Cultuur en Educatie - Buitenland

Even now, in this age when the very reading of literature is endangered — or so the articles tell us — Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) retains a notable ability to pick up new admirers. But even though he may have a decent readership by the standards of French novelists who... Read more »

Stephen King has that rare, and spectacularly profitable, skill to suck you into his world and compel you to flip to the next page. And when you’re hooked, his words have the uncanny ability to simply unfold like a movie in your head. So it isn’t surprising that his books... Read more »

This Halloween marks the 100th anniversary of the death of famed escape artist Harry Houdini. Today, most of us know more about the manner of that death than we do about any of the feats of escape artistry that made him famous in the first place. As the story goes,... Read more »

Ray Ellis had a six-decade career as a producer, arranger, and jazz composer. And while he’s best known for arranging music for Billie Holiday’s Lady in Satin (1958), he also enjoyed a long career orchestrating music for television. Working under a pseudonym “Yvette Blais” (his wife’s name), Ellis composed background music for the cartoon... Read more »

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 vanishing at a rate that soon turns alarming;... Read 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. Lee plays the doctor to whom... Read more »

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 to accept that those stately ruins were... Read more »

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 would pour out... Read more »

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 Sears Catalog, transformed America with mass consumption, offering customers... Read more »

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. That spring, we featured here on Open Culture an amusing retro-technological diversion... Read more »

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 album’s true center, a swirling, swinging,... Read more »

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 Death,” written though they may have been with... Read more »

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 a colleague to review the paper, just to make sure it covered the right bases. What happened next Hetherington explained in... Read more »

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 vouchsafe his paintings to posterity. The support... Read more »