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

in Music, Television | January 16th, 2026

MTV still exists. At least, it still exists in the Unit­ed States, or in cer­tain of that coun­try’s mar­kets, for the time being. A flur­ry of pre­ma­ture obit­u­ar­ies recent­ly blew through the inter­net after the announce­ment that the net­work had shut down in oth­er parts of the world, Europe includ­ed. But even there, some expressed the sen­ti­ment that MTV had already died long before. And indeed, in the U.S., where it orig­i­nal­ly launched, ask­ing who remem­bers when MTV actu­al­ly used to play music videos has been a com­mon lament for decades, aired even by gen­er­a­tions too young to remem­ber those days them­selves. But mem­bers of any gen­er­a­tion can now relive them — or live them for the first time — through a new site called MTV Rewind.

The first music video that greets the vis­i­tor is The Bug­gles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star,” and appro­pri­ate­ly so, since it inau­gu­rat­ed MTV itself when it went live on August 1st, 1981. What fol­lows are all the rest of the videos played on that first day, like Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight,” Blondie’s “Rap­ture,” David Bowie’s “Boys Keep Swing­ing,” and Kate Bush’s “Wuther­ing Heights.”

(Oth­er, less wide­ly remem­bered entries include no few­er than three songs by Cliff Richard, which speaks to the then-incom­plete for­ma­tion of the kind of pop-musi­cal cul­ture we still asso­ciate with MTV.) The site’s oth­er playlists recre­ate oth­er eras and genre-spe­cif­ic pro­grams, from 120 Min­utes to Total Request Live, Head­banger’s Ball to Yo! MTV Raps.

Cur­rent­ly, MTV Rewind’s music video count comes to about 40,000, enough to ensure any for­mer addict of the net­work a stream of nos­tal­gia hits. But the site’s cre­ator (a 43-year-old Amer­i­can res­i­dent in Alba­nia, accord­ing to the New York Times, known pseu­do­ny­mous­ly as “Flex”) has also incor­po­rat­ed vin­tage sta­tion IDs and com­mer­cials, many of them liable to trig­ger down­right Prous­t­ian sen­sa­tions in the right view­er. What may feel refresh­ing even to curi­ous younger vis­i­tors is that, whichev­er chan­nel they choose, the next video that plays is deter­mined not by an algo­rithm attempt­ing to pre­dict their per­son­al tastes. Rather, each playlist is shaped by the pop­u­lar cul­ture of a par­tic­u­lar era, with enough left-field selec­tions to keep it inter­est­ing: just the sort of thing in hopes of which we used to flip over to MTV, back when the idea of stream­ing video on our com­put­ers still sound­ed like sheer­est fan­ta­sy. Enter MTV Rewind here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch the First 2+ Hours of MTV’s Inau­gur­al Broad­cast (August 1, 1981)

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

The Com­plete Col­lec­tion Of MTV’s Head­bangers Ball: Watch 1,215 Videos from the Hey­day of Met­al Videos

The Inter­net Archive Res­cues MTV News’ Web Site, Mak­ing 460,000+ of Its Pages Search­able Again

The 50 Great­est Music Videos of All Time, Ranked by AV Club

Revis­it Pop-Up Video: The VH1 Series That Rein­vent­ed Music Videos & Pop Cul­ture

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.

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Discover Michelangelo’s First Painting, Created When He Was Only 12 or 13 Years Old

in Art, History | January 15th, 2026

Think back, if you will, to the works of art you cre­at­ed at age twelve or thir­teen. For many, per­haps most of us, our out­put at that stage of ado­les­cence amount­ed to direc­tion­less doo­dles, chaot­ic comics, and a few unsteady-at-best school projects. But then, most of us did­n’t grow up to be Michelan­ge­lo. In the late four­teen-eight­ies, when that tow­er­ing Renais­sance artist was still what we would now call a “tween,” he paint­ed The Tor­ment of Saint Antho­ny, a depic­tion of the tit­u­lar reli­gious fig­ure beset by demons in the desert. Though based on a wide­ly known engrav­ing, it nev­er­the­less shows evi­dence of rapid­ly advanc­ing tech­nique, inspi­ra­tion, and even cre­ativ­i­ty — espe­cial­ly when placed under the infrared scan­ner.

For about half a mil­len­ni­um, The Tor­ment of Saint Antho­ny was­n’t thought to have been paint­ed by Michelan­ge­lo. As explained in the video from Inspi­rag­gio just below, when the paint­ing sold at Sothe­by’s in 2008, the buy­er took it to the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art for exam­i­na­tion and clean­ing.

