Clare Torry’s Rare Live Performances of “Great Gig in the Sky” with Pink Floyd

in Music | June 16th, 2026

When Clare Tor­ry went into the stu­dio to record her now-leg­endary vocals for Pink Floyd’s “Great Gig in the Sky,” the cen­ter­piece of 1973’s Dark Side of the Moon, nei­ther the singer nor the band was par­tic­u­lar­ly impressed with each oth­er. David Gilmour remem­bered the moment in an inter­view on the album’s 30th anniver­sary:

Clare Tor­ry did­n’t real­ly look the part. She was Alan Par­sons’ idea. We want­ed to put a girl on there, scream­ing orgas­mi­cal­ly. Alan had worked with her pre­vi­ous­ly, so we gave her a try. And she was fan­tas­tic. We had to encour­age her a lit­tle bit. We gave her some dynam­ic hints: “Maybe you’d like to do this piece qui­et­ly, and this piece loud­er.” She did maybe half a dozen takes, and then after­wards we com­piled the final per­for­mance out of all the bits. It was­n’t done in one sin­gle take.

Asked the fol­low-up ques­tion “what did she look like?,” Gilmour replied, “like a nice Eng­lish house­wife.”

Tor­ry, for her part, was hard­ly starstruck. “If it had been the Kinks,” she lat­er said, “I’d have been over the moon.” She also remem­bers the ses­sion very dif­fer­ent­ly. “They had no idea what they want­ed,” she says. Told only “we don’t want any words,” she decid­ed to “pre­tend to be an instru­ment.” She remem­bers “hav­ing a lit­tle go” and knock­ing out the ses­sion in a cou­ple takes.

This Rashomon sce­nario involves not only faulty mem­o­ry but also the legal ques­tion as to who com­posed the song’s melody and vocal concept—a ques­tion even­tu­al­ly decid­ed, in 2004, in Torry’s favor, enti­tling her to roy­al­ties.

She clear­ly wasn’t about to become a tour­ing mem­ber of the band, even after the album’s mas­sive suc­cess and two sub­se­quent tours. Still, while Tor­ry may not have suit­ed Gilmour’s phys­i­cal pref­er­ences for female singers, and while she may not have thought much of Pink Floyd, she has appeared live with their dif­fer­ent iter­a­tions over the years, includ­ing a show at the Rain­bow The­atre in Lon­don just months after the album’s release (fur­ther up). Lat­er, in 1987, Tor­ry appeared again, this time with Roger Waters at Wem­b­ley Sta­di­um on his K.A.O.S. on the Road Tour.

Tor­ry would then join the David Gilmour-led Pink Floyd in 1990 for “Great Gig in the Sky” at Kneb­worth. I do not think she resem­bles an Eng­lish house­wife in the con­cert film at the top—or at least no more than the rest of the band look like mid­dle-aged Eng­lish hus­bands. But she still pulls off the soar­ing vocal, more or less, sev­en­teen years after she first stepped into the stu­dio, hav­ing lit­tle idea who Pink Floyd was or what would become of that fate­ful ses­sion.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2020.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear How Clare Torry’s Vocals on Pink Floyd’s “The Great Gig in the Sky” Made the Song Go from Pret­ty Good to Down­right Great

How Con­flict Helped Cre­ate Pink Floyd’s “Com­fort­ably Numb” and Its Leg­endary Gui­tar Solos

Hear Pink Floyd’s “Great Gig in the Sky” Played on the Theremin

Hear Lost Record­ing of Pink Floyd Play­ing with Jazz Vio­lin­ist Stéphane Grap­pel­li on “Wish You Were Here”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. 

The Splendid Book Design of the 1946 Edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

in Books, Design | June 15th, 2026

In 1929, the book pub­lish­er George Macy found­ed The Lim­it­ed Edi­tions Club (LEC), an imprint tasked with pub­lish­ing fine­ly illus­trat­ed lim­it­ed edi­tions of clas­sic books. In the years to come, Macy worked with artists like Matisse and Picas­so, and pho­tog­ra­phers like Edward West­on, to pro­duce books with artis­tic illus­tra­tions on their inner pages. And some­times The Lim­it­ed Edi­tions Club even turned its design focus to oth­er parts of the book. Take for exam­ple this 1946 edi­tion of Edward Gib­bon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and its pret­ty amaz­ing spine design.

