Culture & Media news

• The History of Glam Rock and How It Put an End to the Hippie Era

  07-08-2026 18:16 via openculture.com
  
  Cast your mind back to the distant year 2021 and recall, if you will, its music, its fashions, the obsessions of its youth. This probably won’t be a difficult task, since in most respects — the dampening effects of the pandemic notwithstanding — none of those aspects of popular culture seem any different today. Yet roughly the same time span separated Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” and David Bowie’s “Starman
  
  Read more

• How Ancient Greek Warships Worked: The Engineering of the Trireme Explained in 3D Animation

  06-08-2026 18:46 via openculture.com
  
  Recall, if you will, the first time you read Book 2 of Homer’s Iliad. The section likely to have given you the most trouble — unless, of course, you’re blessed with an obsessive interest in ancient naval warfare — is the much-remarked-upon Catalogue of Ships, a rundown of not just the contingents of the Achaean army sailing to Troy, but also the ships they’re doing it in. However evocative Homer’s poetry, more than a few modern readers may face a certain diffi
  
  Read more

• Read 20,000+ Golden Age Comic Books Free Online: Superheroes, Westerns, Romance, Horror, and More

  05-08-2026 16:34 via openculture.com
  
  For generations of kids in the twentieth century, few pleasures were as intoxicating as a trip to the comic-book shop with the week’s allowance fresh in hand. Those of us who grew up in the nineties had any number of high-production-value paper superhero spectacles from major publishers on which to blow our money. Personally, I preferred the greater value of Carl Barks’ old Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck stories then being reprinted. But nothing offered quite so much value as the car
  
  Read more

• What Did Ancient Rome Look Like? A 3D Virtual Tour of the City During the Second Century AD

  04-08-2026 17:51 via openculture.com
  
  The description “open-air museum” has often been applied, in various senses both positive and negative, to the country of Italy in general and the city of Rome in particular. Indeed, only the imagination of a truly blinkered (or unusually phone-addicted) tourist could fail to be cast back to antiquity upon entering its historic center, itself an officially designated UNESCO World Heritage Site. Yet it also takes little exposure to the intense culture of tourism and all it has wrought
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• Watch the Evolution of Manhattan Unfold in a Timelapse Video, from 1600 to 2026

  03-08-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  A Manhattan without skyscrapers sounds difficult, if not impossible, to imagine today. But such a place really did exist, at least up until the turn of the twentieth century. While the title of the very first skyscraper ever built may go to the Home Insurance Building in Chicago, New York City caught up so aggressively thereafter — in its characteristic style — that it soon became practically synonymous with tall steel-framed towers. The shape of modern Manhattan would surely have be
  
  Read more

• Why Mapmakers Put Fake Towns on Their Maps in the 1920s — and the One That Became Real

  31-07-2026 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  Open Culture readers may know John Green best for Crash Course, the YouTube channel that teaches everything you need to know about subjects like world history, U.S. history, big history, literature, and philosophy. Or at least it teaches everything a teenage student facing down the prospect of Advanced Placement subject exams needs to know. Such viewers have always had a decent chance of knowing Green as the author of novels for young readers like Looking for Alaska, The Fault in Our Stars,
  
  Read more

• A Guide to Every Major Film Adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey Before Christopher Nolan’s Movie

  30-07-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  If you plan on shooting your own adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, bear in mind how much rests on your choice of leading man. In order to play Odysseus, an actor must summon a real gravitas, but also a still-smoldering vitality: here is a man who led the Greek army to defeat Troy, but still has the doggedness to make the decade-long journey back home to his wife. In the mid-nineteen-fifties, Hollywood had just the chin for the job: Kirk Douglas, who plays Odysseus under his Latin name in the
  
  Read more

• How a 13th-Century Monk Created a Prayer Manuscript by Writing Over—and Accidentally Preserving—Archimedes’ Groundbreaking Mathematical Works

  29-07-2026 11:04 via openculture.com
  
  In Jerusalem of the year 1229, there lived a Greek Orthodox monk named Johannes Myronas. Needing some parchment for a prayer book, he grabbed some already-used pages, erased their existing content, and over them wrote down “prayers for the dead, prayers for repentance, blessings for the loaves at Easter, and even a prayer for those who were unreasonably excluded,” says math-and-science YouTuber Ben Syversen in the video above. Myronas may have fulfilled his religious duty without usi
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• Christopher Hitchens Explains Why Homer’s Odyssey Still Matters to Our World (2000)

