How to Make Sure You Get Open Culture in Your Facebook Newsfeed: Now You Can Take Control

in Media, Technology | July 9th, 2015

For the longest time, Face­book gave you no abil­i­ty to con­trol what con­tent you see in your Face­book news­feed. Some 378,000 peo­ple have “liked” our Face­book page. But only a frac­tion actu­al­ly see Open Cul­ture posts in their news­feed. That’s because a Face­book algo­rithm start­ed mak­ing the deci­sions for you, show­ing you mate­r­i­al from some people/publishers, and not oth­ers.

Now, Face­book has final­ly intro­duced a new fea­ture that will let you con­trol what you see. Please check out the instruc­tions below. When you’re done read­ing them, con­sid­er giv­ing us a Like on Face­book, and then set your news­feed accord­ing­ly. (You get bonus points if you Fol­low us on Twit­ter too!)

• If you’re using a mobile phone, open the Face­book app, click the “More” icon along the bot­tom of the app, then scroll down and click “News­feed pref­er­ences,” then click “Pri­or­i­tize who to see first,” and make your picks. (You can select more than one item.)
• If you’re using Face­book on a com­put­er, click on the down­ward fac­ing arrow on the top nav bar, then click “News­feed pref­er­ences,” locate one of the peo­ple or pub­lish­ers you fol­low, and change the set­ting from “Fol­low­ing” to “See First.”

Hope all of that makes sense.

Open Culture Goes Mobile: Your Feedback Requested

in Random | October 28th, 2010

A quick note for our read­ers: This week, we soft launched a new mobile web site for Open Cul­ture – one designed to give our read­ers the abil­i­ty to access Open Cul­ture con­tent with far greater ease on their smart­phones. If you have an iPhone, iPod Touch, Android phone (or any phone with an advanced web brows­er), you should be able to read our posts, watch videos, and lis­ten to audio much more clean­ly, no mat­ter where you are. Sim­ply pick up your phone, vis­it any page on openculture.com, and you will see what I mean.

This mobile site is still in “beta.” So if you expe­ri­ence any prob­lems, or have any feed­back, please send it our way. We want your input. And, if you don’t pre­fer the mobile site, you can always turn it off. Just scroll to the bot­tom of the mobile page and click “Switch to Stan­dard View.”

Final­ly, as you can imag­ine, this project required some time and expense. If you can com­fort­ably afford it, please con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion via Pay­Pal to sup­port this ini­tia­tive and oth­ers like it. And if you can’t swing it, that’s a‑okay. Maybe just tell a friend about the site (or about our Free iPhone app) and oth­er­wise enjoy the ride.

Thanks for any feed­back you might have, and hope you enjoy the mobile ver­sion of Open Cul­ture.

The New Design and Your Feedback

in Uncategorized | January 28th, 2009

As you prob­a­bly know, Open Cul­ture launched a new look last week, and it seemed worth devot­ing a few words to it. With the new design, I was hop­ing to give the site a more invit­ing look and stream­line the over­all nav­i­ga­tion. I was also hop­ing to make it clear that user con­tri­bu­tions are always wel­come. If you have tips on good media, send them our way. And if you ever want to write a guest blog post, please feel free to let me know what you have in mind. The more indi­vid­ual read­ers con­tribute, the more our com­mu­ni­ty of read­ers ben­e­fits.

I def­i­nite­ly want to send a word of thanks to the folks at Rolling Orange, who han­dled all of the design and imple­men­ta­tion. An excel­lent group to work with. Also, I want to thank Eric Ober­le who has been very gen­er­ous with his tech sup­port since the begin­ning.

Last­ly, this is a great time to ask you what you would like to see from Open Cul­ture in the future. What should the site do more of? What should it do less of? What good things haven’t we thought about? Your input would be real­ly appre­ci­at­ed. Feel free to send thoughts from the con­tact page, or add any thoughts in the com­ments sec­tion below. Thanks in advance to all…

University Course Collection Now Updated with RSS Feeds

in Uncategorized | July 24th, 2007 Read More...

What Feed Readers Don’t See on Open Culture

in Uncategorized | June 28th, 2007 Read More...

Open Culture Podcast Directories Viewable in Feed Readers

in Uncategorized | February 19th, 2007

The only down­side to using a feed read­er (Blog­lines, Google Read­er, MyYa­hoo, etc.) to access Open Cul­ture
is that you won’t be able to see our pod­cast direc­to­ries which reside
in our left nav bar. To assist you, we have past­ed links below that
will give you direct access to the pod­cast col­lec­tions. We’ll post this reminder from time to time.

