~openculture | Bookmarks (170)

From 1945 to 1951, Disney produced a series of educational films to be shown in American schools. How to bathe an infant. How not to catch a cold. Why you shouldn’t drive fast. Disney covered these subjects in its educational shorts, and then eventually got to the touchy subject of biology and sexuality. If there was […]

As of this writing, the Beatles’ “Revolution 9″ has more than 13,800,000 plays on Spotify. This has no doubt generated decent revenue, even given the platform’s oft-lamented payout rates. But compare that number to the more than half-a-billion streams of “Blackbird,” also on the Beatles’ self-titled 1968 “white album,” and you get an idea of […]

The good news is that an album has just been released by Kate Bush, Annie Lennox, Damon Albarn of Gorillaz, The Clash, Tori Amos, Hans Zimmer, Pet Shop Boys, Jamiroquai, and Yusuf (previously known as Cat Stevens), Billy Ocean, and many other musicians besides, most of them British. The bad news is that it contains […]

In 1969, Ella Fitzgerald released Sunshine of Your Love, a live album recorded at the Venetian Room in The Fairmont San Francisco. Recorded by music producer Norman Granz, the album featured contemporary pop songs that showcased Fitzgerald’s ability to transcend jazz standards. Take, for example, a version of the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” and Cream’s “Sunshine […]

Diego Velázquez painted Las Meninas almost 370 years ago, and it’s been under scrutiny ever since. If the public’s appetite to know more about it has diminished over time, that certainly isn’t reflected in the view count of the analysis from YouTube channel Rabbit Hole above, which as of this writing has crossed the 2.5 million […]

Image by Carl Van Vechten, via Wikimedia Commons “How did Faulkner pull it off?” is a question many a fledgling writer has asked themselves while struggling through a period of apprenticeship like that novelist John Barth describes in his 1999 talk “My Faulkner.” Barth “reorchestrated” his literary heroes, he says, “in search of my writerly self… downloading […]

Who invented rock and roll? Ask Chuck Berry, he’ll tell you. It was Chuck Berry. Or was it Bill Haley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard? Muddy Waters? Robert Johnson? Maybe even Lead Belly? You didn’t, but if you asked me, I’d say that rock and roll, like country blues, came not from one lone hero […]

Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power has been a popular book since its first publication over a quarter-century ago. Judging by the discussion that continues among its fervent (and often proselytizing) fans, it’s easy to forget that its title isn’t How to Become Powerful. Granted, it may sometimes get filed in the self-help section, […]

Neil deGrasse Tyson may not be a film critic. But if you watch the video above from his Youtube channel StarTalk Plus, you’ll see that — to use one of his own favorite locutions — he loves him a good science fiction movie. Given his professional credentials as an astrophysicist and his high public profile […]

NOTE: You can watch the video here. Not long ago I stumbled upon this pretty wonderful video of David Bowie playing an acoustic version of “Heroes,” one of my favorite songs, and I thought I’d quickly share it today. Why wait? Appearing at Neil Young’s annual Bridge School Benefit concert in October 1996, Bowie gives us […]

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 […]