What an 85-Year-Long Harvard Study Says Is the Real Key to Happiness

in Life, Psychology | September 8th, 2025

We’ve long used the French word milieu in Eng­lish, but not with quite the same range of mean­ings it has back in France. For exam­ple, French soci­ety (and espe­cial­ly the mem­bers of its old­er gen­er­a­tions) explic­it­ly rec­og­nizes the val­ue of a milieu in the sense of the col­lect­ed friends, acquain­tances, and rela­tions with whom one has reg­u­lar and fre­quent con­tact. Keep­ing a good milieu is a key task for liv­ing a good life. Robert Waldinger does­n’t use the word in the new hour-long Big Think video above, but then, he comes from a dif­fer­ent cul­tur­al back­ground: he’s Amer­i­can, for one, a Har­vard psy­chi­a­trist, and he also hap­pens to be a Zen Bud­dhist priest. But he would sure­ly agree whole­heart­ed­ly about the impor­tance of the milieu to human hap­pi­ness.

As the fourth direc­tor of the long-term Har­vard Study of Adult Devel­op­ment, which has been keep­ing an eye on the well-being of its sub­jects for more than 85 years now, Waldinger knows some­thing about hap­pi­ness. Ear­ly in the video, he cites find­ings that half of it is “a kind of bio­log­i­cal set point,” 10 per­cent is “based on our cur­rent life cir­cum­stances,” and the remain­ing 40 per­cent is under our con­trol. The sin­gle most impor­tant fac­tor in the vari­abil­i­ty of our hap­pi­ness, he explains, is our rela­tion­ships. To take the mea­sure of that aspect of our own lives, we should ask our­selves these ques­tions: “Do I have enough con­nec­tion in my life?” “Do I have rela­tion­ships that are warm and sup­port­ive?” “What am I get­ting from rela­tion­ships?”

There are, of course, good rela­tion­ships and bad rela­tion­ships, those that fill you with ener­gy and those that drain you of ener­gy. To a great extent, Waldinger says, good rela­tion­ships can be cul­ti­vat­ed, and even bad rela­tion­ships can be mod­i­fied or approached in an advan­ta­geous way. What makes learn­ing to do so impor­tant is that a lack of rela­tion­ships — that is, lone­li­ness — can take as much of a phys­i­cal toll as obe­si­ty or heavy smok­ing. Alas, since tele­vi­sion made its way into the home after the Sec­ond World War, we’ve lived with a rapid­ly and cease­less­ly mul­ti­ply­ing array of forces that make it dif­fi­cult to form and main­tain rela­tion­ships; at this point, we’re so “con­stant­ly dis­tract­ed by our won­der­ful screens” that we have trou­ble pay­ing atten­tion to even the peo­ple we think we love. This is where Zen comes in.

Atten­tion, as one of Waldinger’s own teach­ers in that tra­di­tion put it, is “the most basic form of love,” and med­i­ta­tion has always been a reli­able way to cul­ti­vate it. Such a prac­tice reveals our own minds to be “messy and chaot­ic,” and from that real­iza­tion, it’s not far to the under­stand­ing that “every­body’s minds are messy and chaot­ic.” Attain­ing a clear view of our own ques­tion­able impuls­es and irri­tat­ing defi­cien­cies helps us to accept those same qual­i­ties in oth­ers. “We can some­times imag­ine that oth­er peo­ple have it all fig­ured out, and we’re the only one who has ups and downs in our life,” says Waldinger, but the truth is that “every­body has ups and downs. We nev­er fig­ure it out, ulti­mate­ly.” The fleet­ing nature of sat­is­fac­tion con­sti­tutes just one facet of the imper­ma­nence Zen requires us to accept. Noth­ing lasts for­ev­er: cer­tain­ly not our lives, nor those of the mem­bers of our milieu, so if we want to enjoy them, we’d bet­ter start pay­ing atten­tion to them while we still can.

Relat­ed con­tent:

What Are the Keys to Hap­pi­ness? Lessons from a 75-Year-Long Har­vard Study

How to Be Hap­pi­er in 5 Research-Proven Steps, Accord­ing to Pop­u­lar Yale Pro­fes­sor Lau­rie San­tos

A 6‑Step Guide to Zen Bud­dhism, Pre­sent­ed by Psy­chi­a­trist-Zen Mas­ter Robert Waldinger

All You Need is Love: The Keys to Hap­pi­ness Revealed by a 75-Year Har­vard Study

How Much Mon­ey Do You Need to Be Hap­py? A New Study Gives Us Some Exact Fig­ures

How Lone­li­ness Is Killing Us: A Primer from Har­vard Psy­chi­a­trist & Zen Priest Robert Waldinger

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.