Cre­at­ed by Clarence P. Hor­nung, the design cap­tures the essence of Gib­bon’s clas­sic, show­ing Roman pil­lars pro­gres­sive­ly crum­bling as your eyes move from Vol­ume 1 to Vol­ume 7. George Macy lat­er called the col­lec­tion, which also fea­tures illus­tra­tions by the great 18th-cen­tu­ry print­mak­er Gio­van­ni Bat­tista Pirane­si, “the most her­culean labor of our career.”

Find more infor­ma­tion about this 1946 edi­tion here. Or, if you have deep pock­ets, pur­chase a copy here.

Note: an ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in June 2015.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

55 Cov­ers of Vin­tage Phi­los­o­phy, Psy­chol­o­gy & Sci­ence Books Come to Life in a Short Ani­ma­tion

How Rome Began: The His­to­ry As Told by Ancient His­to­ri­ans

157 Ani­mat­ed Min­i­mal­ist Mid-Cen­tu­ry Book Cov­ers

David Bowie Picks His 12 Favorite David Bowie Songs

in Music | June 11th, 2026

Admit it, your list of favorite Bowie songs is full of the big hits. Hell, maybe it’s all hits; there’s no shame in that. Dig­ging deep into the crates will yield many an over­looked sur­prise, many a sub­tle sleep­er, cut-up clas­sic, and elec­tron­ic exper­i­ment. But if all you’ve got is Changes­bowie—the 1990 com­pi­la­tion that became, for some gen­er­a­tions, a defin­i­tive state­ment of his career—you’ve still got a col­lec­tion of songs the likes of which have nev­er been heard before or since in mod­ern pop.

Com­pletists may grouch, but even res­i­dent Bowie scholars/local record store clerks have an “Ash­es to Ash­es,” “’Heroes’,” “Changes,” or “Mod­ern Love” in their top ten. Whether ardent or casu­al fans, we con­nect with Bowie’s music through mile­stones, both in his career and in our own lives. This truth has been exploit­ed. In 2008, Mike Schiller at Pop­Mat­ters bemoaned the fact that almost 20 Bowie com­pi­la­tion albums had been released, a few of which “don’t real­ly seem to court any greater pur­pose what­so­ev­er.”

Giv­en this sur­feit of Bowie com­pi­la­tions on the mar­ket, Schiller’s ini­tial groan­ing reac­tion to news of yet anoth­er (“Oh, good Lord. Anoth­er David Bowie col­lec­tion?”) seems appo­site. Except this col­lec­tion, iSE­LECT: BOWIE, released in 2008 to read­ers of the U.K.’s Mail on Sun­day, then lat­er in an offi­cial CD and dig­i­tal edi­tion, “is actu­al­ly some­thing spe­cial.” Bowie “picked the track­list him­self. Even more than that, the track­list actu­al­ly looks like some­thing he’d have picked him­self, rather than hav­ing a man­ag­er or pub­li­cist pick it for him.”

iSE­LECT: BOWIE
1. “Life On Mars?” (from the album Hunky Dory)
2. “Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing” (from the album Dia­mond Dogs)
3. “The Bewlay Broth­ers” (from the album Hunky Dory)
4. “Lady Grin­ning Soul” (from the album Aladdin Sane)
5. “Win” (from the album Young Amer­i­cans)
6. “Some Are” (cur­rent­ly exclu­sive to this com­pi­la­tion)
7. “Teenage Wildlife” (from the album Scary Mon­sters)
8. “Rep­e­ti­tion” (from the album Lodger)
9. “Fan­tas­tic Voy­age” (from the album Lodger)
10. “Lov­ing The Alien” (from the album Tonight)
11. “Time Will Crawl (MM Remix)” (new remix by David Bowie)
12. “Hang On To Your­self [live]” (from the album Live San­ta Mon­i­ca ’72)

See the full track­list above and hear a playlist of his picks at the top. If we put all our lists of favorites togeth­er, we might see a very high per­cent­age of “Life on Mars?” picks. We’re in excel­lent com­pa­ny; it’s Bowie’s num­ber one favorite song of his. But how many of his oth­er picks might we choose? The eight-and-a-half minute “Sweet Thing”/”Candidate”/”Sweet Thing (Reprise)” from Dia­mond Dogs? “Win” from Young Amer­i­cans or “The Bewlay Broth­ers” from Hunky Dory?

