Culture & Media news

• Morning Consult: Aside from some Democrats, nobody cares that much about Trump’s taxes anymore

  19-01-2017 00:21 via hotair.com
  
  It’s funny how something so critical to everyone in the Democratic party, 98% of the media and even a majority of Republicans (both NeverTrump and otherwise) falls out of fashion once the voting is done. The demands for Trump to provide his tax returns was loud and continuous throughout 2016, but according to the latest Morning Consult polling, interest in the subject has begun to seriously fade.President-elect Donald Trump’s latest reiteration that the only people who care about his
  
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• How the Year 2440 Was Imagined in a 1771 French Sci-Fi Novel

  15-04-2024 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  Many Americans might think of Rip Van Winkle as the first man to nod off and wake up in the distant future. But as often seems to have been the case in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the French got there first. Almost 50 years before Washington Irving’s short story, Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s utopian novel L’An 2440, rêve s’il en fut jamais (1771) sent its sleeping protagonist six and a half centuries forward in time. Read today, as it is in the new
  
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• Why the Short-Lived Calvin and Hobbes Is Still One of the Most Beloved & Influential Comic Strips

  15-04-2024 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  If you know more than a few millennials, you probably know someone who reveres Calvin and Hobbes as a sacred work of art. That comic strip’s cultural impact is even more remarkable considering that it ran in newspapers for only a decade, from 1985 to 1995: barely an existence at all, by the standards of the American funny pages, where the likes of Garfield has been lazily cracking wise for 45 years now. Yet these two examples of the comic-strip form could hardly be more different from each
  
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• Beavis and Butt-Head on SNL

  14-04-2024 21:58 via openculture.com
  
  If you need six minutes of comic relief, this might do the trick. For those who don’t get the underlying reference, watch here. Enjoy! :)
  
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• Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium: A Beautiful Digital Edition of the Poet’s Pressed Plants & Flowers Is Now Online

  12-04-2024 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  So many writers have been gardeners and have written about gardens that it might be easier to make a list of those who didn’t. But even in this crowded company, Emily Dickinson stands out. She not only attended the fragile beauty of flowers with an artist’s eye—before she’d written any of her famous verse—but she did so with the keen eye of a botanist, a field of work then open to anyone with the leisure, curiosity, and creativity to undertake it.
  “In an era
  
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• Who’s Behind These Scammy Text Messages We’ve All Been Getting?: The Search Engine Podcast Demystifies the Global Scam

  12-04-2024 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  You have received those odd text messages from a stranger. (“Hi, This is Anita. Have you received the Panamera parts yet?”) You know the messages are spam, but you don’t quite understand the angle of the scam. Above, the Search Engine podcast works with Bloomberg reporter Zeke Faux to break down the con operation. The story turns out to be more complicated than it first appears. It involves crypto, but also human trafficking and forced labor compounds in Cambodia and Myanmar.
  
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• Studio Ghibli Lets You Download Free Images from Hayao Miyazaki’s “Final” Film, The Boy and the Heron

  11-04-2024 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  Studio Ghibli fans are still pondering the meaning of Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron, which came out last year. Though by some measure the studio’s most lavish feature yet — not least by the measure of it being the most expensive film yet produced in Japan — it’s also the one least amenable to simple interpretation. Even more so than in his previous work, Miyazaki seems to have intended to make a movie less to be explained than to be experienced. Just as th
  
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• The Fictional Brand Archives: Explore a Growing Collection of Iconic But Fake Brands Found in Movies & TV

  11-04-2024 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  Los Pollos Hermanos, Madrigal Electromotive, Mesa Verde Bank and Trust, Davis & Main: Attorneys at Law—all of these brands come from the Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul universe. They also appear in the Fictional Brands Archive, a website dedicated to “fictional brands found in films, series and video games.” Taking the brands seriously as brands, the site draws on research from a new book written by Lorenzo Bernini entitled Fictional Brand Design. And, with its many entries
  
