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

What kind of delu­sion­al self-aggran­diz­er, called to tes­ti­fy before a Unit­ed States Sen­ate Sub­com­mit­tee, uses it as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to quote the lyrics of a song he’s writ­ten… in their entire­ty!?

Sounds like the work of a cer­tain rapper/prospective polit­i­cal can­di­date or per­haps some daffy buf­foon as brought to life by Ben Stiller or Will Fer­rell.

Only children’s tele­vi­sion host Fred Rogers could pull such a stunt and emerge unscathed, nay, even more beloved, as he does above in doc­u­men­tary footage from 1969.

Mis­ter Rogers’ impulse to recite What Do You Do With the Mad That You Feel to then-chair­man of the Sub­com­mit­tee on Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, Sen­a­tor John Pas­tore, was ulti­mate­ly an act of ser­vice to the Cor­po­ra­tion for Pub­lic Broad­cast­ing and its child view­ers.

New­ly elect­ed Pres­i­dent Richard Nixon opposed pub­lic tele­vi­sion, believ­ing that its lib­er­al bent could only under­mine his admin­is­tra­tion. Deter­mined to strike first, he pro­posed cuts equal to half its $20 mil­lion annu­al oper­at­ing bud­get, a mea­sure that would have seri­ous­ly hob­bled the fledg­ling insti­tu­tion.

Mr. Rogers appeared before the Com­mit­tee armed with a “philo­soph­i­cal state­ment” that he refrained from read­ing aloud, not wish­ing to monop­o­lize ten min­utes of the Committee’s time. Instead, he sought Pas­tore’s promise that he would give it a close read lat­er, speak­ing so slow­ly and with such lit­tle out­ward guile, that the tough nut Sen­a­tor was moved to crack, “Would it make you hap­py if you did read it?”

Rather than tak­ing the bait, Rogers touched on the ways his show’s bud­get had grown thanks to the pub­lic broad­cast­ing mod­el. He also hipped Pas­tore to the qual­i­ta­tive dif­fer­ence between fre­net­ic kid­die car­toons and the vast­ly more thought­ful and emo­tion­al­ly healthy con­tent of pro­gram­ming such as his. Mr. Roger’s Neigh­bor­hood was a place where such top­ics as hair­cuts, sib­ling rela­tion­ships, and angry feel­ings could be dis­cussed in depth.

Rogers’ emo­tion­al intel­li­gence seems to hyp­no­tize Pas­tore, whose chal­leng­ing front was soon dropped in favor of a more respect­ful line of ques­tion­ing. By the end of Rogers’ heart­felt, non-musi­cal ren­di­tion of What Do You Do… (it’s much pep­pi­er in the orig­i­nal), Pas­tore has goose­bumps, and the Cor­po­ra­tion for Pub­lic Broad­cast­ing has its 2 mil’ back in the bag.

What do you do with the mad that you feel

When you feel so mad you could bite?

When the whole wide world seems oh, so wrong…

And noth­ing you do seems very right?

What do you do? Do you punch a bag?

Do you pound some clay or some dough?

Do you round up friends for a game of tag?

Or see how fast you go?

It’s great to be able to stop

When you’ve planned a thing that’s wrong,

And be able to do some­thing else instead

And think this song:

I can stop when I want to

Can stop when I wish.

I can stop, stop, stop any time.

And what a good feel­ing to feel like this

And know that the feel­ing is real­ly mine.

Know that there’s some­thing deep inside

That helps us become what we can.

For a girl can be some­day a woman

And a boy can be some­day a man.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

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

Pup­pet Mak­ing with Jim Hen­son: A Price­less Primer from 1969

Ayun Hal­l­i­day’s new play, Fawn­book, debuts as part of the Bad The­ater Fes­ti­val in NYC tomor­row night. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

105 Animated Philosophy Videos from Wireless Philosophy: A Project Sponsored by Yale, MIT, Duke & More

You may remem­ber that we fea­tured Wire­less Phi­los­o­phy, an open access phi­los­o­phy project cre­at­ed by Yale and MIT, back in 2013 when it first got start­ed. Wi-Phi, for short, has kept on keep­ing in with its mis­sion of pro­duc­ing free, infor­ma­tive and enter­tain­ing ani­mat­ed videos meant to intro­duce a host of philo­soph­i­cal issues. Our own Josh Jones called it “a nec­es­sary ser­vice to those just begin­ning to wade out into the sea of The Big Ques­tions” in 2013, and now, in 2015, you can wade in from a wider expanse of the Big Ques­tion coast­line than ever before. There are cur­rent­ly 105 Wiphi videos in total.