• Arts & Cul­ture Pod­casts
• Audio Book Pod­casts
• For­eign Lan­guage Les­son Pod­casts
• News & Infor­ma­tion Pod­casts
• Tech­nol­o­gy Pod­casts
• Uni­ver­si­ty Pod­casts- All
• Uni­ver­si­ty Pod­casts — Busi­ness School

If you like what we’re doing here, please email your friends and let them know about Open Cul­ture.

If you need a new/bigger iPod or iPod Gear to lis­ten to our pod­casts, vis­it our new Ama­zon store.

Open Culture Podcast Directories Viewable in Feed Readers

in Uncategorized | January 17th, 2007

The only down­side to using a feed read­er (Blog­lines, Google Read­er, MyYa­hoo, etc.) to access Open Cul­ture is that you won’t be able to see our pod­cast direc­to­ries which reside in our left nav bar. To assist you, we have past­ed links below that will give you direct access to the pod­cast col­lec­tions. Book­mark & enjoy.

• Arts & Cul­ture Pod­casts
• Audio Book Pod­casts
• For­eign Lan­guage Les­son Pod­casts
• News & Infor­ma­tion Pod­casts
• Tech­nol­o­gy Pod­casts
• Uni­ver­si­ty Pod­casts

RIP Gladys Mae West, the Pioneering Black Mathematician Who Helped Lay the Foundation for GPS

in History, Math, Technology | January 28th, 2026

Gladys Mae West was born in rur­al Vir­ginia in 1930, grew up work­ing on a tobac­co farm, and died ear­li­er this month a cel­e­brat­ed math­e­mati­cian whose work made pos­si­ble the GPS tech­nol­o­gy most of us use each and every day. Hers was a dis­tinc­tive­ly Amer­i­can life, in more ways than one. Seek­ing an escape from the agri­cul­tur­al labor she’d already got­ten to know all too well, she won a schol­ar­ship to Vir­ginia State Col­lege by becom­ing her high school class vale­dic­to­ri­an; after earn­ing her bach­e­lor’s and mas­ter’s degrees in math­e­mat­ics, she taught for a time and then applied for a job at the naval base up in Dahlgren. She first dis­tin­guished her­self there by ver­i­fy­ing the accu­ra­cy of bomb­ing tables with a hand cal­cu­la­tor, and from there moved on up to the com­put­er pro­gram­ming team.

This was the ear­ly nine­teen-six­ties, when pro­gram­ming a com­put­er meant not cod­ing, but labo­ri­ous­ly feed­ing punch cards into an enor­mous main­frame. West and her col­leagues used IBM’s first tran­sis­tor­ized machine, the 7030 (or “Stretch”), which was for a few years the fastest com­put­er in the world.

It cost an equiv­a­lent of $81,860,000 in today’s dol­lars, but no oth­er com­put­er had the pow­er to han­dle the project of cal­cu­lat­ing the pre­cise shape of Earth as affect­ed by grav­i­ty and the nature of the oceans. About a decade lat­er, anoth­er team of gov­ern­ment sci­en­tists made use of those very same cal­cu­la­tions when putting togeth­er the mod­el employed by the World Geo­det­ic Sys­tem, which GPS satel­lites still use today. Hence the ten­den­cy of cel­e­bra­to­ry obit­u­ar­ies to under­score the point that with­out West­’s work, GPS would­n’t be pos­si­ble.

Nor do any of them neglect to point out the fact that West was black, one of just four such math­e­mati­cians work­ing for the Navy at Dahlgren. Sto­ries like hers have drawn much greater pub­lic inter­est since the suc­cess of Hid­den Fig­ures, the Hol­ly­wood adap­ta­tion of Mar­got Lee Shet­ter­ly’s book about the black female math­e­mati­cians at NASA dur­ing the Space Race. When that movie came out, in 2016, even West­’s own chil­dren did­n’t know the impor­tance of the once-clas­si­fied work she’d done. Only in 2018, when she pro­vid­ed that infor­ma­tion on a bio­graph­i­cal form she filled out for an event host­ed by her col­lege soror­i­ty, did it become pub­lic. She thus spent the last years of her long life as a celebri­ty, sought out by aca­d­e­mics and jour­nal­ists eager to under­stand the con­tri­bu­tions of anoth­er no-longer-hid­den fig­ure. But to their ques­tions about her own GPS use, she report­ed­ly answered that she pre­ferred a good old-fash­ioned paper map.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Mar­garet Hamil­ton, Lead Soft­ware Engi­neer of the Apol­lo Project, Stands Next to Her Code That Took Us to the Moon (1969)

Women’s Hid­den Con­tri­bu­tions to Mod­ern Genet­ics Get Revealed by New Study: No Longer Will They Be Buried in the Foot­notes