Aside from “Life on Mars?” and the far less­er-col­lect­ed “Lov­ing the Alien” and “Time Will Crawl,” none of his twelve selec­tions were released as sin­gles. There are no songs from two of the most acclaimed Bowie albums, Low and ’Heroes’, unless we count “Some Are” a bonus track includ­ed on the Low 1991 rere­lease. There are two tracks from Lodger, the third and least acces­si­ble of his vaunt­ed Berlin tril­o­gy, and only one selec­tion from Zig­gy Star­dust, and it ain’t “Zig­gy Star­dust.”

If any­one else hand­ed you this list of favorite Bowie tracks, you’d be skep­ti­cal. Who puts “Hang On To Your­self” (Live San­ta Mon­i­ca ’72) above any of the stu­dio tracks on that clas­sic 1972 break­out album? David Bowie, that’s who. And who knows, if you’d asked him the day before or after, he might have picked twelve dif­fer­ent songs. There’s no telling how seri­ous­ly he took the exer­cise, but in the news­pa­per release, he did “casu­al­ly [pen] his inspi­ra­tions for the songs and the record­ing process­es behind them,” notes Allmusic’s Jason Lyman­grover.

On his choice of “Teenage Wildlife,” for exam­ple, Bowie com­ment­ed: “So it’s late morn­ing and I’m think­ing, ‘New song and a fresh approach. I know. I’m going to do a Ron­nie Spec­tor. Oh yes I am. Ersatz just for one day.’ And I did and here it is. Bless. I’m still very enam­oured of this song and would give you two ‘Mod­ern Love’s for it any­time…” Bowie got to expe­ri­ence his own music in a way no one else could. iSE­LECT: BOWIE gets behind the great­est hits col­lec­tions for a glimpse at the way he heard and remem­bered his cat­a­logue.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2019.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Bowie’s 100 Must Read Books

The Art Col­lec­tion of David Bowie: An Intro­duc­tion

How David Bowie Used William S. Bur­roughs’ Cut-Up Method to Write His Unfor­get­table Lyrics

David Bowie Sings Impres­sions of Bruce Spring­steen, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Tom Waits & More In Stu­dio Out­takes (1985)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. 

How Nick Drake’s “River Man” Has Captivated Generation after Generation of Listeners

in Music | June 8th, 2026

In 1999, Volk­swa­gen aired a tele­vi­sion com­mer­cial for the Golf Mk3 Cabrio. Deal­er­ships were soon inun­dat­ed with calls, as pop­u­lar cul­ture his­to­ry remem­bers it, but not from peo­ple inquir­ing about the car. Rather, they were des­per­ate to know the name of the song sound­track­ing the ad’s footage of a top-down night dri­ve to a house par­ty. For all they knew, it was a new sin­gle from an up-and-com­ing young man with an acoustic gui­tar and sen­si­tiv­i­ty exquis­ite enough to cut through the sound and fury of turn-of-the-mil­len­ni­um pop. In fact, the song had come out 27 years before, and the artist had been dead for 25 of them. Thus began the obscure Eng­lish singer-song­writer Nick Drake’s belat­ed ascent to star­dom.

“Pink Moon,” the song from the VW Spot (a late replace­ment for The Church’s eight­ies hit “Under the Milky Way”), was the title cut from Drake’s third and final album, which closed a record­ing career not even three years long. It had begun in 1969, with the debut Five Leaves Left. If lis­ten­ers of the late nineties curi­ous enough to pick it up — or, as had just become pos­si­ble, down­load it from file-shar­ing net­works — could hard­ly have been dis­ap­point­ed, they still would­n’t have been pre­pared for its sec­ond track, “Riv­er Man.”

Described by Ian Mac­Don­ald as “one of the sky-high clas­sics of post-war Eng­lish pop­u­lar music,” the song com­bines Drake’s haunt­ing­ly evoca­tive lyri­cism and uncon­ven­tion­al gui­tar tun­ing with a rich lay­er of orches­trat­ed strings that stops just short of cloy­ing, all in jazzy 5/4 time.

