Jane Goodall, the revered conservationist, passed away today at age 91. In her honor, we’re featuring above a National Geographic documentary called Jane. Directed by Brett Morgen, the film draws “from over 100 hours of never-before-seen footage that has been tucked away in the National Geographic archives for over 50 years.” The documentary offers an […]| Open Culture
Stalactites hang tight to the ceiling, and stalagmites push up with might from the floor: this is a mnemonic device you may once have learned, but chances are you haven’t had much occasion to remember it since. Still, it would surely be called to mind by a visit to Luray Caverns in the American state of […]| Open Culture
Punk rock has a robust tradition of gross-out, offensive comedy—one carried into the present by bands like Fat White Family and Diarrhea Planet, who may not exist were it not for Fear, an unstable L.A. band led by an obnoxious provocateur who goes by the name Lee Ving. Like fellow L.A. punks the Germs, Circle […]| Open Culture
The work of the comic artist Jean Giraud, better known as Moebius (or, more stylishly, Mœbius), has often appeared on Open Culture over the years, but even if you’ve never seen it here, you know it. Granted, you may never have read a page of it, to say nothing of an entire graphic novel’s worth, […]| Open Culture
Last night, while the home team lost the big game on TVs at a local dive bar, my noisy rock band opened for a chamber pop ensemble. Electric guitars and feedback gave way to classical acoustics, violin, piano, accordion, and even a saw. It was an interesting cultural juxtaposition in an evening of cultural juxtapositions. […]| Open Culture
Though he died too young, Carl Sagan left behind an impressively large body of work, including more than 600 scientific papers and more than 20 books. Of those books, none is more widely known to the public — or, still, more widely read by the public — than Cosmos, accompanied as it was by Cosmos: […]| Open Culture
Difficult as it may be to remember now, there was a time when Meryl Streep was not yet synonymous with silver-screen stardom — a time, in fact, when she had yet to appear on the silver screen at all.| Open Culture
Why do David Bowie's songs sounds like no one else's, right down to the words that turn up in their lyrics? Novelist Rick Moody, who has been privy more than once to details of Bowie's songwriting process, wrote about it in his column on Bowie's 2013 album The Next Day:| Open Culture
With the tenth anniversary of David Bowie’s death coming up early next year, more than a few fans will have their minds on a pilgrimage to mark the occasion. Perhaps with that very time frame in mind, the V&A East Storehouse in London has just opened the David Bowie Center. Run by the Victoria and […]| Open Culture
Ever-increasing economic inequality, rapid technological change, the creation of dominant corporations controlled by a small business elite, political corruption, and the rise of populism and nativism. These are all features of American life in 2025. But our nation has also seen this movie play before, most notably back in the Gilded Age, which ran from […]| Open Culture
If you follow the ongoing beef many popular scientists have with philosophy, you’d be forgiven for thinking the two disciplines have nothing to say to each other. That’s a sadly false impression, though they have become almost entirely separate professional institutions. But during the first, say, 200 years of modern science, scientists were “natural philosophers”—often […]| Open Culture
Times New Roman has been around since 1931, longer than most of us have been alive — and for longer than many of us have been alive, word-processing applications have come with it as the default font. We tend, therefore, to regard it less as something created than as something for all intents and purposes […]| Open Culture
From today’s vantage, the first decade of the twentieth century can look like an even more distant period of history than it is. In many corners of urban civilization, the cabarets, tearooms, and other near-paralytically mannered institutions of the Belle Époque were very much going concerns. To those who lived in that era, it must […]| Open Culture
There is a well-known scene in Woody Allen’s Take The Money And Run (1969) when Virgil Starkwell (Allen) takes a psychological test to join the Navy, but is thwarted by his lascivious unconscious. The psychological measure that proves to be Starkwell’s undoing—rejected, he turns to a life of crime—is the Rorschach inkblot test, devised a […]| Open Culture
Rigorously clean-cut, competent on the acoustic guitar and double bass, and seldom dressed in anything more daring than cherry-red blazers, Tom and Dick Smothers looked like the antithesis of nineteen-sixties rebellion.| Open Culture
Here on Open Culture, we've previously featured Domain of Science's elaborate infographic maps of such vast fields of intellectual endeavor as mathematics, physics, computer science, quantum physics, quantum computing, chemistry, biology, and medicine.| Open Culture
Some people talk to plants.| Open Culture
One hardly has to be an expert on the films of Wes Anderson to imagine that the man writes with a fountain pen. Maybe back in the early nineteen-nineties, when he was shooting the black-and-white short that would become Bottle Rocket on the streets of Austin, he had to settle for ordinary ballpoints.| Open Culture
Last February, Neil Gaiman sat down for a 90-minute interview with author, entrepreneur and podcaster Tim Ferriss.| Open Culture
Got spare cash burning a hole in your pocket? An urge to commodify your favorite jazz artist? The need for an admittedly beautiful writing instrument? All of the above, you say? Good, because Montblanc recently unveiled a new line of Miles Davis pens.| Open Culture
Take Johannes Vermeer's, The Girl with a Pearl Earring, and then try to reproduce it with a simple BiC pen. That's what artist James Mylne does here. In 90 seconds, we see what took him 90 hours to pull off.| Open Culture
At the moment, there's no better way to see anything in space than through the lens of the James Webb Space Telescope.| Open Culture
Discover thousands of free online courses, audio books, movies, textbooks, eBooks, language lessons, and more.| Open Culture
Michelangelo was born in the Republic of Florence, with the talent of... well, Michelangelo.| Open Culture
There have been many times in American history when celebrations of the country’s multi-ethnic, ever-changing demography served as powerful counterweights to narrow, exclusionary, nationalisms.| Open Culture
Discover thousands of free online courses, audio books, movies, textbooks, eBooks, language lessons, and more.| Open Culture
The Wizard of Oz is now showing at Las Vegas' Sphere. Or a version of it is, at any rate, and not one that meets with the approval of all the picture's countless fans.| Open Culture
Most people’s to-do lists are, almost by definition, pretty dull, filled with those quotidian little tasks that tend to slip out of our minds. Pick up the laundry. Get that thing for the kid. Buy milk, canned yams and kumquats at the local market.| Open Culture
No artist became a Renaissance master through a single piece of work, though now, half a millennium later, that may be how most of us identify them. Leonardo? Painter of the Mona Lisa. Michelangelo?| Open Culture
Discover thousands of free online courses, audio books, movies, textbooks, eBooks, language lessons, and more.| Open Culture
Sam Phillips changed the course of music history with his label Sun Records, which gave us Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and Roy Orbison and essentially the second half of the 20th Century’s pop culture.| 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
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
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
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