Meet Grace Hop­per, the Pio­neer­ing Com­put­er Sci­en­tist Who Helped Invent COBOL and Build the His­toric Mark I Com­put­er (1906–1992)

Joce­lyn Bell Bur­nell Dis­cov­ered Radio Pul­sars in 1974, But the Cred­it Went to Her Advi­sor; In 2018, She Gets Her Due, Win­ning a $3 Mil­lion Physics Prize

Hen­ri­et­ta Lacks Gets Immor­tal­ized in a Por­trait: It’s Now on Dis­play at the Nation­al Por­trait Gallery

Black His­to­ry in Two Min­utes: Watch 93 Videos Writ­ten & Nar­rat­ed by Hen­ry Louis Gates Jr.

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Can Genius Be Taught? The Polgár Sisters and the Experiment That Put the Question to the Test

in Education, Games | January 8th, 2026

As any new par­ent soon finds out, there exists a robust mar­ket for prod­ucts, ser­vices, and media that promise to boost a child’s intel­li­gence. Some of these offer­ings come as close as legal­ly pos­si­ble to hold­ing out the promise of putting any tot on the path to genius, brazen­ly beg­ging the ques­tion of whether it’s pos­si­ble to raise a genius in the first place. Still, the efforts par­ents have delib­er­ate­ly made in that direc­tion have occa­sion­al­ly pro­duced notable results, from epochal fig­ures like Mozart or John Stu­art Mill to the promis­ing-math­e­mati­cian-turned-street­car-trans­fer-obsessed-recluse William Sidis. More recent­ly came the Pol­gár sis­ters, who were suc­cess­ful­ly raised to become some of the great­est female chess play­ers in his­to­ry.

Hav­ing stud­ied the nature of intel­li­gence at uni­ver­si­ty, their father Lás­zló got it in his head that, since most genius­es start­ed learn­ing their sub­jects inten­sive­ly and ear­ly, par­ents could cul­ti­vate genius-lev­el per­for­mance in their chil­dren by direct­ing that learn­ing process them­selves. He sought out a wife both intel­lec­tu­al­ly promis­ing and will­ing to devote her­self to test­ing this hypoth­e­sis. Togeth­er they went on to father three daugh­ters, putting them through a rig­or­ous, cus­tom-made edu­ca­tion ori­ent­ed toward chess mas­tery. Chess became the pro­jec­t’s cen­tral sub­ject in large part because of its sheer objec­tiv­i­ty, all the bet­ter for Lás­zló Pol­gár to mea­sure the results of this domes­tic exper­i­ment.

Nor could it have hurt, giv­en the impor­tance of retain­ing the inter­est of chil­dren, that chess was a game — and one with evoca­tive toy-like pieces — that offers imme­di­ate feed­back and feel­ings of accom­plish­ment. For his daugh­ters, Pol­gár has empha­sized, learn­ing involved none of the drudgery and busy­work of school. “A child does not like only play: for them it is also enjoy­able to acquire infor­ma­tion and solve prob­lems,” he writes in his book Raise a Genius! “A child’s work can also be enjoy­able; so can learn­ing, if it is suf­fi­cient­ly moti­vat­ing, and if it means a con­stant sup­ply of prob­lems to solve that are appro­pri­ate for the lev­el of the child’s needs. A child does not need play sep­a­rate from work, but mean­ing­ful action.”

The proof of Pol­gár’s the­o­ries is in the pud­ding — or at any rate, in the rat­ings. All three of his daugh­ters became elite chess play­ers. Sofia, the mid­dle one, became the sixth-strongest female play­er in the world; Susan, the eldest, the top-ranked female play­er in the world; Judit, the youngest, the strongest female chess play­er of all time. This despite the fact that their father was an unex­cep­tion­al chess play­er, and their moth­er not a chess play­er at all. Some eager­ly take the sto­ry of the Pol­gár sis­ters as a vin­di­ca­tion of nur­ture over nature; oth­ers, sci­en­tif­ic researchers includ­ed, argue that it only shows that prac­tice is a nec­es­sary con­di­tion for this kind of genius, not a suf­fi­cient one. For my part, hav­ing kept an eye on a pair of infant twins while writ­ing this, I’d be hap­py if my own kids could just mas­ter hold­ing on to their bot­tles.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Learn How to Play Chess Online: Free Chess Lessons for Begin­ners, Inter­me­di­ate Play­ers & Beyond

Meet Alma Deutsch­er, the Clas­si­cal Music Prodi­gy: Watch Her Per­for­mances from Age 6 to 14

The Mag­ic of Chess: Kids Share Their Unin­hib­it­ed, Philo­soph­i­cal Insights about the Ben­e­fits of Chess