  28-07-2026 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  At the moment, the answer to the question of why we should read Homer’s Odyssey seems rather straightforward: so we can more intelligently voice our opinions on Christopher Nolan’s new blockbuster film adaptation. A quarter-century ago, the matter was somewhat less clear. Still, an occasion had presented itself in the form of a new English translation, by University of Kansas classics professor Stanley Lombardo. That book, and the work of Homer in general, was the subject of a l
  
  Read more

• Christopher Nolan Picks 15 Favorite Films from the Criterion Closet

  27-07-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  Maybe you’ve already seen Christopher Nolan’s new cinematic interpretation of the Odyssey more than once; maybe you don’t know whether you’ll ever get around to it at all. Either way, you’ve got to admit that the man makes films in a way very few living directors do. His combination of blockbuster-scale spectacle and personal vision, a rare experience indeed at the theater these days, can really only be achieved by filmmakers with a thoroughgoing love of the me
  
  Read more

• Where Did Europe’s Countries—and the United Kingdom—Get Their Names?

  24-07-2026 10:05 via openculture.com
  
  The typical student traveling on a Eurail pass will stop in such lands as Österreich, Italia, Česko and Schweiz — also known as Suisse, Svizzera, and Svizra. If that student happens to hail from the English-speaking world, the names Austria, Italy, the Czech Republic (the recent movement for Czechia notwithstanding), and Switzerland will sound more familiar. But the question inevitably comes to mind while riding between one historically and culturally rich cap
  
  Read more

• A Free Online Archive Lets You Explore 5.8 Million Works of Art Spanning 5,000 Years of History

  23-07-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  Though it’s traditionally meant “last in a progression or series,” as Merriam-Webster puts it, the word ultimate has been more often used in recent decades to mean “the best or most extreme of its kind.” The name of a recently launched digital archive performs a rare inversion, labeling as last a creation marked not by finality but extremity. Billed as “the largest search engine for museum art,” The Last Museum cu
  
  Read more

• How Did Everything Begin?: Animations on the Origins of the Universe Narrated by X‑Files Star Gillian Anderson

  23-07-2026 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  We previously brought you the BBC series of short animated videos, A History of Ideas. Produced in collaboration with the UK’s Open University and narrated by Harry Shearer, these fun introductions to such philosophers as Simone de Beauvoir and Edmund Burke, and such weighty philosophical topics as free will and the problem of evil, make challenging, abstract concepts accessible to non-philosophers. Now the series is back with a new chapter, How Did Everything Begin?, a survey of several t
  
  Read more

• Umberto Eco’s Personal Library Opens to the Public: More Than 32,000 Books, Exactly as He Left Them

  22-07-2026 18:44 via openculture.com
  
  Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose sold so well that its English translator William Weaver could add an extension onto his Tuscan villa, which he called the “Eco Chamber.” The Biblioteca Eco, or Eco Library, whose ribbon-cutting earlier this month you can see in the Italian news clip just above, may not be as wittily named, but it’s a much more ambitious project. It was opened this year, the tenth anniversary of the famed philosopher, semiotician, novelist, and
  
  Read more

• Hear the Haunting Sound of an Ancient Celtic War Trumpet: Silent for 2,000 Years, It Now Sounds Again

  21-07-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  Norfolk is known for its network of rivers and lakes, its stock of medieval churches, and for being the home county of Alan Partridge. Last year, it quite literally unearthed another mark of distinction in the form of an iron age war trumpet. “The bronze trumpet or carnyx is only the third ever found in Britain, and the most complete example discovered anywhere in the world,” writes the Guardian’s Esther Addley. “Fashioned in the shape of a snarling wild an
  
  Read more

• The World’s Greatest Song That Simply Shouldn’t Exist: The Making of The Beatles’ “A Day in the Life”

  20-07-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  Were we to take bets on the single most widely heard alarm clock, the one included on the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” would surely be a popular choice. It comes, you’ll recall, at the beginning of the song’s middle section, when Paul takes over from John and sings about waking up, combing his hair, catching a bus, and having a smoke. Given the lyrics’ subject matter, its inclusion seems natural, and even like one of the most straightforwardly explicable choic
  
  Read more

• Where Did the Monk’s Haircut Come From? A Look at the Rich and Contentious History of the Tonsure

