There isn’t much place for dodecahedra in modern life, at least in those modern lives with tabletop role-playing. In the ancient Roman Empire, however, those shapes seem to have been practically household objects — not that we know what the household would have done with them. Thus far, well over 100 similarly designed copper-alloy second-to-fourth-century […]| Open Culture
In 1942, John Cage composed a short piece of music adapted from the text of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Titled “The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs,” the piece was originally commissioned and performed by amateur soprano and socialite Justine Fairbank, and while we don’t have a recording of her performance, we do have Cage’s sheet […]| Open Culture
Browse the ever-vaster selection of self-help books, videos, podcasts, and social-media accounts on offer today, and you’ll find no shortage of prescriptions for how to live. Much of what the gurus of the twenty-twenties have to say sounds awfully similar, and almost as much may seem contradictory. As in so many fields of human endeavor, […]| Open Culture
Between 1985 and 1988, a teenager by the name of Sohrab Habibion was attending punk and post-punk shows around the Washington, DC area. What set him apart was the bulky video camera he’d bring to the show and let roll, documenting entire gigs in all their low-rez, lo-fi glory. Just a kid trying to document […]| Open Culture
You could say that we live in the age of artificial intelligence, although it feels truer about no aspect of our lives than it does of advertising. “If you want to sell something to people today, you call it AI,” says Yuval Noah Harari in the new Big Think video above, even if the product […]| Open Culture
Image by Immanuel Giel, via Wikimedia Commons It’s an old TV and movie trope: the man of wealth and taste, often but not always a supervillain, offers his distinguished guest a bottle of wine, his finest, an ancient vintage from one of the most venerable vineyards. We might follow the motif back at least to […]| Open Culture
Western scholarship has had “a bias against studying sensual experience,” writes Reina Gattuso at Atlas Obscura, “the relic of an Enlightenment-era hierarchy that considered taste, touch, and flavor taboo topics for sober academic inquiry.” This does not mean, however, that cooking has been ignored by historians. Many a scholar has taken European cooking seriously, before […]| Open Culture
The snail may leave a trail of slime behind him, but a little slime will do a man no harm… whilst if you dance with dragons, you must expect to burn. - George R. R. Martin, The Mystery Knight As any Game of Thrones fan knows, being a knight has its downsides. It isn’t all […]| Open Culture
Joan Baez was already heralded as the “Queen of Folk” by the time Robert Zimmerman aka Bob Dylan arrived in New York City. Many things brought him to the burgeoning folk scene there, but Baez was the siren who called to a young Dylan through his television set long before he met her. He was […]| Open Culture
Though the pop-cultural moment that gave rise to the association has passed, when many of us hear about Kabbalah, we still think of Madonna. Her study of that Jewish-mystic school of thought in the nineteen-nineties has been credited, at least in part, with the sonic transformation that led to her hit album Ray of Light. […]| Open Culture
Buster Keaton’s penchant and skill for comedic stunts made him one of the biggest stars of the silent-film era. Nobody at the time imagined that he would still be engaging in dangerous-looking pratfalls 40 years later in his seventies, especially since his career seemed to have come to an end in 1926. That was the […]| Open Culture
Tim Burton grew up watching Japanese monster movies in Burbank, which must explain a good deal about his artistic sensibility. It seems to be for that reason, in any case, that the new Konbini “Vidéo Club” episode above takes him first to the Asian cinema section of JM Vidéo, one of Paris’ last two DVD […]| Open Culture
Since its ancient origins as the camera obscura, the photographic camera has always mimicked the human eye, allowing light to enter an aperture, then projecting an image upside down. Renaissance artists relied on the camera obscura to sharpen their own visual perspectives. But it wasn’t until photography—the ability to reproduce the obscura’s images—that the rudimentary […]| Open Culture
A too-precious genre of internet meme depicts departed public figures who did not know each other in life meeting in heaven with hugs, high-fives, and wincingly earnest exchanges.| Open Culture
Discover thousands of free online courses, audio books, movies, textbooks, eBooks, language lessons, and more.| Open Culture
In 2018 we brought you some exciting news.| Open Culture
So discovered Aleister Crowley, the early twentieth-century Occultist now remembered not just for his unconventional religious practices, but also for his knack for gathering cults around himself.| Open Culture
Ozzy Osbourne in a clip included in the Biography television documentary above.| Open Culture
If you head to the Louvre, make sure you visit the Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, and Liberty Leading the People. But then swing by the Department of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman Antiquities. There you might find (no guarantee!) a Roman mosaic featuring a rabbit riding a chariot pulled by geese.| Open Culture
In the decades after the Second World War, many countries faced the challenge of rebuilding their housing and infrastructure while also having to accommodate a fast-arriving baby boom.| Open Culture
In 2003, Disney released a six minute animated short called Destino, finally bringing closure to a project that began 57 years earlier. The story of Destino goes way back to 1946 when two very different cultural icons, Walt Disney and Salvador Dalí, decided to work together on a cartoon.| Open Culture
Salvador Dalí painted melting clocks.| Open Culture
The close associations between Surrealism and Freudian psychoanalysis were liberally encouraged by the most famous proponent of the movement, Salvador Dalí, who considered himself a devoted follower of Freud.| Open Culture
Dalí has long been alleged to have had fascist sympathies, a charge that goes back to the 1930’s.| Open Culture
If you want to see a tour de force of modern technology and design, there's no need to visit a Silicon Valley showroom.| Open Culture
Discover thousands of free online courses, audio books, movies, textbooks, eBooks, language lessons, and more.| Open Culture
Many of us now use the word hobo to refer to any homeless individual, but back in the America of the late 19th and early 20th century, to be a hobo meant something more.| Open Culture
As a New York City subway rider, I am constantly exposed to public health posters. More often than not these feature a photo of a wholesome-looking teen whose sober expression is meant to convey hindsight regret at having taken up drugs, dropped out of school, or forgone condoms.| Open Culture
The truth, they say, is stranger than fiction — or at least it is in the work of Herodotus, the ancient Greek writer and traveler often described as 'the Father of History' (and a favorite writer of none other than Jorge Luis Borges).| Open Culture
In a 1956 New Statesman piece, the British scientist-novelist C. P. Snow first sounded the alarm about the increasingly chasm-like divide between what he called the 'scientific' and 'traditional' cultures.| Open Culture
Watch 4,000+ quality movies online. Includes classics, indies, film noir, documentaries showcasing the talent of our greatest actors, actresses and directors.| Open Culture
In December 1967, The Monkees blew their audience's minds by hosting Frank Zappa, “participant in and perhaps even leader of” the Mothers Of Invention. Or did they?| Open Culture
The global tourism industry has seen better days than these. In regions like western Europe, to which travelers from all parts have long flocked and spent their money, the coronavirus' curtailment of world travel this year has surely come as a severe blow.| Open Culture
In Simone de Beauvoir’s 1945 novel The Blood of Others, the narrator, Jean Blomart, reports on his childhood friend Marcel’s reaction to the word “revolution”: It was senseless to try to change anything in the world or in life; things were bad enough even if one did not meddle with them.| Open Culture
Since the J. Paul Getty Museum launched its Open Content program back in 2013, we've been featuring their efforts to make their vast collection of cultural artifacts freely accessible online.| Open Culture
