Culture & Media news

• Why Inventing Color TV Was So Difficult

  04-09-2026 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  Many who read this will remember watching television on a black-and-white set at some point in their lives. Fewer will remember doing so because only black-and-white sets existed. Of course, your own experience will depend upon your country of origin. The United States began the transition to color television in 1953, and more than half of its population owned color sets less than twenty years thereafter. France’s stations started to change over in 1967, and the last one did so in 1983. So
  
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• The Genius Logic of the NATO Phonetic Alphabet: How It Was Created & How It Works

  16-09-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  Most of us can rattle off the first few words-that-stand-for-letters of the NATO phonetic alphabet. Alfa, Bravo, and Charlie no doubt come right to mind, and depending on how many war movies you’ve seen, so may Delta, Echo, and Foxtrot. But how many of us would recognize Kilo, Mike, and Sierra? For that matter, how much do any of us know about how these particular words came to be used to spell out other words when communicating over walkie-talkies or other low-fidelity communication syste
  
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• The Radical Ideas of Plato’s Republic: An In-Depth Introduction

  15-09-2026 17:08 via openculture.com
  
  We no longer live in a time when college freshmen get shocked by much of the reading material assigned to them. Counterintuitively, the texts that do retain their power to disturb young minds (presuming they can read texts in the first place) tend to skew old — and in one prominent case, about 2,400 years old. Even the most superficial interpretations of Plato’s Republic challenge the political assumptions held by almost every student today, at least in the developed West. Many of th
  
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• How the Silk Road Actually Worked (and What Could Go Terribly Wrong On It)

  14-09-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  You don’t have to spend a long time reading up on the Silk Road before you see the term itself (“Silk Road”) called a misnomer. In fact, what we refer to by that name comprises a whole network of trade routes connecting Asia, Africa, and Europe, whose traffic constantly shifted over a millennium and a half according to climatic, geopolitical, and civilizational conditions. Nor was silk the only, or even the primary type of good carried along those routes. From East to West went
  
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• How Martin Luther King, Jr. Used Nietzsche, Hegel & Kant to Overturn Segregation in America

  14-09-2026 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  Image by Dick DeMarsico, via Wikimedia Commons
  The influence of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel on the revolutionary philosophy of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels is well known. Marx wrote a critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and claimed to have turned the German idealist philosopher on his head, and the development of Marxist theory among a school of neo-Hegelians, wrote Rebecca Cooper in 1925, occurred in a period “peculiarly auspicious for the birth of a revolutionary social ph
  
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• Scientists Discover the Earliest Evidence of Drug Use in 25,000-Year-Old Teeth

  11-09-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  Image by Fakhri
  “Scientists Discover the Earliest Evidence of Drug Use in Really Old Teeth” may sound like odd headline language, at least by the traditional standards of the New York Times. But then, the teeth in question are, indeed, really old. “Archaeologists have pushed the timeline of human drug use back further than ever before by studying teeth that belonged to a hunter-gatherer who lived in Indonesia sometime from 16,000 to 25,000 years ago,” writes reporte
  
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• Route 66 Turns 100 This Year: Take a Tour of America’s Most Famous Highway

  10-09-2026 17:35 via openculture.com
  
  This past summer, the United States of America celebrated 250 years of independence. But for a great many Americana-lovers around the world, this year also brings another, even more resonant date: the 100th anniversary of the establishment of Route 66. In the months leading up to November 11th, the official birthday of what John Steinbeck dubbed the “Mother Road,” tourists both foreign and domestic have seized the occasion to make the 2,448-mile drive of which they’ve long drea
  
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• Download Hundreds of Issues of Jugend, Germany’s Pioneering Art Nouveau Magazine (1896–1940)

  10-09-2026 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  It’s an ungainly word for English speakers, which is maybe why we do not hear it often: Gleichschaltung. Yet the concept remains central for a clear view of what happened to Germany in the 1930s. In 1933, the nation completely transformed, seemingly overnight, through “a concerted policy of ‘coordination’ (Gleichschaltung),” the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum writes. “Culture, the economy, education, and law all came under Nazi control.” Those artists a
  