  20-07-2026 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  One might assume from a modern viewpoint that the hairstyles worn by monks arose to deal with male pattern baldness anxiety. As in the school uniform approach, you can’t single out one person’s baldness when everyone is bald. But this, again, would be a modern view, full of the vanity the tonsured—those with religiously shaven heads—ostensibly vowed to renounce. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, the tonsure (from the Latin verb for “to shear”) began as a
  
  Read more

• The Radical, Unclassifiable Art of William Blake

  17-07-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  William Blake is a household name, or not far from it, but things get more complicated when it comes to professional description. He was a poet, a painter, and a printmaker, at least insofar as he wrote poetry, painted paintings, and made prints. But we can’t hope to attain even a basic understanding of his legacy if we regard him as one man who happened to have the energy to do three different things. In fact, the ostensibly separate artistic pursuits in which he engaged were but three as
  
  Read more

• A Walk Through Homer’s Odyssey: A Guide to the Epic Before Seeing Christopher Nolan’s Film

  17-07-2026 09:55 via openculture.com
  
  You’re gearing up to see Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, but you haven’t read the Homeric work. Or you read it so long ago that it feels like you’ve never read it at all. No worries. Above, Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, the hosts of The Rest Is History podcast, take you through the major plot lines of the Odyssey, unpacking the literary and historical meaning of the epic’s different tales. It’s a good primer—just what you need to get ready for one of t
  
  Read more

• The Origins of the Monsters in Homer’s Odyssey: The Cyclops, Sirens, Scylla & More

  16-07-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  Despite having been composed about two and a half millennia before the invention of cinema, Homer’s Odyssey has offered tempting material to generation after generation of filmmakers. Part of the appeal is, of course, the work’s age, which obviates the need for potentially frustrating rights negotiations. But what really captures a director’s imagination about retelling the story of Odysseus’ long journey back to Ithaca must have a great deal to do with the host
  
  Read more

• Explore 1,300+ Beautiful Wildlife Illustrations from the 19th Century, Now Restored and Available Online

  15-07-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  Today, if you want to know about any of the flora or fauna that surround us, you have only to look it up online. After you get your fill of knowledge, you can decide whether or not you want to venture out into the world and see your object of interest in its natural environment (or a controlled simulation thereof). In the Victorian era, things worked a bit differently. Ideally, you’d have grown up in a household, or at least had access to an institution, with the complete set of The Natur
  
  Read more

• How Anti-Chinese Immigration Laws Unexpectedly Led to a Chinese Restaurant Boom in America

  14-07-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  This past spring, the oldest continuously operated family-owned Chinese restaurant in the United States served its last plate of chop suey. Pekin Noodle Parlor had been an institution in Butte, Montana’s Chinatown since 1911, long outlasting the town’s gold-rush boom, but according to its final, fifth-generation owner, it couldn’t survive changing attitudes toward dining out in the twenty-twenties. Whether or not COVID-influenced habits or delivery-app addiction are t
  
  Read more

• Tatlin’s Tower, One of the Most Ambitious Buildings That Was Never Built

  13-07-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  It’s no small project to found a new society, especially when you’re doing it on the scale of a place like Russia. Apart from the considerable practical challenges it entails, there’s also the need for symbols bold enough to represent the underlying ideal. The avant-garde artist Vladimir Tatlin took it upon himself to create just such a symbol in the years after the Russian Revolution. The result is officially known as the Monument to the Third International, named for the orga
  
  Read more

• The Bayeux Tapestry Explained: Watch an Animated Retelling of the Norman Conquest

  10-07-2026 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  Every time the World Cup comes around, or at least since England first and last won it 60 years ago, there’s talk of whether it’ll be brought “back home.” The idea being, of course, that football (or soccer, as it’s called in a couple of the countries hosting this year’s matches) was made in England. However the showdown with Norway goes this Sunday, and indeed how the rest of the World Cup plays out during the week thereafter, something much older — and
  
  Read more

• Watch the First Spectacular Film Adaptation of the Odyssey (1911)

  09-07-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  Public and commercial spaces around the world are now lined with imagery of a vertebra-studded battle helmet and statues surrounded by flame. It’s all part of the promotional campaign for Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of the Odyssey, which will begin opening in theaters later this month. Much has been said and written about how the project represents the next phase of Nolan’s ever-grander cinematic ambitions, but banking on the spectacle value of Homer
  
