Open Culture

Enjoy Three Hours of Free Nature Videos Narrated by David Attenborough

OC — Fri, 22 May 2026 08:13:38 +0000

For your weekend viewing pleasure, enjoy three hours of David Attenborough narrating free nature videos from the BBC. Attenborough just turned 100 this month, and he’s still going strong!

via Kottke

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The Spread of Christianity Animated, from Antiquity Until Today, on an Animated Map

Colin Marshall — Thu, 21 May 2026 09:00:44 +0000

Christianity has long been closely identified with Western civilization. The association is especially strong, in modern times, with the United States of America, that source of derisively quoted, quite possibly apocryphal arguments that “if English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it ought to be good enough for our children.” But of course, Jesus never heard a word of English, and though the spread of the religion named after him did shift into high gear not long after his death — to say nothing of after Constantine’s — it took its sweet time getting to the American continent. In fact, it doesn’t show up there until more than five and a half minutes into the new eight-minute video from Ollie Bye above, which animates Christianity’s historical propagation on a world map.

It’s a world map by the end, in any case: the view zooms out as the reach of Christianity increases, starting with the region we now call the Middle East and ending up with every continent on display, none of them untouched save Antarctica (which actually does have eight churches of its own). Remarkable though it is that this first-century “desert religion” has taken root in such a variety of environments, cultures, and societies, it hasn’t come through that process completely unchanged.

Indeed, Bye’s map includes a running legend of its major variants, from Nicene, Celtic, and Chalcedonian Christianity early on to Anglican, Lutheran, Baptist, and many more in our time. It makes less sense to speak of the spread of Christianity, perhaps, than the spread of Christianities.

In the singular or the plural, what has made all this so adaptable to such a wide variety of human settings? Christianity’s non-ethnic universalism surely has something to do with it, as does the broad emotional resonance of its core narratives of sin, salvation, and rebirth. The assiduous translation of its texts and outward march of missionaries and other carriers of the gospel has been going on almost since the very beginning. Throughout its history, Christianity has also shown the versatility to thrive as a clandestine underground movement, a state religion, and everything in between. All the while, it has assimilated qualities of the civilizations it enters, from Greco-Roman philosophy to Celtic festivals to Korean shamanistic traditions. In fact, I’m writing this very post from one of the many church cafés in Seoul, as convincing an experience as to underscore Christianity’s improbable — and continuing — endurance.

180,000 Years of Religion Charted on a “Histomap” in 1943

The Birth and Rapid Rise of Islam, Animated (622‑1453)

A Visual Map of the World’s Major Religions (and Non-Religions)

World Religions Explained with Useful Charts: Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Christianity & More

The History of the World in One Video: Every Year from 200,000 BCE to Today

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.

Watch Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page Rock the Theremin, the Early Soviet Electronic Instrument

OC — Thu, 21 May 2026 08:00:21 +0000

It can be frustrating for Led Zeppelin fans to hear the band reduced to plagiarism lawsuits or the quintessence of sexually-aggressive rock-star entitlement (though much of that is deserved). For one thing, Zeppelin’s occult songwriting tendencies, courtesy of both Page and Plant, play just as prominent a role as their blues-rock come-ons (as several generations of fantasy metal bands can attest). For another, their studio productions and live shows are renowned for pioneering mash-ups of modern rock, folk, and classical instrumentation, courtesy of both Page and Jones. And finally, the band’s recording techniques were—for the time—demonstrations of technical wizardry.

Thus it should come as no surprise that technical wizard Jimmy Page would play the Theremin, though he does play on it the kind of screaming, feedback-laden bends he unleashed from his Les Paul. Introduced to the world by Soviet inventor Leon Theremin in 1919, the early electronic instrument emits high-pitched singing when a player’s hands come within range of its invisible electrical fields. “It hasn’t got six strings,” Page says in his demonstration at the top of the post, from the 2009 film It Might Get Loud, “but it’s a lot of fun.”

Page used a Sonic Wave Theremin in his Zeppelin days in a very guitar-like way—running it through a Maestro Echoplex and Orange amps and cabinets. (Watch him revive the technique in a 1995 French TV broadcast above.) For several months in 1971, writes fansite Achilles Last Stand, Page “used a double-stacked Theremin” for twice the sonic assault.

Though he seems to have gone back to just the one Theremin in the solo above, the effect is no less electrifying, if you’ll excuse the pun, as he sends echoes of ray-gun noise cascading around the theater. Well over five minutes into the hypnotic affair, Page takes to his Les Paul, creating more ragged patterns with violin bow and Echoplex. Even if you aren’t in a dazed and confused state, you’ll feel like you are if you give yourself over to this piece of performance art. Heroics? Yes, and indeed the bowed guitar act has its phallic overtones. But it begins and ends with long stretches of the kind of droning experimental noise one would expect to find onstage at an early Kraftwerk show.

