Is Consciousness an Illusion?? Five Experts in Science, Religion & Technology Explain

in Neuroscience, Philosophy, Religion | February 9th, 2024

Even among non-neuroscientists, determining the origin and purpose of consciousness is widely known as “the hard problem.” Since its coinage by philosopher David Chalmers thirty years ago, that label has worked its way into a variety of contexts; about a decade ago, Tom Stoppard even used it for the title of a play. Unsurprisingly, it’s also referenced in the episode of Big Think’s Dispatches from the Well above, which presents discussions of the nature of consciousness with neuroscientist Christof Koch, Vedanta Society of New York minister Swami Sarvapriyananda, technology entrepreneur Reid Hoffman, Santa Fe Institute Davis Professor of Complexity Melanie Mitchell, and mathematical physicist Roger Penrose.

Koch describes consciousness as “what you see, it’s what you hear, it’s the pains you have, the love you have, the fear, the passion.” It is, in other words, “the experience of anything,” and for all their sophistication, our modern inquiries into it descend from René Descartes’ proposition, “Cogito, ergo sum.” Sarvapriyananda, too, makes reference to Descartes in explaining his own conception of consciousness as “the light of lights,” by which “everything here is lit up.”

Mitchell conceives of it as a continuum: “I’m more conscious when I’m awake,” for example, and “certain species are more conscious than other species.” And perhaps it could develop even in non-biological entities: “I don’t think that we have any machines that are conscious in any interesting sense yet,” Mitchell says, but “if we ever do, they’ll be part of that spectrum.”

The question of whether a machine can attain consciousness naturally arises in host Kmele Foster’s conversation with Hoffman, who’s made serious investments in artificial-intelligence research. As impressive as AI chatbots have lately become, few among us would be willing to deem them conscious; nevertheless, attempting to create not just intelligence but consciousness in machines may prove a fruitful way to learn about the workings of the “genuine articles” within us. Penrose’s theory holds that consciousness arises from as-yet-unpredictable quantum processes occurring in the microtubules of the brain. Perhaps, as Koch has suggested, it actually exists to one degree or another in all forms of matter. Or maybe — to quote from a song in heavy rotation on my childhood Walkman — it’s just what you make of yourself.

John Searle Makes A Forceful Case for Studying Consciousness, Where Everything Else Begins

Reality Is Nothing But a Hallucination: A Mind-Bending Crash Course on the Neuroscience of Consciousness

The Simulation Theory Explained In Three Animated Videos

What Is Higher Consciousness?: How We Can Transcend Our Petty, Day-to-Day Desires and Gain a Deeper Wisdom

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

The Ten Earliest Depictions of Jesus: How Art Visualized Jesus in the First Centuries After His Death

in Art, History, Religion | December 13th, 2023

Jesus Christ: as soon as you hear those words, assuming they’re not being used exclamatorily, you see a face. In almost all cases, that face is bearded and framed by long brown hair. Usually it has strong, somewhat sharp features and an expression of benevolence, patience, faint expectancy, or (depending on the relevant Christian tradition) complete agony. Whatever the details of his appearance, even the least religious among us has a personal Jesus in our imagination, a composite of the many depictions we’ve seen throughout our lives. But where, exactly, did those depictions come from?

The UsefulCharts video above assembles the ten earliest known images of Jesus in art, organizing them in a countdown that works its way back from the sixth century. Remarkably, these examples remain immediately recognizable even a millennium and a half back, though beyond that point the son of God becomes rather more clean-cut.

“Originally, Jesus was always depicted without a beard,” explains UsefulCarts creator Matt Baker, “and as we’re about to see, he usually just looks like a typical Roman from the time of the Roman Empire.” Ancient-Rome enthusiasts will recognize his manner of dress, although they might be surprised to see him using a magic wand, in one late-third-century image, to raise Lazarus from the dead.

