Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is the most important rock & roll album ever made, an unsurpassed adventure in concept, sound, songwriting, cover art and studio technology by the greatest rock & roll group of all time. From the title song’s regal blasts of brass and fuzz guitar to the orchestral seizure and long, dying piano chord at the end of “A Day in the Life,” the 13 tracks on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band are the pinnacle of the Beatles’ eight years as recording artists. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were never more fearless and unified in their pursuit of magic and transcendence.…
Sgt. Pepper formally ushered in an unforgettable season of hope, upheaval and achievement: the late 1960s and, in particular, 1967’s Summer of Love. In its iridescent instrumentation, lyric fantasias and eye-popping packaging, Sgt. Pepper defined the opulent revolutionary optimism of psychedelia and instantly spread the gospel of love, acid, Eastern spirituality and electric guitars around the globe. No other pop record of that era, or since, has had such an immediate, titanic impact. This music documents the world’s biggest rock band at the very height of its influence and ambition.
Given Sgt. Pepper’s iconic status, it’s hard to imagine a contemporary band deciding to cover the entire album. (Can you really improve upon it?) But that’s just what The Flaming Lips have done with With a Little Help From My Fwends. Scheduled to be released next week, the album features contributions by fwends like Moby, My Morning Jacket, Miley Cyrus, and others. Proceeds from the album — which is now streaming free for a limited time at NPR — will go to the Bella Foundation, a non-profit that assists low-income, elderly or terminally ill pet owners with the cost of veterinary care when it cannot be afforded. You can pre-order the Flaming Lips album on Amazon and iTunes.
In other news, Paul McCartney announced today that he has unearthed a Wings’ song he played (back in the day) with John Bonham on drums. An intriguing idea. Catch it here.
But if this seems out of bounds, wait until you hear what he suggests. Instead of issuing even more seemingly arbitrary, burdensome commands, Pinker aims to free us from the tyranny of the senseless in grammar—or, as he calls it in an article at The Guardian, from “folklore and superstition.” Below are five of the ten “common issues of grammar” Pinker selects “from those that repeatedly turn up in style guides, pet-peeve lists, newspaper language columns and irate letters to the editor.” In each case, he explains the absurdity of strict adherence and offers several perfectly reasonable exceptions that require no correction to clarify their meaning.
Beginning sentences with conjunctions
We have almost certainly all been taught in some fashion or another that this is a no-no. “That’s because teachers need a simple way” to teach children “how to break sentences.” The “rule,” Pinker says, is “misinformation” and “inappropriate for adults.” He cites only two examples here, both using the conjunction “because”: Johnny Cash’s “Because you’re mine, I walk the line,” and the stock parental non-answer, “Because I said so.” And yet (see what I did?), other conjunctions, like “and,” “but,” “yet,” and “so” may also “be used to begin a sentence whenever the clauses being connected are too long or complicated to fit comfortably into a single megasentence.”
Dangling modifiers
Having taught English composition for several years, and thus having read several hundred scrambled student essays, I find this one difficult to concede. The dangling modifier—an especially easy error to make when writing quickly—too easily creates confusion or downright unintelligibility. Pinker does admit since the subjects of dangling modifiers “are inherently ambiguous,” they might sometimes “inadvertently attract a reader to the wrong choice, as in ‘When a small boy, a girl is of little interest.’” But, he says, this is not a grammatical error. Here are a few “danglers” he suggests as “perfectly acceptable”:
“Checking into the hotel, it was nice to see a few of my old classmates in the lobby.”
“Turning the corner, the view was quite different.”
“In order to contain the epidemic, the area was sealed off.”
Who and Whom
I once had a student ask me if “whom” was an archaic affectation that would make her writing sound forced and unnatural. I had to admit she had an excellent point, no matter what our overpriced textbook said. In most cases, even if correctly used, whom can indeed sound “formal verging on pompous.” Though they seem straightforward enough, “the rules for its proper use,” writes Pinker, “are obscure to many speakers, tempting them to drop ‘whom’ into their speech whenever they want to sound posh,” and to generally use the word incorrectly. Despite “a century of nagging by prescriptive grammarians,” the distinction between “who” and “whom” seems anything but simple, and so one’s use of it—as with any tricky word or usage—should be carefully calibrated “to the complexity of the construction and the degree of formality” the writing calls for. Put plainly, know how you’re using “whom” and why, or stick with the unobjectionable “who.”
