One occasionally hears it said that, thanks to the internet, all the books truly worth reading are free: Shakespeare, Don Quixote, the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, the Divine Comedy, the Bible. Ca...
It doesn’t take an expert in the field to know that, around the world, there is much disagreement on the subject of religion. But as explained in the UsefulCharts video above by Matt Baker, w...
Go to Japan today, and the country will present you with plenty of opportunities to buy pan, tabako, and tempura. These products themselves — bread, cigarettes, and deep-fried seafood or vege...
The Middle East is hardly the world’s most harmonious region, and it only gets more fractious if you add in South Asia and the Mediterranean. But there’s one thing on which many residents of ...
Robert Waldinger works as a part-time professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, but he also describes himself as a “Zen master.” This may strike some listeners as a presumptuous clai...
In the nineteen-sixties, the music media encouraged the notion that a young rock-and-roll fan had to side with either the Beatles or their rivals, the Rolling Stones. On some level, it must have ...
We now live, as one often hears, in an age of few musical superstars, but towering ones. The popular culture of the twenty-twenties can, at times, seem to be contained entirely within the person ...
For many, even most of us moderns, the central religious choice is a simple one: adhere to the belief system in which you grew up, or stop adhering to it. But if you survey the variety of religio...
https://www.openculture.com/2024/03/180000-years-of-religion-charted-on-a-histomap-in-1943.html
In less than a year and a half, the centenary of Antoni Gaudí’s death will be here. Faced with this fact, especially dedicated enthusiasts of Catalan architecture may already be planning their...
https://www.openculture.com/2024/03/an-architectural-tour-of-sagrada-familia.html
History remembers Henry Dunant (1828–1910) for two things–being the co-founder of the Red Cross movement and winning the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901. Less well known is his diagram of th...
In the Buddhist Asia of a dozen centuries ago, the equivalent of going off to study at an Ivy League school was going off to study at Nalanda. It was founded in the year 427 in what’s now the I...
https://www.openculture.com/2024/02/discover-the-worlds-oldest-university.html
Even among non-neuroscientists, determining the origin and purpose of consciousness is widely known as “the hard problem.” Since its coinage by philosopher David Chalmers thirty years ago, th...
Jesus Christ: as soon as you hear those words, assuming they’re not being used exclamatorily, you see a face. In almost all cases, that face is bearded and framed by long brown hair. Usually it...
“For most of the last two thousand years, the Bible has been virtually the only history book used in Western civilization,” writes Isaac Asimov in his Guide to the Bible. “Even today, it re...
To anyone unfamiliar with the history of Islam, it comes as something of a shock that it got started less than a millennium and a half ago. In that relatively short span of time, Islam has become...
https://www.openculture.com/2023/08/the-birth-and-rapid-rise-of-islam-animated-622-1453.html