Gandhi Writes Letters to Hitler: “We Have Found in Non-Violence a Force Which Can Match the Most Violent Forces in the World” (1939/40) Image via Wikimedia Commons It must come up in every single argument, from sophisticated to sophomoric, about the practicability of non-violent pacifism. 'Look what Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. ...

Gandhi Writes Letters to Hitler: “We Have Found in Non-Violence a Force Which Can Match the Most Violent Forces in the World” (1939/40)

A Newly Discovered Recording Lets You Hear Delta Blues Legend Robert Johnson in Stunning Clarity Great swathes of rock music since the nineteen-sixties would never have existed, we're sometimes told, were it not for the recordings of Robert Johnson. Certainly the likes of Keith Richards, Eric Cla...

A Newly Discovered Recording Lets You Hear Delta Blues Legend Robert Johnson in Stunning Clarity

The Powerful Messages That Woody Guthrie & Pete Seeger Inscribed on Their Guitar & Banjo: “This Machine Kills Fascists” and “This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces it to Surrender” 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 Qua...

The Powerful Messages That Woody Guthrie & Pete Seeger Inscribed on Their Guitar & Banjo: “This Machine Kills Fascists” and “This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces it to Surrender”

George Orwell’s Six Rules for Writing Clear and Tight Prose Image via Wikimedia Commons Most everyone who knows the work of George Orwell knows his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” (published here), in which he rails against careless, confusing, ...

George Orwell’s Six Rules for Writing Clear and Tight Prose

Is there a remotely normal person in the Trump administration?

The $666 Board That Built Apple: How the Apple I Changed Computing 50 Years Ago Americans of a certain age may well remember growing up with an Apple II in the classroom, and the perpetual temptation it held out to play The Oregon Trail, Number Munchers, or perhaps Lode Runner.

The $666 Board That Built Apple: How the Apple I Changed Computing 50 Years Ago

Try the Oldest Known Recipe For Toothpaste: From Ancient Egypt, Circa the 4th Century BC Image of Ancient Egyptian Dentistry, via Wikimedia Commons When we assume that modern improvements are far superior to the practices of the ancients, we might do well to actually learn how people in t...

Try the Oldest Known Recipe For Toothpaste: From Ancient Egypt, Circa the 4th Century BC

An Animated Introduction to Michel Foucault, “Philosopher of Power” Do you still need a working knowledge of the ideas of Michel Foucault to hold your own on the cocktail party circuit? Probably not, but the ideas themselves, should you bring them up there, remain as ...

An Animated Introduction to Michel Foucault, “Philosopher of Power”

How Jackson Pollock Redefined Modern Art: An Introduction In his lifetime, Jackson Pollock had only one successful art show.

How Jackson Pollock Redefined Modern Art: An Introduction

The Entire Archives of Radical Philosophy Go Online: Read Essays by Michel Foucault, Alain Badiou, Judith Butler & More (1972–2022) On a seemingly daily basis, we see attacks against the intellectual culture of the academic humanities, which, since the 1960s, have opened up spaces for leftists to develop critical theories of all k...

The Entire Archives of Radical Philosophy Go Online: Read Essays by Michel Foucault, Alain Badiou, Judith Butler & More (1972–2022)

A Newly Discovered Recording Lets You Hear Delta Blues Legend Robert Johnson in Stunning Clarity Great swathes of rock music since the nineteen-sixties would never have existed, we're sometimes told, were it not for the recordings of Robert Johnson. Certainly the likes of Keith Richards, Eric Cla...

A Newly Discovered Recording Lets You Hear Delta Blues Legend Robert Johnson in Stunning Clarity

John Turturro Reads Italo Calvino’s Fairy Tale, “The False Grandmother,” in a Short Animated Film In 1956, Italo Calvino, one of Italy's finest postwar writers, published Italian Folktales, a series of 200 fairy tales based sometimes loosely, sometimes more strictly on stories from a great folk tr...

John Turturro Reads Italo Calvino’s Fairy Tale, “The False Grandmother,” in a Short Animated Film

How George Orwell Predicted the Rise of “AI Slop” in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) We've lived but a few years so far into the age when artificial intelligence can produce convincing stories, songs, essays, poems, novels, and even films.

How George Orwell Predicted the Rise of “AI Slop” in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

A Newly Discovered Recording Lets You Hear Delta Blues Legend Robert Johnson in Stunning Clarity Great swathes of rock music since the nineteen-sixties would never have existed, we're sometimes told, were it not for the recordings of Robert Johnson. Certainly the likes of Keith Richards, Eric Cla...

A Newly Discovered Recording Lets You Hear Delta Blues Legend Robert Johnson in Stunning Clarity

People in the Middle Ages Slept Not Once But Twice Each Night: How This Lost Practice Was Rediscovered The importance of a good night's sleep has been featured now and again here on Open Culture. But were a medieval European to visit our time, he'd probably ask — among other questions — if we didn't me...

