A Tour of the New David Bowie Archive Featuring 90,000 Artifacts from His Life & Career

in Museums, Music | September 25th, 2025

With the tenth anniversary of David Bowie’s death coming up early next year, more than a few fans will have their minds on a pilgrimage to mark the occasion. Perhaps with that very time frame in mind, the V&A East Storehouse in London has just opened the David Bowie Center. Run by the Victoria and Albert Museum, to which Bowie left an archive of about 90,000 of his possessions, this new institution will show a few hundred of those artifacts at a time, and even make a range of them available on request to visitors. As for what exactly is in there, Jessica the Museum Guide makes a brief survey of the Bowieana currently on display in the video above.

Some of the featured objects, like the suits Bowie wore in his videos for “Life on Mars?” and “Let’s Dance” or the crystal ball he held aloft as Jareth the Goblin King in Labyrinth, may well be recognizable even to casual Bowie appreciators. Longer-term fans will surely recognize the outlandish but elegant Kansai Yamamoto-designed costumes that visually defined personae like Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane, the Alexander McQueen-designed Union Jack frock from the cover of Earthling, and perhaps even the metal angel wings Bowie donned onstage during the highly ambitious but much-derided Glass Spider Tour of the late nineteen-eighties.

Going deeper, there’s also the Stylophone, a kind of toy electronic instrument from the late sixties, that Bowie used on “Space Oddity” (and had to repurchase on eBay); the much more professional-grade EMS suitcase synthesizer given to him by Brian Eno, which he used on the “Berlin trilogy” albums they made together; the personal deck of Oblique Strategies, co-created by Eno, that shows signs of intensive use in Bowie’s own creative process; his correspondence with Let’s Dance producer Nile Rodgers (a curator of the Bowie Center’s current exhibition), about their second album Black Tie White Noise; and materials from Omikron: The Nomad Soul, the computer game to which he contributed music as well as a digitized performance in the late nineties.

The collection that Bowie donated to the V&A already came carefully organized and cataloged, which shows a meticulousness uncommon to rock stars, and a deliberateness about not just cultivating his public image at any given cultural moment, but also actively curating the materials of his own historical narrative. It seems Bowie always had one eye on the past: his own, of course, but also more distant eras, rich with disused aesthetics to revive and make his own. The other eye he kept on the future, especially as the internet was growing into a cultural force. The David Bowie Center has his personal notes on the subject, which include a reference to BowieNet, the internet service provider he founded around the turn of the millennium. BowieNet is now long gone, of course, but Bowie’s legacy — especially now that it’s been institutionally enshrined and made so accessible to the public — will outlast us all.

The Art Collection of David Bowie: An Introduction

Behold The Paintings of David Bowie: Neo-Expressionist Self Portraits, Illustrations of Iggy Pop, and Much More

Meet the Memphis Group, the Bob Dylan-Inspired Designers of David Bowie’s Favorite Furniture

David Bowie Is: The First Major Exhibit Dedicated to Bowie Spans 50 Years & Features 300 Great Objects

The Musical Career of David Bowie in One Minute … and One Continuous Take

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Gilded Age: A Free Historical Documentary That Helps Make Sense of Our Own Fraught Times

in Film, History | September 25th, 2025

Ever-increasing economic inequality, rapid technological change, the creation of dominant corporations controlled by a small business elite, political corruption, and the rise of populism and nativism. These are all features of American life in 2025. But our nation has also seen this movie play before, most notably back in the Gilded Age, which ran from the 1870s through the late 1890s. Above, we have a free two-hour documentary on the Gilded Age created by PBS. They write:

In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, during what has become known as the Gilded Age, the population of the United States doubled in the span of a single generation. The nation became the world’s leading producer of food, coal, oil, and steel, attracted vast amounts of foreign investment, and pushed into markets in Europe and the Far East. As national wealth expanded, two classes rose simultaneously, separated by a gulf of experience and circumstance that was unprecedented in American life. These disparities sparked passionate and violent debate over questions still being asked in our own times: How is wealth best distributed, and by what process? Does government exist to protect private property or provide balm to the inevitable casualties of a churning industrial system? Should the government concern itself chiefly with economic growth or economic justice? The battles over these questions were fought in Congress, the courts, the polling place, the workplace and the streets. The outcome of these disputes was both uncertain and momentous, and marked by a passionate vitriol and level of violence that would shock the conscience of many Americans today. The Gilded Age presents a compelling and complex story of one of the most convulsive and transformative eras in American history.