Those in the know will know that Page put the theremin to use on one of the band’s most technically experimental recordings (though it also happens to be an appropriated blues stomper), “Whole Lotta Love” from 1969’s Led Zeppelin II. “I always envisioned the middle to be quite avant-garde,” Page told Guitar World, “The Theremin generates most of the higher pitches and my Les Paul makes the lower sounds.” Watch him rip out a theremin-and-guitar solo above in the live performance from 1973. Taken with the psychedelic video effects, the performance reaches mystical planes of rhythmic abstraction.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.

Learn How to Play the Theremin: A Free Short Video Course

Meet Clara Rockmore, the Pioneering Electronic Musician Who First Rocked the Theremin in the Early 1920s

Leon Theremin Advertises the First Commercial Production Run of His Revolutionary Electronic Instrument (1930)

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

The Lost Scenes of Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons Are Being Controversially Restored with AI

Colin Marshall — Wed, 20 May 2026 09:00:04 +0000

When television mogul Ted Turner died earlier this month, it gave cinephiles occasion to remember his brief but high-profile foray into colorization. In the mid-nineteen-eighties, he commissioned for broadcast colorized versions of more than 100 classic movies, from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre to It’s a Wonderful Life to Casablanca. It was only thanks to a clause specifying a black-and-white picture in Orson Welles’ contract with RKO that Citizen Kane never got the full Turner treatment. That blessedly failed project is now being invoked again in comparison with the startup Fable Studio’s enterprise, underway even now, of using artificial intelligence to restore Welles’ sophomore feature The Magnificent Ambersons, which was notoriously mutilated by the studio before its release in 1942.

The recut happened in Welles’ absence. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, he received what sounds like something more than a request from Nelson Rockefeller, then the government’s Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, to go to Brazil and shoot a documentary about Carnival in the interest of “Pan-American unity.” Due to a disastrous test screening, as Welles explains in the clip from a 1982 Arena broadcast above, “it was thought by everyone in Hollywood, while I was in South America, that it was too ‘downbeat,’ a famous Hollywood word at the time.” Yet the entire film, to his mind, was about the downfall of the titular family, who lose their wealth and prestige as the society they knew slips out from underneath them during the transformations of the early automobile age: not a widely resonant theme, it seems, in mid-twentieth-century America.

“They destroyed Ambersons,” Welles says of the RKO’s recut, “and the picture itself destroyed me.” Yet even the Bowdlerized version has more than a few admirers. Among them is Edward Saatchi, the movie-loving advertising-company scion behind this AI restoration and/or reconstruction project. “His Amazon-backed generative‑A.I. platform, Showrunner, would feed off the data from the extant version of the film to prompt entire new scenes, based on voluminous production materials that survived, including scripts, photographs, and detailed notes,” writes the New Yorker’s Michael Schulman. “For emotional authenticity, Fable would first shoot live actors, then overlay the footage with the digitized voices and likenesses of the long-dead cast members.” The result has the potential to be unsettling on several levels at once.

As Schulman emphasizes, the film’s concern with the human cost of a technological revolution is hardly lost on Saatchi. “With all their speed forward, they may be a step backward in civilization,” says Joseph Cotten’s character, an early automobile investor, in a scene from the studio cut. “It may be that they won’t add to the beauty of the world or the life of men’s souls — I’m not sure. But automobiles have come, and almost all outward things are going to be different because of what they bring.” Even the human mind, he speculates, will be “changed in subtle ways,” a process clearly in effect by the forties. As far as the consequences of AI, we can already see how it’s begun changing the thinking of its early adopters. Saatchi himself displays an ambivalence about the technology, describing it as “potentially the end of human creativity” but also going full-speed-ahead with his unauthorized work on The Magnificent Ambersons — which, at the very least, he’s keeping in black-and-white.

AI “Completes” Keith Haring’s Unfinished Painting and Controversy Erupts

Artificial Intelligence Brings to Life Figures from 7 Famous Paintings: The Mona Lisa, Birth of Venus & More

Discover the Lost Films of Orson Welles

Isaac Asimov Describes How Artificial Intelligence Will Liberate Humans & Their Creativity: Watch His Last Major Interview (1992)

When Ted Turner Tried to Colorize Citizen Kane: See the Only Surviving Scene from the Great Act of Cinematic Sacrilege

Hand-Colored Photographs from 19th Century Japan: 110 Images Capture the Waning Days of Traditional Japanese Society

OC — Wed, 20 May 2026 08:00:49 +0000

What we euphemistically refer to as the “Opening of Japan” catalyzed a period of seismic upheaval for the proud formerly closed country. Between the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1853 and the Meiji restoration in 1868, Japanese society changed rapidly due to the sudden forced influx of foreign capital and influence, much of it destructive. “Unemployment rose,” writes historian John W. Dower, “Domestic prices soared sky high…. Much of Japan was wracked by famine in the mid 1860s…. As if all this were not curse enough, the foreigners also brought cholera with them.” They also brought photography, and both Western and Japanese photographers documented not only the country’s profound transformation, but also its traditional dress and culture.