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Why You Should Only Work 3–4 Hours a Day, Like Charles Darwin, Virginia Woolf & Adam Smith

in Life, Productivity | September 8th, 2025

These days, we hear much said on social media — sure­ly too much — in favor of the “hus­tle cul­ture” and the “grind mind­set” (or, abbre­vi­at­ed for max­i­mum effi­cien­cy, the “grind­set”). Ded­i­ca­tion to your work is to be admired, pro­vid­ed that the work itself is of val­ue, but the more of a day’s hours you devote to it, the like­li­er returns are to dimin­ish. Oliv­er Burke­man, a pop­u­lar writer on pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and time man­age­ment, has made this point in a vari­ety of ways, usu­al­ly return­ing to the same find­ing: look at the work habits of a range of lumi­nar­ies includ­ing Charles Dar­win, Hen­ri Poin­caré, Thomas Jef­fer­son, Charles Dick­ens, Vir­ginia Woolf, J.G. Bal­lard, Ing­mar Bergman, Alice Munro, John le Car­ré, and Adam Smith, and you’ll find that they all put in about three or four hours of con­cen­trat­ed effort per day.

“You almost cer­tain­ly can’t con­sis­tent­ly do the kind of work that demands seri­ous men­tal focus for more than about three or four hours a day,” Burke­man writes on his site. If you do work of that kind, it would behoove you to “just focus on pro­tect­ing four hours — and don’t wor­ry if the rest of the day is char­ac­ter­ized by the usu­al scat­tered chaos.”

Doing so entails mak­ing an “inter­nal psy­cho­log­i­cal move: to give up demand­ing more of your­self than three or four hours of dai­ly high-qual­i­ty men­tal work.” You’ll also final­ly have to “aban­don the delu­sion that if you just man­aged to squeeze in a bit more work, you’d final­ly reach the com­mand­ing sta­tus of feel­ing ‘in con­trol’ and ‘on top of every­thing’ at last.”

The “the tru­ly valu­able skill here,” Burke­man con­tin­ues, “isn’t the capac­i­ty to push your­self hard­er, but to stop and recu­per­ate despite the dis­com­fort of know­ing that work remains unfin­ished, emails unan­swered, oth­er peo­ple’s demands unful­filled.” This is eas­i­er said than done, of course, but any attempt to imple­ment what Burke­man calls the “three-to-four-hour rule” must begin with a bit of tri­al and error: about when best in the day to sched­ule those hours, but also about how best to elim­i­nate dis­trac­tions dur­ing those hours. Under­neath all this lies the need to accept life’s fini­tude, as Burke­man explains in the inter­view at the top of the post, with its impli­ca­tion that we can only get so much done in what he often describes as our allot­ted 4,000 weeks — minus how­ev­er many thou­sand we’ve already lived so far.

To think more about man­ag­ing your time effec­tive­ly, see Burk­er­man’s books: Four Thou­sand Weeks: Time Man­age­ment for Mor­tals and also Med­i­ta­tions for Mor­tals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Lim­i­ta­tions and Make Time for What Counts.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Charles Dar­win & Charles Dick­ens’ Four-Hour Work Day: The Case for Why Less Work Can Mean More Pro­duc­tiv­i­ty

The Dai­ly Rou­tines of Famous Cre­ative Peo­ple, Pre­sent­ed in an Inter­ac­tive Info­graph­ic

Write Only 500 Words Per Day and Pub­lish 50+ Books: Gra­ham Greene’s Writ­ing Method

David Lynch Explains How Sim­ple Dai­ly Habits Enhance His Cre­ativ­i­ty

Haru­ki Murakami’s Dai­ly Rou­tine: Up at 4:00 a.m., 5–6 Hours of Writ­ing, Then a 10K Run

How to Read Many More Books in a Year: Watch a Short Doc­u­men­tary Fea­tur­ing Some of the World’s Most Beau­ti­ful Book­stores

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.

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Explore an Online Archive of 12,700 Vintage Cookbooks

in Food & Drink | September 4th, 2025

“Ear­ly cook­books were fit for kings,” writes Hen­ry Notak­er at The Atlantic. “The old­est pub­lished recipe col­lec­tions” in the 15th and 16th cen­turies in West­ern Europe “emanat­ed from the palaces of mon­archs, princes, and grand señores.” Cook­books were more than recipe collections—they were guides to court eti­quette and sump­tu­ous records of lux­u­ri­ous liv­ing. In ancient Rome, cook­books func­tioned sim­i­lar­ly, as the extrav­a­gant fourth cen­tu­ry Cook­ing and Din­ing in Impe­r­i­al Rome demon­strates.

Writ­ten by Api­cius, “Europe’s old­est [cook­book] and Rome’s only one in exis­tence today”—as its first Eng­lish trans­la­tor described it—offers “a bet­ter way of know­ing old Rome and antique pri­vate life.” It also offers keen insight into the devel­op­ment of heav­i­ly fla­vored dish­es before the age of refrig­er­a­tion. Api­cius rec­om­mends that “cooks who need­ed to pre­pare birds with a ‘goat­ish smell’ should bathe them in a mix­ture of pep­per, lovage, thyme, dry mint, sage, dates, hon­ey, vine­gar, broth, oil and mus­tard,” Melanie Radz­ic­ki McManus notes at How Stuff Works.

