Last month, we delved into a proposal to use digital technology to clone the 2,500-year-old Parthenon Marbles currently housed in the British Museum.

The hope is that such uncanny facsimiles might finally convince museum Trustees and the British government to return the originals to Athens.

Today, we’ll take a closer look at just how these treasures of antiquity, known to many as the Elgin marbles, wound up so far afield.

The most obvious culprit is Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin, who initiated the takeover while serving as Britain’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1798-1803.

Prior to setting sail for this posting, he hatched a plan to assemble a documentary team who would sketch and create plaster molds of the Parthenon marbles for the eventual edification of artists and architects back home. Better yet, he’d get the British government to pay for it.

The British government, eying the massive price tag of such a proposal, passed.

So Elgin used some of his heiress wife’s fortune to finance the project himself, hiring landscape painter Giovanni Battista Lusieri – described by […]

We know that Neil deGrasse Tyson was something of a wunderkind during his high school years. If you’re an OC regular, you’ve read all about how Carl Sagan personally recruited Tyson to study with him at Cornell. Deftly, politely, the young Tyson declined and went to Harvard.

There’s perhaps another side of the precocious Tyson you might not know as much about. The athletic side. While a student at The Bronx High School of Science, Tyson (class of 1976) wore basketball sneakers belonging to the Knick’s Walt “Clyde” Frazier. He ran an impressive 4:25 mile. And he captained the school’s wrestling team, during which time he conjured up a new-fangled wrestling move. In professional wrestling, Ric Flair had the dreaded Figure Four Leg Lock, and Jimmy Snuka, a devastating Superfly Splash. Tyson? He had the feared “Double Tidal Lock.” He explains and demonstrates the physics-based move in the video below, originally recorded at the University of Indianapolis.

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Great news for Open Culture readers. Taschen, the publisher of beautiful art books, is running its biannual warehouse sale. It starts today and runs through Sunday, February 5. This sale gives you the chance to buy art books at nicely discounted prices–anywhere from 25% to 75% off. Here’s a list of some notable picks, and remember that the books tend to sell out quickly:

• Berlin 1920s
• Japanese Woodblock Prints
• The Star Wars Archives. 1977–1983
• The Cabinet of Natural Curiosities
• Dalí, Tarot
• Jean-Michel Basquiat
• Leonardo. The Complete Paintings and Drawings
• Warhol and Basquiat
• Hokusai. Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji
• The World’s Most Beautiful Libraries
• Egypt, People, Gods & Pharaohs
• Covers, Jazz Records
• The Complete Films of Alfred Hitchcock
• William Blake Complete Drawings of Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’
• The Stanley Kubrick Archives
• Bauhaus
• Film Noir

See all of the books in the sale here.

Note that Taschen is a partner of ours. So if you purchase […]

A recent Pew Research Center survey found that nearly one in five American teenagers is on Youtube “almost constantly.” Ten years ago, the figure surely wouldn’t have been that high, and twenty years ago, of course, Youtube didn’t exist at all. But today, no enterprise directed at teenagers can afford to ignore it: that goes for pop music and fashion, of course, but also for education. Most kids just starting college are on Youtube, but so are those about to start college, those taking time off from college, and those unsure of whether they’re willing or able to go to college at all. Hence College Foundation, a new extension of Youtube channel Study Hall, the product of a partnership between Arizona State University, YouTube and Crash Course.

Crash Course has long produced video series that, both entertainingly and at length, cover subjects taught in school from history to literature to philosophy and beyond. The College Foundation’s program will make it possible not just to learn on Study Hall, but […]

“The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,” declares the opening poem in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot. But the possibilities are many and varied: “Peter, Augustus, Alonzo or James”; “Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter”; “Munkustrap, Quaxo, or Coricopat.” Things must have been  less complicated in the Middle Ages, when you could just call a cat Gyb and be done with it. “The shortened form of the male name Gilbert, Gyb” explains Kathleen Walker-Meikle in Medieval Cats, dates as “a popular name for individual pet cats” at least back to the late fourteenth century.

In a slightly different form, the name even appears in Shakespeare, when Falstaff describes himself as “as melancholy as a gib cat.” Gyb’s equivalent across the Chanel was Tibers or Tibert; the sixteenth-century French poet Joachim du Bellay kept a “beloved gray cat” named Belaud.

Legal texts reveal that the Irish went in for “cat names that refer to the animal’s physical appearance,” like Méone (“little meow”), Cruibne (“little paws”), and Bréone (“little […]