To a certain degree, this documentary will help you make better sense of our own fraught times and perhaps feel more optimistic about where we might end up. (It’s worth keeping in mind that the disruptions of the Gilded Age eventually gave way to the reforms of the Progressive Era.) What’s more, if you’re watching the excellent HBO series, The Gilded Age, the film provides historical background that will directly add to your appreciation of the show. You can watch the film online above, or find it in our collection of Free Documentaries, a subset of our collection 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.

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!

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Ernst Haeckel’s Sublime Drawings of Flora & Fauna: The Beautiful Scientific Drawings That Influenced Europe’s Art Nouveau Movement (1889)

in Art, Biology, Science | September 24th, 2025

If you follow the ongoing beef many popular scientists have with philosophy, you’d be forgiven for thinking the two disciplines have nothing to say to each other. That’s a sadly false impression, though they have become almost entirely separate professional institutions. But during the first, say, 200 years of modern science, scientists were “natural philosophers”—often as well versed in logic, metaphysics, or theology as they were in mathematics and taxonomies. And most of them were artists too of one kind or another. Scientists had to learn to draw in order to illustrate their findings before mass-produced photography and computer imaging could do it for them. Many scientists have been fine artists indeed, rivaling the greats, and they’ve made very fine musicians as well.

And then there’s Ernst Heinrich Haeckel, a German biologist and naturalist, philosopher and physician, and proponent of Darwinism who described and named thousands of species, mapped them on a genealogical tree, and “coined several scientific terms commonly known today,” This is Colossal writes, “such as ecology, phylum, and stem cell.” That’s an impressive resume, isn’t it? Oh, and check out his art—his brilliantly colored, elegantly rendered, highly stylized depictions of “far flung flora and fauna,” of microbes and natural patterns, in designs that inspired the Art Nouveau movement. “Each organism Haeckel drew has an almost abstract form,” notes Katherine Schwab at Fast Co. Design, “as if it’s a whimsical fantasy he dreamed up rather than a real creature he examined under a microscope. His drawings of sponges reveal their intensely geometric structure—they look architectural, like feats of engineering.”

Haeckel published 100 fabulous prints beginning in 1889 in a series of ten books called Kunstformen der Natur (“Art Forms in Nature”), collected in two volumes in 1904. The astonishing work was “not just a book of illustrations but also the summation of his view of the world,” one which embraced the new science of Darwinian evolution wholeheartedly, writes scholar Olaf Breidbach in his 2006 Visions of Nature.

Haeckel’s method was a holistic one, in which art, science, and philosophy were complementary approaches to the same subject. He “sought to secure the attention of those with an interest in the beauties of nature,” writes professor of zoology Rainer Willmann in a book from Taschen called The Art and Science of Ernst Haeckel, “and to emphasize, through this rare instance of the interplay of science and aesthetics, the proximity of these two realms.”

The gorgeous Taschen book includes 450 of Haeckel’s drawings, watercolors, and sketches, spread across 704 pages, and it’s expensive. But you can see all 100 of Haeckel’s originally published prints in zoomable high-resolution scans here. Or purchase a one-volume reprint of the original Art Forms in Nature, with its 100 glorious prints, through this Dover publication, which describes Haeckel’s art as “having caused the acceptance of Darwinism in Europe…. Today, although no one is greatly interested in Haeckel the biologist-philosopher, his work is increasingly prized for something he himself would probably have considered secondary.” It’s a shame his scientific legacy lies neglected, if that’s so, but it surely lives on through his art, which may be just as needed now to illustrate the wonders of evolutionary biology and the natural world as it was in Haeckel’s time.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

Explore a New Archive of 2,200 Historical Wildlife Illustrations (1916–1965): Courtesy of The Wildlife Conservation Society

Two Million Wondrous Nature Illustrations Put Online by The Biodiversity Heritage Library

Cats in Japanese Woodblock Prints: How Japan’s Favorite Animals Came to Star in Its Popular Art

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Explore a New Digital Edition of Printing Types, the Authoritative History of Printing & Typography from 1922

in Books, Design | September 24th, 2025

Times New Roman has been around since 1931, longer than most of us have been alive — and for longer than many of us have been alive, word-processing applications have come with it as the default font. We tend, therefore, to regard it less as something created than as something for all intents and purposes eternal, but there was a time when publishers had to actively adopt it. The first American firm to start using Times New Roman was the Merrymount Press, which had already made a highly prestigious name for itself with publications like the elegant Book of Common Prayer financed by no less a captain of industry than J. Pierpont Morgan. But other printers knew Merrymount for a book that would have inspired in them an equally worshipful impulse.

