Bookmarks (172)

For longtime readers of American book journalism, scrolling through the New York Times Book Review’s just-published list of the 100 best books of the twenty-first century will summon dim memories of many a once-unignorable critical fuss. At one time or another over the past 25 years, some of us felt as if we could hardly […]

Upon stepping into the hallowed Criterion Closet, stocked with hundreds of that cinephile video label’s finest releases, Francis Ford Coppola speaks of a director who “believed in a film he wanted to make, and used his entire fortune, because the financing system of the time wouldn’t finance it. And it came out and it was a big […]

Allow me to name just a few of the people I want to hear hosting and curating radio shows—former Sex Pistols’ singer John Lydon, former Clash frontman Joe Strummer, former Woody Guthrie impersonator Bob Dylan.… Luckily for me, this ain’t just fantasy baseball; at various times, and with varying levels of commitment, each of these tastemakers has hosted […]

A Charlie Brown Christmas uses a cast of amateur child voice actors, deals with the theme of seasonal depression, and culminates in the recitation of a Bible verse, all to a jazz score. It was not, safe to say, the special that CBS had expected, to say nothing of its sponsor, the Coca-Cola Company. In […]

When Leonardo da Vinci was 42 years old, he hadn’t yet completed any major publicly viewable work. Not that he’d been idle: in that same era, while working for the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza, he “developed, organized, and directed productions for festival pageants, triumphal processions, masks, jousting tournaments, and plays, for which he choreographed […]

J.R.R. Tolkien is best known for the sweeping fantasy landscapes of Lord of The Rings and The Hobbit. Apart from being a celebrated author, the Oxford University professor of Anglo-Saxon was also a devoted father who doted on his children. In 1920, a few short years after Tolkien returned from World War I, he began […]

With his cane, his famous waxed mustache, and his habit of taking unusual animals for walks, Salvador Dalí would appear to have cultivated his own photographability. But taking a picture of the man who stood as a living definition of popular surrealism wasn’t a task to be approached casually — especially not for Philippe Halsman, […]

Back in 1993, the Beat writer William S. Burroughs wrote and narrated a 21-minute claymation Christmas film oddly produced by Francis Ford Coppola. And, as you can well imagine, it’s not your normal happy Christmas flick. Nope, this film – The Junky’s Christmas – is all about Danny the Carwiper, a junkie, who spends Christmas Day […]

“It’s interesting that some people find science so easy, and others find it kind of dull and difficult,” says Richard Feynman at the beginning of his 1983 BBC series Fun to Imagine. “One of the things that makes it very difficult is that it takes a lot of imagination. It’s very hard to imagine all […]

Physicist and saxophonist Stephon Alexander has argued in his many public lectures and his book The Jazz of Physics that Albert Einstein and John Coltrane had quite a lot in common. Alexander in particular draws our attention to the so-called “Coltrane circle,” which resembles what any musician will recognize as the “Circle of Fifths,” but […]

A month ago, drones were spotted near Morris County, New Jersey. Since then, reports of further sightings in various locations in the region have been lodged on a daily basis, and anxieties about the origin and purpose of these unidentified flying objects have grown apace. “We have no evidence at this time that the reported […]

I’m not sure the Sex Pistols had “available for children’s parties” on their press release, but on a cold and grim Christmas in 1977, that’s exactly what happened. While many Britons were settling in for a warm yuletide, the Pistols decided to host a party/benefit for the children of striking firemen and miners at a […]

The video above from Sabins Civil Engineering promises to reveal “the MAGIC behind Da Vinci’s Self Supporting Bridge.” That sounds like a typical example of YouTube hyperbole, though on first glance, it isn’t at all obvious how the fragile-looking structure can stay up, much less support the weight of a crossing army. Not only does […]

Kind Reader, Will you do us the honor of accepting our holiday invitation? Carve five minutes from your holiday schedule to spend time celebrating The Insects’ Christmas, above. In addition to offering brief respite from the chaos of consumerism and modern expectations, this simple stop-motion tale from 1913 is surprisingly effective at chasing away holiday […]

Nearly fifty years ago, the celebrated young pianist Keith Jarrett arrived in the West German city of Köln (better known in English as Cologne). Having just come off a 500-mile-long road trip from Switzerland, where he’d played a concert the previous day, he was left with barely any time to recover before going onstage at […]

The Smithsonian sets the scene for this Christmas card sent in 1933, a few years into the Great Depression. They write: Despite the glum economic situation, the Pinero family used a brown paper bag to fashion an inexpensive holiday greeting card. They penned a clever rhyme and added some charming line drawings of Mom, Dad, […]

