Wednesday, January 15, 2025 from Open Culture
Bob Ross the man died nearly thirty years ago, but Bob Ross the archetypal TV painter has never been more widely known. “With his distinctive hair, gentle voice, and signature expressions such as ‘happy little trees,’ he’s an enduring...Wednesday, January 15, 2025 from Open Culture
We are regularly urged to take 10,000 steps a day. However, it turns out 10,000 isn’t exactly a number anchored in science. Rather, it’s a product of marketing. According to a Harvard medical website, that figure goes back to “1965, when...Tuesday, January 14, 2025 from Open Culture
“Considering that, in a cartoon, anything can happen that the mind can imagine, the comics have generally depicted pretty mundane worlds,” writes Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson. “Sure, there have been talking animals, a few...Tuesday, January 14, 2025 from Open Culture
Charles Darwin’s work on heredity was partly driven by tragic losses in his own family. Darwin had married his first cousin, Emma, and “wondered if his close genetic relation to his wife had had an ill impact on his children’s health,...Monday, January 13, 2025 from Open Culture
Saturday Night Live began its 50th season last fall, around the same time as the premiere of Jason Reitman’s film Saturday Night, which dramatizes the program’s 1975 debut. All of this has put fans into something of a retrospective mood,...Monday, January 13, 2025 from Open Culture
Here’s a strange home video of Nirvana when they were unknown, playing inside a Radio Shack in the band’s hometown of Aberdeen, Washington. The video was recorded on the evening of January 24, 1988, after the store had closed. In those...Monday, January 13, 2025 from Open Culture
A new deal to start a new year: Coursera is offering a $200 discount on its annual subscription plan called “Coursera Plus.” Normally priced at $399, Coursera Plus (now available for $199) gives you access to 90% of Coursera’s...Friday, January 10, 2025 from Open Culture
The end of the nineteenth century is still widely referred to as the fin de siècle, a French term that evokes great, looming cultural, social, and technological changes. According to at least one French mind active at the time, among...Friday, January 10, 2025 from Open Culture
In 1972, Jerry Lewis made the ill-considered decision to write, direct, and star in a film about a German clown in Auschwitz. The result was so awful that he never allowed its release, and it quickly acquired the reputation—along with...Thursday, January 9, 2025 from Open Culture
We’ve often featured the work of the Public Domain Review here on Open Culture, and also various searchable copyright-free image databases that have arisen over the years. It makes sense that those two worlds would collide, and now...Thursday, January 9, 2025 from Open Culture
A new deal to start a new year: Coursera is offering a $200 discount on its annual subscription plan called “Coursera Plus.” Normally priced at $399, Coursera Plus (now available for $199) gives you access to 90% of Coursera’s...Thursday, January 9, 2025 from Open Culture
What’s that, you ask? Did Miles Davis open for the Grateful Dead at the Fillmore West? In what world could such a thing happen? In the world of the late sixties/early seventies, when jazz fused with acid rock, acid rock with country, and...Wednesday, January 8, 2025 from Open Culture
A Complete Unknown, the new movie about Bob Dylan’s rise in the folk-music scene of the early nineteen-sixties and subsequent electrified break with it, has been praised for not taking excessive liberties, at least by the standards of...Wednesday, January 8, 2025 from Open Culture
In 1581, the medieval cartographer and Protestant theologian Heinrich Bünting created a symbolic map of the world that adorned his book Itinerarium Sacrae Scripturae (Travel Through Holy Scripture). Hand-colored and shaped like a...Tuesday, January 7, 2025 from Open Culture
Ideally, a viewer should be able to identify the work of a particular auteur from any one scene that the auteur has directed. In reality, it’s not always possible to do so, even in the work of filmmakers with highly idiosyncratic styles....Tuesday, January 7, 2025 from Open Culture
Nowadays musicians can reach hundreds, thousands, sometimes millions of listeners with a few, usually free, online services and a minimal grasp of technology. That’s not to say there aren’t still economic barriers aplenty for the...