“Released in 1922 with a later revision in 1937,” Printing Types: Their History, Forms and Use “became known as the standard work on the history of [printing and typography] and a basic book for all interested in the graphic arts. This two-volume work spans nearly 450 years and includes detailed analyses of the printers and type designers and their work.”

So writes the designer Nicholas Rougeux, previously featured here on Open Culture for his digital editions of vintage books like Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants; British & Exotic Mineralogy; A Monograph of the Trochilidæ, or Family of Humming-Birds; Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours; Euclid’s Elements, and Pierre-Joseph Redouté’s collections of rose and lily illustrations. His latest project to go live is a painstakingly assembled digital edition of Printing Types, which you can explore here.

That book was also originally the work of one man, Merrymount Press founder Daniel Berkeley Updike. “During his tenure at Harvard University, he taught a course on Technique of Printing in the Graduate School of Business Administration for five years,” Rougeux writes, “the lectures of which served as the basis for Printing Types.” In the book, Updike offers a history of “the art of typography from the dawn of Western printing in the fifteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth — focusing primarily on European printing in Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and England as well as the United States.” In tracing “the development of type design,” he also discusses “the importance of each historic period and the lessons they contain for contemporary designers.”

Originally published in 1922 and extensively revised in 1937, Printing Types long stood as the authoritative history of typography in the Latin alphabet, with its “more than 360 facsimile illustrations showcasing examples of typography, borders, flowers, and pages pulled from the books covered.” Tracking down the sources of those illustrations constituted no small part of the painstaking production of Rougeux’s digital edition, and the 100 of them most highly praised by Updike have also been made available for purchase in poster form. For those who do a lot of work with text, in print or digital forms, it could provide just as much motivation as an actual copy of Printing Types on the shelf to find our way beyond the defaults.

See How The Gutenberg Press Worked: Demonstration Shows the Oldest Functioning Gutenberg Press in Action

Discover the First Illustrated Book Printed in English, William Caxton’s Mirror of the World (1481)

The Art of Collotype: See a Near Extinct Printing Technique, as Lovingly Practiced by a Japanese Master Craftsman

Behold a Digitization of “The Most Beautiful of All Printed Books,” The Kelmscott Chaucer

Fonts in Use: Enter a Giant Archive of Typography, Featuring 12,618 Typefaces

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

A Trip Around the World in 1900: See Restored Footage Showing Life in New York, London, India, Japan, China & Beyond

in Film, History | September 23rd, 2025

From today’s vantage, the first decade of the twentieth century can look like an even more distant period of history than it is. In many corners of urban civilization, the cabarets, tearooms, and other near-paralytically mannered institutions of the Belle Époque were very much going concerns. To those who lived in that era, it must have been easy enough to believe that the ways of nineteenth-century-style aristocracy and empire could perpetuate themselves forever. Yet those were also the years of Georges Méliès Le Voyage dans la Lune, the Wright brothers’ first flight; the proliferation of automobiles and subway trains; Russia’s loss in war to Japan and first revolution; Einstein’s discovery of relativity, the photoelectric effect, and Brownian motion; and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

The world as it was, in other words, was giving way to the world as it would be. Such is the context of the documentary footage collected — and colorized, and upscaled — in the video at the top of the post. Beginning in a bustling working-class street in Hollinwood, England, this tour of the nineteen-hundreds continues on to places like Spain, India, China, New York, Japan, Brazil, Denmark, Austria, and Germany.

One aspect of all this footage liable to catch the twenty-first-century eye is all the myriad forms of transportation on display, some running on solely animal or even human muscle, and others propelled by the kind of engines then at the heart of industrial revolutions the world over. (You can even catch a glimpse of Wuppertal’s suspended Schwebebahn, previously featured here on Open Culture.)