As music YouTu­ber Charles Cor­nell points out in the video at the top of the post, you’ll no doubt rec­og­nize that time sig­na­ture from Dave Brubeck­’s “Take Five,” which makes that high­ly unusu­al rhythm feel nat­ur­al. So does “Riv­er Man,” though the more close­ly you lis­ten to it, the more musi­cal­ly dar­ing it sounds, even if you don’t have the the­o­ret­i­cal lan­guage to explain it as Cor­nell does. There is, for exam­ple, no cho­rus, which could­n’t have helped its chances of radio air­play at the time, nor could the song’s somber and reflec­tive mood. “The coun­ter­cul­ture was car­ni­va­lesque, its opti­mism com­pul­so­ry,” Mac­Don­ald writes. “Drake saw deep­er.” It’s hard­ly implau­si­ble, in fact, to read the song as a Blakean and Bud­dhis­tic alle­go­ry of an indi­vid­ual faced with a choice between the con­crete, cycli­cal real­i­ty of human affairs and the unknown realms beyond.

Drake com­posed “Riv­er Man” dur­ing his brief time at Cam­bridge, and the books writ­ten about him quote acquain­tances from that peri­od describ­ing it as a remark­able step for­ward in his artis­tic evo­lu­tion. Dur­ing the Five Leaves Left ses­sions, he sang and played gui­tar live with the orches­tra, whose arrange­ments (by the band­leader Har­ry Robin­son, then known on British TV for his nov­el­ty band Lord Rock­ing­ham’s XI) filled space Drake had delib­er­ate­ly left in the com­po­si­tion. The strings, in oth­er words, weren’t an incon­gru­ous attempt at sweet­en­ing, as Phil Spec­tor would per­form on the Bea­t­les’ “The Long and Wind­ing Road” the fol­low­ing year, but an inte­gral part of the song. Drake’s solo per­for­mance of it on BBC Radio 2’s Night Ride (a broad­cast host­ed by none oth­er than John Peel) sounds cap­ti­vat­ing, but incom­plete. On the Five Leaves Left ver­sion, every ele­ment works togeth­er to make “Riv­er Man” endur­ing — and, in every sense, tran­scen­dent.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Doc­u­men­tary Intro­duc­tion to Nick Drake, Whose Haunt­ing & Influ­en­tial Songs Came Into the World 50 Years Ago Today

How John Lennon Wrote the Bea­t­les’ Best Song, “A Day in the Life”

How Joni Mitchell Wrote “Wood­stock,” the Song that Defined the Leg­endary Music Fes­ti­val, Even Though She Wasn’t There (1969)

How Grace Slick Wrote “White Rab­bit”: The 1960s Clas­sic Inspired by LSD, Lewis Car­roll, Miles Davis’ Sketch­es of Spain, and Hyp­o­crit­i­cal Par­ents

Paul Simon Tells the Sto­ry of How He Wrote “Bridge Over Trou­bled Water” (1970)

How a Fake Car­toon Band Made “Sug­ar Sug­ar” the Biggest Sell­ing Hit Sin­gle of 1969

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.

The First Live Performance of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (1991)

in Music | June 2nd, 2026

It’s almost 35 years ago now that Nirvana’s video for “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” debuted on MTV’s 120 Min­utes and, for bet­ter or worse, inau­gu­rat­ed the grunge era. The video (below) arrived as a shock and a thrill to a gen­er­a­tion too young to remem­ber punk and sick of the steady stream of cheesy cor­po­rate dance music and hair met­al that char­ac­ter­ized the late-80s. For every­one out­side the small Seat­tle scene that nur­tured them and the tape-trad­ing kids in the know, the band seemed to arrive out of nowhere as a total angst-rid­den pack­age, and the MTV video, by first-time direc­tor Samuel Bay­er, seemed brac­ing­ly anar­chic and raw at the time.

But a look at the first live per­for­mance of “Teen Spir­it” (above) makes it seem pret­ty tame by com­par­i­son. The video’s a lit­tle grainy and low-res, which suits the song just fine. Live, “Teen Spir­it’s” dis­turb­ing under­tones are more pro­nounced, its qui­et-loud dynam­ics more force­ful, and the ener­gy of the crowd is real, not the thrash­ing around of a bunch of teenage extras. Not a cheer­leader in sight, but I think this would have grabbed me more than the pep ral­ly-riot-themed MTV video did when it debuted a few months lat­er. Despite their anti-cor­po­rate stance, Nir­vana was a casu­al­ty of their own suc­cess, eat­en up by the machin­ery they despised. Their best moments are still the unscript­ed and unpre­dictable. For con­trast, zip back to 1991 and watch the MTV video below.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2012.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Nirvana’s Home Videos: Watch Nir­vana Rehearse in Krist Novoselic’s Mother’s House (1988)

Watch Nir­vana Per­form “Smells Like Teen Spir­it,” Just Days After the Release of Nev­er­mind (1991)

Nir­vana Before They Were Nir­vana: Watch Their 1988 Per­for­mance Record­ed in a Radio Shack

Nir­vana Refus­es to Play ‘Smells Like Teen Spir­it’ After the Crowd Hurls Sex­ist Insults at the Open­ing Act (Buenos Aires, 1992)

Nir­vana Refus­es to Mime Along to “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” on Top of the Pops (1991)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. 

