Open Culture

Why Inventing Color TV Was So Difficult

Colin Marshall — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 08:00:05 +0000

Many who read this will remember watching television on a black-and-white set at some point in their lives. Fewer will remember doing so because only black-and-white sets existed. Of course, your own experience will depend upon your country of origin. The United States began the transition to color television in 1953, and more than half of its population owned color sets less than twenty years thereafter. France’s stations started to change over in 1967, and the last one did so in 1983. South Korea, where I live, started its own regular color broadcasts in 1980, though at that point, those from the American Forces Network, Japan, and even North Korea could already be tuned in for years.

Today we all take color TV for granted, but as the Primal Space video above explains, its invention was no simple matter. Still, it occurred much earlier than most of us would imagine. In 1925, Scottish inventor John Logie Baird came up with the first television, which involved passing light through holes in a spinning disc onto a photoelectric cell for transmission through cables or radio waves. This system could only register the brightness of the light, producing a black-and-white image. But the mechanism itself suggested a means of introducing color: enlarge the disc, add separate sets of holes for red, green, and blue, and reproduce a frame of each in quick, cyclical succession at the other end, taking advantage of the human eye’s tendency to collapse them into a single image.

Baird first demonstrated his color television system in 1928. Though impressive, it also looked unlikely to perform at a scale that could produce a sharp, smooth moving picture. Other engineers saw more televisual promise in the technology of the cathode ray tube, or CRT, which Japanese inventor Kenjiro Takayanagi had already harnessed for his own black-and-white mechanical television in the year before. The key component was the iconoscope invented by Vladimir Zworykin in 1933. “Essentially the world’s first video camera,” it employed an internal electron gun to “scan” a captured image into a transmissible electrical signal. Still, the question remained: how to do it in color?

Enter the Radio Corporation of America, whose abbreviated name more than a few of us will remember from our childhood TV sets. Having developed a video camera “that took the incoming light and filtered it through special prisms to separate the red, green, and blue,” converting each into its own signal, RCA then faced the problem of delivering the result to viewers at home. None of the more than five million black-and-white sets already extant in the U.S. could receive those three signals at all. The solution involved using one electron gun per color, each of whose signals would be encoded so as to be hidden in the existing black-and-white television signal and then decoded by color sets. Consumers may not have taken up the technology all at once, but those who did in time for The Wizard of Oz’s first broadcast in 1956 surely understood that color TV had a future.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

Wes Anderson Picks Nine of His Favorite Criterion Films

Colin Marshall — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 09:00:20 +0000

Many an internet cinephile has wondered aloud if the Criterion Closet is a real place, or just a set thrown together to make videos when famous directors like Christopher Nolan, Francis Ford Coppola, or Jim Jarmusch drop by. It turns out indeed to exist, not only at Criterion’s offices in New York, but also elsewhere. The Criterion Mobile Closet, for example, has taken the label’s home-video library on the road since 2024, the 40th anniversary of the company’s foundation. If it comes to your town, queue up in as timely a fashion as possible, and you may get the chance to enter and remain inside for three minutes. That may sound brief, but no less an auteur than Wes Anderson takes almost a minute less to make his cinematic selections in the new video above.

The occasion was the Criterion Mobile Closet’s stop at the Hollywood Bowl, which coincided with the three-night concert event Music from the Films of Wes Anderson this past June. With a few days’ travel ahead of him, he picks out nine Criterion releases as viewing material to take along on “our road trip across America.”

With an eye toward pleasing the entire family, he goes mostly for “reliable, standby” classics, beginning with Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps and continuing on to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (“my daughter loves this movie”), and two from Ernst Lubitsch, Heaven Can Wait and Design for Living — a picture that must appeal to Anderson on several levels, not least in that it deals with Americans in Paris, a set of which he’s long been a member.

Other of Anderson’s more canonical picks include Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve with Barbara Stanwyck, “one of the greatest actresses in the history of cinema, as everybody knows”; Stagecoach, which requires by way of introduction only the name of John Ford; and, from Satyajit Ray, not the celebrated Apu trilogy (which Nolan took home) but Charulata, the inspiration for the binocular shots in his own Moonrise Kingdom. He also pulls from the shelf Sydney Pollack’s Tootsie (“remember, Bill Murray is in there”), a somewhat more recent selection. What stands out even more is the practically brand new Flow, Latvian animator Gints Zilbalodis’ dialogue-free adventure movie with only animal characters. It may have yet to pass the test of time, but if the man who directed Isle of Dogs likes it — to say nothing of Criterion’s imprimatur — it’s surely worth a watch.

