Franz Kafka’s Unfinished Novel, The Castle, Gets Turned Into an Album by Czech Musicians: Watch a Music Video for the Song, “The Grave”

If, for some unfath­omable rea­son, author Franz Kaf­ka should emerge from his grave to direct a music video, the result would most cer­tain­ly resem­ble the one for “The Grave” by The Kaf­ka Band, above.

The air of futil­i­ty and social fore­bod­ing…

The chilly bro­ken land­scape, ren­dered in black and white…

Biki­nis and bling…

(Kid­ding! Over­coats and hag­gard expres­sions.)

“The Grave” was direct­ed by ani­ma­tor, Noro Hold­er, but the lyrics are cred­it­ed to Kaf­ka, drawn direct­ly from his unfin­ished nov­el, The Cas­tle. As the band’s name might imply, this is no fick­le flir­ta­tion with the author’s sen­si­bil­i­ties.

“The Grave” is actu­al­ly part of a ten-song album inspired by The Cas­tle. (Stream it on Spo­ti­fy below.) As band­mate, author Jaroslav Rudiš, observed:

Kaf­ka is often deemed as a dark author, yet we strive to chal­lenge this cliché. The nov­el pos­sess­es plen­ty of black and absurd humour, which we reflect­ed in some of our com­po­si­tions.

The album led to a col­lab­o­ra­tion with Germany’s The­ater Bre­men on a the­atri­cal adap­ta­tion that fea­tured the music played live.

The moody wood­cut-inspired visu­als seen above come from a graph­ic nov­el adap­ta­tion of The Cas­tle illus­trat­ed by Rudiš’ band­mate, Jaromír 99, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with David Zane Mairowitz, an Amer­i­can play­wright who pre­vi­ous­ly tack­led Kafka’s The Tri­al

At the point where anoth­er group might decide to take a detour into sun­nier territory—a pop romp through the oeu­vre of Milan Kun­dera perhaps—the Kaf­ka Band is dou­bling down on anoth­er copro­duc­tion with The­ater Bre­men, an adap­ta­tion of Kafka’s nov­el Ameri­ka (or The Man Who Dis­ap­peared), slat­ed to open this fall.

The Grave

I’m dream­ing of

Being with you

With­out inter­rup­tion

On earth

There is no space

For our love

Not in the vil­lage

Not any­where else.

Deep in the earth / around us only death / the liv­ing won’t find us.

I’m imag­in­ing a grave

Deep and tight

We hold each oth­er

My face next to yours

Yours next to mine

Nobody will ever see us

On earth there is no space

For our love.

Deep in the earth / around us only death / the liv­ing won’t find us.

Watch the video for “Arrival,” anoth­er track inspired by The Cas­tle, with draw­ings by Jaromír 99 here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Meta­mor­fo­s­is: Franz Kafka’s Best-Known Short Sto­ry Gets Adapt­ed Into a Tim Bur­tonesque Span­ish Short Film

Four Franz Kaf­ka Ani­ma­tions: Enjoy Cre­ative Ani­mat­ed Shorts from Poland, Japan, Rus­sia & Cana­da

Franz Kafka’s Exis­ten­tial Para­ble “Before the Law” Gets Brought to Life in a Strik­ing, Mod­ern Ani­ma­tion

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and the­ater mak­er, soon to be appear­ing in a clown adap­ta­tion of Faust, inspired by the cur­rent admin­is­tra­tion and open­ing in New York City this June. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Discover “The Ghost Club,” the Historic Paranormal Society Whose Members Included Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle & W.B. Yeats

(more…)

All 886 episodes of Mister Roger’s Neighborhood Streaming Online (for a Limited Time)

It’s a beau­ti­ful day in the neigh­bor­hood, kids. On Mon­day, at noon Cal­i­for­nia time, Twitch will start a marathon air­ing of Mis­ter Roger’s Neigh­bor­hood, stream­ing all 886 episodes of the clas­sic children’s TV show. If you have 17 free days, you can watch the marathon from start to fin­ish. Dur­ing this time, Twitch will also be run­ning a fundrais­er for PBS, which faces stiff fund­ing cuts if  “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named” has his way.

