Open Culture

Why Mapmakers Put Fake Towns on Their Maps in the 1920s — and the One That Became Real

Colin Marshall — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 08:00:45 +0000

Open Culture readers may know John Green best for Crash Course, the YouTube channel that teaches everything you need to know about subjects like world history, U.S. history, big history, literature, and philosophy. Or at least it teaches everything a teenage student facing down the prospect of Advanced Placement subject exams needs to know. Such viewers have always had a decent chance of knowing Green as the author of novels for young readers like Looking for Alaska, The Fault in Our Stars, and Paper Towns. That last takes its title from just the kind of historical phenomenon that would in any case have fascinated Green, in his capacity as a vlogger, enough to inspire a video: the wholly fictional settlements created by mapmakers in order to expose cartographic plagiarists.

Green discusses one such paper town in the episode of Vlogbrothers, the long-running channel Green runs with his brother Hank, at the top of the post. Agloe, New York, an upstate hamlet in Colchester, Delaware County, was fabricated in the nineteen-twenties by cartographer Otto G. Lindberg and his assistant Ernest Alpers, who’d been commissioned to make maps for the gas-station chain Esso.

Mapmakers (like Lindberg and Alpers) have guarded against plagiarism by inserting “paper towns” — invented streets, landmarks, or other features — into their maps. The logic is simple: two cartographers might easily draw the same real town, but two cartographers can’t independently dream up the same fake one. So if a rival’s map contains the same invented place, it all but proves they copied the map.

Though intended as nothing more than a “copyright trap,” the name of the dot in the road, Agloe, soon manifested in the real world. A business named Agloe Lodge Farms appeared in 1930, and it went on to apply the name to a local fishing lodge it acquired. Thus was Agloe, New York brought into existence, at least in the eyes of the law: by the time they were challenged about its inclusion on their own maps, Rand McNally could cite official county records in their defense.

In other words, “a made-up name for a made-up place inadvertently created a real place that, for a time, really existed,” writes NPR’s Robert Krulwich. “Rand McNally, one presumes, was found not guilty. Then the store closed. It isn’t there anymore. Decades passed.” At the time Krulwich was writing, in 2014, an internet search for Agloe, New York would still return a point where Lindberg and Alpers had originally placed it on their map the better part of a century earlier. “But then, just as this story was to be published, to be extra sure, we went to Google Earth, typed in ‘Agloe’ one last time, and, whaddya know? It isn’t there any more!” Adolescent readers imagining themselves running away in the manner of Margo Spiegelman will have to seek out another faraway paper town to dream about — or, more likely these days, a pixel town.

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John Green’s Crash Course in U.S. History: From Colonialism to Obama in 47 Videos

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.

A Guide to Every Major Film Adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey Before Christopher Nolan’s Movie

Colin Marshall — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 09:00:22 +0000

If you plan on shooting your own adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, bear in mind how much rests on your choice of leading man. In order to play Odysseus, an actor must summon a real gravitas, but also a still-smoldering vitality: here is a man who led the Greek army to defeat Troy, but still has the doggedness to make the decade-long journey back home to his wife. In the mid-nineteen-fifties, Hollywood had just the chin for the job: Kirk Douglas, who plays Odysseus under his Latin name in the eponymous Ulysses. Though merciless in its excisions to Homer’s text, as explained in the Underrated Cinema video above, it still has more or less everything you’d want in a fantastical Technicolor spectacle — and one shot by The Wizard of Oz veteran Harold Rosson at that.

Those in search of a viewing experience more adherent to the original story should consider L’Odissea: not the Italian silent film from 1911 recently featured here on Open Culture, but the 1968 Italian miniseries directed by Franco Rossi, who would go on to be better known for Quo Vadis? Though no Odyssey adaptation fits everything in, this one gets just about as complete as a classics fan could hope for in its 446-minute runtime.

As Odysseus, the Yugoslav heartthrob Bekim Fehmiu (for a brief moment thereafter, cinema’s next global star) may or may not be to your taste. More acclaimed is Armand Assante, portrayer of figures from John Gotti to Mickey Spillane to Nietzsche, in NBC’s Odyssey miniseries from 1997, which also features the likes of Isabella Rossellini, Bernadette Peters, Christopher Lee, and Vanessa Williams.

Though star-studded, shot in the real Mediterranean, and directed by onetime Tarkovsky collaborator Andrei Konchalovsky, the Odyssey of the nineties isn’t much referenced today, perhaps due to its dated visual effects. Viewers will never have any such objection to Uberto Pasolini’s The Return, not because it only came out the year before last, but because it has practically no visual effects in the first place. Focusing only on the latter half of the Odyssey, the film dramatizes the reunion of Odysseus and his wife: a very human story, especially in that it contains no monsters. Different adaptations have cut out the sirens, say, or Scylla and Charybdis, though it’s a rare production bold enough not to put everything it has into the cyclops scene. But you can get an actor like Ralph Fiennes to play Odysseus — and for that matter, Juliette Binoche to play Penelope — there’s little need for a creature feature.