“Beneath the lay­ers of dirt accu­mu­lat­ed over the cen­turies,” says the nar­ra­tor, “a very par­tic­u­lar col­or palette appeared. “The tones, the blends, the way the human fig­ure was treat­ed: all of it began to resem­ble the style Michelan­ge­lo would use years lat­er in none oth­er than the Sis­tine Chapel.” Infrared reflec­tog­ra­phy sub­se­quent­ly turned up pen­ti­men­ti, or cor­rec­tion marks, a com­mon indi­ca­tion that “a paint­ing is not a copy, but an orig­i­nal work cre­at­ed with artis­tic free­dom.”

It was the Kim­bell Art Muse­um in Fort Worth, Texas that first bet big on the prove­nance of The Tor­ment of Saint Antho­ny. Its new­ly hired direc­tor pur­chased the paint­ing after turn­ing up “not a sin­gle con­vinc­ing argu­ment against the attri­bu­tion.” Thus acquired, it became “the only paint­ing by Michelan­ge­lo locat­ed any­where in the Amer­i­c­as, and also just one of four easel paint­ings attrib­uted to him through­out his entire career,” dur­ing most of which he dis­par­aged oil paint­ing itself. About a decade lat­er, and after fur­ther analy­sis, the art his­to­ri­an Gior­gio Bon­san­ti put his con­sid­er­able author­i­ty behind a defin­i­tive con­fir­ma­tion that it is indeed the work of the young Michelan­ge­lo. There remain doubters, of course, and even the noto­ri­ous­ly uncom­pro­mis­ing artist him­self may have con­sid­ered it an imma­ture work unwor­thy of his name. But who else could have cre­at­ed an imma­ture work like it?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Orig­i­nal Por­trait of the Mona Lisa Found Beneath the Paint Lay­ers of Leonar­do da Vinci’s Mas­ter­piece

When Michelan­ge­lo Cre­at­ed Artis­tic Designs for Mil­i­tary For­ti­fi­ca­tions to Pro­tect Flo­rence (1529–1530)

How Four Mas­ters — Michelan­ge­lo, Donatel­lo, Ver­roc­chio & Berni­ni — Sculpt­ed David

A Secret Room with Draw­ings Attrib­uted to Michelan­ge­lo Opens to Vis­i­tors in Flo­rence

Michelan­ge­lo Entered a Com­pe­ti­tion to Put a Miss­ing Arm Back on Lao­coön and His Sons — and Lost

Michelangelo’s Illus­trat­ed Gro­cery List

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.

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Download 435 High Resolution Images from John J. Audubon’s The Birds of America

in Art, Biology, Nature | January 15th, 2026

In our expe­ri­ence, bird lovers fall into two gen­er­al cat­e­gories:

Keen­ly obser­vant cat­a­loguers like John James Audubon …

And those of us who can­not resist assign­ing anthro­po­mor­phic per­son­al­i­ties and behav­iors to the 435 stars of Audubon’s The Birds of Amer­i­ca, a stun­ning col­lec­tion of prints from life-size water­col­ors he pro­duced between 1827 and 1838.

Our sus­pi­cions have lit­tle to do with biol­o­gy, but rather, a cer­tain zesti­ness of expres­sion, an overem­phat­ic beak, a droll gleam in the eye.

The Audubon Society’s new­ly redesigned web­site abounds with trea­sure for those in either camp:

Free high res down­loads of all 435 plates.

Mp3s of each specimen’s call.

And vin­tage com­men­tary that effec­tive­ly splits the dif­fer­ence between sci­ence and the unin­ten­tion­al­ly humor­ous locu­tions of anoth­er age.

Take for instance, the Bur­row­ing Owl, as described by self-taught nat­u­ral­ist Thomas Say (1787–1834):

It is delight­ful, dur­ing fine weath­er, to see these live­ly lit­tle crea­tures sport­ing about the entrance of their bur­rows, which are always kept in the neat­est repair, and are often inhab­it­ed by sev­er­al indi­vid­u­als. When alarmed, they imme­di­ate­ly take refuge in their sub­ter­ranean cham­bers; or, if the dread­ed dan­ger be not imme­di­ate­ly impend­ing, they stand near the brink of the entrance, brave­ly bark­ing and flour­ish­ing their tails, or else sit erect to recon­noitre the move­ments of the ene­my.

The notes of ornithol­o­gist John Kirk Townsend (1809 – 1851) sug­gest that not every­one was as tak­en with the species as Say (who was, in all fair­ness, the father of Amer­i­can ento­mol­o­gy):

Noth­ing can be more unpleas­ant than the bag­ging of this species, on account of the fleas with which their plumage swarms, and which in all prob­a­bil­i­ty have been left in the bur­row by the Bad­ger or Mar­mot, at the time it was aban­doned by these ani­mals. I know of no oth­er bird infest­ed by that kind of ver­min. 

