Patti Smith Reads Sylvia Plath’s Poem, “The Moon and the Yew Tree”

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Court Green, the rural Devon property Sylvia Plath called home for sixteen months toward the end of her life is a popular pilgrimage for Plathophiles, seeking to worship at the wellspring of some of her best known poems – The Bee Meeting, Daddy, Lady Lazarus, and many other works posthumously published in 1965’s Ariel.

(Her ex-husband Ted Hughes wrote his collection, Crow, there as well, not long after Plath died by suicide. Something tells us his widow, Carol, a staunch defender of her husband’s legacy, doesn’t exactly roll out the welcome mat when she sees starry eyed devotee’s of her husband’s first wife tromping around the perimeter of the property where she still lives…)

Plath scholar Dorka Tamás made the trip to St. Peter’s, the North Tawton church abutting Court Green. Plath took pleasure in describing its grounds in letters to friends and family, and immoratlized its massive yew in “The Moon and the Yew Tree”:

I looked around the Victorian gravestones, slowly passing the souls of the […]

The 50 Greatest Music Videos of All Time, Ranked by AV Club

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It’s not an especially straightforward matter to pin down when music videos first emerged. In a sense, the Beatles were already making them back in the late sixties, but then, MTV, where the music video as we know it rapidly took shape, didn’t start broadcasting until 1981. The very first video aired…

“Doctor, My Eyes” Performed by Jackson Browne & Musicians Around the World

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The music collective Playing for Change is back. This time, they have Jackson Browne performing his 1970s hit, “Doctor, My Eyes,” supported by musicians from Brazil, Jamaica, India, Puerto Rico, France and beyond. Browne is also joined by Leland Sklar and Russ Kunkel, who played on the original 1972 song, and they still sound…

The Earliest Surviving Photos of Iran: Photos from 1850s-60s Capture Everything from Grand Palaces to the Ruins of Persepolis

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The technology and art of photography emerged in nineteenth-century Europe. And so, when a part of the world outside Europe was well-photographed in those days, it tended to be a traveling European behind the camera. Take John Thomson, previously featured here on Open Culture, for his photos of China in the eighteen-seventies.…

Coffee Connoisseur James Hoffmann Reviews a $20,000 Espresso Maker

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It costs roughly $20,000, weighs nearly 100 pounds, and looks like a high-end microscope. Handmade in Switzerland, the MANUMENT Leva Machine makes espresso. How well does it make espresso? How do the shots taste?: According to coffee expert James Hoffmann–he’s the author of The World Atlas of Coffee—the shots have a texture that…