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Wes Anderson’s Favorite Films

Wes Anderson & Yasujiro Ozu: New Video Essay Reveals the Unexpected Parallels Between Two Great Filmmakers

Jim Jarmusch Picks His Favorite Films from the The Criterion Collection

The Cult of the Criterion Collection: The Company Dedicated to Gathering & Distributing the Greatest Films from Around the World

Discover J.R.R. Tolkien’s Personal Book Cover Designs for The Lord of the Rings Trilogy

OC — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 08:00:51 +0000

In some rare cases, adaptations and interpretations of a literary work can surpass the source. Despite hundreds of valiant efforts on the part of fans, filmmakers, game/toy designers, and radio producers, this has never been true of the fully-realized fantasy world in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy (not that it’s ever been anyone’s intent). As we noted in a previous post, Tolkien’s fictional world is so intricate, its sources so vast and varied, that Corey Olsen, “The Tolkien Professor,” has made it his entire life’s work to open that world up to students and curious readers, such as with his eight-part lecture series on The Hobbit.

One might also add illustrators to the list of Tolkien interpreters above who have—in the almost ninety years since The Hobbit’s publication and more than seventy years since the first appearance of The Lord of the Rings trilogy—done their best to visualize Tolkien’s world. But perhaps no one did so better than the master himself. Long known as a visual artist as well as a literary one, Tolkien left behind over 100 illustrations for The Hobbit, one of which adorns 2011’s HarperCollins 75th anniversary edition of the book. He also created these original cover designs for each book in The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

In the long and complex publication history of Tolkien’s most famous of works, it’s unclear if these designs ever made it onto books published during his lifetime, but the sigil in the center of The Fellowship of the Ring design (above), with its ominous eye of Sauron surrounded by elvish runes and topped by the one ring, did grace the elegant, minimalist covers of the first edition of the trilogy. Tolkien’s artwork received a thorough treatment in a 1995 monograph J.R.R. Tolkien Artist & Illustrator, which covers over 60 years of Tolkien’s life as an artist, and the magic of flickr brings us this compendium of Tolkien illustrations.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2013.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.

How Leonardo da Vinci’s Procrastination Contributed to His Creativity

Colin Marshall — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 09:00:44 +0000

At the height of their productivity as Beatles, neither Paul McCartney nor John Lennon could read or write music notation. Clearly it didn’t keep them from making a cultural impact, and as with so much else in life, they regarded it humorously. As McCartney has said, they used to liken themselves to ancient Egyptian pharaohs, who relied on scribes rather than being literate themselves. It’s worth considering whether, all things considered, this inability was really a deficiency: not being rigorously schooled in the traditions and conventions of music could have given them just the freedom they needed to create fresh songs. And if you’ve struggled with procrastination, have you considered likening yourself to Leonardo da Vinci?

“Leonardo’s difficulties with sticking to tasks were pervasive from childhood,” says a ScienceDaily summary of a 2019 paper by clinical neuroscientist Marco Catani. “Accounts from biographers and contemporaries show Leonardo was constantly on the go, often jumping from task to task.” Regarding his life at a distance of half a millennium, we may consider Leonardo not just a genius but a highly productive one, with a body of work including numerous inventions built and unbuilt as well as paintings like Lady with an Ermine, The Last Supper, and the Mona Lisa — which nearly joined the man’s pile of abandoned projects. As Nicolas Cole writes at Inc., scholarship suggests that Leonardo “painted the Mona Lisa on and off for a few years starting in 1503, left it unfinished, and didn’t complete it until close to his death in 1519.”

“While painting The Last Supper, Leonardo would sometimes stare at the work for an hour, finally make one small stroke, and then leave,” writes Walter Isaacson in his biography Leonardo da Vinci. His explanation: “Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least, for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.” When the non-Renaissance men of the world say things like that, it comes off as self-aggrandizing excuse-making. Many, perhaps most of us have spent so much time telling ourselves we’re preparing for a task that it just became another means of procrastination. But “procrastinating like Leonardo requires work: it involves gathering all the possible facts and ideas, and only after that allowing the collection to simmer,” notes Isaacson.

Not that the patrons frustrated by Leonardo’s failures to deliver could always keep that in mind. After he worked at the Vatican for three years, Pope Leo X dismissed him with the judgment that he would never accomplish anything, “for he begins by thinking of the end of the work, before the beginning.” Even Leonardo himself made a deathbed apology “to God and Man for leaving so much undone.” Having examined the nature of both Leonardo’s challenges and his brilliance, Catani comes to the conclusion that he exhibited traits consistent with a condition only given a name well within living memory, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). When we find ourselves compulsively fleeing from the incomplete work at hand, we’d do well to bear in mind not just Leonardo’s example, but also the words of aphorist Aaron Haspel: “We all suffer from a cluster of psychological disorders; it used to be known as personality.”