  Read more

• Albert Einstein Imposes on His First Wife a Cruel List of Marital Demands

  09-07-2026 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  Albert Einstein passionately wooed his first wife Mileva Maric, against his family’s wishes, and the two had a turbulent but intellectually rich relationship that they recorded for posterity in their letters. Einstein and Maric’s love letters have inspired the short film above, My Little Witch (in Serbian, I believe, with English subtitles) and several critical re-evaluations of Einstein’s life and Maric’s influence on his early thought. Some historians have even suggeste
  
  Read more

• How an Edward Hopper Painting Inspired Norman Bates’ Iconic House in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho

  08-07-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  Alfred Hitchcock was not American, as even casual viewers of his television show could tell right away. He may have exaggerated his Englishness, but like more than a few high-profile outsiders, he also used his cultural position to render the United States all the more vividly in his work. Growing up, he amassed enough second-hand knowledge of the country in which he would one day live that he already knew his way around New York when first he set foot there. But it was some years after he relo
  
  Read more

• How Nashville Became Home to a Full-Scale Replica of the Parthenon

  07-07-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  Asked to identify “the Athens of the South,” many Americans might well point to Athens, Georgia, especially if they happen to be fans of REM, the B‑52s, or Of Montreal. In fact, that title was claimed by Nashville, Tennessee as early as the eighteen-fifties, when the city put into action its ambitious plans for a public education system. By the end of that century, Nashville boasted not just more than 20 colleges and universities (Vanderbilt being the best known today), but als
  
  Read more

• Alfred Hitchcock Wanted Frank Lloyd Wright to Design the North by Northwest House: An Architect Just Built It for $45 Million

  06-07-2026 17:48 via openculture.com
  
  Villains who live in opulent, remote modernist houses may have been a cliché since the last century, but given Hollywood’s addiction to the tried and true, they do still turn up now and again. Unsurprisingly, few filmmakers have managed to use them anywhere near as memorably as Alfred Hitchcock did. Think back to North by Northwest, that showcase of both late-fifties high style and unadulterated Hitchcockery, and any number of images come right to mind: the deadly crop dus
  
  Read more

• The Declaration of Independence Performed by Morgan Freeman, Benicio del Toro, Winona Ryder & Other Actors

  03-07-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  Some successful Hollywood producers spend their money on yachts, sports teams, and European castles. Norman Lear’s biggest purchase, or at least his most famous one, was a copy of the Declaration of Independence. He did not, of course, buy the kind of reproduction any tourist can pick up at the gift shop of a major American historic site, but a “Dunlap broadside,” one of 200 or so run off by Philadelphia printer John Dunlap on the very night of July 4th, 1776. After handing ove
  
  Read more

• Meet the Syntopicon: The Ambitious Index That Tried to Organize All of Western Thought (1952)

  02-07-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  Mortimer J. Adler rose to cultural prominence in the mid-twentieth-century United States, not that a figure like him could have done so in any other place or time. A haphazard professional and intellectual path involving copy-boy work at the New York Sun, night school, and an incomplete Columbia degree eventually led to a faculty position teaching philosophy of law at the University of Chicago. In 1945, he commenced work on what would become the Great Books of the Western World, a 54-
  
  Read more

• The Thai Beef Noodle Soup That Has Been Continuously Simmering for 52 Years

  01-07-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  As Bangkok rises into the ranks of the world’s great culinary destination cities, its restaurant scene caters to ever more well-heeled travelers. There, you can now visit establishments with not just one, and not just two, but three Michelin stars. Even so, many a Bangkok habitué will surely tell you that the city’s best food is still served in the same humble places as always, or at least whose rent hasn’t been hiked too badly. Even in as hipsterized an area as Ekkamai
  
  Read more

• Isaac Asimov Laments the “Cult of Ignorance” in the United States (1980)

  01-07-2026 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  Rochester Institute of Technology, via Wikimedia Commons
  In 1980, scientist and writer Isaac Asimov argued in an essay that “there is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been.” That year, the Republican Party stood at the dawn of the Reagan Revolution, which initiated a decades-long conservative groundswell. Political strategist Steve Schmidt (who has been regretful about choosing Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate in 2008) once pointed to wha
  
  Read more

• An Entire Ancient Greek Philosophical Treatise Burned by Mount Vesuvius Has Been Deciphered with X‑Ray and AI Technologies

  30-06-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  Most of our conception of Stoicism, an ancient school of thought much featured here on Open Culture, derives from the writings of just three figures: Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Seneca the Younger. But there were other Stoics, and despite their antiquity, we may yet learn more about them. Take Chrysippus of Soli, who was officially known as the Second Founder of Stoicism due to his influence on its spread throughout the Greek and Roman world. What we know of his demanding work, we know becau
  
