Bookmarks (2296)

“We have to celebrate Columbus because he discovered America.” “No he didn’t. Leif Erikson got there first.” “Nuh-uh.” “Uh-huh….” etc… I paraphrase here from the halls of my elementary school circa sometime in the late 20th century, when many of us were convinced the first Europeans to set foot on the continent were not the […] New Research Confirms That the Vikings Landed in...

Few jazz guitarists today could claim to be entirely free of the influence of Django Reinhardt. This despite the fact that he lost the use of two fingers — which ultimately encouraged him to develop a distinctive playing style — and that he died 68 years ago. The unfortunate abbreviation of Reinhardt’s life means that […] Watch Django Reinhardt & Stéphane Grappelli Play Masterfully...

As we first mentioned last year, Google has launched a series of Career Certificate programs that allow students to gain expertise in a field, ideally enough to start working without a 4-year college degree. This initiative now includes a Certificate in Project Management, which consists of six courses. Foundations of Project Management Project Initiation: Starting […] Become a Project Manager Without a College Degree...

What is fascism? Fascism is an ideology developed and elaborated in early 20th-century Western Europe and enabled by technology, mass media, and weapons of war. Most of us learned the basics of that development from grade school history textbooks. We generally came to appreciate to some degree — though we may have forgotten the lesson […] Yale Professor Jason Stanley Identifies 10 Tactics of...

“Believe it or not, this was the very first piece of music I started on the cello when I was four years old,” said Yo Yo Ma before playing the “Prelude” from J.S. Bach’s Unaccompanied Cello Suite No. 1 for NPR’s Tiny Desk concert series in 2018. That same year, the world-famous cello prodigy released his […] Three Hours of Yo Yo Ma Playing Bach’s...

FYI: Earlier this year, Bill Gates published the New York Times bestseller, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need. In the book, Gates explains why we need to work toward net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases, and how we can achieve this goal.  Given that this responsibility will eventually […] Bill Gates Lets College Students Download a Free...

When did Americans lose the ability to think and act rationally? Or did they ever, on the whole, have such ability? These are the questions at the heart of the Big Think video above, a supercut of interview clips from public intellectuals — Neil DeGrasse, Michael Shermer,  Tyson, Kurt Andersen, Bill Nye, and Margaret Atwood […] Why–and When–Did the United States Turn Against Science?:...

Oh, to be in the studio audience of CBS’ Television City in Hollywood on September 9th, 1956, to see Elvis Presley’s gyrating pelvis rocket him to superstardom on The Ed Sullivan Show. His appearance made television history, but 60 million home viewers were left to fill in some major blanks, as the rising heartthrob was filmed […] Elvis’ Three Appearances on The Ed Sullivan Shows:...

Facial-recognition technology has come into its own in recent decades, though its imagined large-scale uses do tend to sound troublingly dystopian. Still, some of its actual success stories have been pleasing indeed, few of them so much as the one briefly told in the video above by Bachman Turner Overdrive’s Randy Bachman. Its protagonist is not […] How Randy Bachman Found His Stolen Favorite Guitar...

At an event celebrating the release of his new memoir, The Storyteller, Dave Grohl paid a visit to the Ford Theatre in Los Angeles and revisited his Nirvana days, playing drums to the original track of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” It’s a little a remembrance of days long past. Enjoy…. Related Content  How Nirvana’s Iconic […] Dave Grohl Rocks Out, Playing Drums Along to...

Over the past 59 years, the duty of performing a James Bond movie theme has fallen to the likes of Tom Jones, Paul McCartney, Carly Simon, Bono, Madonna — and most recently, for the latest installment, No Time to Die, Billie Eilish. But one of the greatest Bond themes ever written has never been heard in […] How Radiohead Wrote the Perfect James Bond Theme...

To lysergic acid diethylamide, better known as LSD, we owe much of what has endured from Western popular culture of the mid-20th century: consider, for instance, the latter half of the Beatles’ oeuvre. In Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties, Ian MacDonald describes LSD as “a powerful hallucinogen whose function is temporarily […] “The Hippie Temptation”: An Angst-Ridden CBS TV Show...

Whatever the benefits and pleasures of our current internet-enriched world, one must admit that it’s not quite as exciting as the setting of Snow Crash. Originally published in 1992, that novel not only made the name of its author Neal Stephenson, it elevated him to the status of a technological Nostradamus. It did so, at […] How Neal Stephenson’s Sci-Fi Novel <i>Snow Crash</i> Invented...

