80 Massive Open Online Courses Getting Started in April: Enroll in a MOOC Today

in MOOCs | April 3rd, 2014

We’re seeing about 80 MOOCs getting started in April. It’s a far cry from the 180 that got underway in January. But still not bad. You can visit our comprehensive list of MOOCs here and find a course that speaks to you. Some of the ones that caught our eye include:

Street Fighting Math – MIT on edx – April 8 (7 weeks)
Design Thinking – Macromedia University on iversity – April 14 (4 weeks)
Warhol – University of Edinburgh on Coursera – April 21 (5 weeks)
Start Writing Fiction – The Open University on Futurelearn – April 28 (8 weeks)

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

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

in Books | April 2nd, 2014

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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 88 ) |

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.

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.

by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

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

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.

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

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

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”

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

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.

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

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?

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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!

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

80 Massive Open Online Courses Getting Started in April: Enroll in a MOOC Today

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

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

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

Hipsters Ordering Coffee

Now You Can Learn to Speak Klingon with Rosetta Stone

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

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

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