Culture & Media news

• Milton Glaser (RIP) Presents 10 Rules for Life & Work: Wisdom from the Celebrated Designer

  29-06-2020 07:36
  
  “None of us has really the ability to understand our path until it’s over,” the celebrated graphic designer Milton Glaser (RIP) muses less than a minute into the above video.
  Glaser’s many contributions to pop culture---the  I ? NY logo, the psychedelic portrait of a rainbow-haired Bob Dylan, DC Comics’ classic bullet logo---confer undeniable authority. To the outside eye, he seems to have had a pretty firm handle on the path he traveled for lo these many decad
  
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• The Origins of Anime: Watch Early Japanese Animations (1917 to 1931)

  26-04-2024 11:00
  
  Japanese animation, AKA anime, might be filled with large-eyed maidens, way cool robots, and large-eyed, way cool maiden/robot hybrids, but it often shows a level of daring, complexity and creativity not typically found in American mainstream animation. And the form has spawned some clear masterpieces from Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira to Mamoru Oishii’s Ghost in the Shell to pretty much everything that Hayao Miyazaki has ever done.
  Anime has a far longer history than you might think;
  
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• What Would Happen If a Nuclear Bomb Hit a Major City Today: A Visualization of the Destruction

  26-04-2024 10:02
  
  One of the many memorable details in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, placed prominently in a shot of George C. Scott in the war room, is a binder with a spine labeled “WORLD TARGETS IN MEGADEATHS.” A megadeath, writes Eric Schlosser in a New Yorker piece on the movie, “was a unit of measurement used in nuclear-war planning at the time. One megadeath equals a million fatalities.” The destructive c
  
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• Inside the Beautiful Home Frank Lloyd Wright Designed for His Son (1952)

  25-04-2024 10:00
  
  Being Frank Lloyd Wright’s son surely came with its downsides. But one of the upsides — assuming you could stay in the mercurial master’s good graces — was the possibility of his designing a house for you. Such was the fortune of his fourth child David Samuel Wright, a Phoenix building-products representative well into middle age himself when he got his own Wright house. It must have been worth the wait, given that he and his wife lived there until their deaths at age 102
  
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• Steven Spielberg Calls Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange “the First Punk Rock Movie Ever Made”

  24-04-2024 11:00
  
  Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick are two of the first directors whose names young cinephiles get to know. They’re also names between which quite a few of those young cinephiles draw a battle line: you may have enjoyed films by both of these auteurs, but ultimately, you’re going to have to side with one cinematic ethos or the other. Yet Spielberg clearly admires Kubrick himself: his 2001 film A.I. Artificial Intelligence originated as an unfinished Kubrick proj
  
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• Hear Flannery O’Connor Read “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (1959)

  24-04-2024 10:03
  
  Flannery O’Connor was a Southern writer who, as Joyce Carol Oates once said, had less in common with Faulkner than with Kafka and Kierkegaard. Isolated by poor health and consumed by her fervent Catholic faith, O’Connor created works of moral fiction that, according to Oates, “were not refined New Yorker stories of the era in which nothing happens except inside the characters’ minds, but stories in which something happens of irreversible magnitude, often death by violent
  
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• A Guided Tour of the Largest Handmade Model of Imperial Rome: Discover the 20x20 Meter Model Created During the 1930s

  23-04-2024 11:00
  
  At the moment, you can’t see the largest, most detailed handmade model of Imperial Rome for yourself. That’s because the Museo della Civiltà Romana, the institution that houses it, has been closed for renovations since 2014. But you can get a guided tour of “Il Plastico,” as this grand Rome-in-miniature is known, through the new Ancient Rome Live video above. “The archaeologist and architect Italo Gismondi created this amazing model,” explains host Dari
  
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• Watch Iconic Artists at Work: Rare Videos of Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky, Renoir, Monet, Pollock & More

  23-04-2024 10:00
  
  Claude Monet, 1915:
  We’ve all seen their works in fixed form, enshrined in museums and printed in books. But there’s something special about watching a great artist at work. Over the years, we’ve posted film clips of some of the greatest artists of the 20th century caught in the act of creation. Today we’ve gathered together eight of our all-time favorites.
  Above is the only known film footage of the French Impressionist Claude Monet, made when he was 74 years old, painti
  
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• Humans First Started Enjoying Cannabis in China Circa 2800 BC

  22-04-2024 11:00
  
  Judging by how certain American cities smell these days, you’d think cannabis was invented last week. But that spike in enthusiasm, as well as in public indulgence, comes as only a recent chapter in that substance’s very long history. In fact, says the presenter of the PBS Eons video above, humanity began cultivating it “in what’s now China around 12,000 years ago. This makes cannabis one of the single oldest known plants we domesticate,” even earlier than “st
  
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• Is Now An Opportune Moment To Examine GUOMAI Culture & Media Co., Ltd. (SZSE:301052)? - Simply Wall St

  20-04-2024 05:04
  
  Is Now An Opportune Moment To Examine GUOMAI Culture & Media Co., Ltd. (SZSE:301052)?  Simply Wall St
  
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• Daniel Dennett Presents the 4 Biggest Ideas in Philosophy in One of His Final Videos (RIP)