All this gives us a clearer sense of why so many contemporary observers expressed feelings of civilizational whiplash, especially if, as was becoming more and more common, they’d emigrated from a less technologically advanced society to a more technologically advanced one. For those living at the edge of progress, the shape of things to come (a phrase later used as a book title by one such observer, the prolific H. G. Wells) was anyone’s guess, and it’s hardly surprising that so many forward-looking philosophies, ideologies, and art movements would arise from such a ferment. Still, it would have taken a prescient mind indeed to foresee the ascendance of communism, Nazism, the American empire, and mass broadcast media just ahead, to say nothing of two world wars. William Gibson had yet to be born, let alone to utter his now-famous quote, but as we can see, the future was already here in the nineteen-tens — and unevenly distributed.

Paris Had a Moving Sidewalk in 1900, and a Thomas Edison Film Captured It in Action

Immaculately Restored Film Lets You Revisit Life in New York City in 1911

Berlin Street Scenes Beautifully Caught on Film (1900–1914)

Watch Life on the Streets of Tokyo in Footage Recorded in 1913: Caught Between the Traditional and the Modern

Watch 1920s “City Symphonies” Starring the Great Cities of the World: From New York to Berlin to São Paulo

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Hermann Rorschach’s Original Rorschach Test: What Do You See? (1921)

in Art, Psychology | September 23rd, 2025

There is a well-known scene in Woody Allen’s Take The Money And Run (1969) when Virgil Starkwell (Allen) takes a psychological test to join the Navy, but is thwarted by his lascivious unconscious. The psychological measure that proves to be Starkwell’s undoing—rejected, he turns to a life of crime—is the Rorschach inkblot test, devised a century ago by Carl Jung’s compatriot and fellow psychologist, Hermann Rorschach. Although Rorschach would die young, at 37, his namesake remains embedded in our perception of psychology, alongside Freud’s couch and Pavlov’s dog.

Hermann Rorschach’s father was an art teacher, and encouraged his son to express himself. Whether the young Rorschach had innate artistic leanings, or had begun to listen to his father more closely after the death of his mother at age 12, is uncertain. What is known, however, is that Hermann became so fascinated with making pictures out of inkblots—a Swiss game known under the delightful designation of Klecksography—that his schoolmates gave him the nickname of Klecks.

Although he struggled to choose between art and science as a career, Rorschach, on the counsel of eminent German biologist and ardent Darwin supporter Ernst Haeckel, chose medicine, specializing in psychology. Still, he never abandoned art.

Even before the young Rorschach began to study psychology, the medical profession had flirted with imagery association. In 1857, a German doctor named Justinus Kerner published a book of poetry, with each poem inspired by an accompanying inkblot. Alfred Binet, the father of intelligence testing, also tinkered with inkblots at the outset of the 20th century, seeing them as a potential measure of creativity. While the claim that Rorschach was familiar with these particular inkblots rests on conjecture, we know that he was familiar with the work of Szymon Hens, an early psychologist who explored his patients’ fantasies using inkblots, as well as Carl Jung’s practice of having his patients engage in word-association.

After noticing that schizophrenic patients associated vastly different things with inkblots than other patients, Rorschach, following some experimentation, created the first version of the inkblot test as a measure of schizophrenia in 1921. The test, however, only came to be used as a form of personality assessment when Samuel Beck and Bruno Klopfer expanded its original scope in the late 1930s. Since then, psychologists have frequently used the various aspects of people’s responses (e.g., inkblot focus area) to make judgment calls about broad personality traits. Ironically, Rorschach himself had been skeptical about the inkblots’ value in assessing personality.

In honor of Rorschach’s birthday (he was born on this day in 1884), we’ve highlighted his original images below, as well as some of the most popular responses. If you see something else in these images, feel free to let us know in the comments section below. The images, we should note, are in the public domain, and otherwise readily viewable on Wikipedia. And, according to Wikimedia Commons, the images are in the public domain.

