Bruce Springsteen & Barack Obama Release a New Podcast, “Renegades: Born in the USA”

Yes­ter­day, Barack Oba­ma and Bruce Spring­steen unveiled the first two episodes of an 8‑part pod­cast called “Rene­gades: Born In The USA.”  The pod­cast (avail­able on Spo­ti­fy) is “a series of con­ver­sa­tions between Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma and Bruce Spring­steen about their lives, music, and endur­ing love of America—despite all its chal­lenges.” The con­ver­sa­tions were taped at Spring­steen’s home between July and Decem­ber of 2020. To hear the episodes, you will seem­ing­ly need to cre­ate a Spo­ti­fy account, if you don’t have one already.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book and BlueSky.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The 150 Best Pod­casts to Enrich Your Mind

Bruce Spring­steen Lists 20 of His Favorite Books: The Books That Have Inspired the Song­writer & Now Mem­oirist

Pres­i­dent Oba­ma Names His Favorite Books, Movies & Songs of 2018

Bruce Spring­steen and the E Street Band Impro­vis­es and Plays, Com­plete­ly Unre­hearsed, Chuck Berry’s “You Nev­er Can Tell,” Live Onstage (2013)

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The Life & Death of an Espresso Shot in Super Slow Motion

Some YouTu­ber post­ed online a pret­ty nice clip of an espres­so shot being pulled from a La Mar­zoc­co FB80 espres­so machine at 120 frames per sec­ond. They rec­om­mend mut­ing the sound, then putting on your own music. I gave it a quick shot with the famous sound­track for Kubrick­’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. And I’ll be damned, it syncs up pret­ty well. Have a bet­ter sound­track to rec­om­mend? Feel free to let us know in the com­ments sec­tion below.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book and BlueSky.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Espres­so Mak­er Made in Le Corbusier’s Bru­tal­ist Archi­tec­tur­al Style: Raw Con­crete on the Out­side, High-End Parts on the Inside

Cof­fee Entre­pre­neur Rena­to Bialet­ti Gets Buried in the Espres­so Mak­er He Made Famous

How William S. Bur­roughs Used the Cut-Up Tech­nique to Shut Down London’s First Espres­so Bar (1972)

The Hertel­la Cof­fee Machine Mount­ed on a Volk­swa­gen Dash­board (1959): The Most Euro­pean Car Acces­so­ry Ever Made

Philoso­phers Drink­ing Cof­fee: The Exces­sive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard

“The Vertue of the COFFEE Drink”: An Ad for London’s First Cafe Print­ed Cir­ca 1652

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Wired Co-Founder Kevin Kelly Gives 36 Lectures on Our Future World: Education, Movies, Robots, Autonomous Cars & More

Giv­en recent events, 2019 may now seem to us like the dis­tant past. But to those who were think­ing hard about the future the year before last, noth­ing that has hap­pened since has been whol­ly unex­pect­ed — and espe­cial­ly not to those who’d already been think­ing hard about the future for decades. Take Kevin Kel­ly, co-founder of Wired mag­a­zine and writer on tech­nol­o­gy as well as a host of oth­er sub­jects. It was in 2019 that state telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­ny Chi­na Mobile com­mis­sioned him to give a series of 36 short video lec­tures on the “Future of X”: not the future of the inter­net in Chi­na and the future of India in com­pe­ti­tion with Chi­na, but a range of top­ics that will sure­ly affect us all, no mat­ter our part of the world.

Self-dri­ving cars, vir­tu­al real­i­ty, 5G, robots: Kel­ly has giv­en con­sid­er­a­tion to all these much-dis­cussed tech­nolo­gies and the roles they may come to play in our lives. But the impor­tant thing about them isn’t to know what form they’ll take in the future, since by def­i­n­i­tion no one can, but to devel­op habits of mind that allow you to grasp as wide a vari­ety of their pos­si­bil­i­ties as you can right now.

The future, as Kel­ly frames it in his talk on uncer­tain­ties, con­sists of “known knowns,” “known unknowns,” and “unknown unknowns.” Those last, bet­ter known as “black swans,” are events “com­plete­ly unex­pect­ed by any­body” that “change the world for­ev­er.” As exam­ples of pos­si­ble black swans to come he names World War Three, the dis­cov­ery of cheap fusion ener­gy, and, yes, a pan­dem­ic.

Soci­etal prepa­ra­tion for the future, to Kel­ly’s mind, will involve devel­op­ing “a very sys­tem­at­ic way of col­lect­ing these unknown unknowns and turn­ing them into known unknowns.” Per­son­al prepa­ra­tion for the future, accord­ing to his talk on schools and learn­ing, will involve cease­less acqui­si­tion and refine­ment of knowl­edge and under­stand­ing.

