Wednesday, April 9, 2025 from Open Culture
As much as you may enjoy a night in with a book, you might not look so eagerly forward to it if that book comprised 314 folios of 1,971 papal letters and other documents relating to ecclesiastical law, all from the thirteenth century....Wednesday, April 9, 2025 from Open Culture
Back in December, you hopefully thoroughly immersed yourself in The Map of Physics, an animated video–a visual aid for the modern age–that mapped out the field of physics, explaining all the connections between classical...Tuesday, April 8, 2025 from Open Culture
Artificial intelligence may be one of the major topics of our historical moment, but it can be surprisingly tricky to define. In the more than 30-year-old interview clip above, Isaac Asimov describes artificial intelligence as “a phrase...Tuesday, April 8, 2025 from Open Culture
She’s worked with Stanley Kubrick *and* “Weird Al” Yankovic, and helped Robert Moog in the development of his eponymous synthesizer. Wendy Carlos is also one of the first high profile transgender artists–credited as Walter Carlos for...Monday, April 7, 2025 from Open Culture
In most places across the world, speak the name of Dante, and your listeners will think of Inferno. Since its first publication more than 700 years ago, its depiction of Hell has become influential enough to shape the perceptions of even...Saturday, April 5, 2025 from Open Culture
Although it’s certainly more plausible than hypotheses like ancient aliens or lizard people, the idea that slaves built the Egyptian pyramids is no more true. It derives from creative readings of Old Testament stories and technicolor...Friday, April 4, 2025 from Open Culture
Prada, Alfa Romeo, Pellegrino, Ferrari, Illy, Lamborghini, Gucci: these are a few Italian corporations we all know, though we don’t necessarily know that they’re all from the north of Italy. The same is true, in fact, of most Italian...Thursday, April 3, 2025 from Open Culture
Just out of curiosity, and apropos of nothing, we asked Grok (the AI chatbot created by Elon Musk) the following question: If a president of a superpower wanted to destroy his own country, what steps would he take? Here’s what Grok had...Thursday, April 3, 2025 from Open Culture
Nobody reads books anymore. Whether or not that notion strikes you as true, you’ve probably heard it expressed fairly often in recent decades — just as you might have had you lived in the Roman Empire of late antiquity. During that time,...Thursday, April 3, 2025 from Open Culture
Here’s a remarkable short film of the great jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, violinist Stéphane Grappelli and their band the Quintette du Hot Club de France performing on a movie set in 1938. The film was hastily organized by the band’s...Wednesday, April 2, 2025 from Open Culture
Ultra-tall high-rises against dark skies. A huge distance between the rich and the poor. Robber barons at the helm of large-scale industrial operations that turn man into machine. Machines that have become intelligent enough to displace...Wednesday, April 2, 2025 from Open Culture
?si=l7KWVf9NZBUkPyM6 In July 1963, Bob Dylan made his first appearance at the Newport Folk Festival. On opening night, he captivated a crowd of 13,000 with a performance of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” accompanied by Joan Baez, Pete Seeger,...Tuesday, April 1, 2025 from Open Culture
Despite its status as one of the most widely known and studied epic poems of all time, Homer’s Iliad has proven surprisingly resistant to adaptation. However much inspiration it has provided to modern-day novelists working in a variety...Tuesday, April 1, 2025 from Open Culture
April 10th will mark the 100th anniversary of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic American novel, The Great Gatsby. As A.O. Scott notes in a recent tribute, when first published, The Great Gatsby got off to a slow start. Initially, “Reviewers...Monday, March 31, 2025 from Open Culture
For all the means of communication and exchange we’ve established between the cultures of the world, no matter how distant they may be from one another, we still have no truly universal single human language. The reason could date back...