The holiday season is an especially appropriate time to consider where our cultural conception of Jesus comes from, given that he is — at least as some Christians put it — the very “reason for the season.” And indeed, among these ten earliest artworks featuring Jesus is a sarcophagus lid inscribed with a classic Christmas tableau, which depicts him as a “baby being held by his mother, Mary. Standing behind them is, presumably, Joseph, and in front of them are the three wise men and the star of Bethlehem.” That’s certainly a depiction of Jesus for all time. As for what depiction of Jesus reflects our own time, we can hardly stop a certain “restored” nineteen-thirties Spanish fresco turned internet phenomenon from coming to mind.

Behold! The Very First Christmas Card (1843)

Did Psychedelic Mushrooms Appear in Medieval Christian Art?: A Video Essay

Salvador Dalí’s Avant-Garde Christmas Cards

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

A Map of All the Countries Mentioned in the Bible: What The Countries Were Called Then, and Now

in History, Maps, Religion | December 4th, 2023

“For most of the last two thousand years, the Bible has been virtually the only history book used in Western civilization,” writes Isaac Asimov in his Guide to the Bible. “Even today, it remains the most popular, and its view of ancient history is still more widely and commonly known than is that of any other.” As a result, “millions of people today know of Nebuchadnezzar, and have never heard of Pericles, simply because Nebuchadnezzar is mentioned prominently in the Bible and Pericles is never mentioned at all.” That same disproportionate recognition is accorded to “minor Egyptian pharaohs” like Shishak and Necho, “people whose very existence is doubtful” like Nimrod and the Queen of Sheba, and “small towns in Canaan, such as Shechem and Bethel.”

Asimov notes that “only that is known about such places as happens to be mentioned in the Bible. Ecbatana, the capital of the Median Empire, is remembered in connection with the story of Tobit, but its earlier and later history are dim indeed to most people, who might be surprised to know that it still exists today as a large provincial capital in the modern nation of Iran.” In the video from Hochelaga above, we learn that Iran, then called Persia, is celebrated in the Bible “for ending the Jewish exile and returning Israel to its homeland. The Book of Usaiah gives a special shout-out to its King, Cyrus the Great: he is given the title ‘anointed one,’ or ‘messiah.’ ”

Though “Persia has played a huge role in the history of the region, and at a time was one of the largest empires of its day,” it’s just one of the surprisingly many lands to receive Biblical acknowledgement. As Hochelaga creator Tommy Trelawny makes clear, “when the Bible was written, the countries as we know them today didn’t even exist.” But though the concept of the modern nation-state hadn’t yet come into being, the places that would give rise to a fair few of the nation-states in the twenty-first century certainly had: “shout-out to Egypt, Lebanon, Israel, Persia, Cyprus, Greece, Italy, and Spain, that still exist today, or at least go by the names that appear in the Bible.”

You may notice, Trelawny adds, that “many of these exotic lands are mentioned in the story of King Solomon’s temple, and how precious raw materials were imported from faraway places, from the strongest Lebanese cedars to the finest Indian ivories.” It hardly matters “whether King Solomon was even real; we know these geographical regions exist today, and that Biblical writers seemed to know of them as well.” As depicted in the Bible or other sources, the ancient world can seem scarcely recognizable to us. But if we make the necessary adjustments to our perspective, we can see a process of globalization not dissimilar to what we see in our own societies — whose fascination with distant lands and expensive luxuries seems hardly to have diminished over the millennia.

Christianity Through Its Scriptures: A Free Course from Harvard University

Introduction to the Old Testament: A Free Yale Course

Introduction to New Testament History and Literature: A Free Yale Course

Ancient Israel: A Free Course from NYU

Isaac Asimov’s Guide to the Bible: A Witty, Erudite Atheist’s Guide to the World’s Most Famous Book

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

The Birth and Rapid Rise of Islam, Animated (622‑1453)

in History, Religion | August 16th, 2023

To anyone unfamiliar with the history of Islam, it comes as something of a shock that it got started less than a millennium and a half ago. In that relatively short span of time, Islam has become the world’s second-largest religion, a fact that becomes more understandable when you see the running start to which it got off visualized in the video above. Created by Ollie Bye — previously featured here on Open Culture for his cartographical animations of the rise and fall of the British Empire, the spread of writing, and the history of the world — it depicts the spread of Islam, which began in earnest after the death of its founder, the prophet Muhammad, in the year 632, and whose legacy is the “Muslim world” as we know it today.

