Culture & Media news

• The Ancient Tool Used in Japan to Strengthen Memory & Focus: The Abacus

  07-01-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  William Gibson famously observed that the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. That line is often thought to have been inspired by Japan, which was already projecting a thoroughly futuristic image, at least in popular culture, by the time he made his debut with Neuromancer in 1984. But as anyone who’s spent enough time in the country understands — albeit not without frustration — even twenty-first-century Japan remains in many ways a pre-dig
  
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• The Greek Mythology Family Tree: A Visual Guide Shows How Zeus, Athena, and the Ancient Gods Are Related

  06-01-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  It was long ago that polytheism, as the story comes down to us, gave way to monotheism. Humanity used to have many gods, and now almost every religious believer acknowledges just one — though which god, exactly, does vary. Some popular theories of “big history” hold that, as the scale of a society grows larger, the number of deities proposed by its faiths gets smaller. In that scheme, it makes sense that the growing Roman Empire would eventually adopt Christianity, and also tha
  
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• 300,000 Wondrous Nature Illustrations Put Online by The Biodiversity Heritage Library

  06-01-2026 10:00 via openculture.com
  Are we truly in the midst of a human-caused sixth mass extinction, an era of “biological annihilation”? Many scientists and popular science writers say yes, using terms like “Holocene” or “Anthropocene” to describe what follows the Ordovician, Devonian, Permian, Triassic, and Cretaceous periods. Peter Brannen, the author of extinction history The Ends of the Earth has found at least one scientist who thinks the concept is “junk.” But Brannen
  
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• Discover Ichi-go Ichi‑e, the Japanese Art of Savoring Every Moment

  05-01-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  Each culture has its own sayings about the uniqueness and transience of the present moment. In recent years, the English-speakers have often found themselves reminded, through the expression “YOLO,” that they only live once. (The question of whether that should really be “YLOO,” or “You Live Only Once,” we put aside for the time being.) In Japan, unsurprisingly, one sometimes hears a much more venerable equivalent: “ichi-go ichi‑e,” whic
  
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• J.R.R. Tolkien, Using a Tape Recorder for the First Time, Reads from The Hobbit for 30 Minutes (1952)

  05-01-2026 10:00 via openculture.com
  Having not revisited The Hobbit in some time, I’ve felt the familiar pull—shared by many readers—to return to Tolkien’s fairy-tale novel itself. It was my first exposure to Tolkien, and the perfect book for a young reader ready to dive into moral complexity and a fully-realized fictional world.
  And what better guide could there be through The Hobbit than Tolkien himself, reading (above) from the 1937 work? In this 1952 recording in two parts (part 2 is below), the ve
  
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• When Two Filmmakers Make the Same Movie — and One of Them Is Werner Herzog

  02-01-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  In 1991, the French husband-and-wife volcanologist-filmmaker team Maurice and Katia Krafft were killed by the flow of ash from the eruption of Mount Unzen in Nagasaki. Inexplicably, Werner Herzog didn’t get around to making a film about them for more than 30 years. These would seem to be ideal subjects for the documentary half of his career, a large portion of which he’s spent on portraits of eccentric, romantic, often foolhardy, and more than occasionally ill-fated individuals who p
  
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• The Birth of Espresso: The Story Behind the Coffee Shots That Fuel Modern Life

  02-01-2026 10:00 via openculture.com
  Espresso is neither bean nor roast.
  It is a method of pressurized coffee brewing that ensures speedy delivery, and it has birthed a whole culture.
  Americans may be accustomed to camping out in cafes with their laptops for hours, but Italian coffee bars are fast-paced environments where customers buzz in for a quick pick-me-up, then head right back out, no seat required.
  It’s the sort of efficiency the Father of the Modern Advertising Poster, Leonetto Cappiello, alluded to in his famou
  
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• What’s Entering the Public Domain in 2026: Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, All Quiet on the Western Front, Betty Boop & More

  01-01-2026 22:00 via openculture.com
  Though it isn’t the kind of thing one hears discussed every day, serious Disney fans do tend to know that Goofy’s original name was Dippy Dawg. But how many of the non-obsessive know that Mickey’s faithful pet Pluto was first called Rover? (We pass over in dignified silence the quasi-philosophical question of why the former dog is humanoid and the latter isn’t.) It is Rover, as distinct from Pluto, who passes into the public domain this new year, one of a cast of now-libe
  
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• The Mystery of How a Samurai Ended up in 17th Century Venice

