Culture & Media news

• 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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• 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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• 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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• How IKEA Revolutionized Furniture-Making

  21-11-2025 10:21 via openculture.com
  The humorist Sandra Tsing Loh once described her generational cohort as “today’s young, highly trained, downwardly mobile professionals: ‘dumpies.’ We’re just emerging from years of college only to learn that there are no jobs available for people with our advanced qualifications,” and thus no route to ownership of all their hoped-for lifestyle accoutrements. No, she’s not a millennial, but rather what she calls a “late boomer” in an essay th
  
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• Why Movies Don’t Feel Real Anymore: A Close Look at Changing Filmmaking Techniques

  20-11-2025 17:37 via openculture.com
  Anyone who keeps an eye on Hollywood knows — indeed, has been ever more frequently and anxiously informed — that the theater business is in trouble. If fewer of us than ever have been going out to the movies, one reason must have to do with the easy availability of home streaming, to say nothing of all the proliferating digital distractions precision-engineered to capture our attention. But could it also have to do with a change in the pictures themselves? With more than two million
  
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• An Introduction to Hilma af Klint: Once a Forgotten Painter, Now a Celebrated Pioneer of Abstract Art

  19-11-2025 11:00 via openculture.com
  If pressed to pick the most international art figure of the past dozen years, one could do much worse than the Swedish artist-mystic Hilma af Klint, despite her having been dead for more than 80 years now. As evidenced by the links at the bottom of the post, we’ve been featuring her here on Open Culture since 2017, first in the context of whether she counts as the first abstract painter. Just a few years before that, practically no one in the world had ever heard her name, let alone beheld
  
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• The Fascinating History of Tarot Card Decks: From the Renaissance to the Modern Day

  18-11-2025 11:00 via openculture.com
  Whether or not we believe that the cards of the tarot have supernatural powers, we all think of them primarily as tools for divination. It might seem as if they’ve played that cultural role since time immemorial, but in fact, that particular use only goes back to the eighteenth century. They were, at first, playing cards, used for a game known as tarocchi in Renaissance Italy. That was the original purpose of the oldest tarot cards in possession of the Victoria and Albert Museum, whic
  
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• How a Dutch “Dementia Village” Improves Quality of Life with Intentional Design

  18-11-2025 10:00 via openculture.com
  People suffering from dementia lose their ability to take an active part in conversations, everyday activities, and their own physical upkeep.
  They are prone to sudden mood swings, irritability, depression, and anxiety.
  They may be stricken with delusions and wild hallucinations.
  All of these things can be understandably upsetting to friends and families. There’s a lot of stigma surrounding this situation.
  Taking care of a spouse or parent with dementia can be an overwhelmingly isolating e
  
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• Why Overconfidence Is Our Most Dangerous Cognitive Bias

  17-11-2025 11:00 via openculture.com
  In the two-thousands, the magician-comedians Penn and Teller hosted a television series called Bullshit! In it, they took on a variety of cultural phenomena they regarded as worthy of the titular epithet, from ESP to Area 51, exorcism to creationism, feng shui to haute cuisine. Their sardonic arguments were enriched by clips of assorted interviewees —speaking in defense of the topic of the day. Penn once addressed the viewers, saying that we might wonder why anyone agrees to come on t
  
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• Why Your Vision of Ancient Rome Is All Wrong, According to Historian Mary Beard

  14-11-2025 09:12 via openculture.com
  Everyone in ancient Rome wore togas, surrounded themselves with pure-white marble statues, bayed for blood as gladiators fought to the death in the Colosseum, programmatically imitated the Greeks, and, after each and every debaucherous feast, excused themselves to the vomitoria, where they ritually vacated their stomachs. Or at least that’s the picture any of us here in the twenty-first century might piece together out of the impressions we happen to receive from a steady flow of sword-and
  
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• How Paris Became Paris: The Story Behind Its Iconic Squares, Bridges, Monuments & Boulevards

  13-11-2025 11:00 via openculture.com
  Even today, the Paris of the popular imagination is, for the most part, the Paris envisioned by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann and made a reality in the eighteen-fifties and sixties. Not that he could order the city built whole: as explained by Manuel Bravo in the new video above, Paris had already existed for about two millennia, growing larger, denser, and more intricate all the while. But as the prefect under Emperor Napoleon III, Haussmann was empowered to carve it up by force, openin
  
