Gary Panter designed punk flyers before building the surreal world of Pee-wee Herman

Gary Panter's punk art defined the '70s and '80s counterculture

The artist got his start providing fliers and logos for early Los Angeles punk bands, but later took his psychedelic, Pop Art-vision to designing on "Pee-Wee's Playhouse," for which he won three Emmy Awards.

Before he had his own show, Pee-wee Herman appeared on 'The Dating Game'

Paul Reubens' character Pee-wee Herman would become a sensation with his 1986 children's show "Pee-wee's Playhouse," but in 1979 he appeared as the hilariously naive character on "the Dating Game." It's not clear if the show (or its audience) understood what they were seeing.

Raymond Pettibon designed Black Flag's iconic logo

Pettibon’s brother, Greg Ginn, was the guitarist for a new band in search of a logo. Pettibon delivered an image that would become one of the defining icons of punk: four black bars, meant to symbolize a waving flag.

Richard Hell is one of punk's most accomplished writers

Richard Hell is punk royalty, known for his work with Television, the Heartbreakers, and the Voidoids. He's also a well-traveled poet, novelist, critic, and memoirist, as this detailed profile from Poetry Foundation's Andrew Marzoni shows.

The first known use of 'punk rock' was in 1971

When Creem Magazine's Dave Marsh wrote about seeing '60s garage rockers ? and the Mysterians perform, he remarked it would be unthinkable "to miss such a landmark exposition of punk-rock." The band isn't considered a punk band, but Marsh's description would go on to define other scrappy, back-to-basics acts.

Basquiat was in an experimental punk band in the late 1970s

The band Gray was formed in New York after the city’s ‘70s punk explosion, though Basquiat’s band (which also featured filmmaker Michael Holman and actor Vincent Gallo) was considered no wave—a more experimental subgenre that used the guitar for dissonance rather than melody and toyed with multiple sounds, including hip-hop.

In 1984, Dylan began experimenting with punk

When Bob Dylan was asked to appear on David Letterman’s relatively new late-night show, he decided to call an audible. He’d been intrigued by LA’s exploding post-punk scene and had spent time jamming with one of its bands, the Plugz, whom he decided to bring to Letterman as his backing band. The appearance sounds unlike anything else in his catalog and is one of his more fascinating creative reinventions in a career loaded with them.

The early Los Angeles punk scene found a home in Chinatown

Acts like Black Flag, X, and Circle Jerks performed in unconventional venues like Madame Wong’s and the Hong Kong Cafe—restaurants in the city’s Chinatown neighborhood that became an integral part of the nascent scene.

Jules Feiffer revolutionized the political cartoon

Feiffer’s drawings for various newspapers functioned less as entertainment and more as editorial, skewering popular beliefs and accepted dogmas. In 1986, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his work.

Pepe the Frog went from internet meme to symbol of hate

The character first appeared in 2005, in an online comic called "Boy's Club," inspiring countless memes in which his likeliness was used as a supportive shorthand. Then, people started pairing Pepe with hateful messages, morphing him into something his author never intended.

Mid-century modern graphic designers, known for their bright colors and bold lines in advertising, also found success with children's books.

Mid-century modern graphic designers like Milton Glaser and Eric Carle found success with children's books

Glaser was famous for creating the "I Heart NY" logo, the DC Comics logo, and an iconic Bob Dylan poster for CBS Records, but he naturally transitioned to illustrating children's books like "The Smallest Elephant in the World" and "If Apples had Teeth." Carle, author of "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" and "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?," began his career in advertising. Scholars say mid-century modern's preference for clean lines and bold colors was a natural fit for kids' books.

Andy Warhol’s 'Exploding Plastic Inevitable' shows were multimedia performance art

If you wandered into one of Andy Warhol’s "Exploding Plastic Inevitable" events in the 1960s, you might have encountered a Velvet Underground performance, go-go dancers, strobe lights, guerrilla filmmakers asking very personal questions, and mimes. Warhol was on the cutting edge of many art forms, and performance art was no exception.

The Ramones' 'Pet Sematary,' the theme song for the Stephen King novel of the same name, was written while the band was admiring the writer's collection of horror memorabilia.

Stephen King's basement inspired a Ramones classic

The horror writer was a fan of the band and invited them to his home in Maine. While hanging out in the basement, Dee Dee Ramone, the band's bassist, stole away with a copy of King's "Pet Sematary" and wrote a song about it. The song appeared in the film adaptation of the book, which began shooting a month later.

Matt Groening wrote the comic 'Life in Hell' before creating 'The Simpsons'

The strip began in 1977 as a self-published book featuring disturbing-looking rabbits navigating the indignities of life in Los Angeles, where Groening had recently moved. It was picked up by the Los Angeles Reader in 1980 and then syndicated by over 250 newspapers by 1986. Eventually, it caught the eye of James L Brooks, who was looking for a cartoonist to create sketches for "The Tracey Ullman Show" for Fox.

The Marc Jacobs grunge fashion collection

After Nirvana's breakthrough, the grunge aesthetic became a marketable commodity. Fashion designer Marc Jacobs created a collection for Perry Ellis that featured grunge fashion, incorporating thrift store clothing typically worn by grunge bands onto the runway, accompanied by the music of Nirvana and Sonic Youth. Jacobs sent samples of the collection to Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, but the couple burned them. "We were punkers," Love said in 2010, "we didn't like that kind of thing."

