~openculture | Bookmarks (161)

In 2004, John Conway and Alexander Soifer, both working on mathematics at Princeton University, submitted to the American Mathematical Monthly what they believed was “a new world record in the number of words in a [math] paper.” Soifer explains: “On April 28, 2004 … I submitted our paper that included just two words, ‘n2 + 2 can’ and our two drawings. [See […]

Raise your children with a love of science, and there’s a decent chance they’ll grow up wanting to be like Richard Feynman, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, or any number of other famous scientists from history. Luckily for them, they won’t yet have learned that the pursuit of such a career will almost certainly entail grinding […]

Scientists need hobbies. The grueling work of navigating complex theory and the politics of academia can get to a person, even one as laid back as Brown University professor and astrophysicist Stephon Alexander. So Alexander plays the saxophone, though at this point it may not be accurate to call his avocation a spare time pursuit, […]

The idea of discovering a lost ancient city underground has long captured the human imagination. But why are the abandoned built environments of those fantasies always buried? The answer, in large part, is that such places do indeed exist under our feet, at least in certain parts of the world. When archaeologists started digging under […]

On Youtube, jazz enthusiast Jonathan Holmes declares: “I can guarantee this is the cleanest sounding Louis Armstrong record you’ll ever hear! With the original transfer supplied by Nick Dellow, here is the mother record which was shipped by Okeh to Germany for their Odeon pressings. The sound is wonderfully immediate, and crystal clear.” No crackle […]

In the new Architectural Digest video above, Michael Wyetzner talks about a fair few buildings we’ve featured over the years here on Open Culture: the Imperial Hotel, the Ennis House, Taliesin, Fallingwater. These are all, of course, the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, who still stands as the embodiment of American architecture more than 65 […]

East meets West, and the Ancient, the Modern. That’s what happens every time Luna Lee plays one of your favorites on the Gayageum, a Korean instrument that dates back to the 6th century. We’ve featured her work in years past (see the Relateds below). Above, watch one of her standout performances—a cover of “The Man Who Sold […]

Whether or not you believe Jesus Christ is the son of God, you probably envision him (or, if you prefer, Him) in much the same way as most everyone else does. The long hair and beard, the robe, the sandals, the beatific gaze: these traits have all manifested across two millennia of Christian art. “However, […]

When John Nash wrote “Non-Cooperative Games,” his Ph.D. dissertation at Princeton in 1950, the text of his thesis (read it online) was brief. It ran only 26 pages. And more particularly, it was light on citations. Nash’s diss cited two texts: John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944), which essentially created game theory and revolutionized the field […]

The Citigroup Center in Midtown Manhattan is also known by its address, 601 Lexington Avenue, at which it’s been standing for 47 years, longer than the median New Yorker has been alive. Though still a fairly handsome building, in a seventies-corporate sort of way, it now pops out only mildly on the skyline. At street […]

It can be tempting to view the box office’s domination by visual-effects-laden Hollywood spectacle as a recent phenomenon. And indeed, there have been periods during which that wasn’t the case: the “New Hollywood” that began in the late nineteen sixties, for instance, when the old studio system handed the reins to inventive young guns like […]

On Tuesday, the cardinals locked themselves into the Sistine Chapel, officially beginning the conclave to elect the 267th pope. First formalized by Pope Gregory X in 1274, the conclave (a word derived from the Latin words cum clave, meaning “with a key”) follows a highly scripted process honed over the past 800 years. How the conclave […]

Today, 133 cardinals from around the world enter the conclave to determine the next pope, during which they’ll cast their votes in the Sistine Chapel. Despite being one of the most famous tourist attractions in Europe, the Sistine Chapel still serves as a venue for such important official functions, just as it has since its […]

Several years back, Colin Marshall highlighted George Orwell’s essay, “A Nice Cup of Tea,” which first ran in the Evening Standard on January 12, 1946. In that article, Orwell weighed in on a subject the English take seriously–how to make the perfect cup of tea. (According to Orwell, “tea is one of the mainstays of civilization.”) And […]

Despite developing in Asia, as the Chinese form of a religion originally brought over from India and later refined in Japan, Zen Buddhism has long appealed to Westerners as well. Some of that owes to the spare, elegant aesthetics with which popular culture associates it, and more to the promise it holds out: freedom from […]

Who wants to be a billionaire? A few years ago, Forbes published author Roberta Chinsky Matuson’s sensible advice to businesspeople seeking to shoot up that golden ladder. These lawful tips espoused such familiar virtues as hard work and community involvement, and as such, were easily adaptable to the rabble—artists, teachers, anyone in the service industry […]

You may believe that you’ve had a close enough view of Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. You may have gone to The Hague and seen the painting in person at the Mauritshuis. You may have zoomed into the ten billion-pixel scan we featured here on Open Culture in 2021. But if you haven’t […]

When inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville sang a nursery rhyme into his phonoautogram in 1860, he had no plans to ever play back this recording. A precursor to the wax cylinder, the phonoautogram took inputs for the study of sound waves, but could not be turned into an output device. How amazing then, that 150 […]

Image via Hereford Cathedral and Hereford Mappa Mundi Trust At this point, every aspect of William Shakespeare’s life has produced more speculation than any of us could digest in a lifetime. That goes for his professional life, of course, but also his even more scantily documented personal life. As far as his marriage is concerned, […]

Above, Lars Schmitz, a professor at Claremont McKenna College, guides us “through a giant tree of life mapping the evolution of eyes in the animal kingdom: how they work, why they’ve taken the form they have, and the evolutionary advantages they’ve unlocked across species.” The video comes courtesy of Wired. It’s 36 minutes and downright fascinating. […]

This year, YouTube celebrated its twentieth anniversary, prompting younger users to wonder what life could have been like before it. The fiftieth anniversary of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which premiered in April of 1975, has inspired similar reflection among comedy enthusiasts. It can be difficult, at this point, to imagine oneself back in […]

It’s hard to believe, but Marvin Gaye’s classic 1967 recording of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” was originally rejected by his record label. The song, about a man’s grief over hearing rumors of his lover’s infidelity, was written by the legendary Motown Records producer Norman Whitfield and singer Barrett Strong. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles first […]

“The Sound of Silence” Is the Most Metal Song of the Past Decade”: imagine that headline, and the contrarian culture piece practically writes itself. Not so long ago, Slate was notorious for publishing that kind of thing, but it seems they’ve now put that sensibility behind them — or at least mostly behind them. “If […]

When the Romans pushed their way north into the German provinces, they built (circa 90 AD) the Saalburg, a fort that protected the boundary between the Roman Empire and the Germanic tribal territories. At its peak, 2,000 people lived in the fort and the attached village, and it remained active until around 260 AD. Sometime during […]