If we want to thrive in an uncer­tain future, he argues, we should “adopt a method of learn­ing called delib­er­ate prac­tice, falling for­ward or fail­ing for­ward,” in which we keep push­ing our­selves into unknown intel­lec­tu­al ter­ri­to­ry, always remain­ing “new­bies” at some­thing, assist­ed all the while by tech­nol­o­gy.

Just a cou­ple of decades into the 21st cen­tu­ry, we’ve already caught a glimpse of what tech­nol­o­gy can do to opti­mize our learn­ing process — or sim­ply to enable learn­ing where it would­n’t hap­pen oth­er­wise. “I don’t imag­ine that we’re going to go away from a class­room,” Kel­ly says, but we also “have the online video world, and more and more peo­ple today are learn­ing how to do an amaz­ing vari­ety of things, that we would­n’t have thought would work on video.”

Of course, since he spoke those words, one black swan in par­tic­u­lar has pushed much of human­i­ty away from the class­room, and we’ve found out a good deal more about what kind of learn­ing works (and does­n’t) over the inter­net. The future, it seems, is now.

You can watch the full playlist of videos, all 36 of them, below. We also rec­om­mend his very insight­ful book, The Inevitable: Under­stand­ing the 12 Tech­no­log­i­cal Forces That Will Shape Our Future.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Tech­nol­o­gy Wants: Kevin Kel­ly @ Google

The Best Mag­a­zine Arti­cles Ever, Curat­ed by Kevin Kel­ly

What Books Could Be Used to Rebuild Civ­i­liza­tion?: Lists by Bri­an Eno, Stew­art Brand, Kevin Kel­ly & Oth­er For­ward-Think­ing Minds

Octavia Butler’s Four Rules for Pre­dict­ing the Future

9 Sci­ence-Fic­tion Authors Pre­dict the Future: How Jules Verne, Isaac Asi­mov, William Gib­son, Philip K. Dick & More Imag­ined the World Ahead

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.

How the Internet Archive Digitizes 3,500 Books a Day–the Hard Way, One Page at a Time

Does turn­ing the pages of an old book excite you? How about 3 mil­lion pages? That’s how many pages Eliza Zhang has scanned over her ten years with the Inter­net Archive, using Scribe, a spe­cial­ized scan­ning machine invent­ed by Archive engi­neers over 15 years ago. “Lis­ten­ing to 70s and 80s R&B while she works,” Wendy Hana­mu­ra writes at the Inter­net Archive blog, “Eliza spends a lit­tle time each day read­ing the dozens of books she han­dles. The most chal­leng­ing part of her job? ‘Work­ing with very old, frag­ile books.”

The frag­ile state and wide vari­ety of the mil­lions of books scanned by Zhang and the sev­en­ty-or-so oth­er Scribe oper­a­tors explains why this work has not been auto­mat­ed. “Clean, dry human hands are the best way to turn pages,” says Andrea Mills, one of the lead­ers of the dig­i­ti­za­tion team. “Our goal is to han­dle the book once and to care for the orig­i­nal as we work with it.”

Rais­ing the glass with a foot ped­al, adjust­ing the two cam­eras, and shoot­ing the page images are just the begin­ning of Eliza’s work. Some books, like the Bureau of Land Man­age­ment pub­li­ca­tion fea­tured in the video, have myr­i­ad fold-outs. Eliza must insert a slip of paper to remind her to go back and shoot each fold-out page, while at the same time inputting the page num­bers into the item record. The job requires keen con­cen­tra­tion.

If this expe­ri­enced dig­i­tiz­er acci­den­tal­ly skips a page, or if an image is blur­ry, the pub­lish­ing soft­ware cre­at­ed by our engi­neers will send her a mes­sage to return to the Scribe and scan it again.

It’s not a job for the eas­i­ly bored; “It takes con­cen­tra­tion and a love of books,” says Inter­net Archive founder Brew­ster Kahle. The painstak­ing process allows dig­i­tiz­ers to pre­serve valu­able books online while main­tain­ing the integri­ty of phys­i­cal copies. “We do not dis­bind the books,” says Kahle, a method that has allowed them to part­ner with hun­dreds of insti­tu­tions around the world, dig­i­tiz­ing 28 mil­lion texts over two decades. Many of those books are rare and valu­able, and many have been deemed of lit­tle or no val­ue. “Increas­ing­ly,” writes the Archive’s Chris Free­land, “the Archive is pre­serv­ing many books that would oth­er­wise be lost to his­to­ry or the trash bin.”

In one exam­ple, Free­land cites The dic­tio­nary of cos­tume, “one of the mil­lions of titles that reached the end of its pub­lish­ing life­cy­cle in the 20th cen­tu­ry.” It is also a work cit­ed in Wikipedia, a key source for “stu­dents of all ages… in our con­nect­ed world.” The Inter­net Archive has pre­served the only copy of the book avail­able online, mak­ing sure Wikipedia edi­tors can ver­i­fy the cita­tion and researchers can use the book in per­pe­tu­ity. If look­ing up the def­i­n­i­tion of “pet­ti­coat” in an out-of-print ref­er­ence work seems triv­ial, con­sid­er that the Archive dig­i­tizes about 3,500 books every day in its 18 dig­i­ti­za­tion cen­ters. (The dic­tio­nary of cos­tume was iden­ti­fied as the Archive’s 2 mil­lionth “mod­ern book.”)

