~openculture | Bookmarks (171)

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 social-media post — or indeed, a time when the hype didn’t slide into utopian or apocalyptic […]

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 8H, located at 30 Rockefeller, since SNL first premiered in 1975. In this 22-minute tour, you’ll visit […]

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 under three minutes by the official video animated above. First constructed around […]

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 spinning around a flat featureless background. Think of a Mondrian or Malevich painting that moves, often in time to the […]

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 Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” If you dig through their Youtube archive, you can also revisit performances of two Talking Heads […]

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 too late do they discover the true meaning of the old line about being separated by […]

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 discourse about itself, its never-ending monologue of self-praise.” The slickness of TV, even live comedy TV, masks carefully orchestrated […]

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 Appendices, his diary of the year 1995 published by Faber & Faber. […]

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 Not Ready for Prime Time Players” (Belushi, Aykroyd, Gilda, Jane, Chevy, Garrett, Laraine […]

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 and performing for the show. (Anyone remember Stuart Smalley giving a motivational pep talk to […]

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 in his home studio. “Welles, a singer-songwriter with a shaggy, dirty-blond mane and […]

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 abruptly, likely because it’s responding to something Maryat said in a […]

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. In the half-decades since its introduction, the Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument, or CMI, had reshaped the sound […]

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 manuscript of Austen’s abandoned novel, The Watsons. In announcing the acquisition, the Bodleian wrote: The Watsons is Jane Austen’s first […]

At least since The Canterbury Tales, the setting of the medieval tavern has held out the promise of adventure. For their customer base during the actual Middle Ages, however, they had more utilitarian virtues. “If you ever find yourself in the late medieval period, and you are in need of food and drink, you’d better […]

In 1913, Germany, flush with a new nation’s patriotic zeal, looked like it might become the dominant nation of Europe and a real rival to that global superpower Great Britain. Then it hit the buzzsaw of World War I. After the German government collapsed in 1918 from the economic and emotional toll of a half-decade […]

H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds has terrified and fascinated readers and writers for decades since its 1898 publication and has inspired numerous adaptations. The most notorious use of Wells’ book was by Orson Welles, whom the author called “my little namesake,” and whose 1938 War of the Worlds Halloween radio play caused public alarm (though not actually a […]

People understand evolution in all sorts of different ways. We’ve all heard a variety of folk explanations of that all-important phenomenon, from “survival of the fittest” to “humans come from monkeys,” that run the spectrum from broadly correct to badly mangled. One less often heard but more elegant way to put it is that all […]

Neil deGrasse Tyson has spent his career talking up not just science itself, but also its practitioners. If asked to name the greatest scientist of all time, one might expect him to need a minute to think about it — or even to find himself unable to choose. But that’s hardly Tyson’s style, as evidenced […]

And now for a good use of AI. The UK-based telecom company O2 has developed a chatbot (“named Daisy”) that performs a noble task. Impersonating an elderly grandmother, the chatbot engages with internet fraudsters and then systematically frustrates them and wastes their time. As part of a demo, notes The Guardian, Daisy wasted a series […]

It’s Friday, which means that tonight, many of us will sit down to watch a movie with our family, our friends, our significant other, or — for some cinephiles, best of all — by ourselves. If you haven’t yet lined up any home-cinematic experience in particular, consider taking a look at this playlist of 31 […]

Music is often described as the most abstract of all the arts, and arguably the least visual as well. But these qualities, which seem so basic to the nature of the form, have been challenged for at least three centuries, not least by composers themselves. Take Antonio Vivaldi, whose Le quattro stagioni, or The Four […]

As you’ve probably noticed if you’re a regular reader of this site, we’re big fans of book illustration, particularly that from the form’s golden age—the late 18th and 19th century—before photography took over as the dominant visual medium. But while photographs largely supplanted illustrations in textbooks, magazines, and newspapers over the course of the 20th century, […]

We made sand think: this phrase is used from time to time to evoke the particular technological wonders of our age, especially since artificial intelligence seems to be back on the slate of possibilities. While there would be no Silicon Valley without silica sand, semiconductors are hardly the first marvel humanity has forged out of […]