The Com­mon Gallinule, above, sug­gests that there’s often more to these birds than meets the eye. His some­what sheep­ish look­ing coun­te­nance belies the red hot love life Audubon recounts:

… the man­i­fes­ta­tions of their ama­to­ry propen­si­ty were quite remark­able. The male birds court­ed the females, both on the land and on the water; they fre­quent­ly spread out their tail like a fan, and moved round each oth­er, emit­ting a mur­mur­ing sound for some sec­onds. The female would after­wards walk to the water’s edge, stand in the water up to her breast, and receive the caress­es of the male, who imme­di­ate­ly after would strut on the water before her, jerk­ing with rapid­i­ty his spread tail for awhile, after which they would both resume their ordi­nary occu­pa­tions.

Being that we are firm­ly plant­ed in the sec­ond type of bird lover’s camp, this ornitho­log­i­cal cor­nu­copia main­ly serves to whet our appetite for more Falseknees, self-described bird nerd Joshua Barkman’s beau­ti­ful­ly ren­dered web­com­ic.

Yes, Audubon’s Indi­go Bird, aka Petit Pape­bleu, “an active and live­ly lit­tle fel­low” who “pos­sess­es much ele­gance in his shape, and also a cer­tain degree of firm­ness in his make” was sep­a­rat­ed by a cen­tu­ry or so from “Mood Indi­go”—we pre­sume that’s the tune stuck in Barkman’s bird’s head—but he does look rather pre­oc­cu­pied, no?

Pos­si­bly just think­ing of meal­worms…

Explore Audubon’s Birds of Amer­i­ca by chrono­log­i­cal or alpha­bet­i­cal order, or by state, and down­load them all for free here.

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Cor­nell Launch­es Archive of 150,000 Bird Calls and Ani­mal Sounds, with Record­ings Going Back to 1929

A Lav­ish­ly Illus­trat­ed Cat­a­log of All Hum­ming­bird Species Known in the 19th Cen­tu­ry Gets Restored & Put Online

What Kind of Bird Is That?: A Free App From Cor­nell Will Give You the Answer

Explore an Inter­ac­tive Ver­sion of The Wall of Birds, a 2,500 Square-Foot Mur­al That Doc­u­ments the Evo­lu­tion of Birds Over 375 Mil­lion Years

The Bird Library: A Library Built Espe­cial­ly for Our Fine Feath­ered Friends

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and the­ater mak­er in NYC.

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When Pianist Maria João Pires Prepared to Perform the Wrong Mozart Concerto, Then Recovered Miraculously

in Life, Music | January 14th, 2026

Imag­ine, if you will, tak­ing a seat at the piano before a full house of 2,000 music lovers ready to hear Mozart’s Piano Con­cer­to No. 20 in D minor — and, more impor­tant­ly, on stage with an orches­tra and con­duc­tor more than ready to play it. That would be dif­fi­cult enough, but now imag­ine that you thought you were sup­posed to play the Piano Con­cer­to No.23 in A major, anoth­er piece of music entire­ly. This is the stuff of night­mares, and indeed, the very sit­u­a­tion in which pianist Maria João Pires found her­self in 2013, after she’d been recruit­ed to fill in for anoth­er play­er at an open rehearsal held at Ams­ter­dam’s Con­cert­ge­bouw. You can watch it unfold, assum­ing you can bear it, in the clip above.

As Pires says in the Clas­sic FM inter­view below, it had been “per­haps 11 months” since she’d last played the piece into which she could hear the orches­tra launch­ing, “and that’s the moment where you start los­ing the mem­o­ry of the details. That’s how the mem­o­ry func­tions, you know. And when peo­ple see this pan­ic, they per­haps don’t know that the real­i­ty is, we lose our mem­o­ries after just a cou­ple of months.”

It seems to have been the encour­age­ment of con­duc­tor Ric­car­do Chail­ly that got her through the moment of pan­ic and into a cred­itable per­for­mance. “You know it so well!” he insist­ed to her, and indeed, as he remem­bered lat­er, “The mir­a­cle is that she has such a mem­o­ry that she could, with­in a minute, switch to a new con­cer­to with­out mak­ing one mis­take.”