Libraries “have been vital in times of cri­sis,” writes Alis­tair Black, emer­i­tus pro­fes­sor of Infor­ma­tion Sci­ences at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois, and “the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic may prove to be a chal­lenge that dwarfs the many episodes of anx­i­ety and cri­sis through which the pub­lic library has lived in the past.” A huge part of our com­bined glob­al crises involves access to reli­able infor­ma­tion, and book scan­ners at the Inter­net Archive are key agents in pre­serv­ing knowl­edge. The col­lec­tions they dig­i­tize “are crit­i­cal to edu­cat­ing an informed pop­u­lace at a time of mas­sive dis­in­for­ma­tion and mis­in­for­ma­tion,” says Kahle. When asked what she liked best about her job, Zhang replied, “Every­thing! I find every­thing inter­est­ing…. Every col­lec­tion is impor­tant to me.”

The Inter­net Archive offers over 20,000,000 freely down­load­able books and texts. Enter the col­lec­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Libraries & Archivists Are Dig­i­tiz­ing 480,000 Books Pub­lished in 20th Cen­tu­ry That Are Secret­ly in the Pub­lic Domain

10,000 Vin­tage Recipe Books Are Now Dig­i­tized in The Inter­net Archive’s Cook­book & Home Eco­nom­ics Col­lec­tion

Clas­sic Children’s Books Now Dig­i­tized and Put Online: Revis­it Vin­tage Works from the 19th & 20th Cen­turies

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

De-Stress with 30 Minutes of Relaxing Visuals from Director Hayao Miyazaki

What does it mean to describe some­thing as relax­ing?

Most of us would agree that a relax­ing thing is one that qui­ets both mind and body.

There’s sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence to sup­port the stress-reliev­ing, restora­tive effects of spend­ing time in nature.

Even go-go-go city slick­ers with a han­ker­ing for excite­ment and adven­ture tend to under­stand the con­cept of “relax­ing” as some­thing slow-paced and sur­prise-free.

HBO Max is tout­ing its col­lec­tion of ani­ma­tion mas­ter Hayao Miyaza­ki’s films with 30 Min­utes of Relax­ing Visu­als from Stu­dio Ghi­b­li, above.

Will all of us expe­ri­ence those 30 min­utes as “relax­ing”?

Maybe not.

Stu­dio Ghi­b­li fans may find them­selves gripped by a sort of triv­ia con­test com­pet­i­tive­ness, shout­ing the names of the films that sup­ply these pas­toral visions—PonyoGrave of the Fire­flies!! Howl’s Mov­ing Cas­tle!!! 

Fledg­ling ani­ma­tors may feel as if they’ve swal­lowed a stone—no mat­ter how hard I try, noth­ing I make will approach the beau­ty on dis­play here.

Sticklers—and there are plen­ty leav­ing com­ments on YouTube—may be irri­tat­ed to real­ize that it’s actu­al­ly not 30 but 6 min­utes of visu­als, looped 5 times.

Insom­ni­acs (such as this reporter) may wish there was more loop­ing and less con­tent. The select­ed scenery is tran­quil enough, but the clips them­selves are brief, lead­ing to some jar­ring tran­si­tions.

(One pos­si­ble workaround for those hop­ing to lull them­selves to sleep: fid­dle with the speed set­tings. Played at .25 and mut­ed, this com­pi­la­tion becomes very relax­ing, much like artist Dou­glas Gordon’s video instal­la­tion, 24 Hour Psy­cho. Leave the sound up and the lap­ping waves, gen­tle winds, and chuff­ing trains turn into some­thing wor­thy of a slash­er flick.

Final­ly, with so much atten­tion focussed on Mars these days, we can’t help imag­in­ing what alien life forms might make of these earth­ly visions—ahh, this green, sheep-dot­ted pas­ture does low­er my stress lev­el… waitWTF was THAT!? Noth­ing on my home plan­et pre­pared me for the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a mon­strous winged house com­prised of over­grown bag­pipes and chick­en legs lum­ber­ing through the coun­try­side!