What Is Procrastination & How Can We Solve It? An Introduction by One of the World’s Leading Procrastination Experts

The Art of Structured Procrastination

Miranda July Teaches You How to Avoid Procrastination

Leonardo da Vinci’s To-Do List from 1490: The Plan of a Renaissance Man

Medieval Monks Complained About Constant Distractions: Learn How They Worked to Overcome Them

Watch the Completely Unsafe, Vertigo-Inducing Footage of Workers Building New York’s Iconic Skyscrapers

OC — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 08:00:15 +0000

Would anyone in their right mind sign up for a job that had a high risk of mortality/disability? Or a job where red hot metal is being hurled directly at your face? Back in the 1920s this was the lot of the men who built New York’s skyline, the men who constructed the Chrysler Building and the Empire State, giant phallic symbols of America’s burgeoning wealth and power.

In this short clip (remastered and quite decently colorized) from the Smithsonian Channel, we get a brief glimpse of the perils encountered daily on the building site. Nicknamed “roughnecks,” the narrator points out that they work without harnesses, safety ropes, or hard hats. Red hot rivets are thrown at men on the metal beams higher up and they are meant to catch them with what looks like a tin funnel. You can see the thinnest of ropes used to lift the now-iconic stainless steel art-deco eagles into place by men wearing felt hats and no gloves.

The workers came from Europe, many who had trained on ships. Some came from Montreal’s Kahnawake reservation. The latter, known as Iron Walkers, were Mohawk, known for working fearlessly at great heights.

“A lot of people think Mohawks aren’t afraid of heights; that’s not true,” Kyle Karonhiaktatie Beauvais said in 2002. “We have as much fear as the next guy. The difference is that we deal with it better.”

Much of this work was documented by photographer Lewis Hine, who captured a mix of brute strength and gravity-defying courage along with private moments of rest, catching a smoke or taking lunch. You can see many of his famous photos in this clip:

The Chrysler Building was completed in 1930, and reached a height of 1,046 feet (319 m), featuring 77 floors. It held its fame as the world’s tallest building for only 11 months. In 1931 workers completed the Empire State Building, standing at 1,454 feet (443.2 m) and housing 102 floors. (That’s dinky compared to the current record-holder: Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, which stands at 2,722 feet (829.8 m)).

Heads up: The Smithsonian Channel clip has some of the worst examples of YouTube comments among the videos we’ve highlighted over the years, as if people still don’t work in terrible and unsafe conditions in order to feed their families and pay rent. And look! Here’s a guy who walks out onto the Chrysler eagle just for fun. Don’t say we didn’t warn you:

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2019.

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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts.

How Phone Addiction Keeps You from Achieving a Productive “Flow State”

Colin Marshall — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 09:00:35 +0000

If you have an iPhone, try pushing its side button three times in a row. Just like magic, the screen should turn from color into black-and-white, or rather grayscale. (To do the same on an Android phone, you’ll have to dive into settings, then “accessibility,” “vision enhancements,” and “color correction.”) Why would you want that in the first place? As Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School professor Arthur C. Brooks explains in the Big Think video above, “one of the ways that you can actually get less hooked by social media, or any screen-based technology, is by turning off the color.” When you get only black, white, and the shades of gray in between, “you will care less about your screen, and you will look at it less.”

This may ring true to those of us who remember purely monochromatic cellphones, and how little time we spent staring at them. But no matter your generation, Brooks has plenty of useful advice about how to break the dependency on your phone from which, as a twenty-first-century internet user, you almost certainly suffer.

“You notice when somebody is addicted to heroin, because it’s not that common for ordinary people,” he says. “You don’t notice when somebody’s addicted to their phone, because literally everybody is addicted to their phones.” Therefore, we could all benefit from turning off notifications, setting defined “tech times,” exercising without our devices, and going on multi-day meditation retreats — though we may have to work up to that last one.

The functional phone addict may believe that all his daily scrolling may not have that much of a negative impact on his life, and even that it helps him unwind. What he doesn’t realize, in Brooks’ view, is the extent to which digital distractions keep him out of what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called “flow.” (These comments come around the 27:06 mark.) Flow happens “when you’re involved immersively in something, and hours turn to minutes. You lose track of time. It’s intensely pleasurable,” almost “like a state of Buddhist meditation.” Consciously or unconsciously, we use our phones and other digital devices in a way that prevents flow, “multitasking” between numerous tasks and distractions, never paying sustained attention to any one thing. At the root of this impulse is a fear of boredom, which must be endured in order to accomplish anything meaningful. The irony of our newfound ability to evade boredom every moment is that, if we do so, the whole of life turns out to be pretty boring.

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Why Smart People Feel Like Frauds: The Psychology of Impostor Syndrome and Its Hidden Benefits

How to Get into a Creative “Flow State”: A Short Masterclass

Lynda Barry on How the Smartphone Is Endangering Three Ingredients of Creativity: Loneliness, Uncertainty & Boredom

Milton Glaser’s 10 Rules for Life & Work: The Celebrated Designer Dispenses Wisdom Gained Over His Long Life & Career

OC — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 08:00:09 +0000

“None of us has really the ability to understand our path until it’s over,” the celebrated graphic designer Milton Glaser mused less than a minute into the above video.

