News
Updated 25 Oct, 05:30
15 articles
-
Watch Rome Rise, Fall, and Rise Again in a Three-Minute 3D Timelapse
Scholars disagree on when, exactly, Rome fell. But if you watch the new video from City 3D Timelapse above, you’ll understand the lack of debate on the question of whether it fell. Around the turn of the sixth century AD, buildings start…
-
Christopher Lee Reads Edgar Allan Poe: “The Raven,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” & More
Sir Christopher Lee and Edgar Allan Poe went way back. Or at least they went as far back as 1969, the year of The Oblong Box, a loose and lurid film adaptation of the eponymous story starring Lee and the also Poe-associated Vincent Price…
-
What Ancient Latin Sounded Like, And How We Know It
Latin is a language As dead as dead can be; It killed the Romans long ago, And now it’s killing me. That famed ditty isn’t likely to resonate with many modern school children, but interest in ancient Rome remains fairly robust. We’ve come…
-
In 1897, London’s Lampposts Dispensed Hot Coffee, Tea, and “Fluid Beef”
Any reader of Victorian literature will wonder how much a ha’penny was actually worth in those days. For a little more than a year at the very end of that period, it could buy you a cup of coffee, cocoa, milk, tea, or “fluid beef” — which…
-
Sears Sold 75,000 DIY Mail Order Homes Between 1908 and 1939, and Transformed American Life
Two of the books that most shaped American culture both happened to bear the nickname “The Big Book.” While the second of these, the A.A. Manual, published in 1939, changed the country with 12-Step recovery groups, the first of these, the…
-
Doctor Who’s Tom Baker Plays Douglas Adams’ Digital “Agent” in the AI-Predicting Hyperland (1990)
Cast your mind, if you will, back to the year 2020. It now feels like a different time, what with the spreading COVID-19 pandemic and the heated sociopolitical battles being waged online, and indeed in the (socially distanced) streets…
-
Hear How Clare Torry’s Vocals on Pink Floyd’s “The Great Gig in the Sky” Made the Song Go from Pretty Good to Downright Great
Smack in the middle of Pink Floyd’s classic Dark Side of the Moon sits a song many listeners may hear as an extended bridge between the two true centerpieces, “Time” and “Money.” But I’ve always thought of “The Great Gig in the Sky” as the…
-
The Dark Story Behind Edgar Allan Poe’s Most Famous Photograph, Taken Four Days After a Laudanum Overdose
In the Halloween season, one American writer comes to mind more often than any other: Edgar Allan Poe. That owes in large part to his famously macabre tales like “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” and “The Masque of the Red…
-
When a Cat Co-Authored a Paper in a Leading Physics Journal (1975)
Back in 1975, Jack H. Hetherington, a physics professor at Michigan State University, wrote a research paper on low–temperature physics for the respected scientific journal Physical Review Letters. Before sending it off, Hetherington asked…
-
How Vincent van Gogh’s Sister-in-Law Worked Tirelessly to Make Him Famous
No artist, no matter how solitary by nature, becomes a cultural phenomenon alone. That’s even true of such an isolated figure as Vincent van Gogh, whose death in obscurity at the age of 37 left open the question of who, if anyone, would…
-
The Megaprojects That Even the Ancient Romans Couldn’t Pull Off: Rerouting the Tiber, Digging a Canal, and More
Some would call the United States of America the mightiest empire the world has ever known. Yet over the past half-century or so, it has shown a strange inability to build domestic infrastructure, at least at the efficiency or on the scale…
-
Watch “The Midnight Parasites,” a Surreal Japanese Animation Set in the World of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (1972)
Hieronymus Bosch’s bizarre paintings might have looked perfectly ordinary to his contemporaries, argues Stanley Meisler in “The World of Bosch.” Modern viewers may find this very hard to believe. We approach Bosch through layers of…
-
Why Cleopatra, Lawrence of Arabia, Ben-Hur & Other Hollywood Classics Still Look So Good
Cleopatra cost Twentieth Century Fox $44 million, by the studio’s own estimate. That may sound like the budget of one of those genre pictures that winds up going straight to streaming, but if we convert those 1963 dollars into current…
-
Soviet-Era Illustrations of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1976)
Until I read J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, my favorite book growing up was, by far, The Hobbit. Growing up in Russia, however, meant that instead of Tolkien’s English version, my parents read me a Russian translation. To me…
-
The Names of Nearly 4 Million Enslaved People in Former British Colonies Are Now Searchable Online, Helping Descendants Find Lost Ancestors
A few years ago, we featured here on Open Culture the Freedmen’s Bureau Project database, which contains searchable information on formerly enslaved people in the United States after its Civil War. With nearly 1.8 million men, women, and…