Very unique
Oftentimes we find the most innocuous-sounding, common sense usages called out by uptight pedants as ungrammatical when there’s no seeming reason why they should be. The phrase “very unique,” a description that may not strike you as excessively weird or backward, happens to be “one of the commonest insults to the sensibility of the purist.” This is because, such narrow thinkers claim, as with other categorical expressions like “absolute” or “incomparable,” something either is or it isn’t, in the same way that one either is or isn’t pregnant: “referring to degrees of uniqueness is meaningless,” says the logic, in the case of absolute adjectives. Of course, it seems to me that one can absolutely refer to degrees of pregnancy. In any case, writes Pinker, “uniqueness is not like pregnancy […]; it must be defined relative to some scale of measurement.” Hence, “very unique,” makes sense, he says. But you should avoid it on aesthetic grounds. “’Very,’” he says, “is a soggy modifier in the best of circumstances.” How about “rather unique?” Too posh-sounding?
That and which
I breathed an audible sigh on encountering this one, because it’s a rule I find particularly irksome. Of note is that Pinker, an American, is writing in The Guardian, a British publication, where things are much more relaxed for these two relative pronouns. In U.S. usage, “which” is reserved for nonrestrictive—or optional clauses: “The pair of shoes, which cost five thousand dollars, was hideous.” For restrictive clauses, those “essential to the meaning of the sentence,” we use “that.” Pinker takes the example of a sentence in a documentary on “Imelda Marcos’s vast shoe collection.” In such a case, of course, we would need that bit about the price; hence, “The pair of shoes that cost £5,000 was hideous.”
It’s a reasonable enough distinction, and “one part of the rule,” Pinker says, “is correct.” We would rarely find someone writing “The pair of shoes, that cost £5,000…” after all. It probably looks awkward to our eyes (though I’ve seen it often enough). But there’s simply no good reason, he says, why we can’t use “which” freely, as the Brits already do, to refer to things both essential and non-. “Great writers have been using it for centuries,” Pinker points out, citing whoever (or “whomever”) translated that “render unto Caesar” bit in the King James Bible and Franklin Roosevelt’s “a day which will live in infamy.” QED, I’d say. And anyway, “which” is so much lovelier a word than “that.”
See Pinker’s Guardian piece for his other five anti-rules and free yourself up to write in a more natural, less stilted way. That is, if you already have some mastery of basic English. As Pinker rightly observes, “anyone who has read an inept student paper [um-hm], a bad Google translation, or an interview with George W. Bush can appreciate that standards of usage are desirable in many areas of communication.” How do we know when a rule is useful and when it impedes “clear and graceful prose?” It’s really no mystery, Pinker says. “Look it up.” It sounds like his book might help put things into better perspective than most writing guides, however. You can also hear him discuss his accessible and intuitive writing advice in the KQED interview with Michael Krasny above.
A couple of years back, Marco Tempest, a technoillusionist from Switzerland, retold the life story of inventor Nikola Tesla using the principles of Tanagra theater, a form of theater popular in Europe nearly a century ago. A good description of this forgotten form of theatre is surprisingly hard to come by. Perhaps the best I encountered comes from this academic web site:
Tanagra Theatres existed in many European cities in the years 1910–1920. The name comes from the figures excavated at Tanagra in the 1890s whose name became synonymous with perfect living miniatures, particularly female. The sideshow illusion consisted of a miniature stage where living actors appeared as real but tiny figures, through an arrangement of plain and concave mirrors. Its development as a sideshow attraction came about as a by-product of research into optical instruments which could better sustain the perception of depth. The use of concave mirrors has a long history in magic but for the Tanagra the stronger light of electricity was essential.
In his presentation, Tempest takes the concepts of Tanagra to a whole new level, combining projection mapping and intricate pop-up art. As you watch the show, you might find yourself intrigued as much by the method as by the story itself. If that’s the case, you will want to watch the “behind-the-scenes” video below. Tempest also gave his presentation at TED. You can watch it here.