Hear What Homer’s Odyssey Sounded Like When Sung in the Original Ancient Greek

A Walk Through Homer’s Odyssey: A Guide to the Epic Before Seeing Christopher Nolan’s Film

Christopher Hitchens Explains Why Homer’s Odyssey Still Matters to Our World (2000)

The Origins of the Monsters in Homer’s Odyssey: The Cyclops, Sirens, Scylla & More

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The Visionary Mystical Art of Carl Jung: See Illustrated Pages from The Red Book

OC — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 08:00:02 +0000

Carl Jung’s Liber Novus, better known as The Red Book, has come to light in a complete English translation, published by Norton in a 2009 facsimile edition and a smaller “reader’s edition” in 2012. The years since have seen several exhibitions of the book, which “could pass for a Bible rendered by a medieval monk,” writes art critic Peter Frank, “especially for the care with which Jung entered his writing as ornate Gothic script.”

Jung “refused to think of himself as an ‘artist’” but “it’s no accident the Liber Novus has been exhibited in museums, or functioned as the nucleus of ‘Encyclopedic Palace,’ the survey of visionary art in the 2013 Venice Biennale.” Jung’s elaborate paintings show him “every bit the artist the medieval monk or Persian courtier was; his art happened to be dedicated not to the glory of God or king, but that of the human race.”

One could more accurately say that Jung’s book was dedicated to the mystical unconscious, a much more nebulous and oceanic category. The “oceanic feeling”—a phrase coined in 1927 by French playwright Romain Rolland to describe mystical oneness—so annoyed Sigmund Freud that he dismissed it as infantile regression.

Freud’s antipathy to mysticism, as we know, did not dissuade Jung, his onetime student and admirer, from diving in and swimming to the deepest depths. The voyage began long before he met his famous mentor. At age 11, Jung later wrote in 1959, “I found that I had been in a mist, not knowing how to differentiate myself from things; I was just one among many things.”

Jung considered his elaborate dream/vision journal—kept from 1913 to 1930, then added to sporadically until 1961—“the central work in his oeuvre,” says Jung scholar Sonu Shamdasani in the Rubin Museum introduction above. “It is literally his most important work.”

And yet it took Dr. Shamdasani “three years to convince Jung’s family to bring the book out of hiding,” notes NPR. “It took another 13 years to translate it.” Part of the reason his heirs left the book hidden in a Swiss vault for half a century may be evident in the only portion of the Red Book to appear in Jung’s lifetime, “The Seven Sermons of the Dead.”

Jung had this text privately printed in 1916 and gave copies to select friends and family members. He composed it in 1913 in a period of Gnostic studies, during which he entered into visionary trance states, transcribing his visions in notebooks called the “Black Books,” which would later be rewritten in The Red Book.

You can see a page of Jung’s meticulously hand-lettered manuscript above. The “Sermons,” he wrote in a later interpretation, came to him during an actual haunting:

The atmosphere was thick, believe me! Then I knew that something had to happen. The whole house was filled as if there were a crowd present, crammed full of spirits. They were packed deep right up to the door, and the air was so thick it was scarcely possible to breathe. As for myself, I was all a‑quiver with the question: “For God’s sake, what in the world is this?” Then they cried out in chorus, “We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not what we sought/’ That is the beginning of the Septem Sermones.

The strange, short “sermons” are difficult to categorize. They are awash in Gnostic theology and occult terms like “pleroma.” The great mystical oneness of oceanic feeling also took on a very sinister aspect in the demigod Abraxas, who “begetteth truth and lying, good and evil, light and darkness, in the same word and in the same act. Wherefore is Abraxas terrible.”

There are tedious, didactic passages, for converts only, but much of Jung’s writing in the “Seven Sermons,” and throughout The Red Book, is filled with strange obscure poetry, complemented by his intense illustrations. Jung “took on the similarly stylized and beautiful manners of non-western word-image conflation,” writes Frank, “including Persian miniature painting and east Asian calligraphy.”

If The Red Book is, as Shamdasani claims, Jung’s most important work—and Jung himself, though he kept it quiet, seemed to think it was—then we may in time come to think of him not only as an inspirer of eccentric artists, but as an eccentric artist himself, on par with the great illuminators and visionary mystic poet/painters.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2020.

