Friday, January 17, 2025 from Open Culture
Image by Sasha Kargaltsev via Wikimedia Commons As every cinephile has by now heard, and lamented, we’ve just lost a great American filmmaker. From Eraserhead to Blue Velvet to Mulholland Drive to Inland Empire, David Lynch’s features...Thursday, January 16, 2025 from Open Culture
“This is fire season in Los Angeles,” Joan Didion once wrote, relating how every year “the Santa Ana winds start blowing down through the passes, and the relative humidity drops to figures like seven or six or three per cent, and the...Thursday, January 16, 2025 from Open Culture
In the summer of 1981, the British band Queen was recording tracks for their tenth studio album, Hot Space, at Mountain Studios in Montreux, Switzerland. As it happened, David Bowie had scheduled time at the same studio to record the...Thursday, January 16, 2025 from Open Culture
For those looking to boost their skills or explore new fields without breaking the bank, Class Central has done the heavy lifting. Known as a search engine for online courses, Class Central has compiled what might be the largest...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
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...