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• The Ancient Greek Water Clock That Kept the Most Accurate Time for 1,800 Years

  09-09-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  Today, we’re surrounded by technologies we could justifiably describe as time thieves. In ancient Greece, those who wanted to know where their time was going consulted a device they called a “water thief.” The roots of the clepsydra, or water clock, go back as far as the sixteenth century BC, with evidence of such devices found in modern-day Iraq, Iran, and Egypt, and more ambiguous evidence unearthed in places like India and China. The mechanism in the earliest examples t
  
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• Historian Timothy Snyder Teaches a Free Course on Hitler, Stalin & How “It” Can Happen Here

  09-09-2026 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  When the historian Timothy Snyder left Yale for the University of Toronto in 2024, he took with him the practice of occasionally putting his course lectures online, making them available to anyone who cares to learn from them. Above, you can watch ten lectures from his recent course Hitler and Stalin Today. In this course:
  Snyder examines the Nazi and Soviet responses to the new globalized world they shared. The course begins with the colonial background that made totalitarianism possible, and
  
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• Frank Lloyd Wright’s Secret Career as a Japanese Art Dealer & How It Shaped His Architecture

  08-09-2026 18:00 via openculture.com
  
  Frank Lloyd Wright was often strapped for cash. In that respect, he had something in common with Vincent van Gogh, who passed most of his much shorter life in more dire circumstances. Unlike Wright, who enjoyed decades of fame at the pinnacle of the American architectural profession, van Gogh remained practically unknown until after his death. But if they’ve encountered one another in the afterlife, they’ve certainly discussed one subject above all others: their shared appreciation
  
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• Bertrand Russell Explains Why Karl Marx’s Philosophy Produced the Disaster of Communism

  07-09-2026 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  In 1927, Bertrand Russell delivered a lecture titled “Why I Am Not a Christian.” At the time, such a declaration was still fairly bold, as was the reasoning he provided for it. Nearly three decades thereafter, he included in his collection Portraits from Memory another, shorter piece, “Why I Am Not a Communist.” That description was safe to apply to oneself in 1954, at least in the mainstream of the English-speaking world. It would have been riskier for those who mov
  
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• Meet Lloyd Kahn, the Counterculture Publisher Who Is Skateboarding at 91

  07-09-2026 09:02 via openculture.com
  
  Lloyd Kahn worked as an insurance broker before quitting in 1965. Then, he took a turn into the DIY building movement that emerged with the 1960s counterculture. Soon enough, he found himself editing the influential Whole Earth Catalog and publishing Shelter in 1973, a book still considered the bible of hand-built homes. Now 91 years old, Lloyd remains active in publishing. He also continues to run, paddleboard, and skateboard, a sport he took up when he turned 65. How many people can say that?
  
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• Wes Anderson Picks Nine of His Favorite Criterion Films

  03-09-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  Many an internet cinephile has wondered aloud if the Criterion Closet is a real place, or just a set thrown together to make videos when famous directors like Christopher Nolan, Francis Ford Coppola, or Jim Jarmusch drop by. It turns out indeed to exist, not only at Criterion’s offices in New York, but also elsewhere. The Criterion Mobile Closet, for example, has taken the label’s home-video library on the road since 2024, the 40th anniversary of the company’s foundation. If it
  
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• Discover J.R.R. Tolkien’s Personal Book Cover Designs for The Lord of the Rings Trilogy

  03-09-2026 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  In some rare cases, adaptations and interpretations of a literary work can surpass the source. Despite hundreds of valiant efforts on the part of fans, filmmakers, game/toy designers, and radio producers, this has never been true of the fully-realized fantasy world in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy (not that it’s ever been anyone’s intent). As we noted in a previous post, Tolkien’s fictional world is so intricate, its sources so v
  