The Lost Scenes of Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons Are Being Controversially Restored with AI

in Artificial Intelligence, Film, Technology | May 20th, 2026

When tele­vi­sion mogul Ted Turn­er died ear­li­er this month, it gave cinephiles occa­sion to remem­ber his brief but high-pro­file for­ay into col­oriza­tion. In the mid-nine­teen-eight­ies, he com­mis­sioned for broad­cast col­orized ver­sions of more than 100 clas­sic movies, from The Trea­sure of the Sier­ra Madre to It’s a Won­der­ful Life to Casablan­ca. It was only thanks to a clause spec­i­fy­ing a black-and-white pic­ture in Orson Welles’ con­tract with RKO that Cit­i­zen Kane nev­er got the full Turn­er treat­ment. That bless­ed­ly failed project is now being invoked again in com­par­i­son with the start­up Fable Stu­dio’s enter­prise, under­way even now, of using arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence to restore Welles’ sopho­more fea­ture The Mag­nif­i­cent Amber­sons, which was noto­ri­ous­ly muti­lat­ed by the stu­dio before its release in 1942.

The recut hap­pened in Welles’ absence. After the attack on Pearl Har­bor, he received what sounds like some­thing more than a request from Nel­son Rock­e­feller, then the government’s Coor­di­na­tor of Inter-Amer­i­can Affairs, to go to Brazil and shoot a doc­u­men­tary about Car­ni­val in the inter­est of “Pan-Amer­i­can uni­ty.” Due to a dis­as­trous test screen­ing, as Welles explains in the clip from a 1982 Are­na broad­cast above, “it was thought by every­one in Hol­ly­wood, while I was in South Amer­i­ca, that it was too ‘down­beat,’ a famous Hol­ly­wood word at the time.” Yet the entire film, to his mind, was about the down­fall of the tit­u­lar fam­i­ly, who lose their wealth and pres­tige as the soci­ety they knew slips out from under­neath them dur­ing the trans­for­ma­tions of the ear­ly auto­mo­bile age: not a wide­ly res­o­nant theme, it seems, in mid-twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca.

“They destroyed Amber­sons,” Welles says of the RKO’s recut, “and the pic­ture itself destroyed me.” Yet even the Bowd­ler­ized ver­sion has more than a few admir­ers. Among them is Edward Saatchi, the movie-lov­ing adver­tis­ing-com­pa­ny scion behind this AI restora­tion and/or recon­struc­tion project. “His Ama­zon-backed generative‑A.I. plat­form, Showrun­ner, would feed off the data from the extant ver­sion of the film to prompt entire new scenes, based on volu­mi­nous pro­duc­tion mate­ri­als that sur­vived, includ­ing scripts, pho­tographs, and detailed notes,” writes the New York­er’s Michael Schul­man. “For emo­tion­al authen­tic­i­ty, Fable would first shoot live actors, then over­lay the footage with the dig­i­tized voic­es and like­ness­es of the long-dead cast mem­bers.” The result has the poten­tial to be unset­tling on sev­er­al lev­els at once.

As Schul­man empha­sizes, the film’s con­cern with the human cost of a tech­no­log­i­cal rev­o­lu­tion is hard­ly lost on Saatchi. “With all their speed for­ward, they may be a step back­ward in civ­i­liza­tion,” says Joseph Cot­ten’s char­ac­ter, an ear­ly auto­mo­bile investor, in a scene from the stu­dio cut. “It may be that they won’t add to the beau­ty of the world or the life of men’s souls — I’m not sure. But auto­mo­biles have come, and almost all out­ward things are going to be dif­fer­ent because of what they bring.” Even the human mind, he spec­u­lates, will be “changed in sub­tle ways,” a process clear­ly in effect by the for­ties. As far as the con­se­quences of AI, we can already see how it’s begun chang­ing the think­ing of its ear­ly adopters. Saatchi him­self dis­plays an ambiva­lence about the tech­nol­o­gy, describ­ing it as “poten­tial­ly the end of human cre­ativ­i­ty” but also going full-speed-ahead with his unau­tho­rized work on The Mag­nif­i­cent Amber­sons — which, at the very least, he’s keep­ing in black-and-white.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch the New Trail­er for Orson Welles’ Lost Film The Oth­er Side of the Wind: A Glimpse of Footage from the Final­ly Com­plet­ed Film