The eleventh-hour call Pires received ask­ing her to take the gig was part of the prob­lem, but so was a mis­heard num­ber. Accord­ing to the Köchel cat­a­logue, which orga­nizes all of Mozart’s work, the Piano Con­cer­to No. 20 in D minor is 466, where­as the Piano Con­cer­to No. 23 in A major is 488. Whether Pires mis­heard the K‑number or the caller mis­spoke, she soon found her­self faced with a musi­cal chal­lenge for which she felt com­plete­ly unpre­pared. In fact, she was­n’t: as Chail­ly knew, or at least banked on, her career as a clas­si­cal pianist up to that point had giv­en her all the expe­ri­ence she need­ed to draw upon to over­come the cri­sis. As her recov­ery reminds us, pro­fes­sion­al­ism isn’t so much about mak­ing sure that things always go right as being able to han­dle it when they go wrong. It hap­pens that Pires has gone through this par­tic­u­lar kind of mix-up three times, which makes her a con­sum­mate pro­fes­sion­al indeed.

via MyMod­ern­Met

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Kei­th Jar­rett Played on a Bro­ken Piano & Turned a Poten­tial­ly Dis­as­trous Con­cert Into the Best-Sell­ing Piano Album of All Time (1975)

Watch the First Per­for­mance of a Mozart Com­po­si­tion That Had Been Lost for Cen­turies

Hear the Exper­i­men­tal Piano Jazz Album by Come­di­an H. Jon Ben­jamin — Who Can’t Play Piano

The Piano Played with 16 Increas­ing Lev­els of Com­plex­i­ty: From Easy to Very Com­plex

The Mis­take Waltz: Watch the Hilar­i­ous Bal­let by Leg­endary Chore­o­g­ra­ph­er Jerome Rob­bins

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.

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“Riders on the Storm” Performed by John Densmore, Robby Krieger and 20+ Musicians Around the World

in Music | January 14th, 2026

Formed in 1965, the Doors burned hot until Jim Mor­ri­son died in 1971, and the band final­ly broke up in 1973. The group left behind more than a few fine songs—“Light My Fire,” “Break On Through (To the Oth­er Side),” “L.A. Woman,” and “Road­house Blues,” to name a few. Above, the music col­lec­tive Play­ing for Change pays trib­ute to anoth­er Doors clas­sic, “Rid­ers on the Storm.” Fea­tur­ing per­for­mances by the two sur­viv­ing Doors mem­bers John Dens­more and Rob­by Krieger, the video also weaves in appear­ances by 20+ musi­cians, every­one from Lukas and Mic­ah Nel­son, to Don Was and Foo Fight­ers key­boardist Rami Jaf­fee. Accord­ing to Play­ing for Change, the “per­for­mance reimag­ines the clas­sic anthem as a med­i­ta­tion on uni­ty, hope, and shared human­i­ty,” qual­i­ties that oth­er­wise seem in short sup­ply today. Enjoy!

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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 

The Doors’ Ray Man­zarek Walks You Through the Writ­ing of the Band’s Icon­ic Song, “Rid­ers on the Storm”

How the Doors Got Banned from The Ed Sul­li­van Show (1967)

“The Lost Paris Tapes” Pre­serves Jim Morrison’s Final Poet­ry Record­ings from 1971

The Grate­ful Dead’s “Rip­ple” Played By Musi­cians Around the World (with Cameos by David Cros­by, Jim­my Buf­fett & Bill Kreutz­mann)

Jim Mor­ri­son Accu­rate­ly Pre­dicts the Future of Elec­tron­ic Music in 1969

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Stream 4,000+ Public Domain Movies on WikiFlix: Silent Classics, Academy Award-Winners, Hitchcock Films & More

in Film | January 13th, 2026

Human­i­ty was already enjoy­ing motion pic­tures a cen­tu­ry ago. But the abil­i­ty to do so at home still lay a few decades in the future, and the abil­i­ty to pull up a movie on demand through a stream­ing ser­vice much fur­ther still. Young peo­ple in the twen­ty-twen­ties may be unable to fath­om how pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions got by with­out Net­flix and the like, but all of us, what­ev­er our age, may be curi­ous about what such plat­forms would have offered in the nine­teen-twen­ties. Now we can see for our­selves on Wik­i­Flix, a free stream­ing site that offers more than 4,000 pub­lic-domain films for our enjoy­ment. Cur­rent­ly hot on its front page: Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis, Sergei Eisen­stein’s Bat­tle­ship Potemkin, and F. W. Mur­nau’s Nos­fer­atu.

Even casu­al film-lovers will know those impor­tant titles, even if they have yet to watch the pic­tures them­selves. Reg­u­lar Open Cul­ture read­ers may also spot more than a few movies pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here: Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon; Lotte Reiniger’s The Adven­tures of Prince Achmed; William Cameron Men­zies’ (H. G. Wells-script­ed) Things to Come; Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hik­er.

There’s also Stan­ley Donen’s Cha­rade, the best film Alfred Hitch­cock nev­er made — as well as some of the films he did make, like The Lodger, Jamaica Inn, and Noto­ri­ous. Hitch­cock­’s Mur­der! was one of the works from 1930 that just came avail­able on Pub­lic Domain Day at the begin­ning of this month, along with the likes of the Marx Broth­ers-star­ring Ani­mal Crack­ers and the Best Pic­ture-win­ning All Qui­et on the West­ern Front.

