Open Culture

2 weeks ago | openculture.com | Colin Marshall

As Mike Tyson once put it, with characteristic straightforwardness, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Back in the time of the Roman Republic and the early Roman Empire, all of Rome’s enemies must have had a plan until pila punched through their shields. A kind of javelin with a wooden shaft and a sharp iron shank, the pilum came in both long and short lengths.

2 weeks ago | openculture.com | Colin Marshall |In ART

If you happen to go to the Louvre to have a look at Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, you’ll find that you can’t get especially close to it. That owes in part to the ever-present crowd of cellphone photographers, and more so to the painting’s having been installed behind a wooden barrier and encased in a sturdy-looking glass box. These are suitable precautions, you might imagine, for the single most famous work of art in the world.

2 weeks ago | openculture.com | Colin Marshall

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater is a “house museum,” first designed as a residence, and now open to the public. In fact, as the institution’s director Justin Gunther explains in the Open Space video above, it’s “the first house of the modern movement to open as a public site,” having begun offering tours in 1964. The openness of Fallingwater owes a great deal to the efforts of Edgar Kaufmann Jr., the son of the Pittsburgh department-store magnate who commissioned the house in the first place.

3 weeks ago | openculture.com | Colin Marshall

Miles Davis didn’t put out any studio albums from 1973 until the middle of 1981. In explaining the reasons for this lacuna in his recording career, Milesologists can point to a variety of factors in the man’s professional and personal life. But one in particular looms large: the failure of his 1972 album On the Corner. Davis wasn’t known for occupying any one style of jazz for very long, to put it mildly, but the On the Corner sessions find him very nearly breaking with jazz itself.

3 weeks ago | openculture.com | Colin Marshall

Most tourists in Rome put the Colosseum at the top of their to-see list.