  Read more

• How Japan Invented Daisugi, the Ancient Method of Growing Lumber Without Cutting Down Trees

  29-06-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  Ask anyone, of most any age and in most any society, how we get wood, and you’ll hear one answer: by cutting down trees. It’s therefore natural that any method of lumber production that leaves trees standing will get a lot of attention. Such has been the case with daisugi, the 600-year-old Japanese technique we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture. The Leaf of Life video above explains just what it involves: “Specially planted cedar trees are pruned heavily. Think
  
  Read more

• When Bill Murray Unexpectedly Adapted a W. Somerset Maugham Novel: The Razor’s Edge (1984)

  29-06-2026 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  In summer of 1984, American popular culture was dominated by Ghostbusters, a blockbuster that combined sharp comedy and spectacular visual effects on a scale — and in an unlikely harmony — moviegoers had never seen before. Its great success advanced the careers of everyone involved, not least that of Bill Murray. Having already been an early (if not immediately beloved) Saturday Night Live cast member and given much-praised performances in comedies like Caddyshack, Stripes,
  
  Read more

• Rare Film of Sculptor Auguste Rodin Working at His Studio in Paris (1915)

  26-06-2026 10:03 via openculture.com
  
  We’ve previously featured a series of remarkable little films of French artists Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet and Edgar Degas. Here we wrap things up with just one more: a rare glimpse of the great sculptor Auguste Rodin.
  The footage was taken in 1915, two years before Rodin’s death. There are several sequences. The first shows the artist at the columned entrance to an unidentified structure, followed by a brief shot of him posing in a garden somewhere. The rest of the film, be
  
  Read more

• The Great Moon Hoax of 1835: Where “Fake News” Began

  25-06-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  Thinking back to the many childhood grocery-store trips made with their parents, Americans of a certain age will remember nothing so vividly as the Weekly World News. It always stood out on the checkout stand’s impulse-buy rack, in part because of its adherence to stark yet jumbled black-and-white cover designs even as all the other magazines grew slicker and simpler. But what really caught our young and impressionable eyes had even more to do with the contrast between the surrounding publ
  
  Read more

• Leonardo da Vinci’s Notebooks, Separated for 400 Years, Have Been Reunited and Put Online

  24-06-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  Leonardo da Vinci was a painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect, to provide only his most widely agreed-upon list of occupations. It is he, more than any other single figure, who comes to mind when we think of the ideal of the “Renaissance man.” Though considered rather less practical today than it was in fifteenth-century Italy, the relentless questing for both scientific knowledge and artistic perfection implied by that title has never entirely
  
  Read more

• How to Cook Like Frida Kahlo & Georgia O’Keeffe

  24-06-2026 10:03 via openculture.com
  
  It’s a myth that starving artists don’t eat.
  They do, just not often or well. Their meals rarely rate recipes, let alone cookbooks.
  Those cookbooks do exist though.…
  The mostly conceptual Starving Artist Cookbook put together by EIDIA (aka artists Paul Lamarre and Melissa Wolf) comes close to the spirit of sustaining life through meager ingredients… like spaghetti or 4 pages of shredded Pravda.
  Not so this other title, which approaches cute overload with an abundance of
  
  Read more

• This Man Has Been Drawing a Map of an Imaginary Land Since 1963

  23-06-2026 11:09 via openculture.com
  
  At one time or another, we all feel twinges of anxiety about what will constitute the legacy we leave behind. Jerry Gretzinger may well be subject to just the same discomfort, but at least he can point to the Map: an enormous representation, made of thousands and thousands of individually created and continually modified panels, of an entirely fictional land called Ukrania. You can see Jerry’s Map painstakingly laid out in its most up-to-date state in the new People Make Games video above.
  
