Culture & Media news

• 3 Reasons Why Trump Might Hesitate to Go After Legal Pot

  20-11-2016 00:26
  
  Click here for reuse options!There's a lot of worry that the incoming president will try to reinstate reefer madness in states where pot is already legal.The election of Donald Trump is sending chills down the spine of the nation's nascent marijuana industry. Could he and a Republican Congress try to roll back the clock and force federal pot prohibition down the throats of states that have, via the popular vote, gone down the path toward legalization?Marijuana remains illegal under federal law,
  
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• Every Frame a Painting Returns to YouTube & Explores Why the Sustained Two-Shot Vanished from Movies

  05-09-2024 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  Video essayists don’t normally retire; in most cases, they just drift into inactivity. Hence the surprise and even dismay of the internet’s cinephiles when Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos declared the end of their respected channel Every Frame a Painting in 2016. We here at Open Culture had featured their analyses of everything from the work of auteurs like Martin Scorsese, Jackie Chan, and Michael Bay to how classical art inspired celebrated shots to the thoughts and feelings of edi
  
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• Watch Fantasmagorie, the World’s First Animated Cartoon (1908)

  05-09-2024 07:49 via openculture.com
  
  Trying to describe the plot of Fantasmagorie, the world’s first animated cartoon, is a folly akin to putting last night’s dream into words:
  I was dressed as a clown and then I was in a theater, except I was also hiding under this lady’s hat, and the guy behind us was plucking out the feathers, and I was maybe also a jack in the box? And I had a fishing pole that turned into a plant that ripped my head off, but only for a few seconds. And then there was a giant champagne bottle
  
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• A Digital Archive Features Hundreds of Audio Cassette Tape Designs, from the 1960s to the 1990s

  04-09-2024 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  Audio cassette tapes first appeared on the market in the early nineteen-sixties, but it would take about a decade before they came to dominate it. And when they did, they’d changed the lives of many a music-lover by having made it possible not just to listen to their albums of choice on the go, but also to collect and trade their own custom-assembled listening experiences. By the eighties, blank tapes had become a household necessity on the order of batteries or toilet paper for such cons
  
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• Behold the First American Board Game, Travellers’ Tour Through the United States (1822)

  03-09-2024 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  Asked to name a classic American board game, most of us would first think of Monopoly, whose imagery and verbiage — Park Place, Rich Uncle Pennybags, “Do not pass go” — has worked its way deep into the culture since Parker Brothers brought it to market in 1935. Despite that, it isn’t the oldest American board game: that honor goes to Travellers’ Tour Through the United States, which came out more than a century earlier, in 1822. Whereas Monopoly teaches its p
  
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• Coursera Offers 30% Off of Coursera Plus (Until September 30), Giving You Unlimited Access to Courses & Certificates

  03-09-2024 09:01 via openculture.com
  
  As the new school year gets underway, millions of students are heading back to classrooms. And you can too. From now until September 30, 2024, Coursera is offering a 30% discount on its annual subscription plan called “Coursera Plus.” Normally priced at $399, Coursera Plus (currently available for $279.30) gives you access to 7,000+ courses for one all-inclusive subscription price. This includes courses covering everything from artificial intelligence, to ancient history, philosophy
  
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• Download 1,000+ Digitized Tapes of Sounds from Classic Hollywood Films & TV, Courtesy of the Internet Archive

  02-09-2024 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  Watch enough classic movies — especially classic movies from slightly downmarket studios — and you’ll swear you’ve been hearing the very same sound effects over and over again. That’s because you have been hearing the very same sound effects over and over again: once recorded or acquired for one film, they could, of course, be re-used in another, and another, and another. No such frequently employed recording has a more illustrious and well-documented history than
  
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• The World’s First Mobile Phone Shown in 1922 Vintage Film

