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So many writers have been gardeners and have written about gardens that it might be easier to make a list of those who didn’t. But even in this crowded company, Emily Dickinson stands out. She not only attended the fragile beauty of flowers with an artist’s eye—before she’d written any of her famous verse—but she […]

Aldous Huxley put himself forever on the intellectual map when he wrote the dystopian sci-fi novel Brave New World in 1931. (Listen to Huxley narrating a dramatized version here.) The British-born writer was living in Italy at the time, a continental intellectual par excellence. Then, six years later, Huxley turned all of this upside down. He […]

Here at Open Culture, Richard Feynman is never far from our minds. Though he distinguished himself with his work on the development of the atomic bomb and his Nobel Prize-winning research on quantum electrodynamics, you need no special interest in either World War II or theoretical physics to look to him as an intellectual model. […]

?si=RFbzFSzSNWzua3‑7 Could you use a mental escape? Maybe a trip to Mars will do the trick. Above, you can find high definition footage captured by NASA’s three Mars rovers–Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity. The footage (also contributed by JPL-Caltech, MSSS, Cornell University and ASU) was stitched together by ElderFox Documentaries, creating what they call the most lifelike experience of being […]

Things change… Especially when you’re tracking the continental movement from Pangea to the present day in 5 million years increments at the rate of 2.5 million years per second. Wherever you are, 350 million years ago, your address would’ve been located on the mega-continent of Pangea. Early humans debuted around 200 million years ago, which […]

?si=pnmakCdYBQ6dTM0T From the Royal Society comes a short primer on snowflakes. Narrated by physicist Brian Cox, the video explains how they form, and why no two snowflakes have the exact same dimensions. It also recounts how Johannes Kepler developed a groundbreaking theory about the hexagonal shape of snowflakes in 1611–one proved right 400 years later. […]

Step right up, folks! Shoot the Chutes! Thrill to the Fire and Flames show! Ride an elephant! See the Bearded Lady! Early in the 20th century, crowds flocked to New York City’s Coney Island, where wonders awaited at every turn. In 1902, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle published a few of the highlights in store for […]