“By conquest and conversion, the new religion spread quickly westwards through the territories of the Byzantine empire,” says the Victoria and Albert Museum’s page on luxury objects of the period. “By the 640s, Muslim forces were advancing across North Africa, conquering Sicily in 652 and the Iberian Peninsula in 711.”

Let’s pause to give that achievement due consideration: Islam overtook Spain just a century after its foundation, a conquering speed that puts the Roman Empire in the shade. (The Muslims also managed to get the upper hand of the Persians, who’d presented such a stiff challenge to not just the Romans but the Greeks before them.) “By the early 8th century, Islamic territories had almost encircled the Mediterranean.“ ‘

“During this time Muslim rulers, soldiers, traders, Sufis, scholars, poets and architects all contributed to the shaping of distinctive Islamic cultures,” says the site of Harvard’s Pluralism Project. “Across the wide-reaching Islamic world, transregional Islamic culture mixed with local traditions to produce distinctive forms of statecraft, theology, art, architecture, and science.” (Nor should we neglect the delights of Moorish cuisine.) This Islamic Golden Age, like all golden ages, eventually came to an end. The center of civilization had shifted undeniably by the time of the European Renaissance — which, according to the Pluralism Project, may never have taken place “without the creativity and myriad achievements of Muslim scholars, thinkers, and civilizations.” And given that Islam remains the world’s fastest-growing major religion by births, it surely hasn’t exerted the last of its global influence just yet.

Animated Map Shows How the Five Major Religions Spread Across the World (3000 BC – 2000 AD)

The Complex Geometry of Islamic Art & Design: A Short Introduction

How Arabic Translators Helped Preserve Greek Philosophy … and the Classical Tradition

A Visual Map of the World’s Major Religions (and Non-Religions)

The History of the World in One Video: Every Year from 200,000 BCE to Today

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

J. Robert Oppenheimer Explains How, Upon Witnessing the First Nuclear Explosion, He Recited a Line from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I Am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds”

in History, Physics, Religion | July 17th, 2023

No matter how little we know of the Hindu religion, a line from one of its holy scriptures lives within us all: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” This is one facet of the legacy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, an American theoretical physicist who left an outsized mark on history. For his crucial role in the Manhattan Project that during World War II produced the first nuclear weapons, he’s now remembered as the“father of the atomic bomb.” He secured that title on July 16, 1945, the day of the test in the New Mexican desert that proved these experimental weapons actually work — that is, they could wreak a kind of destruction previously only seen in visions of the end of the world.

“We knew the world would not be the same,” Oppenheimer remembered in 1965. “A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ ”

The translation’s grammatical archaism made it even more powerful, resonating with lines in Tennyson (“I am become a name, for always roaming with a hungry heart”), Shakespeare (“I am come to know your pleasure”), and the Bible (“I am come a light into the world, that whosoever believeth on me should not abide in darkness”).

But what is death, as the Gita sees it? In an interview with Wired, Sanskrit scholar Stephen Thompson explains that, in the original, the word that Oppenheimer speaks as “death” refers to “literally the world-destroying time.” This means that “irrespective of what Arjuna does” — Arjuna being the aforementioned prince, the narrative’s protagonist — everything is in the hands of the divine.” Oppenheimer would have learned all this while teaching in the 1930s at UC Berkeley, where he learned Sanskrit and read the Gita in the original. This created in him, said his colleague Isidor Rabi, “a feeling of mystery of the universe that surrounded him like a fog.”