  31-12-2025 10:00 via openculture.com
  It wouldn’t surprise us to come across a Japanese person in Venice. Indeed, given the global touristic appeal of the place, we could hardly imagine a day there without a visitor from the Land of the Rising Sun. But things were different in 1873, just five years after the end of the sakoku policy that all but closed Japan to the world for two and a half centuries. On a mission to research the modern ways of the newly accessible outside world, a Japanese delegation arrived in Venice and
  
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• J. R. R. Tolkien Admitted to Disliking Dune “With Some Intensity” (1966)

  30-12-2025 11:00 via openculture.com
  One can easily imagine a reader enjoying both The Lord of the Rings and Dune. Both of those works of epic fantasy were published in the form of a series of long novels beginning in the mid-twentieth century; both create elaborate worlds of their own, right down to details of ecology and language; both seriously (and these days, unfashionably) concern themselves with the theme of what constitutes heroic action; both have even inspired multiple big-budget Hollywood spectacles. The reader equ
  
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• Brian Eno’s Book & Music Recommendations

  30-12-2025 10:00 via openculture.com
  If you’re a regular listener, you know that Ezra Klein wraps up his podcast interviews with a familiar question: what three books would you recommend to the audience? When Klein interviewed Brian Eno in October, the producer had these three books to offer.
  First up was Printing and the Mind of Man, a catalog from an exhibition held at the British Museum in 1963. “It was about the history of printing, but actually, the book is about the most important books in the Western canon and th
  
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• How Far Back in History Can You Start to Understand English?

  29-12-2025 11:01 via openculture.com
  It’s easy to imagine the myriad difficulties with which you’d be faced if you were suddenly transported a millennium back in time. But if you’re a native (or even proficient) English speaker in an English-speaking part of the world, the language, at least, surely wouldn’t be a problem. Or so you’d think, until your first encounter with utterances like “þat troe is daed on gaerde” or “þa rokes forleten urne tun.” Both of those
  
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• How to Jumpstart Your Creative Process with William S. Burroughs’ Cut-Up Technique

  29-12-2025 10:00 via openculture.com
  The inner critic creates writer’s block and stifles adventurous writing, hems it in with safe clichés and overthinking. Every writer has to find his or her own way to get free of that sourpuss rationalist who insists on strangling each thought with logical analysis and fitting each idea into an oppressive predetermined scheme or ideology. William S. Burroughs, one of the most adventurous writers to emerge from the mid-20th century, famously employed what he called the cut-up method.
  
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• Salvador Dalí’s Surreal Jewelry Designs: From Throbbing Heart Necklaces to Medusa Brooches

  26-12-2025 10:00 via openculture.com
  Upon hearing the name of Salvador Dalí, even a total layman in the art world is bound to get visions of melting clocks. Surprisingly, for an artist who showed so much self-marketing savvy, Dalí never brought an actual timepiece in that distinctively, even canonically surreal shape to market. But that hardly stopped Cartier from putting out the Crash, whose distorted shape may have always brought The Persistence of Memory to mind, but whose name hints at the inspiration of
  
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• Discover the First Depiction of Santa Claus (and Its Origins in Civil War Propaganda)

  25-12-2025 10:00 via openculture.com
  It will no doubt come as a relief to many readers that Santa Claus appears to have been a Union supporter. We know this because he appears distributing gifts to soldiers from that side of the Mason-Dixon in one of his earliest depictions. That illustration, “Santa Claus in Camp” (above), first appeared in the Harper’s Weekly Christmas issue of 1862, when the American Civil War was still tearing its way through the country. Its artist, a Bavarian immigrant named Thomas Nas
  
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• Discover 20 Historical Christmas Recipes: Fruitcake, Gingerbread, Figgy Pudding & More

  24-12-2025 10:00 via openculture.com
  One can hardly consider the Christmas season for long, at least in the English-speaking world, without the work of Charles Dickens coming to mind. That owes for the most part, of course, to A Christmas Carol, the novella that revived the public culture of a holiday that had been falling into desuetude by the mid-nineteenth century. Whatever its literary shortcomings, the book offers a host of memorable images, not least culinary ones: Mrs. Cratchit’s pudding, for instance, which Dickens li
  
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• Top 10 Alternative Christmas Movie Lists: Horror, Action, Comedy & More

  23-12-2025 16:02 via openculture.com
  Die Hard is a Christmas movie. That once-contrarian categorization has increasingly been accepted over the past couple of decades, at least since an editor with whom I’ve often worked first declared it in a Slate roundup. As a result, John McTiernan’s sturdy piece of one-building eighties Hollywood action may have displaced It’s a Wonderful Life as a holiday home-video tradition in certain households. But it’s also stoked a broader desire for ever more alternati
  