The late Milton Glaser’s many contributions to pop culture—the I ❤ NY logo, the psychedelic portrait of a rainbow-haired Bob Dylan, DC Comics’ classic bullet logo—conferred undeniable authority. To the outside eye, he seemed to have a pretty firm handle on the path he traveled for lo those many decades. Aspirant designers would do well to give extra consideration to any advice he might have shared.

As would the rest of us.

His “Ten Things I Have Learned,” originally delivered as part of a talk to the AIGA—a venerable membership organization for design professionals—qualifies as solid life advice of general interest.

Yes, the Internet spawns bullet-pointed tips for better living the way spring rains yield mushrooms, but Glaser, a self-described “child of modernism,” did not truck in pithy Instagram-friendly aphorisms. Instead, his list was born of reflection on the various turns of a long and mostly satisfying creative career.

We’ve excerpted some of his most essential points below, and suggest that those readers who are still in training give special emphasis to number seven. Don’t place too much weight on number nine until you’ve established a solid work ethic. (See number four for more on that.)

MILTON GLASER”S TEN RULES FOR WORK AND LIFE (& A BONUS JOKE ABOUT A RABBIT).

1. YOU CAN ONLY WORK FOR PEOPLE THAT YOU LIKE

Some years ago I realized that… all the work I had done that was meaningful and significant came out of an affectionate relationship with a client.

2. IF YOU HAVE A CHOICE NEVER HAVE A JOB

Here, Glaser quotes composer John Cage: Never have a job, because if you have a job someday someone will take it away from you and then you will be unprepared for your old age.

3. SOME PEOPLE ARE TOXIC AVOID THEM.

Glaser recommends putting a questionable companion to a gestalt therapy test. If, after spending time with that person “you are more tired, then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy, you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible and I suggest that you use it for the rest of your life.”

4. PROFESSIONALISM IS NOT ENOUGH (or THE GOOD IS THE ENEMY OF THE GREAT)

Glaser concedes that a record of dependable excellence is something to look for in a brain surgeon or auto mechanic, but for those in the arts, “continuous transgression” is the quality to cultivate. Professionalism does not allow for that because transgression has to encompass the possibility of failure and if you are professional your instinct is not to fail, it is to repeat success.

5. LESS IS NOT NECESSARILY MORE

I have an alternative to the proposition that I believe is more appropriate. ‘Just enough is more.’

6. STYLE IS NOT TO BE TRUSTED

Style change is usually linked to economic factors, as all of you know who have read Marx. Also fatigue occurs when people see too much of the same thing too often.

7. HOW YOU LIVE CHANGES YOUR BRAIN

The brain is the most responsive organ of the body…. Thought changes our life and our behavior. I also believe that drawing works in the same way…. Drawing also makes you attentive. It makes you pay attention to what you are looking at, which is not so easy.

8. DOUBT IS BETTER THAN CERTAINTY

One of the signs of a damaged ego is absolute certainty. Schools encourage the idea of not compromising and defending your work at all costs. Well, the issue at work is usually all about the nature of compromise…. Ideally, making everyone win through acts of accommodation is desirable.

9. IT DOESN’T MATTER

Glaser credits essayist Roger Rosenblatt’s Rules for Aging (misidentifying the title as Aging Gracefully) with helping him articulate his philosophy here. It doesn’t matter what you think. It does not matter if you are late or early, if you are here or there, if you said it or didn’t say it, if you are clever or if you were stupid. If you were having a bad hair day or a no hair day or if your boss looks at you cockeyed or your boyfriend or girlfriend looks at you cockeyed, if you are cockeyed. If you don’t get that promotion or prize or house or if you do – it doesn’t matter.

10. TELL THE TRUTH

It’s interesting to observe that in the new AIGA’s code of ethics there is a significant amount of useful information about appropriate behavior towards clients and other designers, but not a word about a designer’s relationship to the public. If we were licensed, telling the truth might become more central to what we do.

BONUS JOKE

A butcher was opening his market one morning and as he did a rabbit popped his head through the door. The butcher was surprised when the rabbit inquired ‘Got any cabbage?’ The butcher said ‘This is a meat market – we sell meat, not vegetables.’ The rabbit hopped off. The next day the butcher is opening the shop and sure enough the rabbit pops his head round and says ‘You got any cabbage?’ The butcher now irritated says ‘Listen you little rodent, I told you yesterday we sell meat, we do not sell vegetables and the next time you come here I am going to grab you by the throat and nail those floppy ears to the floor.’ The rabbit disappeared hastily and nothing happened for a week. Then one morning the rabbit popped his head around the corner and said ‘Got any nails?’ The butcher said ‘No.’ The rabbit said ‘Ok. Got any cabbage?’’