Youtuber Polyphonic has done a good job of looking at some hoary old classics of ‘60s rock, but he doesn’t always dip his toe in taking on contemporary music, or even considering a modern canon. Pronouncing what is essential listening of the last few decades is a minefield, especially among the ranks of Commentus YouTubus. […] Demystifying Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ “Red...

The prison gig has been a staple of live performance since Johnny Cash played Folsom in 1968, with variations on the theme like the Cramps’ legendary performance at a California Psychiatric Hospital (revisited in the documentary We Were There to Be There). Some bands who play institutions may not be far away from inhabiting them. […] The Does and Don’ts of Putting on a...

Many and bold are the claims made for the power of classical music: not just that it can enrich your aesthetic sensibility, but that it can do everything from deter juvenile delinquency to boost infant intelligence. Making claims for the latter are CDs with titles like Baby Mozart: Music to Stimulate Your Baby’s Brain, a case […] Mozart Sonatas Can Help Treat Epilepsy: A New...

Did Salvador Dalí meet the diagnostic criteria for a personality disorder and maybe, also, a form of psychosis, as some have alleged? Maybe, but there’s no real way to know. “You can’t diagnose psychiatric illnesses without doing a face to face psychiatric examination,” Dutch psychiatrist Walter van den Broek writes, and it’s possible Dali “consciously […] When Salvador Dali Viewed Joseph Cornell’s Surrealist Film,...

Two centuries ago, Haiti, “then known as Saint-Domingue, was a sugar powerhouse that stood at the center of world trading networks,” writes Philippe Girard in his history of the Haitian war for independence. “Saint-Domingue was the perle de Antilles… the largest exporter of tropical products in the world.” The island colony was also at the […] The Beautifully Illustrated <i>Atlas of Mushrooms: Edible, Suspect...

Some of the distinctiveness of Spain as we know it today comes as a legacy of the period from 700 to 1200, when most of it was under Muslim rule. The culture of Al-Andalus, as the Islamic states of modern-day Spain and Portugal were then called, survives most visibly in architecture. But it also had its […] A 13th-Century Cookbook Featuring 475 Recipes from Moorish...

For all its talk of liberty, the US government has practiced dehumanizing authoritarianism and mass murder since its founding. And since the rise of fascism in the early 20th century, it has never been self-evident that it cannot happen here. On the contrary — wrote Yale historian Timothy Snyder before and throughout the Trump presidency […] A Beautifully Illustrated Edition of <I>On Tyranny: Twenty...

FYI. For the next 22 hours, the Criterion Collection is running a flash sale (click here), giving you a chance to purchase “all in-stock Blu-rays & DVDs at 50% off.” Head over to the Criterion site and get classic films by Hitchcock, Lynch, Welles, Kubrick, the Coen Brothers, and many others. The sale ends on October […] Criterion Collection Flash Sale: Get 50% Off In-Stock...

I’m sitting on the balcony Reading Flannery O’Connor With a pencil and a plan – Nick Cave, Carnage Access to technology has transformed the creative process, and many artists who’ve come to depend on it have long ceased to marvel at the labor and time saved, seething with resentment when devices and digital access fails. Musician Nick […] Nick Cave’s Online Store: Pencils Adorned with Lyrics,...

Oscar Wilde left a body of literature that continues to entertain generation after generation of readers, but for many of his fans his life leads to his work, not the other way around. Its latest retelling, Oscar Wilde: A Life by Matthew Sturgis, came out in the United States just this past week. “Universally heralded […] The Downfall of Oscar Wilde: An Animated Video...

  Unlike our 21st-century cat memes and other such online feline-based entertainments, children’s author Eulalie Osgood Grover’s 1911 work, Kittens and Cats: A First Reader was intended to educate. Its related poems will almost certainly strike those of us whose understanding of feline attitude has been shaped by LOLCats, Grumpy Cat, the existential Henri, Talking Kitty Cat’s acerbic Sylvester, and the mordant 1970s TV […] A 110-Year-Old Book Illustrated with Photos of Kittens...

“If you had tried to give rock and roll another name, you would call it Chuck Berry,” says John Lennon by way of introduction to his hero in the clip above from The Mike Douglas Show. The two perform Berry’s “Memphis, Tennessee” and “Johnny B. Goode” (with Lennon’s backing band, Elephant’s Memory, and unwelcome discordant […] John Lennon Finally Meets & Jams with His...