At the top of the post, you can watch a whole playlist of Wi-Phi’s videos on cog­ni­tive bias­es, which add up to a sur­pris­ing­ly thor­ough half-hour primer on the forces that knock our think­ing askew, from the “alief” (an auto­mat­ic or habit­u­al men­tal atti­tude, as opposed to a delib­er­ate belief) to ref­er­ence depen­dence and loss aver­sion to what we might per­haps describe as a meta-bias amus­ing­ly called the GI Joe fal­la­cy (the ten­den­cy for our bias­es to stick around even when we should know bet­ter). Just above, we have Wi-Phi’s three-part guide to the good life, as exam­ined by Pla­to, Aris­to­tle, and Kant.

Both of those playlists do come with a cer­tain prac­ti­cal­i­ty, at least by philo­soph­i­cal stan­dards: who, after all does­n’t want to think more cor­rect­ly (or at least less incor­rect­ly), and who does­n’t want to live the good life (or at least a bet­ter life than they live now)? But the hard­er core of casu­al phi­los­o­phy enthu­si­asts — always a demand­ing group — should rest assured that Wiphi also offers video series on more abstract or his­tor­i­cal philo­soph­i­cal top­ics, such as the sev­en-part playlist on clas­si­cal the­ism above. Dig deep­er into their Youtube chan­nel and you’ll find more sim­ple but not sim­plis­tic lessons on the phi­los­o­phy of math­e­mat­ics, lan­guage, ancient Chi­na, and much more.

The list of uni­ver­si­ty stake­hold­ers in Wire­less Phi­los­o­phy nowa­days includes, we should note, Duke, Uni­ver­si­ty of Mass­a­chu­setts at Amherst, and U. Toron­to, in addi­tion to Yale and MIT. Plus, you’ll find that profs from oth­er uni­ver­si­ties have con­tributed to the video col­lec­tion. For exam­ple, Chris Sur­prenant (Uni­ver­si­ty of New Orleans) cre­at­ed the videos on Pla­to, Aris­to­tle, and Kant. Also find com­plete cours­es taught by Sur­prenant on our list of Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es, a sub­set of our list, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Intro­duc­ing Wire­less Phi­los­o­phy: An Open Access Phi­los­o­phy Project Cre­at­ed by Yale and MIT

The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life: A Phi­los­o­phy Pod­cast

Phi­los­o­phy Bites: Pod­cast­ing Ideas From Pla­to to Sin­gu­lar­i­ty Since 2007

Phi­los­o­phize This!: The Pop­u­lar, Enter­tain­ing Phi­los­o­phy Pod­cast from an Uncon­ven­tion­al Teacher

Down­load 90 Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es and Start Liv­ing the Exam­ined Life

Take First-Class Phi­los­o­phy Lec­tures Any­where with Free Oxford Pod­casts

Col­in Mar­shall writes else­where on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­maand the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Apply to the New David Lynch Masters in Film Program, Where You’ll Meditate & Create

david lynch film program

Image by amoe­bafin­ger on Flickr Com­mons.

When the Amer­i­can Film Insti­tute set up its con­ser­va­to­ry for Advanced Film Stud­ies in 1969, its first round of stu­dents includ­ed Ter­rence Mal­ick, Caleb Deschanel, Paul Schrad­er, and the Mas­ter of Absurd him­self, David Lynch. (Now that’s a class reunion worth going to!) Now some 40 years on, the Mahar­ishi Uni­ver­si­ty of Man­age­ment, in Fair­field, Iowa, is accept­ing appli­ca­tions for its David Lynch MA in Film pro­gram.

Lynch has been prac­tic­ing Tran­scen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion for as long as he’s been a film­mak­er, and in inter­views and in books like Catch­ing the Big Fish, he espous­es the won­ders of med­i­ta­tion for cre­ativ­i­ty. (See him talk more about that here.) Stu­dents enrolled in the David Lynch Film pro­gram will fol­low Lynch’s exam­ple by com­bin­ing med­i­ta­tion with film­mak­ing. You might not cre­ate the next Eraser­head (Lynch’s AFI project that turned into his career-defin­ing debut), but, accord­ing to Lynch, stu­dents are promised to dis­cov­er

the abil­i­ty to dive within—to tran­scend and expe­ri­ence that unbound­ed ocean of pure con­scious­ness which is unbound­ed intel­li­gence, cre­ativ­i­ty, hap­pi­ness, love, ener­gy, pow­er, and peace.