We con­cede that 30 Min­utes of Relax­ing Visu­als from Stu­dio Ghi­b­li is a pleas­ant thing to have play­ing in the back­ground as we wait for COVID restric­tions to be lift­ed… but ulti­mate­ly, you may find these 36 min­utes of music from Stu­dio Ghi­b­li films more gen­uine­ly relax­ing.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Stu­dio Ghi­b­li Makes 1,178 Images Free to Down­load from My Neigh­bor Totoro, Spir­it­ed Away & Oth­er Beloved Ani­mat­ed Films

A Mag­i­cal Look Inside the Paint­ing Process of Stu­dio Ghi­b­li Artist Kazuo Oga

Stu­dio Ghi­b­li Puts Online 400 Images from Eight Clas­sic Films, and Lets You Down­load Them for Free

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

Witness the Birth of Kermit the Frog in Jim Henson’s Live TV Show, Sam and Friends (1955)

Long before “green” became syn­ony­mous with eco-friend­ly prod­ucts and pro­duc­tion, an 18-year-old Jim Hen­son cre­at­ed a pup­pet who would go on to become the color’s most cel­e­brat­ed face from his mother’s cast-off green felt coat and a sin­gle ping pong ball.

Ker­mit debuted in black and white in the spring of 1955 as an ensem­ble mem­ber of Sam and Friendsa live tele­vi­sion show com­prised of five-minute episodes that the tal­ent­ed Hen­son had been tapped to write and per­form, fol­low­ing some ear­li­er suc­cess as a teen pup­peteer.

Air­ing on the Wash­ing­ton DC-area NBC affil­i­ate between the evening news and The Tonight ShowSam and Friends was an imme­di­ate hit with view­ers, even if they ranked Ker­mit, orig­i­nal­ly more lizard than frog, fourth in terms of pop­u­lar­i­ty. (Top spot went to a skull pup­pet named Yorick.)

Watch­ing the sur­viv­ing clips of Sam and Friends, it’s easy to catch glimpses of where both Ker­mit and Hen­son were head­ed.

While Hen­son voiced Sam and all of his pup­pet friends, Ker­mit wound up sound­ing the clos­est to Hen­son him­self.

Kermit’s sig­na­ture face-crum­pling reac­tions were by design. Where­as oth­er pup­pets of the peri­od, like the tit­u­lar Sam, had stiff heads with the occa­sion­al mov­ing jaw, Kermit’s was as soft as a foot­less sock, allow­ing for far greater expres­sive­ness.

Hen­son honed Kermit’s expres­sions by plac­ing live feed mon­i­tors on the floor so he and his pup­peteer bride-to-be Jane, could see the pup­pets from the audi­ence per­spec­tive.

Unlike pre­vi­ous­ly tele­vised pup­pet per­for­mances, which pre­served the exist­ing prosce­ni­ums of the the­aters to which the play­ers had always been con­fined, Hen­son con­sid­ered the TV set frame enough. Lib­er­at­ing the pup­pets thus­ly gave more of a sketch com­e­dy feel to the pro­ceed­ings, some­thing that would car­ry over to Sesame Street and lat­er, The Mup­pet Show.

By the 12th episode, Ker­mit has found a niche as wry straight man for wack­i­er char­ac­ters like jazz afi­ciona­do Har­ry the Hip­ster who intro­duced an ele­ment of musi­cal nota­tion to the ani­mat­ed let­ters and num­bers that would become a Sesame Street sta­ple.

And sure­ly we’re not the only ones who think the Mup­pets’ recent appear­ance in a Super Bowl ad pales in com­par­i­son to Ker­mit and Harry’s live com­mer­cial for Sam and Friends’ spon­sor, a region­al brand of bacon and lunch meat.

Sam and Friends ran from 1955 to 1961, but Kermit’s first per­for­mance on The Tonight Show in 1956, lip sync­ing to Rose­mary Clooney’s record­ing of “I’ve Grown Accus­tomed to Your Face” and mug­ging in a blonde braid­ed wig, hint­ed that he and Hen­son would soon out­grow the local tele­vi­sion pond.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Jim Hen­son Cre­ates an Exper­i­men­tal Ani­ma­tion Explain­ing How We Get Ideas (1966)

The Cre­ative Life of Jim Hen­son Explored in a Six-Part Doc­u­men­tary Series

Watch The Sur­re­al 1960s Films and Com­mer­cials of Jim Hen­son

Jim Hen­son Teach­es You How to Make Pup­pets in Vin­tage Primer From 1969

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine, cur­rent issue #63. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Paul Simon Deconstructs “Mrs. Robinson” (1970)

There’s noth­ing like hav­ing a dead­line. When Simon and Gar­funkel were called on by direc­tor Mike Nichols to pro­vide music for his 1967 com­e­dy The Grad­u­ate, the film was already being edit­ed, and the duo were work­ing on the movie stu­dio clock. To hear Simon tell it in this inter­view with Dick Cavett (from the same inter­view we fea­tured ear­li­er this week), it was that crunch time that pro­duced one of their best songs, and their biggest hit, “Mrs. Robin­son.”