Closed for 200 years, Japan became a source of endless fascination for Westerners as artifacts made their way across the sea. Among them was “an extensive photographic documentation of Japan,” notes the New York Public Library, and “of interaction between the Japanese and foreigners” (Commodore Perry’s expedition to Tokyo Bay included a daguerreotype photographer.)

“In the broadest sense, photography entered Asia from Europe and America as part of the process of colonialism, but soon took root in those regions with local photographers.”

The colorized images you see here come from the NYPL’s large collection of late 19th century Japanese photography, taken by photographers like the Italian-British Felice Beato and his Japanese student Kimbei, who “assisted Beato in the hand-coloring of photographs until 1863,” then “set up his own large and flourishing studio in Yokohama in 1881.” The archive provides “a rich resource for the understanding of the political, social, economic, and artistic history of Asia from the 1870s to the early 20th century.” These images date from between 1890 and 1909, by which time much of Japan had already been extensively westernized in dress, architecture, and style of government.

To many Japanese, the old ways, sustained through a couple hundred years of isolation, must have seemed in danger of slipping away. To many Westerners, however, the encounter with Japan offered a kind of cultural renewal. As the Metropolitan Museum of Art points out, “a tidal wave of foreign imports” from Asia, including “woodcut prints by masters of the ukiyo‑e school… transformed Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art.” European collectors, traders, and artists discovered a mania for all things Japanese, even as some of its cultural forms threatened to disappear. Enter the NYPL’s digital collection, Photographs of Japan, here.

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

What Happens When a Japanese Woodblock Artist Depicts Life in London in 1866, Despite Never Having Set Foot There

Japanese Kabuki Actors Captured in 18th-Century Woodblock Prints by the Mysterious & Masterful Artist Sharaku

The Evolution of The Great Wave off Kanagawa: See Four Versions That Hokusai Painted Over Nearly 40 Years

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

Every Book of the Bible Explained in One Video

Colin Marshall — Tue, 19 May 2026 09:12:41 +0000

Whether we’re religious or not, we can all agree that the Bible isn’t just a book. In fact, it’s at least 66 of them, 39 Old Testament and 27 in the New, and that’s just in the Protestant tradition. Even if you’ve never read a single page of the Bible, you may well have a decent idea of what quite a few of those books contain: the stories of Adam, Eve, Noah, and the creation in Genesis; the plagues and Moses parting the Red Sea in Exodus; the various depictions of Jesus in the Gospels that define his popular image; the apocalyptic grotesqueries of Revelation. That’s even likelier to be true if you watch Hochelaga, the YouTube channel that just came out with a new video explaining all those stories and everything in between.

The result is long, to be sure, but not as long as you might expect: Hochelaga creator Tommie Trelawny manages to cover the 66 books of the Bible in two hours, the length of an ordinary feature film. For visuals, he draws upon the history of Western art, whose connections with Christianity and penchant for depicting the religion’s central events goes without saying.

In the case of biblical figures like Jonah, Job, or Lot’s wife (before or after her conversion into a pillar of salt), we’ve developed our own mental images at least through cultural osmosis, informed or not by the visions of Renaissance masters. But how many of us can call so easily scenes from the books of Obadiah, Haggai, or Philemon up in our mind’s eye?

This video may prove most helpful in providing a “big picture” of the Bible, allowing viewers with no experience of biblical scholarship to place isolated episodes to which they’ve heard references all their lives in context with each other. And yet, it’s also entirely possible that they’ll come out of these two hours wondering to what extent all these parts really fit together in the first place. Collected from material originally written over centuries and in various forms, not to mention passed through the vagaries of translation, the Bible could hardly be expected to present itself with polished coherence. Whether or not you believe it contains the word of God, you could well feel ready, after Hochelaga’s overview, to grapple with its text in all its linguistic richness, its surprising contradictions, and its moral grandeur — as well as its more-than-occasional strangeness.

Why Real Biblical Angels Are Creepy, Beastly, and Hardly Angelic

What Happened to Jesus’ Twelve Disciples After the Bible — It Wasn’t Pretty

How Many Lives Does God Take in the Bible: An Investigation into a Surprisingly High Body Count

Discover Thomas Jefferson’s Cut-and-Paste Version of the Bible, and Read the Curious Edition Online

Isaac Asimov’s Guide to the Bible: A Witty, Erudite Atheist’s Guide to the World’s Most Famous Book

What Happens When a Musician Plays Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Pride and Joy” on a $25 Kids’ Guitar at Walmart

OC — Tue, 19 May 2026 08:00:56 +0000

There’s a maxim that says, “It’s not the guitar, it’s the player.” And the video above bears it out.

