What Books Should Every Intelligent Person Read?: Tell Us Your Picks; We’ll Tell You Ours

in Books | April 2nd, 2014

intelligent books to read

Back in 2011 we fea­tured astro­physi­cist Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s list of the books “every sin­gle intel­li­gent per­son on the plan­et” should read. His picks include the Bible (“to learn that it’s eas­i­er to be told by oth­ers what to think and believe than it is to think for your­self”); Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (“to learn that cap­i­tal­ism is an econ­o­my of greed, a force of nature unto itself”); and Machi­avel­li’s The Prince (“to learn that peo­ple not in pow­er will do all they can to acquire it, and peo­ple in pow­er will do all they can to keep it”). The list, which has gen­er­at­ed a great deal of inter­est and dis­cus­sion, leads you to think about the very nature of not just what con­sti­tutes essen­tial read­ing, but what defines an “intel­li­gent per­son.” Should every such indi­vid­ual real­ly read any book in par­tic­u­lar? Does it mat­ter if oth­ers already acknowl­edge these books as essen­tial, or can they have gone thus far undis­cov­ered?

Admirably, Tyson man­ages to com­pile his selec­tions of books well-known across the Eng­lish-speak­ing world into a list that, as a whole, some­how avoids dull­ness or pre­dictabil­i­ty. In eschew­ing obscu­ran­tism, he makes the per­haps dar­ing impli­ca­tion that an intel­li­gent per­son must con­nect to a wide­ly shared cul­ture, rather than demon­strat­ing their brain­pow­er by get­ting through vol­ume upon lit­tle-read vol­ume, writ­ten in the most labyrinthine lan­guage, expound­ing on the most abstract sub­ject mat­ter, or grap­pling with the knot­ti­est philo­soph­i­cal prob­lems. This inspires me to high­light five more pieces of read­ing mate­r­i­al, all intel­lec­tu­al­ly stim­u­lat­ing but acces­si­bly writ­ten, all ref­er­enced fre­quent­ly in count­less areas of human endeav­or, and all avail­able in our col­lec­tion of free eBooks:

  • Mar­cus Aure­lius’ Med­i­ta­tions (iPad/iPhone – Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats), because the ideas that “you have pow­er over your mind, not out­side events,” or that “the hap­pi­ness of your life depends upon the qual­i­ty of your thoughts,” or that “every­thing we hear is an opin­ion, not a fact” and “every­thing we see is a per­spec­tive, not the truth” apply as much today as they did in antiq­ui­ty.
  • Miguel de Cer­vantes’ Don Quixote (iPad/iPhone (Vol 1 – Vol 2) – Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats), because we could all use a firmer grasp on what we mean when we label some­one “quixot­ic,” a sim­ple descrip­tion that takes its name from a sur­pris­ing­ly com­plex and unex­pect­ed­ly admirable char­ac­ter.
  • James Joyce’s A Por­trait of the Artist as a Young Man (iPad/iPhone – Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats) because, what­ev­er ideas you may have about Joyce — pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive — if you haven’t yet cracked his first nov­el, I guar­an­tee a read­ing expe­ri­ence unlike any you might expect.
  • Michel de Mon­taigne’s Essays (iPad/iPhone – Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats), because not only do his pieces exem­pli­fy (because they prac­ti­cal­ly invent­ed) the strongest short form to cap­ture the paths of human thought, but they feel espe­cial­ly rel­e­vant now in this inter­net-dri­ven “age of the essay.”
  • Alex­is de Toc­queville’s Democ­ra­cy in Amer­i­ca (vol­ume 1: iPad/iPhone – Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats — Read Online; vol­ume 2: iPad/iPhone — Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats — Read Online), because the French­man’s diag­no­sis of the advan­tages and lia­bil­i­ties of this then-young and exper­i­men­tal coun­try still give us much to con­sid­er today, not just in regard to Amer­i­ca, but — now that so many coun­tries have gone demo­c­ra­t­ic, each in their own way — most of the world.