Ear­ly cook­books com­mu­ni­cat­ed in “a folksy, impre­cise man­ner until the Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion of the 1800s,” when stan­dard (or met­ric) mea­sure­ment became de rigueur. The first cook­book by an Amer­i­can, Amelia Sim­mons’ 1796 Amer­i­can Cook­ery, placed British fine din­ing and lav­ish “Queen’s Cake” next to “john­ny cake, fed­er­al pan cake, buck­wheat cake, and Indi­an slap­jack,” Kei­th Stave­ly and Kath­leen Fitzger­ald write at Smith­son­ian, all recipes sym­bol­iz­ing “the plain, but well-run and boun­ti­ful Amer­i­can home.” With this book, “a dia­logue on how to bal­ance the sump­tu­ous with the sim­ple in Amer­i­can life had begun.”

Cook­books are win­dows into history—markers of class and caste, doc­u­ments of dai­ly life, and snap­shots of region­al and cul­tur­al iden­ti­ty at par­tic­u­lar moments in time. In 1950, the first cook­book writ­ten by a fic­tion­al lifestyle celebri­ty, Bet­ty Crock­er, debuted. It became “a nation­al best-sell­er,” McManus writes. “It even sold more copies that year than the Bible.” The image of the per­fect Step­ford house­wife may have been big­ger than Jesus in the 50s, but Crock­er’s career was decades in the mak­ing. She debuted in 1921, the year of pub­li­ca­tion for anoth­er, more hum­ble recipe book: the Pil­grim Evan­gel­i­cal Luther­an Church Ladies’ Aid Soci­ety of Chicago’s Pil­grim Cook Book.

As Ayun Hal­l­i­day not­ed in an ear­li­er post, this charm­ing col­lec­tion fea­tures recipes for “Blitz Torte, Cough Syrup, and Sauer­kraut Can­dy,” and it’s only one of thou­sands of such exam­ples at the Inter­net Archive’s Cook­book and Home Eco­nom­ics Col­lec­tion, drawn from dig­i­tized spe­cial col­lec­tions at UCLA, Berke­ley, and the Prelinger Library. When we last checked in, the col­lec­tion fea­tured 3,000 cook­books. It has grown since 2016 to a library of 12,700 vin­tage exam­ples of home­spun Amer­i­cana, fine din­ing, and mass mar­ket­ing.

Laugh at gag-induc­ing recipes of old; cringe at the pious advice giv­en to women osten­si­bly anx­ious to please their hus­bands; and mar­vel at how var­i­ous inter­na­tion­al and region­al cuisines have been rep­re­sent­ed to unsus­pect­ing Amer­i­can home cooks. (It’s hard to say whether the cov­er or the con­tents of a Chi­nese Cook Book in Plain Eng­lish from 1917 seem more offen­sive.) Cook­books of recipes from the Amer­i­can South are pop­u­lar, as are cov­ers fea­tur­ing stereo­typ­i­cal “mam­my” char­ac­ters. A more respect­ful inter­na­tion­al exam­ple, 1952’s Luchow’s Ger­man Cook­book gives us “the sto­ry and the favorite dish­es of Amer­i­ca’s most famous Ger­man restau­rant.”

There are guides to mush­rooms and “com­mon­er fun­gi, with spe­cial empha­sis on the edi­ble vari­eties”; col­lec­tions of “things moth­er used to make” and, most prac­ti­cal­ly, a cook­book for left­overs. And there is every oth­er sort of cook­book and home ec man­u­al you could imag­ine. The archive is stuffed with help­ful hints, rare ingre­di­ents, unex­pect­ed region­al cook­eries, and mil­lions of minute details about the habits of these books’ first hun­gry read­ers.

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!

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Data­base of 5,000 His­tor­i­cal Cookbooks–Covering 1,000 Years of Food History–Is Now Online

Dis­cov­er the World’s Old­est Sur­viv­ing Cook­book, De Re Coquinar­ia, from Ancient Rome

A 13th-Cen­tu­ry Cook­book Fea­tur­ing 475 Recipes from Moor­ish Spain Gets Pub­lished in a New Trans­lat­ed Edi­tion

The World’s Old­est Cook­book: Dis­cov­er 4,000-Year-Old Recipes from Ancient Baby­lon

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

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How Egon Schiele Made Enduring Art from His Troubled Life and Times

in Art, History | September 4th, 2025

“May you live in inter­est­ing times,” goes the apoc­ryphal but nev­er­the­less much-invoked “Chi­nese curse.” Egon Schiele, born in the Aus­tria-Hun­gary of 1890, cer­tain­ly did live in inter­est­ing times, and his work, as fea­tured in the new Great Art Explained video above, can look like the cre­ations of a cursed man. That’s espe­cial­ly true of those of his many self-por­traits that, as host James Payne puts it, ren­der his own body “more ema­ci­at­ed than it actu­al­ly was, rad­i­cal­ly dis­tort­ed and twist­ed, some­times face­less or limb­less, some­times in abject ter­ror.” Here Schiele worked at “an inter­sec­tion of suf­fer­ing and sex, as if he is dis­gust­ed by his own body.”

