CULTURE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWOw884dPW4 With the tenth anniver­sary of David Bowie’s death com­ing up ear­ly next year, more than a few fans will have their minds on a pil­grim­age to mark the occa­sion. Per­haps with that very time frame in mind, the V&A...

Ana Teixeira Pinto: I feel like everybody is writing the same article these days. The argument goes like this: the Left has lost the plot by choosing to fight cultural wars instead of economic ones. ‘Divisive issues’ alienated the working...

If you fol­low the ongo­ing beef many pop­u­lar sci­en­tists have with phi­los­o­phy, you’d be for­giv­en for think­ing the two dis­ci­plines have noth­ing to say to each oth­er. That’s a sad­ly false impres­sion, though they have become almost entire­ly sep­a­rate pro­fes­sion­al...

Times New Roman has been around since 1931, longer than most of us have been alive — and for longer than many of us have been alive, word-pro­cess­ing appli­ca­tions have come with it as the default font. We tend, there­fore,...

Let us all unite and toil together To give the best we have to Africa The cradle of mankind and fount of culture Our pride and hope at break of dawn (From the African Union anthem) Consider this scenario, courtesy...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-UhDuKZ2OQ From today’s van­tage, the first decade of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry can look like an even more dis­tant peri­od of his­to­ry than it is. In many cor­ners of urban civ­i­liza­tion, the cabarets, tea­rooms, and oth­er near-par­a­lyt­i­cal­ly man­nered insti­tu­tions of the...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZIoa3JJyXw There is a well-known scene in Woody Allen’s Take The Mon­ey And Run (1969) when Vir­gil Stark­well (Allen) takes a psy­cho­log­i­cal test to join the Navy, but is thwart­ed by his las­civ­i­ous uncon­scious. The psy­cho­log­i­cal mea­sure that proves to...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4hE-SOHf5A Rig­or­ous­ly clean-cut, com­pe­tent on the acoustic gui­tar and dou­ble bass, and sel­dom dressed in any­thing more dar­ing than cher­ry-red blaz­ers, Tom and Dick Smoth­ers looked like the antithe­sis of nine­teen-six­ties rebel­lion. When they first gained nation­al recog­ni­tion with their...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FqFg-rjzPo Here on Open Cul­ture, we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured Domain of Sci­ence’s elab­o­rate info­graph­ic maps of such vast fields of intel­lec­tu­al endeav­or as math­e­mat­ics, physics, com­put­er sci­ence, quan­tum physics, quan­tum com­put­ing, chem­istry, biol­o­gy, and med­i­cine. Over time, the series’ cre­ator Dominic...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOwP0KUlnZg Teach­ing child vis­i­tors how to write their names using an unfa­mil­iar or antique alpha­bet is a favorite activ­i­ty of muse­um edu­ca­tors, but Dr. Irv­ing Finkel, a cuneiform expert who spe­cial­izes in ancient Mesopotami­an med­i­cine and mag­ic, has grander designs....