In 22 lectures, Yale historian Paul Freedman takes you on a 700 year tour of medieval history. Moving from 284‑1000 AD, this free online course covers “the conversion of Europe to Christianity, the fall of the Roman Empire, the rise of Islam and the Arabs, the ‘Dark Ages,’ Charlemagne and the Carolingian renaissance, and the Viking and Hungarian invasions.” And let’s not forget St. Augustine and the “Splendor of Byzantium.”
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The many fans of Ta-Nehisi Coates, longtime Atlantic correspondent and author of books like The Beautiful Struggle and Between the World and Me (not to mention his more recent role as a writer of Black Panther comics), know a thing or two about the trials and tribulations he went through to become one of America’s best-known public intellectuals, but fewer of them know how intense a battle he’s waged, over the past few years, on the side: that of mastering the French language in his 30s and 40s.
“I’m taking an hour a week to try to teach myself French,” Coates wrote on his blog at The Atlantic in the summer of 2011, explaining that his wife “went to Paris five years ago and loved it. She wants me to go back with her, and I want to go. But I refuse to do so until I have a rudimentary understanding of the language. This isn’t about impressing the French — I expect my accent to mocked — it’s about how I interpret the world. Language is a big part of it.” After starting to dig into the Foreign Service Institute’s French materials (available free in our language-learning collection), he crossed out the word week in “an hour a week” to replace it with day, already sensing, no doubt, the unexpected demands this particular language would make on him.
“ ‘Et alors’ is similar to our ‘So what?’ But ‘Et Alors’ doesn’t simply sound different, it feels different, it carries another connotation, another music,” he wrote in an early 2012 follow-up. “I don’t know if that means anything to people who don’t write professionally, but for me it means a ton.” It seems only right, he concluded, “that a writer should explore languages and try to spend time with as many as he or she can. That I should arrive at such an obvious conclusion at this late date is humbling.” And so he pressed steadfastly on, memorizing French vocabulary words and grammatical structures, taking classes, meeting with a tutor, and after receiving his first passport at the age of 37, studying and practicing in real Francophone places like Paris and Switzerland.
Coates stepped up to a higher level of French skill — and a much higher level of French challenge — when he signed up for Middlebury College’s seven-week French immersion program, throwing himself into an environment of much younger and “fiercer” classmates without the possibility of leaning on his native language. When he sat down for the four-minute video interview at the top of the post before shipping out to Middlebury, he later revealed, “there were several moments when I didn’t even understand the question.” No such problems when he sat for another short conversation after the seven weeks, captured in the video just above: “What changed most at Middlebury, for me, was not in how I talked, but how I heard.”
Though Middlebury clearly helped push him forward, Coates doesn’t seem to consider participation in such a program a requirement for even the ambitious French learner. Maintaining the right attitude, however, is non-negotiable: “I expect to suck for awhile. Then I expect to slowly get better. The point is neither mastery, nor fluency. The point is hard study — the repeated application of a principle until the eyes and ears bleed a little.” Grappling with French has taught him, among other life lessons he’s written about, “that it is much better to focus on process, than outcomes. The question isn’t ‘When will I master the subjunctive?’ It’s ‘Did I put in my hour of study today?’ ”
How you feel about your process of study, Coates emphasizes, “it is as important as any objective reality. Hopelessness feeds the fatigue that leads the student to quit. It is not the study of language that is hard, so much as the ‘feeling’ that your present level is who you are and who you will always be. I remember returning from France at the end of the summer of 2013, and being convinced that I had some kind of brain injury which prevented me from hearing French vowel sounds. But the real enemy was not any injury so much as the ‘feeling’ of despair. That is why I ignore all the research about children and their language advantage. I don’t want to hear it. I just don’t care.”