  02-09-2024 06:21 via openculture.com
  
  A number of years ago, British Pathé uncovered some striking footage from 1922 showing two women experimenting with the first mobile phone. A spokesman for the archive said: ”It’s amazing that 90 years ago mobile phone technology and music … was not only being thought of but being trialled.” “The phone even has a lid which makes it the first flip-phone [that] we are aware of, although it is probably not going to win any design awards.” He added, &rdquo
  
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• Browse 64 Years of RadioShack Catalogs Free Online … and Revisit the History of American Consumer Electronics

  30-08-2024 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  “I bet RadioShack was great once,” writes former employee Jon Bois in a much-circulated 2014 piece for SB Nation. “I can’t look through their decades-old catalogs and come away with any other impression. They sold giant walnut-wood speakers I’d kill to have today. They sold computers back when people were trying to understand what they were. When I was a little kid, going to RadioShack was better than going to the toy store. It was the toy store for tall people.&rd
  
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• Maurice Sendak’s First Published Illustrations: Discover His Drawings for a 1947 Popular Science Book

  30-08-2024 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  McGraw-Hill/public domain; copy from the Niels Bohr Library & Archives
  Once upon a time, long before Maurice Sendak illustrated Where The Wild Things Are (1963), he published, notes Ars Technica, “his first professional illustrations in a 1947 popular science book about nuclear physics, Atomics for the Millions.” Only 18 years old, Sendak provided the illustrations; his physics teacher, Hyman Ruchlis authored the text, along with professor Maxwell Leigh Eidinoff.
  According to sc
  
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• Solving a 2,500-Year-Old Puzzle: How a Cambridge Student Cracked an Ancient Sanskrit Code

  29-08-2024 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  If you find yourself grappling with an intellectual problem that’s gone unsolved for millennia, try taking a few months off and spending them on activities like swimming and meditating. That very strategy worked for a Cambridge PhD student named Rishi Rajpopat, who, after a summer of non-research-related activities, returned to a text by the ancient grammarian, logician, and “father of linguistics” Pāṇini and found it newly comprehensible. The rules of its compositi
  
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• Frank Lloyd Wright Thought About Making the Guggenheim Museum Pink

  28-08-2024 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  Image via The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives
  Seen today, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, seems to occupy several time periods at once, looking both modern and somehow ancient. The latter quality surely has to do with its bright white color, which we associate (especially in such an institutional context) with Greek and Roman statues. But just like those statues, the Guggenheim wasn’t actually white to begin with. “Fewer and fewer New Yorkers
  
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• Is Andrew Huberman Ruining Your Morning Coffee Routine?

  28-08-2024 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  Andrew Huberman–the host of the influential Huberman Lab podcast–has gotten a lot of mileage out of his recommended morning routine. His routine emphasizes the importance of getting sunlight within 30–60 minutes of waking; also engaging in light physical activity; hydrating well; and avoiding coffee for the first 90–120 minutes. In his words:
  I highly recommend that everybody delay their caffeine intake for 90 to 120 minutes after waking. However painful it may be to even
  
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• The 11 Censored Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies Cartoons That Haven’t Been Aired Since 1968

  27-08-2024 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  For decades and decades, Warner Bros.’ Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons have served as a kind of default children’s entertainment. Originally conceived for theatrical exhibition in the nineteen-thirties, they were animated to a standard that held its own against the subsequent generations of television productions alongside which they would later be broadcast. Even their classical music-laden soundtracks seemed to signal higher aspirations. But when scrutinized closely enoug
  
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• The Enchanting Opera Performances of Klaus Nomi

  27-08-2024 05:37 via openculture.com
  
  After making one of the grandest entrances in music history on the stages of East Village clubs, the BBC’s The Old Grey Whistle Test, and Saturday Night Live, theatrical German new wave space alien Klaus Nomi died alone in 1983, a victim of the “first beachhead of the AIDS epidemic.” The disease frightened Nomi’s friends away—no one knew anything about what was then called “gay cancer” but that it was deadly. Soon afterward, the immensely talented singer
  
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• How Marcel Duchamp Signed a Urinal in 1917 & Redefined Art

