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Architect Breaks Down the Design Of Four Iconic New York City Museums: the Met, MoMA, Guggenheim & Frick

Por Colin Marshall

Context may not count for everything in art. But as underscored by everyone from Marcel Duchamp (or Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven) to the journalists who occasionally convince virtuoso musicians to busk in dingy public spaces, it certainly counts for something. Whether or not you believe that works of art retain the same essential value no matter where they’re beheld, some environments are surely more conducive to appreciation than others. The question of just which design elements make the difference has occupied museum architects for centuries, and in New York City alone, you can directly experience more than 200 years of bold exercises and experiments in the form.

In the Architectural Digest video above, architect Michael Wyetzner (previously featured here on Open Culture for his exegeses of New York’s apartments, bridges, and subway stations, as well as Central Park and the Chrysler Building) uses his expert knowledge to reveal the design choices that have gone into the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Frick Collection. No two of these famous art institutions were conceived in quite the same period, none look or feel quite the same as the others, and we can be reasonably sure that no single piece of art would look quite the same if it were moved between any of them.

Occupying five blocks of Central Park, MoMA is less a building than a collection of buildings — each added at a different time, in a style of that time — and indeed, less a collection of buildings than “a city unto itself,” as Wyetzner puts it.  (No wonder Claudia and Jamie Kincaid could run away from home and go unnoticed living in it.) The comparatively modest MoMA has also grown addition-by-addition, beginning with a “stripped-down form of modernism” that stood well out on the West 53rd street of the late thirties. It opened as the first of the many “clean white boxes” that would appear across the country — and later the world — to show the art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The original MoMA building remains striking today, but it’s now flanked by expansions from the hands of Philip Johnson, Cesar Pelli, Yoshio Taniguchi, and Jean Nouvel. Much less likely to have anything attached to it is the Guggenheim, with its instantly recognizable spiral design by Frank Lloyd Wright. Based on an idea by Le Corbusier, its narrow atrium-wrapping galleries do present certain difficulties for the proper display of large-scale artworks. Wyetzner also mentions the oft-heard criticism of Wright’s having “created a monument to himself — but it’s one hell of a monument.”

Last comes “the original building for the Whitney Museum of American Art, which later became the Met Breuer, which now has become the Frick. Who knows what it’ll become next.” The second of its names refers to its architect, the Bauhaus-trained Marcel Breuer (he of the Wassily chair), whose muscular design “slices off” the museum from the brownstone neighborhood that surrounds it. With its “open, loft-like spaces,” it provides a context meant for the art of its time, much as the Met, MoMA, and the Guggenheim do for the art of theirs. But all these institutions have succeeded just as much by carving out contexts of their own in the open-air museum of architecture and urbanism that is New York City.

Related content:

Architect Breaks Down Five of the Most Iconic New York City Apartments

The 5 Innovative Bridges That Make New York City, New York City

How Central Park Was Created Entirely By Design & Not By Nature: An Architect Breaks Down America’s Greatest Urban Park

An Architect Breaks Down the Design of New York City Subway Stations, from the Oldest to Newest

A Whirlwind Architectural Tour of the New York Public Library — “Hidden Details” and All

A 3D Animation Shows the Evolution of New York City (1524 — 2023)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

The $25,000 Turntable Designed by Brian Eno That Glows in Different Colors as It Plays

Por Colin Marshall

When we think of Brian Eno’s work, we first think of his records. These include not just his own classics of “ambient music” — a term he popularized — like Discreet Music and Music for Airports, but also the albums he’s produced: Devo’s Q. Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!, Talking Heads’ Remain in Light, U2’s The Joshua Tree, David Bowie’s Outside. Yet even before he got into music, Eno was painting, and in some sense, he’s never stopped. He was describing his work with sound as the creation of “imaginary landscapes” even in the nineteen-eighties; in this century, he’s continued to put out records while creating ever-more-high-profile works of a more visual nature, from installations to apps.

A few years ago, Eno even got into the business of functional sculpture, designing a turntable that emanates LED light of various, gradually shifting colors while it plays records. “The light from it was tangible as if caught in a cloud of vapor,” said Eno about his early experience with the finished product, quoted at designboom upon the announcement of its limited production run in 2021.

“We sat watching for ages, transfixed by this totally new experience of light as a physical presence.” Now comes the sequel, Eno’s Turntable II, which will be produced in equally restricted numbers.  “Those who can afford one of the 150 limited units also receive the musician’s signature and edition number engraved on the side of the neon turntable’s base,” says designboom.

Eno’s turntable design recently drew attention as the inspiration for U2’s stage set during their residency at Las Vegas’ brazen new venue The Sphere. In the home, it serves multiple functions: “When it doesn’t have to do anything in particular, like play a record, it is a sculpture,” Eno says, “and when it’s in action, it’s a generative artwork. Several overlapping light cycles will keep producing different color balances and blends — and different shadow formations that slowly evolve and never exactly repeat.” Die-hard fans who know how long Eno has been following this artistic and intellectual thread may consider Turntable II’s £20,000 (or more than $25,000 USD) price tag almost reasonable. And next to the $60,000 Linn Sondek LP12 Jony Ive redesigned last year, it’s practically a bargain.

Related content:

Brian Eno Explains the Origins of Ambient Music

Watch Brian Eno’s “Video Paintings,” Where 1980s TV Technology Meets Visual Art

Brian Eno on Creating Music and Art As Imaginary Landscapes (1989)

Brian Eno Shares His Critical Take on Art & NFTs: “I Mainly See Hustlers Looking for Suckers”

World Records: New Photo Exhibit Pays Tribute to the Era of Vinyl Records & Turntables

Pizza Box Becomes a Playable DJ Turntable Through the Magic of Conductive Ink

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Punk Dulcimer: Hear The Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated” Played on the Dulcimer

Por OC

Sam Edelston can rock the duclimer. On his YouTube channel, he writes: “Dulcimers are natural rock instruments. In fact, I even say that dulcimers are among the world’s coolest musical instruments, and they deserve to be known by the general public — the way that everybody knows guitars and ukuleles. Though usually associated with old folk songs and tunes, dulcimers are great for a shocking variety of modern music, too. I do these videos to inspire more people to play and listen to dulcimer music, in diverse, non-traditional styles.” Above, watch him cover the Ramones’ 1978 classic “I Wanna Be Sedated.” Find more covers of  Zeppelin, the Stones & Beatles here. And yet more covers–including Bowie’s “Space Oddity” and Sabbath’s “War Pigs”–on the Contemporary Dulcimer YouTube Channel. Enjoy.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. Or follow our posts on Threads, Facebook, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

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A Bluegrass Version of Metallica’s Heavy Metal Hit, “Enter Sandman”

Pakistani Musicians Play Amazing Version of Dave Brubeck’s Jazz Classic, “Take Five”

Watch Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Voodoo Chile’ Performed on a Gayageum, a Traditional Korean Instrument

A 3D Animation Shows the Evolution of New York City (1524 — 2023)

Por Colin Marshall

Nearly two and a half centuries after its founding, the United States of America is still both celebrated and derided as a young country. Examined on the whole, the US may or may not seem less mature than other lands in any obvious way, but the difference manifests much more clearly on the level of cities. For even among those founded before the independence of the country itself, no American city has yet attained 500 official years of age. But in the case of New York City, we can trace its formation through half a millennium of history, as rendered in the 3D animated video from InfoGeek above.

