After a long hiatus, the RSA (The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) has returned with another one of the whiteboard animated-lectures they pioneered five years ago.
The animated reboot (above) brings to life the thoughts of another Stanford psychology professor, Carol S. Dweck. The author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success(a book that appeared on Bill Gates’s Best of 2015 list), Dweck has looked closely at how our beliefs/mindsets strongly influence the paths we take in life. And, in this clip, she talks about how well-meaning parents, despite their best intentions, might be creating the wrong mindsets in their kids, paving the way for problems down the road. You can watch the complete, unanimated lecture here.
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Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, the most prominent public defender of science education and funding, frequently comes in for some good-natured ribbing for his genial pedantry, ascension to Carl Sagan’s unofficial spokesmanship, and downgrading of the beloved Pluto from planet status. But he takes it all in stride. As another science communicator, Phil Plate the “Bad Astronomer,” has written, “The man is brilliant, charming, a pillar of science education, and a glutton for punishment. But I think he secretly revels in it.” If you follow Tyson’s Twitter account and watch him engage with cranks, or if you’ve seen him in any of the hundreds of public debates and panels he attends, it seems he more than revels in it; he’s totally in his element, so to speak, publicly modeling the mix of confidence, humility, and curiosity that drives science forward.
In the video above, Tyson dares to try and fill the shoes of another great communicator—and no, I don’t mean Ronald Reagan, but the president whose most famous speech Charles Sumner called “a monumental act.” And though Abraham Lincoln was not nearly as comfortable in front of an audience as Tyson is, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address set the bar for how to get a point across with the maximum amount of eloquence and minimum of redundancy and rambling. Can Tyson deliver the goods like Lincoln did with only 272 words to work with? Is the attempt to “reply” to the “Gettysburg Address” an act of hubris or the ultimate tribute? Decide for yourself as you listen to Tyson’s April, 2015 acceptance speech at the National Academy of Science for the Public Welfare Medal, the Academy’s “most prestigious award.”
Tyson’s speech has been enhanced with a dramatic animation and sound effects for a technological impact Lincoln never could have achieved, though by most accounts he didn’t need it. Not a solemn occasion like Gettysburg, the awards ceremony nonetheless called for at least a little pomp, as well as some history. Tyson points out that “during the bloody year of his Gettysburg Address, President Lincoln chartered the National Academy of Sciences.” For more of that story, see the short video above, where you’ll learn, among other things, that Lincoln was the first and only American president to hold a patent on a scientific invention.
Of the rare and extraordinary times in U.S. history when the U.S. government actively funded and promoted the arts on a national scale, two periods in particular stand out. There is the CIA’s role in channeling funds to avant-garde artists after the Second World War as part of the cultural front of the Cold War—a boon to painters, writers, and musicians, both witting and unwitting, and a strange way in which the intelligence community used the anti-communist left to head off what it saw as more dangerous and subversive trends. Most of the highly agenda-driven federal arts funding during the Cold War proceeded in secret until decades later, when long-sealed documents were declassified and agents began to tell their stories of the period.
Of a much less covertly political nature was the first major federal investment in the arts, begun under Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and championed in large part by his wife, Eleanor. Under the 1935-established Works Progress Administration (WPA)—which created thousands of jobs through large-scale public infrastructure projects—the Federal Project Number One took shape, an initiative, write Don Adams and Arlene Goldbard, that “marked the U.S. government’s first big, direct investment in cultural development.” The project’s goals “were clearly stated and democratic; they supported activities not already subsidized by private sector patrons… and they emphasized the interrelatedness of culture with all aspects of life, not the separateness of a rarefied art world.”
Thousands more whose names have gone unrecorded were able to fund community theater productions, literary lectures, art classes and many other works of cultural enrichment that kept people in the arts working, engaged whole communities, and gave ordinary Americans opportunities to participate in the arts and to find representation where they otherwise would be overlooked or ignored. Federal One not only “put legions of unemployed artists back to work,” writes George Washington University’s Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project, “but their creations would invariably entertain and enrich the larger population.”
“If FDR was only lukewarm about Federal One,” GWU points out, “his wife more than made up for it with her enthusiasm. Eleanor Roosevelt felt strongly that American society had not done enough to support the arts, and she viewed Federal One as a powerful tool with which to infuse art and culture into the daily lives of Americans.”