Such a pre­oc­cu­pa­tion, as Payne sug­gests, may not seem com­plete­ly unrea­son­able in a man who wit­nessed his own father’s death from syphilis — caught from a pros­ti­tute, on the night of his wed­ding to Schiele’s moth­er — when he was still in ado­les­cence.

But what tends to occu­py most dis­cus­sions of Schiele’s art is less his famil­ial or psy­cho­log­i­cal back­ground than his line: the “thin line between beau­ty and suf­fer­ing” that clear­ly obsessed him, yes, but also the line cre­at­ed by the hand with which he drew and paint­ed. His art remains imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­niz­able today because “his line has a par­tic­u­lar rhythm: angu­lar, tense, and eco­nom­i­cal­ly placed. It’s not just a means of describ­ing form; it’s a voice.”

In this voice, Schiele com­posed not like­ness­es but “psy­cho­log­i­cal por­traits, a search for the self or the ego, a pre­oc­cu­pa­tion of the time.” The fig­ure of Sig­mund Freud loomed large over fin-de-siè­cle Vien­na, of course, and into the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, the city and its civ­i­liza­tion were “caught between the old impe­r­i­al order and mod­ern demo­c­ra­t­ic move­ments.” A “lab­o­ra­to­ry for psy­cho­analy­sis, rad­i­cal art, music, and taboo-break­ing lit­er­a­ture,” Vien­na had also giv­en rise to the career of Schiele’s men­tor Gus­tav Klimt. By the time Schiele hit his stride, he could express in his work “not just per­son­al dis­com­fort, but the sick­ness and fragili­ty of an entire soci­ety” — before he fell vic­tim to the Span­ish flu pan­dem­ic of 1918 at just 28 years old, along with his wife and unborn child. In a sense, he was unlucky to live when and where he did. But as his art also reminds us, we don’t mere­ly inhab­it our time and place; we’re cre­at­ed by them.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

New Dig­i­tal Archive Will Fea­ture the Com­plete Works of Egon Schiele: Start with 419 Paint­ings, Draw­ings & Sculp­tures

How Art Gets Stolen: What Hap­pened to Egon Schiele’s Paint­ing Boats Mir­rored in the Water After Its Theft by the Nazis

The Life & Art of Gus­tav Klimt: A Short Art His­to­ry Les­son on the Aus­tri­an Sym­bol­ist Painter and His Work

Gus­tav Klimt’s Icon­ic Paint­ing The Kiss: An Intro­duc­tion to Aus­tri­an Painter’s Gold­en, Erot­ic Mas­ter­piece (1908)

Great Art Explained: Watch 15 Minute Intro­duc­tions to Great Works by Warhol, Rothko, Kahlo, Picas­so & More

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.

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Behold an Anatomically Correct Replica of the Human Brain, Knitted by a Psychiatrist

in Art, Biology, Creativity | September 4th, 2025

Our brains dic­tate our every move.

They’re the ones who spur us to study hard, so we can make some­thing of our­selves, in order to bet­ter our com­mu­ni­ties.

They name our babies, choose our clothes, decide what we’re hun­gry for.

They make and break laws, orga­nize protests, frit­ter away hours on social media, and give us the green light to binge watch a bunch of dumb shows when we could be read­ing War and Peace.

They also plant the seeds for Fitz­car­ral­do-like cre­ative endeav­ors that take over our lives and gen­er­ate lit­tle to no income.

We may describe such endeav­ors as a labor of love, into which we’ve poured our entire heart and soul, but think for a sec­ond.

Who’s real­ly respon­si­ble here?

The heart, that mus­cu­lar fist-sized Valen­tine, con­tent to just pump-pump-pump its way through life, lub-dub, lub-dub, from cra­dle to grave?

Or the brain, a crafty Iago of an organ, pos­ses­sor of bil­lions of neu­rons, com­plex, con­tra­dic­to­ry, a mys­tery we’re far from unrav­el­ing?

Psy­chi­a­trist Dr. Karen Nor­berg’s brain has steered her to study such heavy duty sub­jects as the day­care effect, the rise in youth sui­cide, and the risk of pre­scrib­ing selec­tive sero­tonin reup­take inhibitors as a treat­ment for depres­sion.

On a lighter note, it also told her to devote nine months to knit­ting an anatom­i­cal­ly cor­rect repli­ca of the human brain.

(Twelve, if you count three months of research before cast­ing on.)

How did her brain con­vince her to embark on this mad­cap assign­ment?

Easy. It arranged for her to be in the mid­dle of a more pro­sa­ic knit­ting project, then goosed her into notic­ing how the ruf­fles of that project resem­bled the wrin­kles of the cere­bral cor­tex.

Coin­ci­dence?

Not like­ly. Espe­cial­ly when one of the cere­bral cor­tex’s most impor­tant duties is deci­sion mak­ing.

