Open Culture

The ill-fated romance of Abelard and Héloïse may be a permanent cultural fixture, but it’s worth asking what any of us understand about Abelard or Héloïse themselves. Before the two ever crossed paths,

From Newton’s mechanical calculations to Einstein’s general and special relativity to the baffling indeterminacy of quantum mechanics, the discipline of physics has become increasingly arcane and complex, and less and less governed b...

If you had to pick a single figure to represent the concept of the film auteur, you could do much worse than Stanley Kubrick. That’s not to call him the greatest director who ever lived, nor even to call his body of work the greatest...

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to travel back in time and look over the shoulder of one of the early 20th century’s greatest artists to watch him work? In this brief film from 1926, we get to see the Russian painter

The term apocryphal may sound antiquated, but any reasonably serious reader encounters it fairly often, even in recently published texts. In the modern usage, it usually describes words or events that, despite probably never...