The necessity of the United States’ subsequent dropping of not one but two atomic bombs on Japan, examined in the 1965 documentary The Decision to Drop the Bomb (below), remains a matter of debate. Oppenheimer went on to oppose nuclear weapons, describing himself to an appalled President Harry Truman as having “blood on my hands.” But in developing them, could he have simply seen himself as a modern Prince Arjuna? “It has been argued by scholars,” writes the Economic Times’ Mayank Chhaya, “that Oppenheimer’s approach to the atomic bomb was that of doing his duty as part of his dharma as prescribed in the Gita.” He knew, to quote another line from that scripture brought to mind by the nuclear explosion, that “if the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst into the sky that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One” — and perhaps also that splendor and wrath may be one.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2020. In the light of the new Oppenheimer film, we’re bringing it back.

Related Content:

Oppenheimer: The Man Behind the Bomb

The “Shadow” of a Hiroshima Victim, Etched into Stone, Is All That Remains After 1945 Atomic Blast

Haunting Unedited Footage of the Bombing of Nagasaki (1945)

63 Haunting Videos of U.S. Nuclear Tests Now Declassified and Put Online

53 Years of Nuclear Testing in 14 Minutes: A Time Lapse Film by Japanese Artist Isao Hashimoto

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

When There Were Three Popes at Once: An Animated Video Drawn in the Style of Medieval Illuminated Manuscript

in History, Religion | June 9th, 2023

Pope Francis, who’s been head of the Catholic Church for a decade now, is officially Pontiff number 266. But if you scroll through Wikipedia’s list of popes, you’ll see quite a few entries without numbers, their rows cast in a disreputable-looking darker shade of gray. The presence of several such unofficial Popes usually indicates particularly interesting times in the history of the Church, and thus the history of Western civilization itself. The new TED-Ed video above, written by medieval history professor Joëlle Rollo-Koster, tells of the only period in which three popes vied simultaneously for legitimacy. This was The Western Schism — or the Papal Schism, or the Great Occidental Schism, or the Schism of 1378.

However one labels it, “the origins of this papal predicament began in 1296, when France’s King Philip IV decided to raise taxes on the church.” So begins the narrator of the video, which animates the historical scenes he describes in the style of a medieval illuminated manuscript. (It includes many amusing details, though I haven’t managed to spot any aggressive rabbits or snails, to say nothing of butt trumpets.) Pope Boniface VIII, the Church’s leader at the time, responded with the Unam Sanctam, “a radical decree asserting the pope’s total supremacy over earthly rulers.” The clash between the two resulted in the death of Boniface, who was eventually replaced in 1305 by Clement V.

As “a French diplomat seeking peace in the war between England and his homeland,” Clement strategically moved the seat of the papacy to Avignon. Seven popes later, the papacy moved back to Italy — not long before the death of Gregory XI, the Pontiff who moved it. Out of the chaotic process of selecting his successor came Pope Urban VI, who turned out to be “a reformer who sought to limit the cardinals’ finances.” Those cardinals then “denounced Urban as a usurper” and elected Pope Clement VII to replace him. But Urban refused to relinquish his position, and in fact “entrenched himself in Rome while Clement and his supporters returned to Avignon.”

This began the schism, splitting Western Christendom between the capitals of Avignon and Rome. Each capital kept its line going, replacing popes who die and perpetuating the situation in which “European rulers were forced to choose sides as both popes vied for spiritual and political supremacy.” Only in 1409 did a group of cardinals attempt to put an end to it, electing a new pope themselves — who went unrecognized, of course, by the existing popes in Rome and Avignon. The schism went on for nearly 40 years, underscoring the alliterative truth that “even those who are supposed to be pious are prone to petty power struggles.” Most popes, like any figures of power, must feel lonely at the top — but that’s surely better than when it’s too crowded there.

A Brief Animated History of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses & the Reformation — Which Changed Europe and Later the World

The Vatican Library Goes Online and Digitizes Tens of Thousands of Manuscripts, Books, Coins, and More

Animated: Stephen Fry & Ann Widdecombe Debate the Catholic Church

Pope John Paul II Takes Batting Practice in California, 1987

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Discover the Sarajevo Haggadah, the Medieval Illuminated Manuscript That Survived the Inquisition, Holocaust & Yugoslav Wars

in Art, History, Museums, Religion | April 14th, 2023

If you attended a seder this month, you no doubt read aloud from the Haggadah, a Passover tradition in which everyone at the table takes turns recounting the story of Exodus.

