Bookmarks (170)

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 will surely continue to bewilder and inspire generation after generation of aspiring young auteurs. (There seems even to […]

“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 bougainvillea starts rattling in the driveway, and people start watching the horizon for […]

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 title song for the movie Cat People. Before long, Bowie stopped by the Queen sessions […]

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 collection of free online certificates and badges available anywhere. From tech giants like Google and Microsoft […]

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 icon,” writes Michael J. Mooney in an Atlantic piece from 2020. “His likeness appears on […]

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 a Japanese company made a device named Manpo-kei, which translates to ’10,000 steps meter.’ ” […]

“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 spaceships and whatnot, but the comics have rarely shown us anything truly bizarre. Little Nemo’s dream imagery, however, is […]

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, three (of 10) of whom died before the age of 11,” Katherine Harmon writes […]

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, especially if they happen to have been tuning in since the very beginning. For others, […]

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 days the group went by the name of Ted Ed Fred. Only the day […]

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 those changes would be a fin des livres as humanity then knew them. “I do […]

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 disasters like George Lucas’ Star Wars Holiday Special—as one of the biggest mistakes in movie […]

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 they’ve done so in the form of the just-launched Public Domain Image Archive (PDIA). The Public Domain […]

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 courses, Guided Projects, Specializations, and Professional Certificates, all of which are taught by top instructors from leading […]

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 pop culture took a long strange trip. The “inspired pairing” of the […]

A Complete Unknown, the new movie about Bob Dylan’s rise in the folk-music scene of the early nineteen-sixties and subsequent electrified break with it, has been praised for not taking excessive liberties, at least by the standards of popular music biopics. Its conversion of a real chapter of cultural history has entailed various conflations, compressions, […]

In 1581, the medieval cartographer and Protestant theologian Heinrich Bünting created a symbolic map of the world that adorned his book Itinerarium Sacrae Scripturae (Travel Through Holy Scripture). Hand-colored and shaped like a three-leaf clover, the map put Jerusalem at its center, highlighting its central role in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. From that center flowed […]

Ideally, a viewer should be able to identify the work of a particular auteur from any one scene that the auteur has directed. In reality, it’s not always possible to do so, even in the work of filmmakers with highly idiosyncratic styles. But in the case of Quentin Tarantino, it would probably be more difficult […]

Nowadays musicians can reach hundreds, thousands, sometimes millions of listeners with a few, usually free, online services and a minimal grasp of technology. That’s not to say there aren’t still economic barriers aplenty for the struggling artist, but true independence is not an impossible prospect. In the 1950s and 60s, on the other hand, as […]

The July 17, 1929 issue of Variety carried a notice about a laugh-filled new short film in which “skeletons hoof and frolic,” the peak of whose hilarity “is reached when one skeleton plays the spine of another in xylophone fashion, using a pair of thigh bones as hammers.” The final lines of this strong recommendation […]

Bertrand Russell, the great British philosopher and social critic, appeared on the BBC program Face-to-Face in 1959 and was asked a closing question: What would you tell a generation living 1,000 years from now about the life you’ve lived and the lessons you’ve learned? His answer is short, but pithy. You can read a transcript […]

In the video above, Laurie Anderson describes C. P. Cavafy’s poem “Waiting for the Barbarians” as being “set in ancient Rome.” That’s a reasonable interpretation, given that it contains an emperor, senators, and orators, though Cavafy himself said that none of them are necessarily Roman. The universality of the situation the poem describes, in which a […]

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 Sun” (to honor Chris Cornell), and Patti Smith’s “People Have the Power.” In their latest video, they revisit an old favorite: Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” a […]

1939 is widely considered the greatest year in Hollywood history. Back then, writes 1939: The Year in Movies author Tom Flannery, the so-called “Big Eight” major American studios “had a combined 590 actors, 114 directors and 340 writers under contract, each of whom worked an eight-hour shift every weekday,” plus half a day on Saturday. […]

On January 13, 1931, the Society of Beaux-Arts Architects held a ball at the Hotel Astor in New York City. According to an advertisement for the event, anyone who paid $15 per ticket (big money during the Depression) could see a “hilarious modern art exhibition” and things “modernistic, futuristic, cubistic, altruistic, mystic, architistic and feministic.” […]

Each Public Domain Day seems to bring us a richer crop of copyright-liberated books, plays, films, musical compositions, sound recordings, works of art, and other pieces of intellectual property. This year happens to be an especially notable one for connoisseurs of Belgian culture. Among the characters entering the American public domain, we find a certain […]

If you want to understand the history of music videos, you must consider a lot of things that are not obviously music videos. The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star,” the first selection of MTV’s inaugural broadcast, must surely count as a music video — but then, it was produced a couple years earlier for […]

Public-transit projects are the religious building endeavors of twenty-first century America, less because they’re motivated by the belief in any particular deity than by how much time and money they now require to complete. Take New York’s Second Avenue subway, whose less than two-mile-long first phase opened in 2017: its construction had cost $4.45 billion, […]

51 years ago, Hunter S. Thompson wrote Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, which “is still considered a kind of bible of political reporting,” noted Matt Taibbi in a 40th anniversary edition of the book. Fear and Loathing ’72 entered the canon of American political writing for many reasons. But if you’re looking for […]

There was a time when a company like Volkswagen could commission various luminaries to write letters to the future, then publish them in Time magazine as part of an ad campaign. In fact, that time wasn’t so very long ago: it was the year 1988, to be precise, when no less an optimistic (or optimistically […]

