Arts and Culture

Originally recorded back in 2014, this clip of David Blaine performing a card trick for Harrison Ford went viral this week. (Can we still use this expression in the age of COVID?) Hang with it until the end. It’s worth the 1:50 of your time. 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.  via Clarisse Loughrey Related Content: Willie Nelson Shows You a Delightful Card Trick Monkey Sees A Magic Trick Orson Welles Performs a Magic Trick Harrison Ford Gets Delightfully Dumbfounded by David Blaine’s Card Trick is a post from: Open Culture . Follow us on Facebook a

Can great art be explained? Isn’t it a little like explaining a joke? Yet this can be worthwhile when the joke is in a foreign language or an unfamiliar idiom, a long-forgotten dialect or an alien idiolect. Consider, for example, the most common response to Mark Rothko’s monochromatic rectangles: “I don’t get it.” Will perplexed viewers better understand Rothko’s Seagram murals when they learn that “he was found in a pool of blood six by eight feet wide, roughly the size of one of his paintings,” as James Payne writes , hours after he sent the nine canvasses to the Tate Modern gallery in London in 1970? “His suicide would change everything and shape the way we respond to his work,” adding a darker edge to comments of his like “I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions, tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on.” Last summer, Payne launched his series Great Art Explained in Fifteen Minutes , “a brilliant new addition to YouTube art history channels,” Forbes enthuse

Over the past year, the story of evictions during COVID has often risen above the muck. It’s made headlines in major newspapers and  TIME  magazine , and received serious attention from the government, with stop-gap eviction moratoriums put in effect and renewed several times, and likely due to be renewed again. Stopping evictions is not enough. “For many landlords,”  notes the United Way , “the order created a financial burden of housing renters with no payments,” and without income, they have no way to pay. But these measures have kept many thousands of vulnerable adults and children from experiencing homelessness. And yet moratoriums aside, the number of people losing their homes is on the rise during the pandemic, with a  disproportionate impact on Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities , and shelters have been forced to close or lower capacity. Framing increasing homelessnes solely as a crisis driven by the virus misses the fact that it has been  growing since 20

Thrillseekers! Are you girding your loins to rejoin the amusement park crowds this summer? No worries if you don’t feel quite ready to brave the socially distanced rollercoaster lines. Indulge in some low-risk vertigo, thanks to  British Pathé ‘s vintage newsreels of  steeplejacks , steelworkers, and window cleaners doing their thing. While these tradespeople were called in whenever an industrial chimney required repair or a steel beam was in need of welding, many of the newsreels feature iconic locations, such as New York City’s Woolworth Building, above, getting a good stonework cleaning in 1931. In 1929, some “workmen acrobats” were engaged to adorn  St. Peter’s Basilica  and the Vatican with thousands of lamps when Pope Pius XI, in his first official act as pope, revived the public tradition of  Urbi et Orbi , a papal address and apostolic blessing for the first time in fifty-two years. Some gender boundaries got smashed in the aftermath of WWII, but

A gentleman goes to the movies, only to find a marquee full of retreads, reboots, sequels, and prequels. He demands to know why no one makes original films anymore, a reasonable question people often ask. But it seems he has run directly into a graduate student in critical theory behind the glass. The ticket-seller rattles off a theory of unoriginality that is difficult to refute but also, it turns out, only a word-for-word recitation of the Wikipedia page on “Plagiarism.” This is one of the ironies in “Allergy to Originality” every English teacher will appreciate. In the short, animated New York Times Op-Doc by Drew Christie, an official Sundance selection in 2014, “two men discuss whether anything is truly original — especially in movies and books,” notes the Times . The question leads us to consider what we might mean by originality when every work is built from pieces of others. “In creating this Op-Doc animation,” Christie writes, “I copied well-known images and photograp