The long version of New York’s story begins in 1524, the year Giovanni da Verrazzano commanded the French ship La Dauphine into what we now know as New York Harbor. While he and his crew did not, of course, get the dramatic forest-of-skyscrapers view for which that approach would later be celebrated, they would, perhaps, have seen an actual forest, as well as other elements of a natural landscape that would have appeared sublimely untouched. A century later, the Dutch there founded the trading outpost of New Amsterdam, which commenced the written history of New York — as well as the aggressive development that would eventually come to characterize the city and its culture.

New Amsterdam became New York in 1664, one of the many historical events that scroll past in the window at the video’s lower-left corner. At that point in time, the population had grown to about 3,600, a figure counted at the bottom of the frame. Yet even as we see streets roll out, buildings rise, and trees sprout rapidly around us over the next 150 or so years of our stroll, and even after New York becomes America’s largest city in 1790, we must bear in mind that its century hasn’t even begun. It’s something of an irony that the hugely destructive Great Fire of 1835 precedes a developmental push that makes the city, even to our twenty-first-century eyes, look almost modern.

Later in the nineteenth century, we witness the appearance of Central Park and the introduction of motorcars; by the turn of the twentieth, New York’s population approaches three and a half million. Walking down Wall Street (and into the Great Depression), we pass just-materializing landmarks that remain iconic today, like the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building and — after a somewhat dramatic fast-forward in time — Frank Lloyd Wright’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Minoru Yamasaki’s ill-fated World Trade Center. We’re now well into the New York of living memory, and even when the animation has passed the creative decrepitude of the seventies and eighties and arrives at the city as it was last year (population: 7,888,120), we sense that its evolution has only just begun.

Related content:

New York City: A Social History (A Free Online Course from N.Y.U.)

Immaculately Restored Film Lets You Revisit Life in New York City in 1911

Scenes of New York City in 1945 Colorized & Revived with Artificial Intelligence

The Lost Neighborhood Buried Under New York City’s Central Park

How Central Park Was Created Entirely By Design & Not By Nature: An Architect Breaks Down America’s Greatest Urban Park

An Architect Demystifies the Art Deco Design of the Iconic Chrysler Building (1930)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

The Cover of George Orwell’s 1984 Becomes Less Censored with Wear & Tear

Por OC

1984 before

In 2013, Penguin released in the UK a series of new covers for five works by George Orwell, including a particularly bold cover design for Orwell’s best-known work, 1984. According to Creative Review, the designer, David Pearson, made it so that the book’s title and Orwell’s name were debossed, then almost completely obscured by black foiling, leaving just “enough of a dent for the title to be determined.” No doubt, the design plays on the whole idea of censorship, “referencing the rewriting of history carried out by the novel’s Ministry of Truth.”

Years later, you’ll have difficulty buying new copies of Pearson’s design. They’re in pretty short supply. But anyone with a well-worn copy of the book might discover what one Redditor has also observed–that the cover design “becomes less censored with wear.” Compare the “before” image above to the “after” image down below. Was this all part of Pearson’s long-range master plan? Or something of a design flaw? We’ll probably never know. But if you’re looking for a book that gets better with age, then this is one to add to your list.

1984 after

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. Or follow our posts on Threads, Facebook, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

Related Content:

Hear the Very First Adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 in a Radio Play Starring David Niven (1949)

Free Download: A Knitting Pattern for a Sweater Depicting an Iconic Cover of George Orwell’s 1984

George Orwell’s Harrowing Race to Finish 1984 Before His Death

Aldous Huxley to George Orwell: My Hellish Vision of the Future is Better Than Yours (1949)

10 Biggest Threats to the World in 2024, Ranked by Ian Bremmer

Por OC

At the start of each year, Ian Bremmer, a political scientist and president of Eurasia Group, creates a list that ranks the greatest threats to our world. In 2024, Bremmer puts his finger on Ungoverned AI, a Partitioned Ukraine, a volatile Middle East, and a sputtering Chinese economy. But the biggest threat? A divided United States where the right and left consider each other an existential threat, where political candidates threaten their rivals, where power doesn’t get transitioned peacefully, and where foreign nations look to further sow the seeds of internal division. You can read Bremmer’s full report here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. Or follow our posts on Threads, Facebook, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

 

 

Black History in Two Minutes: Watch 93 Videos Written & Narrated by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Por Colin Marshall

We’re nearly halfway through February, which the United States of America also knows as Black History Month. Perhaps there are relevant subjects on which you’ve been meaning to catch up, but you haven’t quite got around to it yet. If so, never fear: in the next couple of weeks, you’ll have plenty of time to binge-watch the Youtube series Black History in Two Minutes. Written and narrated by historian Henry Louis Gates Jr., it has so far covered everything from Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth to the Civil War and emancipation to the civil rights movement and school integration.

Those of us who went to school in the US — and especially those of us who did so after the institution of Black History Month, in 1970 — will remember those subjects having been discussed in the classroom. But even within the brief confines of two minutes (sometimes sprawling out to three minutes and change), Gates introduces facts most of us will never have heard.

For instance, the very first underground railroad in the eighteenth century ran not from the south of the country to the north, but the other way around, Spanish Florida having then been “a sanctuary for slaves who fled south from English rule” — though the freedom it offered did require conversion to Catholicism.

Also among the nearly 100 videos Black History in Two Minutes has so far produced are a wealth of bite-sized treatments of movements and figures important to not just black culture but the whole of American culture. These include Billie Holiday and Maya Angelou, the 1893 World’s Fair, the births of jazz and hip hop, and Negro league baseball. The show also encompasses episodes of history well within living memory, such as the Los Angeles riots and the election of Barack Obama — as well as the earlier, pioneering presidential run of Jesse Jackson. And in light of Jackson’s campaign T‑shirts’ having made a fashion comeback in Korea, where I live, it now seems to say that the culture that has arisen out of black history isn’t just vital to the culture of America, but of the world.

You can watch the complete playlist of videos at the top, or visit the Black History in Two Minutes website here.

via Kottke

Related content:

Take Free Online Courses on African-American History from Yale and Stanford: From Emancipation, to the Civil Rights Movement, and Beyond

30,000 Photographs of Black History & Culture Are Available Online in a New Getty Images Archive

How African-American Explorer Matthew Henson Became the First Person to Reach the North Pole, Then Was Forgotten for Almost 30 Years

Take The Near Impossible Literacy Test Louisiana Used to Suppress the Black Vote (1964)

W.E.B. Du Bois Creates Revolutionary, Artistic Data Visualizations Showing the Economic Plight of African-Americans (1900)

Watch the Pioneering Films of Oscar Micheaux, America’s First Great African-American Filmmaker

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Why Incompetent People Think They’re Competent: The Dunning-Kruger Effect, Explained

Por Colin Marshall

When surveyed, eighty to ninety percent of Americans consider themselves possessed of above-average driving skills. Most of them are, of course, wrong by statistical definition, but the result itself reveals something important about human nature. So does another, lesser-known study that had two groups, one composed of professional comedians and the other composed of average Cornell undergraduates, rank the funniness of a set of jokes. It also asked those students to rank their own ability to identify funny jokes. Naturally, the majority of them credited themselves with an above-average sense of humor.

Not only that, explains the host of the After Skool video above, “those who did the worst placed themselves in the 58th percentile on average. They believed that they were better than 57 other people out of 100. Their real score? Twelfth percentile.” Here we have an example of the cognitive bias whereby “people with a little bit of knowledge or skill in an area believe that they are better than they are,” now commonly known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. It’s named for social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, who conducted the aforementioned joke-ranking study as well as others in various domains that all support the same basic finding: the incompetent don’t know how incompetent they are.