For longtime readers of American book journalism, scrolling through the New York Times Book Review’s just-published list of the 100 best books of the twenty-first century will summon dim memories of many a once-unignorable critical fuss. At one time or another over the past 25 years, some of us felt as if we could hardly […]

Upon stepping into the hallowed Criterion Closet, stocked with hundreds of that cinephile video label’s finest releases, Francis Ford Coppola speaks of a director who “believed in a film he wanted to make, and used his entire fortune, because the financing system of the time wouldn’t finance it. And it came out and it was a big […]

Allow me to name just a few of the people I want to hear hosting and curating radio shows—former Sex Pistols’ singer John Lydon, former Clash frontman Joe Strummer, former Woody Guthrie impersonator Bob Dylan.… Luckily for me, this ain’t just fantasy baseball; at various times, and with varying levels of commitment, each of these tastemakers has hosted […]

A Charlie Brown Christmas uses a cast of amateur child voice actors, deals with the theme of seasonal depression, and culminates in the recitation of a Bible verse, all to a jazz score. It was not, safe to say, the special that CBS had expected, to say nothing of its sponsor, the Coca-Cola Company. In […]

When Leonardo da Vinci was 42 years old, he hadn’t yet completed any major publicly viewable work. Not that he’d been idle: in that same era, while working for the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza, he “developed, organized, and directed productions for festival pageants, triumphal processions, masks, jousting tournaments, and plays, for which he choreographed […]

J.R.R. Tolkien is best known for the sweeping fantasy landscapes of Lord of The Rings and The Hobbit. Apart from being a celebrated author, the Oxford University professor of Anglo-Saxon was also a devoted father who doted on his children. In 1920, a few short years after Tolkien returned from World War I, he began […]

With his cane, his famous waxed mustache, and his habit of taking unusual animals for walks, Salvador Dalí would appear to have cultivated his own photographability. But taking a picture of the man who stood as a living definition of popular surrealism wasn’t a task to be approached casually — especially not for Philippe Halsman, […]

Back in 1993, the Beat writer William S. Burroughs wrote and narrated a 21-minute claymation Christmas film oddly produced by Francis Ford Coppola. And, as you can well imagine, it’s not your normal happy Christmas flick. Nope, this film – The Junky’s Christmas – is all about Danny the Carwiper, a junkie, who spends Christmas Day […]

“It’s interesting that some people find science so easy, and others find it kind of dull and difficult,” says Richard Feynman at the beginning of his 1983 BBC series Fun to Imagine. “One of the things that makes it very difficult is that it takes a lot of imagination. It’s very hard to imagine all […]

Physicist and saxophonist Stephon Alexander has argued in his many public lectures and his book The Jazz of Physics that Albert Einstein and John Coltrane had quite a lot in common. Alexander in particular draws our attention to the so-called “Coltrane circle,” which resembles what any musician will recognize as the “Circle of Fifths,” but […]

A month ago, drones were spotted near Morris County, New Jersey. Since then, reports of further sightings in various locations in the region have been lodged on a daily basis, and anxieties about the origin and purpose of these unidentified flying objects have grown apace. “We have no evidence at this time that the reported […]

I’m not sure the Sex Pistols had “available for children’s parties” on their press release, but on a cold and grim Christmas in 1977, that’s exactly what happened. While many Britons were settling in for a warm yuletide, the Pistols decided to host a party/benefit for the children of striking firemen and miners at a […]

The video above from Sabins Civil Engineering promises to reveal “the MAGIC behind Da Vinci’s Self Supporting Bridge.” That sounds like a typical example of YouTube hyperbole, though on first glance, it isn’t at all obvious how the fragile-looking structure can stay up, much less support the weight of a crossing army. Not only does […]

Kind Reader, Will you do us the honor of accepting our holiday invitation? Carve five minutes from your holiday schedule to spend time celebrating The Insects’ Christmas, above. In addition to offering brief respite from the chaos of consumerism and modern expectations, this simple stop-motion tale from 1913 is surprisingly effective at chasing away holiday […]

Nearly fifty years ago, the celebrated young pianist Keith Jarrett arrived in the West German city of Köln (better known in English as Cologne). Having just come off a 500-mile-long road trip from Switzerland, where he’d played a concert the previous day, he was left with barely any time to recover before going onstage at […]

The Smithsonian sets the scene for this Christmas card sent in 1933, a few years into the Great Depression. They write: Despite the glum economic situation, the Pinero family used a brown paper bag to fashion an inexpensive holiday greeting card. They penned a clever rhyme and added some charming line drawings of Mom, Dad, […]

Between 711 and 1492, much of the Iberian Peninsula, including modern-day Spain, was under Muslim rule. Not that it was easy to hold on to the place for that length of time: after the fall of Toledo in 1085, Al-Andalus, as the territory was called, continued to lose cities over the subsequent centuries. Córdoba and […]

We all know about the Titanic. Less often do we hear about the Britannic—the sister passenger liner that the British turned into a hospital ship during World War I. Launched in 1914, two years after the Titanic sank in the North Atlantic Ocean, the Britannic featured a number of safety improvements. It had enhanced watertight […]

Earlier this week, we featured the 99-year-old Dick Van Dyke’s performance in Coldplay’s new music video, full of visual references to the sitcom that made him a household name in the early nineteen-sixties. And a household name he remains these six decades later, though one does wonder how many of those who appreciate his extreme […]

The Soviet Union’s repressive state censorship went to absurd lengths to control what its citizens read, viewed, and listened to, such as the almost comical removal of purged former comrades from photographs during Stalin’s reign. When it came to aesthetics, Stalinism mostly purged more avant-garde tendencies from the arts and literature in favor of didactic […]