As she explained in an inter­view with The Tele­graph, brain devel­op­ment is not unlike the growth of a knit­ted piece:

You can see very nat­u­ral­ly how the ‘rip­pling’ effect of the cere­bral cor­tex emerges from prop­er­ties that prob­a­bly have to do with nerve cell growth. In the case of knit­ting, the effect is cre­at­ed by increas­ing the num­ber of stitch­es in each row.

Dr. Norberg—who, yes, has on occa­sion referred to her project as a labor of love—told Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can that such a mas­sive crafty under­tak­ing appealed to her sense of humor because “it seemed so ridicu­lous and would be an enor­mous­ly com­pli­cat­ed, absurd­ly ambi­tious thing to do.”

That’s the point at which many people’s brains would give them per­mis­sion to stop, but Dr. Nor­berg and her brain per­sist­ed, push­ing past the hypo­thet­i­cal, cre­at­ing col­or­ful indi­vid­ual struc­tures that were even­tu­al­ly sewn into two cud­dly hemi­spheres that can be joined with a zip­per.

(She also let slip that her brain—by which she means the knit­ted one, though the obser­va­tion cer­tain­ly holds true for the one in her head—is female, due to its robust cor­pus cal­lo­sum, the “tough body” whose mil­lions of fibers pro­mote com­mu­ni­ca­tion and con­nec­tion.)

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How to Rewire Your Brain in 6 Weeks: A BBC Reporter Explores How Every­day Life Changes Can Alter Our Brains

The Human Brain: A Free Online Course from MIT

The “Brain Dic­tio­nary”: Beau­ti­ful 3D Map Shows How Dif­fer­ent Brain Areas Respond to Hear­ing Dif­fer­ent Words

A Mas­sive, Knit­ted Tapes­try of the Galaxy: Soft­ware Engi­neer Hacks a Knit­ting Machine & Cre­ates a Star Map Fea­tur­ing 88 Con­stel­la­tions

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er.

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Hear the First Masterpiece of Electronic Music, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge

in Music | September 3rd, 2025

Karl­heinz Stock­hausen appears, among many oth­er cul­tur­al fig­ures, on the cov­er of Sgt. Pep­per’s Lone­ly Hearts Club Band. His inclu­sion was more than a trendy ges­ture toward the Euro­pean avant-garde; any­one who knows that path­break­ing elec­tron­ic com­poser’s work will notice its influ­ence on the album at first lis­ten. Paul McCart­ney him­self went on record with his notion that assum­ing the alter egos of the title would allow him and his fel­low Bea­t­les to branch out both cul­tur­al­ly and intel­lec­tu­al­ly in their music, incor­po­rat­ing pas­tich­es of Ravi Shankar, B. B. King, Albert Ayler, the Doors, the Beach Boys, and indeed Stock­hausen, whose Gesang der Jünglinge had already inspired “Tomor­row Nev­er Knows” on Revolver.

Lit­er­al­ly “Song of the Youths,” Gesang der Jünglinge was an ear­ly work for Stock­hausen, who com­posed it in 1954, when he was still a PhD stu­dent in com­mu­ni­ca­tions at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Bonn. Inspired by not just his tech­no­log­i­cal inter­ests but also his devout Catholi­cism, he decid­ed to cre­ate a mass for elec­tron­ic sounds and voic­es, with the intent to debut it at Cologne Cathe­dral. (Leg­end has it that he was rebuffed by reli­gious author­i­ties, who insist­ed that loud­speak­ers had no place in a house of wor­ship, but sources dis­agreed on whether he actu­al­ly sought their per­mis­sion in the first place.)

He drew its words from a pas­sage of the Old Tes­ta­ment sto­ry of three boys cast into the fire by King Neb­uchad­nez­zar for their refusal to wor­ship a gold­en idol and kept unharmed by the praise to God they sang amid the flames.

In Stock­hausen’s high-tech ren­der­ing, the boys are rep­re­sent­ed by the voice of twelve-year-old Josef Protsch­ka (who would grow up to become an acclaimed vocal­ist in his own right), and the fire by a col­lage of elec­tron­ic sounds. Though the com­poser’s manip­u­la­tions, part design and part chance, the human and mechan­i­cal halves of the piece become one: Protschka’s vocals break apart and reform into frag­ments of lan­guage nev­er before heard, and the arti­fi­cial­ly gen­er­at­ed tones bend uncan­ni­ly toward the sound of sung vow­els. All this, to say noth­ing of its play­back in five-chan­nel sound in a time when stereo was still a nov­el­ty, would have sound­ed deeply, even dis­turbing­ly unfa­mil­iar to the audi­ence at Gesang der Jünglinge’s pre­miere — and its impact prob­a­bly had­n’t been much dimin­ished by the time of the 2001 per­for­mance above. Stock­house­n’s music may have been after the shock of the new, but it also faced the eter­nal.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch Karl­heinz Stockhausen’s Great Heli­copter String Quar­tet, Star­ring 4 Musi­cians, 4 Cam­eras & 4 Copters

Pio­neer­ing Elec­tron­ic Com­pos­er Karl­heinz Stock­hausen Presents “Four Cri­te­ria of Elec­tron­ic Music” & Oth­er Lec­tures in Eng­lish (1972)

Hear Karl­heinz Stockhausen’s Pio­neer­ing Com­po­si­tions for Music Box­es

A Karl­heinz Stock­hausen Brand­ed Car: A Play­ful Trib­ute to the Ground­break­ing Elec­tron­ic Com­pos­er

“Tomor­row Nev­er Knows”: How The Bea­t­les Invent­ed the Future With Stu­dio Mag­ic, Tape Loops & LSD

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music in 476 Tracks (1937–2001)

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.