  20-04-2024 01:02
  
  A week ago, Big Think released this video featuring philosopher Daniel Dennett talking about the four biggest ideas in philosophy. Today, we learned that he passed away at age 82. The New York Times obituary for Dennett reads: “Espousing his ideas in best sellers, he insisted that religion was an illusion, free will was a fantasy and evolution could only be explained by natural selection.” “Mr. Dennett combined a wide range of knowledge with an easy, often playful writing style
  
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• Discover the Singing Nuns Who Have Turned Medieval Latin Hymns into Modern Hits

  19-04-2024 11:00
  
  We now live, as one often hears, in an age of few musical superstars, but towering ones. The popular culture of the twenty-twenties can, at times, seem to be contained entirely within the person of Taylor Swift — at least when the media magnet that is Beyoncé takes a breather. But look past them, if you can, and you’ll find formidable musical phenomena in the unlikeliest of places. Take the Poor Clares of Arundel, a group of singing nuns from Sussex who, during the COVID-19 pa
  
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• Watch Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mind-Bending Masterpiece Free Online

  19-04-2024 10:00
  
  “I feel like every single frame of the film is burned into my retina,” said Oscar-winning actress Cate Blanchett about the movie Stalker (1979). “I hadn’t seen anything like it before and I haven’t really seen anything like it since.
  Andrei Tarkovsky’s final film in the USSR seems like an unlikely movie to have a devoted, almost cultish, following. It is a dense, multivalent, maddeningly elusive work that has little of the narrative pay-offs of a Hol
  
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• Beautifully-Preserved Frescoes with Figures from the Trojan War Discovered in a Lavish Pompeii Home

  18-04-2024 11:00
  Image via  Pompeii Archaeological Park
  Imagine visiting the home of a prominent, wealthy figure, and at the evening’s end finding yourself in a room dedicated to late-night entertaining, painted entirely black except for a few scenes from antiquity. Perhaps this wouldn’t sound entirely implausible in, say, twenty-first century Silicon Valley. But such places also existed in antiquity itself: or at least one of them did, as recently discovered in Pompeii. Preserved for nearly tw
  
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• Learn How to Create Your Own Custom AI Assistants Using OpenAI GPTs: A Free Course from Vanderbilt University

  18-04-2024 10:00
  
  Last fall, OpenAI started letting users create custom versions of ChatGPT–ones that would let people create AI assistants to complete tasks in their personal or professional lives. In the months that followed, some users created AI apps that could generate recipes and meals. Others developed GPTs to create logos for their businesses. You get the picture.
  If you’re interested in developing your own AI assistant, Vanderbilt computer science professor Jules White has released a free on
  
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• Creating Your Own Custom AI Assistants Using OpenAI GPTs: A Free Course from Vanderbilt University

  18-04-2024 10:00
  
  Last fall, OpenAI started letting users create custom versions of ChatGPT–ones that would let people create AI assistants to complete tasks in their personal or professional lives. In the months that followed, some users created AI apps that could generate recipes and meals. Others developed GPTs to create logos for their businesses. You get the picture.
  If you’re interested in developing your own AI assistant, Vanderbilt computer science professor Jules White has released a free on
  
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• An Archive of Vividly Illustrated Japanese Schoolbooks, from the 1800s to World War II

  17-04-2024 11:00
  
  If you want to appreciate Japanese books, it helps to be able to read Japanese books. It helps, but it’s not 100 percent necessary: even if you’ve never learned a single kanji character, you’ve probably marveled at one time or another at the aesthetics of Japan’s print culture. Maybe you’ve even done so here at Open Culture, where we’ve previously featured archives of Japanese books going back to the seventeenth century, a collection of Japanese wave and ripp
  
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• Free: Download the The Anarchist’s Tool Chest, The Anarchist’s Design Book, The Anarchist’s Workbench & Other Woodworking Texts

  17-04-2024 10:00
  
  For Christopher Schwarz, American anarchism isn’t “about bombs and leather jackets; it’s about being an independent designer.” It’s about working outside “massive and dehumanizing institutions” (like corporations) and designing beautiful objects that last. He writes: “As a designer of books, tools and furniture, I have zero desire to make things that are intended from the get-go to fall apart.” Based in Covington, Kentucky, Schwarz runs a sm
  
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• How the Berlin Wall Worked: The Engineering & Structural Design of the Wall That Formidably Divided East & West

  16-04-2024 11:00
  
  More than thirty years after the formal dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, few around the world have a clear understanding of how life actually worked there. That holds less for the larger political and economic questions than it does for the routine mechanics of day-to-day existence. These had a way of being even more complex in the regions where the USSR came up against the rest of the world. Take the German capital of Berlin, which, as everyone knows, was formerly divided
  
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• Google & MIT Offer a Free Course on Generative AI for Teachers and Educators

  16-04-2024 10:00
  
  FYI. Google and MIT RAISE have partnered to create a free course for teachers and educators, one designed to show teachers how they can use generative AI tools to save “time on everyday tasks, personaliz[e] instruction to meet student needs, and enhanc[e] lessons and activities in creative ways.” According to the course description, in this two-hour self-paced course, teachers can learn how to use generative AI tools to:Create engaging lesson plans and materials. For example with gen
  
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• How the Year 2440 Was Imagined in a 1771 French Sci-Fi Novel

  15-04-2024 11:00
  
  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
  
  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
  
  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
  
  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
  
  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
  
  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
  
  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
  
  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
  
  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
  
  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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