Before one gets too excit­ed and thinks that the direc­tor him­self will be teach­ing every class and that you’ll get to hang out with him dur­ing office hours, that’s not the way the pro­gram works.

Class­es are taught by director/cinematographer Michael W. Barnard (and once the head of the Maharishi’s film depart­ment), screen­writer Dorothy Rompalske, and David Lynch Foun­da­tion Tele­vi­sion founder Amine Kouider. Guest speak­ers have includ­ed Jim Car­rey, Peter Far­rel­ly, script doc­tor Dara Marks, Twin Peaks alum Duwayne Dun­ham, and many oth­er Hol­ly­wood insid­ers.

How­ev­er, stu­dents do get a field trip to Los Ange­les to meet Lynch and spend time with the film­mak­er. The aspir­ing film­mak­ers should con­sid­er them­selves lucky, see­ing that the direc­tor is busy work­ing on Twin Peaks’ new sea­son and appar­ent­ly writ­ing an auto­bi­og­ra­phy.

There are two schol­ar­ships up for grabs for appli­cants who have a film or script to sub­mit, but the dead­line is fast approach­ing on Nov. 1.

via Cri­te­ri­on

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Lynch Explains Where His Ideas Come From

Pat­ti Smith and David Lynch Talk About the Source of Their Ideas & Cre­ative Inspi­ra­tion

David Lynch Explains How Med­i­ta­tion Enhances Our Cre­ativ­i­ty

David Lynch Cre­ates a Very Sur­re­al Plug for Tran­scen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion

David Lynch Talks Med­i­ta­tion with Paul McCart­ney

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

How Cultured Are You? Test Your Knowledge With Cultural Quizzes from 1958

1ArtQuiz.jpg.CROP.original-original

Do you con­sid­er your­self well-edu­cat­ed? Cul­tured, even? By whose stan­dards?

We may super­fi­cial­ly assume these terms name immutable qual­i­ties, but they are in any analy­sis depen­dent on where and when we hap­pen to be sit­u­at­ed in his­to­ry. The most sophis­ti­cat­ed of Medieval doctors—a title then clos­er to the Euro­pean “docent” than our gen­er­al use of Dr.—would appear pro­found­ly igno­rant to us; and we, with our painful­ly inad­e­quate grasp of church Latin, Aris­totelian­ism, and arcane the­o­log­i­cal argu­ments, would appear pro­found­ly igno­rant to him.

What does it mean to be cul­tured? Is it the acqui­si­tion of most­ly use­less cul­tur­al cap­i­tal for its own sake, or of a set of codes that helps us nav­i­gate the world suc­cess­ful­ly? In an attempt to address these fraught ques­tions, Ash­ley Mon­tagu, a stu­dent of huge­ly influ­en­tial Ger­man-born anthro­pol­o­gist Franz Boas, wrote The Cul­tured Man in 1958. Rebec­ca Onion at Slate describes the book as con­tain­ing “quizzes for 50 cat­e­gories of knowl­edge in the arts and sci­ences, with 30 ques­tions each.” In the page above, we have the first 22 ques­tions of Montagu’s “Art” quiz (with the answers here).

You’ll prob­a­bly notice right away that while most of the ques­tions have def­i­nite, unam­bigu­ous answers, oth­ers like “Define art,” seem patent­ly unan­swer­able in all but the most gen­er­al and unsat­is­fac­to­ry ways. Mon­tagu defines art in one suc­cinct sen­tence: “Art is the mak­ing or doing of things that have form and beauty”—which strikes me as ane­mic, though func­tion­al enough.

