openculture.comadded August 2026
Open Cultureby Colin Marshall3d ago
David Byrne will always be most widely known as the co-founder and frontman of Talking Heads. That may count among the greatest possible achievements for any artist — to the minds of many an Open...
Open Cultureby Colin Marshall3d ago
Even before the success of the electric car company that now bears his name, Nikola Tesla was a widely respected historical figure.
Open Cultureby OC4d ago
There may be no more a macabrely misogynistic sentence in English literature than Edgar Allan Poe’s contention that “the death… of a beautiful woman” is “unquestionably the most poetical topic in...
Open Cultureby Colin Marshall4d ago
If you’re trying to understand a city, its map isn’t a bad place to start. Today, of course, we can call up an accurate map of practically any part of any city at any time we like, with detailed...
Open Cultureby OC5d ago
When will the world end? We can find serious scientific answers to this question, depending on what we mean by “world” and “end.” If we mean the end of civilization as we currently know it, climate...
Open Cultureby Colin Marshall5d ago
High culture and new technology have never been a natural pairing. As our digital era has often underscored, media innovations tend to be adopted earliest to deliver the most puerile...
Open Cultureby OC6d ago
We have become quite used to pronouncements of doom, from scientists predicting the sixth mass extinction due to the measurable effects of climate change, and from religionists declaring the...
Open Cultureby Colin Marshall6d ago
The printing press was invented in the middle of the fifteenth century, and it’s been downhill for the written word ever since.
Open Cultureby Colin Marshall10d ago
Image via Buckminster Fuller Estate The novels of John Brunner have become a niche taste, even within his genre of science fiction. A more sociologically minded version of Philip K.
Open Cultureby Colin Marshall11d ago
The word wireless is going the way of computerized and portable, and for much the same reasons. We no longer regard wireless devices that require no physical connections to anything else as...
Open Cultureby OC12d ago
The history of the printed word is full of bibliographic twists and turns, major historical moments, and the significant printing of books now so obscure no one has read them since their...
Open Cultureby Colin Marshall12d ago
You may remember a time when it was difficult to make it through the day without hearing someone cite a TED Talk.
Open Cultureby OC13d ago
In the fall of 1969 the Rolling Stones were in a Los Angeles recording studio, putting the final touches on their album Let It Bleed. It was a tumultuous time for the Stones.
Open Cultureby Colin Marshall13d ago
The idea of a youngster vacillating between whether to become a magician or join the Central Intelligence Agency may sound implausible, but those two working environments have deeper commonalities...
Open Cultureby OC14d ago
The field of psychology is very different than it used to be. Nowadays, the American Psychological Association has a code of conduct for experiments that ensures a subject’s confidentiality...
Open Cultureby Colin Marshall17d ago
Before she became a composer of electronic music, Else Marie Pade was a sick child listening to the radio.
Open Cultureby Colin Marshall17d ago
We have any number of reasons for difficulty getting to sleep, not least worries about the future.
Open Cultureby OC18d ago
Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I mentally revisit the various homes of my childhood, wandering from room to room, turning on lights and peering in closets until I conk out.
Open Cultureby Colin Marshall18d ago
Many a foreigner has visited England and found it an unexpectedly surreal place. Some of that effect has to do with encountering familiar icons — Big Ben, double-decker Routemaster buses, Marmite —...
Open Cultureby Colin Marshall19d ago
There was a time when you could just go out and buy an Enigma machine. In the early nineteen-twenties, any organization with a need to keep its communications secret could order a few of those...
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