In much the same way David Lynch gave us way more Twin Peaks than we’d ever hoped for in 2017, Peter Jackson and the Beatles are giving us nothing like the little seen and quickly shelved Let It Be documentary from 1970, but a full six hours of the final musical works of the Beatles. […] A Sneak Peek of Peter Jackson’s New Beatles...

In 79 AD, 17-year-old Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus, known as Pliny the Younger, gazed across the Bay of Naples from his vacation home in Misenum and watched Mount Vesuvius erupt. “Darkness fell, not the dark of a moonless or cloudy night,” Pliny wrote in his eyewitness account — the only surviving such document — “but […] The Bombing of Pompeii During World War II...

Yesterday Star Trek‘s William Shatner, now 90 years old, finally became a Rocket Man, taking a trip to space. And upon his return he said: “I hope I never recover from this.” “I’m so filled with emotion about what just happened. It’s extraordinary, extraordinary. It’s so much larger than me and life. It hasn’t got […] William Shatner in Tears After Becoming the Oldest...

At the end of World War II the Nazis burned an Austrian castle full of masterpieces, including three paintings by Gustav Klimt entitled Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence. Called the “Faculty Paintings,” these were commissioned by the University of Vienna for the ceiling of its Great Hall in 1900, then, upon completion seven years later, were […] 136 Paintings by Gustav Klimt Now Online (Including...

Surfing is generally believed to have originated in Hawaii and will be forever associated with the Polynesian islands. Yet anthropologists have found evidence of something like surfing wherever humans have encountered a beach — on the coasts of West Africa, in the Caribbean, India, Syria, and Japan. Surfing historian Matt Warshaw sums up the problem […] Archaeologists Discover 1300-Year-Old Pair of Skis, the Best-Preserved...

When Americans hear the phrase “slot machine,” they think of pensioners compulsively pulling levers day and night in Las Vegas. But when the British hear it, a much less bleak vision comes to their minds: the automated dispensation of cigarettes, coffee, groceries, and even entire meals. Or at least such a vision came to the minds […] <i>Slot Machine Age</i>: A 1964 British Newsreel Angsts...

What makes for a “cult band”? Not just a small audience, because Grateful Dead fans are an archetypical cult. Not just a devoted, emotionally invested audience; no volume of Swifties make Taylor Swift qualify as a cult act. Does the music have to be somehow inaccessible, or the fans snobby? Your host Mark Linsenmayer and […] What Makes a “Cult” Band? Pretty Much Pop:...

In the early 1860s, a few Westerners had seen China — but nearly all of them had seen it for themselves. The still-new medium of photography had yet to make images of everywhere available to viewers everywhere else, which meant an opportunity for traveling practitioners like John Thomson. “The son of a tobacco spinner and […] Behold the Photographs of John Thomson, the First...

For many Open Culture readers, the Halloween season offers an opportunity — not to say an excuse — to re-experience classic horror films: F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu from 1922, for instance, or even George Méliès The Haunted Castle, which launched the whole form in 1896. This year, may we suggest a home screening of the formidable […] Watch Free Cult Films by Stanley Kubrick, Fritz...

How do you make the show go on after a broken leg? The blessing we give performers before they go onstage isn’t something we actually want to see happen. Nonetheless, stage injuries occur frequently, and in some cases, severely, as when Patti Smith fell 15 feet into a concrete orchestra pit in 1977 and broke […] Dave Grohl Falls Offstage & Breaks His Leg,...

You should never become lazy. It’s essential to remain positive about your life and never give up. You need to push yourself and stay aware, so you can move forward.  — Tsuneko Sasamoto Sound advice whether one is interested in sustaining a creative practice or remaining vigorous as one ages. Photographer Tsuneko Sasamoto is an excellent poster child […] Meet Tsuneko Sasamoto, Japan’s First Female Photojournalist and...

Even if you don’t know the myth by name, you know the story. In Greek mythology, Sisyphus, King of Corinth, was punished “for his self-aggrandizing craftiness and deceitfulness by being forced to roll an immense boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, repeating this action for eternity.” In modern times, this story inspired Albert […] The Myth of Sisyphus Creatively Animated in an...

