Culture & Media news

• Why Ancient Egyptian Honey Remains Edible After 3,000 Years

  05-05-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  The global bee population comes up in the news every now and again. Sometimes we’re assured that the number is stable or rising; more often, we’re warned about collapsing colonies and the large-scale ecological disaster that could result. As with most high-stakes issues, it can be difficult to know what to believe. But even if you lack the time to invest in an understanding of the science behind the complex connections between apian and human welfare, you can easily come to apprecia
  
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• What Happens When the Author Directs the Movie: How Robert Rodriguez Recruited Frank Miller to Co-Direct Sin City

  05-06-2026 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  In the nineteen-nineties, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez first collaborated on a movie. No, it wasn’t From Dusk Till Dawn, the Rodriguez-directed crime-picture-turned-horror-comedy in which Tarantino plays George Clooney’s psychotic brother. It was an anthology picture called Four Rooms, whose separate but interconnected stories, all set in the same hotel on New Year’s Eve, were directed by an all-star lineup of the “Indiewood” auteurs of 1995
  
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• Hear the First Book of Homer’s Iliad Read Aloud in the Original Greek

  04-06-2026 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  You can, of course, learn the Greek language as it’s spoken today. You can also learn Greek as it was spoken in antiquity — and as it was, until fairly recently in historical time, taught to students in the modern West. But it’s a fairly different endeavor again to learn Greek as Homer spoke it. The fact of the matter is that no human being ever really spoke like Achilles, Agamemnon, Odysseus, Penelope, or any of the other characters in the Iliad and Odyssey. Homer’s
  
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• How Conflict Helped Create Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” and Its Legendary Guitar Solos

  03-06-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  Even among the most acclaimed albums ever recorded, not a single one is perfect. That goes more so for the releases of what I call the “heroic age of the album,” which enjoyed its zenith around the late seventies. Not coincidentally, 1979 was the year that Pink Floyd put out The Wall, a rock opera whose sprawl across two discs deals with themes ranging from the bombings of the Second World War to drug dependency to fascist impulses to the isolation of superstardom. This ambition was
  
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• Kurt Vonnegut Diagrams the Shape of All Stories in a Master’s Thesis Rejected by U. Chicago

  03-06-2026 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  “What has been my prettiest contribution to the culture?” asked Kurt Vonnegut in his autobiography Palm Sunday. His answer? His master’s thesis in anthropology for the University of Chicago, “which was rejected because it was so simple and looked like too much fun.” The elegant simplicity and playfulness of Vonnegut’s idea is exactly its enduring appeal. The idea is so simple, in fact, that Vonnegut sums the whole thing up in one elegant sentence: “The
  
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• An Introduction to the Islamic World: 1,000 Years of History in 19 Minutes

  02-06-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  References to Islam in major media can make it sound monolithic and eternal. But it’s actually a much younger and less unified phenomenon than many of us imagine, especially if we happen to live outside the Middle East. As a religion, it dates back “only” to the seventh century, when it was founded by the Prophet Muhammad. As an engine of large-scale civilization, Islam took a bit longer to come into its own, and it hasn’t stopped undergoing divisions, transformations, de
  
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• The First Live Performance of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (1991)

  02-06-2026 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  It’s almost 35 years ago now that Nirvana’s video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” debuted on MTV’s 120 Minutes and, for better or worse, inaugurated the grunge era. The video (below) arrived as a shock and a thrill to a generation too young to remember punk and sick of the steady stream of cheesy corporate dance music and hair metal that characterized the late-80s. For everyone outside the small Seattle scene that nurtured them and the tape-trading kids in the know, t
  
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• The Largest Bookshelf Tour Ever Filmed: Inside a Classicist’s 20,000-Volume Library

  01-06-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  If you grew up in the last few generations, chances are you didn’t get much of an education, if any, in Latin or ancient Greek. One long-made argument for phasing them out of curricula in English-speaking countries holds that room must be made for Spanish, Mandarin, and other languages actually used at scale in the modern world. Nowadays, when even those classes face the pressure of extinction, advocacy for classical languages exudes an ever stronger contrarian appeal. “Dea
  
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• A Tour of Athens’ Acropolis, Explained with 3D Reconstructions

  28-05-2026 17:43 via openculture.com
  
  Since it was first built as a Mycenaean fortress in the thirteenth century BC, what we now know as the Acropolis has been used to worship not just Greek gods, but also, in later periods, the Virgin Mary and Allah. Now, of course, with its days of military and religious functions long behind it, it stands as a set of ruins. Still, they’re very popular ruins, as evidenced by the crowds captured in the video above from Manuel Bravo. Though most tourists at the Acropolis come with the idea tha
  
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• Take a Random Walk Around the Berlin Wall Just Months Before Its Sudden Fall (Summer 1989)

  27-05-2026 13:33 via openculture.com
  
  Officially, the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989. Demolition would take more than four years, and a few sections remain for memorial purposes, but it was on that date that passage between East and West Berlin — and thus East and West Germany — opened to all citizens of both countries. To say that it came as a surprise would be a serious understatement. Earlier that year, even the best informed observers were predicting that the wall would stand for at least a few more decades. Ea
  