None will have come as news to you, but some it may take you a moment to real­ize that, hey, you nev­er did get around to them in the first place. Take in books like these, and not only will they res­onate rich­ly with every­thing else already knock­ing around your brain — you do read Open Cul­ture, after all — but they’ll let you in on what, exact­ly, all those read­ers and writ­ers around the world and through his­to­ry have meant when they cite them so read­i­ly.

We also invite you to tell us: which books, freely avail­able or oth­er­wise, do you con­sid­er essen­tial read­ing for the intel­li­gent? Have I missed the boat by fail­ing to include Finnegans Wake (Read Online), say, or the Trac­ta­tus Logi­co-Philo­soph­i­cus (iPad/iPhone — Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats — Read Online)? Let loose your own rec­om­men­da­tions and we’ll cre­ate a com­pi­la­tion of your best picks in the com­ings days.

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Watch Orson Welles’ Trailer for Citizen Kane: As Innovative as the Film Itself

in Film | April 2nd, 2014

Over the years, the movie trail­er has evolved from being a long bag­gy com­mer­cial for an upcom­ing fea­ture to a visu­al­ly strik­ing mini-gem of film­mak­ing that some­times over­shad­ows the film it adver­tis­es. Pret­ty much every trail­er from a movie by Zack Sny­der, for instance, is expo­nen­tial­ly bet­ter than the actu­al film.

Not sur­pris­ing­ly, one of the first film­mak­ers to embrace the pos­si­bil­i­ties of the movie trail­er was one of cinema’s great inno­va­tors – Orson Welles. The trail­er for Cit­i­zen Kane, which you can see above, has no actu­al footage from the movie – some­thing of a rar­i­ty. Instead, the trail­er serves as a curi­ous four-minute long doc­u­men­tary fea­tur­ing behind-the-scenes footage and short vignettes of char­ac­ters react­ing to the movie’s mys­te­ri­ous cen­tral char­ac­ter.

Dis­play­ing the same visu­al verve that would make Cit­i­zen Kane a cin­e­mat­ic land­mark, the trail­er opens with a gor­geous shot of a boom low­er­ing into view. And then we hear Welles’s sig­na­ture bari­tone voice intro­duc­ing him­self, “How do you do, ladies and gen­tle­men. This is Orson Welles.”

After inform­ing the audi­ence about a com­ing attrac­tion — his film — Welles segues straight into a shot of pret­ty girls, deliv­ered with a wry wink at the audi­ence. “Speak­ing of attrac­tions, cho­rus girls are cer­tain­ly an attrac­tion. Frankly, ladies and gen­tle­men, we’re just show­ing you the cho­rus girls for the pur­pos­es of bal­ly­hoo.”

He goes on to intro­duce the cast of Cit­i­zen Kane — mem­bers of Welles’s famed Mer­cury The­atre like Joseph Cot­ten, Agnes Moore­head, and Ray Collins — on set but out of cos­tume, look­ing bash­ful­ly toward the cam­era. The one per­son miss­ing is Welles him­self, who, aside from his urbane, author­i­ta­tive voice over, is com­plete­ly absent.

The trail­er then shifts gears. “Cit­i­zen Kane is a sto­ry about a mod­ern Amer­i­can called Kane, Charles Fos­ter Kane. I don’t know how to tell you about him, there’s so much to say. I’ll turn you over to the char­ac­ters in the pic­ture.” We then see a mon­tage of the char­ac­ters of Cit­i­zen Kane. They’re all on the tele­phone, air­ing their wild­ly diver­gent opin­ions of the film’s cen­tral char­ac­ter. Kane him­self nev­er makes an appear­ance. Welles ends the piece by pre­sent­ing Kane as an enig­ma, “a hero, a scoundrel, a no-account, a swell guy, a great lover, a great Amer­i­can cit­i­zen, and a dirty dog.”

Crit­ic and actor Simon Cal­low argued in his book Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu that the trail­er for Kane was just as ground­break­ing as the movie. It’s all shot with the same look as Kane — deep focus and expres­sion­is­tic light­ing.