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

How a 13th-Century Monk Created a Prayer Manuscript by Writing Over—and Accidentally Preserving—Archimedes’ Groundbreaking Mathematical Works

Colin Marshall — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 09:04:29 +0000

In Jerusalem of the year 1229, there lived a Greek Orthodox monk named Johannes Myronas. Needing some parchment for a prayer book, he grabbed some already-used pages, erased their existing content, and over them wrote down “prayers for the dead, prayers for repentance, blessings for the loaves at Easter, and even a prayer for those who were unreasonably excluded,” says math-and-science YouTuber Ben Syversen in the video above. Myronas may have fulfilled his religious duty without using too much valuable parchment, but he couldn’t have known the even greater relevance his actions would turn out to have had in the realm of mathematics. For the pages he’d scrubbed were a Greek compilation containing the only known copy of certain works by the ancient polymath Archimedes.

As it turns out, Myronas committed perhaps the most notable act of inadvertent preservation in the history of mathematics. We get the word palimpsest from the medieval practice of overwriting a page after first erasing what had been on it before, though incompletely; hence the meaning of multiple layers that have remained legible over time.

In the case of what we now know as the Archimedes Palimpsest, that legibility was achieved only with the aid of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century technology, in addition to the painstaking conservation effort required to keep this tenth-century document in more or less one piece. (And all of that was only possible thanks to the epic historical journey the Palimpsest took, which ended in 1998 when it sold for $2 million at Christie’s to a tech figure we’re only assured is not Bill Gates.)

You can learn more about that project from the TED Talk just above by its director, the late William Noel of Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum. Thanks to his dedication and that of his team, we now have writings of Archimedes like the Stomachion, which deals with a kind of children’s puzzle that turns out to have considerable similarities with an early problem in the field of combinatorics, and more importantly, The Method of Mechanical Theorems, an explanation of calculus-like procedures for determining area or volume. None of this proves that Archimedes was the inventor of combinatorics or calculus, exactly, but it does show us just how much further he’d managed to push Greek mathematics than we’d previously known. Besides, any work that can bring together historians, classicists, mathematicians, conservators, physicists, and computer scientists more than two millennia after its composition surely merits a place in the canon.

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Hear What Homer’s Odyssey Sounded Like When Sung in the Original Ancient Greek

OC — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Image via Wikimedia Commons

It’s been a humanist truism for some time to say that Shakespeare speaks to every age, transcending his time and place through the sheer force of his universal genius. But any honest student first encountering the plays will tell you differently, as will many a seasoned scholar who works hard to place the writer and his work in historical context. Even onetime director of London’s National Theatre, Nicholas Hytner, once said, “I’ll admit that I hardly ever go to a performance of one of Shakespeare’s plays without experiencing blind panic during the first five minutes. I sit there thinking… I have no idea what these people are talking about.”

Of course, none of that means we can’t learn to appreciate Shakespeare, and we do not need a graduate-level education to do so. But much of his archaic language and obscure references will always sound foreign to modern ears. How much more so, then, the language of the ancient Greeks, whether in translation or not? Although we’ve also been taught to think of the Homeric epics as containers of universal truth and beauty, the world of Homer was, in many ways, an alien one—and the literature of ancient Greece was far closer to song than even Shakespeare’s musical speeches.

In fact, “before writing was generally known among the Greeks,” the University of Cincinnati notes, “poets recited and sang stories for audiences at the courts of city leaders and at festivals. A poet could actually improvise a tale in the six-beat rhythm of Greek verse if he knew the plot of his story.” We do not know whether Homer was one enterprising scribe or “a group of poets whose works on the theme of Troy were collected” under one name. But in either case, that poet or poets heard the tales of Hector and Achilles, Odysseus and Penelope, and all those meddling gods sung before they wrote them down. Now, thanks to Georg Danek of the University of Vienna and Stefan Hagel of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, we have some idea of what those songs may have sounded like.

“In the course of the last years,” write Danek and Hagel, “we have developed a technique of singing the Homeric epics, which is appropriate for the primarily oral tradition from which these poems emerge.” The two scholars caution that their theoretical recreations are “not to be understood as the exact reconstruction of a given melody, but as an approach to the technique the Homeric singers used to accommodate melodic principles to the demands of the individual verse.” Accompanied by a four-stringed lyre-like instrument called a phorminx, “the Homeric bard” would improvise the “melody at the same time as he improvised his text, which was unique in every performance.” In the audio above, you can hear Danek and Hagel’s melodic recreation of lines 267–366 of book 8 of the Odyssey, in which Demodocus sings about the love of Ares and Aphrodite.