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• Ernest Hemingway’s Advice to Aspiring, Young Writers (1935)

  10-04-2024 17:06 via openculture.com
  
  Here in the twenty-twenties, a hopeful young novelist might choose to enroll in one of a host of post-graduate programs, and — with luck — there find a willing and able mentor. Back in the nineteen-thirties, things worked a bit differently. “In the spring of 1934, an aspiring writer named Arnold Samuelson hitchhiked from Minnesota to Florida to see if he could land a meeting with his favorite author,” says Nicole Bianchi, narrator of the InkWell Media video above. “
  
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• 67 Logical Fallacies Explained in 11 Minutes

  10-04-2024 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  Fallacies—notes Purdue’s Writing Lab—“are common errors in reasoning that will undermine the logic of your argument. Fallacies can be either illegitimate arguments or irrelevant points, and are often identified because they lack evidence that supports their claim. Avoid these common fallacies in your own arguments and watch for them in the arguments of others.” Purdue’s website then highlights a number of the mental traps that students often fall into—fo
  
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• How Photos Were Transmitted by Wire in 1937: The Innovative Technology of a Century Ago

  09-04-2024 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  When did you last send someone a photo? That question may sound odd, owing to the sheer commonness of the act in question; in the twenty-twenties, we take photographs and share them worldwide without giving it a second thought. But in the nineteen-thirties, almost everyone who sent a photo did so through the mail, if they did it at all. Not that there weren’t more efficient means of transmission, at least to professionals in the cutting-edge newspaper industry: as dramatized in the short 1
  
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• Aldous Huxley, Dying of Cancer, Left This World Tripping on LSD (1963)

  09-04-2024 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  Aldous Huxley put himself forever on the intellectual map when he wrote the dystopian sci-fi novel Brave New World in 1931. (Listen to Huxley narrating a dramatized version here.) The British-born writer was living in Italy at the time, a continental intellectual par excellence.
  Then, six years later, Huxley turned all of this upside down. He headed West, to Hollywood, the newest of the New World, where he took a stab at writing screenplays (with not much luck) and started experimenting wit
  
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• How Was the Great Pyramid Built?; What Did the Ancient Egyptian Language Sound Like?; Were There Bars in Ancient Egypt?: An Egyptologist Answers These Questions & More from Internet Users

  08-04-2024 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  What did ancient Egyptians sound like? What did they eat and drink? What ancient Egyptian medicine and tools do we still use in modern times? Why did they practice mummification? Above, Laurel Bestock, a professor from Brown University, discusses everything you ever wanted to know about Ancient Egypt. Not a stranger to popular media productions—Bestock appears in a recent National Geographic production, Egypt’s Lost Wonders—the professor fields every question that comes her way
  
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• When a Medieval Monk Crowdsourced the Most Accurate Map of the World, Creating “the Google Earth of the 1450s”

  08-04-2024 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  If we want to know the precise geographical location of, say, a particular church in Madrid, video arcade in Tokyo or coffee shop in Addis Ababa, we can figure it out in a matter of seconds. This is, in historical terms, a recent development indeed: many of us remember when the most detailed cartographical information we could get about distant lands (or for that matter, most of our own land) revealed to us only its cities and major roads — assuming we even had a world atlas at hand. Now,
  
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• G.H.Y Culture & Media Holding Co., Limited's (SGX:XJB) P/S Still Appears To Be Reasonable - Yahoo Canada Shine On

  06-04-2024 01:04 via news.google.com
  
  G.H.Y Culture & Media Holding Co., Limited's (SGX:XJB) P/S Still Appears To Be Reasonable  Yahoo Canada Shine On
  
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• 17 Minutes of Charles Schulz Drawing Peanuts