1CultureHistoryQuiz

Mon­tagu intend­ed his book to test not only knowl­edge of cul­tur­al facts, but also of “atti­tudes”: a per­son “con­sid­ered ‘cul­tured,’” writes Onion, “would not just be able to read­i­ly sum­mon facts, but also to access humane feel­ings, which would nec­es­sar­i­ly come about after con­tact with cul­ture.” Many admin­is­tra­tors of “culture”—curators, art his­to­ri­ans, lit­er­a­ture pro­fes­sors, etc—would agree with the premise: ide­al­ly, the more cul­tur­al knowl­edge we acquire, the more empa­thy and under­stand­ing of oth­er peo­ples and cul­tures we should man­i­fest. Whether this rou­tine­ly occurs in prac­tice is anoth­er mat­ter. For Mon­tagu, Onion remarks, a “cul­tured man” is “curi­ous, unprej­u­diced, ratio­nal, and eth­i­cal.”

2CultureHistoryQuiz.jpg.CROP.original-original

Giv­en Montagu’s enlight­ened philo­soph­i­cal bent, we can char­i­ta­bly ascribe lan­guage in his book that itself seems prej­u­diced to our view­ing this arti­fact from a dis­tance of almost sev­en­ty years in the future. We might also find that many of his ques­tions push us to exam­ine our 21st cen­tu­ry bias­es more care­ful­ly. His approach may remind us of friv­o­lous inter­net diver­sions or the stan­dard­ized tests we’ve grown to think of as the pre­cise oppo­site of live­ly, crit­i­cal­ly-engaged edu­ca­tion­al tools. Yet Mon­tagu intend­ed his quizzes to be “both dynam­ic and con­struc­tive,” to alert read­ers to areas of igno­rance and encour­age them to fill gaps in their cul­tur­al knowl­edge. Many of his answers offer ref­er­ences for fur­ther study. “No one grows who stands still,” he wrote.

To see more of Montagu’s quiz questions—such as those above from the “Cul­ture His­to­ry” cat­e­go­ry (get the answers here)—and find out how you stack up against the cul­tured elite of the 50s, head over to Rebec­ca Onion’s post at Slate.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

Watch Har­vard Stu­dents Fail the Lit­er­a­cy Test Louisiana Used to Sup­press the Black Vote in 1964

Her­mann Rorschach’s Orig­i­nal Rorschach Test: What Do You See? (1921)

Take the 146-Ques­tion Knowl­edge Test Thomas Edi­son Gave to Prospec­tive Employ­ees (1921)

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

NBC University Theater Adapted Great Novels to Radio & Gives Listeners College Credit : Hear 110 Episodes from a 1940s eLearning Experiment

Philco

Cre­ative Com­mons image by Joe Haupt

Before the inter­net became our pri­ma­ry source of infor­ma­tion and entertainment—before it became for many com­pa­nies a pri­ma­ry rev­enue stream—it promised to rev­o­lu­tion­ize edu­ca­tion. We would see a demo­c­ra­t­ic spread of knowl­edge, old hier­ar­chies would crum­ble, ancient divi­sions would cease to mat­ter in the new pri­mor­dial cyber-soup where any­one with entry-lev­el con­sumer hard­ware and the patience to learn basic HTML could cre­ate a plat­form and a com­mu­ni­ty. And even as that imag­ined utopia became just anoth­er econ­o­my, with its own win­ners and losers, large—and free—educational projects still seemed per­fect­ly fea­si­ble.

These days, that poten­tial hasn’t exact­ly evap­o­rat­ed, but we’ve had an increas­ing num­ber of reasons—the threat­ened sta­tus of net neu­tral­i­ty promi­nent among them—to curb our enthu­si­asm. Yet as we remind you dai­ly here at Open Cul­ture, free edu­ca­tion­al resources still abound online, even if the online world isn’t as rad­i­cal as some rad­i­cals had hoped. Fre­quent­ly, those resources reside in online libraries like the Inter­net Archive, who store some of the best edu­ca­tion­al mate­r­i­al from pre-inter­net times—such as the NBC Uni­ver­si­ty The­ater, a pro­gram that comes from anoth­er tran­si­tion­al time for anoth­er form of mass media: radio.

Before pay­ola and tele­vi­sion took over in the fifties, radio also showed great poten­tial for democ­ra­tiz­ing edu­ca­tion. In 1942, at the height of the Gold­en Age of Radio, NBC “rein­au­gu­rat­ed” a pre­vi­ous con­cept for what it called the NBC Uni­ver­si­ty of the Air. “Through­out the mid-1940s,” writes the Dig­i­tal Deli, an online muse­um of gold­en age radio, “NBC pro­duced some twen­ty-five pro­duc­tions specif­i­cal­ly designed to both edu­cate and enter­tain. Indeed, many of those pro­grams were incor­po­rat­ed into the cur­ric­u­la of high schools, col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties through­out the U.S. and Cana­da.”