“When you’re incompetent, the skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is,” Dunning told Errol Morris in a 2010 interview (the first of a five-part series on anosognosia, or the inability to recognize one’s own lack of ability). “In logical reasoning, in parenting, in management, problem solving, the skills you use to produce the right answer are exactly the same skills you use to evaluate the answer.” What’s more, “even if you are just the most honest, impartial person that you could be, you would still have a problem — namely, when your knowledge or expertise is imperfect, you really don’t know it. Left to your own devices, you just don’t know it. We’re not very good at knowing what we don’t know.”

This brings to mind Donald Rumsfeld’s much-mocked remark about “unknown unknowns,” which Dunning actually considered “the smartest and most modest thing I’ve heard in a year.” (Morris, for his part, would go on to make a documentary about Rumsfeld titled The Unknown Known.) But whether you’re the Secretary of Defense, a celebrated filmmaker, a Youtuber, an essayist, or anything else, you’ve almost certainly been afflicted with the Dunning-Kruger effect. But if we can make a habit of subjecting ourselves to bracing objective assessment, we can — at least, at certain times and certain domains — break free of what T. S. Eliot called the endless struggle to think well of ourselves.

Related content:

Why Incompetent People Think They’re Amazing: An Animated Lesson from David Dunning (of the Famous “Dunning-Kruger Effect”)

Bertrand Russell: The Everyday Benefit of Philosophy Is That It Helps You Live with Uncertainty

John Cleese on How “Stupid People Have No Idea How Stupid They Are” (Otherwise Known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect)

24 Common Cognitive Biases: A Visual List of the Psychological Systems Errors That Keep Us From Thinking Rationally

Errol Morris Makes His Groundbreaking Series First Person Free to Watch Online: Binge Watch His Interviews with Geniuses, Eccentrics, Obsessives & Other Unusual Types

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Ten of the Most Expensive Arts & Art Supplies in the Worlds: Japanese Bonsai Scissors & Calligraphy Brushes, Tunisian Dye Made from Snails and More

Por Colin Marshall

A few years ago, we featured a $32,000 pair of bonsai scissors here on Open Culture. More recently, their maker Yasuhiro Hiraka appeared in the Business Insider video above, a detailed 80-minute introduction to ten of the most expensive arts and art supplies around the world. It will come as no surprise that things Japanese figure in it prominently and more than once. In fact, the video begins in Nara Prefecture, “where for over 450 years, the company Kobaien, has been making some of the world’s most sought-after calligraphy ink” — the sumi you may know from the classical Japanese art form sumi‑e.

But even the most painstakingly produced and expensively acquired ink in the world is no use without  brushes. In search of the finest examples of those, the video’s next segment takes us to another part of Japan, Hiroshima Prefecture, where an artisan named Yoshiyuki Hata runs a workshop dedicated to the “no-compromise craftsmanship” of calligraphy brushes. One of his top-of-the-line models, made with rigorously hand-selected goat hair, could cost the equivalent of $27,000 — but for an equally uncompromising master calligrapher, money seems to be no object.

However dedicated its craftsmen and practitioners, by no means does the Land of the Rising Sun have a monopoly on expensive art supplies. This video also includes Tyrian purple dye made in Tunisia the old-fashioned way — indeed, the ancient way — by extracting the glands of murex snails; the sơn mài lacquer painting unique to Vietnam that requires toxic tree resin; long-lasting ultra-high-quality oil paints rich with rare pigments like cobalt blue; and Kolinsky’s Series 7 sable watercolor brush, which is made from hairs from the tails of Siberian weasels, and whose process of production has remained the same since it was first created for Queen Victoria in 1866.

This world tour also comes around to non-traditional art forms and tools. One operation in Ohio turns the muck of industrial pollution — “acid mine drainage,” to get technical — into pigments that can make vivid paints. The stratospheric prices commanded by certain works of “modern art,” broadly considered, have long inspired satire, but here we get a closer examination of the connection between the nature of the work and the cost of purchasing it. “What looks simple can be the culmination of a lifetime’s work,” one example of which is Kazmir Malevich’s Black Square, “the result of twenty years of simplification and development.” If you don’t know anything about that painting, it will seem to have no value; by the same token, if you don’t know anything about those $32,000 bonsai scissors, you’ll probably use them to open Amazon boxes.

Related content:

What Makes the Art of Bonsai So Expensive?: $1 Million for a Bonsai Tree, and $32,000 for Bonsai Scissors

How Ink is Made: The Process Revealed in a Mouth-Watering Video

Behold a Book of Color Shades Depicted with Feathers (Circa 1915)

Why Renaissance Masters Added Egg Yolk to Their Paints: A New Study Sheds Light

Discover Harvard’s Collection of 2,500 Pigments: Preserving the World’s Rare, Wonderful Colors

Watch Artist Shepard Fairey Pretend to Work in an Art Supply Store

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

How an Unscheduled, Last Minute Performance of “Fast Car” Shot Tracy Chapman to Stardom in 1988

Por Ayun Halliday

And the award for the first Black songwriter to win Song of the Year at the Country Music Awards goes to Tracy Chapman …for a tune that transfixed millions of rowdy concertgoers when she sang it at Wembley Stadium 35 years earlier (see above.)

At the time of that performance, Chapman was just 24, nearly a decade younger than 33-year-old Luke Combs, the country superstar whose recent cover was a massive hit.

“Fast Car” was not just a star-making turn at Wembley. It was a last minute, unscheduled one.

Chapman had already performed her 3‑song set at that day’s celebrity-studded Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute concert, sandwiched between Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie’s comedy act and prototypically 80s Scottish soft rockers Wet Wet Wet.

Her 3‑song set list was in keeping with the nature of the event, which helped speed the anti-apartheid activist and future South African president’s release from prison, and was described by music journalist Robin Denselow, as “a more political version of Live Aid, with the aim of raising consciousness rather than just money:”

Why?

Behind the Wall

Talkin’ Bout a Revolution

The audience got to hear “Fast Car” thanks to the unwitting involvement of surprise guest Stevie Wonder.

The R&B great went to Wembley Stadium straight from the airport, unaware that his synclavier’s hard disc, containing all the synthesized music for his act, had not made the trip.

This colossal oversight was only discovered when he was heading toward the stage. Unwilling, or possibly too overwhelmed to come up with a workaround, he declined to go on, leaving organizers scrambling for an artist who could hustle to the mic to fill time.

Chapman and her solo guitar must have struck them as a technically uncomplicated solution.

No one can fault her for seeming a bit breathless at first. How often is an emerging singer-songwriter called upon to save the day by stepping into a legend’s shoes?

Within a year, Chapman was named Best New Artist at the Grammy Awards, and “Fast Car,” which she performed at the ceremony, earned her “Best Pop Vocal Performance Female”. (Song of the Year went to Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry Be Happy,” a cultural juggernaut of a different stripe.)

A few days ago, Chapman reprised “Fast Car” at the 2024 Grammys as a duet with Combs, an interpretation that impressed the New York Times’ pop music critic Lindsay Zoladz as “welcoming and expansive enough to hold every single person (the song) had ever touched, regardless of the markers of identity that so often divide us:”

It was a rare reminder of music’s unique ability to obliterate external differences. “Fast Car” is about something more internal and universal. It is a song about the wants and needs that make us human: the desire to be happy, to be loved, to be free.

That’s certainly one interpretation, but perhaps the artist who wrote it should have the final word:

I never had a Fast Car, it’s just a story about a couple, how they are trying to make a life together and they face challenges…At the time that I wrote the song, I actually didn’t really know who I was writing about. Looking back at it, and this happens with other songs as well, that I feel like I understand it only later… I think that it was a song about my parents… And about how when they met each other they were very young and they wanted to start a new life together and my mother was anxious to leave home. My parents got married and went out into the world to try to make a place for themselves and it was very difficult going.