Not all the movies on Wik­i­Flix are at least 95 years old. Some have fall­en into the pub­lic domain for rea­sons oth­er than sheer age. Oth­ers, like Nina Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues, were made freely avail­able by their cre­ators upon release; browse the site by year, and you can find plen­ty of oth­er recent pro­duc­tions. On the list of sec­tions, you can also orga­nize your view­ing options by coun­try, fre­quen­cy of cita­tion on Wikipedia (whose vol­un­teer com­mu­ni­ty cre­at­ed Wik­i­Flix), or genre. How about a film noir tonight? A bud­dy pic­ture? Some form of exploita­tion? Per­haps a B west­ern? As TechCrunch’s Aman­da Sil­ber­ling writes, “Why not watch a Sovi­et musi­cal inspired by Cin­derel­la, a silent film about swash­buck­ling pirates, or a Japan­ese post-apoc­a­lyp­tic film that fea­tures a guy who some­how played for both the Boston Celtics and the Chica­go Cubs?” With It’s a Won­der­ful Life on there, you at least know you’re set for next Christ­mas.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More

Down­load 9,200+ Free Films from the Prelinger Archives: Doc­u­men­taries, Car­toons & More

Watch 3,000+ Films Free Online from the Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da

60 Free Film Noir Movies You Can Watch Online, Includ­ing Clas­sics by John Hus­ton, Orson Welles & Fritz Lang

Watch 70+ Clas­sic Lit­er­ary Films Free Online: The Snows of Kil­i­man­jaro, Gulliver’s Trav­els, Jane Eyre, and More

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

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.

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Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Sleep Plan: He Slept Two Hours a Day for Two Years & Felt “Vigorous” and “Alert”

in Biology, Life, Science | January 13th, 2026

One poten­tial draw­back of genius, it seems, is rest­less­ness, a mind per­pet­u­al­ly on the move. Of course, this is what makes many cel­e­brat­ed thinkers and artists so pro­duc­tive. That and the extra hours some gain by sac­ri­fic­ing sleep. Voltaire report­ed­ly drank up to 50 cups of cof­fee a day, and seems to have suf­fered no par­tic­u­lar­ly ill effects. Balzac did the same, and died at 51. The caf­feine may have had some­thing to do with it. Both Socrates and Samuel John­son believed that sleep is wast­ed time, and “so for years has thought grey-haired Richard Buck­min­ster Fuller,” wrote Time mag­a­zine in 1943, “futu­rif­ic inven­tor of the Dymax­ion house, the Dymax­ion car and the Dymax­ion globe.”

Engi­neer and vision­ary Fuller intend­ed his “Dymax­ion” brand to rev­o­lu­tion­ize every aspect of human life, or—in the now-slight­ly-dat­ed par­lance of our obses­sion with all things hacking—he engi­neered a series of rad­i­cal “life­hacks.” Giv­en his views on sleep, that seem­ing­ly essen­tial activ­i­ty also received a Dymax­ion upgrade, the trade­marked name com­bin­ing “dynam­ic,” “max­i­mum,” and “ten­sion.” “Two hours of sleep a day,” Fuller announced, “is plen­ty.” Did he con­sult with spe­cial­ists? Med­ical doc­tors? Biol­o­gists? Noth­ing as dull as that. He did what many a mad sci­en­tist does in the movies. (In the search, as Vin­cent Price says at the end of The Fly, “for the truth.”) He cooked up a the­o­ry, and test­ed it on him­self.

“Fuller,” Time report­ed, “rea­soned that man has a pri­ma­ry store of ener­gy, quick­ly replen­ished, and a sec­ondary reserve (sec­ond wind) that takes longer to restore.” He hypoth­e­sized that we would need less sleep if we stopped to take a nap at “the first sign of fatigue.” Fuller trained him­self to do just that, for­go­ing the typ­i­cal eight hours, more or less, most of us get per night. He found—as have many artists and researchers over the years—that “after a half-hour nap he was com­plete­ly refreshed.” Naps every six hours allowed him to shrink his total sleep per 24-hour peri­od to two hours. Did he, like the 50s mad sci­en­tist, become a trag­ic vic­tim of his own exper­i­ment?