In this clip, musician Clay Shelburn and his pal Zac Stokes visit a Walmart at 3 a.m. and pick up a Disney Cars 2 toy guitar. Next, they proceed to play Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Pride and Joy” and unleash the full potential of that $25 guitar. The Barbies all go crazy.

When it comes to the blues, any old guitar will do. That we know. But if you care to watch Shelburn play the same song on a guitar that runs north of $1,000, check out the video below.

Stevie Ray Vaughan Plays the Acoustic Guitar in Rare Footage, Letting Us See His Guitar Virtuosity in Its Purest Form

Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Version of “Little Wing” Played on Traditional Korean Instrument, the Gayageum

Archaeologists Discover Ancient Egyptian Mummy Buried with Pages from Homer’s Iliad: When Literature Guided Souls Through the Afterlife

Colin Marshall — Mon, 18 May 2026 09:00:38 +0000

Renaissance Europe admired ancient Rome, ancient Rome admired ancient Greece, and ancient Greece admired ancient Egypt. But the admiration could actually go both ways in that last case, since the two civilizations’ periods of existence overlapped. The Greeks made no secret of their regard for Egypt as a far deeper well of knowledge and wisdom (indeed, much of what we know about ancient Egypt today comes from Greek records), but archaeological evidence shows that the Egyptians, in turn, were hardly dismissive of Greek accomplishment. Many Hellenic texts have been discovered in Egyptian burial sites, but only recently has a Greek literary work turned up packaged with a mummy — and not just any literary work, but pages from Homer’s Iliad.

Unearthed from a 1,600-year-old Roman-era tomb in the Egyptian town of Al Bahnasa, the fragment contains lines from Book 2’s epic “catalogue of ships,” which lists all the vessels the Achaean army sends off to Troy. It dates from an era in ancient Egypt, centuries after the reign of the Greek-descended Cleopatra, when “Greek literary papyri may have functioned as a crucial cultural passport,” as the New York Times’ Franz Lidz writes.

“Being Hellenic connoted an exclusive social status and financial privilege — and had to be meticulously documented through genealogies going back across several centuries.” It’s possible that pages of the Iliad were assumed to act as a kind of Greek passport that would let the deceased bypass the trials of the underworld described in the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

So venerated was Homer’s work at this stage of ancient Egyptian history, in fact, that physicians also credited it with curative properties. “For a bed-bound patient shivering with malaria, the prescription was simple: Brace your head against a papyrus scroll of Book 4 to break the fever.” Whatever the effectiveness of the Iliad against infectious disease, or even to assure safe passage into the world beyond, its continued study around the world more than a millennium and a half after it was getting slipped into Egyptian tombs — and the better part of three millennia after its composition — suggests a kind of historical and cultural power not possessed by ordinary literature. If Christopher Nolan’s coming adaptation of the Odyssey happens to do well enough to get Hollywood back on its feet, perhaps we’ll have to give it to the ancient Egyptians and admit that Homer really does offer salvation after all.

Hear Homer’s Iliad Read in the Original Ancient Greek

The Only Illustrated Manuscript of Homer’s Iliad from Antiquity

The Oldest Tattoos Ever Discovered on an Egyptian Mummy Date Back 5,000 Years

The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead: A Guidebook for Surviving the Afterlife

How Did the Egyptians Make Mummies? An Animated Introduction to the Ancient Art of Mummification

Read Joan Didion’s Lost Interview with the Grateful Dead (1967)

Colin Marshall — Mon, 18 May 2026 08:00:50 +0000

Without wanting to make too broad a generalization, it’s safe to say that Saturday Evening Post readers probably didn’t understand much about what was going on in San Francisco during the Summer of Love. Or they didn’t, at least, until the magazine ran “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Joan Didion’s simultaneous report from and obituary for the drug-fueled seeker scene that had formed around Haight-Ashbury. Quite possibly her single most widely known piece of writing, the piece relates her encounters both direct and indirect with participants in the counterculture both obscure and prominent.

That latter group includes no less a San Francisco hippie institution than the Grateful Dead, Didion’s interview with whom didn’t make it into the final piece. But over nearly six decades since then, its typescript has remained among her papers, and it was recently discovered in Didion and John Gregory Dunne’s literary archive at the New York Public Library by Didion biographer Timothy Denevi. Just days ago, music journalist Jeff Weiss posted the 1967 text online, describing it “as a landmark early interview with the band directly after the release of their self-titled debut album, but before national stardom swept them on the Golden Road to unlimited devotion and drug consumption.”