Now, thanks to the Library of Congress, we can see what that infusion of culture looked like in colorful poster form. Of the 2,000 WPA arts posters known to exist, the LoC has digitized over 900 produced between 1936 and 1943, “designed to publicize exhibits, community activities, theatrical productions, and health and education al programs in seventeen states and the District of Columbia.”
These posters, added to the Library’s holdings in the ‘40s, show us a nation that looked very different from the one we live in today—one in which the arts and culture thrived at a local and regional level and were not simply the preserves of celebrities, private wealth, and major corporations. Perhaps revisiting this past can give us a model to strive for in a more democratic, equitable future that values the arts as Eleanor Roosevelt and the WPA administrators did. Click here to browse the complete collection of WPA arts posters and to download digital images as JPEG or TIFF files.
Still, it’s hard to resist the preternaturally mature 11-year-old Björk reading the nativity story in her native Icelandic, backed by unsmiling older kids from the Children’s Music School in Reykjavík.
Particularly since I myself do not speak Icelandic.
It would also appear that little Björk, the fiercely self-reliant latchkey kid of a Bohemian single mother, was far and away the most charismatic kid enrolled in the Barnamúsikskóli.
(Less than a year later her self-titled first album sold 7000 copies in Iceland—a modest amount compared to Adele’s debut, maybe, but c’mon, the kid was 11! And Iceland’s population at the time was a couple hundred thousand and change.)
As to the above performance’s religious slant, it wasn’t a reflection of her personal beliefs. As she told the UK music webzine Drowned in Sound in 2011:
…nature is my religion, in a way… I think everybody has their own private religion. I guess what bothers me is when millions have the same one. It just can’t be true. It’s just…what?
Still, it probably wasn’t too controversial that the programmers elected to cleave to the reason in the season. Icelandic church attendance may be low-key, but the overwhelming majority of its citizens identify as Lutheran, or some other Christian denomination.
(They also believe in elves and 13 formerly fearsome Yule Lads, descendants of the ogres Grýla and Leppalúði. By the time Björk appeared on earth, they had long since evolved, through a combination of foreign influence and public decree, into the kinder, gentler, not quite Santa-esque version, addressing the studio audience at the top of the act.)
Cartoonist turned educator Lynda Barry is again permitting the world at large to freely audit one of her fascinating University of Wisconsin-Madison classes via her Tumblr. (To get to the start of the class, click here and then scroll down the page until you reach the syllabus, then start working your way backwards.)
As in previous classes, the syllabus, above, spells out a highly specialized set of required supplies, including a number of items rarely called for at the college level.
It’s become a time honored tradition for Barry’s students to adopt new names by which to refer to each other in-class, something they’ll enjoy hearing spoken aloud. For “Making Comics,” Barry is flying under the handle Professor SETI (as in “search for extraterrestrial intelligence”), telling the class that “images are the ETI in SETI.”
The students have responded with the following handles: Chef Boyardee, Ginger, Lois Lane, Rosie the Riveter, Regina Phalange, Arabella, Snoopy, Skeeter, Tigger, Arya Stark, Nala, Nostalgia, Akira, Lapus Lazuli, The Buffalo,Mr. November, The Short Giraffe, Nicki Minaj, Neko, Vincent Brooks, Regular Sized Rudy, and Zef.
(Sounds like a rough and ready crew. What name would you choose, and why?)
As usual, Barry draws inspiration from the dizzying bounty of images available on the net, bombarding her pupils with findings such as the lobed teeth of the crab-eater seal, above.
What to do with all of these images? Draw them, of course! As Barry tells her students:
Drawing is a language. It’s hard to understand what that really means until you’ve ‘spoken’ and ‘listened’ to it enough in a reliable regular way like the reliable regular way we will have together this semester.
That’s an important definition for those lacking confidence in their drawing abilities to keep in mind. Barry may revere the inky blacks of comics legend Jaime Hernandez, but she’s also a devotee of the wild, unbridled line that may be a beginner’s truest expression. (Stick figures, however, “don’t cut it.”) To her way of thinking, everyone is capable of communicating fluently in visual language. The current crop of student work reveals a range of training and natural talent, but all are worthy when viewed through Barry’s lens.
