Shows / Open Culture
Episodes
- Open Culture
The Wisdom of David Bowie: On Art, Religion, Technology and More
It doesn’t quite ring true to call David Bowie a rock star. Ziggy Stardust, the neon synthetic-clad alien alter ego he both created and retired in the early…
- Open Culture
The Very First Film Adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a Thomas Edison Production (1910)
The story of humans creating monstrous beings in their image may have perennial relevance, even if it seems specific to our contemporary cultural moment…
- Open Culture
The Daily Routine of Marcus Aurelius: How to Live Like a Stoic
Marcus Aurelius did not have a smartphone. In fact, he didn’t have a phone of any kind, owing to the fact that he lived in the second century, though we can be…
- Open Culture
The Women of the Bauhaus: See Hip, Avant-Garde Photographs of Female Students & Instructors at the Famous Art School
Take a look at photos of Bush Tetras — a three-girl-one-guy No Wave/Post-Punk band from the early 1980s downtown Manhattan scene. Now, look at the photograph…
- Open Culture
Why Americans Stopped Reading Books
The kids can’t read. Such has been the implication, even the declaration, made by a wave of articles in recent years. But the statement needs some…
- Open Culture
Discover the Mundaneum, an Early 20th-Century “Internet” That Put the World’s Knowledge on Millions of Index Cards
Pitch to friends or family the idea of a trip to Mons, Belgium to visit the Mundaneum, and you may be met with a less-than-enthusiastic reception. That’s…
- Open Culture
A 1932 Illustrated Map of Harlem’s Night Clubs: From the Cotton Club to the Savoy Ballroom
Harlem’s undergoing another Renaissance, and has been for years now. Crime’s down, real estate prices are up, and throngs of pale-faced hipsters are descending…
- Open Culture
The Complete History of the Beatles as Told By Conan O’Brien
The world ended in the nineteen-sixties. Or rather, one world ended in the nineteen-sixties and gave way to another, a transition personified by no human…
- Open Culture
NASA Enlists Andy Warhol, Annie Leibovitz, Norman Rockwell & 350 Other Artists to Visually Document America’s Space Program
It’s hard to imagine that the space-crazed general public needed any help getting worked up about astronauts and NASA in the early ’60s. Perhaps the wild…
- Open Culture
The Secret History of the Antichrist
PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel has spoken publicly on a variety of issues from contrarian entrepreneurship to technical stagnation to geopolitical struggle…
- Open Culture
5,000 Classic Movie Posters Digitized & Put Online: Free to Browse & Download
Who hasn’t pinned one of Saul Bass’ elegant film posters on their wall—either with thumbtacks above the dorm room bed or in frame and glass in grown-up…
- Open Culture
The Genius of Airplane!: How to Make a Comedy by Playing Everything Completely Straight
Not every 46-year-old comedy still gets laughs, but Airplane! seems only to get funnier with the decades. Some viewers too young to have caught it in its…
- Open Culture
The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam Has Digitized 840,000 Works of Art, Including Great Works by Rembrandt and Vermeer
Art may seem inessential to those who make the big decisions in times of crisis. But it never seemed more necessary to artists working in the time of plague…
- Open Culture
Discover the Ancient Roman Shorthand Writing System with 4,000 Symbols Commissioned by Cicero
You can still type a symbol originally invented for Cicero nearly 21 centuries ago — at least if you configure your keyboard properly.  The character ⁊…
- Open Culture
When the US Mail Was Delivered Underground at 35 MPH Through a Network of Pneumatic Tubes (1893–1953)
Twenty years ago, United States senator Ted Stevens drew long-lasting online ridicule by describing the internet as “a series of tubes.” While some…
- Open Culture
One of the Best Preserved Ancient Manuscripts of The Iliad Is Now Digitized: See the “Bankes Homer” Manuscript in High Resolution (Circa 150 C.E.)