Read Milton Glaser’s “Ten Things I Have Learned” in its entirety here.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

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Tim Curry (RIP) Breaks Down His Most Iconic Roles: Rocky Horror, Clue, Muppet Treasure Island & More

Colin Marshall — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 15:39:34 +0000

Upon hearing of Tim Curry’s death last week, some of us could recall having seen him on stage: in Amadeus or Spamalot on Broadway, perhaps, though he also drew acclaim in the work of Stoppard, Brecht, and Shakespeare. For many more of us — perhaps all of us — it was his most memorable film and television performances that sprang to mind. To an extent, which ones are most memorable depends on the viewer. Some will forever remember Curry as DJ Johnny LaGuardia in Times Square, the deceitful Romanian philanthropist in Congo, the arch-nemesis King Chicken on Duckman, or even as the Bard himself in the series Will Shakespeare.

More will remember him as Dr. Frank-N-Furter, the cross-dressing mad scientist from the planet Transsexual at the center of the stage musical The Rocky Horror Show as well as its film adaptation The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The latter ended up becoming the much larger-scale cultural phenomenon, still screened at midnight to this day, more than half a century after its theatrical release.

In that time, the audience-participation rituals have grown elaborate enough to overshadow the content. Still, if you really try to focus on the action onscreen, you’ll notice the remarkable extent to which — even now that all the tropes of science-fiction B movies, nineteen-fifties teen culture, and deliberate glam-rock excess have become barely recognizable — Curry’s performance remains vital.

Just six months ago, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences put up a video in which Curry looks back at his defining roles. The list begins, naturally, with Rocky Horror, but also includes his turns as the Lord of Darkness in Legend (which he was offered after Ridley Scott saw him as Dr. Frank-N-Furter), Pennywise in Stephen King’s It (now regarded as the ne plus ultra of evil clown characters), and Long John Silver in Muppet Treasure Island (his personal favorite of his movies). We’re also told of parts he didn’t get, like Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park, for which he was considered, or — more tantalizingly — Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, whom he “desperately wanted to play.” He also offhandedly mentions that, in addition to Clue’s three existing endings, he also shot a fourth in which his butler is revealed to have committed all the murders. “Of course, that was my favorite,” he says. Alas, “they never released that ending, because they thought it was too obvious.”

via Laughing Squid

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The Periodic Table of Endangered Elements: Visualizing the Chemical Elements That Could Vanish Before You Know It

OC — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 08:00:21 +0000

The Periodic Table of Elements lists the 118 chemical elements that make up everything in our world. Some you’re familiar with—Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen, etc. Others maybe less so—Vanadium, Germanium, and Yttrium.

According to the American Chemical Society, 44 of those 118 elements might disappear by century’s end. Enter the Periodic Table of Endangered Elements (shown above). The most endangered ones, highlighted in red, are Zinc, Gallium, Germanium, Arsenic (is this a good or very bad thing?), Silver, Indium, Tellurium, and Hafnium. Made available under a Creative Commons license, the Periodic Table of Endangered Elements can be viewed in a larger format here.

The original image (top of the page), created in 2015, was updated by EuChemS in 2023 (above). The updated table features the current-day availability of all 90 elements, rather than just the endangered 44 elements, adds an axis for sustainability, and flags elements used in smartphone production.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

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Why AI Companies Are Buying—And Then Destroying—Old Books

Colin Marshall — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 08:00:27 +0000

We’ve long joked about delaying bedtime in order to read the entire internet, but the prospect of actually doing so doesn’t sound as appealing as it used to. An ever-growing proportion of text online, we may sense, hasn’t been written by humans, but generated by artificial intelligence. One solution is to return to reading on paper, and beyond that, spending our time only with books published before the advent — and thus uncorrupted by the output — of large language models. Ironically, that’s what large language models themselves have had to do, and in order to ensure them a steady diet of manmade text, their owners are resorting to controversially destructive methods.

Suspicions first arose when book dealers noticed a spike in their income due to large orders from mysterious buyers for titles they assumed they’d never unload. Books on home oxygen treatment in Italy, marriage litigation in medieval England, Texas civil procedure in the twenty-tens, Swedish comedy in the sixties: these entities bought them all, and for whatever price the seller happened to be asking.

404 Media reporter Emanuel Maiberg tracked the path of one such book, which eventually wound up at a Las Vegas scanning facility run by Amazon. Though undergirded by advanced technology, the work done there is simple: digitize as many books as possible, then destroy them.

“In order to scan them really fast, they cut the spines off the books and fed the pages to the scanner,” Maiberg explained to NPR. Many are technically rare, albeit esoteric obscurities like vanity publications and old instruction manuals rather than first-edition classics. Humans may not value them, but LLMs do: their consumption forestalls “a problem called model collapse, where if an AI trains on AI training data, it gets worse.” Amazon and Anthropic have both been found to use the book-sacrificing method to harvest text, but every company with models to train needs a solution. All this makes for “an unusually on-the-nose example of digital technology devouring literary culture,” as the Wall Street Journal’s Melissa Korn puts it. But when you really have read the entire internet, perhaps extreme measures are inevitable.