Com­pare Kane’s trail­er with one that was more typ­i­cal of its time like Casablan­ca. Amid the over­wrought copy and some com­i­cal­ly flashy tran­si­tions, that trail­er all but tells you what is going to hap­pen in the film. There’s vio­lence! Dan­ger! Romance! Kane’s trail­er, on the oth­er hand, is less a sales pitch than a mys­tery. It shows plen­ty about the peo­ple behind the mak­ing of the movie but it shows noth­ing from the actu­al film. Based sole­ly on the trail­er, you don’t know what Kane is about, short of being about a shad­owy, com­pli­cat­ed char­ac­ter called Kane.

Welles wasn’t just being cagey for the sake of build­ing audi­ence inter­est. He was try­ing to head off a fight.  Though Welles pub­licly claimed that Kane was not about media baron William Ran­dolph Hearst, you can hard­ly blame the tycoon for feel­ing oth­er­wise. Hearst was a news­pa­per mag­nate with a show­girl mis­tress who built him­self a pre­pos­ter­ous­ly opu­lent cas­tle. Cit­i­zen Kane is about a news­pa­per mag­nate with a show­girl wife who built him­self a pre­pos­ter­ous­ly opu­lent cas­tle.

Hearst did every­thing he could to stop the movie’s pro­duc­tion – and he could do quite a lot. When he failed to kill the pic­ture by pres­sur­ing the stu­dio, he pres­sured the­ater own­ers. He used his media empire to slan­der Welles – using the direc­tor’s com­pli­cat­ed per­son­al life as tabloid fod­der and even imply­ing that he was a Com­mu­nist. Hearst’s cam­paign to dis­cred­it Welles was so suc­cess­ful that when the direc­tor’s name came up dur­ing the 1942 Acad­e­my Awards, it elicit­ed boos.

Welles, of course, got the last laugh. Kane was such an auda­cious, stun­ning­ly orig­i­nal work that, once redis­cov­ered in the 1950s, it was quick­ly declared a mas­ter­piece. The pres­ti­gious Sight and Sound poll of crit­ics and film­mak­ers rat­ed Kane as the best movie ever made for five decades straight before get­ting unseat­ed last year by Alfred Hitch­cock­’s Ver­ti­go.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lis­ten to Orson Welles’ Clas­sic Radio Per­for­mance of 10 Shake­speare Plays

Lis­ten to Eight Inter­views of Orson Welles by Film­mak­er Peter Bog­danovich (1969–1972)

Watch Orson Welles’ The Stranger Free Online, Where 1940s Film Noir Meets Real Hor­rors of WWII

Orson Welles Explains Why Igno­rance Was His Major “Gift” to Cit­i­zen Kane

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.

 

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Read an Excerpt of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1926 Translation of Beowulf Before It’s Finally Published Next Month

in Books, Literature, Poetry | April 2nd, 2014

TolkienBeowulf

For the first time, J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1926 trans­la­tion of the 11th cen­tu­ry epic poem Beowulf will be pub­lished this May by Harper­Collins, edit­ed and with com­men­tary by his son Christo­pher. The elder Tolkien, says his son, “seems nev­er to have con­sid­ered its pub­li­ca­tion.” He left it along with sev­er­al oth­er unpub­lished man­u­scripts at the time of his death in 1973. The edi­tion will also include a sto­ry called Sel­l­ic Spell and excerpts from a series of lec­tures on Beowulf Tolkien deliv­ered at Oxford in the 1930s. Tolkien did pub­lish one of those lec­tures, “The Mon­ster and the Crit­ic,” in 1936. In this “epoch-mak­ing paper,” writes Sea­mus Heaney in the intro­duc­tion to his huge­ly pop­u­lar 1999 dual lan­guage verse edi­tion, Tolkien treat­ed the Beowulf poet as “an imag­i­na­tive writer,” not a his­tor­i­cal recon­struc­tion. His “bril­liant lit­er­ary treat­ment changed the way the poem was val­ued and ini­ti­at­ed a new era—and new terms—of appre­ci­a­tion.” This very same thing could be said of Heaney’s trans­la­tion which, true to his stat­ed goals, brought the poem out of aca­d­e­m­ic con­fer­ences and class­rooms and into liv­ing rooms and cof­fee shops every­where. (You can hear Heaney read from that trans­la­tion here.)