At their site, the two scholars present an abstract of their Homeric singing theory, with musicological and linguistic evidence for the recreation. Their technical criteria will confuse the non-specialist, and none but ancient Greek speakers will understand the recording above. But it brings us a little closer to experiencing Homer’s epic poetry, “the foundation stones of European Literature,” as the ancient Greeks might have experienced it.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

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

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

What Miles Davis Taught Herbie Hancock: In Music, as in Life, There Are No Mistakes, Just Chances to Improvise

OC — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 09:00:08 +0000

One of my favorite Brian Eno quotes, or rather one that became an Oblique Strategy, is “Honor Your Mistake as a Hidden Intention.” (Or to be pedantic, the original version was “Honor Thy Error…”).

As a teenager growing up and trying to make art (at that time music and comics) there was no advice more freeing. It was the opposite of what I thought I knew: mistakes were shameful, the sign of an amateur or of the lack of practice. But the more art I made, the more I referenced Eno’s idea, and the more I read and listened, the more I realized it wasn’t just Eno.

The Beatles left in an alarm clock meant for the musicians on “A Day in the Life” and the sound of empty booze bottles vibrating on a speaker was left in at the end of “Long Long Long” (along with tons more). The Beastie Boys left in a jumping needle intended for a smooth scratch on “The Sounds of Science.” Radiohead left in Jonny Greenwood’s warm-up chord that became essential to “Creep.” (There’s a whole Reddit thread devoted to these mistakes if you choose to go down the rabbit hole.)

But those examples relate to the recording process of rock music. What about jazz? Surely there are “wrong” notes when it comes to playing, especially if you’re not the soloist.

In this very short video based around an interview with pianist Herbie Hancock, the master improviser Miles Davis honored Hancock’s mistake as a hidden intention by playing along with it. It’s both a surprising look into the arcane world of jazz improvisation and a revealing anecdote of Davis, usually known as a difficult collaborator.

“It taught me a very big lesson not only about music,” says Hancock, “but about life.”

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

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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts.

Christopher Hitchens Explains Why Homer’s Odyssey Still Matters to Our World (2000)

Colin Marshall — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 08:00:42 +0000

At the moment, the answer to the question of why we should read Homer’s Odyssey seems rather straightforward: so we can more intelligently voice our opinions on Christopher Nolan’s new blockbuster film adaptation. A quarter-century ago, the matter was somewhat less clear. Still, an occasion had presented itself in the form of a new English translation, by University of Kansas classics professor Stanley Lombardo. That book, and the work of Homer in general, was the subject of a live two-hour roundtable discussion aired on C‑SPAN’s Book TV in the fall of 2000, which, with the Odyssey back in the zeitgeist, appeared on YouTube just days ago.

Apart from Lombardo himself, the participants include Joseph Bottum, then literary editor of the Weekly Standard; journalist and military veteran Debra J. Dickerson; and Christopher Hitchens, who clearly participated not just because he happened to be living in Washington, D.C., but also out of a genuine appreciation for the Odyssey and an understanding of its relevance in the modern world. Early on in the text, he explains, Homer introduces the concepts of hubris and nemesis, which “we cannot do without in ordinary discourse. There are certain punishments that appear to fall on people, for original arrogance or conceit, that we can’t conceive of relating grand stories without.”

There’s the “caprice of the gods,” with which every religion has had to deal, as well as the even more universal feeling of nostalgia, “a very overused and sentimentalized term now, which literally means — and can only really mean — the yearning to go home.” Adducing such re-interpretations by writers from Alexander Pope to James Joyce, Hitchens declares that we think of the Odyssey as “the original narrative of the striving of humanity — and of the need, also, to beware of what you want, in case you ever do, as Cavafy says, finally get home to Ithaca. It may turn out that it’s better to travel hopefully than to arrive.”

The matter of virtue also arises in the conversation, and specifically whether the range of virtues of which Homer sang (up to and including luck) would be recognized in our Christian or post-Christian world. To the avowedly atheist Hitchens’ mind, of course, we should already have been post-religious. Homer’s deities are “anthropomorphic gods; they are invented by us, as all gods are.” But whatever your religion or lack thereof, “if you don’t know something about classical Greece, then you won’t be able, with much profit, to read Shakespeare, or Milton, or Shelley, or Keats, or even Chaucer. It would be like not knowing what the bible story was and then wondering how you puzzle your way through Shakespeare as well. It’s part of the underlay; it’s part of the common heritage.” The translations and re-interpretations have kept coming, but Homer himself still patiently awaits each of us.