Image 1: Bat, butterfly, moth

Image 2: Two humans

Image 3: Two humans

Image 4: Animal hide, skin, rug

Image 5: Bat, butterfly, moth

Image 6: Animal hide, skin, rug

Image 7: Human heads or faces

Image 8: Animal; not cat or dog

Image 9: Human

Image 10: Crab, lobster, spider,

Happen to see an elephant and a men’s glee club engaged in unmentionable acts? Don’t fret—you’ve likely projected nothing intelligible. The test has long been out of date, and is deemed neither reliable nor valid in the vast majority of cases (although an updated version exists, it suffers from similar methodological flaws). Virgil Starkwell, it seems, would have made a fine Navy officer.

Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture writer. Follow him at@iliablinderman

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

When CBS Canceled The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour for Criticizing the American Establishment and the Vietnam War (1969)

in Comedy, History, Television | September 22nd, 2025

Rigorously clean-cut, competent on the acoustic guitar and double bass, and seldom dressed in anything more daring than cherry-red blazers, Tom and Dick Smothers looked like the antithesis of nineteen-sixties rebellion. When they first gained national recognition with their variety show The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, they must have come off to many young viewers as the kind of act of which their mother — or even grandmother — would approve. But the brothers’ cultivatedly square, neo-vaudevillian appearance was deceiving, as CBS would soon find out when the two took every chance to turn their program into a satirical, relentlessly authority-challenging, yet somehow wholesome showcase of the counterculture.

The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour premiered in February of 1967, and its first season “featured minimal controversial content,” writes Sarah King at U.S. History Scene. Thereafter, “the show became increasingly political. The brothers invited activist celebrities onto their show, including folk singers Pete Seeger and Joan Baez and singer-actor Harry Belafonte.

The show also produced its own political material criticizing the Vietnam War and the politicians who supported it,” not least President Lyndon Johnson. Bringing on Seeger was a daring move, given that he’d been blacklisted from network television for the better part of two decades, though CBS’s censors made sure to cut out the most politically sensitive parts of his act.

Even more so was the brothers’ own performance, with George Segal, of Phil Ochs’s “Draft Dodger Rag,” which they ended by urging their audience to “make love, not war.” All this can look fairly tame by today’s standards, but it locked the show — which had become top-rated, holding its own in a time slot against the cultural phenomenon that was Bonanza — into a grudge match with its own network. Before the third season, CBS’ higher-ups demanded that each show be turned in ten days in advance, ostensibly in order to undergo review for sensitive material. In one instance, they claimed that the deadline hadn’t been met and aired a re-run instead, though it may not have been entirely irrelevant that the intended program contained a tribute by Baez to her then-husband, who was being sent to prison for refusing to serve in the military.

CBS did broadcast Baez’s performance on a later date, after clipping out the reference to the specific nature of her husband’s offense. A similar struggle took place around the “sermonettes” delivered by David Steinberg, one of which you can see in the video above. The irreverence toward U.S. foreign policy, religion, and much else besides in these and other segments eventually proved too much for the network, which fired the brothers after it had already given the green light to a fourth season of the Comedy Hour. Though they successfully sued CBS for breach of contract thereafter, they never did regain the same level of televisual prominence they’d once enjoyed, if enjoy be the word. At any rate, the fallout of all this controversy firmly installed the Smothers Brothers in the pantheon of twentieth-century free-speech warriors, and their experience reminds us still today that, without the freedom to give offense, there can be no comedy worthy of the name.

When The Who (Literally) Blew Up The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1967

Watch 3000 Years of Art, a 1968 Experimental Film That Takes You on a Visual Journey Through 3,000 Years of Fine Art

Revisit Turn-On, the Innovative TV Show That Got Canceled Right in the Middle of Its First Episode (1969)

Pink Lady and Jeff: Japan’s Biggest Pop Musicians Star in One of America’s Worst-Reviewed TV Shows (1980)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 30 ) |

Explore the Fascinating Map of Fungi: An Introduction to the Vast Mushroom Kingdom

in Biology, Maps | September 22nd, 2025

Here on Open Culture, we’ve previously featured Domain of Science’s elaborate infographic maps of such vast fields of intellectual endeavor as mathematics, physics, computer science, quantum physics, quantum computing, chemistry, biology, and medicine. Over time, the series’ creator Dominic Walliman has branched out, as it were, even to kingdoms of the natural world, like plants. With Plantae down, which of the other five has he taken on next? That question is answered in the video above, which introduces Domain of Science’s new Fascinating Map of Fungi.