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• M.I.T. Computer Program Predicts in 1973 That Civilization Will End by 2040

  27-05-2026 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  In 1704, Isaac Newton predicted the end of the world sometime around (or after, “but not before”) the year 2060, using a strange series of mathematical calculations. Rather than study what he called the “book of nature,” he took as his source the supposed prophecies of the Book of Revelation. While such predictions have always been central to Christianity, it is startling for modern people to look back and see the famed astronomer and physicist indulging them. For Newton,
  
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• Hear Robert Johnson’s “Come On in My Kitchen” in Remarkably Restored Audio, Taken from a Rare Test Pressing

  26-05-2026 11:52 via openculture.com
  
  Robert Johnson died at just 27 years old, some say as a consequence of selling his soul to the devil at a crossroads. But before his time came, he managed to record 29 songs, a scant body of work that nevertheless secured his artistic immortality as one of the most influential blues musicians of all time. It’s unfortunate that his recordings, all of them made between 1936 and 1937 in less-than-ideal studio conditions even for the time, leave something to be desired in the audio quality dep
  
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• Revisit Daily Life in China in 1917 Through Footage Enhanced and Colorized by AI

  25-05-2026 11:47 via openculture.com
  
  Even for Americans, keeping up with the geopolitical entanglements of the United States has never been an easy task. More than a century ago, just a few months after their country got involved in what’s now known as World War I, they got word that the military of a distant nation had joined their side: China, whose image would have been both opaque and forbiddingly vast. A dozen years before they’d even heard the name Pearl S. Buck, what impressions of that country they had
  
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• Who Would Be King of the United States If George Washington Had Become a Monarch?

  25-05-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  The young George Washington may never have hacked up his father’s cherry tree and refused to lie about it, but his life nevertheless offers plenty of deeds both virtuous and adequately documented. It was no small thing, for instance, to refuse to seek a third term as the first President of the United States of America — much less to exchange that title for “King of the United States of America.” As every enthusiast of American history knows, this set the precedent, only o
  
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• Enjoy Three Hours of Free Nature Videos Narrated by David Attenborough

  22-05-2026 10:13 via openculture.com
  
  For your weekend viewing pleasure, enjoy three hours of David Attenborough narrating free nature videos from the BBC. Attenborough just turned 100 this month, and he’s still going strong!
  via Kottke
  If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through
  
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• The Lost Scenes of Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons Are Being Controversially Restored with AI

  20-05-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  When television mogul Ted Turner died earlier this month, it gave cinephiles occasion to remember his brief but high-profile foray into colorization. In the mid-nineteen-eighties, he commissioned for broadcast colorized versions of more than 100 classic movies, from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre to It’s a Wonderful Life to Casablanca. It was only thanks to a clause specifying a black-and-white picture in Orson Welles’ contract with RKO that Citizen Kane ne
  
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• Every Book of the Bible Explained in One Video

  19-05-2026 11:12 via openculture.com
  Whether we’re religious or not, we can all agree that the Bible isn’t just a book. In fact, it’s at least 66 of them, 39 Old Testament and 27 in the New, and that’s just in the Protestant tradition. Even if you’ve never read a single page of the Bible, you may well have a decent idea of what quite a few of those books contain: the stories of Adam, Eve, Noah, and the creation in Genesis; the plagues and Moses parting the Red Sea in Exodus; the various depictions of J
  
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• Archaeologists Discover Ancient Egyptian Mummy Buried with Pages from Homer’s Iliad: When Literature Guided Souls Through the Afterlife

  18-05-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  Renaissance Europe admired ancient Rome, ancient Rome admired ancient Greece, and ancient Greece admired ancient Egypt. But the admiration could actually go both ways in that last case, since the two civilizations’ periods of existence overlapped. The Greeks made no secret of their regard for Egypt as a far deeper well of knowledge and wisdom (indeed, much of what we know about ancient Egypt today comes from Greek records), but archaeological evidence shows that the Egyptians, in turn, we
  
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• Read Joan Didion’s Lost Interview with the Grateful Dead (1967)

  18-05-2026 10:00 via openculture.com
  Without wanting to make too broad a generalization, it’s safe to say that Saturday Evening Post readers probably didn’t understand much about what was going on in San Francisco during the Summer of Love. Or they didn’t, at least, until the magazine ran “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Joan Didion’s simultaneous report from and obituary for the drug-fueled seeker scene that had formed around Haight-Ashbury. Quite possibly her single most widely known piece
  
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• The Forgotten Moment When Superman Fought Prejudice in America Instead of Villains (1950)

  15-05-2026 10:00 via openculture.com
  It makes sense that Superman would take a tolerant view of immigrants and other minorities, given that he himself arrived on Earth as a refugee from the planet Krypton.
  The Man of Steel may strike you as an unlikely mouthpiece for progressive ideals, but 1950 found him on a book cover, above, engaged in conversation with a small crowd of mostly white boys:
  “…and remember, boys and girls, your school – like our country – is made up of Americans of many different rac
  