No dan­ger of merg­ing him with a fly or turn­ing him invis­i­ble. The exper­i­men­t’s fail­ure may have meant a day in bed catch­ing up on lost sleep. Instead, Fuller kept it up for two full years, 1932 and 1933, and report­ed feel­ing in “the most vig­or­ous and alert con­di­tion that I have ever enjoyed.” He might have slept two hours a day in 30 minute incre­ments indef­i­nite­ly, Time sug­gests, but found that his “busi­ness asso­ciates… insist­ed on sleep­ing like oth­er men,” and wouldn’t adapt to his eccen­tric sched­ule, though some not for lack of try­ing. In his book Buck­y­Works J. Bald­win claims, “I can per­son­al­ly attest that many of his younger col­leagues and stu­dents could not keep up with him. He nev­er seemed to tire.”

A research orga­ni­za­tion looked into the sleep sys­tem and “not­ed that not every­one was able to train them­selves to sleep on com­mand.” The point may seem obvi­ous to the sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of peo­ple who suf­fer from insom­nia. “Bucky dis­con­cert­ed observers,” Bald­win writes, “by going to sleep in thir­ty sec­onds, as if he had thrown an Off switch in his head. It hap­pened so quick­ly that it looked like he had had a seizure.” Buck­min­ster Fuller was undoubt­ed­ly an unusu­al human, but human all the same. Time report­ed that “most sleep inves­ti­ga­tors agree that the first hours of sleep are the sound­est.” A Col­gate Uni­ver­si­ty researcher at the time dis­cov­ered that “peo­ple awak­ened after four hours’ sleep were just as alert, well-coor­di­nat­ed phys­i­cal­ly and resis­tant to fatigue” as those who slept the full eight.

Sleep research since the for­ties has made a num­ber of oth­er find­ings about vari­able sleep sched­ules among humans, study­ing shift work­ers’ sleep and the so-called “bipha­sic” pat­tern com­mon in cul­tures with very late bed­times and sies­tas in the mid­dle of the day. The suc­cess of this sleep rhythm “con­tra­dicts the nor­mal idea of a monopha­sic sleep­ing sched­ule,” writes Evan Mur­ray at MIT’s Cul­ture Shock, “in which all our time asleep is lumped into one block.” Bipha­sic sleep results in six or sev­en hours of sleep rather than the sev­en to nine of monopha­sic sleep­ers. Polypha­sic sleep­ing, how­ev­er, the kind pio­neered by Fuller, seems to gen­uine­ly result in even less need­ed sleep for many. It’s an idea that’s only become wide­spread “with­in rough­ly the last decade,” Mur­ray not­ed in 2009. He points to the redis­cov­ery, with­out any clear indebt­ed­ness, of Fuller’s Dymax­ion sys­tem by col­lege stu­dent Maria Staver, who named her method “Uber­man,” in hon­or of Niet­zsche, and spread its pop­u­lar­i­ty through a blog and a book.

Mur­ray also reports on anoth­er blog­ger, Steve Pavli­na, who con­duct­ed the exper­i­ment on him­self and found that “over a peri­od of 5 1/2 months, he was suc­cess­ful in adapt­ing com­plete­ly,” reap­ing the ben­e­fits of increased pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. But like Fuller, Pavli­na gave it up, not for “health rea­sons,” but because, he wrote, “the rest of the world is monopha­sic” or close to it. Our long block of sleep appar­ent­ly con­tains a good deal of “wast­ed tran­si­tion time” before we arrive at the nec­es­sary REM state. Polypha­sic sleep trains our brains to get to REM more quick­ly and effi­cient­ly. For this rea­son, writes Mur­ray, “I believe it can work for every­one.” Per­haps it can, pro­vid­ed they are will­ing to bear the social cost of being out of sync with the rest of the world. But peo­ple like­ly to prac­tice Dymax­ion Sleep for sev­er­al months or years prob­a­bly already are.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Pow­er of Pow­er Naps: Sal­vador Dali Teach­es You How Micro-Naps Can Give You Cre­ative Inspi­ra­tion

Peo­ple in the Mid­dle Ages Slept Not Once But Twice Each Night: How This Lost Prac­tice Was Redis­cov­ered

Bertrand Rus­sell & Buck­min­ster Fuller on Why We Should Work Less, and Live & Learn More

Every­thing I Know: 42 Hours of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Vision­ary Lec­tures Free Online (1975)

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

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A Brief History of Surrealist Art: From the Bible and Ancient Egypt to Salvador Dalí’s Dream Worlds

in Art, History | January 12th, 2026

The term sur­re­al­ism — or rather, sur­réal­isme — orig­i­nates from the French words for “beyond real­i­ty.” That’s a zone, we may assume, reach­able by only dar­ing, and pos­si­bly unhinged, artis­tic minds. But in fact, even the most down-to-earth among us go beyond real­i­ty on a night­ly basis. We do so in our dreams, where the accept­ed mechan­ics of space and time, life and death, and cause and effect do not apply. Or rather, they’re replaced by anoth­er set of rules entire­ly, which feels per­fect­ly con­sis­tent and con­vinc­ing to us in the moment. Such “dream log­ic” may frus­trate the friends and fam­i­ly we attempt to regale with tales of our night visions, but as the sur­re­al­ists found, it could also be put to the ser­vice of endur­ing art.