Nowhere in Heaney’s intro­duc­tion to his ver­sion does he men­tion Tolkien’s trans­la­tion of the poem, so we must pre­sume he did not know of it. Long before Tolkien’s lec­tures and trans­la­tion, Beowulf had been per­haps the most revered poem in the Eng­lish lan­guage, at least since the 18th cen­tu­ry, when the sole man­u­script was res­cued from fire and and trans­lat­ed and dis­sem­i­nat­ed wide­ly. Despite that sta­tus, Beowulf was not actu­al­ly writ­ten in English—not an Eng­lish we would recognize—but in Old Eng­lish, or Anglo-Sax­on. As read­ers of Heaney’s dual trans­la­tion will know, that dis­tant provin­cial ances­tor of the mod­ern glob­al lan­guage, named for the mix­ture of Ger­man­ic peo­ples who inhab­it­ed Eng­land 1000 years ago, appears most­ly alien to us now. (To add to the strange­ness, its unfa­mil­iar alpha­bet once con­sist­ed entire­ly of runes).

The poem, more­over, is not set in Eng­land, but where Shake­speare set his Ham­let, Den­mark. Its tit­u­lar hero, a prince from Geat (ancient Swe­den), stalks a mon­ster named Gren­del on behalf of Dan­ish king Hroð­gar, killing the monster’s moth­er along the way. Tolkien’s almost uni­ver­sal­ly beloved body of fic­tion was deeply influ­enced by Beowulf. Nev­er­the­less, his trans­la­tion may be less acces­si­ble than Heaney’s, though no less beau­ti­ful, per­haps, for dif­fer­ent rea­sons. In Heaney’s verse, one hears Ted Hugh­es, some echoes of Mil­ton, Heaney’s own voice. If we are to cred­it the red­di­tor who post­ed a now-defunct 2003 arti­cle from Cana­di­an news­pa­per Nation­al Post that quotes from Tolkien’s trans­la­tion, the Hob­bit author’s verse hews to a more direct cor­re­spon­dence with the Anglo Sax­on, a lan­guage made of giant rocks and tim­ber and crash­ing waves, not ele­gant, elab­o­rat­ed claus­es. The Nation­al Post arti­cle announces the dis­cov­ery at Oxford of the Tolkien trans­la­tion by Eng­lish Pro­fes­sor Michael Drout (a sto­ry he’s since debunked), and quotes from both Heaney and Tolkien. See the com­par­i­son below:

Heaney’s trans­la­tion:

Time went by, the boat was
on water,
in close under the cliffs.
Men climbed eager­ly up the
gang­plank,
sand churned in surf, war­riors
loaded
a car­go of weapons, shin­ing
war-gear
in the ves­sel’s hold, then
heaved out,
away with a will in their
wood-wreathed ship.

Tolkien’s trans­la­tion of Beowulf and his men set­ting sail:

On went the hours:
on
ocean afloat
under cliff was their craft.
Now climb blithe­ly
brave man aboard;
break­ers pound­ing
ground the shin­gle.
Gleam­ing har­ness
they hove to the bosom of the
bark, armour
with cun­ning forged then cast
her forth
to voy­age tri­umphant,
valiant-tim­bered
fleet foam twist­ed.

One won­ders what the recent­ly depart­ed Irish poet would have said had he lived to read this Tolkien edi­tion. Might it, as Heaney said of his lec­tures, change the way the poem is val­ued? Or might he see it resem­bling oth­er dif­fi­cult attempts to make mod­ern Eng­lish repli­cate the strong­ly inflect­ed built-in rhythms of Anglo-Saxon—a lan­guage, Tolkien once said, from “the dark hea­then ages beyond the mem­o­ry of song.”