After less than a year of studying French, Coates found, his brain had begun to “hunger for that feeling of stupidity” that comes from less-than-satisfactory comprehension. “There is absolutely nothing in this world like the feeling of sucking at something and then improving at it,” he wrote in a more recent reflection on his ongoing (and now surely lifelong) engagement with French. “Everyone should do it every ten years or so.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
The so-called “Great Vowel Shift” was a very unusual occurrence. During the period between around 1500 to around 1700, the English language “lost the purer vowel sounds of most European languages, as well as the phonetic pairing between long and short vowel sounds,” writes the site The History of English. Such radical linguistic change seems a “sudden and dramatic shift” historically, and “a peculiarly English phenomenon…. contemporary and neighboring languages like French, German and Spanish were entirely unaffected.” Over a period of around 200 years, in other words, English completely morphed from Chaucer’s melodic, nearly incomprehensible Middle English into the sounds we hear in Damian Lewis’s speech as Antony in Julius Caesar, above.
Shakespeare’s English sounded like neither of these, but somewhat like both. English became more distinctive precisely during the time it became more cosmopolitan, philosophical, and, eventually, global.
It was a period of “a large intake of loanwords from the Romance languages of Europe…, which required a different kind of pronunciation”—and of a great flood of Latinate words from scientific, legal, and medical discourse. “Latin loanwords in Old and Middle English are a mere trickle,” writes Charles Barber in The English Language, “but in Early Modern English,” Shakespeare’s Elizabethan English, “the trickle becomes a river, and by 1600 it is a deluge.”
The English Renaissance sits smack in the middle of the Great Vowel Shift, its literary productions reflecting a riotous and thrilling confluence of speech, a wild field of linguistic play and experimentation, novelty, ingenuity, and controversy. The scholars and writers of the time were themselves very aware of these changes. One “Elizabethan headmaster,” notes Barber, “commented in 1582 on the large number of foreign words being borrowed daily by the English language.” (Emphasis mine.)
Shakespeare’s language revels in such borrowing, and coining, of words, while often preserving the pronunciation and the syntax, of earlier forms of English from all over the UK. All other arguments for reading and listening to Shakespeare aside—and they are too numerous—the richness of the language may be the most robust for centuries to come. As long as there is something called English—though a thousand years hence, our version may sound as alien as the language of Beowulf does today—Shakespeare will still represent some of the wittiest, most adventurous expressions of the most fertile and creative moment in the language’s history.
Luckily for those future English speakers, writers, and appreciators, Shakespeare has also been the most widely adapted, recorded, and performed writer in the English language, and there will never be a shortage of his work in any format. Original Pronunciation Shakespeare has only recently left the academy and made it to regular performances on the stage, giving us a taste of just how different the verbal music of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet sounded to their first audiences. But what’s remarkable is how Shakespeare seems to work in any accent and any setting… almost.
As far as American actors go, Brando may have been more up to the task of playing Mark Antony than Charlton Heston was, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have both, and hundreds more besides. I would argue that there’s no such thing as too much Shakespeare in too many different voices. His plays needn’t be the greatest ever written to nonetheless contain some of the greatest speeches ever performed on any stage. That very much includes the speeches in lesser-known tragedies like Coriolanus, which an ensemble cast of Ralph Fiennes, Vanessa Redgrave, Brian Cox, Elan Eshkeri, and Gerard Butler turned into a 21st-century political barnburner of a movie.
The music and dialogue from that 2011 film adaptation open the playlist of Shakespeare’s tragedies, further up, which also includes a performance from Sir John Gielgud in Hamlet and a recorded performance of American composer Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra, a 1966 opera with a libretto by Franco Zeffirelli based exclusively on Shakespeare’s text. This work premiered as “one of the great operatic disasters of all time,” according to one critic who was in its first audience, “at one point the soprano Leontyne Price… found herself trapped inside a pyramid.” The idiosyncratic delivery in these various performances all stress the flexibility of Shakespeare’s language, which can still mesmerize, even under Spinal Tap-like conditions of performance anxiety.
After you’ve worked your way through 18 hours of Shakespeare’s tragedies, listen further up to 19 hours of Comedies, 13 hours of Histories, and, just above, to something we may not have enough of—5 hours of readings of Shakespeare’s poetry, by actors like Gielgud and Sir Anthony Quayle, Richard Burton, Emma Topping, and many more. Another great vowel shift may be coming, along with other world historical changes. These copious recordings preserve for the future the diverse sounds of Late Modern English, speaking the richest literary language of its Early Modern ancestor.