In fact, the song stitched togeth­er two unre­lat­ed sketch­es. The first was the gui­tar fill that starts the song, which was Simon just riff­ing over a chase scene. “But it wasn’t work­ing,” he says. The oth­er, the cho­rus, was a frag­ment: “And here’s to you Mrs. Robin­son, Jesus loves you more than you will know.”

“For no par­tic­u­lar rea­son, the words just came into my head,” Simon tells Cavett. The next line men­tioned Mrs. Roo­sevelt, and who knows where Simon might have gone with the song if Mike Nichols hadn’t told him to ditch any­thing polit­i­cal and keep with just the one char­ac­ter.

If you have the sound­track to The Grad­u­ate, you’ll notice that the ver­sion of “Mrs. Robin­son” only has scat singing in the vers­es, just mak­ing it up as they went along. There was no time to flesh out the track, and it fit in the movie bet­ter than any of the songs Mike Nichols had licensed already from the duo. It would be one of many pre­scient choic­es for the clas­sic com­e­dy, includ­ing cast­ing the unknown Jew­ish 30-year-old Dustin Hoff­man for the main role instead of the very white choic­es the stu­dio was try­ing to push on the direc­tor.

It was only three months after the film came out that Simon and Gar­funkel record­ed the full ver­sion with the lyrics in the vers­es. It became their sec­ond num­ber one sin­gle in 1968 and was the first rock song to win a Gram­my for Record of the Year. But true to the orig­i­nal sound­track ver­sion, it keeps its open­ing verse word-free.

And it’s an odd song. Simon describes the writ­ing as stream of con­scious­ness. Though Mrs. Robin­son is indeed a char­ac­ter in the film, played by Anne Ban­croft, the lyrics rarely ref­er­ence the film, except for “It’s a lit­tle secret just the Robin­son’s affair/Most of all you’ve got to hide it from the kids.” (And even here Simon seems to be singing about hid­ing pre­scrip­tion drugs). Instead Simon cre­ates an ellip­ti­cal nar­ra­tive for Mrs. Robin­son, plac­ing her at the cen­ter of a sto­ry set…at a san­i­tar­i­um, per­haps? The sto­ry jumps all around, but Mrs. Robin­son remains con­fused, out of sorts, suf­fer­ing the alien­ation of the sub­ur­ban wife, nos­tal­gic for an imag­i­nary past. It’s where Joe DiMag­gio comes in, called out like a sav­ior (“a nation turns its lone­ly eyes to you”) when the “Jesus loves you” exhor­ta­tions don’t work. Lat­er, Simon would explain the DiMag­gio ref­er­ence as, “I thought of him as an Amer­i­can hero and that gen­uine heroes were in short sup­ply.” (Simon was more of a Mick­ey Man­tle fan, but DiMag­gio had bet­ter syl­la­bles).

The good thing about writ­ing in this stream of con­scious­ness, Simon tells Cavett, is “You find out what was in your mind was rel­e­vant even though at the time it didn’t seem so.” The song sounds chip­per, but those lyrics are the sto­ry of a soci­ety about to come apart, which it would do sev­er­al months lat­er in 1968. Like The Grad­u­ate, with its satire about sub­ur­bia, loos­en­ing morals, hypocrisy, and “plas­tics” both as a career choice and a way of describ­ing soci­ety, the song is a rev­e­la­tion of a world to come.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Art Gar­funkel Lists 1195 Books He Read Over 45 Years, Plus His 157 Favorites (Many Free)

Watch Simon & Gar­funkel Sing “The Sound of Silence” 45 Years After Its Release, and Just Get Haunt­ing­ly Bet­ter with Time

Paul Simon Tells the Sto­ry of How He Wrote “Bridge Over Trou­bled Water” (1970)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

4,000 Priceless Scrolls, Texts & Papers From the University of Tokyo Have Been Digitized & Put Online

The phrase “open­ing of Japan” is a euphemism that has out­lived its pur­pose, serv­ing to cloud rather than explain how a coun­try closed to out­siders sud­den­ly, in the mid-19th cen­tu­ry, became a major influ­ence in art and design world­wide. Nego­ti­a­tions were car­ried out at gun­point. In 1853, Com­modore Matthew Per­ry pre­sent­ed the Japan­ese with two white flags to raise when they were ready to sur­ren­der. (The Japan­ese called Perry’s fleet the “black ships of evil men.”) In one of innu­mer­able his­tor­i­cal ironies, we have this ugli­ness to thank for the explo­sion of Impres­sion­ist art (van Gogh was obsessed with Japan­ese prints and owned a large col­lec­tion) as well as much of the beau­ty of Art Nou­veau and mod­ernist archi­tec­ture at the turn of the cen­tu­ry.

We may know ver­sions of this already, but we prob­a­bly don’t know it from a Japan­ese point of view. “As our glob­al soci­ety grows ever more con­nect­ed,” writes Katie Bar­rett at the Inter­net Archive blog, “it can be easy to assume that all of human his­to­ry is just one click away. Yet lan­guage bar­ri­ers and phys­i­cal access still present major obsta­cles to deep­er knowl­edge and under­stand­ing of oth­er cul­tures.”