You can pre-order a copy of Tolkien’s trans­la­tion of Beowulf here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sea­mus Heaney Reads His Exquis­ite Trans­la­tion of Beowulf and His Mem­o­rable 1995 Nobel Lec­ture

Dis­cov­er J.R.R. Tolkien’s Per­son­al Book Cov­er Designs for The Lord of the Rings Tril­o­gy

“The Tolkien Pro­fes­sor” Presents Three Free Cours­es on The Lord of the Rings

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Hipsters Ordering Coffee

in Comedy, Food & Drink | April 2nd, 2014

“Cap­puc­ci­no small, low fat, extra dry.” Sor­ry to say, but that’s my line 2–3 times per day. That makes me almost as bad as the cof­fee-order­ing hip­sters in this new video by Nacho Punch. Let the video roll for a bit. It has its fun­ny moments.

On a more seri­ous note, if you live in the San Fran­cis­co Bay Area, con­sid­er spend­ing Sat­ur­day, May 3rd at Stan­ford’s one-day cof­fee sym­po­sium. Orga­nized by Stan­ford Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies, the sym­po­sium — Cof­fee: From Tree to Beans to Brew and Every­thing in Between – will fea­ture guest speak­ers (his­to­ri­ans, sci­en­tists, the CEO of Blue Bot­tle Cof­fee, etc.) talk­ing about what goes into mak­ing this great bev­er­age of ours. Stu­dents will also have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to par­tic­i­pate in cof­fee tast­ing and eval­u­a­tion ses­sions. In full dis­clo­sure, I helped put the pro­gram togeth­er. It promis­es to be a great day. So I had to give a plug. You can learn more and sign up here.

via Huff­Po

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Curi­ous Sto­ry of London’s First Cof­fee­hous­es (1650–1675)

Hon­oré de Balzac Writes About “The Plea­sures and Pains of Cof­fee,” and His Epic Cof­fee Addic­tion

Men In Com­mer­cials Being Jerks About Cof­fee: A Mashup of 1950s & 1960s TV Ads

The His­to­ry of Cof­fee and How It Trans­formed Our World

Black Cof­fee: Doc­u­men­tary Cov­ers the His­to­ry, Pol­i­tics & Eco­nom­ics of the “Most Wide­ly Tak­en Legal Drug”

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Now You Can Learn to Speak Klingon with Rosetta Stone

in Language Lessons | April 1st, 2014

For only $269, you can learn to speak Klin­gon with Roset­ta Stone.

Our big col­lec­tion of Free Lan­guage Lessons offers tuto­ri­als in Bam­bara, Bul­gar­i­an, Ice­landic, Yid­dish and more. But Klin­gon? That, sad­ly, you can only get at Roset­ta Stone. Their soft­ware is com­pat­i­ble with Win­dows XP+ and OS X+, requires a CD-Rom dri­ve and a head­set with a micro­phone, and it lets you have live con­ver­sa­tion ses­sions with native speak­ers. By the time you’re done, you should be able to make small talk in Klin­gon — order food at a restau­rant, make a hotel reser­va­tion, ask for direc­tions. You know, the basics.

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Beautiful Equations: Documentary Explores the Beauty of Einstein & Newton’s Great Equations

in Math, Science | April 1st, 2014

Like many right-brained peo­ple, artist and crit­ic Matt Collings finds high­er math mys­ti­fy­ing, a word that implies both bewil­der­ment and won­der. Faced with the equa­tions that make, for exam­ple, Stephen Hawking’s work pos­si­ble, most of us are left sim­i­lar­ly slack-jawed. Collings apt­ly describes the realm of the­o­ret­i­cal physics—which so con­tra­dicts our every­day experience—as “an alien world,” with its equa­tions like “incom­pre­hen­si­ble hiero­glyphs.” He decid­ed to enter this world, to “learn about some of the most impor­tant equa­tions in sci­ence.” His angle? He views them as art, “mas­ter­pieces” that “explain the world we live in.” Collings spends his hour-long BBC spe­cial Beau­ti­ful Equa­tions chat­ting with Stephen Hawk­ing and oth­er the­o­rists about such par­a­digm-shift­ing equa­tions as Einstein’s for­mu­la for spe­cial rel­a­tiv­i­ty and Newton’s laws of grav­i­ty.