The teacher’s philosophy is the binding element here, but don’t fret if you are unable to take the class in person:
We rarely speak directly about the work we do in our class though we look at it together. We stare at it and sometimes it makes us laugh or we silently point out some part of it to the classmate beside us. To be able to speak this unspoken language we need to practice seeing (hearing) the way it talks.
That earlier-alluded-to rigor is no joke. Daily diary comics, 3 minute self portraits on index cards, pages folded to yield 16 frames in need of filling, and found images copied while listening to prescribed music, lectures, and readingsare a constant, non-negotiable expectation of all participants. Her methodology may sound goose‑y but it’s far from loose‑y.
In other words, if you want to play along, prepare to set aside a large chunk of time to complete her weekly assignments with the vigor demanded of non-virtual students.
Those who aren’t able to commit to going the distance at this time can reconstruct the class later. Barry leaves both the assignments and examples of student work on her Tumblr for perpetuity. (You can see an example here.) For now, try completing the 20 minute exercise using the assigned image above, or by choosing from one of her “extra credit” images, below:
Set timer for three minutes and begin this drawing using a yellow color pencil. Try to draw as much of the drawing as you can in three minutes. You can draw fast, and in a messy way, The important thing is to get as much covered as you can in three minutes. You can color things in if you like. Look for the darkest areas of the photo and color those in.
Set a timer for another three minutes and using your non-dominant hand, draw with orange or color pencil to draw the entire drawing again, drawing right on top of the first drawing layer. The lines don’t have to match or be right on top of each other, you can change your mind as you add this layer. You can move a bit to the right rather than try to draw directly onto the first set of lines.
Set a timer for another 3 minutes and use a red pencil and draw it again, using you dominant hand, adding another layer to the drawing. Again, you don’t have to follow your original lines. Just draw on top of them.
Set a timer for another 3 minutes and use a dark green pencil to draw the entire drawing one more time on top of all the others.
Set a timer for 8 minutes and use a dark blue pencil to draw it one more time.
Spend the last 8 minutes inking the image in with your uniball pen. Remember that solid black is the very last thing you’d do given your time limit. You want to make sure to draw all the parts of the picture first.
John Cleese, you say, a spokesman for the American Philosophical Association? Why would such a serious organization, whose stated mission is to foster the “broader presence of philosophy in public life,” choose a British comedian famous for such characters as the overbearing Basil Fawlty and ridiculous Minister of Silly Walks as one of their public faces?
They chose him, I imagine, because in his various roles—as a onetime prep school teacher and student of law at Cambridge, as a comedy writer and Monty Python star, and as a post-Python comedian, author, public speaker, and visiting professor at Cornell—Cleese has done more than his part to spread philosophy in public life. Monty Python, you’ll remember, aired a number of absurd philosophy sketches, notable for being as smart as they are funny.
Given these credentials, and his ability to apply his intelligence, wit, and comic timing to subjects not often seen as particularly exciting by the general public, Cleese seems like the perfect person for the job, even if he isn’t an American philosopher. The APA, founded in 1900, has recently hosted conferences on religious tolerance and “Cultivating Citizenship.” In 2000, as part of its centennial celebration, the organization had Cleese record 22 very short “Public Service Announcements” to introduce novices to the important work of philosophy. These range from the very general “What Philosophers Do” at the top of the post to the influence of philosophy on social and political reformers like Martin Luther King, Jr., Jane Addams, and Simone de Beauvoir (above), showing philosophy’s “bearing on the real world.”
In this PSA, Cleese makes the controversial claim that “the 21st century may belong far more to philosophy than to psychology or even traditional religion.” “What a strange thought,” he goes on, then explains that philosophy “works against confusion”—certainly a hallmark of our age. There’s not much here to argue with—Cleese isn’t formulating a position, but giving his listeners provocative little nuts to crack on their own, should they find his PSAs intriguing enough to draw them into further study. They might as well begin where most of us do, with Socrates, whom Cleese introduces below.
As a lover of fantasy and science fiction, but by no means a know-it-all fanboy, I know what it’s like to come to a fictional universe late. It can seem like everyone else has already read the canon, seen the movies, and memorized the genealogies, origin stories, magical arcana, number of ancient blood feuds, etc. For example, I grew up steeped in Star Trek but never watched Dr. Who. Now that British sci-fi show is seemingly everywhere, and I find myself intrigued. But who has the time to catch up on several decades of missed episodes? Some people may have felt similarly in the last few years aboutThe Lord of the Rings, what with the number of J.R.R. Tolkien adaptations besieging theaters. If you haven’t read any of those books, Middle Earth—for all its air of medieval legend and Norse myth—can be a very confusing place.