Yes, this big map depicts the realm of the humble mushroom, which “shares the forest with the plants and the animals, but it’s not a plant, and it’s not an animal.” And the mushroom itself, like we’re used to seeing sprouting beneath our feet, is only a small part of the organism: the rest “lives hidden, out of sight, below ground. Beneath every mushroom is a fungal network of hair-like strands called the mycelium,” which begins as a spore.

The hugely diverse “fruiting bodies” that they push out of the surface have only one job: “to disperse the spores and grow the next generation.” But only ten percent of fungi species actually do this; the rest don’t produce anything we would recognize as mushrooms at all.

About 150,000 species of fungi have been discovered so far. Though inanimate, they manage to do quite a lot, such as supplying nutrients to plants (or killing them), generating chemicals that have proven extremely useful (or at least consciousness-expanding) to humans, hijacking the nervous systems of arthropods, and even surviving in outer space. And of course, “because of their ability to concentrate nutrients from within the soil, fungi are an excellent source of food for us and many other animals.” Mycologists estimate that there remain at least two or three million more species “out there in nature waiting to be discovered.” At least a few of them, one hopes, will turn out to be tasty.

The Beautifully Illustrated Atlas of Mushrooms: Edible, Suspect and Poisonous (1827)

The Mushroom Color Atlas: An Interactive Web Site Lets You Explore the Incredible Spectrum of Colors Created from Fungi

Death-Cap Mushrooms are Terrifying and Unstoppable: A Wild Animation

Björk Takes You on a Journey into the Vast Kingdom of Mushrooms with the New Documentary Fungi: Web of Life

How Mushroom Time-Lapses Are Filmed: A Glimpse Into the Pioneering Time-Lapse Cinematography Behind the Netflix Documentary Fantastic Fungi

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

How to Write in Cuneiform, the Oldest Writing System in the World: A Short Introduction

in History, Language Lessons | September 19th, 2025

Teaching child visitors how to write their names using an unfamiliar or antique alphabet is a favorite activity of museum educators, but Dr. Irving Finkel, a cuneiform expert who specializes in ancient Mesopotamian medicine and magic, has grander designs.

His employer, the British Museum, has over 130,000 tablets spanning Mesopotamia’s Early Dynastic period to the Neo-Babylonian Empire “just waiting for young scholars to come devote themselves to (the) monkish work” of deciphering them.

Writing one’s name might well prove to be a gateway, and Dr. Finkel has a vested interest in lining up some new recruits.

The museum’s Department of the Middle East has an open access policy, with a study room where researchers can get up close and personal with a vast collection of cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia and surrounding regions.

But let’s not put the ox before the cart.

As the extremely personable Dr. Finkel shows Matt Gray and Tom Scott of Matt and Tom’s Park Bench, above, cuneiform consists of three components—upright, horizontal and diagonal—made by pressing the edge of a reed stylus, or popsicle stick if you prefer, into a clay tablet.

The mechanical process seems fairly easy to get the hang of, but mastering the oldest writing system in the world will take you around six years of dedicated study. Like Japan’s kanji alphabet, the oldest writing system in the world is syllabic. Properly written out, these syllables join up into a flowing calligraphy that your average, educated Babylonian would be able to read at a glance.

Even if you have no plans to rustle up a popsicle stick and some Play-Doh, it’s worth sticking with the video to the end to hear Dr. Finkel tell how a chance encounter with some naturally occurring cuneiform inspired him to write a horror novel, which is now available for purchase, following a successful Kickstarter campaign.

Begin your cuneiform studies with Irving Finkel’s Cuneiform: Ancient Scripts.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2018.