In an era char­ac­ter­ized by sci­en­tists encroach­ing on the arts—to claim Mar­cel Proust as a neu­ro­sci­en­tist, Jane Austen as game the­o­rist—it’s refresh­ing to see a human­i­ties per­son engage the world of math, using the only schema he knows to make sense of what seems to him unin­tel­li­gi­ble. Unlike those sci­en­tists-turned-lit­er­ary crit­ics, Collings doesn’t make any large claims or assert exper­tise. He plays the hum­ble every­man, own­ing his igno­rance, his most endear­ing and effec­tive tool since it pro­vides the basis for his inter­locu­tors’ reme­di­al, and friend­ly, expla­na­tions. The results are an intel­li­gent primer for lay­folk, a refresh­er for the more knowl­edge­able, and per­haps an enter­tain­ing diver­sion for experts, who will like­ly have their quib­bles with Collings’ nec­es­sar­i­ly basic pre­sen­ta­tion. But he is not on the hunt for complexity—quite the oppo­site. As the title of the spe­cial indi­cates, Collings’ inquiry seeks to find out just what makes the work of New­ton, Ein­stein, and oth­ers so pro­found­ly, sim­ply ele­gant.

Aes­thet­ic feel­ing is not at all alien to math—far from it, in fact. As Bertrand Rus­sell famous­ly wrote in his essay “Mys­ti­cism and Log­ic”: “Math­e­mat­ics, right­ly viewed, pos­sess­es not only truth, but supreme beau­ty.” Rus­sel­l’s point has been empir­i­cal­ly val­i­dat­ed by recent neu­ro­science. As BBC.com report­ed in Feb­ru­ary, a study in the jour­nal Fron­tiers in Human Neu­ro­science found that in the brains of math­e­mati­cians, “the same emo­tion­al brain cen­tres used to appre­ci­ate art” are “acti­vat­ed by ‘beau­ti­ful’ maths.” While the con­cept of beau­ty itself may be impos­si­ble to quan­ti­fy, when it comes to equa­tions, sci­en­tists (or at least their brains) know it when they see it. The rest of us, like Collings, may require an appre­ci­a­tion course to under­stand the awe inspired by the math that, as our host puts it, so ele­gant­ly cap­tures the “enor­mi­ty of the uni­verse.”

You can find Beau­ti­ful Equa­tions list­ed in our col­lec­tion of Free Doc­u­men­taries, part of our larg­er col­lec­tion of 675 Free Movies Online.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Einstein’s Big Idea: E=mc²

Sev­en Ques­tions for Stephen Hawk­ing: What Would He Ask Albert Ein­stein & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Batgirl Fights for Equal Pay in a 1960s Television Ad Supporting The Equal Pay Act

in History, Politics, Television | April 1st, 2014

Fea­tured on the Emi­ly’s List Face­book Page today is this “PSA from the 1960s,” where “Bat­girl advo­cates for equal pay while sav­ing Bat­man and Robin.” Emi­ly’s List, a PAC aim­ing to put more pro-choice Demo­c­rat female can­di­dates into polit­i­cal office, goes on to note, “Over 50 years ago, Con­gress passed the Equal Pay Act, a law designed to end wage dis­crim­i­na­tion against women. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the fight’s still got many rounds left.”

Indeed, a 2008 Cen­sus Bureau report shows that wom­en’s medi­an annu­al earn­ings were 77.5% of men’s earn­ings, and efforts to address that imbal­ance with The Pay­check Fair­ness Act have been fil­i­bus­tered suc­cess­ful­ly by Repub­li­cans in the Sen­ate. Although Pres­i­dent Oba­ma sup­ports the mea­sure, data shows women aren’t far­ing well finan­cial­ly in the Oba­ma White House either. Where’s Bat­girl when we need her?