  26-08-2024 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  Marcel Duchamp didn’t sign his name on a urinal for lack of ability to create “real” art. In fact, as explained by gallerist-Youtuber James Payne in the new Great Art Explained video above, Duchamp’s grandfather was an artist, as were three of his siblings; he himself attained impressive technical proficiency in painting by his teen years. In 1912, when he was in his mid-twenties, he could transcend convention thoroughly enough to bewilder and even enrage the public by pa
  
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• Hear the Evolution of the London Accent Over 660 Years: From 1346 to 2006

  23-08-2024 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  Read a novel by Charles Dickens, and you’ll still today feel transported back to the London of the eighteen-twenties. Some of that experience owes to his lavishly reportorial descriptive skills, but even more to his way with dialogue. Dickens faithfully captured the vocabulary of the times and places in which he set his stories, and for some particularly colorful characters, went as far as to render their distinctive accents phonetically: that of The Pickwick Papers’ beloved valet Sa
  
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• George Orwell Reviews Mein Kampf: “He Envisages a Horrible Brainless Empire” (1940)

  23-08-2024 08:45 via openculture.com
  
  Christopher Hitchens once wrote that there were three major issues of the twentieth century — imperialism, fascism, and Stalinism — and George Orwell proved to be right about all of them.
  Orwell displays his remarkable foresight in a fascinating book review, published in March 1940, of Adolf Hitler’s notorious autobiography Mein Kampf. In the review, the author deftly cuts to the root of Hitler’s toxic charisma, and, along the way, anticipates themes to appear in hi
  
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• How the Oldest Company in the World, Japan’s Temple-Builder Kongō Gumi, Has Survived Nearly 1,500 Years

  22-08-2024 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  Image from New York Public Library, via Wikimedia Commons
  If you visit Osaka, you’ll be urged to see two old buildings in particular: Osaka Castle and Shitennō-ji (above), Japan’s first Buddhist temple. In beholding both, you’ll behold the work of construction firm Kongō Gumi (金剛組), the oldest continuously run company in the world. It was with the building of Shitennō-ji, commissioned by Prince Shōtoku Taishi in the year 578, that broug
  
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• When Samuel Beckett Drove Young André the Giant to School

  21-08-2024 19:00 via openculture.com
  
  Are your idle moments spent inventing imaginary conversations between strange bedfellows? The sort of conversation that might transpire in a pickup truck belonging to Samuel Beckett, say, were the Irish playwright to chauffeur the child André Rene Roussimoff—aka pro wrestler André the Giant—to school?
  Too silly, you say? Nonsense. This isn’t some wackadoo random pairing, but an actual historic meeting of the minds, as André’s Princess Bride co-star a
  
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• How an Ancient Roman Shipwreck Could Explain the Universe

  21-08-2024 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  In a 1956 New Statesman piece, the British scientist-novelist C. P. Snow first sounded the alarm about the increasingly chasm-like divide between what he called the “scientific” and “traditional” cultures. We would today refer to them as the sciences and the humanities, while still wringing our hands over the inability of each side to learn from (or even coherently communicate with) the other. Nevertheless, recent history provides the occasional heartening example of scie
  
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• Jimi Hendrix Arrives in London in 1966, Asks to Get Onstage with Cream, and Blows Eric Clapton Away: “You Never Told Me He Was That F‑ing Good”

  21-08-2024 07:43 via openculture.com
  
  Jimi Hendrix arrived on the London scene like a ton of bricks in 1966, smashing every British blues guitarist to pieces the instant they saw him play. As vocalist Terry Reid tells it, when Hendrix played his first showcase at the Bag O’Nails, arranged by Animals’ bassist Chas Chandler, “there were guitar players weeping. They had to mop the floor up. He was piling it on, solo after solo. I could see everyone’s fillings falling out. When he finished, it was silence. Nobody
  
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• The Alphabet Explained: The Origin of Every Letter

