Open Culture

Over 100,000 people move to the San Francisco Bay Area each year. Their motivations for doing so no doubt vary, but these days, the ambition to make a fortune at the epicenter of the tech industry — especially amid the rapidly inflating AI bubble — is hardly unheard of. Unfortunately, that desire can be so all-consuming as to crowd out any interest in, or even curiosity about, the city itself, to say nothing of its wider region. Yet the San Francisco we know today is the result of a story at lea

In 1962, the animator Fyodor Khitruk made his directorial debut with Story of One Crime, a film that broke with a Soviet tendency to make imitations of Disney-style animations. The film, as The Guardian explained in its 2012 obituary for the animator, came as a shock. It was stylistically simple and dealt with themes that Disney films would never touch — like, why would a polite clerk murder two housewives with a frying pan? Khitruk made other films that were packed with soci

These are, perhaps, not the very best times for humanities majors. Seldom do we even hear the once-standard defense that, by pursuing a course of study in subjects of that kind, students “learn how to think.” Such a justification still points to real value, at least in the most demanding settings. Take Harvard’s course Humanities 10, whose digital device-free environment and syllabus covering everything from The Odyssey and Ulysses to Plato and James Baldwin — at a pace of one substant

The old vaudeville phrase “Will it play in Peoria?” has its roots in the late 19th century, specifically in Horatio Alger’s novel Five Hundred Dollars; Or Jacob Marlowe’s Secret. Like all of the books Alger wrote extolling the virtues of thrift, study, grooming, industry, etc., this one articulates a middle American bootstraps philosophy and rags-to-riches mythology, while giving the entertainment industry a colorful way to sum up the small-town audiences who embraced Alger’s strait-la

 From roughly the mid-nineteen-fifties through the mid-nineteen-seventies, the availability of airtime on American television stations exceeded their capacity to fill it with high-quality original programming. This was especially true in the hours when relatively few viewers were awake to tune in, a condition that gave rise to the late-night movie show. Specializing in lesser Hollywood productions and the releases of by-then forgotten studios, these programs came to constitute home revival hous

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 Switched-On Rock, Switched-On Country, Switched-On Santa, or Switched-On Bacharach? More likely than not, you’ve never even heard of those other albums, which have nothing to do with Carlos and everything to do with the music-industry fad that her then-high-tech renditions of Bach set off in the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies. That’s the subject o

What do Franz Kafka, Nikolai Gogol, and Modest Mussorgsky have in common? They stand alone among their peers for their darkly humorous sensibilities, fascination with the grotesque, imaginative takes on cultural traditions, and a predisposition for the proto-surreal. Like the odd figure lurching through the first movement of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, they are gnomic artists: enigmatic and ambiguous, given to the aphoristic in stories and tone poems of monstrous and marvelous beings

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. As will hardly escape your attention, most subjects that consistently draw the attention of the GoPro class are not nineteenth-century Catholic churches. But Antoni Gaudí’s masterpiece, whose construction alone has survived him by a century now, transcends many boundaries of intellectual and cultural interest: history channels feature it, travel channels fea

Maybe it’s the cloistered headiness of Rene Descartes, or the rigorous austerity of Isaac Newton; maybe it’s all the leathern breeches, gray waistcoats, sallow faces, and powdered wigs… but we tend not to associate Enlightenment Europe with an explosion of color theory. Yet philosophers of the late 17th and 18th centuries were obsessed with light and sight. Descartes wrote a treatise on optics, as did Newton. Newton first described in his 1672 paper the “revolutionary new theory of light an

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 a notable ability to pick up new admirers. But even though he may have a decent readership by the standards of French novelists who died in the middle of the nineteenth century, one does wonder whether he still inspires the kind of devotion embodied by William Hobart Royce. A Brooklyn bookseller’s assistant first introduced to Les Cent Contes drolatiques as

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 you’re hooked, his words have the uncanny ability to simply unfold like a movie in your head. So it isn’t surprising that his books have been widely adapted to the silver screen. Some are flat out masterpieces. Others are most decidedly not. This appreciation by filmmakers of King’s storytelling chops isn’t just contained to this side of the Iron Curtain. I

This Halloween marks the 100th anniversary of the death of famed escape artist Harry Houdini. Today, most of us know more about the manner of that death than we do about any of the feats of escape artistry that made him famous in the first place. As the story goes, he’d mastered his own body to the extent that he could tighten his abdominal muscles so as to withstand even the hardest punch to the gut. Or at least that’s the image he let circulate: taking it as a challenge, a student and amateur

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 Holiday’s Lady in Satin (1958), he also enjoyed a long career orchestrating music for television. Working under a pseudonym “Yvette Blais” (his wife’s name), Ellis composed background music for the cartoon studio Filmation between 1968 and 1982. And, during the late 60s, he notably created the background and incidental musi

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 debate on the question of whether it fell. Around the turn of the sixth century AD, buildings start vanishing at a rate that soon turns alarming; long before the end of the first millennium, it’s clear that Rome has been plunged into very hard times indeed. In the video’s accelerated visual history, that much-scrutinized 500-year span passes in a little more t

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 lurid film adaptation of the eponymous story starring Lee and the also Poe-associated Vincent Price. Lee plays the doctor to whom a gang of grave-robbers delivers Price’s character, an Englishman disfigured in a voodoo ceremony who fakes his own death in order to escape the captivity of his brother. Whatever its entertainment value, the picture doesn’t rank es

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 resonate with many modern school children, but interest in ancient Rome remains fairly robust.  We’ve come to accept that those stately ruins were once covered in graffiti. We can recreate their meals from hors d’oeuvres (Boiled Eggs with Pine Nut Sauce) to dessert (Pear Patina). Thermae Romae, a popular Japanese manga-cum-feature-film, t

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 very end of that period, it could buy you a cup of coffee, cocoa, milk, tea, or “fluid beef” — which would pour out of a lamppost on the corner. The Pluto Lamp, as it was branded, made its debut at the Victorian Era Exhibition, which was held in 1897 to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Amid such attractions as a 360-degree panorama of ancient Rome, Peppe

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. Manual, published in 1939, changed the country with 12-Step recovery groups, the first of these, the Sears Catalog, transformed America with mass consumption, offering customers in every part of the country access to modern conveniences and retail goods of all kinds at unheard of prices. Beginning in 1908, Sears started selling entire houses, in approximately

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 heated sociopolitical battles being waged online, and indeed in the (socially distanced) streets. That spring, we featured here on Open Culture an amusing retro-technological diversion called Hyperland. First broadcast on BBC2, the program stars The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams as himself and Doctor Who’s Tom Baker as his age

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 true centerpieces, “Time” and “Money.” But I’ve always thought of “The Great Gig in the Sky” as the album’s true center, a swirling, swinging, soulful prog-rock masterpiece, carried to stratospheric heights by British singer Clare Torry. The song’s wordless gospel vocal makes it an ecstatic, even hopeful, tent pole supporting Dark Side’s brill