Friday, August 7, 2020 from Open Culture
The cards of the tarot, first created for play around 600 years ago and used in recent centuries for occult divination of truths about life, the universe, and everything, should by all rights be nothing more than a historical curiosity...Friday, August 7, 2020 from Open Culture
A little over four years ago, discriminatory and arbitrarily confusing travel bans descended on the U.S., tearing refugee families apart and leaving thousands in diplomatic limbo. This seemed nightmarish enough at the time. But it took a...Friday, August 7, 2020 from Open Culture
Remember early April, when we threw ourselves into the Getty Challenge, turning ourselves into historic art recreations in lieu of climbing the walls? Seems like ages ago, doesn’t it, that you wrapped a shower curtain around your head...Thursday, August 6, 2020 from Open Culture
The New York Times writes: "Right now, polls say Joe Biden has a healthy lead over President Trump. But we’ve been here before (cue 2016), and the polls were, frankly, wrong. One man, however, was not. The historian Allan Lichtman was...Roald Dahl Gives a Tour of the Small Backyard Hut Where He Wrote All of His Beloved Children’s Books
Thursday, August 6, 2020 from Open Culture
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The BFG, The Witches, Matilda: Roald Dahl wrote these and all his other beloved children's books in a hut. Just fifteen feet long and ten feet wide, it served him for 35 years as an office in which no...Thursday, August 6, 2020 from Open Culture
Ever had a friend who cannot bring themselves suspend disbelief? It’s not a moral failing, but it can be a tedious quality in situations like, say, the movies, or the cinema, or whatever you call it when you’ve paid your day’s wages for...Thursday, August 6, 2020 from Open Culture
The ukulele has gotten a bad rap, thanks to some well-meaning musicians who turned the small, guitar-like Hawaiian lute into a novelty instrument. Chief among the offenders is Tiny Tim. Exploding into fame in the early sixties with his...Thursday, August 6, 2020 from Open Culture
Your hosts Mark Linsenmayer, Erica Spyres, and Brian Hirt are joined by Utah philosophy prof and former food writer C. Thi Nguyen to talk food as art, foodies, elitism, food TV, cooking vs. eating, and how analyzing food is like...Wednesday, August 5, 2020 from Open Culture
If you’re a regular reader of this site, you’re likely familiar with the simulation hypothesis, the idea that conscious experience is nothing more than a computer program. This concept has many sci-fi implications, from Matrix-like...Wednesday, August 5, 2020 from Open Culture
In the early 1900s, British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans unearthed almost 3,000 tablets on the island of Crete, inscribed with a language he had never seen before. The discovery began a decades-long race to read the language of...Wednesday, August 5, 2020 from Open Culture
If you’re a regular reader of this site, you’re likely familiar with the simulation hypothesis, the idea that conscious experience is nothing more than a computer program. This concept has many sci-fi implications, from Matrix-like...Wednesday, August 5, 2020 from Open Culture
Even those who know nothing else about Istanbul know that it used to be called Constantinople. The official renaming happened in 1930, meaning that the photographs you see here, all of which date from around 1890, were taken, strictly...Tuesday, August 4, 2020 from Open Culture
Image via Wikimedia Commons Fifteen centuries after its fall, the Roman Empire lives on in unexpected places. Take, for instance, the former colonial city of Timgad, located in Algeria 300 miles from the capital. Founded by the Emperor...Tuesday, August 4, 2020 from Open Culture
Try calling to mind Nirvana’s Nevermind without its naked, swimming baby; or London Calling without Paul Simenon smashing his bass. Think of Sgt. Pepper’s or Abbey Road without thinking about their sleeves. Classic rock albums and...Tuesday, August 4, 2020 from Open Culture
There are many reasons, some quite literal, that it can be painful to talk about racism in the U.S. For one thing, it often seems that writers like W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, or James Baldwin, have already...Monday, August 3, 2020 from Open Culture
"Even in third world countries, like Senegal, it isn't like this..." Related Content: Carl Sagan Predicts the Decline of America: Unable to Know “What’s True,” We Will Slide, “Without Noticing, Back into Superstition & Darkness”...Monday, August 3, 2020 from Open Culture
In our time, few branches of science have taken as much public abuse as quantum physics, the study of how things behave at the atomic scale. It's not so much that people dislike the subject as they see fit to draft it in support of any...Monday, August 3, 2020 from Open Culture
Welkom in Amsterdam… 1922. Neural network artist Denis Shiryaev describes himself as “an artistic machine-learning person with a soul.” For the last six months, he’s been applying himself to re-rendering documentary footage of city...Monday, August 3, 2020 from Open Culture
The story of popular music in the late 20th century is never complete without an account of the explosive psychedelic rock, funk, Afrobeat, and other hybrid styles that proliferated on the African continent and across Latin American and...