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The World’s Most Famous Organ Piece Played on the World’s Largest Fully Operational Pipe Organ

in Music | September 3rd, 2025

The world’s most famous organ piece, played on the world’s largest ful­ly func­tion­ing pipe organ. That’s what you have above. Here, organ­ist Dylan David Shaw per­forms Bach’s Toc­ca­ta and Fugue in D minor on the famous Wana­mak­er organ.

Orig­i­nal­ly built for the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, the organ end­ed up in Philadel­phi­a’s Wana­mak­er’s depart­ment store in 1911. More than a cen­tu­ry lat­er, the organ still resides in the same store. But Macy’s even­tu­al­ly took over Wanamaker’s, and Macy’s now plans to close the store, leav­ing the fate of the organ unknown. Where will the 28,000-pipe organ find a new home? That’s still TBD, some­thing that’s like­ly to get resolved in the months to come.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Down­load the Com­plete Organ Works of J.S. Bach for Free

Bohemi­an Rhap­sody Played on the Pipe Organ

The “All of Bach” Project Is Mak­ing Per­for­mances of Every Bach Piece Avail­able Online: Watch 346 High-Qual­i­ty Record­ings

Bach’s Most Famous Organ Piece Played on Wine Glass­es

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How Raphael Became A Master: Watch the Evolution of the Artist Through His Madonna Paintings

in Art, History | September 2nd, 2025

No artist became a Renais­sance mas­ter through a sin­gle piece of work, though now, half a mil­len­ni­um lat­er, that may be how most of us iden­ti­fy them. Leonar­do? Painter of the Mona Lisa. Michelan­ge­lo? Painter of the Sis­tine Chapel ceil­ing (or, per­haps, the sculp­tor of the most famous David, depend­ing on your medi­um of choice). Raphael? Painter of The School of Athens, as recent­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. Raphael paint­ed that mas­ter­work in Vat­i­can City’s Apos­tolic Palace between the years 1509 and 1511, when he was in his mid-twen­ties. Under­stand­ing how he could have attained that lev­el of skill by that age requires exam­in­ing his oth­er work, as Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer, does in the new video above.

Specif­i­cal­ly, Puschak exam­ines Raphael’s Madon­nas, a sub­ject to which he returned over and over again through­out the course of his short but pro­duc­tive career. In what seems to have been his first ren­di­tion of Mary and her holy son, Puschak says, “you can see that Raphael has a bet­ter sense of three-dimen­sion­al bod­ies and how to make them feel like they’re part of the space that they’re in” than his father, who’d been a well-regard­ed painter him­self, or even than Piero del­la Francesca, from whom his father learned.

“Yet the paint­ing also suf­fers from “an awk­ward­ness in the arrange­ment of the fig­ures,” as well as a lack of “emo­tion, rela­tion­ships, or any sense of nar­ra­tive” — much like “a thou­sand oth­er Madon­nas that came before.”

Yet Raphael was a quick study, a trait reflect­ed in the devel­op­ment of the many Madon­nas he paint­ed there­after. From Leonar­do he learned tech­niques like sfu­ma­to, the cre­ation of soft tran­si­tions between col­ors; from Michelan­ge­lo, “how to use the human body as an expres­sive tool.” But what most clear­ly emerges is the con­cept con­tem­po­rary the­o­rist Leon Bat­tista Alber­ti called his­to­ria: a nar­ra­tive that plays out even with­in the con­fines of a sta­t­ic image. In Raphael’s cir­cu­lar, abun­dant­ly detailed Alba Madon­na of 1511, Puschak sees the infant Jesus “not so much tak­ing as grab­bing his future and pulling it clos­er” as Mary looks on with emo­tions sub­tly lay­ered into her face. How, exact­ly, Raphael honed his instinct for dra­ma is a ques­tion for art his­to­ri­ans. But would it be too much of a reach to guess that he also learned a thing or two from his time as a stage-set design­er?

