Open Culture
Reviews
- The Mundaneum A search engine with a postal interface, fifteen million cards deep
- Ransom Center Movie Posters Five thousand sheets that actually hung in Texas lobbies, free to download at printing size
- Tironian Notes Cicero's secretary invented shorthand, and Dublin still parks by it
- The Bankes Homer Sixteen columns of Iliad 24, and a second man's handwriting all over them
- Pneumatic Tube Mail Twenty-seven miles of pipe under New York, 600 letters to a canister, 35 miles an hour
- How Buildings Learn Six hours on what happens to a building after the architect leaves
- Ansel Adams' National Parks Murals 226 photographs for a wall that was never built, free to download
- Agloe, New York A town invented as a copyright trap, which then opened for business
- The Archimedes Palimpsest A prayer book written across the only known copies of two lost Archimedes works
- Japanese Anatomical Woodblock Prints Tiny workers run the body like a village, one gate labeled 'urine'
- John Margolies Roadside America Archive 11,710 free photos of the teapot gas stations and doughnut shops America paved over
- The First Herculaneum Scroll, Read A 2,000-year-old scroll read in full without ever being opened
- The 1911 Odyssey The earliest feature-length Odyssey on film — a restored 1911 Italian silent, free to watch
Finds
- Milton Glaser's Ten Rules for Work and Life Including an almost infallible test for whether a person is good for you
- The EuChemS Periodic Table of Endangered Elements All 90 natural elements recolored by how soon we might run out
- Splendor Solis Twenty-two gilded plates arguing that alchemy is a philosophy
- Edison's Frankenstein (1910) The first Frankenstein film, with an apology attached
- The Mundaneum The world’s knowledge, on millions of index cards
- The NASA Art Program Warhol, Rockwell and Leibovitz on the government payroll
- Ransom Center Movie Posters 5,000 posters from the company that owned nearly every cinema in Texas
- Rijksstudio 840,000 works from the Rijksmuseum, free to download and free to cut up
- Tironian Notes Cicero's secretary invented shorthand, and one of his symbols is still in Unicode
- How Ancient Greek Warships Worked A 3D animation that finally makes three tiers of oars make sense
- Mark Twain's "From The 'London Times' in 1904" An 1898 short story in which a condemned man is saved by a video call
- The Bankes Homer A 2nd-century Iliad papyrus, now readable at full resolution
- Pneumatic Tube Mail Sixty years of American post travelling underground at 35 mph
- How Buildings Learn Stewart Brand's six-part series, scored by Brian Eno, free to watch
- Ansel Adams' National Parks Murals 226 photographs for a mural the war cancelled, free at full size
- 'Money', Performed With Actual Money The tape loop that opens the song, played live at Abbey Road
- The Earliest Known Polyphonic Music Two melodies at once, written down around 900 AD
- Oskar Sala's Mixtur-Trautonium Every bird in Hitchcock's The Birds is an electronic instrument
- The Catalogue of Ships Book II of the Iliad, plotted on the real Aegean
- Comicbooks.com Reading Room 20,000 restored golden-age comics, sorted by genre, free
- The Evolution of Manhattan, 1600–2026 Four centuries of an island in a few minutes
- Agloe, New York A town invented as a copyright trap, which then opened for business
- The Archimedes Palimpsest A prayer book written across the only known copies of two lost Archimedes works
- The Odyssey Sung in Ancient Greek Homer with the pitch accent put back
- Japanese Anatomical Woodblock Prints Tiny workers run the body like a village, one gate labeled 'urine'
- The Last Museum A semantic search engine for 5.8 million artworks, browsable by theme instead of keyword
- Biblioteca Umberto Eco Umberto Eco's 32,000-book personal library, opened exactly as he left it
- Michel Foucault's Lectures Decades of Foucault's own recorded lectures, gathered in one place
- John Margolies Roadside America Archive 11,700 free photos of teapot gas stations and doughnut-shaped shops
- Naturalist's Library Wildlife Illustrations 1,300+ restored hand-colored plates from a Victorian-era natural history series
- The First Herculaneum Scroll, Read A 2,000-year-old scroll read in full without ever being opened
- The Syntopicon Mortimer Adler's hand-built index to the Great Ideas
- Amenemopet's Painter's Palette A 3,000-year-old painter's palette still holding its pigments
- The 1911 Odyssey The first film adaptation of Homer's epic — a surviving Italian silent, free to watch
- Amenemopet's 3,000-year-old painter's palette A scribe's palette at the Met, still smudged with its original pigments
- The Hopper painting behind the Psycho house Norman Bates's mansion was lifted from a 1925 Edward Hopper canvas
- Nashville's Parthenon A full-scale Parthenon — gilded 42-foot Athena and all — in Tennessee
- Leonardo da Vinci's Reunited Notebooks Manuscripts split for 400 years, now browsable together online
- Jerry Gretzinger's Imaginary Land Map One man's hand-drawn map of a fictional country, in progress since 1963
- The 52-Year Simmering Noodle Soup A Bangkok beef noodle broth that has never stopped cooking since 1974
- Julius Sumner Miller: Why Is It So? Complete 1962–73 physics demo show archived by ABC Australia
- The Map of Physics Animated overview of every physics field and the gaps between them
- A Tour of Athens' Acropolis with 3D Reconstructions Manuel Bravo's video walks the Acropolis as it stood in 432 BC
- A Random Walk Around the Berlin Wall, Summer 1989 Restored amateur footage from months before the Wall's collapse
- M.I.T.'s 1973 Civilization Collapse Model Jay Forrester's 'Limits to Growth' simulation said civilization ends around 2040
- Robert Johnson's "Come On In My Kitchen" Restored Nick Dellow's digitization of rare 1936-37 Robert Johnson test pressings
- The Math Behind Van Gogh's Starry Night TED-Ed video explaining how the painting captures real fluid-dynamics turbulence
- WKRP in Cincinnati Becomes a Real Station The fictional 1978 sitcom call letters are finally on the air
- Buckminster Fuller — Animated Population Growth, 1965 Fuller's silent Dymaxion-projection visualisation of human population from 1000 BCE to 1965
- Why 3,000-year-old Egyptian honey is still edible Low water, low pH, antimicrobial peroxide — honey is its own preservative
- The Dot and the Line Chuck Jones' 1965 Oscar-winning ten-minute fable about geometry and self-improvement
- And Vinyly A UK service that presses your cremated remains into a playable vinyl record
- Why Some Homes Feel Good (and Most Don't) Two interior-design principles you can apply tonight