Hear the Pieces Mozart Com­posed When He Was Only 5 Years Old

Read an 18th-Cen­tu­ry Eye­wit­ness Account of 8‑Year-Old Mozart’s Extra­or­di­nary Musi­cal Skills

The Renewed Pop­u­lar­i­ty of Chess and The Queen’s Gam­bit: Pret­ty Much Pop Cul­ture Pod­cast Dis­cus­sion #78 with Chess Expert J. J. Lang

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

What’s Entering the Public Domain in 2026: Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, All Quiet on the Western Front, Betty Boop & More

in Books, Comics/Cartoons, Film, Law, Music | January 1st, 2026

Though it isn’t the kind of thing one hears dis­cussed every day, seri­ous Dis­ney fans do tend to know that Goofy’s orig­i­nal name was Dip­py Dawg. But how many of the non-obses­sive know that Mick­ey’s faith­ful pet Plu­to was first called Rover? (We pass over in dig­ni­fied silence the qua­si-philo­soph­i­cal ques­tion of why the for­mer dog is humanoid and the lat­ter isn’t.) It is Rover, as dis­tinct from Plu­to, who pass­es into the pub­lic domain this new year, one of a cast of now-lib­er­at­ed char­ac­ters includ­ing Blondie and Dag­wood as well as Bet­ty Boop — who, upon mak­ing her debut in Fleis­ch­er Stu­dios’ Dizzy Dish­es of 1930, has a some­what canoid appear­ance her­self. You can see them all in the video above from Duke Uni­ver­si­ty’s Cen­ter for the Study of the Pub­lic Domain, with much more infor­ma­tion avail­able in their blog post mark­ing this year’s “Pub­lic Domain Day.”

The year 1930, write the Cen­ter’s Jen­nifer Jenk­ins and James Boyle, was one “of detec­tives, jazz, speakeasies, and icon­ic char­ac­ters step­ping onto the cul­tur­al stage — many of whom have been locked behind copy­right for near­ly a cen­tu­ry.”

Nov­els that come avail­able this year include William Faulkn­er’s As I Lay Dying, Dashiell Ham­met­t’s The Mal­tese Fal­con, and Agatha Christie’s The Mur­der at the Vic­arage; among the films are Lewis Mile­stone’s Best Pic­ture-win­ning All Qui­et on the West­ern Front, Vic­tor Heer­man’s Marx Broth­ers pic­ture Ani­mal Crack­ers, and Luis Buñuel and Sal­vador Dalí’s L’Âge d’Or. In music, com­po­si­tions like “I Got Rhythm” and “Embrace­able You” by the Gersh­win Broth­ers as well as record­ings like “Nobody Knows the Trou­ble I’ve Seen” by Mar­i­an Ander­son and “Sweet Geor­gia Brown” by Ben Bernie and His Hotel Roo­sevelt Orches­tra have also, at long last, gone pub­lic.

Reflec­tion on some of these works them­selves sug­gests some­thing about the impor­tance of the pub­lic domain. With the title of Cakes and Ale, anoth­er book in this year’s crop, Som­er­set Maugh­am makes ref­er­ence to “a clas­sic pub­lic domain work, in this case Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night”; so, for that mat­ter, does Faulkn­er, giv­en that the line “as I lay dying” comes from the Odyssey. “To tell new sto­ries, we draw from old­er ones,” write Jenk­ins and Boyle. “One work of art inspires anoth­er — that is how the pub­lic domain feeds cre­ativ­i­ty.” Today, we’re free to take explic­it inspi­ra­tion for our own work from Nan­cy Drew, “Just a Gigo­lo,” Blondie, Mon­dri­an’s Com­po­si­tion with Red, Blue, and Yel­low, Hitch­cock­’s Mur­der!, and much else besides. And by all means use Rover, but if you also want to bring in Dip­py Dawg, you’re going to have to wait until 2028.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What’s Enter­ing the Pub­lic Domain in 2025: Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Ear­ly Hitch­cock Films, Tintin and Pop­eye Car­toons & More

The Harlem Jazz Singer Who Inspired Bet­ty Boop: Meet the Orig­i­nal Boop-Oop-a-Doop, “Baby Esther”

Car­toon­ists Draw Their Famous Car­toon Char­ac­ters While Blind­fold­ed (1947)

Watch Restored Ver­sions of Clas­sic Fleis­ch­er Car­toons on Youtube, Fea­tur­ing Bet­ty Boop, Koko the Clown & Oth­ers

Vin­tage Audio: William Faulkn­er Reads From As I Lay Dying

16 Free Hitch­cock Movies Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.