Not every 46-year-old comedy still gets laughs, but Airplane! seems only to get funnier with the decades. Some viewers too young to have caught it in its theatrical release even take the Benjaminian view of it as the kind of great work that creates its own genre: the rapid-fire deadpan joke machine, we could call it. […]

Art may seem inessential to those who make the big decisions in times of crisis. But it never seemed more necessary to artists working in the time of plague. So it was 366 years ago when Rembrandt painted a portrait of his son, Titus, in a monk’s robe in 1660. Eight years later, Titus was […]

You can still type a symbol originally invented for Cicero nearly 21 centuries ago — at least if you configure your keyboard properly.  The character ⁊ appears in Unicode as U+204A, but is better known as the “Tironian et”: the “et” is Latin for “and,” and the “Tironian” comes from its creator, a man named […]

Twenty years ago, United States senator Ted Stevens drew long-lasting online ridicule by describing the internet as “a series of tubes.” While some commentators noted that the analogy wasn’t quite as outlandish as it seemed, most reacted with nothing more than amused bafflement. Where had Stevens come up with that image? Given that he was […]

Each time I sit through the end credits of a film, I think about how weird auteur theory is—that a work of cinema can be primarily thought of as the singular vision of the director. Typical examples come from artier fare than the usual Hollywood blockbuster in which crews of thousands of stuntpeople, special effects […]

Over the years, you’ve probably heard at least a few people casually describe themselves as Epicureans. As used today, the label can refer to as little as enjoying the occasional expensive restaurant meal. The bar was a bit higher in the second century, as explained by ancient-history YouTuber Garrett Ryan in the new video above […]

Stewart Brand came onto the cultural scene during the 1960s, helping to stage the Acid Tests made famous by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, and later launching the influential Whole Earth Catalog (something Steve Jobs described as “Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along”). He also vigorously campaigned in 1966 to have NASA release […]

Among Beatles connoisseurs, it’s fair game to claim anything from Rubber Soul to Abbey Road as one’s favorite album. But even within that span of the catalog, a hierarchy of acclaim exists, and that hierarchy has been rearranged over the decades. The ecstatic reception of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band lasted at least a decade. […]

Like many American stories, the story of the National Parks begins with pillage, death, deep cultural misunderstanding, and venture capitalism. According to Ken Burns’ film series The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, we can date the idea back to 1851, with the “discovery” of Yosemite by a marauding armed battalion that entered the land “searching […]

Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Special Effects, though viewers raised on more recent Hollywood spectacles would hardly find its mechanized and optically printed avian attackers convincing. Still, the picture as a whole has retained its eerie, ominous power over the last six decades, and a decent amount of the […]

When Pink Floyd recorded “Money” in 1972, Roger Waters spliced into the opening moments the sounds of cash registers, tearing paper, and jingling coins. Half a century later, the German drummer Sina Doering and her band performed those sounds live, using a bowl of loose change, a toy register, a money counter, and a sheet […]

Cast your mind back to the distant year 2021 and recall, if you will, its music, its fashions, the obsessions of its youth. This probably won’t be a difficult task, since in most respects — the dampening effects of the pandemic notwithstanding — none of those aspects of popular culture seem any different today. Yet […]

Recall, if you will, the first time you read Book 2 of Homer’s Iliad. The section likely to have given you the most trouble — unless, of course, you’re blessed with an obsessive interest in ancient naval warfare — is the much-remarked-upon Catalogue of Ships, a rundown of not just the contingents of the Achaean […]

Most people know that Mark Twain wrote about Jim and Huckleberry Finn navigating down the Mississippi. Less well known is that he occasionally dabbled in the burgeoning genre of science fiction. His 1898 short story “The Great Dark” is about a ship that sails across a drop of water on a microscope slide. His novel […]

For generations of kids in the twentieth century, few pleasures were as intoxicating as a trip to the comic-book shop with the week’s allowance fresh in hand. Those of us who grew up in the nineties had any number of high-production-value paper superhero spectacles from major publishers on which to blow our money. Personally, I […]

