Open Culture

Today, if you want to know about any of the flora or fauna that surround us, you have only to look it up online.

Many connoisseurs of architecture are enthralled by the modernist philosophy of Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and I M Pei, who shared a belief that form follows function, or, as Wright had it, that form and function are one.

In the days of popular retrofuturism-say, the first half of the twentieth century-people tended to imagine the world of tomorrow looking very much like the world of today, only with a lot more flying cars, monorails, and videophones.

Asked to identify 'the Athens of the South,' many Americans might well point to Athens, Georgia, especially if they happen to be fans of REM, the B-52s, or Of Montreal.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Rochester Institute of Technology, via Wikimedia CommonsIn 1980, scientist and writer Isaac Asimov argued in an essay that 'there is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been.' That year, the Republican Party stood at the dawn of

Necessity being the mother of invention, this led to the creation of an ingenious solution: daisugi, the growing of additional trees, in effect, out of existing trees

Thinking back to the many childhood grocery-store trips made with their parents, Americans of a certain age will remember nothing so vividly as the Weekly World News.

Image by Pete Welsch, via Wikimedia CommonsPhilip K. Dick's mind was invaded in 1974.It happened following surgery for an impacted wisdom tooth. While recovering, the author of Ubik and The Man in the High Castle, received a delivery of pain medication.

At one time or another, we all feel twinges of anxiety about what will constitute the legacy we leave behind.