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• The Life and Work of Afrobeat Creator Fela Kuti Explored by Radiolab’s Jad Abumrad

  23-12-2025 10:00 via openculture.com
  When discussing a musician like Fela Kuti, many of our usual terms fail us. They fail us, that is, if we came of age in a musical culture in which artists and bands put out an album of ten or so lyrics-forward songs every two or three years, promoting it on tour while also playing their biggest hits. Fela — as all his fans refer to him — could put out six or seven albums in a single year, and refused to play live any material he’d already recorded. Even the word song, as we kno
  
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• What Pompeii Looked Like Hours Before Its Destruction: A Reconstruction

  22-12-2025 16:41 via openculture.com
  However celebrated by historians, scrutinized by archaeologists, and descended-upon by tourists it may be, Pompeii is not exceptional — not even in the fate of having been buried in ash by Mount Vesuvius in the year 76, which also happened to the nearby town of Herculaneum. Rather, it is the sheer ordinariness of that medium-sized provincial Roman city that we most value today, inadvertently preserved as it was by that volcanic disaster. The new Lost in Time video above reconstructs Pompei
  
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• Hunter S. Thompson Sets His Christmas Tree on Fire, Nearly Burning His House Down (1990)

  19-12-2025 11:00 via openculture.com
  It was something of a Christmas ritual at Hunter S. Thompson’s Colorado cabin, Owl Farm. Every year, his secretary Deborah Fuller would take down the Christmas tree and leave it on the front porch rather than dispose of it entirely. That’s because Hunter, more often than not, wanted to set it on fire. In 1990, Sam Allis, a writer for the then formidable TIME magazine, visited Thompson’s home and watched the fiery tradition unfold. He wrote:
  I gave up on the interview and starte
  
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• A Visual Timeline of World History: Watch the Rise & Fall of Civilizations Over 5,000 Years

  18-12-2025 11:00 via openculture.com
  In the video above, UsefulCharts creator Matt Baker suggests that we not refer to the period spanning the fifth and the late fifteenth centuries as the “dark ages.” In justification, he doesn’t put forth the argument, now fairly common, that the time in question was actually full of subtle innovation occluded by modern prejudice. The real problem, as he sees it, is that the slowing, if not reversing, of the progress of human society that we’ve traditionally regarded as oc
  
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• The Evil Genius of Fascist Design: How Mussolini and Hitler Used Art & Architecture to Project Power

  17-12-2025 11:00 via openculture.com
  When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they declared the beginning of a “Thousand-Year Reich” that ultimately came up about 988 years short. Fascism in Italy managed to hold on to power for a couple of decades, which was presumably still much less time than Benito Mussolini imagined he’d get on the throne. History shows us that regimes of this kind suffered a fairly severe stability problem, which is perhaps why they needed to put forth such a solid, formidable image.
  
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• Why Coffee Makes You Go #2

  17-12-2025 10:00 via openculture.com
  James Hoffmann, the author of The World Atlas of Coffee and the creator of a coffee-centric YouTube channel, can tell you many things about coffee—from how to roast coffee, to the tools and techniques needed to make espresso, to the ultimate French Press technique. Then he can also get into more tangentially related questions, like why coffee makes you drop the proverbial deuce. Above, Mr. Hoffmann takes you on a short scientific journey through the human body, exploring the effe
  
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• Why Coffee Makes You Do Your Business

  17-12-2025 10:00 via openculture.com
  James Hoffmann, the author of The World Atlas of Coffee and the creator of a coffee-centric YouTube channel, can tell you many things about coffee—from how to roast coffee, to the tools and techniques needed to make espresso, to the ultimate French Press technique. Then he can also get into more tangentially related questions, like why coffee makes you drop the proverbial deuce. Above, Mr. Hoffmann takes you on a short scientific journey through the human body, exploring the effe
  
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• How Movies Created Their Special Effects Before CGI: Metropolis, 2001: A Space Odyssey & More

  16-12-2025 11:00 via openculture.com
  The youngest moviegoers today do not, of course, remember a time before visual effects could be created digitally. What may give us more pause is that, at this point in cinema history, most of their parents don’t remember it either. Consider the fact that Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, with its once impossibly realistic (and still wholly passable) CGI dinosaurs, came out 32 years ago. That may put it, we must acknowledge, into the realm of the “classic,” the kind of pi
  
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• How Many Humans Have Ever Lived, and How Many Are Alive Right Now?