On a seemingly daily basis, we see attacks against the intellectual culture of the academic humanities, which, since the 1960s, have opened up spaces for leftists to develop critical theories of all kinds. Attacks from supposedly liberal professors and centrist op-ed columnists, from well-funded conservative think tanks and white supremacists on college campus tours. All rail against the evils of feminism, post-modernism, and something called “neo-Marxism” with outsized agitation.
For students and professors, the onslaughts are exhausting, and not only because they have very real, often dangerous, consequences, but because they all attack the same straw men (or “straw people”) and refuse to engage with academic thought on its own terms. Rarely, in the exasperating proliferation of cranky, cherry-picked anti-academia op-eds do we encounter people actually reading and grappling with the ideas of their supposed ideological nemeses.
Were non-academic critics to take academic work seriously, they might notice that debates over “political correctness,” “thought policing,” “identity politics,” etc. have been going on for thirty years now, and among left intellectuals themselves. Contrary to what many seem to think, criticism of liberal ideology has not been banned in the academy. It is absolutely the case that the humanities have become increasingly hostile to irresponsible opinions that dehumanize people, like emergency room doctors become hostile to drunk driving. But it does not follow therefore that one cannot disagree with the establishment, as though the University system were still beholden to the Vatican.
Understanding this requires work many people are unwilling to do, either because they’re busy and distracted or, perhaps more often, because they have other, bad faith agendas. Should one decide to survey the philosophical debates on the left, however, an excellent place to start would be Radical Philosophy, which describes itself as a “UK-based journal of socialist and feminist philosophy.” Founded in 1972, in response to “the widely-felt discontent with the sterility of academic philosophy at the time,” the journal was itself an act of protest against the culture of academia.
Radical Philosophy has published essays and interviews with nearly all of the big names in academic philosophy on the left—from Marxists, to post-structuralists, to post-colonialists, to phenomenologists, to critical theorists, to Lacanians, to queer theorists, to radical theologians, to the pragmatist Richard Rorty, who made arguments for national pride and made several critiques of critical theory as an illiberal enterprise. The full range of radical critical theory over the past 45 years appears here, as well as contrarian responses from philosophers on the left.
Rorty was hardly the only one in the journal’s pages to critique certain prominent trends. Sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant launched a 2001 protest against what they called “a strange Newspeak,” or “NewLiberalSpeak” that included words like “globalization,” “governance,” “employability,” “underclass,” “communitarianism,” “multiculturalism” and “their so-called postmodern cousins.” Bourdieu and Wacquant argued that this discourse obscures “the terms ‘capitalism,’ ‘class,’ ‘exploitation,’ ‘domination,’ and ‘inequality,’” as part of a “neoliberal revolution,” that intends to “remake the world by sweeping away the social and economic conquests of a century of social struggles.”
One can also find in the pages of Radical Philosophy philosopher Alain Badiou’s 2005 critique of “democratic materialism,” which he identifies as a “postmodernism” that “recognizes the objective existence of bodies alone. Who would ever speak today, other than to conform to a certain rhetoric? Of the separability of our immortal soul?” Badiou identifies the ideal of maximum tolerance as one that also, paradoxically, “guides us, irresistibly” to war. But he refuses to counter democratic materialism’s maxim that “there are only bodies and languages” with what he calls “its formal opposite… ‘aristocratic idealism.’” Instead, he adds the supplementary phrase, “except that there are truths.”
Badiou’s polemic includes an oblique swipe at Stalinism, a critique Michel Foucault makes in more depth in a 1975 interview, in which he approvingly cites phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty’s “argument against the Communism of the time… that it has destroyed the dialectic of individual and history—and hence the possibility of a humanistic society and individual freedom.” Foucault made a case for this “dialectical relationship” as that “in which the free and open human project consists.” In an interview two years later, he talks of prisons as institutions “no less perfect than school or barracks or hospital” for repressing and transforming individuals.