In a sense, the members themselves occupied the eye of the countercultural storm. “I told the Dead I was trying to figure out what was going on,” Didion writes, “and one of them said ‘When you find out, tell us.’ ” Topics of discussion include the venues they dislike (Los Angeles’ Cheetah, for instance, where “there was a computer, everything was programmed”), their resentment for the Council for a Summer of Love’s attempts to organize the burgeoning scene, the ongoing deterioration of that scene (“a small and productive creative thing” whose energy eventually attracted “all these people in some lame bag or another”), their loathing of the then-new radio hit “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair),” and the regrettable temporary absence of Ron “Pigpen” McKernan (“easily our most photogenic member”).

It was around this same time that the Dead were also interviewed by CBS TV news for “The Hippie Temptation,” previously featured here on Open Culture, a segment on the popularity and dangers of LSD. Whereas they came off in that context as denizens of the belly of the beast, if reasonably articulate ones, they seem positively straight (in the parlance of the time) compared with most of the other interviewees in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”: the disoriented groupies, the aggressively enlightened bohemian blowhards, the infamous five-year-old on acid in “High Kindergarten.” It’s no surprise that the Dead inspired one of the few lasting movements to come out of that headily utopian era, thanks in part to its very peripatetic formlessness and lack of a political program. As Jefferson Airplane’s Paul Kantner tended to recall, for a few weeks there in 1966, everything was perfect — but Joan Didion turned up in 1967. Read her lost interview with the Grateful Dead here.

Stream a Massive Archive of Grateful Dead Concerts from 1965–1995

“The Hippie Temptation”: An Angst-Ridden CBS TV Show Warns of the Risks of LSD (1967)

The Night When Miles Davis Opened for the Grateful Dead (1970)

Read 12 Masterful Essays by Joan Didion for Free Online, Spanning Her Career From 1965 to 2013

Joan Didion Creates a Handwritten List of the 19 Books That Changed Her Life

The Forgotten Moment When Superman Fought Prejudice in America Instead of Villains (1950)

OC — Fri, 15 May 2026 08:00:11 +0000

It makes sense that Superman would take a tolerant view of immigrants and other minorities, given that he himself arrived on Earth as a refugee from the planet Krypton.

The Man of Steel may strike you as an unlikely mouthpiece for progressive ideals, but 1950 found him on a book cover, above, engaged in conversation with a small crowd of mostly white boys:

“…and remember, boys and girls, your school – like our country – is made up of Americans of many different races, religions and national origins, so … If YOU hear anybody talk against a schoolmate or anyone else because of his religion, race or national origin – don’t wait: tell him THAT KIND OF TALK IS UN-AMERICAN. HELP KEEP YOUR SCHOOL ALL-AMERICAN!”

In other words, citizens must steel themselves to take action, because you can’t always count on a superhero to show up and make things right.

The cheap paper jacket, above, was distributed to school children by the Institute For American Democracy, an offshoot of the New York-based Anti-Defamation League.

Meanwhile, a full color version of the 66-year-old illustration has been making the rounds on social media. Let us consider it a placeholder. Eventually someone will surely take it back to the drawing board to add more girls, children with disabilities, and children of color.

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

Read Martin Luther King and The Montgomery Story: The Influential 1957 Civil Rights Comic Book

Dr. Seuss Draws Anti-Japanese Cartoons During WWII, Then Atones with Horton Hears a Who!

The Original 1940s Superman Cartoon: Watch 17 Classic Episodes Free Online

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

The Most Influential Philosophers Explained in 26 Minutes: From Socrates to Wittgenstein

Colin Marshall — Thu, 14 May 2026 09:00:42 +0000

The question of who are the fifteen most influential philosophers of all time may not arise at every conversation down at the pub — not outside the circle of Open Culture readers, in any case. But even among non-specialists, it could spark a livelier debate than you might imagine. Names like Socrates, Aristotle, Descartes, and Marx are known, after all, even among the general public who’ve never read a page of philosophical text. All of them appear in the million-viewed video from Jaydone History above, which takes its own crack at naming a top fifteen. Its 26 minutes also provide a brief biographical sketch of each one, informative if littered with odd mispronunciations, plus a capsulized sense of these philosophers’ lasting ideas.

In pursuit of truth, Socrates created the questioning method of dialogue that bears his name. Plato, Socrates’ student, advocated for rule by the enlightened and the pursuit of knowledge through the contemplation of pure forms. Rejecting Plato’s method, Aristotle dedicated himself to systematic empirical observation. On the other side of the world, Confucius spread teachings about the cultivation of moral virtue to maintain the social relationships he saw as the basic building blocks of civilizational order, which China eventually adopted as its state philosophy. Back in Europe, Augustine synthesized Christian theology and classical philosophy, laying the groundwork for medieval thought. Thomas Aquinas, too, dedicated himself to a combination of faith and reason, making a suite of oft-cited arguments for the existence of God.

