As an Open Culture reader, you surely enjoy a vast range of interests, and what serves as a more robust nexus of interests than the modern city? Each city produces an infinitude of fascinating case studies in architecture, economics, politics, and social psychology.

What’s surprising about Everest Base Camp is the color. It’s a flinty, gray place littered with shards of Himalayan sandstone and shale. Here and there appears a vivid green pool of alpine water. And then there’s the red, blue and green prayer flags hung by Himalayans to blow blessings in the wind.

When television broadcaster Huell Howser passed away last month, we Southern Californians realized just how far his persona reached. The cliché “larger than life” seems, in this light, almost apt; it describes his famously voluble enthusiasm, larger than the broadly local life he explored on camera.

With Google’s Street View we can amble through New York City’s High Line Park, around the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad, and down the cobbled streets of Ouro Preto, Brazil.

What is it with Britons and trains, anyway? Hardly just the title of collection of Irvine Welsh’s stories of heroin and degradation, the term “trainspotting” actually refers to a real, and fervently pursued hobby; trainspotters exist, just as do birdwatchers and sports fans.

The Japanese have a word for it: kuidaore, “to eat oneself bankrupt.” This has risen to some combination of tradition and aspiration in Osaka, Japan’s second-largest city, a former merchant enclave once referred to as the country’s “kitchen.

With 3D scale models, music, and video, Google’s Versailles 3D brings the best of 21st century web arts to 18th century art history. The palace was built by Louis XIV, the “Sun King,” who exemplified all of the authoritarian excesses of the French monarchy.

It’s not the first timelapse video of Venice, and it certainly won’t be the last. You can bank on that. But what distinguishes this clip from the others is its continual focus on the canals that make Venice, Venice. Gives this video three minutes and it will give you a full day in the life of Venetian waterways.

Google Street View launched in 2007, giving web users the ability to tour neighborhoods with a series of 360° panoramic maps. The technology seemed pretty straightforward … until people realized that it wasn’t.

ABC’s period drama Pan Am may have come to an end two weeks ago, but if you look hard enough, you can still find a few Pan American World Airways-inspired media.