In the Hochela­ga video above, that chan­nel’s cre­ator Tom­mie Trelawny pro­vides a long his­to­ry of sur­re­al­ism in a short run­ning time. Trac­ing that move­men­t’s roots, he goes all the way back to the ancient cul­ture of the Aus­tralian Abo­rig­i­nals, for whom the con­cept of the “dream­time” still plays an impor­tant role — and has inspired “pos­si­bly the old­est unbro­ken artis­tic tra­di­tion in the world.”

In oth­er places and oth­er eras of antiq­ui­ty, dreams were also con­sid­ered “a bridge for the spir­it world and the phys­i­cal one.” For the Egyp­tians, “these night­time voy­ages were a chance to see real­i­ty more clear­ly,” as evi­denced by resut, their word for “dream,” which also means “awak­en­ing.” Unsur­pris­ing­ly for reg­u­lar Hochela­ga view­ers, Trelawny also finds dreams in the Bible, “a book full of visions of the divine and glimpses into the cos­mic unknown.”

In every peri­od between antiq­ui­ty and now, art — includ­ing the work of Hierony­mus Bosch, Albrecht Dur­er, and Edvard Munch, as well as Japan­ese wood­block prints — has attempt­ed to cap­ture the sort of expe­ri­ences and imagery encoun­tered only in dreams, and indeed night­mares. But it was only in the wake of Sig­mund Freud’s The Inter­pre­ta­tion of Dreams, first pub­lished in 1899, that sur­re­al­ism could take shape, inspired by the ques­tion, “If the mind can reveal itself through dreams, what if it could reveal itself through art?” Après Freud came the uncon­scious­ness-inspired paint­ings of Gior­gio de Chiri­co, René Magritte, and of course Sal­vador Dalí. Yet none of them could have fore­seen the tru­ly sur­re­al­is­tic déluge that arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence has brought us. If AI reveals to us some­thing of how we think, its hal­lu­ci­na­tions reveal to us even more about how we dream.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Intro­duc­tion to Sur­re­al­ism: The Big Aes­thet­ic Ideas Pre­sent­ed in Three Videos

What Makes Sal­vador Dalí’s Icon­ic Sur­re­al­ist Paint­ing The Per­sis­tence of Mem­o­ry a Great Work of Art

Watch Dreams That Mon­ey Can Buy, a Sur­re­al­ist Film by Man Ray, Mar­cel Duchamp, Alexan­der Calder, Fer­nand Léger & Hans Richter

Europe After the Rain: Watch the Vin­tage Doc­u­men­tary on the Two Great Art Move­ments, Dada & Sur­re­al­ism (1978)

David Lynch Presents the His­to­ry of Sur­re­al­ist Film (1987)

The Fan­tas­tic Women Of Sur­re­al­ism: An Intro­duc­tion

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.

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Elementary School Choir Sings the Grateful Dead’s “Ripple,” “Box of Rain,” “Brokedown Palace” & More: RIP Bob Weir

in Life, Music | January 12th, 2026

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Down in Austin, Texas, music teacher Gavin Tabone leads the Bar­ton Hills Choir, made up of 3rd- through 6th-grade stu­dents. Backed by pro­fes­sion­al musi­cians, the choir per­forms a wide-rang­ing mix of music, from clas­sic pop and rock to indie songs by artists like Wilco, Muse, The Flam­ing Lips, and espe­cial­ly the Grate­ful Dead. Above and below, you can find per­for­mances of such Dead clas­sics as “Rip­ple,” “Box of Rain” and “Going Down the Road Feel­ing Bad” → “I Know You Rid­er.” And if you head to their YouTube chan­nel, you can find ver­sions of “Cas­sidy,” “Touch of Grey,” “Scar­let Bego­nias,” “Broke­down Palace,” and more.