People in the Middle Ages Slept Not Once But Twice Each Night: How This Lost Practice Was Rediscovered

Confidence: The Cartoon That Helped America Get Through the Great Depression (1933) No more bummin', let's all get to work… Actually, hold up a sec.

Confidence: The Cartoon That Helped America Get Through the Great Depression (1933)

The Trump Administration wants the Pope not to talk about politics while they consistently wrap their war in religion.

How does that square?

Watch La Linea, the Popular 1970s Italian Animations Drawn with a Single Line Simplicity is not the goal. It is the by-product of a good idea and modest expectations. Thus spake designer Paul Rand, a man who knew something about making an impression, having created iconic logo...

Watch La Linea, the Popular 1970s Italian Animations Drawn with a Single Line

Authoritarianism wrapped up in fake, performative Christianity.

Leo Tolstoy Calls Shakespeare an ‘Insignificant, Inartistic Writer.’ Then George Orwell Fires Back After his radical conversion to Christian anarchism, Leo Tolstoy adopted a deeply contrarian attitude. The vehemence of his attacks on the class and traditions that produced him were so vigorous that ...

Leo Tolstoy Calls Shakespeare an ‘Insignificant, Inartistic Writer.’ Then George Orwell Fires Back

Watch Animations of Two Italo Calvino Stories: “The False Grandmother” and “The Distance from the Moon” There are those books we go to not to escape this world, but to experience the truth of a mysteriously attributed quote, “There is another world, and it is this one.” That is to say that the worlds we...

Watch Animations of Two Italo Calvino Stories: “The False Grandmother” and “The Distance from the Moon”

Leo Tolstoy Calls Shakespeare an ‘Insignificant, Inartistic Writer.’ Then George Orwell Fires Back After his radical conversion to Christian anarchism, Leo Tolstoy adopted a deeply contrarian attitude. The vehemence of his attacks on the class and traditions that produced him were so vigorous that ...

Leo Tolstoy Calls Shakespeare an ‘Insignificant, Inartistic Writer.’ Then George Orwell Fires Back

10,000 Chicago Concert Recordings Are Being Uploaded to the Internet Archive: Nirvana, Phish, Sonic Youth, They Might Be Giants & More Perhaps you've had the experience of moving to a new city and immediately being told that you've missed its golden age of live music. To an extent, this has happened in more or less every period of th...

10,000 Chicago Concert Recordings Are Being Uploaded to the Internet Archive: Nirvana, Phish, Sonic Youth, They Might Be Giants & More

Hear Hours of Lectures by Michel Foucault: Recorded in English & French Between 1961 and 1983 Tucked in the afterward of the second, 1982 edition of Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow’s Michel Foucault:

Hear Hours of Lectures by Michel Foucault: Recorded in English & French Between 1961 and 1983

Watch 35 Short Films by Charles and Ray Eames: “Powers of Ten,” the History of the Computer & More The Pacific Palisades fire of January 25 destroyed much of that coastal Los Angeles neighborhood, but it somehow spared the Charles and Ray Eames house.

Watch 35 Short Films by Charles and Ray Eames: “Powers of Ten,” the History of the Computer & More

Isaac Asimov Reviews George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Calls It “Not Science Fiction, But a Distorted Nostalgia for a Past that Never Was” Here in the twenty-twenties, a young reader first hearing of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four would hardly imagine it to be a work of science fiction.

Isaac Asimov Reviews George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Calls It “Not Science Fiction, But a Distorted Nostalgia for a Past that Never Was”

Sci-Fi Writer Arthur C. Clarke Predicts the Future in 1964: Artificial Intelligence, Instantaneous Global Communication, Remote Work, Singularity & More Are you feeling confident about the future? No? We understand. Would you like to know what it was like to feel a deep certainty that the decades to come were going to be filled with wonder and the fan...

Sci-Fi Writer Arthur C. Clarke Predicts the Future in 1964: Artificial Intelligence, Instantaneous Global Communication, Remote Work, Singularity & More

Isaac Asimov Reviews George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Calls It “Not Science Fiction, But a Distorted Nostalgia for a Past that Never Was” Here in the twenty-twenties, a young reader first hearing of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four would hardly imagine it to be a work of science fiction.

Isaac Asimov Reviews George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Calls It “Not Science Fiction, But a Distorted Nostalgia for a Past that Never Was”

Anyone care to argue this isn't a cult.

An Animated Introduction to Michel Foucault, “Philosopher of Power” Do you still need a working knowledge of the ideas of Michel Foucault to hold your own on the cocktail party circuit? Probably not, but the ideas themselves, should you bring them up there, remain as ...

An Animated Introduction to Michel Foucault, “Philosopher of Power”