Foucault’s political philosophy inspired feminist and queer theorist Judith Butler, whose arguments inspired many of today’s gender theorists, and who is deeply concerned with questions of ethics, morality, and social responsibility. Her Adorno Prize Lecture, published in a 2012 issue, took up Theodor Adorno’s challenge of how it is possible to live a good life in bad circumstances (under fascism, for example)—a classical political question that she engages through the work of Orlando Patterson, Hannah Arendt, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Hegel. Her lecture ends with a discussion of the ethical duty to actively resist and protest an intolerable status quo.
If nothing else, these essays and many others should upend facile notions of leftist academic philosophy as dominated by “postmodern” denials of truth, morality, freedom, and Enlightenment thought, as doctrinaire Stalinism, or little more than thought policing through dogmatic political correctness. For every argument in the pages of Radical Philosophy that might confirm certain readers’ biases, there are dozens more that will challenge their assumptions, bearing out Foucault’s observation that “philosophy cannot be an endless scrutiny of its own propositions.”
It took Richard Ridel six months of tinkering in his workshop to create this contraption–a mechanical Turing machine made out of wood. The silent video above shows how the machine works. But if you’re left hanging, wanting to know more, I’d recommend reading Ridel’s fifteen page paper where he carefully documents why he built the wooden Turing machine, and what pieces and steps went into the construction.
If this video prompts you to ask, what exactly is a Turing Machine?, also consider adding this short primer by philosopher Mark Jago to your media diet.
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Part of what makes electronic music so wide-reaching and sonically far-seeing, so to speak, is its diversity of influences—classical composition, avant-garde theory, punk and funk energy, the sounds of factories and city streets worldwide—and its range of innovative instrumentation. But foremost among those instruments, many classic analogue synthesizers of old are now found in virtual environments, where their pots, keys, patch bays, and pitch wheels get simulated on laptops and MIDI controllers. Something is lost—a certain “aura,” as Walter Benjamin might say. A certain tremulous imprecision that hovers around the edges of synthesizers like those designed by Robert Moog.
Moog’s creations, writes David McNamee “ooze character” and are “the most iconic synthesizers of all time. FACT.” For this reason, Moog’s analog creations still hold market share as modern instruments while remaining legacy items for their transformation of entire genres of popular music since the 1960s, even though the engineer-inventor had no musical training himself and no real interest at first in making particularly usable instruments.
“Massive, fragile and impossible to tune,” a function Moog initially dismissed, once the Moog was made portable and liberated from specialized, wonky domains, it became a primary compositional tool and both a lead and rhythm instrument.
The Moog’s fuzzy, wobbly, warm sounds are unmistakable; they can purr and thunder, and the breadth of their capabilities is surprising given their relative simplicity. We’ve told their story here before and followed it up with a ten-hour playlist of Moog and Moog-inspired classics. Today, we bring you the playlist above, “Moog This!” which takes a leftfield approach to the theme, and will catch even serious electronic music fans off guard with its selections of not only obscure new sounds inspired by legends like Giorgio Moroder and Vangelis—the music of Firechild, for example—but also tracks from these legends that sit just to the left of their most famous compositions.
Rather than the usual, brilliantly futuristic Donna Summer dance track “I Feel Love”—the Spotify curator here goes for the similar-sounding, but much more elaborate instrumental “Chase” (top), the only track here from Moroder. Rather than the era-defining “West End Girls”—the Pet Shop Boys’ perfect downtempo 1984 pop song—we get “Men and Maggots,” from their moody 2005 score for Sergei Eisenstein’s perfect silent film, Battleship Potemkin. That’s not to say there aren’t any vocal tracks here, but they are mostly of the abstract, highly effected variety, like those from Boards of Canada and Air.
All in all, “Moog This!” the playlist shows what the synthesizer is capable of outside the context of mainstream pop, while still capturing the qualities that make it an ideal vehicle for accessible, emotional music, a pleasing tension so well harnessed by the analog synth-obsessed Stranger Things soundtrack, which, like most of the tracks here, manages to sound both like the soundtrack of a much cooler past and of very cool future.
If ever the creators of the musical The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee are casting about for sequel-worthy source material, we suggest they look no further than The New Yorker’s video above, in which professional Scrabble players replay their greatest moves.