  16-12-2025 10:00 via openculture.com
  ?si=RT8MgKeGcVzX6p9X
  How many people have ever walked the earth? Good question, even if you’ve never quite pondered it before. According to the Population Reference Bureau, a non-profit research organization, if you travel back to 8000 B.C.E., the world population stood at about 5 million. By 1 C.E., the number climbs to 300 million, before gradually increasing to 500 million in 1650. Once we get beyond the plagues of the medieval period, our population explodes, reaching the 1 billion ma
  
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• Take a Tour of 18th-Century London, Recreated with AI

  15-12-2025 11:00 via openculture.com
  If you want to know what it was like to live in seventeenth-century London, read the diary of Samuel Pepys. While doing so, take note of his frequent references to the uncleanliness of the city’s streets: “very dirty and troublesome to walk through,” “mighty dirty after the rain,” and during the large-scale rebuilding in the aftermath of the Great Fire of 1666, “much built, yet very dirty and encumbered.” If you want to know what it was like to live in n
  
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• Tom Jones Performs Prince’s “Purple Rain” Accompanied by Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour (1992)

  15-12-2025 10:00 via openculture.com
  Over the decades, Tom Jones has performed with the best of them. In 1969, we can find him singing “Long Time Gone” with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and taking them delightfully by surprise. The same goes for his duet with Janis Joplin in that same year. Now fast forward to the 1990s. In this decade, Jones teamed up with the Swedish rock band The Cardigans and performed a rollicking version of the Talking Heads “Burning Down the House.” And, rather unexpectedly,
  
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• Göbekli Tepe: The 12,000-Year-Old Ruins That Rewrite the Story of Civilization

  12-12-2025 09:11 via openculture.com
  We didn’t have civilization until we had cities, and we didn’t have cities until we had agriculture. So, at least, goes a widely accepted narrative in “big history” — a narrative somewhat troubled by the discovery of ruins on Göbekli Tepe, or “Potbelly Hill,” in southeastern Turkey. Apparently inhabited from around 9500 to 8000 BC, the ancient settlement predates the Pyramids of Giza by nearly 8,000 years, and Stonehenge by about 6,000 years. Though
  
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• Download 1300 Still Images from the Animated Films of Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli

  11-12-2025 11:00 via openculture.com
  You may have seen every single one of Studio Ghibli’s animated films, going well beyond the Hayao Miyazaki-directed My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, and Kiki’s Delivery Service to the less widely known but also charmingly crafted likes of Ocean Waves, My Neighbors the Yamadas, and The Cat Returns. Even so, the question remains: have you really seen them all? Experiencing them in the theater or on home video is only the first stage of the process. Ideally, each element of a Gh
  
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• The Earliest Known Customer Complaint Was Made 3,800 Years Ago: Read the Rant on an Ancient Babylonian Tablet

  11-12-2025 10:00 via openculture.com
  Image via Wikimedia Commons
  The site Fast Company published an article that describes the “Complaint Restraint project,” an initiative that aims to create a “positive life by eliminating negative statements.” It’s an admirable goal. Though most of us have a perverse love of wallowing in our misery—a human trait amplified a thousandfold by the internet—complaining rarely makes things any better. As in the Buddha’s parable of the “second
  
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• Was the Baghdad Battery Actually a Battery?: An Archaeologist Demystifies the 2,000-Year-Old Artifact

  10-12-2025 11:00 via openculture.com
  Image by Ironie, via Wikimedia Commons
  The average Open Culture reader may well be aware that there is such a thing as Archaeology YouTube. What could come as more of a surprise is how much back-and-forth there is within that world. Below, we have a video from the channel Artifactually Speaking in which Brad Hafford, a University of Pennsylvania archaeologist, gives his take on the so-called Baghdad Battery, an ancient artifact discovered in modern-day Iraq. He does so in the form of a response
  
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• See What the Original Mona Lisa Likely Looked Like

  09-12-2025 11:00 via openculture.com
  If you want to see the Mona Lisa in real life, your first thought may not be to head to the Prado. But according to a school of thought that has emerged in recent years, the Mona Lisa in Madrid has a greater claim to artistic faithfulness than the one in Paris. That’s because researchers have discovered compelling evidence suggesting that what was long considered just another copy of the most famous painting in the world wasn’t made after Leonardo had completed the original, but
  
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• Read the Uplifting Letter That Albert Einstein Sent to Marie Curie During a Time of Personal Crisis (1911)