Hear The Epic of Gilgamesh Read in its Original Ancient Language, Akkadian

Learn Ancient Greek in 64 Free Lessons: A Free Online Course from Brandeis & Harvard

Hear the “Seikilos Epitaph,” the Oldest Complete Song in the World: An Inspiring Tune from 100 BC

Hear What the Language Spoken by Our Ancestors 6,000 Years Ago Might Have Sounded Like: A Reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European Language

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

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

A 107-Year-Old Irish Farmer Reflects on the Changes He’s Seen During His Life (1965)

in History, Television | September 18th, 2025

Talk to a clear-headed 107-year-old today, and you could expect to hear stories of adolescence in the Great Depression, or — if you’re lucky — the Jazz Age seen through a child’s eyes. It’s no common experience to have been formed by the age of radio and live deep into the age of the smartphone, but arguably, Michael Fitzpatrick lived through even greater civilizational transformation. Born in Ireland in 1858, he sat for the interview above 107 years later in 1965, which was broadcast on television. That device was well on its way to saturating Western society at the time, as the automobile already had, while mankind was taking to the skies in jetliners and even to the stars in rocket ships.

The contrast between the world into which Fitzpatrick was born and the one in which he eventually found himself is made starker by his being a son of the land. A lifelong farmer, he can honestly reply, when asked to name the biggest change he’s seen, “Machinery.”

Not all of his answers come across quite so clearly, owing to his thick dialect that must surely have gone extinct by now, even in rural Ireland. Luckily, the video comes with subtitles, making it easier to understand what he has to say about the advent of the “mowing machine” and his memories of the Bodyke evictions of the eighteen-eighties, when mêlées broke out over a local landlord’s attempt to oust his destitute tenants.

One can come up with vaguely analogous events to the Bodyke evictions in the modern world, but in essence, they belong to the long stretch of history when to be human meant to engage in agriculture, or to oversee it. The Industrial Revolution didn’t happen at the same pace everywhere at once, and indeed, Fitzpatrick lived the first part of his life in an effectively pre-industrial reality, before witnessing the scarcely believable process of mechanization take place all around him. He experienced, in other words, the arrival of the civilization into which we were all born, and to which we know no alternative. As for those of us of a certain age today, we can expect to be asked six or seven decades hence — assuming we can go the distance — what life was like with only dial-up internet.

Philosopher Bertrand Russell Talks About the Time When His Grandfather Met Napoleon

1400 Engravings from the 19th Century Flow Together in the Short Animation “Still Life”

A Rare Smile Captured in a 19th Century Photograph

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

An Art Conservator Restores a Painting of the Doomed Party Girl Isabella de’ Medici: See the Before and After

in Art | September 18th, 2025

Some people talk to plants.

The Carnegie Museum of Art’s chief conservator Ellen Baxter talks to the paintings she’s restoring.

“You have to … tell her she’s going to look lovely,” she says, above, spreading varnish over a 16th-century portrait of Isabella de’ Medici prior to starting the laborious process of restoring years of wear and tear by inpainting with tiny brushes, aided with pipettes of varnish and solvent.

Isabella had been waiting a long time for such tender attention, concealed beneath a 19^th-century overpainting depicting a daintier featured woman reputed to be Eleanor of Toledo, wife of Cosimo I de’ Medici, the second Duke of Florence.

Louise Lippincott, the CMA’s former curator of fine arts, ran across the work in the museum’s basement storage. Records named the artist as Bronzino, court painter to Cosimo I, but Lippincott, who thought the painting “awful”, brought it to Ellen Baxter for a second opinion.

As Cristina Rouvalis writes in Carnegie Magazine, Baxter is a “rare mix of left- and right-brained talent”, a painter with a bachelor’s degree in art history, minors in chemistry and physics, and a master’s degree in art conservation:

(She) looks at paintings differently than other people, too—not as flat, static objects, but as three-dimensional compositions layered like lasagna.

The minute she saw the oil painting purported to be of Eleanor of Toledo… Baxter knew something wasn’t quite right. The face was too blandly pretty, “like a Victorian cookie tin box lid,” she says. Upon examining the back of the painting, she identified—thanks to a trusty Google search—the stamp of Francis Leedham, who worked at the National Portrait Gallery in London in the mid-1800s as a “reliner,” transferring paintings from a wood panel to canvas mount. The painstaking process involves scraping and sanding away the panel from back to front and then gluing the painted surface layer to a new canvas.

An x‑ray confirmed her hunch, revealing extra layers of paint in this “lasagna”.

Careful stripping of dirty varnish and Victorian paint in the areas of the portrait’s face and hands began to reveal the much stronger features of the woman who posed for the artist. (The Carnegie is banking on Bronzino’s student, Alessandro Allori, or someone in his circle.)