Enjoy the epic broad­cast, and don’t miss some clas­sic Mis­ter Rogers scenes in the Relat­eds below.

PBS has more infor­ma­tion on the Twitch-PBS part­ner­ship 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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mis­ter Rogers Turns Kids On to Jazz with Help of a Young Wyn­ton Marsalis and Oth­er Jazz Leg­ends (1986)

Mr. Rogers Goes to Con­gress and Saves PBS: Heart­warm­ing Video from 1969

Mr. Rogers Takes Break­danc­ing Lessons from a 12-Year-Old (1985)

Mr. Rogers Intro­duces Kids to Exper­i­men­tal Elec­tron­ic Music by Bruce Haack & Esther Nel­son (1968)

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Japanese Computer Artist Makes “Digital Mondrians” in 1964: When Giant Mainframe Computers Were First Used to Create Art

In the 21st cen­tu­ry, most of us have tried our hand at mak­ing some kind of dig­i­tal art or anoth­er — even if only touch­ing up cell­phone pho­tos of our­selves — but imag­ine the task of pro­duc­ing it 50 years ago. To make dig­i­tal art before the world had bare­ly heard the term “dig­i­tal” required access to a main­frame com­put­er, those huge­ly expen­sive hulks that filled rooms and print­ed out reams and reams of paper data, and the con­sid­er­able tech­ni­cal know-how to oper­ate it.

But the achieve­ment also, to go by the very ear­ly exam­ple of Hiroshi Kawano, required a back­ground in phi­los­o­phy. A grad­u­ate of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Tokyo major­ing in aes­thet­ics and the phi­los­o­phy of sci­ence before becom­ing a research assis­tant at that school and then a lec­tur­er at the Tokyo Met­ro­pol­i­tan Col­lege of Air-Tech­nol­o­gy, Kawano mar­shaled his knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence to cre­ate these “dig­i­tal Mon­dri­ans,” so described because of their com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed resem­blance to that Dutch painter’s most rig­or­ous­ly angu­lar, solid­ly col­ored work.

Kawano had drawn inspi­ra­tion, accord­ing to a Deutsche Welle arti­cle on his dona­tion of his archives to Ger­many’s Cen­ter for Media Art, from “the writ­ings of the Ger­man philoso­pher Max Bense, who pro­posed (among oth­er things) the idea of mea­sur­ing beau­ty using sci­en­tif­ic rules. At the same time, Kawano heard that sci­en­tists were using com­put­ers to cre­ate music. Putting the two togeth­er, he decid­ed to explore the pos­si­bil­i­ty of using a com­put­er to pro­gram beau­ty.”

Doing so required “writ­ing pro­grams in com­plex com­put­er lan­guages, then labo­ri­ous­ly punch­ing these pro­grams into hun­dreds of cards before feed­ing them into the machine.” And “while the design of his works pro­duced dur­ing the 1960s might look sim­ple — they’re not. They are the result of com­plex math­e­mat­i­cal algo­rithms pro­grammed so that, although Kawano sets the rules for how the pic­ture could look, he can’t deter­mine exact­ly what will appear on the print­er.”

Just before Kawano passed away in 2012, the ZKM (or Cen­ter for Art and Media Karl­sruhe), cel­e­brat­ed his pio­neer­ing dig­i­tal art with the exhi­bi­tion “The Philoso­pher at the Com­put­er,” some of which you can see in this Ger­man-lan­guage video clip. “The ret­ro­spec­tive empha­sizes Kawano’s spe­cial role in the cir­cle of pio­neers in ‘com­put­er art,’ ” says its intro­duc­tion. “He was nei­ther artist, who dis­cov­ered the com­put­er as a new pro­duc­tion medi­um and theme, nor engi­neer who came to art via the new machine, but a philoso­pher, who left his desk for the com­put­er cen­ter to exper­i­ment with the­o­ret­i­cal mod­els.”