  09-12-2025 10:00 via openculture.com
  Marie Curie’s 1911 Nobel Prize win, her second, for the discovery of radium and polonium, would have been cause for public celebration in her adopted France, but for the nearly simultaneous revelation of her affair with fellow physicist Paul Langevin, the fellow standing to the right of a 32-year-old Albert Einstein in the above group photo from the 1911 Solvay Conference in Physics.
  Both stories broke while Curie—unsurprisingly, the sole woman in the photo—was attending the c
  
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• How Frank Gehry (RIP) and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Changed Architecture

  08-12-2025 11:00 via openculture.com
  It felt, for quite some time there, like the age of Frank Gehry would never end. But now that the latest defining figure of American architecture — or technically, Canadian-American architecture — has died at the age of 96, the time has come to ask when, exactly, his age began. Or rather, with which building: Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles? The Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris? The radical renovation of his own humble Santa Monica home often cited at the orig
  
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• “The Matilda Effect”: How Pioneering Women Scientists Have Been Written Out of Science History

  08-12-2025 10:00 via openculture.com
  Photo via Wikimedia Commons
  The history of science, like most every history we learn, comes to us as a procession of great, almost exclusively white, men, unbroken but for the occasional token woman—well-deserving of her honors but seemingly anomalous nonetheless. “If you believe the history books,” notes the Timeline series The Matilda Effect, “science is a guy thing. Discoveries are made by men, which spur further innovation by men, followed by acclaim and prizes for m
  
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• The Gnostic Gospels: An Introduction to the Forbidden Teachings of Jesus

  05-12-2025 10:00 via openculture.com
  It would be impossible to understand Western civilization without understanding the history of Christianity. But in order to do that, it may serve us well to think of it as the history of Christianities, plural. So suggests Hochelaga creator Tommie Trelawny in the new video above, which explains the Gnostic Gospels, the “forbidden teachings of Jesus.” As a system of beliefs, Gnosticism is a fairly far cry from the mainstream forms of Christianity with which most of us are familiar to
  
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• Did Tintin Creator Hergé Collaborate with the Nazis? A Historical Investigation

  04-12-2025 11:00 via openculture.com
  The Adventures of Tintin may be a children’s comic series from mid-twentieth-century Europe, but its appeal has long since transcended the boundaries of form, culture, and generation. In fact, many if not most seriously dedicated fans of Tintin are in middle age and beyond, and few of them can have avoided ever considering the question of his creator’s activities during the Second World War. Georges Remi, known by the nom de plume Hergé, was born to a lower-middle-class f
  
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• Why Do Filmmakers Call The Battle of Algiers the Greatest War Movie Ever?: Watch It Free Online

  03-12-2025 11:00 via openculture.com
  Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film, the loose Thomas Pynchon adaptation One Battle After Another, serves up many a memorable scene. But for a certain kind of cinephile, nothing — not the terrorist attacks, not the chases, not the swerves into askew comedy — sticks in the mind quite so much as the moment in which Leonardo diCaprio’s stoned protagonist tunes in to a broadcast of Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers. First released in 1966 (and currently free to wa
  
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• The Oldest Known Depiction of Human Sexuality: The Turin Papyrus (Circa 1150 B.C.E.)

  03-12-2025 10:00 via openculture.com
  Image via Wikimedia Commons
  With the old joke about every generation thinking they invented sex, Listverse brings us the papyrus above, the oldest depiction of sex on record. Painted sometime in the Ramesside Period (1292–1075 B.C.E.), the fragments above—called the “Turin Erotic Papyrus” because of their “discovery” in the Egyptian Museum of Turin, Italy—only hint at the frank versions of ancient sex they depict (see a graphic partial reconstruction at
  
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• The Unlikely Friendship of Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla

  02-12-2025 11:00 via openculture.com
  Mark Twain was, in the estimation of many, the United States of America’s first truly homegrown man of letters. And in keeping with what would be recognized as the can-do American spirit, he couldn’t resist putting himself forth now and again as a man of science — or, more practically, a man of technology. Here on Open Culture, we’ve previously featured his patented inventions (including a better bra strap), the typewriter of which he made pioneering use to write a
  
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• Talking Heads’ David Byrne Performs a Tiny Desk Concert

  02-12-2025 10:00 via openculture.com
  If you’ve seen a David Byrne concert in recent years, you know that he performs with a large ensemble of musicians, each carrying their own instruments across the stage, all while moving in intricately choreographed patterns. On his current tour, Byrne and his band stopped by NPR’s studio and played a very different kind of show—a show tightly squeezed behind NPR’s Tiny Desk. As you will see above, they performed two songs (“Everybody Laughs” and “Don&rs
  