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• How Leonardo da Vinci’s Procrastination Contributed to His Creativity

  02-09-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  At the height of their productivity as Beatles, neither Paul McCartney nor John Lennon could read or write music notation. Clearly it didn’t keep them from making a cultural impact, and as with so much else in life, they regarded it humorously. As McCartney has said, they used to liken themselves to ancient Egyptian pharaohs, who relied on scribes rather than being literate themselves. It’s worth considering whether, all things considered, this inability was really a deficiency: not
  
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• How Phone Addiction Keeps You from Achieving a Productive “Flow State”

  01-09-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  If you have an iPhone, try pushing its side button three times in a row. Just like magic, the screen should turn from color into black-and-white, or rather grayscale. (To do the same on an Android phone, you’ll have to dive into settings, then “accessibility,” “vision enhancements,” and “color correction.”) Why would you want that in the first place? As Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School professor Arthur C. Brooks explains in the Big Thin
  
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• Tim Curry (RIP) Breaks Down His Most Iconic Roles: Rocky Horror, Clue, Muppet Treasure Island & More

  31-08-2026 17:39 via openculture.com
  
  Upon hearing of Tim Curry’s death last week, some of us could recall having seen him on stage: in Amadeus or Spamalot on Broadway, perhaps, though he also drew acclaim in the work of Stoppard, Brecht, and Shakespeare. For many more of us — perhaps all of us — it was his most memorable film and television performances that sprang to mind. To an extent, which ones are most memorable depends on the viewer. Some will forever remember Curry as DJ Johnny LaGuardia in T
  
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• Why AI Companies Are Buying—And Then Destroying—Old Books

  28-08-2026 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  We’ve long joked about delaying bedtime in order to read the entire internet, but the prospect of actually doing so doesn’t sound as appealing as it used to. An ever-growing proportion of text online, we may sense, hasn’t been written by humans, but generated by artificial intelligence. One solution is to return to reading on paper, and beyond that, spending our time only with books published before the advent — and thus uncorrupted by the output — of large language
  
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• The Art of Splendor Solis, the Most Glorious Illuminated Alchemical Manuscript of Them All

  27-08-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  When it was published in the United States in 1998, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was retitled Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. The jokes about the American reading public’s apparent allergy to the very word philosopher write themselves, but the change was also unfortunate for more substantial reasons. A “sorcerer’s stone” had no cultural resonance at all, whereas the philosopher’s stone had been sought after since, at the very
  
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• Isaac Asimov Explains His Three Laws of Robots: Do No Harm, Follow Orders, Survive, in That Order

  27-08-2026 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  A number of futurists, philosophers, and technophiles believe we are approaching what they call the “singularity”: a point in time when smart machines become much smarter, stronger, and faster than their creators, and then become self-conscious. Whatever the chance of this occurring, it’s worthwhile to ponder the consequences. But we do already, all the time—in existentially bleak scenarios like Blade Runner, the Terminator series, the rebooted Battlestar Galactica (and i
  
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• Why Reading Egyptian Hieroglyphics Is Easier Than You Think

  26-08-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  We’ve featured Egyptologist Ilona Regulski here on Open Culture a few times before. Once, she explained how to read ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs; another time, she told us what the Rosetta Stone actually says. It was, perhaps, inevitable that she would cross paths with Rob Watts, creator of the YouTube channel RobWords, whose videos we often post. When he made the journey to Berlin’s Neues Museum, and specifically to its Egyptian Museum, Regulski was the expert he sought out to
  
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• Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” Slowed Down to 33 RPM Sounds Great and Takes on New, Unexpected Meanings (RIP)

  26-08-2026 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  Note: We were sad to see the news that Dolly Parton passed away. Today we are bringing back one of our favorite Dolly Parton posts. She will be missed.
  The Walrus is… Dolly Parton?
  Not every record yields gold when played backwards or spun more slowly than recommended, but a 45 of Parton’s 1973 hit “Jolene” played at 33 RPM not only sounds wonderful, it also manages to reframe the narrative.
  As Andrea DenHoed notes in The New Yorker, “Slow Ass Jolene,” above,
  