After 1948, the pro­gram was retooled as NBC Uni­ver­si­ty The­ater, then sim­ply NBC The­ater. “Irre­spec­tive of the title change,” how­ev­er, the pro­gram “con­tin­ued to main­tain the same high stan­dards and con­tin­ued to expand the num­ber of col­leges offer­ing col­lege cred­it for lis­ten­ing to and study­ing the pro­gram­s’s offer­ings.” Dig­i­tal Deli has the full details of this pro­to-MOOC’s cur­ricu­lum. It con­sists of lis­ten­ing to adap­ta­tions of “great Amer­i­can sto­ries,” great “world” stories–from Voltaire, Swift, and others–and adap­ta­tions of mod­ern Amer­i­can and British fic­tion and “Great Works of World Lit­er­a­ture.”

In short, the NBC Uni­ver­si­ty The­ater adap­ta­tions might sub­sti­tute for a col­lege-lev­el lit­er­ary edu­ca­tion for those unable to attend a col­lege or uni­ver­si­ty. In the playlist above, you can hear every episode from the show’s final run from 1948 to 1951. We begin with an adap­ta­tion of Sin­clair Lewis’s Main Street and end with Thomas Hardy’s “The With­ered Arm.” In-between hear clas­sic radio dra­ma adap­ta­tions of every­thing from Austen to Faulkn­er and Hem­ing­way to Ibsen. There are 110 episodes in total.

Each episode fea­tures com­men­tary from dis­tin­guished authors and crit­ics, includ­ing Robert Penn War­ren, E.M. Forster, and Kather­ine Anne Porter. “Apart from the obvi­ous aca­d­e­m­ic val­ue” of the series, writes Dig­i­tal Deli, “it’s clear that con­sid­er­able thought—and dar­ing—went into the selec­tions as well.” Despite the tremen­dous increase in col­lege atten­dance through the G.I. Bill, this was a peri­od of “ris­ing hos­til­i­ty towards aca­d­e­mics, pure­ly intel­lec­tu­al pur­suits, and the free exchange of philoso­phies in gen­er­al.”

The ensu­ing decade of the fifties might be char­ac­ter­ized cul­tur­al­ly, writes Dig­i­tal Deli, as an “intel­lec­tu­al vacuum”—anti-intellectual atti­tudes swept the coun­try, fueled by Cold War polit­i­cal repres­sion. And radio became pri­mar­i­ly a means of enter­tain­ment and adver­tis­ing, com­pet­ing with tele­vi­sion for an audi­ence. Qual­i­ty radio dra­mas continued—most notably of excel­lent sci­ence fic­tion. But nev­er again would an edu­ca­tion­al pro­gram of NBC Uni­ver­si­ty The­ater’s scope, ambi­tion, and rad­i­cal poten­tial appear on U.S. radio waves.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the Very First Adap­ta­tion of George Orwell’s 1984 in a Radio Play Star­ring David Niv­en (1949)

Hear Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and 84 Clas­sic Radio Dra­mas from CBS Radio Work­shop (1956–57)

Dimen­sion X: The 1950s Sci­Fi Radio Show That Dra­ma­tized Sto­ries by Asi­mov, Brad­bury, Von­negut & More

Free: Lis­ten to 298 Episodes of the Vin­tage Crime Radio Series, Drag­net

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

Inmates in New York Prison Defeat Harvard’s Debate Team: A Look Inside the Bard Prison Initiative

If you want to pre­pare for a career prac­tic­ing law, you could do much worse than join­ing Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty’s debate team. But if, far on the oth­er end of the spec­trum of the Amer­i­can expe­ri­ence, you end up deep on the wrong side of the law, going to prison rather than col­lege, you need not relin­quish your dreams of excelling at this tra­di­tion­al intel­lec­tu­al sport. We now have the prece­dent to prove it: “Months after win­ning a nation­al title,” reports the Guardian’s Lau­ren Gam­bi­no, “Harvard’s debate team has fall­en to a group of New York prison inmates.”