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Christopher Nolan Picks 15 Favorite Films from the Criterion Closet

Colin Marshall — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 09:00:51 +0000

Maybe you’ve already seen Christopher Nolan’s new cinematic interpretation of the Odyssey more than once; maybe you don’t know whether you’ll ever get around to it at all. Either way, you’ve got to admit that the man makes films in a way very few living directors do. His combination of blockbuster-scale spectacle and personal vision, a rare experience indeed at the theater these days, can really only be achieved by filmmakers with a thoroughgoing love of the medium. Most of us will require no further proof of that love than this new video capturing his visit to the Criterion Closet, that both hallowed and much-YouTubed space jam-packed with releases from the most widely known home-video brand for cinephiles.

Unsurprisingly, it’s not his first visit. “Last time I was here, there were no cameras, and I got to just come and steal some films,” he says, “but now I’m singing for my supper.” Unlike some filmmakers, he doesn’t play it cool for the audience; rather, he immediately starts pulling down Don Siegel’s neo-noir Hemingway adaptation The Killers, a five-picture John Cassavetes box set, and Al Reinert’s Brian Eno-scored NASA documentary For All Mankind. It’s not a surprise to see him go for an Orson Welles movie, but the one that first catches his eye is Mr. Arkadin, which Welles “made all over the world in the scrappiest, most sort of homemade, put-his-friends-together, grab-some-costumes, find-an-interesting-location kind of way.”

Fritz Lang’s The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, he recalls, provided him and his brother-collaborator inspiration for the Joker as famously portrayed by Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight. The complete Apu trilogy by Satyajit Ray reminds him that, however great an impact the first of those films made on him, he never did watch the other two. For many moviegoers in the English-speaking world of the mid-twentieth century, Ray’s work was some of the first “world cinema” they’d ever seen; Nolan’s fellow cinephile-auteur Martin Scorsese has done his part to bolster that tradition with his World Cinema Project series, and Nolan pulls off the shelf one of its volumes featuring pictures from Cuba, Indonesia, Iran, and elsewhere.

Though technically British, Nolan is the partially Chicago-raised son of an American mother long since accepted as a kind of Hollywood native. His taste in movies, too, reflects a streak of high Americanism, which manifests in selections like Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, David Lynch’s Lost Highway, Carl Franklin’s One False Move, and Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. (As for Robert Altman’s satirical thriller The Player, it would be hard to imagine how he couldn’t appreciate its wickedly incisive depiction of “the Industry.”) Coming to the end of his Closet time, he also manages to grab Godfrey Reggio’s Qatsi trilogy, which constitutes “one of the great pieces of pure cinema,” and Carroll Ballard’s The Black Stallion, a childhood favorite that stayed with him. Like all the most successful filmmakers, Nolan understands that you’ve got to end strong, and in a way that doesn’t require explanation: hence, perhaps, his final choice of Citizen Kane.

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The Essence of Hayao Miyazaki Films: A Short Documentary About the Humanity at the Heart of His Animation

OC — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 08:00:19 +0000

Filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki detests being referred to as the Japanese Walt Disney. The great animator and storyteller admires the gorgeous animation of classic Disney films, but finds them lacking in emotional complexity, the element he prizes above all else.

Miyazaki’s films are celebrated for their mystical, supernatural elements, but they take shape around the human characters inhabiting them. Plot comes later, after he has figured out the desires driving his people. “Keep it simple,” he counsels in Lewis Bond’s short documentary The Essence of Humanity above. An interesting piece of advice, given that a hallmark of his 60-year career is his insistence on creating realistic three-dimensional characters, warts and all.

American animators are also taught to simplify. They should all be able to sum up the essence of their proposed features by filling in the blank of the phrase “I want _____,” presumably because such concision is a necessary element of a successful elevator pitch.

As Bond points out, Western animated features often end with a convenient deus ex machina, freeing the characters up for a crowd-pleasing dance party as the credits roll.

Miyazaki doesn’t cotton to the idea of tidy, unearned endings, nor does he feel bound to grant his characters their wants, preferring instead to give them what they need. Spiritual growth is superior to wish fulfillment here.

Such growth rarely happens without time for reflection, and Miyazaki films are notable for the number of non-verbal scenes wherein characters perform small, everyday actions, a number of which can be sampled in Bond’s documentary. The beautifully rendered weather and settings have provided clues as to the characters’ development, ever since the lovely scene of cloud shadows skimming across a field in his first feature, 1979’s The Castle of Cagliostro.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

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

Where Did Europe’s Countries—and the United Kingdom—Get Their Names?

Colin Marshall — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 08:05:18 +0000

The typical student traveling on a Eurail pass will stop in such lands as Österreich, Italia, Česko and Schweiz — also known as Suisse, Svizzera, and Svizra. If that student happens to hail from the English-speaking world, the names Austria, Italy, the Czech Republic (the recent movement for Czechia notwithstanding), and Switzerland will sound more familiar. But the question inevitably comes to mind while riding between one historically and culturally rich capital to another: where did all these countries get their names in English? How on Earth, for example, did Deutschland, known in certain other European languages as Allemagne, Alemania, or Alemanha, get to be called Germany?

