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Open Culture
www.openculture.com
32
The best free cultural & educational media on the web
#41643 in All

The Bill Evans Trio in London, 1965: Two Sets by the Legendary Combo

On March 19, 1965, the Bill Evans Trio stopped by the BBC studios in London to play a pair of sets on Jazz 625, the now-legendary program hosted by the British trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton. The combo...

14 h ago

“Good Chemistry” Explains Chemical Bonds with Cutout Animation and Teenage Romance

Love, or the promise of it, sells clothes, cologne and many a compact disc—but who’d think love could sell chemistry? Sixteen-year-old Eli Cirino did, and was he ever right. The tenth grader submitte...

17 h ago 1 person likes this

Entitled Opinions, the “Life and Literature” Podcast That Refuses to Dumb Things Down

Proust. Mimetic desire. The inflationary universe. 1910, American writers in Paris. The history of the book. These topics may sound unusual enough to pique your interest. They may float through your ...

18 h ago 1 person likes this

The Art of Making a Flamenco Guitar: 299 Hours of Blood, Sweat & Tears Experienced in 3 Minutes

The Flamenco guitar grew up in Andalusia, the major province in southern Spain, where it became integral to the culture during the 19th century. The modern flamenco guitar (a first cousin of the mode...

23 h ago

Building the Golden Gate Bridge: A Retro Film Featuring Original Archival Footage

This past weekend, San Francisco celebrated the 75th anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge. And if Bethlehem Steel were still around, it would have been celebrating too. Once America’s second-l...

1 day ago

Download David Hockney’s Playful Drawings for the iPhone and iPad

Last year, the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto staged an exhibit of David Hockney’s playful drawings produced with/for the iPhone and iPad. Hockney became an early adopter of Apple’...

1 day ago

Rare 1959 Audio: Flannery O’Connor Reads ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’

Flannery O’Connor was a Southern writer who, as Joyce Carol Oates once said, had less in common with Faulkner than with Kafka and Kierkegaard. Isolated by poor health and consumed by her ferven...

1 day ago

When Respected Authors, from Goethe to Henry Miller, Try Their Hand at Painting

Freshly posted on publisher Melville House‘s blog, you’ll find examples of visual art by textual artists; drawings and paintings, in other words, drawn and painted by people who have gone...

1 day ago

William F. Buckley Meets (Possibly Drunk) Jack Kerouac, Tries to Make Sense of Hippies, 1968

The first modern use of the word hippie can be traced back to 1965, when Michael Fallon, a San Francisco journalist, used the word to refer to the bohemian lifestyle emerging in the city’s Haig...

1 day ago

Download David Hockney’s Playful Drawings for the iPhone and iPad

Last year, the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto staged an exhibit of David Hockney’s playful drawings produced with/for the iPhone and iPad. Hockney became an early adopter of Apple’...

2 days ago

Neil deGrasse Tyson Delivers the Greatest Science Sermon Ever

Just when you think you’ve had enough Neil deGrasse Tyson, another not-to-miss video comes along. This one comes from the 2006 Beyond Belief Conference, and it features the astrophysicist givin...

2 days ago 1 person likes this

Breaking News: Socrates Tried Again in Athens and Acquitted!

Note: the action starts at about the two minute mark, and the video is accompanied by an English translation. The trial and execution of Socrates at Athens in 399 B.C.E. has come down to us as the ar...

2 days ago

The Ideas of Noam Chomsky: Mostly Linguistics and a Little Politics

We’ve featured the linguist and polemicist Noam Chomsky here before, and not two weeks ago we posted about philosopher-broadcaster Bryan Magee. The Ideas of Noam Chomsky brings the two men toge...

2 days ago

The Open Goldberg Variations: J.S. Bach’s Masterpiece Free to Download

First published in 1741, J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations is often considered the most ambitious composition ever written for harpsichord. As this conversation at NPR notes, the piece begins ...

3 days ago

Jeff Buckley: Everybody Here Wants You. The Musician Remembered in 2002 Documentary

For a brief moment there, it looked like Jeff Buckley would perhaps be the heir apparent to Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen — the next in a line of prolific American musicians. In 1994, Buckley...

