https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EMfA5_tm8Y In 1964—a year before the release of A Charlie Brown Christmas—Vince Guaraldi gave the first televised performance of “Linus and Lucy.” Filmed for public television, the performance featured Guaraldi on piano, Tom Beeson on bass, and John Rae on...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pZDgL6QMN0 The age of social media has shown humanity a fair few truths about itself, not all of them flattering. But once in a while, one of the waves of discourse that roll through the internet really does help us...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYCmPIDWo0o Few professionals tend to live as long, or mature as slowly, as architects. Frank Gehry died late last year at the formidable age of 96, with several projects still under construction. But he’d only really been Frank Gehry for...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrfKOQKyffE Khipus, the portable information archives created by the Inca, may stir up memories of 1970s macrame with their long strands of intricately knotted, earth-toned fibers, but their function more closely resembled that of a densely plotted computerized spreadsheet. As Cecilia Pardo-Grau, lead...
“The three volumes of Green’s Dictionary of Slang demonstrate the sheer scope of a lifetime of research by Jonathon Green, the leading slang lexicographer of our time. A remarkable collection of this often reviled but endlessly fascinating area of the...
Image by Klaus Schmeh, via Wikimedia Commons Magyar, which is spoken and written in Hungary, ranks among the hardest European languages to learn. (The U.S. Foreign Service Institute puts it in the second-to-highest level, accompanied by the dreaded asterisk labeling it...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ny-ujkmMniI Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) never saw a rhino himself, but by relying on eyewitness descriptions of the one King Manuel I of Portugal intended as a gift to the Pope, he managed to render a fairly realistic one, all...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-g5ausURIzM More than a few of us can claim, with some confidence, to know every Beatles song. And indeed it may be true, in that we’ve heard every track of all their studio albums. But as decade after decade of...
Image via Wikimedia Commons On the off chance Lin-Manuel Miranda is casting around for source material for his next American history-based blockbuster musical, may we suggest American Cookery by “poor solitary orphan” Amelia Simmons? First published in 1796, at 47 pages (nearly three of them...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TsfaBwDwEI Last year, we featured here on Open Culture the story of how a samurai ended up in the unlikely setting of seventeenth-century Venice. But as compellingly told as it was in video essay form by Evan Puschak, better known as...
