When considering whether to buy yet another book, you might well ask yourself when you’ll get around to reading it. But perhaps there are other, even more important considerations, such as the intellectual value of the book in its still-unread state. In our personal libraries we all keep at least a few favorites, volumes to which we turn again and again. But what would be the use of a book collection consisting entirely of books we’ve already read? This is the question put to us by the reading (or at least acquiring) life of no less a man of letters than Umberto Eco, seen in the video above walking through his personal library of 30,000 books — a fair few of which, we can safely assume, he never got through.

As Nassim Taleb tells it, Eco separated his visitors into two categories: “those who react with ‘Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have. How many of these books have you read’ and the others — a very small minority — who get the point is that a private library […]

“By the time of his death”—almost two years before, in fact—“Van Gogh’s work had begun to attract critical attention,” writes the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who point out that Van Gogh’s works shown “at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris between 1888 and 1890 and with Les XX in Brussels in 1890… were regarded by many artists as ‘the most remarkable’” in both exhibits. Critics wrote glowing appreciations, and Van Gogh seemed poised to achieve the recognition everyone knows he deserved in his lifetime. Still, Van Gogh himself was not present at these exhibitions. He was first in Arles, where he settled in near-seclusion (save for Gaugin), after cutting off part of his ear. Then, in 1889, he arrived at the asylum near Saint-Rémy, where he furiously painted 150 canvases, then shot himself in the chest, thinking his life’s work a failure, despite the public recognition and praise his brother Theo poignantly tried to communicate to him in his final letters.

Now imagine that Van Gogh had actually been able to experience the acclaim bestowed on him near the end—or the acclaim bestowed on […]

When Joni Mitchell heard the great cabaret artist Mabel Mercer in concert, she was so struck by the older woman’s rendition of “Both Sides Now,” the enduring ballad Mitchell wrote at the tender age of 23, that she went backstage to show her appreciation:

… but I didn’t tell her that I was the author. So, I said, y’know, I’ve heard various recordings of that song, but you bring something to it, y’know, that other people haven’t been able to do. You know, it’s not a song for an ingenue. You have to bring some age to it. 

Well, she took offense. I insulted her. I called her an old lady, as far as she was concerned. So I got out of there in a hell of a hurry! 

But I think I finally became an old lady myself and could sing the song right.

This is just one of many candid treats to be found in Mitchell’s interview with Elton John, for his Apple Music 1 show Rocket […]

Big Think uploaded the video on how to argue above at the end of last month, just in time for the United States midterm election. Where politics — or rather, politically inflected conflicts — have become more or less another national sport, everyone is always looking for an edge. But the expert who stars in the video, Harvard’s International Negotiation program head and Negotiating the Nonnegotiable author Daniel Shapiro, has an unusually capacious notion of what it means to win an argument. Our goal, as he conceives of it, is to have “more effective conversations,” and this entails understanding three keys to having those conversations: identity, appreciation, and affiliation.

“The moment your identity gets hooked in these conflicts,” Shapiro says, “all of a sudden your emotions become a hundred times more powerful” — and the debate at hand becomes a hundred times less tractable. You therefore must “know who you are and what you stand for,” the “values and beliefs” driving you to argue for your particular position.

Ideally, you’ll also put some effort toward finding out the same things about […]

William Shakespeare’s plays have endured not just because of their inherent dramatic and linguistic qualities, but also because each era has found its own way of envisioning and re-envisioning them. The technology involved in stage productions has changed over the past four centuries, of course, but so has the technology involved in art itself. A few years ago, we featured here on Open Culture an archive of 3,000 illustrations of Shakespeare’s complete works going back to the mid-nineteenth century. That site was the PhD project of Cardiff University’s Michael Goodman, who has recently completed another digital Shakespeare project, this time using artificial intelligence: Paint the Picture to the Word.

“Every image collected here has been generated by Stable Diffusion, a powerful text-to-image AI,” writes Goodman on this new project’s About page. “To create an image using this technology a user simply types a description of what they want to see into a text box and […]