Language YouTuber RobWords has an explanation. “To the Romans, it was the land of the Germani, their name for the weird people speaking gibberish languages to the east of the River Rhine,” he says in the video above, standing in a forest conveniently located in Germany itself.

They “also used the word alemanni to describe a confederation of Germanic people, and that’s where a load of other languages get their word for Germany too.” And the meaning of Deutschland? “Land of the Dutch,” that last actually being the descendant of an old Germanic word meaning ‘popular’ or ‘people’ ” — which, before that time, referred not simply to human beings, but the population who spoke the region’s widely understood “popular languages.”

Behind most every European country’s English name lies a story, if sometimes an ambiguous, contested, and controversial one. Most are also historically illuminating: take Belgium, once considered part of the Netherlands (home of the people we now call Dutch), whose name derives from a tribe, or confederation of tribes, known in Latin as the Belgae: a word “adopted by people living in the southern Low Countries during the region’s struggle for independence from Spain in the sixteenth century.” RobWords has more such surprising facts to reveal in the video just above, in which he breaks down the names of all the countries in the United Kingdom, covering Ireland, Scotland, Wales, his native England, and also the word Britain itself, as well as the Great often attached to it. The latter isn’t a boast, he stresses, but rather a means of distinguishing the island from part of France. As for which part, you’ll have to watch to find out.

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19th Century Japanese Woodblock Prints Creatively Illustrate the Inner Workings of the Human Body

OC — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 08:00:40 +0000

Folks with a passing knowledge of ukiyo‑e, the Japanese woodblock print art form popular in the 17th through 19th centuries, will be familiar with its landscapes, as well as its portraits of courtesans and kabuki actors. But often these prints were educational, as demonstrated by these very odd anatomical prints that promote good health as it relates to our internal workings.

Long before animated monsters warned us about our mucus-filled chests, Japanese artists like Utagawa Kunisada (1786–1865) filled the guts of these men and women with little workers, making sure the human body worked like a functioning village or town.

In the first print, Inshoku Yojo Kagami (“Mirror of the Physiology of Drinking and Eating”), a man dines on fish and drinks sake. Inside, little men scurry about a pool wrapped in intestines, stoke a fire under the heart, all the while a scholar keeps reference materials nearby. Down below lonely figures guard the “urine gate” and the “feces gate,” surely one of the worst jobs in all the body economy.

One of Kunisada’s students created a print for the women, focusing on the reproductive organs, called Boji Yojo Kagami (“Rules of Sexual Life”). Keen-eyed viewers will note that the miniature workers here are all women, so at least there’s some equality at play.

The two prints were meant as instructional, pointing out best health practices, and warning against overindulgence and excess.

Other prints are just as inventive: a back and abdomen covered in children playing familiar games; another featuring popular kabuki actors standing in for various organs. (Now, that is just crying out for a modern remake). The last print shows a pregnant woman whose belly contains Tainai jukkai no zu (Ten Realms within the body), a Buddhist idea that you can read more about here. As for their function inside the womb, that is for others of a higher consciousness to discern.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2019.

A Subway Map of Human Anatomy: All the Systems of Our Body Visualized in the Style of the London Underground

“Man as Industrial Palace,” the 1926 Lithograph Depicting the Human Body as a Modern Factory, Comes to Life in a New Animation

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts.

A Free Online Archive Lets You Explore 5.8 Million Works of Art Spanning 5,000 Years of History

Colin Marshall — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 09:00:56 +0000

Though it’s traditionally meant “last in a progression or series,” as Merriam-Webster puts it, the word ultimate has been more often used in recent decades to mean “the best or most extreme of its kind.” The name of a recently launched digital archive performs a rare inversion, labeling as last a creation marked not by finality but extremity. Billed as “the largest search engine for museum art,” The Last Museum currently indexes around five million artworks, both those in the public domain and those covered by fair use. Whatever sort of art you wish to see, just describe it in the search bar, hit enter, and enjoy the numerous and diverse results from throughout history and all around the world.

“Rather than functioning as a museum itself, the website aggregates publicly available collection records and images from thousands of institutions, allowing visitors to explore everything from Old Master paintings and ancient Egyptian sculpture to Japanese woodblock prints and vintage comics in one place,” writes Sage Helene at My Modern Met.

“Visitors can search by themes, moods, colors, subjects, or descriptive phrases without knowing an artwork’s title or artist. The system identifies related concepts and returns visually and thematically connected works, making it easy to discover unexpected pieces across cultures, time periods, and collections.” Its creators understand that the value of search lies in not just efficiency, but also surprise — not that the user experience is entirely “vibes-based,” as the kids today might say.