Between 711 and 1492, much of the Iberian Peninsula, including modern-day Spain, was under Muslim rule. Not that it was easy to hold on to the place for that length of time: after the fall of Toledo in 1085, Al-Andalus, as the territory was called, continued to lose cities over the subsequent centuries. Córdoba and […]

We all know about the Titanic. Less often do we hear about the Britannic—the sister passenger liner that the British turned into a hospital ship during World War I. Launched in 1914, two years after the Titanic sank in the North Atlantic Ocean, the Britannic featured a number of safety improvements. It had enhanced watertight […]

Earlier this week, we featured the 99-year-old Dick Van Dyke’s performance in Coldplay’s new music video, full of visual references to the sitcom that made him a household name in the early nineteen-sixties. And a household name he remains these six decades later, though one does wonder how many of those who appreciate his extreme […]

The Soviet Union’s repressive state censorship went to absurd lengths to control what its citizens read, viewed, and listened to, such as the almost comical removal of purged former comrades from photographs during Stalin’s reign. When it came to aesthetics, Stalinism mostly purged more avant-garde tendencies from the arts and literature in favor of didactic […]

Life evolves, but machines are invented: this dichotomy hardly conflicts with what most of us have learned about biology and technology. But certain specimens roaming around in the world can blur that line — and in the curious case of the Strandbeesten, they really are roaming around. First assembled in 1990 by the Dutch artist […]

Complaints about the commercial-age corruption of Christmas miss one critical fact: as a mass public celebration, the holiday is a rather recent invention. Whether we credit Charles Dickens, Bing Crosby, or Frank Capra—men not opposed to marketing—we must reckon with Christmas as a product of modernity. That includes the sacred ideas about family, piety, and […]

It’s easy to get the impression that enthusiasts of electronic music listen to nothing else. (Not that it isn’t true for some of them, who tend to relegate themselves to smaller subgenres: consult Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music for a map of the sonic territory.) And it’s equally easy to believe that, if you aren’t […]

There’s one thing right with our world, and it’s Dick Van Dyke. Appearing in a new Coldplay music video, Mr. Van Dyke dances barefoot and sings knowingly a little off-key—before reflecting on a century of life on this planet. What is love? Is he afraid of dying? What does luck look like? He knows the […]

We now live in the midst of an artificial-intelligence boom, but it’s hardly the first of its kind. In fact, the field has been subject to a boom-and-bust cycle since at least the early nineteen-fifties. Eventually, those busts — which occurred when realizable AI technology failed to live up to the hype of the boom […]

For a design class project, Rachel Walsh, a student at Cardiff School of Art and Design, set out to explain the concept of a Kindle to Charles Dickens. Recognizing that Dickens, a 19th-century author, wouldn’t understand modern terms like ebooks, downloads or the internet, she decided to take a metaphorical approach. She crafted a “book […]

Between 750 BC and 400 BC, the Ancient Greeks composed songs meant to be accompanied by the lyre, reed-pipes, and various percussion instruments. More than 2,000 years later, modern scholars have finally figured out how to reconstruct and perform these songs with (it’s claimed) 100% accuracy. Writing on the BBC website, Armand D’Angour, a musician and […]

Wherever in the world you grew up, you probably grew up with an inaccurate idea of Chinese food. For Americans, it can come as a shock to hear that such familiar dishes as chop suey and General Tso’s chicken are unknown in China itself. By the same token, almost every country in the world has […]

Generative AI is rapidly becoming an essential tool for streamlining work and solving complex challenges. However, knowing how to use GenAI effectively isn’t always obvious. That’s where Google Prompting Essentials comes in. This course will teach you to write clear and specific instructions—known as prompts—for AI. Once you can prompt well, you can unlock generative […]

As Christmastime approaches, few novelists come to mind as readily as Charles Dickens. This owes mainly, of course, to A Christmas Carol, and even more so to its many adaptations, most of which draw inspiration from not just its text but also its illustrations. That 1843 novella was just the first of five books he […]

When Jon Pertwee reincarnated into Tom Baker in 1974, the Fourth Doctor of the popular sci-fi show Doctor Who ditched the foppish look of velvet jackets and frilly shirts, and went for the “Romantic adventurer” style, with floppy felt hat, long overcoats and, most iconically, his multicolored scarf. Fan legend has it that costume designer […]

Bes mug by USF Institute for Digital Exploration (IDEx) on Sketchfab If ZZ Top have a favorite ancient Egyptian deity, that deity is surely Bes, whom the New York Times’ Alexander Nazaryan quotes curator and scholar Branko van Oppen de Ruiter as calling “a beer drinker and a hell-raiser.” In a paper published last month […]