I’ve never quite understood why the phrase “revisionist history” became purely pejorative. Of course, it has its Orwellian dark side, but all knowledge has to be revised periodically, as we acquire new information and, ideally, discard old prejudices and narrow frames of reference. A failure to do so seems fundamentally regressive, not only in political […]

The description “open-air museum” has often been applied, in various senses both positive and negative, to the country of Italy in general and the city of Rome in particular. Indeed, only the imagination of a truly blinkered (or unusually phone-addicted) tourist could fail to be cast back to antiquity upon entering its historic center, itself […]

Like digging for fossils or panning for gold, the research process can be a tedious affair. But for any researcher, long days of searching and reading will eventually result in discovery. These are the moments scholars cherish. It’s the chance discovery, however rare, that makes the long hours and bleary late nights worthwhile. And some finds can […]

A Manhattan without skyscrapers sounds difficult, if not impossible, to imagine today. But such a place really did exist, at least up until the turn of the twentieth century. While the title of the very first skyscraper ever built may go to the Home Insurance Building in Chicago, New York City caught up so aggressively […]

It’s common to feel like we know our artists, writers, musicians, actors… we want so badly to touch their lives in some way, as their lives touch ours. This overwhelming desire is responsible for a huge market share of our mass media, from the most tasteless tabloid hit jobs to the most respectful longform essays. […]

Open Culture readers may know John Green best for Crash Course, the YouTube channel that teaches everything you need to know about subjects like world history, U.S. history, big history, literature, and philosophy. Or at least it teaches everything a teenage student facing down the prospect of Advanced Placement subject exams needs to know. Such […]

If you plan on shooting your own adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, bear in mind how much rests on your choice of leading man. In order to play Odysseus, an actor must summon a real gravitas, but also a still-smoldering vitality: here is a man who led the Greek army to defeat Troy, but still has […]

Carl Jung’s Liber Novus, better known as The Red Book, has come to light in a complete English translation, published by Norton in a 2009 facsimile edition and a smaller “reader’s edition” in 2012. The years since have seen several exhibitions of the book, which “could pass for a Bible rendered by a medieval monk,” […]

In Jerusalem of the year 1229, there lived a Greek Orthodox monk named Johannes Myronas. Needing some parchment for a prayer book, he grabbed some already-used pages, erased their existing content, and over them wrote down “prayers for the dead, prayers for repentance, blessings for the loaves at Easter, and even a prayer for those […]

Image via Wikimedia Commons It’s been a humanist truism for some time to say that Shakespeare speaks to every age, transcending his time and place through the sheer force of his universal genius. But any honest student first encountering the plays will tell you differently, as will many a seasoned scholar who works hard to […]

One of my favorite Brian Eno quotes, or rather one that became an Oblique Strategy, is “Honor Your Mistake as a Hidden Intention.” (Or to be pedantic, the original version was “Honor Thy Error…”). As a teenager growing up and trying to make art (at that time music and comics) there was no advice more […]

At the moment, the answer to the question of why we should read Homer’s Odyssey seems rather straightforward: so we can more intelligently voice our opinions on Christopher Nolan’s new blockbuster film adaptation. A quarter-century ago, the matter was somewhat less clear. Still, an occasion had presented itself in the form of a new English translation, […]

Maybe you’ve already seen Christopher Nolan’s new cinematic interpretation of the Odyssey more than once; maybe you don’t know whether you’ll ever get around to it at all. Either way, you’ve got to admit that the man makes films in a way very few living directors do. His combination of blockbuster-scale spectacle and personal vision, a […]

Filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki detests being referred to as the Japanese Walt Disney. The great animator and storyteller admires the gorgeous animation of classic Disney films, but finds them lacking in emotional complexity, the element he prizes above all else. Miyazaki’s films are celebrated for their mystical, supernatural elements, but they take shape around the human characters […]

The typical student traveling on a Eurail pass will stop in such lands as Österreich, Italia, Česko and Schweiz — also known as Suisse, Svizzera, and Svizra. If that student happens to hail from the English-speaking world, the names Austria, Italy, the Czech Republic (the recent movement for Czechia notwithstanding), and Switzerland will sound more familiar. But […]