Each time I sit through the end credits of a film, I think about how weird auteur theory is—that a work of cinema can be primarily thought of as the singular…
- Open Culture
The Most Controversial Ancient Philosophy: Epicureanism
Over the years, you’ve probably heard at least a few people casually describe themselves as Epicureans. As used today, the label can refer to as little as…
- Open Culture
Watch Stewart Brand’s 6‑Part Series How Buildings Learn, With Music by Brian Eno
Stewart Brand came onto the cultural scene during the 1960s, helping to stage the Acid Tests made famous by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, and later…
- Open Culture
How the Beatles Made their Most Acclaimed Album, Revolver, Released 60 Years Ago This Month
Among Beatles connoisseurs, it’s fair game to claim anything from Rubber Soul to Abbey Road as one’s favorite album. But even within that span of the catalog…
- Open Culture
226 Ansel Adams Photographs of Great American National Parks Are Now Online
Like many American stories, the story of the National Parks begins with pillage, death, deep cultural misunderstanding, and venture capitalism. According to…
- Open Culture
How the Bird Sound Effects in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds Were Created with a Pioneering Electronic Instrument, the Trautonium
Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Special Effects, though viewers raised on more recent Hollywood spectacles would…
- Open Culture
Watch a Band Perform the Sound Effects from Pink Floyd’s “Money,” Using a Money Counter, Torn Sheets of Paper & More
When Pink Floyd recorded “Money” in 1972, Roger Waters spliced into the opening moments the sounds of cash registers, tearing paper, and jingling coins. Half a…
- Open Culture
The History of Glam Rock and How It Put an End to the Hippie Era
Cast your mind back to the distant year 2021 and recall, if you will, its music, its fashions, the obsessions of its youth. This probably won’t be a difficult…
- Open Culture
How Ancient Greek Warships Worked: The Engineering of the Trireme Explained in 3D Animation
Recall, if you will, the first time you read Book 2 of Homer’s Iliad. The section likely to have given you the most trouble — unless, of course, you’re blessed…
- Open Culture
Mark Twain Predicts the Internet in 1898: Read His Sci-Fi Crime Story, “From The ‘London Times’ in 1904”
Most people know that Mark Twain wrote about Jim and Huckleberry Finn navigating down the Mississippi. Less well known is that he occasionally dabbled in the…
- Open Culture
Read 20,000+ Golden Age Comic Books Free Online: Superheroes, Westerns, Romance, Horror, and More
For generations of kids in the twentieth century, few pleasures were as intoxicating as a trip to the comic-book shop with the week’s allowance fresh in hand…
- Open Culture
How Ada Lovelace, Daughter of Lord Byron, Wrote the First Computer Program in 1842–a Century Before the First Computer
I’ve never quite understood why the phrase “revisionist history” became purely pejorative. Of course, it has its Orwellian dark side, but all knowledge has to…
- Open Culture
What Did Ancient Rome Look Like? A 3D Virtual Tour of the City During the Second Century AD
The description “open-air museum” has often been applied, in various senses both positive and negative, to the country of Italy in general and the city of Rome…
- Open Culture
Hear the Earliest Known Piece of Polyphonic Music: This Composition, Dating Back to 900 AD, Changed Western Music
Like digging for fossils or panning for gold, the research process can be a tedious affair. But for any researcher, long days of searching and reading will…
- Open Culture
Watch the Evolution of Manhattan Unfold in a Timelapse Video, from 1600 to 2026
A Manhattan without skyscrapers sounds difficult, if not impossible, to imagine today. But such a place really did exist, at least up until the turn of the…
- Open Culture
Watch David Bowie & Annie Lennox in Rehearsal, Singing “Under Pressure,” with Queen (1992)
It’s common to feel like we know our artists, writers, musicians, actors… we want so badly to touch their lives in some way, as their lives touch ours. This…
- Open Culture
Why Mapmakers Put Fake Towns on Their Maps in the 1920s — and the One That Became Real
Open Culture readers may know John Green best for Crash Course, the YouTube channel that teaches everything you need to know about subjects like world history…
- Open Culture
A Guide to Every Major Film Adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey Before Christopher Nolan’s Movie
If you plan on shooting your own adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, bear in mind how much rests on your choice of leading man. In order to play Odysseus, an actor…
- Open Culture
The Visionary Mystical Art of Carl Jung: See Illustrated Pages from The Red Book
Carl Jung’s Liber Novus, better known as The Red Book, has come to light in a complete English translation, published by Norton in a 2009 facsimile edition and…
- Open Culture
How a 13th-Century Monk Created a Prayer Manuscript by Writing Over—and Accidentally Preserving—Archimedes’ Groundbreaking Mathematical Works
In Jerusalem of the year 1229, there lived a Greek Orthodox monk named Johannes Myronas. Needing some parchment for a prayer book, he grabbed some already-used…
- Open Culture
Hear What Homer’s Odyssey Sounded Like When Sung in the Original Ancient Greek
Image via Wikimedia Commons It’s been a humanist truism for some time to say that Shakespeare speaks to every age, transcending his time and place through the…
- Open Culture
What Miles Davis Taught Herbie Hancock: In Music, as in Life, There Are No Mistakes, Just Chances to Improvise
One of my favorite Brian Eno quotes, or rather one that became an Oblique Strategy, is “Honor Your Mistake as a Hidden Intention.” (Or to be pedantic, the…
- Open Culture
Christopher Hitchens Explains Why Homer’s Odyssey Still Matters to Our World (2000)
At the moment, the answer to the question of why we should read Homer’s Odyssey seems rather straightforward: so we can more intelligently voice our…
- Open Culture
Christopher Nolan Picks 15 Favorite Films from the Criterion Closet
Maybe you’ve already seen Christopher Nolan’s new cinematic interpretation of the Odyssey more than once; maybe you don’t know whether you’ll ever get…
- Open Culture
The Essence of Hayao Miyazaki Films: A Short Documentary About the Humanity at the Heart of His Animation
Filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki detests being referred to as the Japanese Walt Disney. The great animator and storyteller admires the gorgeous animation of classic…
- Open Culture
Where Did Europe’s Countries—and the United Kingdom—Get Their Names?