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• The Most Influential Philosophers Explained in 26 Minutes: From Socrates to Wittgenstein

  14-05-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  The question of who are the fifteen most influential philosophers of all time may not arise at every conversation down at the pub — not outside the circle of Open Culture readers, in any case. But even among non-specialists, it could spark a livelier debate than you might imagine. Names like Socrates, Aristotle, Descartes, and Marx are known, after all, even among the general public who’ve never read a page of philosophical text. All of them appear in th
  
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• Watch the Moment When the Wreck of the Titanic Was First Discovered (1985)

  13-05-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  The wreck of the RMS Titanic has never ceased to command attention, from pop-cultural fascination to scientific scrutiny and everything in between. That can make it seem, especially to the younger generations, as if humanity has been gazing upon its remains since they first settled at the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean. In fact, the precise location of the shipwreck went unknown for more than 73 years, between the day of the disaster, April 15th, 1912, and that of the discovery, September 1,
  
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• What Happened to Jesus’ Twelve Disciples After the Bible—It Wasn’t Pretty

  13-05-2026 10:00 via openculture.com
  The stories in the Bible have been told in many ways, not least through film. Among the many cinematic adaptations of Christianity’s holy book, none comes to mind that ends with freeze-frame title cards explaining the later fate of each character, in the manner of Animal House, American Graffiti, or Goodfellas. This is surprising, since that device could do much to satisfy our curiosity about so many secondary Biblical figures. Take the twelve disciples of Jesus Christ, whose liv
  
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• How John Coltrane Introduced the World to His Radical Sound with His Recording of “My Favorite Things” (1961)

  12-05-2026 10:00 via openculture.com
  John Coltrane released “more significant works” than his 1960 “My Favorite Things,” says Robin Washington in a PRX documentary on the classic reworking of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway hit. “A Love Supreme” is often cited as the zenith of the saxophonist’s career. “But if you tried to explain that song to an average listener, you would lose them. [“My Favorite Things”] is a definitive work that everyone knows, and anyone can
  
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• Why The Founding Fathers Were Obsessed with This Muslim Ruler

  11-05-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  The writings of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America include many a reference to the likes of Cicero, Montesquieu, and John Locke. That the names Hyder Ali and his son Tipu Sultan never appear may not sound like much of a surprise, even if you happen to know that they ruled the Indian region of Mysore, now officially called Mysuru, at the time. But history records that more than a few Americans, including Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, followed with great interest the struggles
  
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• Nearly 50 Years Later, WKRP in Cincinnati Becomes a Real Radio Station

  11-05-2026 10:00 via openculture.com
  It took nearly 50 years. WKRP in Cincinnati is no longer just a TV sitcom. It’s now a real radio station in Cincinnati.
  A Cincy-area FM station, known as “The Oasis,” has adopted the WKRP call letters after acquiring them from a nonprofit radio station in North Carolina. The Raleigh-based station put the call letters up for auction as part of a fundraising effort. And then The Oasis snapped them up.
  To mark the official launch last week, the station played the TV show’s t
  
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• How a Volcanic Eruption Helped Unleash the Black Death in Europe in 1347

  08-05-2026 18:25 via openculture.com
  The flap of a butterfly’s wings on one side of the world can cause a hurricane on the other, or so they say. If we take it a bit too literally, that old observation may make us wonder what a hurricane can cause. Or if not a hurricane, how about another kind of large-scale natural disaster? If new findings by researchers from the University of Cambridge and the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe are to be believed, a volcano’s eruption helped lead to the o
  
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• Buckminster Fuller Creates an Animated Visualization of Human Population Growth from 1000 B.C.E. to 1965

  07-05-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  Sit back, relax, put on some music (I’ve found Chopin’s Nocturne in B major well-suited), and watch the video above, a silent data visualization by visionary architect and systems theorist Buckminster Fuller, “the James Brown of industrial design.” The short film from 1965 combines two of Fuller’s leading concerns: the exponential spread of the human population over finite masses of land and the need to revise our global perspective via the “Dymaxion
  
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• How Yasujirō Ozu Learned to Use Color in His Masterful Films: A New Every Frame a Painting Video Essay

  07-05-2026 10:00 via openculture.com
  Yasujirō Ozu was born in 1903, and made films from the late nineteen-twenties up until his death in 1963. Though not an especially long life, it spanned Japan’s pre- and postwar eras, meaning that in many ways, it ended in a very different country than it began. Not that you’d know it from Ozu’s films, whose distinctive form and style must have changed less through the decades than those of any of his colleagues. For viewers only casually acquainted with his oeuvre, it&rsq
  
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• 1,000 Years of Medieval European History in 20 Minutes

  06-05-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  More than a few medievalists object to the term “Dark Ages” as applied to the period in which they specialize. That can seem wishful in light of most comparisons between medieval times and the Renaissance that came afterward, or indeed, the era of the Roman Empire that came before. Consider the state of Europe as the fourth century began: “The great cities of antiquity were depopulated, some left in ruins,” says the narrator of the How So video above, telling the story of
  
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