William Shakespeare’s plays have endured not just because of their inherent dramatic and linguistic qualities, but also because each era has found its own way of envisioning and re-envisioning them. The technology involved in stage productions has changed over the past four centuries, of course, but so has the technology involved in art itself. A few years ago, we featured here on Open Culture an archive of 3,000 illustrations of Shakespeare’s complete works going back to the mid-nineteenth century. That site was the PhD project of Cardiff University’s Michael Goodman, who has recently completed another digital Shakespeare project, this time using artificial intelligence: Paint the Picture to the Word.

“Every image collected here has been generated by Stable Diffusion, a powerful text-to-image AI,” writes Goodman on this new project’s About page. “To create an image using this technology a user simply types a description of what they want to see into a text box and […]

There’s a passage from Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions that crosses our desk a lot at this time of year. It’s the one in which he declares Armistice Day, which coincidentally falls on his birthday, sacred:

What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.

And all music is.

Here, here!

Hopefully Shakespeare won’t take umbrage if we skip over his doomed teenaged lovers to celebrate Kurt Vonnegut’s 11/11 Centennial with songs inspired by his work.

Take the Kilgore Trout Experience’s tribute to Sirens of Titan, above.

The driving force behind the KTE Tim Langsford, a drummer who mentors Autistic students at the University of Plymouth, was looking for ways to help his “foggy mind remember the key concepts, characters, and memorable lines that occur in each” of Vonnegut’s 14 books.

The solution? Community and accountability to an ongoing assignment. Langsford launched the Plymouth Vonnegut Collective in 2019 with a typewritten manifesto, inviting interested parties to read (or re-read) the novels in publication order, then gather for monthly discussions.

His loftier goal […]

The popularity of the phrase “style over substance” has encouraged us to assume an inherent and absolute divide between those concepts. But as the most ambitious works of man remind us, style pushed to its limits its substance, and vice versa. This truth has been expressed in various specialized ways: architect Louis Sullivan’s maxim “form follows function,” for example, which went on to attain something like scriptural status among modernists of the mid-twentieth century. It was in that same era that aerospace engineering produced one of the most glorious proofs of the unity of style and substance, form and function, mechanics and aesthetics: Concorde, the supersonic jetliner that flew between 1976 and 2003.

Nobody who flew on Concorde (colloquially but not officially “the” Concorde) has forgotten it. The sharpness and length of its ascent; the thrust of the after-burner, pressing you into your seat like the acceleration of a high-performance sports car; the visible curvature of the Earth and the deep purple of the sky; the impeccable food and drink service that turned a flight between New York and London into […]

Few countries love cats as much as Japan does, and none expresses that love so clearly in its various forms of art. Though not eternal, the Japanese inclination toward all things feline does extend deeper into history than some of us might assume. “In the sixth century, Buddhist monks travelled from China to Japan,” writes Philip Kennedy at Illustration Chronicles. On these journeys, they brought scriptures, drawings, and relics – items that they hoped would help them introduce the teachings of Buddhism to the large island nation.” They also brought cats, in part as carriers of good luck and in part for their ability to “guard the sacred texts from the hungry mice that had stowed on board their ships.”

Buddhism made a lasting mark on Japanese culture, but those cats practically overtook it. “Today, cats can be found nearly everywhere in Japan,” Kennedy writes. “From special cafés and shrines to entire cat islands. Indeed the owners of one Japanese train station were so […]

If you have a question about coffee, James Hoffmann probably has an answer. The author of The World Atlas of Coffee, Hoffmann has developed a robust YouTube channel where he explores the ins-and-outs of making coffee–from how to buy great coffee, to making excellent coffee with The Chemex and the Bialetti Moka pot, to grinding coffee with the right gear. And don’t forget the magic of adding salt to coffee.

Above, in a new video created by Wired, Hoffmann continues his educational mission, “answer[ing] the internet’s burning questions about coffee. What’s the difference between drip and pour over coffee? What’s the difference between iced coffee and cold brew? Does darker roast coffee have more caffeine?” Taken together, he covers a lot of ground in 22 minutes.

Related Content 

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about the Bialetti Moka Express: A Deep Dive Into Italy’s Most Popular Coffee Maker

The Bialetti Moka Express: […]