Culture & Media news

• 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
  
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• David Bowie Picks His 12 Favorite David Bowie Songs

  11-06-2026 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  Admit it, your list of favorite Bowie songs is full of the big hits. Hell, maybe it’s all hits; there’s no shame in that. Digging deep into the crates will yield many an overlooked surprise, many a subtle sleeper, cut-up classic, and electronic experiment. But if all you’ve got is Changesbowie—the 1990 compilation that became, for some generations, a definitive statement of his career—you’ve still got a collection of songs the likes of which have never been he
  
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