Arts and Culture

PBS' American Masters series has released the new documentary, Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool , and it's streaming free online for a limited time . (Some geo-restrictions may apply.) With full access to the Miles Davis Estate, "the film features never-before-seen footage, including studio outtakes from his recording sessions, rare photos and new interviews." Watch the trailer above. Stream the full documentary here . Would you like to support the mission of Open Culture? Please 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. Also consider following Open Culture on Facebook  and   Twitter  and  sharing intelligent media with your friends. Or sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox.  Related Content: 1,150 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, No...

Because my story  was  true. I was certain of that. And it was extremely important, I felt, for the  meaning  of our journey to be made absolutely clear.  The publication history of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the story of gonzo journalism itself, a form dependent upon the unreliability of its narrator, who becomes a central character in the ostensibly real-life drama. In Thompson’s hallucinogenic tales of his travels to Las Vegas with attorney and Chicano activist Oscar Zeta Acosta, the reporter went so far as to become a fictional character. The journey began with a commission from Rolling Stone to report on the death of reporter Ruben Salazar, killed by a Los Angeles police tear gas grenade at an anti-Vietnam War protest. This trip diverted, however, to Las Vegas, where Thompson drove to report on the Mint 400 desert race for Sports Illustrated . Rather than submitting the 250-word piece the magazine requested, he gave them a...

No matter how well you remember your physics classes, you most likely don't remember learning any stories in them. Theories and equations, yes, but not stories — yet each of those theories and equations has a story behind it, as does the entire scientific enterprise of physics they constitute. The video above  from the BBC's Dara Ó Briain's   Science Club provides an overview of the latter story in an animated four minutes, making it ideal for youngsters just starting to learn about physics. It will also do the job for those of us not-so-youngsters circling back to get a better grasp of physics, its discoveries and driving questions. "The story of physics is, for the most part, a tale of ever-increasing confidence," says Ó Briain, a comedian as well as a television host and writer on various subjects. This version of the story begins with rolling balls and falling objects, observed with a new rigor by such 17th-century Italians as Galileo Galilei. Galileo...

The average person believes implicitly that the photograph cannot falsify. Of course, you and I know that this unbounded faith in the integrity of the photograph is often rudely shaken, for, while photographs may not lie, liars may photograph.  — Lewis Wickes Hine , “Social Photography: How the Camera May Help in the Social Uplift” (1909) Long before  Brandon Stanton’s wildly popular Humans of New York project  tapped into the public’s capacity for compassion by combining photos of his subjects with some telling narrative about their lives, educator and sociologist Lewis Wickes Hine was using his camera as a tool to pressure the public into demanding an end to child labor in the United States. In a time when the US Federal Census reported that one in five children under the age of 16 — over 1.75 million — was gainfully employed, Hines traversed the country under the auspices of the  National Child Labor Committee , gathering information and...

No matter how many public institutions you visit in a day—schools, libraries, museums, or the dreaded DMV—you may still feel like privatized services are closing in. And if you’re a fan of national parks and public lands, you’re keenly aware they’re at risk of being eaten up by developers and energy companies . The commons are shrinking, a tragic fact that is hardly inevitable but, as Matto Mildenberger argues at Scientific American , the result of some very narrow ideas. But we can take heart that one store of common wealth has majorly expanded recently, and will continue to grow each year since January 1, 2019— Public Domain Day —when hundreds of thousands of works from 1923 became freely available, the first time that happened in 21 years. This year saw the release of thousands more works into the public domain from 1924, and so it will continue ad infinitum . And now—as if that weren’t enough to keep us busy learning about, sharing, adapting, and repurposing the past into...

Denis Shirayev is at it again! The man who only a few weeks ago put one of the most famous pieces of film history-- the Lumiere Bros. footage of a train arriving at La Ciotat station --through a neural network to bring it “to life,” so to speak, has turned to another fascinating slice of history. For his next installment, he has taken footage of New York City daily life in 1911, eight minutes of tram rides, horse-drawn wagons, the elevated train, and the rush of crowded streets, and applied the same deep learning algorithms to make it all look like it was shot yesterday. This time he had a bit of help from another YouTube historian/technician Guy Jones , who had already speed corrected and tweaked the footage, as well as adding environmental sounds. Shirayev has used AI to upscale the footage to 4K and to 60p. The original footage was shot by Svenska Biografteatern , a Swedish newsreel company, and begins with a shot of the Statue of Liberty as if seen through a spyglass. The...

Euler's conjecture , a theory proposed by  Leonhard Euler in 1769, hung in there for 200 years. Then L.J. Lander and T.R. Parkin came along in 1966, and debunked the conjecture in two swift sentences. Their article -- which is now open access and can be downloaded here -- appeared in the  Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society . If you're wondering what the conjecture and its refutation are all about, you might want to ask Cliff Pickover , the author of 45 books on math and science . He brought this curious document  to the web back in 2015. Would you like to support the mission of Open Culture? Please 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. Also consider following Open Culture on Facebook  and   Twitter  and  sharing intelligent media with your friends. O...