Open Culture

Take a Tour of 18th-Century London, Recreated with AI If you want to know what it was like to live in seventeenth-century London, read the diary of Samuel Pepys.

Take a Tour of 18th-Century London, Recreated with AI

A Quick Six Minute Journey Through Modern Art: How You Get from Manet’s 1862 Painting, “The Luncheon on the Grass,” to Jackson Pollock 1950s Drip Paintings Even those not intimately familiar with Jackson Pollock's work know to file him under a category called 'abstract expressionism,' but somehow his massive paintings — and the layer upon layer of drips ...

A Quick Six Minute Journey Through Modern Art: How You Get from Manet’s 1862 Painting, “The Luncheon on the Grass,” to Jackson Pollock 1950s Drip Paintings

An Animated Introduction to Anna Freud: The Psychoanalyst (and Daughter of Sigmund) Who Theorized Denial, Projection & Other Defense Mechanisms for Our Egos Being in denial, engaging in projection, rationalizing or intellectualizing events, regressing into childhood, displacing your anger, retreating into fantasy: who among us hasn't been subject to accus...

An Animated Introduction to Anna Freud: The Psychoanalyst (and Daughter of Sigmund) Who Theorized Denial, Projection & Other Defense Mechanisms for Our Egos

How to Rescue a Wet, Damaged Book: A Handy Visual Primer How to save those wet, damaged books? The question has to be asked. Above, you can watch a visual primer from the Syracuse University Libraries—people who know something about taking care of books.

How to Rescue a Wet, Damaged Book: A Handy Visual Primer

How the Long-Lost Body of Richard III Was Found Under a Parking Lot: Solving a 500-Year-Old Mystery Lord Stanley seems to have sealed his fate. 'A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse,' he cries out, coining another expression used four centuries later before being slain by the Earl of Richmond, t...

How the Long-Lost Body of Richard III Was Found Under a Parking Lot: Solving a 500-Year-Old Mystery

Watch Peter Tork Quietly Mouth Other Actors’ Lines in The Monkees: A Strange Quirk You’ll Never Unsee And now for something entirely random. As noted on Metafilter, 'Peter Tork from the Monkees had a strange little quirk. Sometimes, when other actors ... were delivering their lines Tork would unthinki...

Watch Peter Tork Quietly Mouth Other Actors’ Lines in The Monkees: A Strange Quirk You’ll Never Unsee

The Met Releases High-Definition 3D Scans of 140 Famous Art Objects: Sarcophagi, Van Gogh Paintings, Marble Sculptures & More www.openculture.com/2026/03/the-...

Watch a 106-Year-Old Wizard of Oz Book Get Magically Restored … By Cutting the Book’s Spine, Washing Pages & Recoloring Illustrations Author, educator and book restoration expert Sophia Bogle is in a constant race against time. Her mission: to rescue and restore ill-treated books before their lamentable conditions can consign them t...

Watch a 106-Year-Old Wizard of Oz Book Get Magically Restored … By Cutting the Book’s Spine, Washing Pages & Recoloring Illustrations

How to Rescue a Wet, Damaged Book: A Handy Visual Primer How to save those wet, damaged books? The question has to be asked. Above, you can watch a visual primer from the Syracuse University Libraries--people who know something about taking care of books.

How to Rescue a Wet, Damaged Book: A Handy Visual Primer

How the Oldest Company in the World, Japan’s Temple-Builder Kongō Gumi, Has Survived Nearly 1,500 Years Image from New York Public Library, via Wikimedia Commons If you visit Osaka, you'll be urged to see two old buildings in particular: Osaka Castle and Shitennō-ji (above), Japan's first Buddhist templ...

How the Oldest Company in the World, Japan’s Temple-Builder Kongō Gumi, Has Survived Nearly 1,500 Years

How the Grateful Dead’s “Wall of Sound”–a Monster, 600-Speaker Sound System–Changed Rock Concerts & Live Music Forever San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom when Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart walked on the stage and found the band’s sound engineer Owsley “Bear” Stanley standing in front of “a solid wall of over 600 ...

How the Grateful Dead’s “Wall of Sound”–a Monster, 600-Speaker Sound System–Changed Rock Concerts & Live Music Forever

Watch Peter Tork Quietly Mouth Other Actors’ Lines in The Monkees: A Strange Quirk You’ll Never Unsee And now for something entirely random. As noted on Metafilter, 'Peter Tork from the Monkees had a strange little quirk. Sometimes, when other actors ... were delivering their lines Tork would unthinki...

Watch Peter Tork Quietly Mouth Other Actors’ Lines in The Monkees: A Strange Quirk You’ll Never Unsee

The Met Releases High-Definition 3D Scans of 140 Famous Art Objects: Sarcophagi, Van Gogh Paintings, Marble Sculptures & More www.openculture.com/2026/03/the-...

The Futurist Cookbook (1930) Tried to Turn Italian Cuisine into Modern Art With the savage cuts in arts funding, perhaps we'll return to a system of noblesse oblige familiar to students of The Gilded Age, when artists needed independent wealth or patronage, and wealthy indus...