Can com­put­ers cre­ate art? Can they even be used to cre­ate art? These ques­tions now have prac­ti­cal­ly obvi­ous answers in the affir­ma­tive, but back in 1964 when Kawano pro­duced the first of these pieces, work­ing through tri­al and error with the advice of the curi­ous staff of his uni­ver­si­ty’s com­put­er cen­ter, the ques­tions must have sound­ed impos­si­bly philo­soph­i­cal. Today, writes Over­head Com­part­men­t’s Clau­dio Rivera, Kawano’s dig­i­tal Mon­dri­ans “sug­gest them­selves as an odd­ly ephemer­al tran­si­tion in the nexus of tech­nol­o­gy and art. The famil­iar col­ors and forms are flash-frozen in crys­talline pix­e­la­tion, almost as if seized up in the final, over­heat­ed throes of a sud­den­ly-too-old com­put­er.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Andy Warhol’s Lost Com­put­er Art Found on 30-Year-Old Flop­py Disks

Watch the Dutch Paint “the Largest Mon­dri­an Paint­ing in the World”

Arti­fi­cial Neur­al Net­work Reveals What It Would Look Like to Watch Bob Ross’ The Joy of Paint­ing on LSD

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Sigmund Freud, Father of Psychoanalysis, Introduced in a Monty Python-Style Animation

Pity the hedge­hog. The freez­ing tem­per­a­tures of win­ter com­pel them to cozy up to oth­ers of its kind, but the prick­ly spines cov­er­ing their bod­ies pre­vent them from sus­tain­ing the easy, ongo­ing inti­ma­cy they so crave.

It’s a hell of a metaphor for human rela­tion­ships, com­pli­ments of 19th-cen­tu­ry philoso­pher Arthur Schopen­hauer. It cer­tain­ly spoke to Sig­mund Freud, who devot­ed his life try­ing to fig­ure out why so many of us resort to pet­ty behav­iors, spurn­ing those we love, and sab­o­tag­ing our­selves at every turn.

Pop­u­lar rep­re­sen­ta­tions would have us believe that the father of psy­cho­analy­sis was a detached sort of know-it-all, emo­tion­al­ly supe­ri­or to the bas­ket cas­es snivel­ing on his couch. Not so. As he not­ed in 1897:

I have been through some kind of neu­rot­ic expe­ri­ence, curi­ous states… twi­light thoughts, veiled doubts… The chief patient I am pre­oc­cu­pied with is myself… my lit­tle hys­te­ria… the analy­sis is more dif­fi­cult than any oth­er. Some­thing from the deep­est depths of my own neu­ro­sis sets itself against any advance in under­stand­ing neu­roses…

We feel ya’, doc, and so does The School of Life, the Lon­don-based orga­ni­za­tion for devel­op­ing emo­tion­al intel­li­gence, co-found­ed by philo­soph­i­cal essay­ist, Alain de Bot­ton:

… con­sult­ing a psy­chother­a­pist should be as acces­si­ble and as nor­mal as devel­op­ing your career, get­ting help for a phys­i­cal prob­lem, or going to the gym to get healthy. Just as we take care of our bod­ies and phys­i­cal health, a vital ele­ment of self-care is devot­ing focused time and ener­gy to explor­ing and under­stand­ing our thoughts and feel­ings.

The school puts your mon­ey where its mouth is by retain­ing a ros­ter of licensed psy­chother­a­pists who can be booked for in-per­son or Skype ses­sions.

It’s not for every­one. There are those who are deter­mined to pur­sue the path to con­tent­ment and self-knowl­edge solo, imper­vi­ous to Freud’s belief that “No one who dis­dains the key will ever be able to unlock the door.”

The ther­a­py-averse can still learn some­thing from the video above. Nar­ra­tor de Bot­ton charms his way through an eas­i­ly digest­ed overview of Freud’s per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al life, and the result­ing tenets of psy­cho­analy­sis.

And film­mak­er Mad Adam ensures that this brief trip through the infant phases—oral, anal, phallic—will be a jol­ly one, replete with droll, most­ly vin­tage images.

