Episode 5 of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos series aired last night on Fox. Thanks to Hulu, US viewers can now watch it online. The episode, called “Hiding the Light,” explores the wave theory of light. It moves across 2000+ years of history and eventually gets into the scientific work of Isaac Newton, William Herschel and Joseph von Fraunhofer, before winding up in modern times and touching on big questions contemplated by astronomers. (For a deeper dive into this material, see our collection of Free Astronomy Courses.) If you need to catch up on earlier episodes, you can find them below.
When not writing here at Open Culture, I host and produce Notebook on Cities and Culture(iTunes link), a globe-traveling podcast dedicated to in-depth conversation with cultural creators, internationalists, and observers of the urban scene about the work they do and the world cities they do it in. Through Kickstarter, I’ve funded the show’s first four seasons, with interviews recorded in places like Los Angeles, Osaka, Vancouver, Mexico City, Copenhagen, and London. Today, a new Kickstarter drive begins to fund the show’s latest and most ambitious venture: the Korea Tour, a season of conversations recorded all around the most fascinating country in Asia today.
You may well have already enjoyed the considerable and often surprising fruits of modern Korean culture through its film (Hong Sangsoo’s work first pulled me in, and boy, does it continue to), its music (which, I can assure you, goes well beyond Girls’ Generation and “Gangnam Style”), its television (which, by the same token, offers more than all reportedly addictive melodramas), or its food (the experience of which doesn’t start and end at barbecue joints). On Notebook on Cities and Culture’s Korea Tour, you’ll go much deeper, hearing from a wide variety of interesting people based in Korea, outside as well as in the vast and undoubtedly exciting capital of Seoul. I’ll talk to as wide a range as possible of Koreans and foreigners alike, including the literarily, technologically, academically, culinarily, and cinematically inclined — to name but a few of their many inclinations.
If you’d like to make the Korea Tour happen, please do visit its Kickstarter page within the week, during which we’ll need to raise its $5000 budget. Should you decide to become a backer, rewards include postcards from Korea, mentions of your project or message on the show, and copies from the very-limited-indeed print run of my textual and photographic Korea Diary. 여러분, 읽어 주셔서 감사합니다. 한국에 갑시다!
I had the great good fortune of having grown up just outside Washington, DC, where on a fifth grade class trip to the Folger Library and Theater, I fell in love with Shakespeare. This experience, along with a few visits to see his plays performed at nearby Wolftrap, made me think I might go into theater. Instead I became a student of literature, but somehow, my love of Shakespeare on the stage didn’t translate to the page until college. While studying for a sophomore-level “Histories & Tragedies” class, I sat, my Norton Shakespeare open, in front of the TV—reading along while watching Kenneth Branagh’s stylish film adaptation of Hamlet, which draws on the entire text of the play.
Only then came the epiphany: this language is music and magic. The rhythmic beauty, depths of feeling, humor broad and incisive, extraordinary range of human types.… If we are to believe pre-eminent Shakespeare scholar Harold Bloom, Shakespeare invented modern humanity. If this seems to go too far, he at least captured human complexity with greater inventive skill than any English writer before him, and possibly after. Is there any shame in finally “getting” Shakespeare’s language from the movies? None at all. One of the most excellent qualities of the Bard’s work—among so many reasons it endures—is its seemingly endless adaptability to every possible period, cultural context, and medium.
While engagement with any of the innumerable Shakespeare adaptations and performances promises reward, there’s little that enhances appreciation of the Bard’s work more than reading it under the tutelage of a trained scholar in the playwright’s Elizabethan language and history. Universal though he may be, Shakespeare wrote his plays in a particular time and place, under specific influences and working conditions. If you have not had the pleasure of studying the plays in a college setting—or if your memories of those long-ago English classes have faded—we offer a number of excellent free online courses from some of the finest universities. See a list below, all of which appear in our list of Free Online Literature Courses, part of our larger list of 875 Free Online Courses.
Also, speaking of the Folger, that venerable institution has just released all of Shakespeare’s plays in free, searchable online texts based on their highly-regarded scholarly print editions. And though some beg to differ, I still say you can’t go wrong with Branagh.
Over thirty years at the desk of his very own late-night talk show, multiple generations of fans, the respect of comedians the world over: David Letterman has had, by any measure, an awfully good run. Though they had to know it could come sooner or later, thousands of viewers, since Letterman announced last Thursday that he plans to retire in 2015, face the imminent prospect of a world without the Late Show as they know it. For the young and young-ish among them, many of whom didn’t come into the world themselves until after Letterman’s 1982 national debut (see video at bottom), this constitutes an entirely new and troublingly less absurd televisual reality. But the master comedy host didn’t simply emerge on to the scene, fully formed, those 32 years ago. Anyone who’s watched long enough to notice the frequency of Letterman’s references to Indianapolis, his hometown and the media market that granted him his first “big” chance as a weatherman, knows that he never forgot his roots.