  Read more

• The History of Soccer and the World Cup: A Short Introduction

  22-06-2026 11:06 via openculture.com
  
  Every four years, humanity undergoes a great increase in its number of soccer fans — or rather, football fans, depending on what part of the world we’re talking about. That’s not to imply that the world otherwise suffers from a dearth of enthusiasts of that particular sport. Nor is football an obscure secondary term: the language of most every country obsessed with the thing itself has localized that name for it, resulting in a variety of words from fútbol to futbol to f
  
  Read more

• Before Bill Nye, There Was Julius Sumner Miller: Watch Complete Episodes of His Classic Science Show, Why Is It So?, Free Online (1962–73)

  19-06-2026 09:24 via openculture.com
  
  “We are approaching a darkness in the land. Boys and girls are emerging from every level of school with certificates and degrees, but they can’t read, write or calculate. We don’t have academic honesty or intellectual rigor.” That quote may sound like a familiar lament today, but it’s actually drawn from an interview conducted about half a century ago with the physicist and television host Julius Sumner Miller. If that name sounds familiar to you, there’s a fa
  
  Read more

• Meet Héloïse, the Medieval Woman Philosopher Who Turned a Doomed Love Affair into a Meditation on Ethics

  18-06-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  The ill-fated romance of Abelard and Héloïse may be a permanent cultural fixture, but it’s worth asking what any of us understand about Abelard or Héloïse themselves. Before the two ever crossed paths, Peter Abelard was already a celebrated philosopher in France whose classes drew large and enthusiastic crowds. This was, bear in mind, a time and place where arguing realism versus conceptualism amounted to a spectator sport. A modern framing might analogize him to a
  
  Read more

• Every Stanley Kubrick Film Ranked from Worst to Best

  17-06-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  If you had to pick a single figure to represent the concept of the film auteur, you could do much worse than Stanley Kubrick. That’s not to call him the greatest director who ever lived, nor even to call his body of work the greatest in cinema. But no filmography more clearly bears the stamp of a single presiding intelligence across various eras, genres, and styles. On one level, Kubrick never made the same movie twice. On another, each is but a facet of the larger project of rendering on
  
  Read more

• Time Travel Back to 1926 and Watch Wassily Kandinsky Make Art in Some Rare Vintage Video

  17-06-2026 09:17 via openculture.com
  
  Have you ever wondered what it would be like to travel back in time and look over the shoulder of one of the early 20th century’s greatest artists to watch him work? In this brief film from 1926, we get to see the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky as he turns a blank canvas into one of his distinctive abstract compositions.
  The film was made at the Galerie Neumann-Nierendorf in Berlin by Hans Cürlis, a pioneer in the making of art documentaries. At the time, Kandinsky was teaching at
  
  Read more

• The Bible’s Deleted Scenes: A Guide to the Strange Biblical Stories Known as the Apocrypha

  16-06-2026 16:22 via openculture.com
  
  The term apocryphal may sound antiquated, but any reasonably serious reader encounters it fairly often, even in recently published texts. In the modern usage, it usually describes words or events that, despite probably never having been spoken or taken place, tend to be cited as if they had. Hochelaga creator Tommie Trelawny says that the word comes from a Greek term meaning “hidden,” and was used to refer to disputed texts not included in the mainstream Bible. Some churches ack
  
  Read more

• David Hockney, RIP: See the Evolution of His Pop-Art Swimming-Pool Masterpiece A Bigger Splash (1967)

  15-06-2026 17:13 via openculture.com
  
  In a way, it always made sense that one of the most memorable visual distillations of Southern California life would have been painted by an Englishman. The purest appreciation for the wide-open lifestyle choices, freestyle built environment, unrepentant private wealth, and high-wattage sunshine of Los Angeles — especially as it was exaggerated, and indeed mythologized, in mid-twentieth century popular culture — could only be felt by someone from an infinitely mor
  
  Read more

• When Roald Dahl Wrote a Story Predicting the Rise of ChatGPT and Other AI Large Language Models (1954)

  12-06-2026 10:03 via openculture.com
  
  Most of us who know the work of Roald Dahl grew up with it, eventually coming to consider the man a master of imaginative, often grotesque tales for children. A bit later on, when we heard that he’d also written books for adults, with titles like Kiss Kiss and Switch Bitch, some of us sought them out as a kind of forbidden literary fruit. What tends to escape notice is that he also wrote for teenagers — or, in any case, that certain of his stories were packaged for teenagers into the
  
  Read more

• How the Hagia Sophia Was Built, and How It’s Being Saved from Collapse

  11-06-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  Ask around for what everyone knows about Istanbul (other than that it used to be called Constantinople), and you’ll find that the presence of Hagia Sophia there comes right to many a mind. Less likely to be mentioned is its proneness to earthquakes, though it tends to rank just below Tokyo on lists of cities under the greatest threat from fault lines below. These two characteristics turn out to have a connection, manifest in the ongoing seismic retrofitting of Istanbul’s symbolic cat
  
  Read more

Follow @CultureMediaNws on Twitter!