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...
Photo by Al Aumuller, via Wikimedia Commons Like another famous Okie from Muskogee, Woody Guthrie came from a part of Oklahoma that the U.S. government sold during the 1889 land rush away from the Quapaw and Osage nations, as well...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuVTY9prYck Though his movies may have benefited greatly from foreign audiences and backers, David Lynch was one of the most thoroughly American of all filmmakers. “Born Missoula, MT,” declared his Twitter bio, yet one never really associates him with a...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xknjAm5fa4 When the history books are written, we’ll remember the politicians, law firms, and CEOs who quickly bent the knee to Donald Trump. We’ll also remember the scant few American figures who refused to back down. Bruce Springsteen will be...
