Open Culture » Life

John Waters’ rollicking commencement speech at The Rhode Island School of Design offered up some good one-liners and a few pearls of wisdom, though phrased, quite naturally, in an irreverent w...

https://www.openculture.com/2024/09/john-waters-risd-graduation-speech-real-wealth-is-life-without-aholes.html

Sometimes it can seem as though the more we think we know a historical figure, the less we actually do. Helen Keller? We’ve all seen (or think we’ve seen) some version of The Miracle Worker, ...

https://www.openculture.com/2024/08/mark-twain-and-helen-kellers-special-friendship.html

There may be as many doors into Alcoholics Anonymous in the 21st century as there are people who walk through them—from every world religion to no religion. The “international mutual-aid fel...

https://www.openculture.com/2024/06/carl-jung-inspired-the-creation-of-alcoholics-anonymous.html

Image by Sage Ross, via Wikimedia Commons The beautiful bonsai tree pictured above–let’s call it the Yamaki Pine Bonsai–began its journey through the world back in 1625. That’s when the Y...

https://www.openculture.com/2024/05/this-392-year-old-bonsai-tree-survived-the-hiroshima-atomic-blast.html

“The more things change, the more they stay the same.” –Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr (1808–90) When Emir O. Filipovic, a medievalist at the University of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, ...

https://www.openculture.com/2024/05/medieval-cats-behaving-badly-kitties-that-left-paw-prints-and-peed-on-15th-century-manuscripts.html

This weekend, Jerry Seinfeld gave the commencement speech at Duke University and offered the graduates his three keys to life: 1. bust your ass, 2. pay attention, and 3. fall in love. Then, 10 mi...

https://www.openculture.com/2024/05/jerry-seinfeld-delivers-commencement-address-at-duke-university-you-will-need-humor-to-get-through-the-human-experience.html

Aldous Huxley put himself forever on the intellectual map when he wrote the dystopian sci-fi novel Brave New World in 1931. (Listen to Huxley narrating a dramatized version here.) The British-bo...

https://www.openculture.com/2024/04/aldous-huxley-dying-of-cancer-left-this-world-tripping-on-lsd-1963.html

“To me, Lou stood out. The real deal! Something important to American music and to ALL MUSIC! I miss him and his dog.” — Keith Richards On what would have been Lou Reed’s 82nd birthday (M...

https://www.openculture.com/2024/03/keith-richards-performs-im-waiting-for-the-man-a-new-tribute-to-lou-reed.html

Atomic physicist Niels Bohr is famously quoted as saying, “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.” Yet despite years of getting things wrong, magazines love thin...

https://www.openculture.com/2024/02/how-french-artists-in-1899-envisioned-what-life-would-look-like-in-the-year-2000.html

It’s difficult to imagine Iman and David Bowie inviting Vogue readers to join them on the above virtual tour of their mountaintop home near Woodstock, New York when the rock legend was alive. G...

https://www.openculture.com/2024/02/a-look-inside-david-bowie-imans-beautiful-mountain-home.html

From Letters Live comes a letter read by Gillian Anderson. They preface it with this: “In 1932, Cuban diarist Anaïs Nin and American novelist Henry Miller began an incredibly intense love affa...

https://www.openculture.com/2024/02/gillian-anderson-reads-anais-nins-passionate-letter-about-sex-and-poetry.html

From the Triton Fountain in the Piazza Barberini to the Fountain of the Four Rivers in Piazza Navona, sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s glorious public fountains have impressed visitors to Rome f...

https://www.openculture.com/2024/01/the-cardboard-bernini.html

Imagine, if you will, an evening’s entertainment consisting of an episode of Portlandia, a spin of Nirvana’s In Utero, and a screening of Koyaanisqatsi. Perhaps these works would, at first gl...

https://www.openculture.com/2024/01/music-producer-steve-albini-director-godfrey-reggio-actor-fred-armisen-explain-why-creating-is-crucial-to-human-existence.html

In 1966, Paul McCartney famously sang of “all the lonely people,” wondering aloud where they come from. Nearly six decades later, their numbers seem only to have increased; as for their origi...

https://www.openculture.com/2024/01/how-loneliness-is-killing-us-a-primer-from-harvard-psychiatrist-zen-priest-robert-waldinger.html

Six months before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to students at Barratt Junior High School in Philadelphia, and asked What Is Your Life’s Blueprint? Addressing the students, he...

https://www.openculture.com/2024/01/martin-luther-king-jr-gives-life-changing-advice-to-teens-watch-his-speech-what-is-your-lifes-blueprint-1967.html