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The Art of Splendor Solis, the Most Glorious Illuminated Alchemical Manuscript of Them All

Colin Marshall — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 09:00:55 +0000

When it was published in the United States in 1998, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was retitled Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. The jokes about the American reading public’s apparent allergy to the very word philosopher write themselves, but the change was also unfortunate for more substantial reasons. A “sorcerer’s stone” had no cultural resonance at all, whereas the philosopher’s stone had been sought after since, at the very latest, the dawn of the fourth century. Some sources claim that human knowledge of it goes all the way back to Adam, who got the word directly from God. In any case, it’s no mystery why the philosopher’s stone has long captured the collective imagination of humanity, given that it’s reputed to turn lead into gold.

Among the rumored possessors of the philosopher’s stone throughout history is Salomon Trismosin, a sixteenth-century Renaissance alchemist who taught the influential physician Paracelsus. He’s also credited, at least in legends, with writing Splendor Solis, a book once no less desirable than the next Harry Potter volume in that series’ heyday.

Nothing so mundane as “a list of instructions for whipping up a little alchemical soup in the hope of finding a nugget of artificial gold in the pot at the end,” writes Jörg Völlnagel at Medievalists.net, it rather “sets forth the philosophy of alchemy, a world view according to which the human being (the alchemist) exists and acts in harmony with nature, respecting divine creation and at the same time intervening in the processes underlying that creation, all the while supporting its growth with the help of alchemy.”

As “a — or rather the – prime example of an illuminated alchemical manuscript,” Splendor Solis has drawn the fascination of even such modern figures as William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, and Umberto Eco. It also became an important work in the symbolic-cultural universe of Carl Jung, who, according to the Association of Jungian Analysts, “recognized the alchemical motifs and symbols as expressions of the individuation process, the transformation and integration of the psyche. Splendor Solis, with its rich symbolism and profound allegories, resonated with Jung’s understanding of the archetypal imagery and the transformative nature of the human psyche, contributing to his theories on analytical psychology.”

None of this is to say that Jung, or many other esteemed intellectuals of the past couple of centuries, believed that base metals really could be transmuted to gold and silver. But they did understand that the phenomenon of alchemy has much to reveal about the irresolvable existential negotiation between man and the world he inhabits. It resonates so deeply that it’s even worked in children’s literature, and to great commercial success at that. You can even feel some of it just by gazing upon Splendor Solis’ 22 gold-highlighted, book-of-hours-style illustrations at the web site of M. Moleiro, publisher of one facsimile edition. And who knows? If, as in the world of Harry Potter, the philosopher’s stone also grants immortality, perhaps Salomon Trismosin still walks somewhere among us.

You can view pages of Splendor Solis on Wikipedia. Enter the image gallery here.

Isaac Newton’s Recipe for the Mythical ‘Philosopher’s Stone’ Is Being Digitized & Put Online (Along with His Other Alchemy Manuscripts)

How the Brilliant Colors of Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts Were Made with Alchemy

Videos Recreate Isaac Newton’s Neat Alchemy Experiments: Watch Silver Get Turned Into Gold

Hundreds of Medieval Medical Manuscripts with Strange Cures Get Digitized & Put Online: From Leeches to Crushed Weasel Testicles

The Visionary Mystical Art of Carl Jung: See Illustrated Pages from the Red Book

Isaac Asimov Explains His Three Laws of Robots: Do No Harm, Follow Orders, Survive, in That Order

OC — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 08:00:55 +0000

A number of futurists, philosophers, and technophiles believe we are approaching what they call the “singularity”: a point in time when smart machines become much smarter, stronger, and faster than their creators, and then become self-conscious. Whatever the chance of this occurring, it’s worthwhile to ponder the consequences. But we do already, all the time—in existentially bleak scenarios like Blade Runner, the Terminator series, the rebooted Battlestar Galactica (and its failed prequel Caprica).

The prospects are never pleasant. Robotic engineers in these worlds hardly seem to bother teaching their machines the kind of moral code that would keep them from turning and destroying us (that is, when they aren’t explicitly designed to do so).

I wonder about this conceptual gap—convenient as it may be in narrative terms—given that Isaac Asimov, one of the forefathers of robot fiction invented just such a moral code. In the video above, he outlines it (with his odd pronunciation of “robot”). The code consists of three laws; in his fiction these are hardwired into each robot’s “positronic brain,” a fictional computer that gives robots something of a human-like consciousness.

First Law: A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Second Law: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Isaac Asimov devoted a good deal of his writing career to the subject of robots, so it’s safe to say, he’d done quite a bit of thinking about how they would fit into the worlds he invented. In doing so, Asimov had to solve the problem of how robots would interact with humans once they had some degree of free will. But are his three laws sufficient? Many of Asimov’s stories—I, Robot, for example—turn on some failure or confusion between them. And even for their chase scenes, explosions, and melodrama, the three screen explorations of artificial life mentioned above thoughtfully exploit philosophical ambiguities and insufficiencies in Asimov’s simple system.