  05-04-2024 11:01 via openculture.com
  
  Anyone can learn to draw the cast of Peanuts, but few can do it every day for nearly half a century. The latter, as far as we know, amounts to a group of one: Charles Schulz, who not only created that world-famous comic strip but drew it single-handed throughout its entire run. He was, as a nineteen-sixties CBS profile put it, “a one-man production team: writer, humorist, social critic.” That clip opens the video above, which compiles footage of Schulz drawing Peanuts while making ob
  
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• Nobel Prize-Winning Psychologist Daniel Kahneman (RIP) Explains the Key Question Every Investor Must Ask, and Why It’s a Fool’s Errand to Pick Stocks

  05-04-2024 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  This past week, the influential psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman passed away at age 90. The winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, Kahneman wrote the bestselling book Thinking, Fast and Slow where he explained the two systems of thinking that shape human decisions. These include “System 1,” which relies on fast, automatic and unconscious thinking, and then “System 2,” which requires attention and concentration and works more slowly. And it’s
  
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• How to Rewire Your Brain in 6 Weeks: A BBC Reporter Explores How Everyday Life Changes Can Alter Our Brains

  04-04-2024 11:00 via openculture.com
  If you suspect that your brain isn’t quite suited for modern life, you’re not alone. In fact, that state of mind has probably been closer to the rule than the exception throughout modernity itself. It’s just that the mix of things we have to think about keeps changing: “The school run. Work calls. Inflation. Remember your lines,” says BBC science reporter Melissa Hogenboom in the video above. “Our brain never evolved for any of this, and yet here we are, getti
  
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• What Earth Could Look Like in 2050 If We Do Nothing About Climate Change

  04-04-2024 10:00 via openculture.com
  
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  What could our future world look like if we continue to do nothing about climate change? That’s the question posed by a new TED ED video, written by Shannon Odell and directed by Sofia Pashaei. We are already seeing the effects of climate change. If you’re paying even a little attention, you’re feeling the hotter summers (which is reflected in the data). You’re noticing the increasing number of droughts. You’re seeing the growing number of fore
  
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• David Lynch Explains Why Depression Is the Enemy of Creativity–and Why Meditation Is the Solution

  03-04-2024 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  David Lynch has a variety of notions about what it takes to make art, but suffering is not among them. “This is part of the myth, I think,” he said in one interview. “Van Gogh did suffer. He suffered a lot. But I think he didn’t suffer while he was painting.” That is, “he didn’t need to be suffering to do those great paintings.” As Lynch sees it, “the more you suffer, the less you want to create. If you’re truly depressed, they say, you
  
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• Sun Ra Plays a Music Therapy Gig at a Psychiatric Hospital & Inspires a Patient to Talk for the First Time in Years

  03-04-2024 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  For some time now it has been fashionable to diagnose dead famous people with mental illnesses we never knew they had when they were alive. These postmortem clinical interventions can seem accurate or far-fetched, and mostly harmless—unless we let them color our appreciation of an artist’s work, or negatively influence the way we treat eccentric living personalities. Overall, I tend to think the state of a creative individual’s mental health is a topic
  
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• Download 9,200+ Free Films from the Prelinger Archives: Documentaries, Cartoons & More

  02-04-2024 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  Depending on how you reckon it, the “American century” has already ended, is now drawing to its close, or has some life left in it yet. But whatever its boundaries, that ambiguous period has been culturally defined by one medium above all: film, or more broadly speaking, motion pictures. These very words might start a series of clips rolling in your mind, a highlight reel of industrial developments, political speeches, protest marches, sports victories, NASA missions, and foreign war
  
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• Is America Declining Like Ancient Rome?