  20-08-2024 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  Think back, if you will, to the climactic scenes of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which take place in the hidden temple that contains the Holy Grail. His father having been shot by the dastardly Nazi-sympathizing immortality-seeker Walter Donovan, Indy has no choice but to retrieve the legendary cup to make use of its reputed healing powers. This entails passing through three deadly chambers, one of which has a floor covered in stones, each one labeled with a letter of the alphabet. The wa
  
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• An Architect Breaks Down the 5 Most Common Styles of College Campus

  19-08-2024 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  Every now and again on social media, the observation circulates that Americans look back so fondly on their college years because never again do they get to live in a well-designed walkable community. The organization of college campuses does much to shape that experience, but so do the buildings themselves. “People often say that college is the best four years of your life,” says architect Michael Wyetzner in the new Architectural Digest video above, “but it was also likely th
  
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• How Editing Saved Ferris Bueller’s Day Off & Made It a Classic

  16-08-2024 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  “In our salad days, we are ripe for a particular movie that will linger, deathlessly, long after the greenness has gone,” writes the New Yorker’s Anthony Lane in a recent piece on movies in the eighties. “When a friend turned to me after the first twenty minutes of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, in 1986, and calmly declared, ‘This is the best film ever made,’ I had no cause to disagree.” Many of us reacted similarly, whether we saw the movie in its firs
  
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• What is Electronic Music?: Pioneering Electronic Musician Daphne Oram Explains (1969)

  15-08-2024 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  Survey the British public about the most important institution to arise in their country after World War II, and a lot of respondents are going to say the National Health Service. But keep asking around, and you’ll sooner or later encounter a few serious electronic-music enthusiasts who name the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Established in 1958 to provide music and sound effects for the Beeb’s radio productions — not least the documentaries and dramas of the artistically and intell
  
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• J. G. Ballard Demystifies Surrealist Paintings by Dalí, Magritte, de Chirico & More

  14-08-2024 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  Before his signature works like The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash, and High-Rise, J. G. Ballard published three apocalyptic novels, The Drowned World, The Burning World, and The Crystal World. Each of those books offers a different vision of large-scale environmental disaster, and the last even provides a clue as to its inspiration. Or rather, its original cover does, by using a section of Max Ernst’s painting The Eye of Silence. “This spinal landscape, with its frenzied rocks towering
  
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• Jean-Paul Sartre Rejects the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964: “It Was Monstrous!”

  14-08-2024 09:54 via openculture.com
  In a 2013 blog post, the great Ursula K. Le Guin quotes a London Times Literary Supplement column by a “J.C.,” who satirically proposes the “Jean-Paul Sartre Prize for Prize Refusal.” “Writers all over Europe and America are turning down awards in the hope of being nominated for a Sartre,” writes J.C., “The Sartre Prize itself has never been refused.” Sartre earned the honor of his own prize for prize refusal by turning down the Nobel Prize in Lite
  
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• The Steampunk Clocks of 19th-Century Paris: Discover the Ingenious System That Revolutionized Timekeeping in the 1880s

  13-08-2024 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  A middle-class Parisian living around the turn of the twentieth century would have to budget for services like not just water or gas, but also time. Though electric clocks had been demonstrated, they were still a high-tech rarity; installing one in the home would have been completely out of the question. If you wanted to synchronize timekeeping across an entire major city, it made more sense to use a proven, reliable, and much cheaper infrastructure: pipes full of compressed air. Paris’ pn
  
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• Keith Moon, Drummer of The Who, Passes Out at 1973 Concert; 19-Year-Old Fan Takes Over

  13-08-2024 07:25 via openculture.com
  
  In November 1973, Scot Halpin, a 19-year-old kid, scalped tickets to The Who concert in San Francisco, California. Little did he know that he’d wind up playing drums for the band that night — that his name would end up etched in the annals of rock ’n’ roll.
  The Who came to California with its album Quadrophenia topping the charts. But despite that, Keith Moon, the band’s drummer, had a case of the nerves. It was, after all, their first show
  
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