Unless we can read Japan­ese, our under­stand­ing of its his­to­ry will always be informed by spe­cial­ist schol­ars and trans­la­tors. Now, at least, thanks to coop­er­a­tion between the Uni­ver­si­ty of Tokyo Gen­er­al Library and the Inter­net Archive, we can access thou­sands more pri­ma­ry sources pre­vi­ous­ly unavail­able to “out­siders.”

“Since June 2020,” notes Bar­rett, “our Col­lec­tions team has worked in tan­dem with library staff to ingest thou­sands of dig­i­tal files from the Gen­er­al Library’s servers, map­ping the meta­da­ta for over 4,000 price­less scrolls, texts, and papers.” This mate­r­i­al has been dig­i­tized over decades by Japan­ese schol­ars and “show­cas­es hun­dreds of years of rich Japan­ese his­to­ry expressed through prose, poet­ry, and art­work.” It will be pri­mar­i­ly the art­work that con­cerns non-Japan­ese speak­ers, as it pri­mar­i­ly con­cerned 19th-cen­tu­ry Euro­peans and Amer­i­cans who first encoun­tered the country’s cul­tur­al prod­ucts. Art­work like the humor­ous print above. Bar­rett pro­vides con­text: 

In one satir­i­cal illus­tra­tion, thought to date from short­ly after the 1855 Edo earth­quake, cour­te­sans and oth­ers from the demi­monde, who suf­fered great­ly in the dis­as­ter, are shown beat­ing the giant cat­fish that was believed to cause earth­quakes. The men in the upper left-hand cor­ner rep­re­sent the con­struc­tion trades; they are try­ing to stop the attack on the fish, as rebuild­ing from earth­quakes was a prof­itable busi­ness for them.

There are many such depic­tions of “seis­mic destruc­tion” in ukiyo‑e prints dat­ing from the same peri­od and the lat­er Mino-Owari earth­quake of 1891: “They are a sober­ing reminder of the role that nat­ur­al dis­as­ters have played in Japan­ese life.” 

You can see many more dig­i­tized arti­facts, such as the charm­ing book of Japan­ese ephemera above, at the Inter­net Archive’s Uni­ver­si­ty of Tokyo col­lec­tion. Among the 4180 items cur­rent­ly avail­able, you’ll also find many Euro­pean prints and engrav­ings held in the library’s 25 col­lec­tions. All of this mate­r­i­al “can be used freely with­out pri­or per­mis­sion,” writes the Uni­ver­si­ty of Tokyo Library. “Among the high­lights,” Bar­rett writes, “are man­u­scripts and anno­tat­ed books from the per­son­al col­lec­tion of the nov­el­ist Mori Ōgai (1862–1922), an ear­ly man­u­script of the Tale of Gen­ji, [below] and a unique col­lec­tion of Chi­nese legal records from the Ming Dynasty.” Enter the col­lec­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch the Mak­ing of Japan­ese Wood­block Prints, from Start to Fin­ish, by a Long­time Tokyo Print­mak­er

Watch Vin­tage Footage of Tokyo, Cir­ca 1910, Get Brought to Life with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Down­load Clas­sic Japan­ese Wave and Rip­ple Designs: A Go-to Guide for Japan­ese Artists from 1903

Down­load Vin­cent van Gogh’s Col­lec­tion of 500 Japan­ese Prints, Which Inspired Him to Cre­ate “the Art of the Future”

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

The Surface of Mars Shown in Stunning 4K Resolution

Could you use a men­tal escape? Some­thing that trans­ports you beyond the con­fines of your pan­dem­ic-nar­rowed world? Maybe a trip to Mars will do the trick. Above and below, you can find high def­i­n­i­tion footage cap­tured by NASA’s three Mars rovers–Spirit, Oppor­tu­ni­ty and Curios­i­ty. The footage (also con­tributed by JPL-Cal­techMSSSCor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty and ASU) was stitched togeth­er by Elder­Fox Doc­u­men­taries, cre­at­ing what they call the most life­like expe­ri­ence of being on Mars.

Safe trav­els.