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• Watch 50 David Bowie Music Videos Spanning Five Decades of Reinvention: “Space Oddity,” “Life on Mars?” “ ‘Heroes’,” “Let’s Dance” & More

  12-11-2025 11:00 via openculture.com
  Each of us has a different idea of when, exactly, the sixties ended, not as a decade, but as a distinct cultural period. Some have a notion of the “long sixties” that extends well into the seventies; if pressed for a specific final year, they could do worse than pointing to 1972, when David Bowie made his epoch-shifting appearance as Ziggy Stardust, backed by the Spiders from Mars, on the BBC’s Top of the Pops. It was also the year he released music videos for “Spac
  
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• The First Photograph of a Human Being: A Photo Taken by Louis Daguerre in 1838

  12-11-2025 10:00 via openculture.com
  You’ve likely heard the reason people never smile in very old photographs. Early photography could be an excruciatingly slow process. With exposure times of up to 15 minutes, portrait subjects found it impossible to hold a grin, which could easily slip into a pained grimace and ruin the picture. A few minutes represented a marked improvement on the time it took to make the very first photograph, Nicéphore Niépce’s 1826 “heliograph.” Capturing the shapes of
  
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• Beautiful, Color Photographs of Paris Taken a Century Ago—at the Beginning of World War I & the End of La Belle Époque

  11-11-2025 11:00 via openculture.com
  It may well be that the major pivot points of history are only visible to those around the bend. For those of us immersed in the present—for all of its deafening sirens of violent upheaval—the exact years future generations will use to mark our epoch remain unclear. But when we look back, certain years stand out above all others, those that historians use as arrestingly singular book titles: 1066: The Year of Conquest, 1492: The Year the World Began, 17
  
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• The Groundbreaking Animation That Defined Pink Floyd’s Psychedelic Visual Style: Watch “French Windows” (1972)

  11-11-2025 10:00 via openculture.com
  You could argue that, of all rock bands, that Pink Floyd had the least need for visual accompaniment. Sonically rich and evocatively structured, their albums evolved to offer listening experiences that verge on the cinematic in themselves. Yet from fairly early in the Floyd’s history, their artistic ambitions extended to that which could not be heard. Can you really understand their enterprise, it’s fair to ask, if you remain merely one of their listeners, never entering the visual d
  
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• The Ambitious Engineering Behind the Golden Gate Bridge

  10-11-2025 11:00 via openculture.com
  As many as a million people crossed the Golden Gate Bridge on foot to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its construction in 1987. More than a few of them would have remembered San Francisco as it was before it had its most iconic structure — and indeed, some would even remember walking across it once before, on its inaugural “Pedestrian Day” in 1937. Barring the possibility of unusually vigorous supercentenarians, that won’t be the case 12 years from now, on the Golden Ga
  
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• Dozens of M.C. Escher Prints Have Been Digitized & Put Online by the Boston Public Library

  10-11-2025 10:00 via openculture.com
  In addition to the iconic scene in Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, or appearances in animated TV shows and video games, M.C. Escher’s work has adorned the covers of albums like Mott the Hoople’s 1969 debut and the speculative fiction of Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges. A big hit with hippies and 1960s college students, writes Heavy Music Artwork, his mind-bending prints became associated with “questioning accepted views of normal experience and testing the limits of percepti
  
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• Skiing Down Mount Everest with No Oxygen: It’s a Wild Ride

  10-11-2025 06:52 via openculture.com
  From Red Bull’s YouTube Channel: “Ski mountaineer Andrzej Bargiel becomes the first person to climb Mount Everest and ski back to Everest Base Camp without supplementary oxygen. After nearly 16 hours climbing in the high altitude “death zone” (above 8,000m where oxygen levels are dangerously low), Bargiel clipped into his skis on the summit of the tallest mountain on earth and started his descent via the South Col Route. He reached Camp II that night and rested — th
  
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• The Roman Empire’s Vast Road Network—186,000 Miles of It—Has Just Been Mapped in a New Digital Atlas

  07-11-2025 10:00 via openculture.com
  Everywhere you look, you can find traces of the ancient Roman civilization from which the modern West descends. That’s especially true if you happen to be looking in Europe, though echoes of Latin make themselves heard in major languages used all over the world. Take, for example, the common English word itinerary, meaning a planned route for travel, which descends from iter, the Latin word for a journey, route, or path. The Romans eventually spoke of itineraria, which meant mor
  
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