My mother didn’t have a high school diploma and my father was a few years older. It was hard for him to create the kind of life that he dreamed of… With the education that he had…. With the opportunities that were available to him… In a sense I think they came together thinking that together they would have a better chance at making it.

– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHallidayOver and out. 

Is Consciousness an Illusion?? Five Experts in Science, Religion & Technology Explain

Por Colin Marshall

Even among non-neuroscientists, determining the origin and purpose of consciousness is widely known as “the hard problem.” Since its coinage by philosopher David Chalmers thirty years ago, that label has worked its way into a variety of contexts; about a decade ago, Tom Stoppard even used it for the title of a play. Unsurprisingly, it’s also referenced in the episode of Big Think’s Dispatches from the Well above, which presents discussions of the nature of consciousness with neuroscientist Christof Koch, Vedanta Society of New York minister Swami Sarvapriyananda, technology entrepreneur Reid Hoffman, Santa Fe Institute Davis Professor of Complexity Melanie Mitchell, and mathematical physicist Roger Penrose.

Koch describes consciousness as “what you see, it’s what you hear, it’s the pains you have, the love you have, the fear, the passion.” It is, in other words, “the experience of anything,” and for all their sophistication, our modern inquiries into it descend from René Descartes’ proposition, “Cogito, ergo sum.” Sarvapriyananda, too, makes reference to Descartes in explaining his own conception of consciousness as “the light of lights,” by which “everything here is lit up.”

Mitchell conceives of it as a continuum: “I’m more conscious when I’m awake,” for example, and “certain species are more conscious than other species.” And perhaps it could develop even in non-biological entities: “I don’t think that we have any machines that are conscious in any interesting sense yet,” Mitchell says, but “if we ever do, they’ll be part of that spectrum.”

The question of whether a machine can attain consciousness naturally arises in host Kmele Foster’s conversation with Hoffman, who’s made serious investments in artificial-intelligence research. As impressive as AI chatbots have lately become, few among us would be willing to deem them conscious; nevertheless, attempting to create not just intelligence but consciousness in machines may prove a fruitful way to learn about the workings of the “genuine articles” within us. Penrose’s theory holds that consciousness arises from as-yet-unpredictable quantum processes occurring in the microtubules of the brain. Perhaps, as Koch has suggested, it actually exists to one degree or another in all forms of matter. Or maybe — to quote from a song in heavy rotation on my childhood Walkman — it’s just what you make of yourself.

Related content:

The Neuronal Basis of Consciousness Course: A Free Online Course from Caltech

John Searle Makes A Forceful Case for Studying Consciousness, Where Everything Else Begins

Reality Is Nothing But a Hallucination: A Mind-Bending Crash Course on the Neuroscience of Consciousness

The Simulation Theory Explained In Three Animated Videos

What Is Higher Consciousness?: How We Can Transcend Our Petty, Day-to-Day Desires and Gain a Deeper Wisdom

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Behold a Surreal 1933 Animation of Snow White, Featuring Cab Calloway & Betty Boop: It’s Ranked as the 19th Greatest Cartoon of All Time

Por OC

Of the three collaborations jazz singer Cab Calloway made with cute cartoon legend Betty Boop, this 1933 Dave Fleischer-directed “Snow White” is probably the most successful. It certainly is the most strange—more hallucinatory than the first in the series “Minnie the Moocher”, and less slapstick-driven than “The Old Man of the Mountain.” It is a singular marvel and rightly deserves being deemed “culturally significant” by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry in 1994. It was also voted #19 of the 50 Greatest Cartoons of all time in a poll of leading animators.

When she made her debut in 1930, Betty Boop would have been recognizable to audiences as the embodiment of the flapper and the sexual freedom of the Jazz Age that was currently in free-fall after the Wall Street crash of 1929. Only a few years before her premiere, Boop would have been the mascot of the age; now she was a bittersweet reminder of a time that had already passed. With a champagne bubble of a voice, kiss curls, daring hemline, plunging neckline, and the ever present garter belt, she was a cartoon character definitely not designed for kids. That her best films are collaborations with Cab Calloway attest to that. Calloway would make sure his Betty Boop cartoons would screen in a city a week or two before he would play a gig. His “advance woman” as he called her helped sell more tickets.

Accompanying her in this film are the Fleischer’s original character Koko the Clown and Bimbo the Pup, which for this film are sort of empty vessels: they protect Betty, they get knocked out, and Koko gets inhabited by the spirit of Cab Calloway, who then turns into a ghost, all legs and head, no torso. (The ghost is animated through rotoscoping over Calloway’s own film footage.) The Queen, whose talking mirror changes his mind over “the fairest in the land” once seeing Betty Boop, sentences her to death, and then chases her through the underworld before turning into a dragon. At the end, Boop and her gang turn the dragon inside out like a sock, a gross gag not seen again (I’m going to guess) until one of the Simpsons’ Halloween Specials.

In the middle of all this bouncy, surreal mayhem is Calloway’s ghost singing “St. James Infirmary Blues,” a mournful tale of a dead girlfriend and the singers plans for the funeral. The origin of the song is shrouded in mystery, possibly a folk ballad by way of New Orleans jazz. Whatever the source, Koko/Cab sings it to the now frozen and entombed Betty Boop, with the seven dwarves as pallbearers. Koko/Cab turns into a number of objects during his dance, including a bottle of booze and a coin on a chain.

This Snow White does in fact take place during winter and writer Anne Blakeley makes the case that the flapper, the snow, the ice, the passage through the underworld, and Calloway’s song allude to a fall from grace, innocence to experience, through drug abuse—in particular the very snowy cocaine. (I mean, could be! But the film is so odd as to refute any definitive reading.)

The animation was designed and completed by one man: Roland Crandall, possibly as a reward from Fleischer for not leaving for the sunny west coast and the more profitable Disney. Crandall worked half a year on the project and that’s really what gives it its one of a kind nature. Every element, whether animated or in the background, has been lovingly rendered. Foreground and background fight for your attention, and when the film finishes, you want to start all over again to see what you missed.

Lastly, let’s praise the vibe of this film, which places its “star” on ice for half the film, and seems none the worse for it. “Snow White”—four years before Disney’s feature version—is a hypnogogic vision, a half-remembered daydream that takes place while the radio is turned down imperceptibly low.

The animation will be added to our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2020.

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

Beethoven’s 5th: Watch an Animated Graphical Score

Por OC

Stephen Malinowski is a self-described “Music Animation Machine,” with a penchant for creating animated graphical scores. Above, he does his thing with the first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony 5.

How does he make this magic? Malinowski writes: “There were a lot of steps; here’s a short summary. I found a recording I could license and made the arrangements to use it. I found a MIDI file that was fairly complete, and imported that into the notation program Sibelius. I compared it to a printed copy of the score from my library and fixed things that were wrong… Then, I listened to the recording and compared that to the score, and modified the score so that the timings were more like what the orchestra was actually playing. I exported this as a MIDI file and ran it through my custom frame-rendering software. Then, I made a “reduction” of the score and colored it to match the colors I was planning to use in the bar-graph score. Unfortunately, when I squished the bar-graph score enough to make room for the notation score, too much detail was lost, so I ended up deciding not to use the notation. Then I put all the pieces (rendered frames, audio, titles) together in Adobe Premiere and exported the movie as a QuickTime file. Then, I used On2 Flix to convert the final file into Flash format (so that YouTube’s conversion to their Flash format wouldn’t change it in unpredictable ways), and uploaded the result.”