As with many illustrious careers, Letterman’s humble early shot followed even humbler, earlier shots. Just above, you can hear the 21-year-old “Dave Letterman”’s broadcast from April Fool’s Day 1969 on WAGO-AM, the closed-circuit radio station he helped to found at his future alma mater, Ball State University. Though only a five-minute clip, this recording showcases not just Letterman’s preternatual microphone presence, but his way with the near-psychedelic walls of sound effects, seemingly free-associative speech, and pure wackiness that so came into its own in the late sixties and early seventies. (The Firesign Theater would soon perfect it.) Letterman followers who must know everything — and they certainly exist — should note that, when he calls a delirious-sounding woman in this segment, he calls none other than Michelle Cook, the very first Mrs. Letterman. Though we have yet to learn the identity of Letterman’s Late Show replacement, I feel certain, after this listening experience, that the Letterman of twenty years from now will rise from the ranks of podcasting. Listen out for him; he may not drop colorful phrases just like “horse dentures falling into a rusted howitzer artillery shell,” but you’ll know him when you hear him. Or her.
Below you can watch Bill Murray’s appearance on Letterman’s first 1982 show.
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Workers, hell. It’s not hard to imagine Andrei Sokolov, whose paintings were exhibited aboard the Mir station, producing high quality renderings for Mad Men’s Don Draper to show high-rolling Martian clients.
And pop science mag Tekhnika Molodezhi (“Technology for the Youth”) promoted the space race with pages of intriguing four-color images. The dollhouse-like cross section (above) of a communal residence below the moon’s crust is practically screaming Wes Anderson’s name.
For at least a decade now, the “death of print” has seemed all but inevitable. Amidst all the nostalgia for printed literature, it’s easy to forget that mass-produced books and media, and a literate population, are fairly recent phenomena in human history. Books—whether printed or hand-copied—had a totemic status for thousands of years, given that they were kept under the protection of an educated elite, who were among the few able to read and interpret them. Even after the age of printing, books were rare and hard to come by, largely too expensive for most people to afford until the advent of paperbacks.
A grisly reminder of the book’s status as an almost magical object surfaced in Harvard’s rare book collection a few years ago. In 2006, librarians discovered at least three volumes bound in human skin—and as travel site Roadtrippers reports, “in one case, skin harvested from a man who was flayed alive.” Gruesome as all this seems, the practice of skin-binding was apparently not the sole province of serial killers:
As it turns out, the practice of using human skin to bind books was actually pretty popular during the 17th century. It’s referred to as Anthropodermic bibliopegy and proved pretty common when it came to anatomical textbooks. Medical professionals would often use the flesh of cadavers they’d dissected during their research.
The book supposedly made of flayed skin is a Spanish law text from the seventeenth century titled Practicarum quaestionum circa leges regias (above). Despite an inscription naming the deceased and claiming his skin as the binding, this volume has actually just been identified as sheepskin—according to a Harvard Law Library blog post from yesterday—“thanks to a technique for identifying proteins that was developed in the last twenty years.” Speculates the Law Library post:
Perhaps before it arrived at HLS [Harvard Law School] in 1946, the book was bound in a different binding at some point in its history. Or perhaps the inscription was simply the product of someone’s macabre imagination.
Nevertheless, other human skin-bound books exist—as far as librarians and scientists can determine. Former director of libraries for the University of Kentucky Lawrence S. Thompson claims that the practice dates as far back as a 13th century French Bible and became more common in the 16th and 17th centuries. A 1933 Crimson article mentioned another skin-bound book in a collection of miniature books, including this graphic detail: “removal of 20 square inches of skin from his back failed to impair the health of its donor, who is still alive and in the best of condition.”
Another skin-bound volume, which Thompson calls “the most famous of all anthropodermic bindings,” resides across the river from Harvard at independent library the Boston Athenaeum. Called The Highwayman: Narrative of the Life of James Allen alias George Walton(above), the book is a memoir of the titular outlaw. The author, reports the Crimson, “was impressed by the courage of a man whom he once attacked, and when Walton was facing execution, he asked to have his memoir bound in his own skin and presented to the brave man.” Thumb through (so to speak) a digital copy of Walton’s 1837 memoir above, and imagine being the recipient of such a gift.
While I normally try not to get involved with comments on web sites (you know what I mean), I’d rather get involved with the comments of some web sites than others. I doubt that underneath any Youtube video, for example, you’d find dozens and dozens of well-considered suggestions for the canon of books every intelligent person should read, as we did here at Open Culture when we put the question to you on Wednesday. In the comments to that post as well as on our Facebook Page, we received a host of responses scattered satisfyingly across the textual map: everything from Michel Foucault to Foucault’s Pendulum, Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to Bryson’s Short History of Nearly Everything, 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant to reptilian conspiracy-envisioning ex-footballer David Icke. The top-ranking volume? Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (available, incidentally, in our free eBook collection: Kindle from Amazon– Read Online), followed by Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (available there too: iPad/iPhone — Kindle + Other Formats). Let none say that Open Culture readers shy away from weighty literature.
The recommendations fascinate, but so do their justifications. (My personal favorite: “It’s a book about shamanism, although it’s not what you would expect from a socially accepted description of shamanism.”) Jo Stafford calls Crime and Punishment and Moby-Dick, the two big winners, “perfect examples of how great fiction can pose the ‘big questions’, particularly around what it means to act morally.” Moira pitches Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as a “modern study of the schism between classicist and romanticist thinking.” Nick Williams says Candide “still feeds the inner cynic,” and Jason considers Walden“a better lesson on capitalism than The Wealth of Nations.” Arthur McMillan recommends Julian Barnes’ A History of the World in 10½ Chapters by holding out the promise that it “encapsulates the sheer futility of everything[ness].” Another reader suggests William Godwin’s Political Enquiry “to be reminded what books inspired us to be: free.” Wise words indeed, Mr. Beer N. Hockey.
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