/10/06

We’ve focused a fair bit here on the work of Delia Derbyshire, pioneering electronic composer of the mid-twentieth century—featuring two documentaries on her and discussing her role in almost creating an electronic backing track for Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday.” There’s good reason to devote so much attention to her: Derbyshire’s work with the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop […]

en-US

What Makes Picasso’s Guernica a Great Painting?:...

Open Culture ·

2025/09/01

A painting is not thought out and settled in advance. While it is being done, it changes as one’s thoughts change. And when it’s finished, it goes on changing, according to the state of mind of whoever is looking at it. — Pablo Picasso In a famous story about Guernica, Pablo Picasso’s wrenching 1937 anti-war […]

en-US

Hear the Long-Lost Chants of English Monks, Revived...

Open Culture ·

2025/08/29

Listening to music, especially live music, can be a religious experience. These days, most of us say that figuratively, but for medieval monks, it was the literal truth. Every aspect of life in a monastery was meant to get you that much closer to God, but especially the times when everyone came together and sang. […]

en-US

1,000+ Artworks by Vincent Van Gogh Digitized & Put...

Open Culture ·

2025/08/28

It gets dark before dinner now in my part of the world, a recipe for seasonal depression. Vincent van Gogh wrote about such low feelings with deep insight. “One feels as if one were lying bound hand and foot at the bottom of a deep dark well, utterly helpless.” Yet, when he looked up at […]

en-US

The 1830s Device That Created the First Animations:...

Open Culture ·

2025/08/28

The image just above is an animated GIF, a format by now older than most people on the internet. Those of us who were surfing the World Wide Web in its earliest years will remember all those little digging, jackhammering roadworkers who flanked the permanent announcements that various sites — including, quite possibly, our own […]

en-US

Animated Map Shows How the Five Major Religions...

Open Culture ·

2025/08/27

Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam.… Claims to ancient origin and ultimate authority notwithstanding, the world’s five major religions are all of recent vintage compared to the couple hundred thousand years or more of human existence on the planet. During most of our prehistory, religious beliefs and practices were largely localized, confined to the territorial or […]

en-US

Watch Momijigari, Japan’s Oldest Surviving Film (1899)

Open Culture ·

2025/08/27

At first, film simply recorded events: a man walking across a garden, workers leaving a factory, a train pulling into a station. The medium soon matured enough to accommodate drama, which for early filmmakers meant simply shooting what amounted to stage productions from the perspective of a viewer in the audience. At that stage, we […]

en-US

Franz Kafka’s Anxious Letters to His Fiancée, Read...

Open Culture ·

2025/08/26

It can’t have been easy being Franz Kafka. But then, it can’t have been much easier being Franz Kafka’s fiancée, as evidenced by the correspondence read aloud by Richard Ayoade in the new Letters Live video above. “It is now 10:30 on Monday morning,” he wrote to Felice Bauer on November 4, 1912. “I have […]

en-US

Seven Philosophy Books for Beginners: Where to Start

Open Culture ·

2025/08/26

One especially appealing aspect of philosophy, as a field of study, is that you don’t have to go anywhere to learn it but the library. And these days, you don’t necessarily have to go there, now that so many philosophical texts have become freely available on the internet. In the video above, philosophy YouTuber Jared […]

en-US

Take a Virtual Tour of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in...

Open Culture ·

2025/08/25

The story of the Globe Theatre, the ancestral home of Shakespeare’s plays, is itself very Shakespearean, in all of the ways we use that adjective: it has deep roots in English history, a tragic backstory, and represents all of the hodgepodge of London, in the early 17th century and today, with the city’s colorful street […]

en-US

376 results