Arts and Culture

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1fiOJDXA-E Combining pop music with opera was always the height of pretension. But where would we be without the pretentious? As Brian Eno observed in his 1995 diary, “My assumptions about culture as a place where you can take psychological risks without incurring physical penalties make me think that pretending is the most important thing we do. It’s the way we make our thought experiments, find out what it would be like to be otherwise.” And with Freddie Mercury and Queen, if it wasn’t for pretense we wouldn’t have “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Hell, we wouldn’t have Queen, period. But in 1988 the gamble didn’t exactly pay off. To the British music press, Mercury was coasting on L ive Aid fumes and the shadow of his unsuccessful solo album. And then to hear that he’d teamed up with opera singer Montserrat Caballé ? Despite what any hagiographic tale of Mercury might say, this passed your average rock fan by. Outside the whims of the charts, however...

Studio Ghibli make lush and captivating animated films. So, on occasion, do other studios, but of how many of their pictures can we say that each and every still frame constitutes a work of art in itself? As a test, try putting on a Ghibli movie and pausing at random, then doing the same for any other major animated feature of similar vintage: chances are, the former will far more often produce an image you’d like to capture in high resolution and use for your desktop background, or perhaps even print out and hang on your wall. Now, Studio Ghibli have provided such images themselves, in an online collection ( click here and scroll down the page ) that offers more than 1,100 stills from their films, all free for the download. This trove has grown considerably since we first featured it this past fall here at Open Culture . In that post, Ted Mills quotes Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki as instructing visitors to use the images “freely within the scope of common sense.” It was Suzuki,...

I mean, the idea that you would give a psychedelic—in this case, magic mushrooms or the chemical called psilocybin that’s derived from magic mushrooms—to people dying of cancer, people with terminal diagnoses, to help them deal with their – what’s called existential distress. And this seemed like such a crazy idea that I began looking into it. Why should a drug from a mushroom help people deal with their mortality? –Michael Pollan in an interview with Terry Gross, “’Reluctant Psychonaut’ Michael Pollan Embraces ‘New Science’ Of Psychedelics” Around the same time Albert Hoffman synthesized LSD in the early 1940s , a pioneering ethnobotanist, writer, and photographer named Richard Evan Schultes set out “on a mission to study how indigenous peoples” in the Amazon rainforest “used plants for medicinal, ritual and practical purposes,” as an extensive history of Schultes’ travels notes . “He went on to spend over a decade immersed in near-continuous fieldwork, collecting more than 24,...

Psst. Amazon currently has AirPods Pro headphones for $199 , while Apple has them listed for $249 . It’s the deal of the day for anyone looking for wireless Bluetooth earbuds, with noise-cancelling, immersive sound. H/T Rolling Stone Technology Arbitrage: Amazon is Selling Airpods Pro Headphones for $50 Less Than Apple is a post from: Open Culture . Follow us on Facebook , Twitter , and Google Plus , or get our Daily Email . And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses , Free Online Movies , Free eBooks ,  Free Audio Books , Free Foreign Language Lessons , and MOOCs . from Open Culture https://ift.tt/3rKrwDF via Ilumina

The late Ray Bradbury wrote a dizzying number of short stories over a career that spanned nine decades. Authorized Bradbury biographer Sam Weller, author of the bestselling The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury and the indispensable companion book, Listen to the Echoes: The Ray Bradbury Interviews makes sense of Bradbury’s voluminous short story output by selecting “The Essential Bradbury,” the 25 finest tales by the beloved writer . Bradbury wrote defiantly across genres: gothic horror, social science fiction, weird tales, fantasy, and contemporary literary fiction. He is, perhaps, best known for his 1953 chef d’oeuvre, Fahrenheit 451 , but Weller (and Bradbury’s late wife of 56 years, Marguerite for that matter) argue that Bradbury’s finest work came in the form of the short story. Weller’s “Essential Bradbury” includes some cool, never-before-seen ephemera, culled from the biographer’s personal archives. Sam Weller worked with Ray Bradbury for 12 years. You can rea...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abspZyhQDm0 Have you ever wondered what generations hundreds or thousands of years hence will make of our strip malls, office parks, and sports arenas? Probably not much, since there probably won’t be much left. How much medium-density fibreboard is likely to remain? The colorful structures that make the modern world seem solid, the grocery shelves, fast food counters, and shiny product displays, will return to the sawdust from which they came. Back in antiquity, on the other hand, things were built to last, even through the fires and devastation of the  eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD . Archaeologists will be discovering for many more years everyday features of Pompeii that survived a historic disaster and the ordinary ravages of time. In 2019, a team fully unearthed what is known as a thermopolium , a fancy Greek word for a snack bar that “would have served hot food and drinks to locals in the city,” the  BBC reports . The find wa...