Friday, February 21, 2025 from Open Culture
Image by Jernej Furman, via Wikimedia Commons It would be difficult to imagine the last couple of years without artificial intelligence, even if you don’t use it. Can you recall the last day without some AI-related news item or...Friday, February 21, 2025 from Open Culture
To help celebrate SNL’s 50th anniversary, Architectural Digest has released a new video featuring Heidi Gardner, Chloe Fineman, and Ego Nwodim giving a tour of the Saturday Night Live set. The show has been broadcasting live from Studio...Thursday, February 20, 2025 from Open Culture
Setting aside just one day for the Louvre is a classic first-time Paris visitor’s mistake. The place is simply too big to comprehend on one visit, or indeed on ten visits. To grow so vast has taken eight centuries, a process explained in...Thursday, February 20, 2025 from Open Culture
At a time when much of animation was consumed with little anthropomorphized animals sporting white gloves, Oskar Fischinger went in a completely different direction. His work is all about dancing geometric shapes and abstract forms...Wednesday, February 19, 2025 from Open Culture
Even if you’ve never read Frank Herbert’s Dune, you may well have encountered its adaptations to a variety of other media: comic books, video games, board games, television series, and of course films, David Lynch’s 1984 version and...Wednesday, February 19, 2025 from Open Culture
Throughout the years, we’ve featured performances of Choir!Choir!Choir!–a large amateur choir from Toronto that meets weekly and sings their hearts out. You’ve seen them sing Prince’s “When Doves Cry,” Soundgarden’s “Black Hole...Wednesday, February 19, 2025 from Open Culture
Even if you’ve never read Frank Herbert’s Dune, you may well have encountered its adaptations to a variety of other media: comic books, video games, board games, television series, and of course films, David Lynch’s 1984 version and...Why Are the Names of British Towns & Cities So Hard to Pronounce?: A Humorous But Informative Primer
Tuesday, February 18, 2025 from Open Culture
When they make their first transoceanic voyage, more than a few Americans choose to go to England, on the assumption that, whatever culture shock they might experience, at least none of the difficulties will be linguistic. Only when it’s...Tuesday, February 18, 2025 from Open Culture
Though he never said so directly, we might expect that Situationist Guy Debord would have included Saturday Night Live in what he called the “Spectacle”—the mass media presentation of a totalizing reality, “the ruling order’s nonstop...Monday, February 17, 2025 from Open Culture
Brian Eno was thinking about the purpose of art a decade ago, as evidenced by his 2015 John Peel Lecture (previously featured here on Open Culture). But he was also thinking about it three decades ago, as evidenced by A Year with Swollen...Monday, February 17, 2025 from Open Culture
50 years of Saturday Night Live. It all started here with this first episode, aired on October 11, 1975. George Carlin hosted the show. Billy Preston and Janis Ian served up the music. Jim Henson staged an elaborate puppet show. And “the...Monday, February 17, 2025 from Open Culture
As Saturday Night Live celebrates its 50th anniversary, Al Franken takes you inside the making of an SNL episode. He should know a thing or two about the subject. Part of the original SNL writing team, Franken spent 15 years writing...Friday, February 14, 2025 from Open Culture
At first glance, Jesse Welles resembles nothing so much as a time traveler from the year 1968. That’s how I would open a profile about him, but The New York Times’ David Peisner takes a different approach, describing him recording a song...Friday, February 14, 2025 from Open Culture
In a letter dated May 31, 1960, Flannery O’Connor, the author best known for her classic story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (listen to her read the story here) penned a letter to her friend, the playwright Maryat Lee. It begins rather...Thursday, February 13, 2025 from Open Culture
In the credits of Phil Collins’ No Jacket Required appears the disclaimer that “there is no Fairlight on this record.” Cryptic though it may have appeared to most of that album’s many buyers, technology-minded musicians would’ve got it....Thursday, February 13, 2025 from Open Culture
Before the word processor, before White-Out, before Post-It Notes, there were straight pins. Or, at least that’s what Jane Austen used to make edits in one of her rare manuscripts. In 2011, Oxford’s Bodleian Library acquired the...