“The show­down,” which revolved around the ques­tion of whether pub­lic schools should be allowed to turn away undoc­u­ment­ed stu­dents, “took place at the East­ern cor­rec­tion­al facil­i­ty in New York, a max­i­mum-secu­ri­ty prison where con­victs can take cours­es taught by fac­ul­ty from near­by Bard Col­lege, and where inmates have formed a pop­u­lar debate club.” They call this pro­gram the Bard Prison Ini­tia­tive, under which inmates have the chance to earn a Bard Col­lege degree (through a non-voca­tion­al “lib­er­al arts cur­ricu­lum, includ­ing lit­er­a­ture, for­eign lan­guage, phi­los­o­phy, his­to­ry and the social sci­ences, math­e­mat­ics, sci­ence, and the arts”) at satel­lite cam­pus­es estab­lished in six New York state pris­ons. You can see this selec­tive, rig­or­ous and high­ly unusu­al edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tion in action in the Wash­ing­ton Post video above. And also in a 2011 PBS News Hour pro­file below.

The Bard Prison Ini­tia­tive’s debate vic­to­ry over Har­vard made for a notable event in the pro­gram’s his­to­ry indeed. “But it’s also worth point­ing out,” writes Peter Hol­ley, author of the Post arti­cle, “the fal­la­cy of our under­ly­ing assump­tions about such a matchup — the first (and most per­ni­cious) being that crim­i­nals aren’t smart. If a defin­i­tive link between crim­i­nal­i­ty and below-aver­age intel­li­gence exists, nobody has found it.” The Bard Prison Ini­tia­tive has oper­at­ed on that premise since 2001, and its debate team’s pre­vi­ous high-pro­file win saw it beat­ing that of West Point — all, you may hard­ly believe, through old-fash­ioned research, with­out any kind of access to the inter­net. If you’d like to leave your con­do­lences for the Har­vard Col­lege Debat­ing Union, you may do so at their Face­book page. You can also make a worth­while finan­cial con­tri­bu­tion to the Bard Prison Ini­tia­tive here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

James Bald­win Debates Mal­colm X (1963) and William F. Buck­ley (1965): Vin­tage Video & Audio

Nor­man Mail­er & Mar­shall McLuhan Debate the Elec­tron­ic Age

Clash of the Titans: Noam Chom­sky & Michel Fou­cault Debate Human Nature & Pow­er on Dutch TV, 1971

The His­toric LSD Debate at MIT: Tim­o­thy Leary v. Pro­fes­sor Jerome Lettvin (1967)

1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

Col­in Mar­shall writes else­where on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­maand the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Watch Noam Chomsky & Lawrence Krauss Talk About Education, Political Activism, Technology & More Before a Sold-Out Crowd

Found­ed and direct­ed by physi­cist Lawrence Krauss, Ari­zona State’s Ori­gins Project has for sev­er­al years brought togeth­er some of the biggest minds in the sci­ences and human­i­ties for friend­ly debates and con­ver­sa­tions about “the 21st Century’s great­est chal­lenges.” Pre­vi­ous all-star pan­els have includ­ed Krauss, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, Bri­an Greene, and Richard Dawkins. Stephen Hawk­ing has graced the ASU Ori­gins Project stage, as has actor and sci­ence com­mu­ni­ca­tor Alan Alda. And this past March, in a sold-out, high­ly-antic­i­pat­ed Ori­gins Project event, Krauss wel­comed Noam Chom­sky to the stage for a lengthy inter­view, which you can watch above.

Although Krauss says he’s wary of hero wor­ship in his lauda­to­ry intro­duc­tion, he nonethe­less finds him­self ask­ing “What Would Noam Chom­sky Do” when faced with a dilem­ma. He also points out that Chom­sky has been “mar­gin­al­ized in U.S. media” for his anti-war, anar­chist polit­i­cal views. Those views, of course, come wide­ly into play dur­ing the con­ver­sa­tion, which ranges from the the­o­ry and pur­pose of education—a sub­ject Chom­sky has expound­ed on a great deal in books and inter­views—to the fate of polit­i­cal dis­si­dents through­out his­to­ry.

Chom­sky also gives us his views on sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the Q&A por­tion of the talk above, in which he answers ques­tions about arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence—anoth­er sub­ject he’s touched on in the past—and ani­mal exper­i­men­ta­tion, among a great many oth­er top­ics. Krauss most­ly hangs back dur­ing the ini­tial dis­cus­sion but takes a more active role in the ses­sion above, offer­ing views on med­ical and sci­en­tif­ic ethics that will be famil­iar to those who fol­low his athe­ist activism and cham­pi­oning of ratio­nal­i­ty over reli­gious dog­ma.