Release more mon­sters of the id with the School of Life’s psy­chother­a­py playlist.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

20,000 Let­ters, Man­u­scripts & Arti­facts From Sig­mund Freud Get Dig­i­tized and Made Avail­able Online

Down­load Sig­mund Freud’s Great Works as Free eBooks & Free Audio Books: A Dig­i­tal Cel­e­bra­tion on His 160th Birth­day

What is Love? BBC Phi­los­o­phy Ani­ma­tions Fea­ture Sartre, Freud, Aristo­phanes, Dawkins & More

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

How Baking, Cooking & Other Daily Activities Help Promote Happiness and Alleviate Depression and Anxiety

Image by Beth MacKen­zie, via Flickr Com­mons

Most healthy peo­ple prac­tice at least some form of what we call these days “self-care,” whether it be yoga, med­i­ta­tion, run­ning, writ­ing, art, music, ther­a­py, col­or­ing books, or what-have-you. And if you’re func­tion­ing tol­er­a­bly well in the mad­ness of our times, you’re prob­a­bly dip­ping reg­u­lar­ly into the well of at least one restora­tive dis­ci­pline, in addi­tion to what­ev­er larg­er beliefs you may hold.

But per­haps you feel at loose ends—unable to find the time or mon­ey for yoga class­es or paint­ing, feel­ing too rest­less to sit motion­less for half an hour or more a day.… The activ­i­ties that sus­tain our psy­ches should not feel unat­tain­able. One need not be a yogi, Zen monk, marathon­er, or Impres­sion­ist to find reg­u­lar ful­fil­ment in life. Per­haps reg­u­lar, ordi­nary activ­i­ties have the pow­er to make us just as hap­py.

Recent research sug­gests that tasks such as “knit­ting, cro­chet­ing and jam-mak­ing” can “work won­ders for well­be­ing,” writes Tom Ough at The Tele­graph, as can oth­er cre­ative prac­tices like “cook­ing, bak­ing, per­form­ing music, paint­ing, draw­ing, sketch­ing, dig­i­tal design and cre­ative writ­ing.” All may have pro­found effects on emo­tion­al health. This list might expand indef­i­nite­ly to include any hands-on activ­i­ty with mea­sur­able results, from wood­work­ing to bee­keep­ing.

A 2016 study of 658 stu­dents at New Zealand’s Ota­go Uni­ver­si­ty found that engag­ing in small cre­ative pur­suits on a dai­ly basis pro­duces enthu­si­asm and feel­ings of “flourishing”—“a men­tal health term describ­ing hap­pi­ness and mean­ing.” The results of, say, mak­ing a loaf of bread or a scarf, don’t sim­ply ben­e­fit us in the moment, but car­ry over into the future. As the study’s lead author Tam­lin Con­nor notes, “engag­ing in cre­ative behav­iour leads to increas­es in well-being the next day, and this increased well-being is like­ly to facil­i­tate cre­ative activ­i­ty on the same day.”

The more we bake, the more we’ll want to bake, the hap­pi­er we’ll feel.

Does focus­ing our atten­tion on small, achiev­able dai­ly tasks lead to the kind of meta­phys­i­cal ful­fil­ment most peo­ple seem to crave—what Vik­tor Fran­kl called “man’s search for mean­ing”? Not nec­es­sar­i­ly, no. “Recent research sug­gests,” notes Daisy Gre­w­al at Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can, “that while hap­pi­ness and a sense of mean­ing often over­lap, they also diverge in impor­tant and sur­pris­ing ways.” Fran­kl may not be wrong about the need for mean­ing, but even he admit­ted that seek­ing it out is not iden­ti­cal to the pur­suit of hap­pi­ness.

In a 2013 study pub­lished in The Jour­nal of Pos­i­tive Psy­chol­o­gy, Roy Baumeis­ter, Kath­leen Vohs, Jen­nifer Aak­er, and Emi­ly Garbin­sky found that hap­pi­ness, “flour­ish­ing,” or emo­tion­al well-being cor­re­late strong­ly with “sat­is­fy­ing one’s needs and wants” as well as with “being a giv­er rather than a tak­er.” Phi­los­o­phy, pol­i­tics, reli­gion, and art may seek truth or coher­ence, but while “con­cerns with per­son­al iden­ti­ty and express­ing the self con­tributed to mean­ing,” they have lit­tle last­ing effect on hap­pi­ness, as many a philoso­pher, priest, or poet may tell you. On the oth­er hand, while hav­ing com­fort­able eco­nom­ic means does mea­sur­ably improve hap­pi­ness, it does not con­tribute sig­nif­i­cant­ly to a sense of larg­er pur­pose (that which, Fran­kl argued stren­u­ous­ly, can save our lives in times of cri­sis).