Enjoy!

Watch Dziga Vertov’s Soviet Toys: The First Soviet Animated Movie Ever (1924)

Por OC

Dziga Vertov is best known for his dazzling city symphony A Man with a Movie Camera, which was ranked by Sight and Sound magazine as the 8th best movie ever made. Yet what you might not know is that Vertov also made the Soviet Union’s first ever animated movie, Soviet Toys.

Consisting largely of simple line drawings, the film might lack the verve and visual sophistication that marked A Man with a Movie Camera, but Vertov still displays his knack for making striking, pungent images. Yet those who don’t have an intimate knowledge of Soviet policy of the 1920s might find the movie — which is laden with Marxist allegories — really odd.

Soviet Toys came out in 1924, during Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP), which gave some market incentives to small farmers. Not surprisingly, the farmers started producing a lot more food than before, and soon a whole new class of middleman traders formed — the reviled “NEPmen.”

The movie opens with a NEPman — a bloated caricature of a Capitalist (who coincidentally looks vaguely like Nikita Khrushchev) — devouring a massive heap of food. He’s so stuffed that he spends much of the rest of the movie sprawled out on the floor, much in the same way one might imagine Jamie Dimon after Thanksgiving dinner. Then he belches riches at a woman who is can-canning on his distended belly. I said this film is odd.

Later, as a couple of squabbling Russian Orthodox priests look on, a worker tries to extract money from the NEPman by cutting his gut with a huge pair of scissors. When that fails, the worker and a passing peasant fuse bodies to create a two-headed being that stomps on the Capitalist’s belly, which pops open like a piñata filled with cash. Then members of the Red Army pile together and form a sort of human pyramid before turning into a giant tree. They hang the Capitalist along with the priests. The end.

Some of the references in this movie are clear: The worker’s use of scissors points to the “Scissors Crisis” – an attempt by the Central Government to correct the price imbalance between agriculture and industrial goods. And the physical melding of the peasantry and the proletariat is a representation of the never quite realized dream of the Bolsheviks. Other images are as obscure as they are weird — the leering close ups of the Capitalist, the NEPman’s girlfriend who disappears into his stomach, the revolutionary filmmaker who has the eyes of a camera lens and the mouth of a camera shutter. They feel like something out of a Marxist fever dream.

Soviet Toys can be found in the Animation section of our collection of Free Movies Online.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.

Related Content:

Watch Dziga Vertov’s A Man with a Movie Camera, Named the 8th Best Film Ever Made

Watch the Surrealist Glass Harmonica, the Only Animated Film Ever Banned by Soviet Censors (1968)

A Soviet Animation of Stephen King’s Short Story “Battleground” (1986)

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.

A Cultural Tour of Istanbul, Where the Art and History of Three Great Empires Come Together

Por Colin Marshall

Imagine a grand tour of European museums, and a fair few destinations come right to mind: the Rijksmuseum, the Prado, the Uffizi Gallery, the Louvre. These institutions alone could take years to experience fully, but it would be an incomplete journey that didn’t venture farther east — much farther east, in the view of Great Art Explained creator James Payne. In his latest Great Art Cities video, he makes the case for Istanbul, adducing such both artistically and historically rich sites as the İstanbul Archaeological Museum, the Basilica Cistern, the Zeyrek Çinili Hamam, Istanbul Modern, and of course — as previously featured here on Open Culture — the unignorable Hagia Sophia.

Payne introduces Istanbul as having been “the capital of three great empires, Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman.” In the continent-straddling metropolis as it is today, “both ancient and modern art blend elements from Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, reflecting its geographical and historical positioning as a bridge between the East and the West.”

The works on display in the city constitute “a visual embodiment of its complex history,” from the Hellenistic to the Roman to the Islamic to the styles and media of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with all of which “modern-day Turkey is now creating its own artistic legacy.”

That legacy is also deeply rooted in the past. Visit the Archaeological Museum and you can see the Alexander Sarcophagus from the fourth century BC, whose astonishingly detailed carvings include “the only existing depiction of Alexander the Great created during his lifetime.” The underground Basilica Cistern, built in the sixth century, counts as much as a large-scale work of Byzantine art as it does a large-scale work of Byzantine engineering. From there, it’s a short tram ride on the Galata Bridge across the Golden Horn to the brand-new, Renzo Piano-designed Istanbul Modern, which has paintings by Cihat Burak, Fahrelnissa Zeid, Bedri Baykam. You may not know those names now, but if you view their work in the unique cultural context of Istanbul — in which so many eras and civilizations are manifest — you’ll never forget them.

Related content:

The Ancient World Comes to Life in an Animation Featuring Istanbul’s Islamic, Ottoman, Greek & Byzantine Art

Istanbul Captured in Beautiful Color Images from 1890: The Hagia Sophia, Topkaki Palace’s Imperial Gate & More

Watch Digital Dancers Electrify the Streets of Istanbul

An Introduction to Hagia Sophia: After 85 Years as a Museum, It’s Set to Become a Mosque Again

How Londinium Became London, Lutetia Became Paris, and Other Roman Cities Got Their Modern Names

Great Art Cities: Visit the Fascinating, Lesser-Known Museums of London & Paris

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Free: Watch Our Planet, a Groundbreaking Nature Documentary Series Narrated by David Attenborough

Por Ayun Halliday

The nature documentary series Our Planet opens with a startlingly stark observation courtesy of broadcaster, biologist, natural historian, and author Sir David Attenborough:

Just 50 years ago, we finally ventured to the moon…

Since then, the human population has more than doubled…

(and) In the last 50 years, wildlife populations have, on average, declined by 60 percent.

The twelve-episode series, narrated by Attenborough, is the result of a four-year collaboration between Netflix, Silverback Films and the World Wildlife Fund. The creators aren’t shy that it’s a race to beat the clock:

For the first time in human history, the stability of nature can no longer be taken for granted.

Rather than take viewers on a doom scroll of global proportions, they cultivate their conservationist impulses with gorgeous, never-before-filmed views of ice caps, deep ocean, deserts and distant forests.

The high def footage of the multitudinous creatures inhabiting these realms is even more of a hook.

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Whether the frame is filled by a Philippine eagle chick, a herd of migrating elephants, a hunting Bengal tiger or a male orchid bee perfuming himself to better his chances of attracting a mate, Our Planet’s non-human stars are consistently captivating.

Some of the footage speaks directly to the hardships these creatures are experiencing as the result of climate change, dwindling habitats, and other havoc wreaked by our species.

Field producer Ed Charles said Attenborough remarked that the plight of a starving polar bear and her cubs paddling around the Arctic Ocean in search of food was “a real heartbreaker, and that it would capture people’s imaginations:”

This mother and her cubs should have been hunting on the ice, even broken ice. That’s where they’re supremely adapted to be, but we found them in water that was open for as far as the eye could see. That’s the reality of the world they live in today. Nature can be brutal. But to see this family with the cub, struggling due to no fault of their own, it makes it very hard.

Given how many non-human creatures’ fates hinge on human action, and the filmmakers’ goal of helping us “truly understand why nature matters to us all, and what we can do to save it, (so) we can create a future where nature and people thrive”, it’s awfully sporting of Netflix to bring the series out from behind its subscription paywall.

The first season can currently be enjoyed for free on YouTube here.

The filmmakers also provide a number of free educational resources for schools and younger viewers.

Not that we adults should sit back and wait for the younger generation to bail us out of this seemingly insoluble mess.