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via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Carl Sagan Presents Six Lec­tures on Earth, Mars & Our Solar Sys­tem … For Kids (1977)

Mars Rover, Curios­i­ty, Will Face Sev­en Min­utes of Ter­ror on August 5

NASA Releas­es a Mas­sive Online Archive: 140,000 Pho­tos, Videos & Audio Files Free to Search and Down­load

Leonard Nimoy Nar­rates Short Film About NASA’s Dawn: A Voy­age to the Ori­gins of the Solar Sys­tem

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Watch Chick Corea (RIP) Perform Intimate Acoustic Performances with Bobby McFerrin, Gary Burton, Hiromi Uehara & Others

It seems impos­si­ble to talk about key­boardist Chick Corea, who passed away from can­cer on Feb­ru­ary 11 at age 79, with­out also talk­ing about Miles Davis. Davis hand picked him for the ground­break­ing albums In a Silent Way and Bitch­es Brew, and as a mem­ber of those ensem­bles, Corea helped shape the future of music and helped divide the jazz com­mu­ni­ty into those who embraced the psy­che­del­ic “fusion” of jazz, rock, and oth­er world musics and those who were fierce­ly pro­tec­tive of tra­di­tion.

Corea, how­ev­er, “had already gone through ear­ly explo­rative phas­es of his career,” writes Jim Bur­long at Jazz Views, before his “brief but not always hap­py” stint with Davis. He was on his way to the avant-garde direc­tion he would take with his lat­er group, Return to For­ev­er. Yet no mat­ter how far out there he went with Davis or the ridicu­lous­ly accom­plished RTF and hun­dreds of oth­er musi­cians he played with, Corea always stayed con­nect­ed to the music’s roots.

“Through­out his career,” Gio­van­ni Rus­sonel­lo writes at The New York Times, Corea “nev­er aban­doned his first love, the acoustic piano, on which his punc­til­ious touch and crisp sense of har­mo­ny made his play­ing imme­di­ate­ly dis­tinc­tive.” We hear it in com­po­si­tions like “Spain” (at the top in a beau­ti­ful­ly spare ver­sion with Bob­by McFer­rin), “500 Miles High,” and “Tones for Joan’s Bones,” all of which have “become jazz stan­dards, marked by his dreamy but bright­ly illu­mi­nat­ed har­monies and ear-grab­bing melodies.”

We hear Corea’s “dreamy” acoustic piano through­out Return to Forever’s 1976 Roman­tic War­rior, an album that fea­tures 29 or so addi­tion­al instru­ments among its four musi­cians, includ­ing a Min­i­Moog, Micro­moog, Poly­moog, Moog 15, ARP Odyssey, and an alarm clock and slide whis­tle on the quirky, medieval “The Magi­cian.” This descrip­tion alone might make purists cringe, but charges that jazz fusion albums are over­stuffed and over­ly busy don’t tend to stick to Corea’s best record­ings.

The sound of Return to For­ev­er on Roman­tic War­rior, an album that influ­enced “bands to come on both sides of the Atlantic,” is “nev­er crowd­ed,” Bur­long writes, “and the over­all ambiance from all com­bi­na­tions of the thir­ty some­thing instru­ments used is most­ly one of con­trolled urgency.” Graced with a finesse that shines equal­ly in weird, Sci­en­tol­ogy-inspired elec­tric albums and tra­di­tion­al acoustic trios, Corea’s “ver­sa­til­i­ty is sec­ond to none when it comes to the jazz world,” says his long­time friend and col­lab­o­ra­tor, vibra­phon­ist Gary Bur­ton.

Corea resist­ed the idea that funk and rock instru­men­ta­tion in pro­gres­sive jazz meant the inven­tion of a new sub-genre. “It’s the media that are so inter­est­ed in cat­e­go­riz­ing music,” he said in 1983, “the media and the busi­ness­men, who, after all, have a vest­ed inter­est in keep­ing mar­ket­ing clear cut and sep­a­rate. If crit­ics would ask musi­cians their views about what is hap­pen­ing, you would find that there is always a fusion of sorts tak­ing place… a con­tin­u­al merg­ing of dif­fer­ent streams.”

His advice to fel­low musi­cians who might feel con­strained by tra­di­tion or the stric­tures of the mar­ket is price­less (or “cheap but good,” he wrote), includ­ing the advice he gave a grad­u­at­ing class at Berklee Col­lege of Music in his home state of Mass­a­chu­setts in 1997: “It’s all right to be your­self. In fact, the more your­self you are, the more mon­ey you make.” As a musi­cian, Corea was nev­er any­thing less than him­self, though he didn’t seem in it for the mon­ey, shar­ing com­po­si­tion cred­it equal­ly among the musi­cians on many of his ensem­ble albums.