3 days ago

Measuring the Universe: How Astronomers Learned to Measure Celestial Distances Explained with Anima...

Have you ever wondered how astronomers figure out the mind-boggling distances between the Earth and various astronomical objects? In this informative animated video from the Royal Observatory at Gree...

3 days ago

Daniel Dennett (a la Jeff Foxworthy) Does the Routine, “You Might be an Atheist If…”

The American comedian Jeff Foxworthy has a well known comedy routine called “You Might be a Redneck If,” where he lists the self-mocking possibilities that answer the question. For exampl...

3 days ago

Vladimir Nabokov (Channelled by Christopher Plummer) Teaches Kafka at Cornell

“From my point of view,” writes Vladimir Nabokov in Lectures on Literature, “any outstanding work of art is a fantasy insofar as it reflects the unique world of a unique individual....

4 days ago 1 person likes this

Andy Samberg Announces Death of Liberal Arts, Coolness of Science Majors at Harvard Class Day

Every time Harvard Class Day rolls around, you can expect a few good laughs from a comedian. In years past, Sacha Baron Cohen (a Cambridge grad), appearing as Ali G, offered some words of nonsensical...

4 days ago

Bill Murray Stars in Playful, Slo-Mo, Mock Trailer (and More Culture from Around the Web)

As Wes Anderson’s new film with Bill Murray hits theaters this weekend, a fun video starring the actor has surfaced on the web. Here’s the quick backstory. Last year, a crew working on a ...

5 days ago

Celebrate the 75th Anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge with a Free iPad App

When it opened to vehicle traffic in May, 1937 the Golden Gate Bridge was the longest suspension bridge in the world. Since then eight bridges have surpassed it in length, but the iconic internationa...

5 days ago

How David Byrne and Brian Eno Make Music Together: A Short Documentary

On Monday, we posted the Artist Series, short profiles of various aesthetically-oriented creators by the late Hillman Curtis. Today, please enjoy what feels like the jewel in the Artist Series’...

6 days ago

ZeroN: An Amazing, Gravity-Defying New Interactive Technology at M.I.T.

In Stephen Spielberg’s film E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial there is a memorable scene in which a group of children ask a stranded visitor from outer space where he is from, and he tries to communic...

6 days ago 1 person likes this

David Rees and His One-Man Artisanal Pencil Sharpening Service

This is for anyone with a love of old school woodworking — luthiers, ébénistes and the rest. In 2009, the humorist David Rees gave up cartooning and opened up his one-man artisanal pencil sharp...

6 days ago

Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize-Winner, Tweets New Story with The New Yorker

In March, Jennifer Egan (A Visit From the Goon Squad) paid a visit to Google and was asked to sum up her year since winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2011. She said: “I am still not used to the ide...

6 days ago

New Great Gatsby, On the Road Adaptations Revive an Old Debate: Can Great Books Make Great Movies?

Two of the greatest American novels of the 20th century–F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road–are headed for the big screen later this year, an...

24 may 12

Leonard Susskind, Father of String Theory, Warmly Remembers His Friend, Richard Feynman

Leonard Susskind — he’s the father of String Theory, someone who won the black hole wars with Stephen Hawking, and a Stanford professor who likes to bring physics to the broader public. (...

24 may 12

Bill Murray Introduces Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom (And Plays FDR In December)

Excited Wes Anderson fans: do you need one more watchable to tide you over before Moonrise Kingdom enters wide release tomorrow? Wes Anderson-neutral filmgoers: do you need a little help cutting thro...

24 may 12

Watch: New Film by Roman Polanski, Starring Helena Bonham Carter, Sir Ben Kingsley & Prada Shoes

At the Cannes Film Festival this week, Roman Polanski screened a restored version of his 1979 film, Tess. And then he tantalized the audience, at least momentarily, when he offered a sneak preview of...

24 may 12

The First Films of Great Directors: Kubrick, Coppola, Scorsese, Tarantino & Truffaut

Great directors – unless they’re Orson Welles – rarely start off making masterpieces. Their craft evolves, reminding us that great filmmaking (like everything else) takes talent, bu...

24 may 12

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