Our Planet’s website shares ways in which all of us can take an active role in saving and restoring precious parts of the planet our species has nearly destroyed.

Again, it’s better than doom scrolling.

Consider our remaining jungles and rainforests, “a natural ally in the fight against climate change” due to the incredible diversity of life they harbor.

They help regulate global weather, cool the planet by reflecting the sun’s heat, generate and send out vast amounts of water, and remove carbon from the atmosphere.

Attenborough points out that humans have cleared jungle and forest sufficient to meeting all future human demand for food and timber. The trick will be learning how to use this previously cleared land more efficiently while practicing environmental stewardship.

Individuals can start by educating themselves and hold themselves to a high standard, refusing to buy any item whose production is tied to deforestation.

Governments can offer financial incentives to companies with a proven commitment to using this land in thoughtful, ecologically sustainable ways.

Rather than succumb to overwhelming despair, take heart from innovators breathing new life into a deforested part of Brazil seven times the size of the United Kingdom.

Ecological concerns did not seem nearly so pressing when vast amounts of rain forest once occupying this land were cleared in order to pasture cattle. A lack of foresight and sustainable practices led it to become so degraded it could no longer support grazing.

(Cattle aside, birds, insects, mammals, plants and other former inhabitants were also SOL.)

Rather than cut down more precious jungle, trailblazing environmental visionaries are promoting regeneration with native seedlings, planting fast-growing, super-efficient crops, and restoring the jungle adjacent to growing areas as a form of natural pesticide.

That provides a glimmer of hope, right?

The 97-year-old Attenborough can even get on board with ecotourism, a risky move given how a large carbon footprint can translate to a dim public view.

Perhaps he’s banking that first-hand encounters with wonders once encountered only in documentaries could help keep the planet spinning long after we’re no longer here to bear witness.

Watch the first season of Our Planet for free here.

Related Content 

David Attenborough Reads “What a Wonderful World” in a Moving Video

How Sounds Are Faked For Nature Documentaries: Meet the Artists Who Create the Sounds of Fish, Spiders, Orangutans, Mushrooms & More

Watch Young David Attenborough Encounter Animals in Their Natural Habitats: Video from the 1950s and 1960s

– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

A 500-Page Book Explores the Ghosts & Monsters from Japanese Folklore

Por Colin Marshall

Westerners tend to think of Japan as a land of high-speed trains, expertly prepared sushi and ramen, auteur films, brilliant animation, elegant woodblock prints, glorious old hotels, sought-after jazz-records, cat islands, and ghost towns. The last of those has, of course, not been shown to harbor literal wraiths and spirits. But if that sort of thing happens to be what you’re looking for, Japan’s long history offers up a wealth of mythological chimeras whose form, behavior, and sheer numbers exceed any of our expectations. Welcome to the supernatural realm of the shapeshifting, good- and bad-luck-bringing, trick-playing yōkai.

“Translating to ‘strange apparition,’ the Japanese word yōkai refers to supernatural beings, mutant monsters, and spirits,” writes Colossal’s Grace Ebert. “Mischievous, generous, and sometimes vengeful, the creatures are rooted in folklore and experienced a boom during the Edo period when artists would ascribe inexplicable phenomena to the unearthly characters.”

Hiroshima Prefecture’s Miyoshi Mononoke Museum, whose opening we announced here on Open Culture in 2019, “houses the largest yōkai collection in the world with more than 5,000 works, and a book recently published by PIE International showcases some of the most iconic and bizarre pieces from the institution.”

Written by ethnologist Yumoto Koichi, a yōkai expert whose donations constitute most of the Miyoshi Mononoke Museum’s collection, the 500-page YOKAI offers “the rare experience of seeing the brushwork of Edo-era painters like Tsukioka Yoshitoshi,” whom we’ve featured here as Japan’s last great woodblock artist. Poised between the human and animal kingdoms, reflecting the ways of the past as well as the forces of nature, yōkai would seem to belong entirely to the tales of a bygone age. But in fact, many of them have joined the canon since Tsukioka’s time, having emerged from haunted-school rumors, the fertile imaginations of manga artists, and even video games. Whether to accept these “modern yōkai” has been a matter of some debate, but as Japanese popular culture has long shown us, every age needs its own monsters.

via Colossal

Related content:

The First Museum Dedicated to Japanese Folklore Monsters Is Now Open

The Ghosts and Monsters of Hokusai: See the Famed Woodblock Artist’s Fearsome & Amusing Visions of Strange Apparitions

When a UFO Came to Japan in 1803: Discover the Legend of Utsuro-bune

Behold the Masterpiece by Japan’s Last Great Woodblock Artist: View Online Tsukioka Yoshitoshi’s One Hundred Aspects of the Moon (1885)

Discover the Ghost Towns of Japan — Where Scarecrows Replace People, and a Man Lives in an Abandoned Elementary School Gym

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Explore the Surface of Mars in Spectacular 4K Resolution

Por OC

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Could you use a mental escape? Maybe a trip to Mars will do the trick. Above, you can find high definition footage captured by NASA’s three Mars rovers–Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity. The footage (also contributed by JPL-CaltechMSSSCornell University and ASU) was stitched together by ElderFox Documentaries, creating what they call the most lifelike experience of being on Mars. Adding more context, Elder Fox notes:

The footage, captured directly by NASA’s Mars rovers — Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity, and Perseverance — unveils the red planet’s intricate details. These rovers, acting as robotic geologists, have traversed varied terrains, from ancient lake beds to towering mountains, uncovering Mars’ complex geological history.

As viewers enjoy these images, they will notice informal place names assigned by NASA’s team, providing context to the Martian features observed. Each rover’s unique journey is highlighted, showcasing their contributions to Martian exploration.

Safe travels.

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Related Content:

Behold Colorful Geologic Maps of Mars Released by The United States Geological Survey

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NASA Releases a Massive Online Archive: 140,000 Photos, Videos & Audio Files Free to Search and Download

Hear the Very First Sounds Ever Recorded on Mars, Courtesy of NASA

Plato’s Dialogue Gorgias Gets Adapted into a Short Avant-Garde Film

Por Colin Marshall

The word sophisticated may sound like praise today, but it originated as more of an accusation. Trace its etymology back far enough and you’ll encounter the sophists, itinerant lecturers in ancient Greece who taught subjects like philosophy, mathematics, music, and rhetoric — the last of which they mastered no matter their ostensible subject area. Their reputation has passed down to us our current understanding of the word sophistry as “subtly deceptive reasoning or argumentation.” A sophist may or may not have known what he was talking about, but he knew how to talk about it in the way his audience wanted to hear.

It is in the company of sophists that Plato places Socrates in the dialogue Gorgias, a section of which has been adapted into the short film above. An “experimental video essay from Epoché magazine,” as Aeon describes it, it “combines somewhat cryptic archival visuals, a haunting, dissonant score, and text from an exchange between Socrates and the titular Gorgias on the nature of oratory.” The latter describes oratory as his “art,” which serves “to produce the kind of conviction needed in courts of law and other large masses of people” on the subject of “right and wrong.” Socrates, in his questioning way, leads Gorgias to hear his objection that oratory produces conviction without knowledge, making it a mere pseudo-art or form of “flattery” akin to baking pastries or beautifully adorning one’s own body.

“For someone with no knowledge of the objects involved,” writes Epoché’s co-editor John C. Brady, “the arts and the pseudo-arts appear perhaps indistinguishable. But, insofar as the pseudo-arts focus on generating belief first and foremost (as opposed to rational justification) they have an advantage. In front of an audience of children, the chef will beat the doctor when it comes to demonstrating prowess in preparing ‘wholesome’ foods.” To that extent, Socrates’ basic observation holds up still today, more than 2,400 years after Gorgias. The situation may even have worsened in that time: “far from us moderns having a more ‘scientific’ (i.e. ‘artful’) approach to our action,” haven’t the pseudo-arts just “added to their repertoire the language of ‘knowledge’?”