The Sex Pistols were created by the owner of a fashion store

Malcolm McLaren and his wife Vivienne Westwood owned and operated a provocative fashion store in London simply called Sex. McLaren created the Sex Pistols from kids who hung around the shop, none of whom were musicians, as a way to infiltrate the music industry.

See nearly 500 early hip-hop flyers

The "back to school jam" may have been revolutionary, but it wasn't the only event that helped build hip-hop culture. This digital collection from Cornell University has hundreds of flyers for concerts from 1977 to 1984, offering a window into the burgeoning underground.

Wally Feresten is the man behind the show's iconic cue cards

“SNL” obsessives are familiar with the show’s cue cards, which occasionally appear on air in fourth-wall-breaking segments. They might even recognize Wally Feresten, the man who’s been handwriting (and holding) them since 1990. This podcast interview delves into Feresten’s curious life behind the scenes at “SNL” and his unexpected turns in front of the camera.

Alfred Hitchcock influenced modern horror director Jordan Peele

Like Alfred Hitchcock, Jordan Peele has built a filmography that’s equal parts thrilling, suspenseful, genre-bending, and literary. It’s no surprise, then, that so many critics have been quick to name Peele as the second coming of “the Master of Suspense.”

One graffiti artist turned a train tunnel into his gallery

Chris Pape, also known as Freedom, began exploring a tunnel under Manhattan's Riverside Park when he was a kid. As he grew more involved with graffiti, he turned its walls into a massive art project, one that reflected both the history of graffiti and the people who made the tunnel their home.

Pepsi uses augmented reality to prank people at a bus shelter

Commuters at a London bus stop have seen alien invasions, monsters from the sewers grabbing pedestrians and tigers running down the street as part of an elaborate advertising campaign.

Rockwell based many of his paintings on staged photographs

Rockwell’s work was often noted for its realism. His paintings' near-photographic precision was no accident. Early in his career, he painted from live models. Later, he’d conceived a scene, staged it, photographed it, and then used the photos as the foundation for his paintings.

Before the Velvet Underground, Lou Reed was a workaday songwriter

His job at Pickwick Records, a label that churned out budget records for department stores, was to crank out generic pop fare. One of those songs was 1964’s “The Ostrich,” a dance song in the style of Chubby Checker’s “The Twist” and Little Eva’s “The Loco-Motion.”

Prince often used pseudonyms when working with other people

Prince was seemingly everywhere in the '80s, though his ubiquity wasn't always apparent on the surface, thanks to a number of pseudonyms he used when contributing to other artists' projects.

One artist's horrifyingly ornate jack-o-lanterns

Ray Villofane is a world-renowned artist known for his realistic and scary pumpkin carvings which take the art to the next level. Spook yourself with a dip into just a few of his pieces, ranging from the silly to the truly terrifying. Villofane's...

See these 16 pieces of art evoking phobias of snakes, flying, spiders, and more. 

'Saturday Night Fever,' the 1977 film that introduced disco to the mainstream, was based on a fabricated magazine story.

Walt Disney's early film 'Alice's Wonderland' was a groundbreaking innovation in the silent film era

The tragic Pulitzer Prize-winning image 'The Vulture and the Little Girl' (1993) generated controversy, raised concerns about ethics in photography, and eventually led to the photographer's death.

American short story writer Flannery O'Connor raised 40 peacocks, which became potent symbols for her fiction's elegant violence

Exploring the Larry Bird punch that almost changed March Madness

The Beatles' US label rejected the band's first two singles, 'Please Please Me' and 'From Me to You,' with one executive calling the band 'dead in the water.'

The animatronic shark from Steven Spielberg's 'Jaws,' the first modern blockbuster, was a complex underwater apparatus called 'Bruce.'

Explore fun facts from the USPS, including unique post office buildings, a stamp that traveled past Pluto, and more.

American dance legend Martha Graham, sometimes called 'the Picasso of dance,' refused to perform at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and conceived the piece 'Chronicle' in response to the experience.

Hear 50 years of iconic hip-hop samples, the genre's foundational looped tracks

Prince's sexually explicit 1984 track 'Darling Nikki' attracted the ire of the Parents Music Resource Center, an advocacy group that inspired the Parental Advisory sticker, even though the song ends with a Christian message.

Graffiti dates back to at least ancient Pompeii, where citizens scrawled messages to one another on public walls

Elk Cloner, the first computer virus to spread in public, was written as a practical joke by Richard Skrenta, a Pittsburgh high school student.

Jimmy Carter signed a 1978 bill that legalized home brewing, a move credited with kick-starting the craft beer industry.

Existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre coined the famous phrase 'Hell is—other people' in his play 'No Exit'

Planarian flatworms are small, aquatic worms with exceptional regenerative capabilities. When cut, the worms can regenerate multiple bodies in a matter of weeks.

The concept of phantom limbs, the perception that amputated limbs are still present, dates back to a French military surgeon in the 16th century.

In 2025, four executives from large tech companies were given positions in the US Army Reserves—including Palantir Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar, which reinforced Palantir's ties with the US military and its role as a leading defense partner.

Planeterrellas create artificial auroras that mimic the atmospheric displays of light by setting up an electric field between two metal balls in a jar filled with a small amount of air.

How Amazon operates a 'flywheel' business model, a self-reinforcing cycle that drives continuous growth

Children are now three times more likely to say they want to be a YouTuber when they grow up than an astronaut, with some even attending 'YouTube camps' that teach kids how to create content for the platform.

Learn how to read a prospectus, the juicy document that any company must file with the SEC before going public.