For one thing, while Asimov’s robots were hunks of metal, taking only vaguely humanoid form, the robots of our current imaginings emerge from an uncanny valley with realistic skin and hair or even a genetic code and circulatory system. They are possible sexual partners, friends and lovers, co-workers and superiors. They can deceive us as to their nature (a fourth law by Bulgarian novelist Lyuben Dilov states that a robot “must establish its identity as a robot in all cases”); they can conceive children or desires their creators never intended. These differences beg important questions: how ethical are these laws? How feasible? When the singularity occurs, will Skynet become aware of itself and destroy us?

Unlike Asimov, we now live in a time where the questions have direct applicability to robots living among us, outside the pages of sci-fi. As Japanese and South Korean roboticists have found, the three laws cannot address what they call “open texture risk”— unpredictable interactions in unstructured environments. Humans rely on nuanced and often preconscious readings of complex social codes and the fine shades of meaning embedded in natural language; despite many advances, machines are still catching up. Whether or not they can successfully develop it is an open question, making humanoid robots with artificial intelligence an “open texture risk.” But as you can see from the video below, we’re perhaps much closer to Blade Runner or, of course, artificial intelligence than to the clunky, interstellar mining machines in Asimov’s fiction.

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2012.

200-Year-Old Robots That Play Music, Shoot Arrows & Even Write Poems: Watch Automatons in Action

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”

Why Reading Egyptian Hieroglyphics Is Easier Than You Think

Colin Marshall — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 09:00:51 +0000

We’ve featured Egyptologist Ilona Regulski here on Open Culture a few times before. Once, she explained how to read ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs; another time, she told us what the Rosetta Stone actually says. It was, perhaps, inevitable that she would cross paths with Rob Watts, creator of the YouTube channel RobWords, whose videos we often post. When he made the journey to Berlin’s Neues Museum, and specifically to its Egyptian Museum, Regulski was the expert he sought out to tell him — and us — all about how hieroglyphs, literally “sacred carvings,” actually make words.

Faced with a stone chiseled full of hieroglyphs, where do we start? Ancient Egyptian texts are all read from top to bottom, but some go left to right, and others right to left. To know which way, Regulski says, we must first look for symbols with a clear front and back, such as those in human or animal shapes.

Some names are written in blocks, themselves read from top to bottom — unless they contain a sign referring to a god, which, of course, gets customarily elevated to the top. But even if we understand the exact order in which we should read a given string of hieroglyphs, the question remains: how do we actually do that reading?

Though many hieroglyphs do appear to be figurative, with their recognizable forms of birds, bugs, arms, legs, and such, only sometimes are they meant to represent what they look like. Regulski explains that some of these signs are letters, and can be pronounced in much the same way as our own alphabet. What looks like a mouth sounds like an r; a highly abstracted bread loaf, t; a horned viper, ph; an owl, m. There is, of course, more to it. Signs can be combined not just to indicate sound, but also to disambiguate meaning. As you may have noticed, hieroglyphic writing is also what Watts calls a “vowel-free zone.” Exactly which of those sounds go where is, like certain other unresolved aspects of hieroglyphs, a matter of ongoing expert inquiry. But Egyptologists, as seeing Regulski in action reminds us, are a dedicated bunch.

How to Carve Hieroglyphs Just Like the Ancient Egyptians Did

You Could Soon Be Able to Text with 2,000 Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs

An Animated Introduction to the Rosetta Stone, and How It Unlocked Our Understanding of Egyptian Hieroglyphs

What the Rosetta Stone Actually Says

What Ancient Egyptian Sounded Like & How We Know It

Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” Slowed Down to 33 RPM Sounds Great and Takes on New, Unexpected Meanings (RIP)

OC — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 08:00:43 +0000

Note: We were sad to see the news that Dolly Parton passed away. Today we are bringing back one of our favorite Dolly Parton posts. She will be missed.

The Walrus is… Dolly Parton?

Not every record yields gold when played backwards or spun more slowly than recommended, but a 45 of Parton’s 1973 hit “Jolene” played at 33 RPM not only sounds wonderful, it also manages to reframe the narrative.

As Andrea DenHoed notes in The New Yorker, “Slow Ass Jolene,” above, transforms Parton’s “baby-high soprano” into something deep, soulful and seemingly, male.

In its original version, the much-covered “Jolene” is a straight up woman-to-woman chest-baring. Our narrator knows her man is obsessed with the sexy, auburn-haired Jolene, to the point where he talks about her in his sleep.