Lippincott was also busily sleuthing, finding a Medici-commissioned copy of the painting in Vienna that matched the dress and hair exactly. Thusly did she learn that the subject was Eleanor of Toledo’s daughter, Isabella de’ Medici, the apple of her father’s eye and a notorious, ultimately ill-fated party girl.

The History Blog paints an irresistible portrait of this maverick princess:

Cosimo gave her an exceptional amount of freedom for a noblewoman of her time. She ran her own household, and after Eleanor’s death in 1562, Isabella ran her father’s too. She threw famously raucous parties and spent lavishly. Her father always covered her debts and protected her from scrutiny even as rumors of her lovers and excesses that would have doomed other society women spread far and wide. Her favorite lover was said to be Troilo Orsini, her husband Paolo’s cousin.

Things went downhill fast for Isabella after her father’s death in 1574. Her brother Francesco was now the Grand Duke, and he had no interest in indulging his sister’s peccadilloes. We don’t know what happened exactly, but in 1576 Isabella died at the Medici Villa of Cerreto Guidi near Empoli. The official story released by Francesco was that his 34-year-old sister dropped dead suddenly while washing her hair. The unofficial story is that she was strangled by her husband out of revenge for her adultery and/or to clear the way for him to marry his own mistress Vittoria Accoramboni.

Baxter noted that the urn Isabella holds was not part of the painting to begin with, though neither was it one of Leedham’s revisions. Its resemblance to the urn that Mary Magdalene is often depicted using as she anoints Jesus’ feet led her and Lippincott to speculate that it was added at Isabella’s request, in an attempt to redeem her image.

“This is literally the bad girl seeing the light,” Lippincott told Rouvalis.

Despite her fondness for the subject of the liberated painting, and her considerable skill as an artist, Baxter resisted the temptation to embellish beyond what she found:

I’m not the artist. I’m the conservator. It’s my job to repair damages and losses, to not put myself in the painting.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2023.

The Art of Restoring a 400-Year-Old Painting: A Five-Minute Primer

Watch the Tate Modern Restore Mark Rothko’s Vandalized Painting, Black on Maroon: 18 Months of Work Condensed Into 17 Minutes

A Restored Vermeer Painting Reveals a Portrait of a Cupid Hidden for Over 350 Years

How an Art Conservator Completely Restores a Damaged Painting: A Short, Meditative Documentary

Watch the Renaissance Painting, The Battle of San Romano, Get Brought Beautifully to Life in a Hand-Painted Animation

Free Course: An Introduction to the Art of the Italian Renaissance

– Ayun Halliday is the author of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book.

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 148 ) |

A Tour of the New David Bowie Archive Featuring 90,000 Artifacts from His Life & Career

The Gilded Age: A Free Historical Documentary That Helps Make Sense of Our Own Fraught Times

Ernst Haeckel’s Sublime Drawings of Flora & Fauna: The Beautiful Scientific Drawings That Influenced Europe’s Art Nouveau Movement (1889)

Explore a New Digital Edition of Printing Types, the Authoritative History of Printing & Typography from 1922

A Trip Around the World in 1900: See Restored Footage Showing Life in New York, London, India, Japan, China & Beyond

Hermann Rorschach’s Original Rorschach Test: What Do You See? (1921)

When CBS Canceled The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour for Criticizing the American Establishment and the Vietnam War (1969)

Explore the Fascinating Map of Fungi: An Introduction to the Vast Mushroom Kingdom

How to Write in Cuneiform, the Oldest Writing System in the World: A Short Introduction

A 107-Year-Old Irish Farmer Reflects on the Changes He’s Seen During His Life (1965)

An Art Conservator Restores a Painting of the Doomed Party Girl Isabella de’ Medici: See the Before and After

Essentials

Support Us

Free Courses

Receive our Daily Email

FREE UPDATES!

GET OUR DAILY EMAIL

Free Movies

Free Language Lessons

Free eBooks

Free Audio Books

Free Textbooks

K-12 Resources

Free Art & Images

Free Music

Writing Tips

Archive

Personal Finance

Categories

Great Lectures

Sign up for Newsletter

About Us

Great Recordings

Book Lists By

Syllabi

Favorite Movies

Archives

Search