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• Inside Disney’s Long, Frustrated Quest to Create Artificial Human Beings: A Six-Hour Documentary

  01-12-2025 11:03 via openculture.com
  For young children today, just as it was for generations of their predecessors, nothing is quite so thrilling about their first visit to a Disney theme park as catching a glimpse of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, or another beloved character greeting them in real life. Creating this memorable experience requires nothing more advanced than a well-trained employee (or “cast member,” as the company puts it) in an oversized costume. Nevertheless, effective though it may be, it wasn’t p
  
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• An Immersive, ASMR-Style Look at Japanese Woodblock Printing

  01-12-2025 10:00 via openculture.com
  While not every Open Culture reader dreams of moving to Japan and becoming a woodblock printmaker, it’s a safe bet that at least a few of you entertain just such a fantasy from time to time. David Bull, a British-Born Canadian who got his first exposure to the art of ukiyo‑e in his late twenties, actually did it. Though he’s been living in Japan and steadily pursuing his art there since 1986, only in recent years has he become known around the world. That’s thanks to his
  
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• How the “Marvelization” of Cinema Accelerates the Decline of Filmmaking

  28-11-2025 10:00 via openculture.com
  As hard as it may be to believe, some of us have never seen a movie belonging to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. If you’re one of those uninitiated, none of the countless clips incorporated into the Like Stories of Old video essay above will tempt you to get initiated. Nor will the laments aired by host Tom van der Linden, who, despite once enjoying the MCU himself, eventually came to wonder why keeping up with its releases had begun to feel less like a thrill than a chore. As if their CGI-
  
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• What Was the Most Revolutionary Painting of the 20th Century?: The Case for Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon

  26-11-2025 11:00 via openculture.com
  Practically anyone could take one glance at Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and identify it as a Picasso, even if they’ve never seen it before and couldn’t say anything else about it. That alone goes some way to explaining why the painting would end up ranked as the most important artwork of the twentieth century, at least according to a study by University of Chicago economist David W. Galenson. For that title it beat out the likes of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty,
  
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• Thanksgiving Menu at the Plaza Hotel in New York City (1899)

  26-11-2025 10:00 via openculture.com
  Above, we have the menu for an 1899 Thanksgiving dinner at the Plaza Hotel in New York. If you were a turkey, you had it relatively easy. But the ducks? Not so much. On the menu, you’ll find Mallard duck and Ruddy duck. But also Red-head duck, Long Island duckling, Teal duck and Canvas-back duck, too. A duck in NYC was not a good place to be.
  And, oh, those prices!  Not one item above a few dollars. But let’s account for inflation, shall we? In 2021, one Redditor noted: “
  
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• How to Improve Your Attention Span: Daniel Pink’s Strategies for the Digital Age

  25-11-2025 11:00 via openculture.com
  In his new video above, the writer Daniel Pink proposes the following exercise: “Grab a book and time yourself. How long can you read without getting up or checking your phone? Really try to push yourself, but don’t judge yourself if it’s only a few minutes. Write down your time; that’s your baseline.” From there, you “train your attention like a muscle: build it by starting small and gradually stretching it.” This is just one of five strategies he recom
  
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• Watch Winsor McCay’s The Sinking of the Lusitania, the First Major Animated Propaganda Film (1918)

  25-11-2025 10:00 via openculture.com
  You might know Winsor McCay (1867? ‑1934) for the gorgeously surreal Little Nemo comic strip or for his early animated short Gertie the Dinosaur (1914). But did you know that he also created some of the earliest examples of animated propaganda ever?
  On May 7, 1915, the RMS Lusitania was just off the coast of Ireland, heading towards its destination of Liverpool, when a German U‑boat attacked the ship without warning. Eighteen minutes after two torpedoes slammed into the ship, it
  
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• Take a 2‑Hour Walking Tour Through New York City: Architects Reveal the Secrets Behind Its Most Iconic Buildings

  24-11-2025 10:00 via openculture.com
  New York isn’t the oldest city in the United States of America, and it certainly isn’t the newest. But it is, quite possibly, the American city where more layers of history coexist than any other, a quality that manifests most vividly in its built environment. Even the most casual tourist can sense the sheer variety of time periods embodied in the buildings around them on, say, a stroll down Broadway — one of the streets featured in the ten-part walking tour compiled
  
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