AI “Com­pletes” Kei­th Haring’s Unfin­ished Paint­ing and Con­tro­ver­sy Erupts

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Brings to Life Fig­ures from 7 Famous Paint­ings: The Mona Lisa, Birth of Venus & More

Dis­cov­er the Lost Films of Orson Welles

Isaac Asi­mov Describes How Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Will Lib­er­ate Humans & Their Cre­ativ­i­ty: Watch His Last Major Inter­view (1992)

When Ted Turn­er Tried to Col­orize Cit­i­zen Kane: See the Only Sur­viv­ing Scene from the Great Act of Cin­e­mat­ic Sac­ri­lege

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.

Every Book of the Bible Explained in One Video

in Books, History, Religion | May 19th, 2026

Whether we’re reli­gious or not, we can all agree that the Bible isn’t just a book. In fact, it’s at least 66 of them, 39 Old Tes­ta­ment and 27 in the New, and that’s just in the Protes­tant tra­di­tion. Even if you’ve nev­er read a sin­gle page of the Bible, you may well have a decent idea of what quite a few of those books con­tain: the sto­ries of Adam, Eve, Noah, and the cre­ation in Gen­e­sis; the plagues and Moses part­ing the Red Sea in Exo­dus; the var­i­ous depic­tions of Jesus in the Gospels that define his pop­u­lar image; the apoc­a­lyp­tic grotes­queries of Rev­e­la­tion. That’s even like­li­er to be true if you watch Hochela­ga, the YouTube chan­nel that just came out with a new video explain­ing all those sto­ries and every­thing in between.

The result is long, to be sure, but not as long as you might expect: Hochela­ga cre­ator Tom­mie Trelawny man­ages to cov­er the 66 books of the Bible in two hours, the length of an ordi­nary fea­ture film. For visu­als, he draws upon the his­to­ry of West­ern art, whose con­nec­tions with Chris­tian­i­ty and pen­chant for depict­ing the reli­gion’s cen­tral events goes with­out say­ing.

In the case of bib­li­cal fig­ures like Jon­ah, Job, or Lot’s wife (before or after her con­ver­sion into a pil­lar of salt), we’ve devel­oped our own men­tal images at least through cul­tur­al osmo­sis, informed or not by the visions of Renais­sance mas­ters. But how many of us can call so eas­i­ly scenes from the books of Oba­di­ah, Hag­gai, or Phile­mon up in our mind’s eye?

This video may prove most help­ful in pro­vid­ing a “big pic­ture” of the Bible, allow­ing view­ers with no expe­ri­ence of bib­li­cal schol­ar­ship to place iso­lat­ed episodes to which they’ve heard ref­er­ences all their lives in con­text with each oth­er. And yet, it’s also entire­ly pos­si­ble that they’ll come out of these two hours won­der­ing to what extent all these parts real­ly fit togeth­er in the first place. Col­lect­ed from mate­r­i­al orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten over cen­turies and in var­i­ous forms, not to men­tion passed through the vagaries of trans­la­tion, the Bible could hard­ly be expect­ed to present itself with pol­ished coher­ence. Whether or not you believe it con­tains the word of God, you could well feel ready, after Hochela­ga’s overview, to grap­ple with its text in all its lin­guis­tic rich­ness, its sur­pris­ing con­tra­dic­tions, and its moral grandeur — as well as its more-than-occa­sion­al strange­ness.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Chris­tian­i­ty Through Its Scrip­tures: A Free Course from Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty

Why Real Bib­li­cal Angels Are Creepy, Beast­ly, and Hard­ly Angel­ic

What Hap­pened to Jesus’ Twelve Dis­ci­ples After the Bible — It Wasn’t Pret­ty

How Many Lives Does God Take in the Bible: An Inves­ti­ga­tion into a Sur­pris­ing­ly High Body Count

Dis­cov­er Thomas Jefferson’s Cut-and-Paste Ver­sion of the Bible, and Read the Curi­ous Edi­tion Online

Isaac Asimov’s Guide to the Bible: A Wit­ty, Eru­dite Atheist’s Guide to the World’s Most Famous Book

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.