When Hollywood’s formidable promotional wing discovered it could announce a movie by not just telling you a big star is in it, but that a big star is it, they had a decades-long field day with the idea that continues, tiresomely, to the present moment. Right now, many of the billboards up around Los Angeles insist upon telling me that “Keanu Reaves is John Wick,” but give it a few weeks and they’ll tell us someone else we know is someone else we don’t (unless, of course, we buy a ticket). Conservation International has taken this marketing trope and spun it into a series of shorts featuring “A‑list” actors, the most famous of the famous, playing the earthly entities with which we should, perhaps, have more familiarity than we do. At the top of the post, Kevin Spacey is the rainforest. Just below, Julia Roberts is Mother Nature. At the bottom, Harrison Ford is the ocean.
“I’m most of this planet,” Ford-as-ocean intones with his signature (and increasingly gruff) gruffness. “I shaped it. Every stream, every cloud, and every raindrop — it all comes back to me.” But as Mother Nature, Roberts makes impressive claims of her own: “I’ve been here for over four and a half billion years — 22,500 times longer than you. I don’t really need people, but people need me.” Not to be outdone, Kevin Spacey’s ever-giving rainforest issues a challenge to us all: “Humans, they’re so smart. So smart. Such big brains and opposable thumbs. They know how to make things — amazing things. Now why would they need an old forest like me anymore? Well, they do breathe air, and I make air. Have they thought about that?”
You can watch the entire series of films, entitled “Nature is Speaking,” on a single Youtube playlist. The rest of the lineup includes Edward Norton as the soil, Penelope Cruz as water (o, hablando en español, como Agua), and Robert Redford as, suitably, the redwood. (You can also see clips from behind the scenes featuring Norton and Ford assuming their elemental roles in the recording studio.) They all combine this considerable amount of vocal star power with equally striking footage of the part of the environment from whom we hear, and sometimes of its destruction. They carry one overall message, which Conversation International has unshyly spelled out: “Nature doesn’t need people. People need nature.” Still, it comes off less heavy-handed than most of the environmental messages I remember from the films of my 1990s youth. If, for the next series, they get Reeves on board (speaking of pieces of my 90s youth), can they find a suitably laid-back element to pair him with? For more information on the campaign, please visit the Nature is Speaking site.
“I do the show in character, he’s an idiot, he’s willfully ignorant of what you know and care about, please honestly disabuse me of my ignorance and we’ll have a great time.”
This secret speaks to the heart of comedian and fake-pundit Stephen Colbert’s wildly popular Colbert Report. But how exactly does he manage to pull this rabbit from his hat, night after night grueling night?
The nuts and bolts of Colbert’s working day make for a fascinating inaugural episode of Working, a new Slate podcast hosted by David Plotz. It shares a title with radio personality Studs Terkel’s famous non-fictional examination, but Plotz’s project is more process oriented. Soup-to-nuts-and-bolts, if you will.
Colbert is happy to oblige with a Little Red Hen-like corn metaphor in which alcohol, not bread, is the ultimate goal.
His morning begins with a deep rummage through the headlines—Google News, Reddit, Slate, The Drudge Report, Fox News, Buzzfeed, The Huffington Post… imagine if this stack was made of paper. When does he have the time to google ex-girlfriends?
From pitch meeting through read-aloud and rewrites, the school hours portion of Colbert’s day resembles that of other deadline-driven shows. He’s quick to acknowledge the contributions of a dedicated and like-minded staff, including executive producer Tom Purcell and head writer Opus—as in Bloom County—Moreschi.
As showtime approaches, Colbert swaps his jeans for a Brooks Brothers suit, and leaves the homey, dog-friendly townhouse where the bulk of the writing takes place for the studio next door.
Ideally, he’ll get at least 10 minutes of headspace to become the monster of his own making, liberal America’s favorite willfully ignorant idiot. (Most of liberal America, anyway. My late-mother-in-law refused to believe it was an act, but it is.)
A bit of schtick with the makeup artist serves as a litmus test for audience responsiveness.
When the cameras roll, Colbert sticks close to his prompter, further proof that the character is a construct. Any improvisational impulses are unleashed during one-on-one interactions with the guest. With some 10,000 hours of comedy under his belt, his instincts tend toward the unerring.
At days end, he thanks the audience, the guest and everyone backstage except for one guy who gets a mere wave. The show is then edited at a zip squeal pace, and will hopefully fall into the “yay!” category. (The other choices are “solid” or “wrench to the head.”)