Seeking a foundation of absolutely certain knowledge, René Descartes arrived at self-awareness, famously declaring, “I think, therefore I am” and articulating his eponymous dualistic worldview. Even apart from his work on the nature of knowledge, John Locke’s thoughts on social organization and government live on in Enlightenment-influenced modern democracies even today. David Hume mounted fundamental challenges to established ideas of empiricism, questioning our very notion that future events will mirror past experience. Jean-Jacques Rousseau introduced the conception of legitimate political authority as arising from the “general will,” a social agreement among free and equal individuals, which turned out to be central to the justifications of the French Revolution. Immanuel Kant worked to bridge the gap between rationalism and empiricism, reconciling the role of both experience and the mind’s physical structure to the formation of knowledge.

Among other concepts, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel defined that of dasein, which encapsulates the human mode of being (and which requires a lifetime spent with his writings to grasp, if even then). A professional journalist and historian, Karl Marx described human history through economic structures and class struggle, and his vision of a perfectly equal society ahead still remains compelling to many. Friedrich Nietzsche declared that “God is dead,” placing the burden of defining morality on man, and specifically a figure he called the Übermensch. Ludwig Wittgenstein took it upon himself to explain the relationship between language and reality with the highest rigor. In the comments, the video’s creator teases a part two, which makes one wonder which philosophers will be included: Spinoza? Heidegger? Sartre? The year and a half it’s taken so far is surely long enough for the narrator to have learned to pronounce them.

Related content:

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Bryan Magee’s In-Depth, Uncut TV Conversations With Famous Philosophers (1978–87)

28 Important Philosophers List the Books That Influenced Them Most During Their College Days

The Daily Habits of Highly Productive Philosophers: Nietzsche, Marx & Immanuel Kant

The 20 Most Influential Academic Books of All Time: No Spoilers

The Tarot Card Deck Created by Salvador Dalí

OC — Thu, 14 May 2026 08:00:06 +0000

The Tarot has long been a tool of charlatans. But it has also long been embraced by brilliant, unconventional thinkers, many of whom themselves have a touch of the charlatan about them (and who would just as likely admit it with a smile). William Butler Yeats was a fan, as is visionary Chilean filmmaker, artist, writer, and psychonaut Alejandro Jodorowsky, who has recorded his own Youtube series explaining his take on this classic mode of divination. With its archetypal symbolism, the Tarot’s appeal to artists should be obvious. Most of them, like Jodorowsky, find far more interesting uses for it than fortune-telling. “You must not talk about the future,” Jodorowsky tells us in his series, “the future is a con. The tarot is a language that talks about the present.”

What might another visionary artist, Salvador Dalí, think of Jodorowsky’s Tarot interpretations? We’ll never know, but I suspect he would find them enchanting. Not only do the two seem like kindred spirits, but Dalí devoted some part of his life to the Tarot, designing his own deck in the 70s.

Initially, the project arrived as a commission from producer Albert Broccoli for the James Bond film Live and Let Die. “Likely inspired by his wife Gala, who nurtured his interest in mysticism,” writes Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, “Dalí eagerly got to work, and continued the project of his own accord when the contractual deal fell through.”

It was just around this time that the Tarot saw a massive resurgence in popularity. The occult interests of the 60s counterculture were mainstreamed in the 70s thanks to books like Stuart Kaplan’s Tarot Cards for Fun and Fortune Telling. But while Dalí had channeled the vivid psychedelia of the age in an earlier illustration project, 1969’s Alice and Wonderland, his Tarot deck, writes Lisa Rainwater at Galo magazine, “actually shows reserve. Yes, reserve—as if his reverence for the tarot nearly humbles him.” His knack for “fanatical self-promotion” does get the better of him eventually: he chooses his own face to represent the Magician (above).

Overall, the deck combines the eclectic origins of occult practices with Dalí’s own unmistakable sensibility. Dalí’s Tarot is “a pastiche of old-world art, surrealism, kitsch, Christian iconography and Greek and Roman sculpture. Many of his recurring motifs such as the rose, the fly and the bull’s head are found throughout the deck.” First published in a limited edition in 1984—and reissued since in editions by TASCHEN and in book form by other publishers—the deck included an introductory booklet that reads, in Spanish, English, and French:

The Wizard (Arcanum I), Salvador Dalí, has transformed with his exceptional art and his marvelous talent the 78 golden plates of ‘The fabulous book of Thot’ into as many artistic marvels, each one of them duly signed by the hand of this unmatchable, internally famous painter … such an extraordinary artistic creation does not detract, in any way, from the Tarot’s close symbolism. On the contrary, it enhances with its captivating beauty, the Tarot’s esoteric and plastic meaning.