There’s no definitive edition of the Haggadah. Every Passover host is free to choose the version of the familiar story they like best, to cut and paste from various retellings, or even take a crack at writing their own.

As David Zvi Kalman, publisher of the annual, illustrated Asufa Haggadah told the New York Times, “The Haggadah in America is like Kit Kats in Japan. It’s a product that accepts a wide variety of flavors. It’s probably the most accessible Jewish book on the market.”

21st century adaptations have included Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Seinfeld, Harry Potter, and Curb Your Enthusiasm themed Haggadot.

There are Haggadot tailored toward feminists, Libertarians, interfaith families, and advocates of the Black Lives Matter movement.

One of the oldest is the miraculously-preserved Sarajevo Haggadah, an illuminated manuscript created by anonymous artists and scribes in Barcelona around 1350.

Though it bears the coats of arms of two prominent families, its provenance is not definitively known.

Leora Bromberg of the University of Toronto’s Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library notes that it is “especially striking for its colorful illuminations of biblical and Passover ritual scenes and its beautifully hand-scribed Sephardic letterforms:”

As precious as this Haggadah was, and still is, Haggadot are books that are meant to be used in festive and messy settings—sharing the table with food, wine, family and guests. The Sarajevo Haggadah was no exception to this; its pages show evidence that it was well used, with doodles, food and red wine stains marking its pages.

Some brave soul took care to smuggle this essential volume out with them when 1492’s Alhambra Decree expelled all Jews from Spain.

The manuscript’s travels thereafter are shrouded in mystery.

It survived the Roman Inquisition by virtue of its contents. As per a 1609 note jotted on one of its pages, nothing therein seemed to be aimed against the Church.

More handwritten notes place the book in the north of Italy in the 16th and 17th centuries, though its new owner is not mentioned by name.

Eventually, it found its way to the hands of a man named Joseph Kohen who sold it to the National Museum of Sarajevo in 1894.

It was briefly sent to Vienna, where a government official replaced its original medieval binding with cardboard covers, chopping its 142 bleached calfskin vellum down to 6.5” x 9” in order to fit them.

It had a narrow escape in 1942, when a high-ranking Nazi official, Johann Fortner, visited the museum, intent on confiscating the priceless manuscript.

The chief librarian, Dervis Korkut, a Muslim, secreted the Haggadah inside his clothing, reputedly telling Fortner that museum staff had turned it over to another German officer.

After that folklore takes over. Korkut either stowed it under the floorboards of his home, buried it under a tree, gave it to an imam in a remote village for safekeeping, or hid it on a shelf in the museum’s library.

Whatever the case, it reappeared in the museum, safe and sound, in 1945.

The museum was ransacked during 1992’s Siege of Sarajevo, but the thieves, ignorant of the Haggadah’s worth, left it on the floor. It was removed to an underground bank vault, where it survived untouched, even as the museum sustained heavy artillery damage.

The president of Bosnia presented it to Jewish community leaders during a Seder three years later.

Shortly thereafter, the head of Sarajevo’s Jewish Community sought the United Nations’ support to restore the Haggadah, and house it in a suitably secure, climate-controlled setting.

A number of facsimiles have been created, and the original codex once again resides in the museum where it is stored under the prescribed conditions, and displayed on rare special occasions, as “physical proof of the openness of a society in which fear of the Other has never been an incurable disease.”

UNESCO added it to its Memory of the World Register in 2017, “praising the courage of the people who, even in the darkest of times during World War II, appreciated its importance to Jewish Heritage, as well as its embodiment of diversity and intercultural harmony depicted in its illustration:”

Regardless of their own religious beliefs, they risked their lives and did all in their power to safeguard the Haggadah for future generations. Its destruction would be a loss for humanity. Protecting it is a symbol of the values which we hold dear.

