openculture.com
Every openculture.com story we have translated and published, newest first. · 50 stories
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The Early Years of Electronic Pop: The Moog Craze, Psychedelic Experiments, and More
There’s a decent chance you’ve heard at least a couple of tracks from Wendy Carlos’ Switched-On Bach. But when was the last time you put on
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Surreal Pinscreen Animations Bring Kafka, Gogol & Mussorgsky to Life (1933–1972)
What do Franz Kafka, Nikolai Gogol, and Modest Mussorgsky have in common? They stand alone among their peers for their darkly humorous sensi
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Inside the Making of the Sagrada Família, Barcelona’s 144-Year Megaproject
To get a sense of Sagrada Família’s popularity with YouTubers, you have only to take a look at the related Open Culture posts linked below.
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The Vibrant Color Wheels Designed by Goethe, Newton & Other Theorists of Color (1665–1810)
Maybe it’s the cloistered headiness of Rene Descartes, or the rigorous austerity of Isaac Newton; maybe it’s all the leathern breeches, gray
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How Balzac’s Extreme Coffee Habit Fueled His Productive Writing Routine
Even now, in this age when the very reading of literature is endangered — or so the articles tell us — Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) retains
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A Soviet Animation of Stephen King’s Short Story “Battleground” (1986)
Stephen King has that rare, and spectacularly profitable, skill to suck you into his world and compel you to flip to the next page. And when
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Harry Houdini Died 100 Years Ago This Halloween: Was He Really Killed by a Punch to the Stomach?
This Halloween marks the 100th anniversary of the death of famed escape artist Harry Houdini. Today, most of us know more about the manner o
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Hear an Hour of the Jazzy Background Music from the Original 1967 Spider-Man Cartoon
Ray Ellis had a six-decade career as a producer, arranger, and jazz composer. And while he’s best known for arranging music for Billie Holid
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Watch Rome Rise, Fall, and Rise Again in a Three-Minute 3D Timelapse
Scholars disagree on when, exactly, Rome fell. But if you watch the new video from City 3D Timelapse above, you’ll understand the lack of de
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Christopher Lee Reads Edgar Allan Poe: “The Raven,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” & More
Sir Christopher Lee and Edgar Allan Poe went way back. Or at least they went as far back as 1969, the year of The Oblong Box, a loose and lu
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What Ancient Latin Sounded Like, And How We Know It
Latin is a language As dead as dead can be; It killed the Romans long ago, And now it’s killing me. That famed ditty isn’t likely to resonat
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In 1897, London’s Lampposts Dispensed Hot Coffee, Tea, and “Fluid Beef”
Any reader of Victorian literature will wonder how much a ha’penny was actually worth in those days. For a little more than a year at the ve
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Sears Sold 75,000 DIY Mail Order Homes Between 1908 and 1939, and Transformed American Life
Two of the books that most shaped American culture both happened to bear the nickname “The Big Book.” While the second of these, the A.A. Ma
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Doctor Who’s Tom Baker Plays Douglas Adams’ Digital “Agent” in the AI-Predicting Hyperland (1990)
Cast your mind, if you will, back to the year 2020. It now feels like a different time, what with the spreading COVID-19 pandemic and the he
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Doctor Who’s Tom Baker Plays Douglas Adams’ Digital “Agent” in the AI-Predicting Hyperland (1990)
Cast your mind, if you will, back to the year 2020. It now feels like a different time, what with the spreading COVID-19 pandemic and the he
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Hear How Clare Torry’s Vocals on Pink Floyd’s “The Great Gig in the Sky” Made the Song Go from Pretty Good to Downright Great
Smack in the middle of Pink Floyd’s classic Dark Side of the Moon sits a song many listeners may hear as an extended bridge between the two
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The Dark Story Behind Edgar Allan Poe’s Most Famous Photograph, Taken Four Days After a Laudanum Overdose
In the Halloween season, one American writer comes to mind more often than any other: Edgar Allan Poe. That owes in large part to his famous
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When a Cat Co-Authored a Paper in a Leading Physics Journal (1975)
Back in 1975, Jack H. Hetherington, a physics professor at Michigan State University, wrote a research paper on low–temperature physics for
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How Vincent van Gogh’s Sister-in-Law Worked Tirelessly to Make Him Famous
No artist, no matter how solitary by nature, becomes a cultural phenomenon alone. That’s even true of such an isolated figure as Vincent van
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The Megaprojects That Even the Ancient Romans Couldn’t Pull Off: Rerouting the Tiber, Digging a Canal, and More
Some would call the United States of America the mightiest empire the world has ever known. Yet over the past half-century or so, it has sho
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Watch “The Midnight Parasites,” a Surreal Japanese Animation Set in the World of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (1972)
Hieronymus Bosch’s bizarre paintings might have looked perfectly ordinary to his contemporaries, argues Stanley Meisler in “The World of Bos
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Why Cleopatra, Lawrence of Arabia, Ben-Hur & Other Hollywood Classics Still Look So Good
Cleopatra cost Twentieth Century Fox $44 million, by the studio’s own estimate. That may sound like the budget of one of those genre picture
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Soviet-Era Illustrations of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1976)
Until I read J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, my favorite book growing up was, by far, The Hobbit. Growing up in Russia, however, m
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The Names of Nearly 4 Million Enslaved People in Former British Colonies Are Now Searchable Online, Helping Descendants Find Lost Ancestors
A few years ago, we featured here on Open Culture the Freedmen’s Bureau Project database, which contains searchable information on formerly
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