The Tarot Card Deck Created by Salvador Dalí

in Art | May 14th, 2026

The Tarot has long been a tool of char­la­tans. But it has also long been embraced by bril­liant, uncon­ven­tion­al thinkers, many of whom them­selves have a touch of the char­la­tan about them (and who would just as like­ly admit it with a smile). William But­ler Yeats was a fan, as is vision­ary Chilean film­mak­er, artist, writer, and psy­cho­naut Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky, who has record­ed his own Youtube series explain­ing his take on this clas­sic mode of div­ina­tion. With its arche­typ­al sym­bol­ism, the Tarot’s appeal to artists should be obvi­ous. Most of them, like Jodor­owsky, find far more inter­est­ing uses for it than for­tune-telling. “You must not talk about the future,” Jodor­owsky tells us in his series, “the future is a con. The tarot is a lan­guage that talks about the present.”

What might anoth­er vision­ary artist, Sal­vador Dalí, think of Jodorowsky’s Tarot inter­pre­ta­tions? We’ll nev­er know, but I sus­pect he would find them enchant­i­ng. Not only do the two seem like kin­dred spir­its, but Dalí devot­ed some part of his life to the Tarot, design­ing his own deck in the 70s.

Ini­tial­ly, the project arrived as a com­mis­sion from pro­duc­er Albert Broc­coli for the James Bond film Live and Let Die. “Like­ly inspired by his wife Gala, who nur­tured his inter­est in mys­ti­cism,” writes Chicago’s Muse­um of Con­tem­po­rary Art, “Dalí eager­ly got to work, and con­tin­ued the project of his own accord when the con­trac­tu­al deal fell through.”

It was just around this time that the Tarot saw a mas­sive resur­gence in pop­u­lar­i­ty. The occult inter­ests of the 60s coun­ter­cul­ture were main­streamed in the 70s thanks to books like Stu­art Kaplan’s Tarot Cards for Fun and For­tune Telling. But while Dalí had chan­neled the vivid psy­che­delia of the age in an ear­li­er illus­tra­tion project, 1969’s Alice and Won­der­land, his Tarot deck, writes Lisa Rain­wa­ter at Galo mag­a­zine, “actu­al­ly shows reserve. Yes, reserve—as if his rev­er­ence for the tarot near­ly hum­bles him.” His knack for “fanat­i­cal self-pro­mo­tion” does get the bet­ter of him even­tu­al­ly: he choos­es his own face to rep­re­sent the Magi­cian (above).

Over­all, the deck com­bines the eclec­tic ori­gins of occult prac­tices with Dalí’s own unmis­tak­able sen­si­bil­i­ty. Dalí’s Tarot is “a pas­tiche of old-world art, sur­re­al­ism, kitsch, Chris­t­ian iconog­ra­phy and Greek and Roman sculp­ture. Many of his recur­ring motifs such as the rose, the fly and the bull’s head are found through­out the deck.” First pub­lished in a lim­it­ed edi­tion in 1984—and reis­sued since in edi­tions by TASCHEN and in book form by oth­er pub­lish­ers—the deck includ­ed an intro­duc­to­ry book­let that reads, in Span­ish, Eng­lish, and French:

The Wiz­ard (Arcanum I), Sal­vador Dalí, has trans­formed with his excep­tion­al art and his mar­velous tal­ent the 78 gold­en plates of ‘The fab­u­lous book of Thot’ into as many artis­tic mar­vels, each one of them duly signed by the hand of this unmatch­able, inter­nal­ly famous painter … such an extra­or­di­nary artis­tic cre­ation does not detract, in any way, from the Tarot’s close sym­bol­ism. On the con­trary, it enhances with its cap­ti­vat­ing beau­ty, the Tarot’s eso­teric and plas­tic mean­ing.

See a pre­view video of the full Dalí deck above, pur­chase a lim­it­ed edi­tion set here, or a much more afford­able ver­sion here.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2016.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky Explains How Tarot Cards Can Give You Cre­ative Inspi­ra­tion

The Fas­ci­nat­ing His­to­ry of Tarot Card Decks: From the Renais­sance to the Mod­ern Day

Meet the For­got­ten Female Artist Behind the World’s Most Pop­u­lar Tarot Deck (1909)

Behold the Sola-Bus­ca Tarot Deck, the Ear­li­est Com­plete Set of Tarot Cards (1490)

Carl Jung on the Pow­er of Tarot Cards: They Pro­vide Door­ways to the Uncon­scious & Per­haps a Way to Pre­dict the Future

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. 