For those interested, the Sarajevo Haggadah figures centrally in the bestselling 2008 novel People of the Book, written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks. You can read an New Times review here.

Turning the Pages of an Illuminated Medieval Manuscript: An ASMR Museum Experience

The Medieval Masterpiece, the Book of Kells, Has Been Digitized and Put Online

– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

15-Year-Old Picasso Paints His First Masterpiece, “The First Communion”

in Art, Religion | November 29th, 2022

It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child. — Pablo Picasso

We think it’s safe to say that most of us have a preconceived notion of Picasso’s style, and The First Communion, above, isn’t it.

Picasso was just 15 when he completed this large-scale oil, having lost his 7‑year-old sister, Conchita, to diphtheria one year before.

The stricken young artist had attempted to bargain with God, vowing to give up painting if she was spared. As Arianna Huffington writes in the biography Picasso: Creator and Destroyer:

…he was torn between wanting her saved and wanting her dead so that his gift would be saved. When she died, he decided that God was evil and destiny an enemy. At the same time, he was convinced that it was his ambivalence that had made it possible for God to kill Conchita. His guilt was enormous—the other side of his belief in his powers to affect the world around him. And it was compounded by his almost magical conviction that his little sister’s death had released him to be a painter and follow the call of the powers he had been given, whatever the consequences.

If there’s evil at work in the “First Communion,” he keeps it under wraps. All eyes are on the rapt young communicant, embodied in his surviving sister, Lola, in a snowy veil and gown.

Their father, painter and drawing professor José Ruiz y Blasco, assumes the part of the girl’s father or godfather, a solemn witness to this rite of passage.

Ruiz y Blasco provided instruction and championed his son’s gift. He encouraged him to enter the “First Communion,” and later, “Science and Charity” (in which he appears as the doctor) in the Exposicion de Bellas Artes, a competition and exhibition opportunity for emerging artists.

Picasso later remarked that “every time I draw a man, I think of my father. To me, man is Don José, and will be all my life…”

Ruiz y Blasco, convinced that Picasso’s talent would bring success as a naturalistic painter of classical scenes and portraits, was deeply disappointed when his teenaged son began blowing off class at Madrid’s prestigious Academia Real de San Fernando.

Just imagine how he reacted to the scandalous Cubist vision of “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” unveiled a mere eleven years after the “First Communion.”

The rest is history.

Just for fun, we invited the free online AI image generator Craiyon (formerly known as DALL‑E Mini) to have a go using the prompt “Picasso First Communion”.

The results should surprise no one.

14 Self-Portraits by Pablo Picasso Show the Evolution of His Style: See Self-Portraits Moving from Ages 15 to 90

How To Understand a Picasso Painting: A Video Primer

- Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Is Consciousness an Illusion?? Five Experts in Science, Religion & Technology Explain

The Ten Earliest Depictions of Jesus: How Art Visualized Jesus in the First Centuries After His Death

A Map of All the Countries Mentioned in the Bible: What The Countries Were Called Then, and Now

The Birth and Rapid Rise of Islam, Animated (622‑1453)

J. Robert Oppenheimer Explains How, Upon Witnessing the First Nuclear Explosion, He Recited a Line from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I Am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds”

When There Were Three Popes at Once: An Animated Video Drawn in the Style of Medieval Illuminated Manuscript

Discover the Sarajevo Haggadah, the Medieval Illuminated Manuscript That Survived the Inquisition, Holocaust & Yugoslav Wars

15-Year-Old Picasso Paints His First Masterpiece, “The First Communion”

Essentials

Support Us

Free Courses

Receive our Daily Email

FREE UPDATES!

GET OUR DAILY EMAIL

Free Movies

Free Language Lessons

Free eBooks

Free Audio Books

Free Textbooks

K-12 Resources

Free Art & Images

Free Music

Writing Tips

Archive

Personal Finance

Categories

Great Lectures

Sign up for Newsletter

About Us

Great Recordings

Book Lists By

Syllabi

Favorite Movies

Archives

Search