Edgar Allan Poe achieved almost instant fame during his lifetime after the publication of The Raven (1845), but he never felt that he received the recognition he deserved. In some respects, he was right. He was, after all, paid only nine dollars for the poem, and he struggled before and after its publication to make a […]

Even the least religious among us speak, at least on occasion, of the circles of hell. When we do so, we may or may not be thinking of where the concept originated: Dante’s Divina Commedia, or Divine Comedy. We each imagine the circles in our own way — usually filling them with sinners and punishments inspired […]

I mean, the idea that you would give a psychedelic—in this case, magic mushrooms or the chemical called psilocybin that’s derived from magic mushrooms—to people dying of cancer, people with terminal diagnoses, to help them deal with their — what’s called existential distress. And this seemed like such a crazy idea that I began looking […]

If you’ve read one work of Hannah Arendt’s, it’s probably Eichmann in Jerusalem, her account of the trial of the eponymous Nazi official — and the source of her much-quoted phrase “the banality of evil.” That book came out in 1963, at which time Arendt still had a dozen productive years left. In fact, at […]

Let’s rewind the videotape and revisit a classic moment in The Dick Van Dyke Show. In the 1962 episode called “Hustling the Hustler,” Mary Tyler Moore (as Laura Petrie) plays pool and sinks three balls in a single shot. The original plan was to splice in footage of a professional pool player making the shot, […]

The story of Jean-Michel Basquiat has its unfortunate aspects: not just his premature death, but also the aggressive marketing of his work and persona in the years leading up to it. He became a vogue artist of the eighties in part because he could be taken as an unfiltered voice of the street, crafting his […]

Hip-hop was once a subculture, but by now it’s long since been one of the unquestionably dominant forms of popular music — not just in America, and not just among young people. There are, of course, still a fair few hip-hop holdouts, but even they’ve come to know a thing or two about it through […]

A heads-up on a Black Friday special: Between today and December 2, 2024, Coursera is offering a 40% discount on its annual subscription plan called “Coursera Plus.” Normally priced at $399, Coursera Plus (now available for $239.40) gives you access to 7,000+ courses for one all-inclusive subscription price. This includes Professional Certificates from leading companies. Take, […]

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 […]

“Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28, 1986” first appeared in print in Tornado Alley, a chapbook published by William S. Burroughs in 1989. Two years later, Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting, My Own Private Idaho, Milk) shot a montage that brought the poem to film, making it at least the second time the director adapted the beat writer to film. […]

We appreciate illuminated manuscripts and historical books here on Open Culture, adhere though we do to a much more restrained aesthetic style in our own texts. But that’s not to deny the temptation to start this paragraph with one of those oversized initial letters that grew ever larger and more elaborate over centuries past. The online […]

A quick heads up: The filmmaker Ken Burns has just released his new documentary on Leonardo da Vinci. Running nearly four hours, the film offers what The New York Times calls a “thorough and engrossing biography” of the 15th-century polymath. Currently airing on PBS, the film can be streamed online through December 17th. If you […]

If you happen to visit the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, do take the time to see the Musée Méliès located inside it. Dedicated to la Magie du cinéma, it contains artifacts from throughout the history of film-as-spectacle, which includes such pictures as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner. Its focus on the evolution of visual effects […]

Sir Isaac Newton, arguably the most important and influential scientist in history, discovered the laws of motion and the universal force of gravity. For the first time ever, the rules of the universe could be described with the supremely rational language of mathematics. Newton’s elegant equations proved to be one of the inspirations for the […]

“This is a work of fiction,” declares the disclaimer we’ve all noticed during the end credits of movies. “Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.” In most cases, this may seem so trivial that it hardly merits a mention, but the very same disclaimer also rolls up after […]

15 years old (1896) It’s possible to look at Pablo Picasso’s many formal experiments and periodic shifts of style as a kind of self-portraiture, an exercise in shifting consciousness and trying on of new aesthetic identities. The Spanish modernist made a career of sweeping dramatic gestures, announcements to the world that he was going to […]

In an age when many of us could hardly make our way to an unfamiliar grocery store without relying on a GPS navigation system, we might well wonder how the Romans could establish and sustain their mighty empire without so much as a proper map. That’s the question addressed by the Historia Militum video above, […]

Charles Mingus, the innovative jazz musician, was known for having a bad temper. He once got so irritated with a heckler that he ended up trashing his $20,000 bass. Another time, when a pianist didn’t get things right, Mingus reached right inside the piano and ripped the strings out with his bare hands — a true […]