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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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Eleanor Roosevelt’s Durable Wisdom on Curiosity, Empathy, Education & Responding to Criticism

in Education, History, Life, Politics | April 1st, 2014

eleanor 2

First Lady Eleanor Roo­sevelt was a pro­lif­ic colum­nist and writer, with an impres­sive list of clips pro­duced both dur­ing FDR’s tenure in the White House and after­wards. George Wash­ing­ton University’s Eleanor Roo­sevelt Papers Project tal­lies up her out­put: 8,000 columns, 580 arti­cles, 27 books, and 100,000 let­ters (not to men­tion speech­es and appear­ances). Many of those columns and arti­cles can be found on their web­site.

Their archive offers every one of Roosevelt’s “My Day” columns, which ran through Unit­ed Fea­tures Syn­di­cate from 1936–1962. These short pieces act­ed like a dai­ly diary, chron­i­cling Roosevelt’s trav­els, the books she read, the peo­ple she vis­it­ed, her evolv­ing polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy, and, occa­sion­al­ly, her reflec­tions on such top­ics as edu­ca­tion, empa­thy, apa­thy, friend­ship, stress, and the scourge of exces­sive mail (“I love my per­son­al let­ters and I am real­ly deeply inter­est­ed in much of my mail, but when I see it in a mass I would some­times like to run away! I just closed my eyes in this case and went to bed!”)

The “My Day” archive is a lit­tle dif­fi­cult to navigate—you have to browse by year, or search by keyword—but the archive’s short list of select­ed longer arti­cles is a bit sim­pler to sur­vey. Some of my favorites:

“In Defense of Curios­i­ty” (Sat­ur­day Evening Post, 1935): Roo­sevelt often drew fire for her insa­tiable inter­est in all areas of nation­al life—a char­ac­ter­is­tic that peo­ple thought of as unla­dy­like. This arti­cle argues that women, too, should be curi­ous, and that curios­i­ty is the basis for hap­pi­ness, imag­i­na­tion, and empa­thy.

“How to Take Crit­i­cism” (Ladies Home Jour­nal, 1944): Roo­sevelt had a lot of haters. This longer piece mulls over the dif­fer­ent types of crit­i­cism that she received dur­ing her pub­lic career, and asks how one should dis­tin­guish between wor­thy and unwor­thy cri­tiques.

“Build­ing Char­ac­ter” (The Parent’s Mag­a­zine, 1931): An edi­to­r­i­al on the impor­tance of pro­vid­ing chil­dren with chal­lenges, clear­ly meant to reas­sure par­ents wor­ried about the effects of the Depres­sion on their kids.

“Good Cit­i­zen­ship: The Pur­pose of Edu­ca­tion” (Pic­to­r­i­al Review, 1930): Much of this piece is about the impor­tance of fair com­pen­sa­tion for good teach­ers. “There are many inad­e­quate teach­ers today,” Roo­sevelt wrote. “Per­haps our stan­dards should be high­er, but they can­not be until we learn to val­ue and under­stand the func­tion of the teacher in our midst. While we have put much mon­ey in build­ings and lab­o­ra­to­ries and gym­na­si­ums, we have for­got­ten that they are but the shell, and will nev­er live and cre­ate a vital spark in the minds and hearts of our youth unless some teacher fur­nish­es the inspi­ra­tion. A child responds nat­u­ral­ly to high ideals, and we are all of us crea­tures of habit.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“F. Scott Fitzger­ald Tells His 11-Year-Old Daugh­ter What to Wor­ry About (and Not Wor­ry About) in Life, 1933”

“’Noth­ing Good Gets Away’: John Stein­beck Offers Love Advice in a Let­ter to His Son (1958)”

“George Washington’s 110 Rules for Civil­i­ty and Decent Behav­ior”

Rebec­ca Onion is a writer and aca­d­e­m­ic liv­ing in Philadel­phia. She runs Slate.com’s his­to­ry blog, The Vault. Fol­low her on Twit­ter: @rebeccaonion. 

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