Baumeis­ter and his col­leagues obtained their find­ings by sur­vey­ing around 400 Amer­i­can adults over a peri­od of three weeks, dur­ing which time the par­tic­i­pants mon­i­tored a vari­ety of dai­ly activ­i­ties. In one read­ing of the Ota­go Uni­ver­si­ty study, Daisy Mea­ger at Vice focus­es spe­cial­ly on bak­ing as a means to ward off a “shit­ty mood.” It may be a mat­ter of taste—some may pre­fer mak­ing sauces to cakes. The effects are the same, “a com­mon cure,” writes Dan­ny Lewis at Smith­son­ian, “for stress or feel­ing down.”

Mea­ger points to work done by Julie Ohana, a “culi­nary ther­a­pist” who uses the kitchen to help patients com­bat “depres­sion, anx­i­ety, and oth­er men­tal health issues.” Vice’s Jack­son Con­nor describes his per­son­al expe­ri­ence of how cook­ing “alle­vi­ates symp­toms of stress and anx­i­ety almost imme­di­ate­ly,” as well as over time. And no less an author­i­ty than food the­o­rist Michael Pol­lan makes the per­sua­sive case for “how cook­ing can change your life” in the short ani­mat­ed video below (see his full talk at the RSA here).

Fur­ther argu­ing, how­ev­er, for bak­ing as a spe­cial form of “flour­ish­ing,” Julie Thom­son at Huff­Po describes the act as “a pro­duc­tive form of self-expres­sion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion” and con­sults with experts like Ohana and Don­na Pin­cus, asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of psy­cho­log­i­cal and brain sci­ences at Boston Uni­ver­si­ty, who told Thom­son, “Bak­ing has the ben­e­fit of allow­ing peo­ple cre­ative expres­sion.” Peo­ple who may not be nat­ur­al artists, writ­ers, or musi­cians. Yet bak­ing is also a kind of prob­lem-solv­ing as well as a cre­ative act, and “actu­al­ly requires a lot of full atten­tion.”

You have to mea­sure, focus phys­i­cal­ly on rolling out dough. If you’re focus­ing on smell and taste, on being present with what you’re cre­at­ing, that act of mind­ful­ness in that present moment can also have a result in stress reduc­tion.

The ref­er­ence to mind­ful­ness is apt. (Go ahead and read about a course on “Brea­d­i­ta­tion,” make fun of it, then try it at home.) I know not a few peo­ple who swear they can­not med­i­tate to save their lives, but who will hap­pi­ly spend a cou­ple hours on a Sat­ur­day evening bak­ing brioche or plates of cook­ies. But there’s more to it than the med­i­ta­tive absorp­tion that comes from mind­ful activ­i­ty. Bak­ing, says Pincus—and cook­ing in general—is a form of altru­ism. “The nice thing about bak­ing,” she ways, “is that you have such a tan­gi­ble reward at the end and that can feel very ben­e­fi­cial to oth­ers.”

So the research sug­gests that—whatever activ­i­ties one grav­i­tates toward—finding hap­pi­ness on a dai­ly basis involves more than using Pin­ter­est boards and mag­a­zines to craft a cozy, styl­ish new life. Though any sus­tained cre­ative activ­i­ty may do the trick, we approach clos­er to last­ing hap­pi­ness as well as greater fulfillment—to meaning—when we direct activ­i­ty to a “con­nec­tion with oth­er peo­ple” through gen­eros­i­ty.

via Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Michael Pol­lan Explains How Cook­ing Can Change Your Life; Rec­om­mends Cook­ing Books, Videos & Recipes

