~openculture | Bookmarks (173)

Founded in 1577, Kobaien remains Japan’s oldest manufacturer of sumi ink sticks. Made of soot and animal glue, the ink stick—when ground against an inkstone, with a little water added—produces a beautiful black ink used by Japanese calligraphers. And, often, a 200-gram ink stick from Kobaien can cost over $1,000. How can soot and animal […]

A heads up on a deal: Between now and March 31, 2024, Coursera is offering a $100 discount on its annual subscription plan called “Coursera Plus.” Normally priced at $399, Coursera Plus (now available for $299) gives you access to 7,000+ world-class courses for one all-inclusive subscription price. This includes Coursera’s Specializations and Professional Certificates, all […]

More than a quarter of a millennium after he composed his first pieces of music, different listeners will evaluate differently the specific nature of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s genius. But one can hardly fail to be impressed by the fact that he wrote those works when he was five years old (or, as some scholars have […]

Everybody can sing. Maybe not well. But why should that stop you? That’s the basic philosophy of Pub  Choir, an organization based in Brisbane, Australia. At each Pub Choir event, a conductor “arranges a popular song and teaches it to the audience in three-part harmony.” Then, the evening culminates with a performance that gets filmed […]

After about a century of indirect company rule, India became a full-fledged British colony in 1858. The consequences of this political development remain a matter of heated debate today, but one thing is certain: it made India into a natural destination for enterprising Britons. Take the aspiring clergyman turned Nottingham bank employee Samuel Bourne, who […]

“We can say of Shakespeare,” wrote T.S. Eliot—in what may sound like the most backhanded of compliments from one writer to another—“that never has a man turned so little knowledge to such great account.” Eliot, it’s true, was not overawed by the Shakespearean canon; he pronounced Hamlet “most certainly an artistic failure,” though he did […]

This year has given us occasion to revisit the 1928 Disney cartoon Steamboat Willie, what with its entry — and thus, that of an early version of a certain Mickey Mouse — into the public domain. Though it may look comparatively primitive today, that eight-minute black-and-white film actually represents a great many advancements in the […]

There was a time, not so very long ago, when many Americans watching movies at home neither knew nor cared who directed those movies. Nor did they feel particularly comfortable with dialogue that sometimes came subtitled, or with the “black bars” that appeared below the frame. The considerable evolution of these audiences’ general relationship to […]

Supply chains—we never thought too much about them. That is, until the pandemic, when supply chains experienced severe disruptions worldwide, leaving us waiting for products for weeks, if not months. That’s when we started appreciating the importance of supply chains and their resilience. Companies like Unilever rely on supply chains to manufacture their goods (e.g., […]

The YouTube channel Lost in Time has taken footage from the legendary Lumière brothers, originally shot in 1896, then upscaled and colorized it, giving us a chance to see a distant world through a modern lens. Nearing the end of the 19th century, the film pioneers (and their employees) visited different parts of the world […]

Lawrence Fishburne brings a degree of gravity to his roles offered by few other living actors. That has secured his place in pop culture as Morpheus from The Matrix, for example. But he could even marshal it early in his career, as evidenced by his role as Apocalypse Now’s “Mr. Clean,” which he took on […]

During World War II, Tokyo sustained heavy damage, especially with the bombings conducted by the U.S. military in March 1945. Known as Operation Meetinghouse, US air raids destroyed 16 square miles in central Tokyo, leaving 100,000 civilians dead and one million homeless. Tokyo didn’t recover quickly. It took until the 1950s for reconstruction to really […]

Launched by The New York Academy of Medicine Library in 2016, Color Our Collections is “an annual coloring festival on social media during which libraries, museums, archives and other cultural institutions around the world share free coloring content featuring images from their collections.” In February, the project released its 2024 archive of coloring books, allowing […]

For many, even most of us moderns, the central religious choice is a simple one: adhere to the belief system in which you grew up, or stop adhering to it. But if you survey the variety of religions in the world, the situation no longer seems quite so binary; if you then add the variety […]

The very words “Ellis Island” bring to mind a host of sepia-toned images, shaped by both American historical fact and national myth. Officers employed there really did inspect the eyelids of new arrivals with buttonhooks, for example, but they didn’t actually make a policy of changing their names, however foreign they sounded. You can learn […]

From The Florida Museum of Natural History comes the openVertebrate project, a new initiative to “provide free, digital 3D vertebrate anatomy models and data to researchers, educators, students and the public.” Introducing the new project (otherwise known as oVert), the museum writes: Between 2017 and 2023, oVert project members took CT scans of more than […]

In less than a year and a half, the centenary of Antoni Gaudí’s death will be here. Faced with this fact, especially dedicated enthusiasts of Catalan architecture may already be planning their festivities. But we can be sure where the real pressure is felt: the Basílica i Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família, Gaudí’s most […]

In 1799, Napoleon’s army encountered a curious artifact in Egypt, a black stone that featured writing in three different languages: Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Demotic Egyptian, and Ancient Greek. Before long, English troops captured the stone and brought it to the British Museum in 1802—where it remains today. The animated video above, created by Egyptologist Franziska Naether, […]

Image by Anders Sandberg, via Wikimedia Commons Asked to imagine the character of everyday life in the Middle Ages, a young student in the twenty-twenties might well reply, before getting around to any other details, that it involved no smartphones. But even the flashiest new technologies have long evolutionary histories, and, in certain notable respects, […]

The Book of Colour Concepts will soon be published by Taschen in a multilingual edition, containing text in English, French, German, and Spanish. This choice makes its abundance of explanatory scholarship widely accessible at a stroke, but even those who read none of those four languages can enjoy the book. For it takes a deep […]

History remembers Henry Dunant (1828–1910) for two things–being the co-founder of the Red Cross movement and winning the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901. Less well known is his diagram of the Apocalypse. Between 1877 and 1890, notes the Red Cross Museum website, Henry Dunant “produced a series of diagrams reflecting his distinctive understanding of humanity’s past […]

A heads up on a deal: Between now and March 31, 2024, Coursera is offering a $100 discount on its annual subscription plan called “Coursera Plus.” Normally priced at $399, Coursera Plus (now available for $299) gives you access to 7,000+ world-class courses for one all-inclusive subscription price. This includes Coursera’s Specializations and Professional Certificates, all […]

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who recognize the phrase “corny dialogue that would make the pope weep,” and those who don’t. If you fall into the former category, your mind is almost certainly filled with images of bleak Midwestern winters, modest trailer homes, hooded figures smashing an already-junkyard-worthy car, and […]

A beautiful early example of visualizing the flow of history, Sebastian C. Adams’ Synchronological Chart of Universal History outlines the evolution of mankind from Adam and Eve to 1871, the year of its first edition. A recreation can be found and closely examined at the David Rumsey Map Collection, which allows you to zoom in on […]