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 […]

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 […]

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: […]

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 […]

When the U.S. media began reporting on the phenomenon of “forest bathing” as a therapy for mental and physical health, the online commentariat—as it will—mocked the concept relentlessly as yet another pretentious, bourgeois repackaging of something thoroughly mundane. Didn’t we just used to call it “going outside”? Well, yes, if all “forest bathing” means is […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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, […]

Would anyone in their right mind sign up for a job that had a high risk of mortality/disability? Or a job where red hot metal is being hurled directly at your face? Back in the 1920s this was the lot of the men who built New York’s skyline, the men who constructed the Chrysler Building […]

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 […]

“None of us has really the ability to understand our path until it’s over,” the celebrated graphic designer Milton Glaser mused less than a minute into the above video. The late Milton 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—conferred […]

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 […]

The Periodic Table of Elements lists the 118 chemical elements that make up everything in our world. Some you’re familiar with—Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen, etc. Others maybe less so—Vanadium, Germanium, and Yttrium. According to the American Chemical Society, 44 of those 118 elements might disappear by century’s end. Enter the Periodic Table of Endangered Elements (shown […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

The story of humans creating monstrous beings in their image may have perennial relevance, even if it seems specific to our contemporary cultural moment. What, after all, is Oscar Isaac’s AI inventor in Ex Machina but a 21st-century update of Victor Frankenstein? (Before Isaac went on to portray Victor himself in Guillermo del Toro’s 2025 film […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

It’s hard to imagine that the space-crazed general public needed any help getting worked up about astronauts and NASA in the early ’60s. Perhaps the wild popularity of space-related imagery was in part what motivated NASA administrator James Webb to create the NASA Art Program in 1962. Although the program’s handpicked artists weren’t edited or censored in any […]