Though the search results can come, by default, from any time between 3000 BC and the current year, you can narrow the historical range by dragging the ends of the blue timeline inward. And if you prefer more specific browsing, you can also navigate through its lists of cultures or museums. The former includes everything from French, Roman, and Japanese (with a strong selection of woodblock prints), to Champa, Tajik, and Basque. The latter includes the British Museum, the Rijksmuseum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as the likes of the HNM-PCC Hungarian National Museum, the Turin National University Library, and the Bath Postal Museum: institutions you can never be sure when you’ll visit next. There will, of course, be more museums founded in the future. But if things go according to plan, none of their holdings will escape The Last Museum’s ever-widening digital net. Enter the digital collection here.

via MyModernMet

Public.Work: A Smoothly Searchable Archive of 100,000+ “Copyright-Free” Images

A Search Engine for Finding Free, Public Domain Images from World-Class Museums

The Getty Makes Nearly 88,000 Art Images Free to Use However You Like

Download Great Works of Art from 40+ Museums Worldwide: Explore Artvee, the New Art Search Engine

Creative Commons Officially Launches a Search Engine That Indexes 300+ Million Public Domain Images

How Did Everything Begin?: Animations on the Origins of the Universe Narrated by X‑Files Star Gillian Anderson

OC — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 08:00:13 +0000

We previously brought you the BBC series of short animated videos, A History of Ideas. Produced in collaboration with the UK’s Open University and narrated by Harry Shearer, these fun introductions to such philosophers as Simone de Beauvoir and Edmund Burke, and such weighty philosophical topics as free will and the problem of evil, make challenging, abstract concepts accessible to non-philosophers. Now the series is back with a new chapter, How Did Everything Begin?, a survey of several theories of the origins of the universe, from Thomas Aquinas’ philosophical speculations, to Hindu cosmology; and from theologian William Paley’s design argument (below), to the theory of the Big Bang (above).

The two videos here present an interesting counterpoint between the origin theories of astrophysics and theology. Though current-day intelligent design proponents deny it, there is still much of William Paley’s argument, at least in style, in their explanations of creation. First propounded in his 1802 work Natural Theology, the theologian’s famous watchmaker analogy—which he extended to the design of the eye, and everything else—gave Charles Darwin much to puzzle over, though David Hume had supposedly refuted Paley’s arguments 50 years earlier. The Big Bang theory—a term created by its foremost critic Fred Hoyle—offers an entirely naturalistic account of the universe’s origins, one that presupposes no inherent purpose or design.

As with the previous videos, these are scripted by the host of the Philosophy Bites podcast, Nigel Warburton. This time around the videos are narrated by Gillian Anderson, whose voice you may not immediately recognize. Rather than sounding like Dana Scully, her famous X‑Files character, Anderson speaks in a British accent, which she slips into easily, having lived in the UK for much of her childhood and now again as an adult. (You may have seen Anderson in many of the English period dramas she has appeared in, or in British crime drama The Fall or Michael Winterbottom’s uproarious adaptation of Tristram Shandy.)

These fascinating speculative theories—whether scientific or mythological—are sure to appeal to fans of the X‑Files, who can perhaps begin to believe again, or remain skeptical, thanks to Chris Carter’s R‑rated director’s cut of X‑Files: I Want to Believe, coming out this fall.

Watch the remaining videos in the series below:

Thomas Aquinas and the First Mover Argument

Hindu Creation Stories

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps – Peter Adamson’s Podcast Still Going Strong

Free Online Philosophy Courses

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

Umberto Eco’s Personal Library Opens to the Public: More Than 32,000 Books, Exactly as He Left Them

Colin Marshall — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 16:44:26 +0000

Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose sold so well that its English translator William Weaver could add an extension onto his Tuscan villa, which he called the “Eco Chamber.” The Biblioteca Eco, or Eco Library, whose ribbon-cutting earlier this month you can see in the Italian news clip just above, may not be as wittily named, but it’s a much more ambitious project. It was opened this year, the tenth anniversary of the famed philosopher, semiotician, novelist, and critic’s death, at the University of Bologna, where he was a professor from 1971 to 2007. Housing more than 32,000 books from his personal library in Milan (previously featured here on Open Culture, and the subject of its own feature-length documentary), it stands as an explorable concrete representation of his capacious mind.