People do not understand how hard a jazz musician works for a living. I’m not putting nobody down, but I’m telling you nobody understands how hard jazz musicians work. Jazz is not big in the US, because the States are too worried about Pac-Man and The Police. — Jaco When Jaco Pastorius uttered the quote […] Watch <i>Jaco Pastorius: The Lost Tapes Documentary</i>, the...

In the mid-50s, Maya Angelou accepted a role as a chorus member in an international touring production of the opera, Porgy and Bess: I wanted to travel, to try to speak other languages, to see the cities I had read about all my life, but most important, I wanted to be with a large, friendly group of Black […] Witness Maya Angelou & James Baldwin’s Close Friendship...

A century after the death of Gustav Klimt, his art continues to enrapture its viewers. Maybe it has enraptured you, but no matter how deep you’ve gone into Klimt’s oeuvre, there are three paintings you’ve only ever seen in black and white. That’s not because he painted them in that way; rich and brilliant colors originally […] Gustav Klimt’s Masterpieces Destroyed During World War II...

When J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings appeared in the mid-1950s, its first critical readers held some diverging views on the books’ quality. On the one hand, there was praise for the revival of fantasy for grown-ups, and comparisons to great epics of the past. On the other hand, Tolkien’s prose was excoriated for its […] When J.R.R. Tolkien Worked for the <i>Oxford English...

It all took place at this weekend’s Ohio State-Maryland game. Enjoy…. Related Content The Anti-Conformist, Libertarian Philosophy That Shaped Rush’s Classic Albums Witness Rush Drummer Neil Peart’s (RIP) Finest Moments On Stage and Screen Notre Dame Marching Band Performs “This Too Shall Pass” Ohio State Marching Band Plays Tribute to Rush: “2112,” “YYZ,” “Tom Sawyer” & “Limelight” is a post from: Open Culture. Follow...

There are any number of ways one might try to turn a globe into a two-dimensional surface. You could start by cutting it down the middle, as in this Vox video on world maps. You could choose volunteers and have them come up to the head of the class and peel oranges in one piece, […] Watch “The Impossible Map,” a Short Animated Film...

When Quentin Tarantino hit it big in the 1990s with Reservoir Dogs, and then much bigger with Pulp Fiction, he became known as the auteur who’d received his film education by working as a video-store clerk. But like much Hollywood hype, that story wasn’t quite true. “No, I was already a movie expert,” says the man […] Quentin Tarantino Gives a Tour of Video Archives,...

One of the first things tourists learn about the great Pyramids of Giza is how they are not far away in some remote location. Turns out they’re just photographed that way with the Western Desert as backdrop. Turn around and you’ll see not just the bustling city of Cairo, but a freakin’ golf course. The […] A Walking Tour Around the Pyramids of Giza:...

History is selective. Or, rather, it’s selected by those in power for their own uses. Nowhere do we see this more than in nationalist re-imaginings of an imperial past, whether it be British, Roman, or, in the case of modern Turkey, Ottoman. “Much has been written,” notes Time magazine’s Alan Mikhail, “about [Turkish president Recep […] An Animated History of the Ottoman Empire (1299...

For a brief time in the 1980s, it seemed like trains powered by maglev — magnetic levitation — might just solve transportation problems everywhere, maybe even replacing air travel, thereby eliminating one of the most vexing sources of carbon emissions. Maglev trains don’t use fuel; they don’t require very much power by comparison with other […] A Brilliant Demonstration of Magnets & the Promise...

A painting? “Moving. Spiritually enriching. Sublime. ‘High’ art.” The comic strip? “Vapid. Juvenile. Commercial hack work. ‘Low’ art.” A painting of a comic strip panel? “Sophisticated irony. Philosophically challenging. ‘High’ art.” So says Calvin of Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes, whose ten-year run constitutes one of the greatest artistic achievements in the history of the […] How to Make Comics: A Four-Part Series from...

When Keith Richards felt he’d gone as far as he could go with the six-string guitar, he took one string off and played five, a trick he learned from Ry Cooder. These days, the trend is to go in the opposite direction, up to seven or eight strings for highly technical progressive metal compositions and […] A Guitarist Rocks Out on Guitars Made from...

Not long ago I stayed in a hotel by the train station of a small Korean city. In the room hung a reproduction of Gustav Klimt’s Die Umarmung, or The Embrace. This at first struck me as just another piece of culturally incongruous décor — a phenomenon hardly unknown in this country — but then […] Gustav Klimt’s Iconic Painting <i>The Kiss</i>: An Introduction...