Relat­ed con­tent:

Pla­to, Aris­to­tle & Oth­er Greek Philoso­phers in Raphael’s Renais­sance Mas­ter­piece, The School of Athens

Artist Turns Famous Paint­ings, from Raphael to Mon­et to Licht­en­stein, Into Inno­v­a­tive Sound­scapes

Why Leonar­do da Vinci’s Great­est Paint­ing is Not the Mona Lisa

The Evo­lu­tion of The Great Wave off Kana­gawa: See Four Ver­sions That Hoku­sai Paint­ed Over Near­ly 40 Years

14 Self-Por­traits by Pablo Picas­so Show the Evo­lu­tion of His Style: See Self-Por­traits Mov­ing from Ages 15 to 90

The Evo­lu­tion of Kandinsky’s Paint­ing: A Jour­ney from Real­ism to Vibrant Abstrac­tion Over 46 Years

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.

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A Massive Choir Sings “Paranoid” to Honor Ozzy Osbourne

in Music | September 2nd, 2025

In Toron­to, 7,000 singers par­tic­i­pat­ed in Choir Choir Choir’s trib­ute to Ozzy Osbourne, all tak­ing part in a giant sing-along of “Para­noid.”  The first sin­gle on Black Sab­bath’s sec­ond album (1970), “Para­noid” reached #4 in the UK mar­ket and put Sab­bath on the map. The song also became an ear­ly heavy met­al clas­sic. Watch Sab­bath per­form the song live in 1970 here; or watch them per­form it for the very last time on July 5, 2025 here. Then enjoy the Choir Choir Choir trib­ute above.

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Watch David Byrne Lead a Mas­sive Choir in Singing David Bowie’s “Heroes”

Watch The Nine Lives of Ozzy Osbourne: A Free Doc­u­men­tary on the Heavy Met­al Pio­neer (RIP)

Ozzy Osbourne’s Gui­tarist Zakk Wylde Plays Black Sab­bath on a Hel­lo Kit­ty Gui­tar

Kids Orches­tra Plays Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” and Zeppelin’s “Kash­mir”

Pat­ti Smith Sings “Peo­ple Have the Pow­er” with a Choir of 250 Fel­low Singers

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Empire Without Limit: Watch Mary Beard’s TV Series on Ancient Rome

in History, Television | September 1st, 2025

As the found­ing myth has it, the city of Rome was estab­lished by a man named Romu­lus, one of two orphaned twin broth­ers raised by a she-wolf on the banks of the Tiber riv­er. The leg­end of Romu­lus and Remus, which involves the for­mer’s frat­ri­ci­dal slay­ing of the lat­ter, lends itself to strik­ing imagery, though it also gives forth more ques­tions than answers. “The Latin for wolf, lupa, also means pros­ti­tute,” for exam­ple, “so was it actu­al­ly a pros­ti­tute who came to the res­cue?” So asks his­to­ri­an Mary Beard in Rome: Empire With­out Lim­it, a four-part series you can watch in its entire­ty above.

In a sense, the sto­ry works either way: the mor­tal clash of broth­er against broth­er makes for a recur­ring metaphor­i­cal theme in the long his­to­ry of Rome, but so does the irre­press­ible pow­er of com­merce. Criss­cross­ing the Euro­pean con­ti­nent, Great Britain, the Mediter­ranean, and Africa by car, boat, bicy­cle, sub­way train, and above all on foot, Beard uses the traces of the might­i­est ancient empire to explain how the whole oper­a­tion actu­al­ly worked, and what its day-to-day expe­ri­ence was like for its sub­jects. When it orig­i­nal­ly aired in 2016, Empire With­out Lim­it fol­lowed up her acclaimed book SPQR: A His­to­ry of Ancient Rome, which cov­ers some of the same themes.

Those who’ve fol­lowed Beard’s work in print, on tele­vi­sion, or in oth­er media know that her ver­sion of Roman his­to­ry is hard­ly anoth­er suc­ces­sion of emper­ors and mil­i­tary cam­paigns. While she does devote time to dis­cussing such sig­nal fig­ures as Julius Cae­sar (who def­i­nite­ly did­n’t say “Et tu, Brute?”), Augus­tus, Hadri­an, and Con­stan­tine, she dis­plays equal or greater inter­est in a four-year-old sil­ver min­er in what’s now Spain, say, or an anony­mous young woman the shape of whose skull sug­gests the extent of migra­tion with­in the empire. And just as wor­thy of con­sid­er­a­tion as any par­tic­u­lar Roman cit­i­zen­ship is the con­cept of Roman cit­i­zen­ship itself, which ulti­mate­ly extend­ed across the vastest empire the world had ever known.

All roads lead to Rome, as the say­ing goes, and in the hey­day of the Roman empire, as Beard points out, it was actu­al­ly true. The ancient Romans were the first to build what she calls “a joined-up world,” where get­ting on a path in Rome and fol­low­ing it could get you all the way to places like Spain or Greece. (And also unprece­dent­ed­ly, you could take a glance at mile mark­ers along that road and imme­di­ate­ly “place your­self in the world.”) Roman dom­i­nance may have end­ed long ago, but the parts of the world have con­tin­ued to join up in much the same way since, and indeed, the broad Roman world­view sur­vives. As Beard puts it, “there’s a lit­tle bit of the Romans in the head of every one of us” — espe­cial­ly those of us who think about their empire every day.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Ancient Rome in 20 Quick Min­utes: A Primer Nar­rat­ed by Bri­an Cox

A Map Show­ing How the Ancient Romans Envi­sioned the World in 40 AD

How Rome Began: The His­to­ry As Told by Ancient His­to­ri­ans

Is Amer­i­ca Declin­ing Like Ancient Rome?