The bingo—a move in which a player uses all seven tiles on their rack, earning a bonus 50 points—figures prominently.
It seems that top ranked players not only eye their racks for potential bingos, they’re constantly calculating the odds of drawing a next-turn bingo by getting rid of existing tiles on a three or four letter word.
And what words!
The desire to win at all costs leads top seated players to throw down such ignoble words as “barf” and “mayo” in an arena where rarified vocabulary is the norm.
For the record, they’re continuous mounds of earth built near rivers to stop water from the river flooding nearby land….
The pros’ game boards yield a vocabulary lesson that is perhaps more useful in Scrabble (or Banangrams) than in life. Look ‘em up!
aerugo
capeskin
celom
enginous
gox
horal
jupon
kex
mura
oxeye
pya
uredele
varve
zincate
Don’t neglect the two-letter words. They can make a one-point difference between a major win and total and unmitigated defeat.
ag
al
da
ef
mo
od
oe
qi
xi
yo
Careful, though—“ir” is not a word, as Top 40 player Jesse Day discovered when attempting to rack up multiple horizontal and vertical points.
Bear in mind that challenging a word can also bite you in the butt. Busting an opponent’s fake word play costs them a turn. If the word in question turns out to be valid, you sacrifice a turn, as top 100 player, Princeton University’s Director of Health Professions Advising, Kate Fukawa-Connelly, found out in a match against David Gibson, a previous North American champ. Had she let it go, she would’ve bested him by one point.
Appear even more in the know by boning up on a glossary of Scrabble terms, though you’ll have to look far and wide for such deep cuts as youngest North American champion and food truck manager, Conrad Bassett-Bouchard’s “forking the board,” i.e. opening two separate quadrants, thus preventing the opposing player from blocking.
You’ll recall, a few months ago, when Google made it possible for all of your Facebook friends to find their doppelgängers in art history. As so often with that particular company, the fun distraction came as the tip of a research-and-development-intensive iceberg, and they’ve revealed the next layer in the form of three artificial intelligence-driven experiments that allow us to navigate and find connections among huge swaths of visual culture with unprecedented ease.
Google’s new Art Palette, as explained in the video at the top of the post, allows you to search for works of art held in “collections from over 1500 cultural institutions,” not just by artist or movement or theme but by color palette.
You can specify a color set, take a picture with your phone’s camera to use the colors around you, or even go with a random set of five colors to take you to new artistic realms entirely.
Admittedly, scrolling through the hundreds of chromatically similar works of art from all throughout history and across the world can at first feel a little uncanny, like walking into one of those houses whose occupant has shelved their books by color. But a variety of promising uses will immediately come to mind, especially for those professionally involved in the aesthetic fields. Famously color-loving, art-inspired fashion designer Paul Smith, for instance, appears in another promotional video describing how he’d use Art Palette: he’d “start off with the colors that I’ve selected for that season, and then through the app look at those colors and see what gets thrown up.”
In collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art, Google’s Art Recognizer, the second of these experiments, uses machine learning to find particular works of art as they’ve variously appeared over decades and decades of exhibition. “We had recently launched 30,000 installation images online, all the way back to 1929,” says MoMA Digital Media Director Shannon Darrough in the video above. But since “those images didn’t contain any information about the actual works in them,” it presented the opportunity to use machine learning to train a system to recognize the works on display in the images, which, in the words of Google Arts and Culture Lab’s Freya Murray, “turned a repository of images into a searchable archive.”
The formidable photographic holdings of Life magazine, which documented human affairs with characteristically vivid photojournalism for a big chunk of the twentieth century, made for a similarly enticing trove of machine-learnable material. “Life magazine is one of the most iconic publications in history,” says Murray in the video above. “Life Tags is an experiment that organizes Life magazine’s archives into an interactive encyclopedia,” letting you browse by every tag from “Austin-Healey” to “Electronics” to “Livestock” to “Wrestling” and many more besides. Google’s investment in artificial intelligence has made the history of Life searchable. How much longer, one wonders, before it makes the history of life searchable?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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