Thanks to Peter Jackson’s films, for better or worse, Tolkien’s books have even more cultural currency than they did in the 70s, when Led Zeppelin mined them for lyrical inspiration, and “Frodo lives” graffiti appeared on overpasses everywhere.
This brings us to the videos we feature here. Presented in a rapid fire style like that of motormouth YA novelist and video educator John Green, “The Lord of the Rings Mythology Explained” is exactly that–two very quick tours, with illustrations, through the complex mythological world of Middle Earth, the setting of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Hobbit, and other books you’ve maybe never heard of. These videos were made before the final installment of Jackson’s interminable Hobbit trilogy, but they cover most major developments before and after the events in short book on which he based those films.
I’ll say this for the effort—Tolkien’s world is one I thought I knew, but I didn’t know it nearly as well as I thought. Like most people, frankly, I haven’t read the sourcebook of so much of that world’s genesis, The Silmarillion, which gets a survey in the first video at the top of the post. I’m much more familiar, and you may be as well—through books or films—with the mythologies of The Lord of the Rings trilogy proper, covered in the video above. If these two thorough explainers don’t satisfy your curiosity, you can likely have further questions answered at one of the videos’ sources, Ask Middle Earth, a site that solicits “any question about Middle Earth.” Another source, the work of comparative mythologist Verlyn Flieger, who specializes in Tolkien, also promises to be highly illuminating.
Last year, a Slate essay called “Against YA” by Ruth Graham irked thousands of readers who took offense at her argument that although grown-ups “brandish their copies of teen novels with pride…. [a]dults should feel embarrassed about reading literature written for children.” Whether we label her article an instance of shaming, trolling, or just the expression of a not-especially consequential, “fuddy-duddy opinion,” what it also served to highlight—as so many other thoughtful and not-so-thoughtful online essays have done—is the huge sales numbers of so-called YA, a literary boom that shows no signs of slowing. Young adult fiction, along with children’s books in general, saw double digit growth in 2014, a phenomenon in part driven by those supposedly self-infantilizing adults Graham faults.
The grown-ups reading teen books do so, Graham writes, because “today’s YA, we are constantly reminded, is worldly and adult-worthy.” Maybe, maybe not, but there is another question to ask here as well, wholly apart from whether the age 30–44 cohort who account for 28 percent of YA sales “should” be buying and reading YA books. And that question is: should young adults read Young Adult fiction? And what counts as Young Adult fiction anyway? A 2012 NPR list of the “100 Best-Ever Teen Novels” includes the expected Harry Potter and Hunger Games series (at numbers one and two, respectively), as well as more “literary,” but still obvious, choices like John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars and S.E. Hinton’s classic The Outsiders.
It also includes Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Frank Herbert’s Dune, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series, and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. It what sense do all of these very different kinds of books—some very complex and challenging, some very much less so—qualify as “teen novels”? Perhaps some of the fuzziness about quality and appropriateness comes from the fact that many “Top-whatever” lists like NPR’s are compiled by readers, of all ages. And enjoyment, not edification, usually tops a general readership’s list of criterion for “top”-ness. However, what would such a list look like if strictly compiled by educators?
You can find out in another top 100 list: the 100 Fiction Books All Children Should Read Before Leaving Secondary School – According to 500 English Teachers (created at the request of Britain’s National Association for the Teaching of English and TES magazine). There’s a good bit of crossover with the reader-chosen NPR list; the Harry Potter books come in at sixth place. Both lists feature classics like Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. But the teacher-chosen list also includes more “adult” writers like Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, and Toni Morrison. One teacher quoted in an Express article describes his own criteria: “It’s always a balancing act in the books that teachers select. Do you go for something that students will enjoy and lap up and read, or do you go for something that will help them cut their teeth?”
There seems to be a good balance of both here. You can see the first ten titles below, with links to free online versions where available. The complete list of 100 books for teenagers is here.
1 Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell (Amazon)
2 To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee (free eBook)
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