Do You Think About Ancient Rome Every Day? Then Browse a Wealth of Videos, Maps & Pho­tos That Explore the Roman Empire

Rick Steves’ Europe: Binge Watch 11 Sea­sons of America’s Favorite Trav­el­er Free Online

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.

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What Makes Picasso’s Guernica a Great Painting?: Explore the Anti-Fascist Mural That Became a Worldwide Anti-War Symbol

in Art | September 1st, 2025

A paint­ing is not thought out and set­tled in advance. While it is being done, it changes as one’s thoughts change. And when it’s fin­ished, it goes on chang­ing, accord­ing to the state of mind of who­ev­er is look­ing at it. — Pablo Picas­so

In a famous sto­ry about Guer­ni­ca, Pablo Picasso’s wrench­ing 1937 anti-war mur­al, a gestapo offi­cer barges into the painter’s Paris stu­dio and asks, “did you do that?”, to which Picas­so acer­bical­ly replies, “you did.” The title refers to the 1937 bomb­ing of a Basque town dur­ing the Span­ish Civ­il War, car­ried out by Span­ish Nation­al­ists and the Luft­waffe. Whether or not the anec­dote about Picas­so and the Nazi ever hap­pened is unim­por­tant; it encap­su­lates the artist’s dis­gust and out­rage over the atroc­i­ties of war and the takeover of his coun­try by Fran­co’s Nation­al­ists, unyield­ing sen­ti­ments found not only in the paint­ing but also its path through the world.

“Guer­ni­ca had this real­ly unique rela­tion­ship with Picas­so and his life,” says art his­to­ri­an Patri­cia Fail­ing. “In a way it was his alter ego.” This is a bold claim con­sid­er­ing that dur­ing most of his career, “Picas­so gen­er­al­ly avoids pol­i­tics,” notes PBS, “and dis­dains overt­ly polit­i­cal art.” After the mural’s exhi­bi­tion at the Span­ish Pavil­ion of the 1937 Paris World’s Fair, how­ev­er, the paint­ing was sent on tours of Europe and North Amer­i­ca “to raise con­scious­ness about the threat of fas­cism.”

In 1939, after the fall of Madrid, the artist declared, “The paint­ing will be turned over to the gov­ern­ment of the Span­ish Repub­lic the day the Repub­lic is restored in Spain!”  Then, almost 30 years lat­er,

In a sur­pris­ing­ly iron­ic turn, Fran­co launched a cam­paign in 1968 for repa­tri­a­tion of the paint­ing, assur­ing Picas­so that the Span­ish Gov­ern­ment had no objec­tion to the con­tro­ver­sial sub­ject mat­ter. One can only imag­ine how incred­u­lous Picas­so must have been. Through his lawyers, Picas­so turned the offer down flat, mak­ing it clear that Guer­ni­ca would be turned over only when democ­ra­cy and pub­lic lib­er­ties were restored to Spain.

Picas­so died in 1973 and nev­er saw his coun­try free from fas­cism. Fran­co died two years lat­er. The paint­ing was not exhib­it­ed in Spain until 1981 — not a “return,” but a restora­tion, per­haps, of an inter­na­tion­al icon that had endured 44 years of exile, had become a potent anti-war sym­bol dur­ing the Viet­nam War, and had sur­vived a van­dal attack the year after the artist’s death.

In the Great Art Explained video above, James Payne “looks at some of the more acknowl­edged inter­pre­ta­tions along with tech­niques, com­po­si­tion and artis­tic inspi­ra­tion,” as the video’s descrip­tion notes. “We all know that Art is not truth,” Picas­so said, con­sis­tent­ly dis­cour­ag­ing tidy inter­pre­ta­tions of Guer­ni­ca as a straight­for­ward protest paint­ing. “Art is a lie that makes us real­ize truth.” What do we real­ize when we stand before the mur­al — all 11 by 25 feet of it? It depends upon our state of mind, the artist might say, as he engulfs view­ers in an alle­gor­i­cal night­mare stand­ing in for a very real hor­ror.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2021.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch Pablo Picasso’s Cre­ative Process Unfold in Real-Time: Rare Footage Shows Him Cre­at­ing Draw­ings of Faces, Bulls & Chick­ens

The Gestapo Points to Guer­ni­ca and Asks Picas­so, “Did You Do This?;” Picas­so Replies “No, You Did!”

Guer­ni­ca: Alain Resnais’ Haunt­ing Film on Picasso’s Paint­ing & the Crimes of the Span­ish Civ­il War

The Mys­tery of Picas­so: Land­mark Film of a Leg­endary Artist at Work, by Hen­ri-Georges Clouzot

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

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