Open Culture

Even now, in this age when the very reading of literature is endangered — or so the articles tell us — Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) retains a notable ability to pick up new admirers.

Stephen King has that rare, and spectacularly profitable, skill to suck you into his world and compel you to flip to the next page.

This Halloween marks the 100th anniversary of the death of famed escape artist Harry Houdini.

Ray Ellis had a six-decade career as a producer, arranger, and jazz composer.

Scholars disagree on when, exactly, Rome fell.

Sir Christopher Lee and Edgar Allan Poe went way back.

Latin is a language As dead as dead can be; It killed the Romans long ago, And now it’s killing me.

Any reader of Victorian literature will wonder how much a ha’penny was actually worth in those days.

Two of the books that most shaped American culture both happened to bear the nickname “The Big Book.”

Cast your mind, if you will, back to the year 2020.

Smack in the middle of Pink Floyd’s classic Dark Side of the Moon sits a song many listeners may hear as an extended bridge between the two true centerpieces, “Time” and “Money.”

In the Halloween season, one American writer comes to mind more often than any other: Edgar Allan Poe.

Back in 1975, Jack H.

No artist, no matter how solitary by nature, becomes a cultural phenomenon alone.

Some would call the United States of America the mightiest empire the world has ever known.

Hieronymus Bosch’s bizarre paintings might have looked perfectly ordinary to his contemporaries, argues Stanley Meisler in “The World of Bosch.”

Cleopatra cost Twentieth Century Fox $44 million, by the studio’s own estimate.

Until I read J.

A few years ago, we featured here on Open Culture the Freedmen’s Bureau Project database, which contains searchable information on formerly enslaved people in the United States after its Civil War.

I am sure that many an Open Culture reader has a Bialetti Moka Express in their kitchen.

In 2002, the retired British submarine lieutenant-commander turned amateur historian Gavin Menzies created a stir with a book about Chinese seafaring in the fifteenth century. 1421: The Year China Discovered the World (tellingly titled 1421: The Year China

There’s ahead of its time, then there’s Traité des couleurs servant à la peinture à l’eau — or, in its original Dutch title, Klaer Lightende Spiegel der Verfkonst, a 900-page book of paint colors made before any such things were common tools of the artist…

David Byrne will always be most widely known as the co-founder and frontman of Talking Heads.

Even before the success of the electric car company that now bears his name, Nikola Tesla was a widely respected historical figure.

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 the world.”

If you’re trying to understand a city, its map isn’t a bad place to start.

When will the world end?

High culture and new technology have never been a natural pairing.

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 apocalypse due to a surfeit of sin.

The printing press was invented in the middle of the fifteenth century, and it’s been downhill for the written word ever since.

Here’s some rare footage of the great Mexican painters Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo paying a visit to exiled Soviet revolutionary Leon Trotsky and his wife, Natalia Sedova, in Coyoacán, Mexico, in 1938.

Image via Buckminster Fuller Estate The novels of John Brunner have become a niche taste, even within his genre of science fiction.

When work on the Sagrada Família first began in 1882, the original architect could hardly have imagined that, 144 years later, the ambitious undertaking would still be underway.

The word wireless is going the way of computerized and portable, and for much the same reasons.

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 publication.

You may remember a time when it was difficult to make it through the day without hearing someone cite a TED Talk.

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.

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 than it would seem.

The field of psychology is very different than it used to be.

Before she became a composer of electronic music, Else Marie Pade was a sick child listening to the radio.

We have any number of reasons for difficulty getting to sleep, not least worries about the future.

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.

Image by Library of Congress/Carl Van Vechten, via Wikimedia Commons Many a foreigner has visited England and found it an unexpectedly surreal place.

In 1924, Zenon Komissarenko, Youry Merkulov and Nikolai Khodataev produced Interplanetary Revolution, which might just be one of the strangest Soviet propaganda films ever produced.

There was a time when you could just go out and buy an Enigma machine.

Critical theorists like Theodor Adorno may have overreached in claiming that all mass culture is mediocre, mechanized propaganda made to justify the status quo.