What you won’t see in the video above is a con­ver­sa­tion Chom­sky and Krauss had with Moth­er­board’s Daniel Ober­haus, who caught up with both thinkers dur­ing the ASU event to get their take on what he calls “anoth­er great space race.” As Ober­haus makes clear, the cur­rent com­pe­ti­tion is not nec­es­sar­i­ly between glob­al super­pow­ers, but—as with so much mod­ern research and development—between pub­lic and pri­vate enti­ties, such as NASA and Space X. As we briefly dis­cussed in a post yes­ter­day on the huge amount of pub­lic domain space pho­tog­ra­phy freely avail­able for use, pri­vate space explo­ration makes research pro­pri­etary, mit­i­gat­ing the poten­tial pub­lic ben­e­fits of gov­ern­ment pro­grams.

As Chom­sky puts it, “the envi­ron­ment, the com­mons… they’re a com­mon pos­ses­sion, but space is even more so. For indi­vid­u­als to allow insti­tu­tions like cor­po­ra­tions to have any con­trol over it is dev­as­tat­ing in its con­se­quences. It will also almost cer­tain­ly under­mine seri­ous research.” He refers to the exam­ple of most mod­ern computing—developed under pub­licly-fund­ed gov­ern­ment pro­grams, then mar­ket­ed and sold back to us by cor­po­ra­tions. Krauss makes a case for unmanned space explo­ration as the cost-effec­tive option, and both thinkers dis­cuss the prob­lem of mil­i­ta­riz­ing space, the ulti­mate goal of Cold War space pro­grams before the fall of the Sovi­et Union. The con­ver­sa­tion is rich and reveal­ing and makes an excel­lent sup­ple­ment to the already rich dis­cus­sion Krauss and Chom­sky have in the videos above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Ori­gins Project Brings Togeth­er Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Bill Nye, Ira Fla­tow, and More on One Stage

Noam Chom­sky Spells Out the Pur­pose of Edu­ca­tion

Noam Chom­sky Explains Where Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Went Wrong

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

An Animated Introduction to Virginia Woolf

It’s a pity writer Vir­ginia Woolf (1882–1941) drowned her­self before the advent of the Inter­net.

Indus­tri­al­iza­tion did not faze her.

It’s less clear how the great observ­er of “the Mod­ern Age” would’ve respond­ed to the pro­lif­er­a­tion of Mom­my blog­gers.

Their sheer num­bers sug­gest that per­haps female writ­ers do not need a “room of one’s own” (though pre­sum­ably all of them would be in favor of such a devel­op­ment.)

Woolf’s name is an endur­ing one, inspir­ing both the title of a clas­sic Amer­i­can play and a dog­gy day care facil­i­ty. Its own­er passed away near­ly 75 years ago, yet she remains a peren­ni­al on Women’s Stud­ies’ syl­labi.

Ergo, it’s pos­si­ble for the gen­er­al pub­lic to know of her, with­out know­ing much of any­thing about her and her work. (Find her major works on our lists of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books).

The lat­est ani­mat­ed install­ment in The School of Life human­i­ties series seeks to rem­e­dy that sit­u­a­tion in ten min­utes with the video above, which offers insight into her place in both the West­ern canon and the ever-glam­orous Blooms­bury Group, and cel­e­brates her as a keen observ­er of life’s dai­ly rou­tine. And that by-now-famil­iar cut-out ani­ma­tion style takes full advan­tage of the author’s best known head shots.

Arrange what­ev­er pieces come your way.

- Vir­ginia Woolf

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load 55 Free Online Lit­er­a­ture Cours­es: From Dante and Mil­ton to Ker­ouac and Tolkien

Watch Pat­ti Smith Read from Vir­ginia Woolf, and Hear the Only Sur­viv­ing Record­ing of Woolf’s Voice

Vir­ginia Woolf and Friends Dress Up as “Abyssin­ian Princes” and Fool the British Roy­al Navy (1910)

Vir­ginia Woolf’s Hand­writ­ten Sui­cide Note: A Painful and Poignant Farewell (1941)

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

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