Watch the Moment When the Wreck of the Titanic Was First Discovered (1985)

in History | May 13th, 2026

The wreck of the RMS Titan­ic has nev­er ceased to com­mand atten­tion, from pop-cul­tur­al fas­ci­na­tion to sci­en­tif­ic scruti­ny and every­thing in between. That can make it seem, espe­cial­ly to the younger gen­er­a­tions, as if human­i­ty has been gaz­ing upon its remains since they first set­tled at the bot­tom of the North Atlantic Ocean. In fact, the pre­cise loca­tion of the ship­wreck went unknown for more than 73 years, between the day of the dis­as­ter, April 15th, 1912, and that of the dis­cov­ery, Sep­tem­ber 1, 1985. In the video above, you can watch the very moment debris from the Titan­ic first came into the view of Argo, the unmanned under­sea cam­era used by the researchers seek­ing it out.

“Some­body should get Bob,” says one of the crew as soon as it becomes clear, even on their low-res­o­lu­tion black-and-white mon­i­tor, that they’re look­ing at man-made objects on the sea floor. And well they should have: the Bob in ques­tion is oceanog­ra­ph­er and Argo inven­tor Robert Bal­lard, who’d been active­ly think­ing about how to find the Titan­ic since at least the ear­ly nine­teen-sev­en­ties and board­ed Woods Hole Oceano­graph­ic Insti­tute’s R/V Knorr with intent to find it.

In truth, the voy­age was financed by the U.S. Navy, which had much less inter­est in find­ing the wreck of the Titan­ic than those of the USS Scor­pi­on and Thresh­er, two nuclear sub­marines lost in the six­ties. If Bal­lard could look for them, so the deal went, he could use the expe­di­tion’s spare time and resources on his life’s mis­sion.

After deter­min­ing that the Scor­pi­on and Thresh­er had implod­ed, Bal­lard and the Knorr crew con­tin­ued on to the gen­er­al area in which the Titan­ic sank. Know­ing that the infa­mous­ly “unsink­able” ocean lin­er would have been sub­ject to the same mighty under­sea pres­sure, they kept their eyes open, through Argo, for sim­i­lar­ly scat­tered frag­ments rather than intact sec­tions of the hull. As the video shows us, the strat­e­gy worked: only when a trail of debris leads them to an iden­ti­fi­able boil­er, proof pos­i­tive that they’d found what they were look­ing for, does the cheer go up. Bal­lard would go on to dis­cov­er oth­er wide­ly known ship­wrecks — the bat­tle­ship Bis­mar­ck, the air­craft car­ri­er USS York­town in 1998 — but one sus­pects that noth­ing quite match­es that first Titan­ic high.

Relat­ed con­tent:

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.

Nearly 50 Years Later, WKRP in Cincinnati Becomes a Real Radio Station

in Music, Television | May 11th, 2026

It took near­ly 50 years. WKRP in Cincin­nati is no longer just a TV sit­com. It’s now a real radio sta­tion in Cincin­nati.

A Cin­cy-area FM sta­tion, known as “The Oasis,” has adopt­ed the WKRP call let­ters after acquir­ing them from a non­prof­it radio sta­tion in North Car­oli­na. The Raleigh-based sta­tion put the call let­ters up for auc­tion as part of a fundrais­ing effort. And then The Oasis snapped them up.

To mark the offi­cial launch last week, the sta­tion played the TV show’s theme song for six straight hours. Mov­ing for­ward, the sta­tion will con­tin­ue play­ing clas­sic rock from the ’60s through the ’80s — much like the music fea­tured on the 1978–82 sit­com. As a bonus, Gary Sandy, who played pro­gram direc­tor Andy Travis, has record­ed pro­mos for the revived WKRP. If the orig­i­nal show was before your time, you can watch some episodes on YouTube. Enjoy…

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent 

All the Music Played on MTV’s 120 Min­utes: A 2,500-Video Youtube Playlist

All of the Songs Played on “WKRP in Cincin­nati” in One Playlist: Stream 202 Clas­sic Tracks

MTV Rewind Lets You Revis­it 40,000 Music Videos & Com­mer­cials from the Gold­en Age of MTV