The typical student traveling on a Eurail pass will stop in such lands as Österreich, Italia, Česko and Schweiz — also known as Suisse, Svizzera, and…
- Open Culture
19th Century Japanese Woodblock Prints Creatively Illustrate the Inner Workings of the Human Body
Folks with a passing knowledge of ukiyo‑e, the Japanese woodblock print art form popular in the 17th through 19th centuries, will be familiar with its…
- Open Culture
A Free Online Archive Lets You Explore 5.8 Million Works of Art Spanning 5,000 Years of History
Though it’s traditionally meant “last in a progression or series,” as Merriam-Webster puts it, the word ultimate has been more often used in recent…
- Open Culture
How Did Everything Begin?: Animations on the Origins of the Universe Narrated by X‑Files Star Gillian Anderson
We previously brought you the BBC series of short animated videos, A History of Ideas. Produced in collaboration with the UK’s Open University and narrated by…
- Open Culture
Umberto Eco’s Personal Library Opens to the Public: More Than 32,000 Books, Exactly as He Left Them
Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose sold so well that its English translator William Weaver could add an extension onto his Tuscan villa, which he called…
- Open Culture
Jimi Hendrix Plays “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” for The Beatles, Just Three Days After the Album’s Release (1967)
There are many ways to celebrate a new album from a band you admire. You can have a listening party alone. You can have a listening party with friends. You can…
- Open Culture
Hear the Haunting Sound of an Ancient Celtic War Trumpet: Silent for 2,000 Years, It Now Sounds Again
Norfolk is known for its network of rivers and lakes, its stock of medieval churches, and for being the home county of Alan Partridge. Last year, it quite…
- Open Culture
Getting Dressed During World War I: A Fascinating Look at How Soldiers, Nursers & Others Dressed During the Great War
Not to diminish the nightmare of mortars and shrapnel, but as evidenced by Crow’s Eye Productions’ period-accurate dressing video above, one of the greatest…
- Open Culture
The World’s Greatest Song That Simply Shouldn’t Exist: The Making of The Beatles’ “A Day in the Life”
Were we to take bets on the single most widely heard alarm clock, the one included on the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” would surely be a popular choice. It…
- Open Culture
Where Did the Monk’s Haircut Come From? A Look at the Rich and Contentious History of the Tonsure
One might assume from a modern viewpoint that the hairstyles worn by monks arose to deal with male pattern baldness anxiety. As in the school uniform approach…
- Open Culture
The Radical, Unclassifiable Art of William Blake
William Blake is a household name, or not far from it, but things get more complicated when it comes to professional description. He was a poet, a painter, and…
- Open Culture
A Walk Through Homer’s Odyssey: A Guide to the Epic Before Seeing Christopher Nolan’s Film
You’re gearing up to see Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, but you haven’t read the Homeric work. Or you read it so long ago that it feels like you’ve never read it…
- Open Culture
The Origins of the Monsters in Homer’s Odyssey: The Cyclops, Sirens, Scylla & More
Despite having been composed about two and a half millennia before the invention of cinema, Homer’s Odyssey has offered tempting material to…
- Open Culture
Hear Hours of Lectures by Michel Foucault: Recorded in English & French Between 1961 and 1983
Tucked in the afterward of the second, 1982 edition of Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow’s Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, we find an…
- Open Culture
Explore 1,300+ Beautiful Wildlife Illustrations from the 19th Century, Now Restored and Available Online
Today, if you want to know about any of the flora or fauna that surround us, you have only to look it up online. After you get your fill of knowledge, you can…