53 New York Times Videos Teach Essen­tial Cook­ing Tech­niques: From Poach­ing Eggs to Shuck­ing Oys­ters

How to Get Start­ed with Yoga: Free Yoga Lessons on YouTube

Stream 18 Hours of Free Guid­ed Med­i­ta­tions

Free Col­or­ing Books from World-Class Libraries & Muse­ums: The Met, New York Pub­lic Library, Smith­son­ian & More

Holo­caust Sur­vivor Vik­tor Fran­kl Explains Why If We Have True Mean­ing in Our Lives, We Can Make It Through the Dark­est of Times

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

A Free Course on Machine Learning & Data Science from Caltech

Right now, Machine Learn­ing and Data Sci­ence are two hot top­ics, the sub­ject of many cours­es being offered at uni­ver­si­ties today. Above, you can watch a playlist of 18 lec­tures from a course called Learn­ing From Data: A Machine Learn­ing Course, taught by Cal­tech’s Feyn­man Prize-win­ning pro­fes­sor Yas­er Abu-Mostafa. The course is sum­ma­rized as fol­lows:

This is an intro­duc­to­ry course in machine learn­ing (ML) that cov­ers the basic the­o­ry, algo­rithms, and appli­ca­tions. ML is a key tech­nol­o­gy in Big Data, and in many finan­cial, med­ical, com­mer­cial, and sci­en­tif­ic appli­ca­tions. It enables com­pu­ta­tion­al sys­tems to adap­tive­ly improve their per­for­mance with expe­ri­ence accu­mu­lat­ed from the observed data. ML has become one of the hottest fields of study today, tak­en up by under­grad­u­ate and grad­u­ate stu­dents from 15 dif­fer­ent majors at Cal­tech. This course bal­ances the­o­ry and prac­tice, and cov­ers the math­e­mat­i­cal as well as the heuris­tic aspects. The lec­tures fol­low each oth­er in a sto­ry-like fash­ion.

A real Cal­tech course (it’s not watered down at all), the course assumes a famil­iar­i­ty with basic prob­a­bil­i­ty, matri­ces, and cal­cu­lus.

Start your future with a Data Science Certificate.

The lec­tures can be found on YouTubeiTunes U and this Cal­tech web­site, which hosts slides and oth­er course mate­ri­als. The pro­fes­sor wrote the course text­book, also called Learn­ing from Data.

Learn­ing From Data will be per­ma­nent­ly added to our list of Free Online Com­put­er Sci­ence Cours­es, part of our ever-grow­ing col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

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:

Down­load 243 Free eBooks on Design, Data, Soft­ware, Web Devel­op­ment & Busi­ness from O’Reilly Media

The Pio­neer­ing Physics TV Show, The Mechan­i­cal Uni­verse, Is Now on YouTube: 52 Com­plete Episodes from Cal­tech

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

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The History of the World in 20 Odd Minutes

Last year, we flagged Bill Wurtz’s “His­to­ry of Japan,” an idio­syn­crat­ic video that cov­ered 40,000 years of Japan­ese his­to­ry in 9 minutes–everything from the rise of tech­nol­o­gy and reli­gion, to the influ­ence of Chi­na on Japan’s lan­guage and brand of bud­dhism, the emer­gence of the samu­rai, the country’s vexed rela­tion­ship with the West, and the bomb­ing of Nagasa­ki and Hiroshi­ma. Although quan­ti­ty isn’t every­thing, the video clocked more than 25 mil­lion views on YouTube–pretty impres­sive con­sid­er­ing that Wurtz cre­at­ed the video as “a pro­to­type to see if I could do a long video in the first place.”

Now comes his new, more expan­sive video–His­to­ry of the World in 20 min­utes. Released on Wednes­day, the video has already sur­passed 4.5 mil­lions views (sure­ly more by the time you read this), and it may teach you a thing … or two … about world his­to­ry. Have fun with it. And if you’re look­ing for meati­er media that cov­ers the big sweep of his­to­ry, check out the items in the Relat­eds below.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take Big His­to­ry: A Free Short Course on 13.8 Bil­lion Years of His­to­ry, Fund­ed by Bill Gates

The His­to­ry of the World in 46 Lec­tures From Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty

Free Online His­to­ry Cours­es

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