For a decade now, I’ve written a post every weekday at Open Culture, usually to do with literature, film, music, art, architecture, television, radio, or language. The total comes to more than 2,800 so far, and here are ten of my favorites from the more than 250 I wrote in 2022:
- P.J. O’Rourke (RIP) Explains Why You Can Never Win Over Your Political Adversaries by Mocking Them
- When Movies Came on Vinyl: The Early-80s Engineering Marvel and Marketing Disaster That Was RCA’s SelectaVision
- Watch David Hockney Paint with Light, Using the Quantel Paintbox Graphics System (1986)
- When David Bowie & Brian Eno Made a Twin Peaks-Inspired Album, Outside (1995)
- The Last Cigarette Commercial Ever Aired on American TV (1971)
- Pink Lady and Jeff: Japan’s Biggest Pop Musicians Star in One of America’s Worst-Reviewed TV Shows (1980)
- Goodbye to the Nakagin Capsule Tower, Tokyo’s Strangest and Most Utopian Apartment Building
- Meet the Hyperpolyglots, the People Who Can Mysteriously Speak Up to 32 Different Languages
- How Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” Went from 80s Pop Smash to Bastion of Internet Culture: A Short Documentary
- The Rise and Fall of Concorde, the Midcentury Supersonic Jetliner That Still Inspires Awe Today
See also my ten favorite Open Culture posts of 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021.