https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZnW-E70wq8 We didn’t have civilization until we had cities, and we didn’t have cities until we had agriculture. So, at least, goes a widely accepted narrative in “big history” — a narrative somewhat troubled by the discovery of ruins on...
You may have seen every single one of Studio Ghibli’s animated films, going well beyond the Hayao Miyazaki-directed My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, and Kiki’s Delivery Service to the less widely known but also charmingly crafted likes of Ocean Waves, My...
Image via Wikimedia Commons The site Fast Company published an article that describes the “Complaint Restraint project,” an initiative that aims to create a “positive life by eliminating negative statements.” It’s an admirable goal. Though most of us have a perverse...
Image by Ironie, via Wikimedia Commons The average Open Culture reader may well be aware that there is such a thing as Archaeology YouTube. What could come as more of a surprise is how much back-and-forth there is within that...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIB1b_8hqB0 In 1980, Newsweek published a cantankerous and sadly on-the-nose diagnosis of the United States’ “cult of ignorance” — written by one Isaac Asimov, “professor of biochemistry at Boston University School of Medicine” and “author of 212 books, most of...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlWoK0hNrSE If you want to see the Mona Lisa in real life, your first thought may not be to head to the Prado. But according to a school of thought that has emerged in recent years, the Mona Lisa in Madrid...
Marie Curie’s 1911 Nobel Prize win, her second, for the discovery of radium and polonium, would have been cause for public celebration in her adopted France, but for the nearly simultaneous revelation of her affair with fellow physicist Paul Langevin,...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnrPZuN0m-0 It felt, for quite some time there, like the age of Frank Gehry would never end. But now that the latest defining figure of American architecture — or technically, Canadian-American architecture — has died at the age of 96, the...
Photo via Wikimedia Commons The history of science, like most every history we learn, comes to us as a procession of great, almost exclusively white, men, unbroken but for the occasional token woman—well-deserving of her honors but seemingly anomalous nonetheless....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2gqnjfzcTY It would be impossible to understand Western civilization without understanding the history of Christianity. But in order to do that, it may serve us well to think of it as the history of Christianities, plural. So suggests Hochelaga creator...