So capacious was that mind, in fact, that the Eco Library actually comprises several libraries, chiefly the Rare Book Library and the much-subdivided Working Library. In them, one encounters sections “dedicated to literary genres, comics and popular culture, works by and about Umberto Eco” — including more than 2,000 editions and translations of his own books — “ancient and medieval philosophy, the history of ideas, semiotics, translation and theories of language,” says the University of Bologna’s magazine Unibo.

There are “Italian, French, English-language, German, Central European, Slavic, Latin American and many other literatures,” including works of “detective fiction and science fiction, popular literature and the feuilleton.” As anyone who’s read Eco’s essay on Peanuts might imagine, “his comic book collection is also of great importance.”

Indeed, as any fan would expect, Eco’s namesake library reflects not just the vast sweep of his humanistic interests and knowledge, but also his playful sense of eccentricity, and even grotesquerie. According to the Fondazione Umberto Eco, most of the volumes it contains “are marked by a distinctive ex libris,” an adaptation of a sixteenth-century woodcut that depicts a donkey on a cornucopia-topped latrine. “The animal plays a small pipe, setting in motion a merry dance of a dozen cavorting monkeys.” The books themselves have been painstakingly arranged just as Eco shelved them, in accordance with the “good neighbor” principle of placing seemingly unrelated titles in close proximity in order to reveal unexpected intellectual connections between them. The volumes from Eco’s country house in Monte Cerignone will also be incorporated into the collection, but as the man himself knew, the best libraries, like the best minds, are never truly complete.

Umberto Eco Explains Why We Make Lists

The Virtue of Owning Books You Haven’t Read: Why Umberto Eco Kept an “Antilibrary”

Discover the 1126 Books in John Cage’s Personal Library: Foucault, Joyce, Wittgenstein, Virginia Woolf, Buckminster Fuller & More

Darwin’s Personal Library Goes Digital: 330 Books Online

The Largest Bookshelf Tour Ever Filmed: Inside a Classicist’s 20,000-Volume Library

Jimi Hendrix Plays “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” for The Beatles, Just Three Days After the Album’s Release (1967)

OC — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 08:00:59 +0000

There are many ways to celebrate a new album from a band you admire. You can have a listening party alone. You can have a listening party with friends. You can learn the title track in a couple of days and play it onstage while the band you admire sits in the audience. That last one might be overkill. Unless you’re Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix was so excited after the UK release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967 that he opened a set at London’s Saville Theatre with his own, Hendrix-ified rendition of the album’s McCartney-penned title song. In the audience: Paul McCartney and George Harrison.

It’s a loose, good-natured tribute that, as you might imagine, made quite an impression on the Beatles in attendance. “It’s still obviously a shining memory for me,” McCartney recalled many years later, “because I admired him so much anyway, he was so accomplished.”

To think that that album had meant so much to him as to actually do it by the Sunday night, three days after the release. He must have been so into it, because normally it might take a day for rehearsal and then you might wonder whether you’d put it in, but he just opened with it. It’s a pretty major compliment in anyone’s book. I put that down as one of the great honours of my career.

McCartney frequently reminisces about that night. See him do so in the clip above from an August, 2010 concert. Macca gushes over Hendrix’s solo, then tells the audience how Jimi—having thrown his guitar out of tune during the solo with his whammy bar dive-bombing—asked Eric Clapton to come onstage and retune for him.

Clapton, who McCartney says was actually in the audience, demurred. It’s a story he continues to tell—in fact.

One lingering question is whether or not Hendrix knew there were Beatles present that night. NME and the BBC both say he did not. In a recreation of the moment, above, from the 2013 fictionalized biopic Jimi: All Is by My Side, Hendrix (played by André Benjamin) knows. Not only that, but he decides to open with “Sgt. Pepper’s” right before the gig, with no rehearsal, over the strenuous objections of Noel Redding, who thinks the Beatles might be insulted. It’s highly doubtful things went down that way at all. (The scene takes other licenses—note the Flying V instead of the white Stratocaster Hendrix actually played). But it makes for some interesting backstage drama in the film.

In any case, I’d guess that Hendrix—“the coolest guy in the world,” as Benjamin called him—would have pulled off the cover with panache, whether he knew McCartney was watching or not. There may be little left to say about Hendrix’s brilliant guitar theatrics, completely innovative playing style, onstage swagger, and powerful songwriting. But his “Sgt. Pepper’s” cover is an example of one of his less-discussed, but highly admirable qualities: his genuinely awesome rock and roll collegiality.

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

Jimi Hendrix Plays the Delta Blues on a 12-String Acoustic Guitar in 1968, and Jams with His Blues Idols, Buddy Guy & B.B. King

Jimi Hendrix Wreaks Havoc on the Lulu Show, Gets Banned From BBC (1969)

Jimi Hendrix’s Final Interview on September 11, 1970: Listen to the Complete Audio

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