See a preview video of the full Dalí deck above, purchase a limited edition set here, or a much more affordable version here.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.

The Fascinating History of Tarot Card Decks: From the Renaissance to the Modern Day

Meet the Forgotten Female Artist Behind the World’s Most Popular Tarot Deck (1909)

Behold the Sola-Busca Tarot Deck, the Earliest Complete Set of Tarot Cards (1490)

Carl Jung on the Power of Tarot Cards: They Provide Doorways to the Unconscious & Perhaps a Way to Predict the Future

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

Watch the Moment When the Wreck of the Titanic Was First Discovered (1985)

Colin Marshall — Wed, 13 May 2026 09:00:54 +0000

The wreck of the RMS Titanic has never ceased to command attention, from pop-cultural fascination to scientific scrutiny and everything in between. That can make it seem, especially to the younger generations, as if humanity has been gazing upon its remains since they first settled at the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean. In fact, the precise location of the shipwreck went unknown for more than 73 years, between the day of the disaster, April 15th, 1912, and that of the discovery, September 1, 1985. In the video above, you can watch the very moment debris from the Titanic first came into the view of Argo, the unmanned undersea camera used by the researchers seeking it out.

“Somebody should get Bob,” says one of the crew as soon as it becomes clear, even on their low-resolution black-and-white monitor, that they’re looking at man-made objects on the sea floor. And well they should have: the Bob in question is oceanographer and Argo inventor Robert Ballard, who’d been actively thinking about how to find the Titanic since at least the early nineteen-seventies and boarded Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute’s R/V Knorr with intent to find it.

In truth, the voyage was financed by the U.S. Navy, which had much less interest in finding the wreck of the Titanic than those of the USS Scorpion and Thresher, two nuclear submarines lost in the sixties. If Ballard could look for them, so the deal went, he could use the expedition’s spare time and resources on his life’s mission.

After determining that the Scorpion and Thresher had imploded, Ballard and the Knorr crew continued on to the general area in which the Titanic sank. Knowing that the infamously “unsinkable” ocean liner would have been subject to the same mighty undersea pressure, they kept their eyes open, through Argo, for similarly scattered fragments rather than intact sections of the hull. As the video shows us, the strategy worked: only when a trail of debris leads them to an identifiable boiler, proof positive that they’d found what they were looking for, does the cheer go up. Ballard would go on to discover other widely known shipwrecks — the battleship Bismarck, the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown in 1998 — but one suspects that nothing quite matches that first Titanic high.

Watch 80 Minutes of Never-Released Footage Showing the Wreckage of the Titanic (1986)

The First Full 3D Scan of the Titanic, Made of More Than 700,000 Images Capturing the Wreck’s Every Detail

Titanic Survivor Interviews: What It Was Like to Flee the Sinking Luxury Liner

Watch the Titanic Sink in Real-Time

See the Well-Preserved Wreckage of Ernest Shackleton’s Ship Endurance Found in Antarctica

What Happened to Jesus’ Twelve Disciples After the Bible—It Wasn’t Pretty

Colin Marshall — Wed, 13 May 2026 08:00:47 +0000

The stories in the Bible have been told in many ways, not least through film. Among the many cinematic adaptations of Christianity’s holy book, none comes to mind that ends with freeze-frame title cards explaining the later fate of each character, in the manner of Animal House, American Graffiti, or Goodfellas. This is surprising, since that device could do much to satisfy our curiosity about so many secondary Biblical figures. Take the twelve disciples of Jesus Christ, whose lives Hochelaga creator Tommie Trelawny takes as his subject in the new video above. Be warned: things didn’t end particularly well for most of them.

Peter, who “has to be one of the most studied figures in history,” seems to have ended his days in Rome. Christianity’s rapid spread there in the first century AD, eventually brought about a crackdown by the ruling class. The emperor Nero blamed the fire of 64 on Christians, and Peter, now known as Saint Peter, was among the victims of the resulting persecution. Judas, the betrayer of Jesus, “remains the most controversial figure in all of Christianity,” though questions about his motivations have gone without definitive answers. We do know, however, that remorse eventually overtook him, leading him to take his own life in Akeldama, or the “field of blood” — and if you believe Dante, he now resides in the ninth circle of Hell.

Trelawny gives the title of most underrated to the one whose skepticism about Jesus’ return from death has guaranteed him his own eternal life through the expression “doubting Thomas.” (As with Peter and Judas, his identity was solidified by a Caravaggio painting.) According to certain stories, he also traveled the farthest of any of the disciples: far enough to follow existing Roman spice routes and found the church of the Saint Thomas Christians in Kerala, India. The not-quite-as-widely known but nevertheless highly important Andrew made travels of his own, going to Scythia, and from there to Greece. After his eventual capture and crucifixion, his holy relics were scattered far and wide: even to Scotland, so the legend has it, home of the University of St. Andrews. The St. Andrews’ Cross appears as the main design element of Scotland’s national flag, as well as a part of the Union Jack.