  02-04-2024 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  Pursued to any depth, the question of whether the United States of America counts as an empire becomes difficult to address with clarity. On one hand, the country has exerted a strong cultural influence on most of the world for the better part of a century, a phenomenon not unrelated to the military presence that extends far beyond its borders. (In Korea, where I live, I once met a former KATUSA, the branch of the Korean Army seconded to the US Army, who told me he’d joined because he &ldq
  
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• Goethe’s Theory of Colors: The 1810 Treatise That Inspired Kandinsky & Early Abstract Painting

  01-04-2024 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  I doubt I need to list for you the many titles of the 18th century German savant and polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, but allow me to add one or two that were new to me, at least: color theorist (or phenomenologist of color) and progenitor of abstract expressionism. As a fascinating Booktryst post informs us, Goethe’s book on color, Zur Farbenlehre (Theory of Colors), written in 1810, disputed the Newtonian view of the subject and formulated a psychological and philosophical account o
  
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• Learn the Korean Language with Hundreds of Episodes of Let’s Speak Korean Free Online

  01-04-2024 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  What with the rise of Korean pop culture over the past decade or so — the virality of Psy’s “Gangnam Style,” BTS’ rise on the Billboard chart, Bong Joon-ho’s Academy Award for Parasite, and the worldwide Netflix phenomenon that was Squid Game — the Korean language is now avidly studied around the world. Back in the nineties, few in Korea would have imagined that possible, and fewer still in the West. I vividly remember the first day of an extracurricula
  
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• Gertrude Stein Gets a Snarky Rejection Letter from a Publisher (1912)

  29-03-2024 09:08 via openculture.com
  
  
  Gertrude Stein considered herself an experimental writer and wrote what The Poetry Foundation calls “dense poems and fictions, often devoid of plot or dialogue,” with the result being that “commercial publishers slighted her experimental writings and critics dismissed them as incomprehensible.” Take, for example, what happened when Stein sent a manuscript to Alfred C. Fifield, a London-based publisher, and received a rejection letter mocking her prose in return. Accordin
  
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• The Song From the 1500’s That Blows Rick Beato Away: An Introduction to John Dowland’s Entrancing Music

  28-03-2024 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  In 2006, Sting released an album called Songs from the Labyrinth, a collaboration with Bosnian lutenist Edin Karamazov consisting mostly of compositions by Renaissance composer John Dowland. This was regarded by some as rather eccentric, but to listeners familiar with the early music revival that had already been going on for a few decades, it would have been almost too obvious a choice. For Dowland had long since been rediscovered as one of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century&rsquo
  
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• The Beautiful Art of Making Japanese Calligraphy Ink Out of Soot & Glue

  28-03-2024 09:00 via openculture.com
  
  Founded in 1577, Kobaien remains Japan’s oldest manufacturer of sumi ink sticks. Made of soot and animal glue, the ink stick—when ground against an inkstone, with a little water added—produces a beautiful black ink used by Japanese calligraphers. And, often, a 200-gram ink stick from Kobaien can cost over $1,000.
  How can soot and animal glue command such a high price? As the Business Insider video above shows, there’s a fine art to making each ingredient—an art hone
  
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• Get Unlimited Access to Courses & Certificates: Coursera Is Offering $100 Off of Coursera Plus Until March 31

  28-03-2024 05:26 via openculture.com
  
  A heads up on a deal: Between now and March 31, 2024, Coursera is offering a $100 discount on its annual subscription plan called “Coursera Plus.” Normally priced at $399, Coursera Plus (now available for $299) gives you access to 7,000+ world-class courses for one all-inclusive subscription price. This includes Coursera’s Specializations and Professional Certificates, all of which are taught by top instructors from leading universities and companies (e.g. Yale, Duke, Goo
  
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• Hear the Evolution of Mozart’s Music, Composed from Ages 5 to 35

  27-03-2024 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  More than a quarter of a millennium after he composed his first pieces of music, different listeners will evaluate differently the specific nature of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s genius. But one can hardly fail to be impressed by the fact that he wrote those works when he was five years old (or, as some scholars have it, four years old). It’s not unknown, even today, for precocious, musically inclined children of that age to sit down and put together simple melodies, or even reasonably
  
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