Apparently she also knows better than to raise the subject with him. Instead, she appeals to Jolene’s sense of mercy:

You could have your choice of men

But I could never love again

He’s the only one for me, Jolene

The song is somewhat autobiographical, though the situation was nowhere near as dire as listeners might assume. In an interview with NPR, Parton recalled a red-haired bank teller who developed a big crush on her husband when she was a young bride:

And he just loved going to the bank because she paid him so much attention. It was kinda like a running joke between us — when I was saying, ‘Hell, you’re spending a lot of time at the bank. I don’t believe we’ve got that kind of money.’ So it’s really an innocent song all around, but sounds like a dreadful one.

For the record, the teller’s name wasn’t Jolene.

Jolene was a pretty little girl who attended an early Parton concert. Parton was so taken with the child, and her unusual name, that she resolved to write a song about her.

Yes, the kid had red hair and green eyes.

Wouldn’t it be wild if she grew up to be a bank teller?

I digress…

In the original version, the irresistible chorus wherein the soon-to-be-spurned party invokes Jolene’s name again and again is plaintive and fierce.

In the slow ass version, it’s plaintive and sad.

The pain is the same, but the situation is much less straightforward, thanks to blurrier gender lines.

Parton told NPR that women are “always threatened by other women, period.”

Jolene’s prodigious feminine assets could also prove worrisome to a gay man whose bisexual lover’s eye is prone to wander.

Or maybe the singer and his man live in a place where same-sex unions are frowned on. Perhaps the singer’s man craves the comfort of a more socially acceptable domestic situation.

Or perhaps Jolene is one hot female-identified tomato, and as far as the singer’s man’s concerned, his pastor and his granny can go to hell! Jolene’s the only one for him.

Or, as one waggish Youtube commenter succinctly put it, “Jolene better stay the hell away from Roy Orbison’s man!”

Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene

I’m begging of you please don’t take my man

Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene

Please don’t take him just because you can

Your beauty is beyond compare

With flaming locks of auburn hair

With ivory skin and eyes of emerald green

Your smile is like a breath of spring

Your voice is soft like summer rain

And I cannot compete with you, Jolene

He talks about you in his sleep

There’s nothing I can do to keep

From crying when he calls your name, Jolene

And I can easily understand

How you could easily take my man

But you don’t know what he means to me, Jolene

Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene

I’m begging of you please don’t take my man

Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene

Please don’t take him just because you can

You could have your choice of men

But I could never love again

He’s the only one for me, Jolene

I had to have this talk with you

My happiness depends on you

And whatever you decide to do, Jolene

Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene

I’m begging of you please don’t take my man

Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene

Please don’t take him even though you can

Jolene, Jolene

via @WFMU

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2018.

Hear Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” Shifted from Minor to Major Key, and Radiohead’s “Creep” Moved from Major to Minor

R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” Reworked from Minor to Major Scale

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and theater maker in NYC.

The Wisdom of David Bowie: On Art, Religion, Technology and More

Colin Marshall — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 09:00:33 +0000

It doesn’t quite ring true to call David Bowie a rock star. Ziggy Stardust, the neon synthetic-clad alien alter ego he both created and retired in the early seventies, was, of course, rock stardom outlandishly personified. But then, that was the concept of what turned out to be just one of many personae he deliberately crafted throughout the course of his career. That career was in music, primarily, but looking back on it today, more than a decade after Bowie’s death, it looks more like his medium was culture itself. That’s underscored by his interviews, clips from a variety of which appear in the new video above from YouTube channel T&H Inspiration.

Most of T&H’s most popular videos add visuals to speeches by the popularizer of Eastern philosophy Alan Watts, who’s been featured here on Open Culture before. He and Bowie had more in common than it may seem at first, beginning with an Englishness that remained thoroughgoing no matter how far out they ventured into the world.

Though Watts’ interest in Buddhism hardly needs stating, it’s worth remembering that he chose to be ordained as an Episcopalian priest rather than as a Buddhist monk. The young Bowie, for his part, very nearly took the latter path, studying under the late Lama Chime Rinpoche, who eventually told him he’d be better off going into the music business.

Bowie did so, of course, but with a new “sense of transience and change, which actually became fundamental to my life and my approach to it,” as he put it decades later. That sense manifests even in his early work, but embracing and even pursuing impermanence — the impermanence of sounds, of fashions, of hit records, of life itself — also kept him from getting mired in the irrelevance or auto-kitsch that threatens every superstar. Given the belief that nothing lasts forever, “looking for the source of one’s own being becomes much more important,” as does attempting artistic or intellectual challenges at the very edge of one’s abilities. Alan Watts would probably have agreed. The bigger question is, did he ever hear “Changes”?

David Bowie on Why It’s Crazy to Make Art — and We Do It Anyway (1998)

The Art Collection of David Bowie: An Introduction

David Bowie Predicts the Good & Bad of the Internet in 1999: “We’re on the Cusp of Something Exhilarating and Terrifying”

How Leonard Cohen & David Bowie Faced Death Through Their Art: A Look at Their Final Albums

Stream David Bowie’s Complete Discography in a 19-Hour Playlist: From His Very First Recordings to His Last