Such enlightened twenty-first century men and women “clip on a Fitbit to track the minutiae of movements, download a ‘Pomodoro’ system app to record the when and the what of their work through the day,” use “calorie-counted food diaries, budget apps, online trackers that tell them how much time they are spending on Twitter vs. e‑mail.” Their eyes are on the prize of a balcony, a work-life balance; there’s often a carafe of wine airing in there somewhere too.” We believe that, in order to realize this dream, “we need to be scientific, rational, collect the data, work smarter not harder etc., etc. But haven’t we just here fallen into the orators’ trap?” All this “better living through data” starts to look like simple perpetuation of “the ease and pleasure of being ‘convinced’ by the many pseudo-arts, rather than grappling with the real objects that constitute the concreteness of our lives.” Wanting is fun; knowing exactly what we want and why we want it is philosophy.

via Aeon

Related content:

Literary Theorist Stanley Fish Offers a Free Course on Rhetoric, or the Power of Arguments

Jon Hamm Narrates a Modernized Version of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Helping to Diagnose Our Social Media-Induced Narcissism

The Drinking Party (1965 Film) Adapts Plato’s Symposium to Modern Times

Why Socrates Hated Democracies: An Animated Case for Why Self-Government Requires Wisdom & Education

How to Speak: Watch the Lecture on Effective Communication That Became an MIT Tradition for Over 40 Years

How Pulp Fiction Uses the Socratic Method, the Philosophical Method from Ancient Greece

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Deal Ends Today: Get $200 Off of Coursera Plus & Gain Unlimited Access to Courses & Certificates

Por OC

A quick final heads up: Coursera’s deal, which offers $200 off of Coursera Plus, ends in two days–February 1. If you’re interested in the discount, you have a couple days to make a call…

Coursera has announced that it’s extending (until February 1) a special deal that will let you get a $200 discount on its annual subscription plan called “Coursera Plus.” Normally priced at $399, Coursera Plus (now available for $199) gives you access to 90% of Coursera’s courses, Guided Projects, Specializations, and Professional Certificates, all of which are taught by top instructors from leading universities and companies (e.g. Yale, Duke, Google, Facebook, and more). The $199 annual fee–which translates roughly to 55 cents per day–could be a good investment for anyone interested in learning new subjects and skills in 2024, or earning certificates that can be added to your resume. Just as Netflix’s streaming service gives you access to unlimited movies, Coursera Plus gives you access to unlimited courses and certificates. It’s basically an all-you-can-eat deal.

You can try out Coursera Plus for 14 days, and if it doesn’t work for you, you can get your money back. Explore the offer here. And, remember, it expires on February 1, 2024.

Note: Open Culture has a partnership with Coursera. If readers enroll in certain Coursera courses and programs, it helps support Open Culture.

Meet Alma Deutscher, the Classical Music Prodigy: Watch Her Performances from Age 6 to 14

Por Ayun Halliday

One needn’t think too hard to come up with a list of celebrated children who seem somehow less exceptional when their baby fat comes off and their permanent teeth come in.

We’ll eat Werner Herzog’s shoe if Alma Deutscher’s name is on it.

When she was 11, conductor Johannes Wildner told the New York Times that “she is not good because she is young. She is good because she is extremely talented and has matured very early.”

Her parents were the first to recognize her extraordinary abilities.

It’s nice when a musically gifted child is born to parents who are not only willing to cultivate that seed, they understand that their 18 month old sings with perfect pitch…

She was nearing the age of reason when the general public became acquainted with the pigtailed composer who played piano and violin, loved improvising and drew constant, not universally welcome comparisons to Mozart.

At seven, she penned a short opera inspired by “The Sweeper of Dreams”, a short story by Neil Gaiman.

 

She followed that up with a full length operatic reimagining of Cinderella (age 10) and rigorous training that built on her early exposure to Partimenti — keyboard improvisation.

Now 18, Alma continues to spellbind listeners with her seemingly magical ability to conjure a piano sonata using randomly selected notes in less that a minute, just as she wowed 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley after he picked a B, an A, an E flat, and a G from a hat back in 2017, when she was 12.

She’s was unabashed about her love of melody in the 60 Minutes appearance, and has remained so, explaining the reasoning behind her piece, Waltz of the Sirens, to a 2019 Carnegie Hall audience by saying that she’s always wanted to write beautiful music:

Music that comes out of the heart and speaks directly to the heart, but some people have told me that nowadays melodies and beautiful harmonies are no longer acceptable in serious classical music because in the 21st century, music must reflect the ugliness of the modern world. Well, in this waltz, instead of trying to make my music artificially ugly in order to reflect the modern world, I went in exactly the opposite direction. I took some ugly sounds from the modern world, and I tried to turn them into something more beautiful through music.

The full length opera The Emperor’s New Waltz is the soon to be 19-year-old’s first major adult achievement in what promises to be a long career.

Taking her inspiration from Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes, she sought to create a love story that would appeal to young pop fans (while also getting a few swipes in at the “tuneless world of atonal contemporary music.”)

As she noted in an interview with Germany’s Klassik Radio, it’s “definitely the beautiful melodies that unite pop and classical music:”

I’m sure that if Mozart or Schubert had heard the most beautiful melodies of ABBA, or Queen or Elton John, then they would have been jealous and they would have said, “I wish I had thought of that!”

Related Content

Leonard Bernstein Introduces 7‑Year-Old Yo-Yo Ma: Watch the Youngster Perform for John F. Kennedy (1962)

Leonard Bernstein’s First “Young People’s Concert” at Carnegie Hall Asks, “What Does Music Mean?”

Hear the Highest Note Sung in the 137-Year History of the Metropolitan Opera

– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

How Being Bilingual Helps Your Brain (Even If You Learn a New Language in Adulthood)

Por Colin Marshall

There was a time in America, not so very long ago, when conventional wisdom discouraged immigrants from speaking the language of the old country at home. In fact, “it used to be thought that being bilingual was a bad thing, that it would confuse or hold people back, especially children. Turns out we couldn’t have been more wrong.” These words are spoken by one of the variety of multilingual narrators of the recent BBC Ideas video above, which explains “why being bilingual is good for your brain” — not just if you pick up a second language in childhood, but also, and differently, if you deliberately study it as an adult.

“Learning a new language is an exercise of the mind,” says Li Wei of the Institute of Education at University College London. “It’s the mental equivalent of going to a gym every day.” In the bilingual brain, “all our languages are active, all at the same time.” (This we hear simultaneously in English and the professor’s native Mandarin.) “The continual effort of suppressing a language when speaking another, along with the mental challenge that comes with regularly switching between languages, exercises our brain. It improves our concentration, problem-solving, memory, and in turn, our creativity.”

In this century, some of the key discoveries about the benefits of bilingualism owe to the research of York University cognitive scientist Ellen Bialystok and her collaborators. Speaking a foreign language, she explains in this Guardian interview, requires using the brain’s “executive control system, whose job it is to resolve competition and focus attention. If you’re bilingual, you are using this system all the time, and that enhances and fortifies it.” In one study, she and her team found that bilinguals with advanced Alzheimer’s could function at the same cognitive levels with milder degrees of the same condition. “That’s the advantage: they could cope with the disease better.”

