https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daIMIv8perM Talk to a clear-headed 107-year-old today, and you could expect to hear stories of adolescence in the Great Depression, or — if you’re lucky — the Jazz Age seen through a child’s eyes. It’s no common experience to have...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFhKZv-fgXs Some people talk to plants. The Carnegie Museum of Art’s chief conservator Ellen Baxter talks to the paintings she’s restoring. “You have to … tell her she’s going to look lovely,” she says, above, spreading varnish over a 16th-century...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixfcoN7n6JE ‘Cancel culture’ is a highly charged term, coming down hard on questionable behaviour. It divides opinion: there are those who believe it levels the playing field for marginalized communities; others argue it stifles free speech and hinders open debate....
Over the past few weeks, Israel marked twenty years since the “Gaza Disengagement”: the 2005 operation that uprooted 8,500 settlers and pulled out its troops. Presented as a way to ease Israel’s military burden and redraw its borders, the move...
In the age of mature Putinism, violence and control, accompanied by a new morality based on so-called ‘traditional values’, have become crucial instruments for managing Russian society. The use of the education system and cultural institutions to indoctrinate the population...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJnEQCMA5Sg We may take it for granted that the earliest writing systems developed with the Sumerians around 3400 B.C.E. The archaeological evidence so far supports the theory. But it may also be possible that the earliest writing systems predate 5000-year-old...
At the moment, there’s no better way to see anything in space than through the lens of the James Webb Space Telescope. Previously featured here on Open Culture, that ten-billion-dollar successor to the Hubble Space Telescope can see unprecedentedly far...
Michelangelo was born in the Republic of Florence, with the talent of… well, Michelangelo. Given those beginnings, it would have been practically impossible for him to avoid entanglement with the House of Medici, the banking family and political dynasty that...
There have been many times in American history when celebrations of the country’s multi-ethnic, ever-changing demography served as powerful counterweights to narrow, exclusionary, nationalisms. In 1855, for example, the publication of Brooklyn native Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself offered a...
Michał Sutowski: In the morning, after the drones entered Poland, the prime minister said, ‘There is no reason to panic; life will go on as normal’. Was he right? Marcin Ogdowski: After every attack on Ukraine – always more massive...
