openculture.com
Every openculture.com story we have translated and published, newest first. · 25 stories
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The Biggest Ship in History Was Built in China 600 Years Ago—Or Was It?
In 2002, the retired British submarine lieutenant-commander turned amateur historian Gavin Menzies created a stir with a book about Chinese
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A 900-Page Pre-Pantone Guide to Color from 1692: A Complete High-Resolution Digital Scan
There’s ahead of its time, then there’s Traité des couleurs servant à la peinture à l’eau — or, in its original Dutch title, Klaer Lightende
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David Byrne’s New Book Explores the Strange Afterlife of Good Ideas: From Vermeer’s Paintings to Roman Concrete & Dark Matter
David Byrne will always be most widely known as the co-founder and frontman of Talking Heads. That may count among the greatest possible ach
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The Strange and Brilliant Inventions of Nikola Tesla
Even before the success of the electric car company that now bears his name, Nikola Tesla was a widely respected historical figure. Often, t
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7 Tips from Edgar Allan Poe on How to Write Vivid Stories & Poems
There may be no more a macabrely misogynistic sentence in English literature than Edgar Allan Poe’s contention that “the death… of a beautif
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Why the Maps of London, Tokyo, New York, and Other Major Cities Look the Way They Do
If you’re trying to understand a city, its map isn’t a bad place to start. Today, of course, we can call up an accurate map of practically a
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It’s the End of the World as We Know It: The Apocalypse Gets Visualized in an Inventive Map from 1486
When will the world end? We can find serious scientific answers to this question, depending on what we mean by “world” and “end.” If we mean
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Discover the Lost Horror Series Deemed Too Shocking for BBC Television (1967)
High culture and new technology have never been a natural pairing. As our digital era has often underscored, media innovations tend to be ad
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In 1704, Isaac Newton Predicted That the World Will End in 2060
We have become quite used to pronouncements of doom, from scientists predicting the sixth mass extinction due to the measurable effects of c
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300 Years Before ChatGPT, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels Imagined Machines Writing Books and Producing Knowledge (1726)
The printing press was invented in the middle of the fifteenth century, and it’s been downhill for the written word ever since. Even before
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Artists Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera Visit Leon Trotsky in Mexico: Vintage Footage from 1938
Here’s some rare footage of the great Mexican painters Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo paying a visit to exiled Soviet revolutionary Leon Trots
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When Buckminster Fuller Proposed Putting a Dome Over Manhattan (1960)
Image via Buckminster Fuller Estate The novels of John Brunner have become a niche taste, even within his genre of science fiction. A more s
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LEGO Lets You Build Gaudí’s Sagrada Família in Its Largest Set Ever
When work on the Sagrada Família first began in 1882, the original architect could hardly have imagined that, 144 years later, the ambitious
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The Cable that Changed the World: How Instant Global Communication Began in 1858
The word wireless is going the way of computerized and portable, and for much the same reasons. We no longer regard wireless devices that re
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The Oldest Book Printed with Movable Type is Not The Gutenberg Bible: Jikji, a Collection of Korean Buddhist Teachings, Predated It By 78 Years and It’s Now Digitized Online
The history of the printed word is full of bibliographic twists and turns, major historical moments, and the significant printing of books n
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How to Explain Complicated Things
You may remember a time when it was difficult to make it through the day without hearing someone cite a TED Talk. A major technological reas
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Mick Jagger Tells the Story Behind ‘Gimme Shelter’ and Merry Clayton’s Haunting Background Vocals
In the fall of 1969 the Rolling Stones were in a Los Angeles recording studio, putting the final touches on their album Let It Bleed. It was
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Read the CIA’s Manual of Trickery and Deception, Written by a Professional Stage Magician
The idea of a youngster vacillating between whether to become a magician or join the Central Intelligence Agency may sound implausible, but
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The Little Albert Experiment: The Perverse 1920 Study That Made a Baby Afraid of Santa Claus & Bunnies
The field of psychology is very different than it used to be. Nowadays, the American Psychological Association has a code of conduct for exp
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How Else Marie Pade, a Prisoner in World War II, Became Denmark’s First Female Electronic Composer
Before she became a composer of electronic music, Else Marie Pade was a sick child listening to the radio. Frequent kidney inflammations con
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The Long, Strange History of Tarot Cards: From the 14th Century to Modern Times
We have any number of reasons for difficulty getting to sleep, not least worries about the future. This is hardly a recent phenomenon, and i
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How to Memorize an Entire Chapter from “Moby Dick”: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I mentally revisit the various homes of my childhood, wandering from room to room, turning on lights and peer
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When Salvador Dalí Gave a Surrealist Lecture in a Diving Suit … and Almost Suffocated (1936)
Many a foreigner has visited England and found it an unexpectedly surreal place. Some of that effect has to do with encountering familiar ic
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Watch Interplanetary Revolution (1924): The Most Bizarre Soviet Animated Propaganda Film You’ll Ever See
In 1924, Zenon Komissarenko, Youry Merkulov and Nikolai Khodataev produced Interplanetary Revolution, which might just be one of the strange
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