Hear a Recently-Discovered 12,000-Year-Old Flute That Musically Mimics the Sound of Raptor Calls

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Here on Open Culture, we’ve featured ancient wind instruments going back 9,000, 18,000, even 43,000 years. Just this month, archaeological research has just added a new item to this venerable lineup: a set of 12,000-year-old flutes made from the bones of birds. “The instruments are among the oldest in the world and,…

Behold a 19th-Century Atlas of the United States, Designed for Blind Students (1837)

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In 1835, the New England Institution for Education of the Blind (now known as Perkins School for the Blind) acquired a printing press.

Under the leadership of its first director, Samuel Gridley Howe, the press was customized in order to print in raised text that allowed blind and visually impaired people…

When Henri Matisse Was 90 Years Old, He Couldn’t Go to His Favorite Swimming Pool, So He Created a Swimming Pool as a Work of Art

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I will die from the heat, take me home. I will make my own Pool. – Henri Matisse

Representing water is an elusive proposition for many artists, especially when it’s not posing placidly on a windless, moonlit evening.

In the summer of 1952, Henri Matisse headed to a favorite Cannes swimming pool…

What Is Gender Theory? Berkeley Professor Judith Butler Explains

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Nobody who keeps up with current discourse could fail to notice that gender has become a fraught topic in recent years. This condition can hardly have gone unforeseen by the theorist Judith Butler, who published the now-well-known volume Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity back in 1990. “Everybody has a theory…

Discover The Plastics, the Influential Japanese New Wave Band from the 1980s

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Brian Eno famously said of the Velvet Underground that, though their debut album didn’t sell well, everyone who bought a copy started a band. One could, perhaps, make a similar remark about a new wave band called The Plastics, who formed a decade or so later on the other side of the Pacific. They recorded…