Mastering a foreign language is, of course, an aspiration commonly held but seldom realized. Based on personal experience, I can say that nothing does the trick quite like moving to a foreign country. But even if you’d rather not pull up stakes, you can benefit from the fact that the internet now provides the greatest, most accessible abundance of language-learning resources and tools humanity has ever known — an abundance you can start exploring right here at Open Culture. If it feels overwhelming to choose just one foreign language from this world of possibilities, feel free to use my system: study seven of them, one for each day of the week. Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s Tuesday, which means I’ve got some français à apprendre.

Related content:

Learn 48 Languages Online for Free: Spanish, Chinese, English & More

Becoming Bilingual Can Give Your Brain a Boost: What Recent Research Has to Say

A Map Showing How Much Time It Takes to Learn Foreign Languages: From Easiest to Hardest

Why You Have an Accent When You Speak a Foreign Language

What Are the Most Effective Strategies for Learning a Foreign Language?: Six TED Talks Provide the Answers

Meet the Hyperpolyglots, the People Who Can Mysteriously Speak Up to 32 Different Languages

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Pangea to the Present to the Future: Watch Animations Showing 500 Million Years of Continental Drift

Por Ayun Halliday

Things change…

Especially when you’re tracking the continental movement from Pangea to the present day in 5 million years increments at the rate of 2.5 million years per second.

Wherever you are, 350 million years ago, your address would’ve been located on the mega-continent of Pangea.

Here’s a map of what things looked like back then.

Those who’ve grown a bit fuzzy on their geography may require some indications of where future landmasses formed when Pangea broke apart. Your map apps can’t help you here.

The first split occurred in the middle of the Jurassic period, resulting in two hemispheres, Laurasia to the north and Gondwana.

As the project’s story map notes, 175 million years ago Africa and South America already bore a resemblance to their modern day configurations.

North America, Asia, and Europe needed to stay in the oven a bit longer, their familiar shapes beginning to emerge between 150 and 120 million years ago.

India peeled off from its “mother” continent of Gondwana some 100 million years ago.

Its tectonic plate collided with the Eurasian Plate, giving rise to the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau, by which point, dinosaurs had been extinct for about 15 million years…)


Geography nerds may chafe at the seemingly inaccurate sizes of Greenland, Antarctica and Australia. Rest assured that the mapmakers are aware, chalking it to the “distortion of the cartographic projection that exaggerates areas close to the Poles.”

Just for fun, let’s run it backwards!

But enough of the past. What of the future?

Those who really want to know could jump ahead to the end of the story map to see PALEOMAP Project founder Christopher Scotese’s speculative configuration of earth 250 million years hence, should current tectonic plate motion trends continue.

Behold his vision of mega-continent, Pangea Proxima, a landmass “formed from all current continents, with an apparent exception of New Zealand, which remains a bit on the side:”

On the opposite side of the world, North America is trying to fit to Africa, but it seems like it does not have the right shape. It will probably need more time…

Not to bum you out, but a more recent study paints a grimmer picture of a coming supercontinent, Pangea Ultima, when extreme temperatures have rendered just 8 percent of Earth’s surface hospitable to mammals, should they survive at all.

As the study’s co-author, climatologist Alexander Farnsworth, told Nature News, humans might do well to get “off this planet and find somewhere more habitable.”

Related Content 

Map Showing Where Today’s Countries Would Be Located on Pangea

Find the Address of Your Home on Pangaea: Open Source Project Lets You Explore the Ancient Land Masses of Our Planet

Paper Animation Tells Curious Story of How a Meteorologist Theorized Pangaea & Continental Drift (1910)

– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

The Codex Seraphinianus: How Italian Artist Luigi Serafini Came to Write & Illustrate “the Strangest Book Ever Published” (1981)

Por Colin Marshall

The Codex Seraphinianus is not a medieval book; nor does it date from the Renaissance along with the codices of Leonardo. In fact, it was published only in 1981, but in the intervening decades it has gained recognition as “the strangest book ever published,” as we described it when we previously featured it here on Open Culture a few years ago. Since then, Rizzoli has published a fortieth-anniversary edition of the Codex, which author-artist Luigi Serafini has granted interviews to promote. What new light has thus been shed on its more than 400 pages filled with bizarre illustrations and indecipherable text?

“The book is designed to be completely alien to anybody who picks it up,” says the narrator of the Curious Archive video at the top of the post. “Not only are the images utterly mind-bending, it’s written in a made-up and thoroughly untranslatable language. And yet, the more you read, the more you might find a strange sense of continuity among the images. That’s because Serafini intended this book to be an encyclopedia: an encyclopedia of a world that doesn’t exist.”

The experience of reading it — if “reading” be the word — “reminds me of being young and flipping through an encyclopedia, staring at pictures and not comprehending the words, but feeling a strange, untranslatable world hovering just outside my understanding.”

Serafini himself describes the Codex as “an attempt to describe the imaginary world in a systematic way” in the Great Big Story video above. To create it, he spent two and a half years in a state he likens to “going in a trance,” drawing all these “fish with eyes or double rhinoceroses and whatever.” These images came first, and they were all so strange that he “had to find a language to explain” them. The resulting experience lets us experience what it is “to read without knowing how to read” — an experience that has attracted the attention of thinkers from Douglas Hofstadter to Roland Barthes to Serafini’s countryman Italo Calvino, a man possessed of no scant interest in the strange, mythical, and inscrutable.

In a 1982 essay, Calvino writes of Serafini’s “very clear italics,” which “we always feel we are just an inch away from being able to read and yet which elude us in every word and letter. The anguish that this Other Universe conveys to us does not stem so much from its difference to our world as from its similarity.” Clearly, “Serafini’s universe is inhabited by freaks. But even in the world of monsters there is a logic whose outlines we seem to see emerging and vanishing, like the meanings of those words of his that are diligently copied out by his pen-nib.” It all brings to mind a joke I once heard that likens humanity, with its invincible instinct to ask what everything means, to a race of space aliens with enormous trunks. When these aliens visit Earth, they respond to everything we try to tell them with the same question: “Yes, but what does that have to do with trunks?”

Related content:

An Introduction to the Codex Seraphinianus, the Strangest Book Ever Published

The Meaning of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights Explained

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Amazon Offers Free AI Courses, Aiming to Help 2 Million People Build AI Skills by 2025

Por OC

Late last year, Amazon announced AI Ready, a new initiative “designed to provide free AI skills training to 2 million people globally by 2025.” This includes eight free AI and generative AI courses, some designed for beginners, and others designed for more advanced students.

As the Wall Street Journal podcast notes above, Amazon created the AI Ready initiative with three goals in mind: 1) to increase the overall number of people in the workforce who have a basic understanding of AI, 2.) to compete with Microsoft and other big companies for AI talent, and 3.) to expose a large number of people to Amazon’s AI systems.

For those new to AI, you may want to explore these AI Ready courses:

You can find more information (including more free courses) on this AI Ready page. We have other free AI courses listed in the Relateds below.

Note: Until February 1, 2024, Coursera is running a special deal where you can get $200 off of Coursera Plus and gain unlimited access to courses & certificates, including a lot of courses on AI. Get details here.

Related Content 

Artificial Intelligence for Everyone: An Introductory Course from Andrew Ng, the Co-Founder of Coursera

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Generative AI for Everyone: A Free Course from AI Pioneer Andrew Ng

Google Launches a Free Course on Artificial Intelligence: Sign Up for Its New “Machine Learning Crash Course”

How to Learn Data Analytics in 2024: Earn a Professional Certificate That Will Help Prepare You for a Job in 6 Months

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