Colbert will only watch the show if there was a problem.
And then? The day begins again.
After peering through this window onto Colbert’s world, we’re stoked for future episodes of Working, when guests as varied as a rock musician, a hospice nurse, and porn star Jessica Drake walk Plotz through a typical day.
In nature, everything is connected — connected in ways you might not expect. The short video above is narrated by George Monbiot, an English writer and environmentalist, who now considers himself a “rewilding campaigner.” The concept of rewilding and how it can save ecosystems in general, and how wolves changed Yellowstone National Park in particular, is something Monbiot explains in greater detail in his 2013 TED Talk below, and in his new book — Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding.
This month, The Institute of Art and Ideas (IAI), an organization committed to fostering “a progressive and vibrant intellectual culture in the UK,” launched IAI Academy — a new online educational platform that features courses in philosophy, science and politics. The initial lineup includes 12 courses covering everything from theoretical physics, the meaning of life, the future of feminism, the often vexed relationship between science and religion, and more.
IAI Academy offers its courses for free. But, like other course providers, they charge a nominal fee (right now about $25) if you would like a Verified Certificate when you’ve successfully completed a course. Here’s the initial lineup:
A Brief Guide to Everything — Web Video — John Ellis, King’s College London, CBE
The Meaning of Life — Web Video — Steve Fuller, University of Warwick
New Adventures in Spacetime — Web Video — Eleanor Knox, King’s College London
Minds, Morality and Agency — Web Video — Mark Rowlands, University of Miami
Nine Myths About Schizophrenia — Web Video — Richard Bentall, University of Liverpool
The History of Fear — Web Video — Frank Furedi, University of Kent
Physics: What We Still Don’t Know — Web Video — David Tong, Cambridge
Science vs. Religion — Web Video — Mark Vernon, Journalist/Philosopher
Sexuality and Power — Web Video — Veronique Mottier, University of Lausanne
The Infinite Quest — Web Video — Peter Cameron, Queen Mary University of London.
End of Equality — Web Video — Beatrix Campbell — Writer/Activist
Rethinking Feminism — Web Video — Finn Mackay — Feminist Activist & Researcher
Ten years in academia gave me a healthy dislike of clichéd jargon, as well as an appreciation for jokes about it. There are a few, like the academic sentence generator and Ph.D. Comics, that capture a bit of what it’s like to go to school and work in higher ed. Corporate drones, of course, have Office Space and Dilbert. But what about the spooks, those nameless, faceless agents who work tirelessly away in the basement of Langley, doing who knows what to whom? Where does the C.I.A. go to laugh at its peculiar brand of hackneyed doublespeak? Not that we were supposed to know this, but perhaps many of them turn to an article called “the Bestiary of Intelligence Writing” in a 1982 copy of internal agency newsletter Studies in Intelligence.
Medium describes this odd piece as a “zoo of fictional fauna,” and like that strange literary form, the medieval European bestiary (often a source of satire and critique), this 17-page article, with footnotes, singles out the most offensive spook buzzwords as though they were cardinal sins—naming 15 members of “the Collection” in all, each one represented by its own Maurice Sendak-like pencil-drawn beast and a description of its habits. The two-headed beast at the top, Multidisciplinary Analysis, is a “hybrid—the fruit of the casual mating of standard forms of Analysis.” Just above, we have Heightened Tensions, “the adult form of Conventional Tensions—Tensions that have acquired stilts by thriving on a rich diet of poverty, malnutrition and especially alienation.” Sounds like rough work, this spy game….
Most of the beasts are cuddly enough, some mischievous, some perhaps deadly. Above, we have Dire Straits and below, Parameters. “The Agency author and artist detailed 15 monsters in all—complete with illustrations,” writes Medium, “Both of their names are redacted in the document. We’ll never know just which CIA agents turned their hand towards snarky political satire.” The document comes to us via a cache of records declassified in a lawsuit filed by former agency employee Jeffry Scudder. We do know that the two anonymous lampoonists were inspired by A Political Bestiary, book by James Kilpatrick, cartoonist Jeff MacNelly, and former senator and presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy. See the full, bone dry article here, and think about the work talk that might drive you to such creative extremes.
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