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• The Wisdom of David Bowie: On Art, Religion, Technology and More

  25-08-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  It doesn’t quite ring true to call David Bowie a rock star. Ziggy Stardust, the neon synthetic-clad alien alter ego he both created and retired in the early seventies, was, of course, rock stardom outlandishly personified. But then, that was the concept of what turned out to be just one of many personae he deliberately crafted throughout the course of his career. That career was in music, primarily, but looking back on it today, more than a decade after Bowie’s death, it looks more l
  
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• The Daily Routine of Marcus Aurelius: How to Live Like a Stoic

  24-08-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  Marcus Aurelius did not have a smartphone. In fact, he didn’t have a phone of any kind, owing to the fact that he lived in the second century, though we can be reasonably certain that he commanded more than enough messengers to keep himself informed around the clock. That’s because he was the Roman emperor at a time when the Roman Empire was at its height. And so, none of us will ever know Marcus’ freedom from digital distraction, nor will we know the intense responsibility he
  
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• The Women of the Bauhaus: See Hip, Avant-Garde Photographs of Female Students & Instructors at the Famous Art School

  24-08-2026 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  Take a look at photos of Bush Tetras — a three-girl-one-guy No Wave/Post-Punk band from the early 1980s downtown Manhattan scene. Now, look at the photograph above, “Marcel Breuer and His Harem,” by Bauhaus photographer Erich Consemüller, taken sometime around 1927. Except for the fact that Breuer looks more like Ron Mael of Sparks sans mustache than drummer Dee Pop, one might mistake this for a photo of the punk band. This raises a few questions: did art students Bush Te
  
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• Why Americans Stopped Reading Books

  21-08-2026 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  The kids can’t read. Such has been the implication, even the declaration, made by a wave of articles in recent years. But the statement needs some qualification: the kids in question are American; what they can’t read is entire books, especially literary fiction; and it isn’t just the kids in the first place. It would be the rare reader, especially of a site like Open Culture, who could resist feeling any despair when confronted with, say, a study finding that only fi
  
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• Discover the Mundaneum, an Early 20th-Century “Internet” That Put the World’s Knowledge on Millions of Index Cards

  20-08-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  Pitch to friends or family the idea of a trip to Mons, Belgium to visit the Mundaneum, and you may be met with a less-than-enthusiastic reception. That’s unfortunate, since such an experience could fundamentally change the way they regard technology they use every day. Though its name may seem to promise unrelieved dullness today, the Mundaneum arose out of enormous high-tech ambitions. The idea behind it, as conceived by Belgian lawyers Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine, was to gather, cla
  
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• A 1932 Illustrated Map of Harlem’s Night Clubs: From the Cotton Club to the Savoy Ballroom

  20-08-2026 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  Harlem’s undergoing another Renaissance, and has been for years now. Crime’s down, real estate prices are up, and throngs of pale-faced hipsters are descending to check the area out.
  Sure, something’s gained, but something’s lost, too.
  For today’s holiday in Harlem, we’re going to climb in the Wayback Machine. Set the dial for 1932. Don’t forget your map. (Click the image above to view a larger version.)
  This delirious artifact comes courtesy of Elmer S
  
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• The Complete History of the Beatles as Told By Conan O’Brien

  19-08-2026 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  The world ended in the nineteen-sixties. Or rather, one world ended in the nineteen-sixties and gave way to another, a transition personified by no human beings more clearly than the Beatles. “They are lightning rods for so much that makes the sixties a revolutionary decade,” says The Rest Is History podcast co-host Tom Holland in the video above. “In all kinds of ways, in the twenty-first century, we’re living in the aftermath of what happened in the sixties, rather
  
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