With the pass­ing of Bob Weir this week­end, it seems like a fit­ting time to high­light these per­for­mances. Weir first joined the Dead when only a teenag­er, still basi­cal­ly a kid him­self, and then con­tin­ued the jour­ney for the next 60 years, intro­duc­ing the Dead­’s song­book to suc­ces­sive gen­er­a­tions of fans. In recent years, he talked about the Dead song­book endur­ing for the next 200 to 300 years, much as Beethoven remains with us today. As we watch ele­men­tary stu­dents per­form Grate­ful Dead clas­sics, it’s hard not to think that Weir was on to some­thing.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Ele­men­tary School Kids Sing David Bowie’s “Space Odd­i­ty” & Oth­er Rock Hits: A Cult Clas­sic Record­ed in 1976

The Grate­ful Dead’s “Rip­ple” Played By Musi­cians Around the World (with Cameos by David Cros­by, Jim­my Buf­fett & Bill Kreutz­mann)

When the Grate­ful Dead Played at the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids, in the Shad­ow of the Sphinx (1978)

The Iso­lat­ed Bass Grooves of The Grate­ful Dead’s Phil Lesh (RIP)

Stream a Mas­sive Archive of Grate­ful Dead Con­certs from 1965–1995

How the Grate­ful Dead’s “Wall of Sound”–a Mon­ster, 600-Speak­er Sound System–Changed Rock Con­certs & Live Music For­ev­er

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Trevor Noah Explains How Kintsugi, the Japanese Art of Repairing Pottery, Helped Him Overcome Life’s Tragedies

in Art, Life | January 9th, 2026

Trevor Noah end­ed his stint as the host of The Dai­ly Show a lit­tle over three years ago, but he’s made him­self into anoth­er kind of pop-cul­tur­al pres­ence since then. In evi­dence, we have his appear­ance above on the pop­u­lar pod­cast and YouTube show Diary of a CEO. For more than two and a half hours, Noah dis­cuss­es with host Steven Bartlett (who, like Noah, also hap­pens to be African-born with mixed parent­age) his rea­sons for quit­ting that polit­i­cal-news-com­e­dy TV insti­tu­tion, his strug­gles with depres­sion, and the time his step­fa­ther shot his moth­er in the head. She lived, owing to the mirac­u­lous­ly unlike­ly tra­jec­to­ry of the bul­let, but that did­n’t stop the expe­ri­ence from becom­ing what Noah describes as the worst of his life.

Dis­cussing all this brings to his mind the Japan­ese art of kintsu­gi (pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture). “It’s a prac­tice of repair­ing pot­tery and ceram­ics that have bro­ken,” Noah explains. “What hap­pens is, you break a plate, or you break a vase or some­thing,” and “they put it back togeth­er, these arti­sans who do it. But they don’t just glue it back togeth­er, they glue it back togeth­er and they sort of adorn it with a gold­en bind­ing. And what you get is an object that is some­how more beau­ti­ful than before it was bro­ken.”

Kintsu­gi struck him as “one of the most beau­ti­ful con­cepts, and a dif­fer­ent way to think about being ‘fixed’ or ‘over­com­ing’ ”; it was­n’t “the idea that we are per­fect, the way we were before some­thing hap­pened to us, but rather, it is that we get to wear our cracks with a new type of pride, and a new type of beau­ty.”

Noah would hard­ly be the only per­son to see in these recon­sti­tut­ed ceram­ic ves­sels with their gleam­ing kintsu­gi seams a metaphor for him­self. Like more than a few pub­lic fig­ures in the West, he’s been will­ing to dis­cuss the vicis­si­tudes of his life in detail, and even use them for mate­r­i­al in work like his stand-up com­e­dy and his mem­oir Born a Crime. But it is unusu­al, in a chat like this with mil­lions and mil­lions of view­ers, to hear ref­er­ence made to a half-mil­len­ni­um-old Japan­ese form of pot­tery repair. That pos­si­bil­i­ty, of course, is cen­tral to the appeal of long-form inter­view pod­casts, whose con­ver­sa­tions have the time and space to go far down unex­pect­ed paths. The Dai­ly Show may deliv­er more laughs per minute, but giv­en its for­mat’s time con­straints, kintsu­gi-type talk is no doubt the first thing to get edit­ed out — and the cut cer­tain­ly won’t be high­light­ed.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Visu­al Intro­duc­tion to Kintsu­gi, the Japan­ese Art of Repair­ing Bro­ken Pot­tery and Find­ing Beau­ty in Imper­fec­tion

How Japan­ese Kintsu­gi Mas­ters Restore Pot­tery by Beau­ti­fy­ing the Cracks

David Lynch Explains Why Depres­sion Is the Ene­my of Cre­ativ­i­ty — and Why Med­i­ta­tion Is the Solu­tion

Stanford’s Robert Sapol­sky Demys­ti­fies Depres­sion, Which, Like Dia­betes, Is Root­ed in Biol­o­gy

Stephen Fry on Cop­ing with Depres­sion: It’s Rain­ing, But the Sun Will Come Out Again

Charles Bukows­ki Explains How to Beat Depres­sion: Spend 3–4 Days in Bed and You’ll Get the Juices Flow­ing Again (NSFW)

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.

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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.

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