In these and other ways, the legacies of the disciples continue to manifest in familiar ways throughout the Western (and, occasionally, non-western) world. After telling the stories of the remaining eight, from John to Bartholomew to Simon the Zealot, Trelawny considers the possibility of a mnemonic rhyme for their fates. Alas, he admits, “I’m still trying to think of what goes with ‘flayed alive by Armenians.’ ” Being a disciple of Jesus turns out, for the most part, to have been a calling with a very low survival rate indeed. But then, in early Christianity, martyrdom was a holy act, a demonstration of devotion in imitation of the Messiah himself — and an element sure to make most any disciple biopic a gruesome viewing experience.

The Gnostic Gospels: An Introduction to the Forbidden Teachings of Jesus

Why Real Biblical Angels Are Creepy, Beastly, and Hardly Angelic

How Our Depiction of Jesus Changed Over 2,000 Years and What He May Have Actually Looked Like

How Many Lives Does God Take in the Bible: An Investigation into a Surprisingly High Body Count

What Makes Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ a Timeless, Great Painting?

When the Nobel Prize Committee Rejected The Lord of the Rings: Tolkien “Has Not Measured Up to Storytelling of the Highest Quality” (1961)

OC — Tue, 12 May 2026 09:00:54 +0000

When J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books appeared in the mid-1950s, they were met with very mixed reviews, an unsurprising reception given that nothing like them had been written for adult readers since Edmund Spenser’s epic 16th century English poem The Faerie Queene, perhaps. At least, this was the contention of reviewer Richard Hughes, who went on to write that “for width of imagination,” The Lord of the Rings “almost beggars parallel.”

Scottish writer Naomi Mitchison did find a comparison: to Sir Thomas Malory, author of the 15th century Le Morte d’Arthur — hardly misplaced, given Tolkien’s day job as an Oxford don of English literature, but not the sort of thing that passed for contemporary writing in the 1950s, notwithstanding the serious appreciation of writers like W.H. Auden for Tolkien’s trilogy. “No previous writer,” the poet remarked in a New York Times review, “has, to my knowledge, created an imaginary world and a feigned history in such detail.”

Auden did find fault with Tolkien’s poetry, a fact upon which critic Edmund Wilson seized in his scathing 1956 Lord of the Rings review. “Mr. Auden is apparently quite insensitive — through lack of interest in the other department,” wrote Wilson, “to the fact that Tolkien’s prose is just as bad. Prose and verse are on the same level of professorial amateurishness.” Five years later, the Nobel prize jury would make the same judgement when they excluded Tolkien’s books from consideration. Tolkien’s prose, wrote jury member Anders Österling, “has not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality.”

The note was discovered recently by Swedish journalist Andreas Ekström, who delved into the Nobel archive for 1961 and found that “the jury passed over names including Lawrence Durrell, Robert Frost, Graham Greene, E.M. Forster, and Tolkien to come up with their eventual winner, Yugoslavian writer Ivo Andrić,” as Alison Flood reports at The Guardian. (The Nobel archives are sealed until 50 years after the year the award is given.) Ekström has been reading through the archives “for the past five years or so,” he says, “and this was the first time I have seen Tolkien’s name among the suggested candidates.” His name appeared on the list chiefly through the machinations of his closest friend and chief supporter, C.S. Lewis.

Lewis, “also of Oxford,” Wilson sneered, “is able to top them all” in praise of Tolkien’s books. From the first appearance of his Middle Earth fantasy in The Hobbit, Lewis promised to “do all in my power to secure for Tolkien’s great book the recognition it deserves,” as he wrote in a 1953 letter to British publisher Stanley Unwin. In what might be considered an unethical promotion of his friend’s work today, Lewis responded tirelessly to critics of the trilogy, going so far, after the publication of The Two Towers, to pen an essay on the subject titled “The Dethronement of Power.” Here, Lewis explains the prolix quality of Tolkien’s prose — that which critics called “tedious” — as a narrative necessity: “I do not think he could have done it any other way.”

Tolkien’s biggest fan also urged readers to spend more time with the books and promised that the rewards would be great. In defense of the second work of the trilogy, he concluded, “the book is too original and too opulent for any final judgment on a first reading. But we know at once that it has done things to us. We are not quite the same men. And though we must ration ourselves in our rereadings, I have little doubt that the book will soon take its place among the indispensables.” And so has all of Tolkien’s work, becoming the literary standard by which high fantasy is measured, with or without a Nobel prize.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2021.

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