The Futurist Cookbook (1930) Tried to Turn Italian Cuisine into Modern Art

Who Would Be Emperor If the Roman Empire Still Existed Today? During Wimbledon a few years ago, a thread about King Felipe VI of Spain went viral. It was posted to the social media platform formerly known as Twitter by Derek Guy, author of the menswear blog Die,...

Who Would Be Emperor If the Roman Empire Still Existed Today?

Where Do You Put the Camera? Every Frame a Painting Presents Insights from Famous Directors Whether or not we believe in auteurhood, we each have our own mental image of what a film director does.

Where Do You Put the Camera? Every Frame a Painting Presents Insights from Famous Directors

The Ancient Greeks Who Converted to Buddhism It would hardly be notable to make the acquaintance of a Greek Buddhist today. Despite having originated in Asia, that religion — or philosophy, or way of life, or whatever you prefer to call it — now...

The Ancient Greeks Who Converted to Buddhism

How Hans Zimmer Created the Otherworldly Soundtrack for Dune Many emotional moments were made at this year’s big awards shows. The Slap, amidst so many historic wins; poignant tributes and criminal omissions; former actor-turned-wartime-hero-president Volodymyr...

How Hans Zimmer Created the Otherworldly Soundtrack for Dune

74 Ways Characters Die in Shakespeare’s Plays Shown in a Handy Infographic: From Snakebites to Lack of Sleep In the graduate department where I once taught freshmen and sophomores the rudiments of college English, it became common practice to include Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus on many an Intro to Lit syl...

74 Ways Characters Die in Shakespeare’s Plays Shown in a Handy Infographic: From Snakebites to Lack of Sleep

The Futurist Cookbook (1930) Tried to Turn Italian Cuisine into Modern Art With the savage cuts in arts funding, perhaps we'll return to a system of noblesse oblige familiar to students of The Gilded Age, when artists needed independent wealth or patronage, and wealthy indus...

The Futurist Cookbook (1930) Tried to Turn Italian Cuisine into Modern Art

Who Would Be Emperor If the Roman Empire Still Existed Today? During Wimbledon a few years ago, a thread about King Felipe VI of Spain went viral. It was posted to the social media platform formerly known as Twitter by Derek Guy, author of the menswear blog Die,...

Who Would Be Emperor If the Roman Empire Still Existed Today?

Inside the Automats Where Coin-Operated Machines Created a Modern, Democratic Dining Experience Alfred Hitchcock to the television viewers of America on March 25, 1959. 'Tonight I'm dining at my favorite club. There are many advantages here. As you can see, informality is the rule. There is also...

Inside the Automats Where Coin-Operated Machines Created a Modern, Democratic Dining Experience

AI Figures Out the Rules of a Mysterious 2,000-Year-Old Board Game from Ancient Rome Image by Walter Crist As far as enthusiasm for board games goes, no continent has yet outdone Europe.

AI Figures Out the Rules of a Mysterious 2,000-Year-Old Board Game from Ancient Rome

When Italian Futurists Declared War on Pasta (1930) Filippo Tommaso Marinetti Odds are Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the father of Futurism and a dedicated provocateur, would be crestfallen to discover how closely his most incendiary gastronomical pronoun...

When Italian Futurists Declared War on Pasta (1930)

Why Most Ancient Civilizations Had No Word for the Color Blue In an old Zen story, two monks argue over whether a flag is waving or whether it’s the wind that waves.

Why Most Ancient Civilizations Had No Word for the Color Blue

Daisugi, the 600-Year-Old Japanese Technique of Growing Trees Out of Other Trees, Creating Perfectly Straight Lumber Necessity being the mother of invention, this led to the creation of an ingenious solution: daisugi, the growing of additional trees, in effect, out of existing trees

Daisugi, the 600-Year-Old Japanese Technique of Growing Trees Out of Other Trees, Creating Perfectly Straight Lumber

How Édouard Manet Became “the Father of Impressionism” with the Scandalous Panting, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863) Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1863) caused quite a stir when it made its public debut in 1863. Today, we might assume that the controversy surrounding the painting had to do with its containing a n...

How Édouard Manet Became “the Father of Impressionism” with the Scandalous Panting, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863)

The Genius Urban Design of Amsterdam: Canals, Dams & Leaning Houses It's common to hear it said that some particular city — usually one of the American metropolises that sprang into existence over the past couple of centuries — 'shouldn't exist.' And indeed, as urban ...

The Genius Urban Design of Amsterdam: Canals, Dams & Leaning Houses

Inside the Automats Where Coin-Operated Machines Created a Modern, Democratic Dining Experience Alfred Hitchcock to the television viewers of America on March 25, 1959. 'Tonight I'm dining at my favorite club. There are many advantages here. As you can see, informality is the rule. There is also...

Inside the Automats Where Coin-Operated Machines Created a Modern, Democratic Dining Experience

AI Figures Out the Rules of a Mysterious 2,000-Year-Old Board Game from Ancient Rome Image by Walter Crist As far as enthusiasm for board games goes, no continent has yet outdone Europe.

AI Figures Out the Rules of a Mysterious 2,000-Year-Old Board Game from Ancient Rome