Corea’s ver­sa­tile musi­cal approach won him 23 Gram­mys (“more than almost any oth­er musi­cian,” writes Rus­sonel­lo), three Latin Gram­mys, and the endur­ing respect and admi­ra­tion of fans and fel­low musi­cians. See more of his flaw­less chops in the inti­mate live per­for­mances above, includ­ing a Tiny Desk Con­cert with Bur­ton, a full con­cert in Spain from 2018 with his acoustic trio, and a duel­ing piano per­for­mance of “Spain” live in Tokyo with pianist Hiro­mi Uehara, just above.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Chick Corea (RIP) Offers 16 Pieces of “Cheap But Good Advice for Play­ing Music in a Group” (1985)

The Uni­ver­sal Mind of Bill Evans: Advice on Learn­ing to Play Jazz & The Cre­ative Process

Miles Davis’ Bitch­es Brew Turns 50: Cel­e­brate the Funk-Jazz-Psych-Rock Mas­ter­piece

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

The Open Syllabus Project Visualizes the 1,000,000+ Books Most Frequently Assigned in College Courses

The Prince, The Can­ter­bury Tales, The Com­mu­nist Man­i­festo, The Souls of Black FolkThe Ele­ments of Style: we’ve read all these, of course. Or at least we’ve read most of them (one or two for sure), if our ever-dim­mer mem­o­ries of high school or col­lege are to be trust­ed. But we can rest assured that stu­dents are read­ing — or in any case, being assigned — these very same works today, thanks to the Open Syl­labus project, which as of this writ­ing has assem­bled a data­base of 7,292,573 dif­fer­ent col­lege course syl­labi. Great­ly expand­ed since we pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured it here on Open Cul­ture, its “Galaxy” now visu­al­izes the 1,138,841 most fre­quent­ly assigned texts in that data­base, pre­sent­ing them in a Google Maps-like inter­face for your intel­lec­tu­al explo­ration.

If you click on the search win­dow in the upper-left cor­ner of that inter­face, a scrol­lable rank­ing of the top 100 most fre­quent­ly assigned texts opens imme­di­ate­ly below. Num­ber one, appear­ing on more than 15,000 of the syl­labi col­lect­ed so far, is Strunk and White’s clas­sic writ­ing-style guide.

Click on its title and you’ll find your­self in its cor­ner of the map, and you’ll see high­light­ed oth­er pop­u­lar read­ings that tend to be assigned togeth­er with it: Diana Hack­er’s A Writer’s Ref­er­ence (at the moment the sec­ond-most assigned text), Aris­totle’s Rhetoric, Mar­tin Luther King Jr.‘s “Let­ter from the Birm­ing­ham Jail,” Jür­gen Haber­mas’ The Struc­tur­al Trans­for­ma­tion of the Pub­lic Sphere.

Michel Fou­cault holds by some mea­sures the record for the great­est num­ber of cita­tions in the human­i­ties. If you’ve read only one of his books, you’ve prob­a­bly read Dis­ci­pline and Pun­ish, his 1975 study of the penal sys­tem — and cur­rent hold­er of six­teenth place on the Open Syl­labus rank­ings. But zoom in on it and you’ll find plen­ty of rel­e­vant books and arti­cles you might not have read: Alan Elsner’s Gates of Injus­tice, William Ian Miller’s The Anato­my of Dis­gustSoledad Broth­er: The Prison Let­ters of George Jack­son. Sim­i­lar­ly, an excur­sion in the neigh­bor­hood of Bene­dict Ander­son’s Imag­ined Com­mu­ni­ties brings encoun­ters with oth­er inves­ti­ga­tions of coun­try and cit­i­zen­ship like Ernest Renan’s What Is a Nation? and Dun­can S.A. Bel­l’s Myth­scapes: Mem­o­ry, Mythol­o­gy, and Nation­al Iden­ti­ty.

In every sense, the results to be found in the Open Syl­labus Galaxy are more inter­est­ing than those offered up by the stan­dard you-may-also-like algo­rithms. Back in col­lege you may have enjoyed, say, Edward Said’s Ori­en­tal­ism, but the range of texts that could accom­pa­ny it would have been lim­it­ed by the theme of the class and the intent of your instruc­tor. Here you’ll find Noam Chom­sky’s Failed States on one side, John R. Bowen’s Why the French Don’t Like Head­scarves on anoth­er, Hans Wehr’s Dic­tio­nary of Mod­ern Writ­ten Ara­bic on anoth­er, and even Mes­sages to the World: The State­ments of Osama bin Laden on anoth­er still. If we want to under­stand a sub­ject, after all, we must read not just about it but around it. In col­lege or else­where, you might well have heard that idea; here, you can see it. Enter the Open Syl­labus Galaxy here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Fos­ter Wallace’s 1994 Syl­labus: How to Teach Seri­ous Lit­er­a­ture with Light­weight Books

W.H. Auden’s 1941 Lit­er­a­ture Syl­labus Asks Stu­dents to Read 32 Great Works, Cov­er­ing 6000 Pages

Lyn­da Barry’s Won­der­ful­ly Illus­trat­ed Syl­labus & Home­work Assign­ments from Her UW-Madi­son Class, “The Unthink­able Mind”

Don­ald Barthelme’s Syl­labus High­lights 81 Books Essen­tial for a Lit­er­ary Edu­ca­tion

Junot Díaz’s Syl­labi for His MIT Writ­ing Class­es, and the Nov­els on His Read­ing List

“Call­ing Bull­shit”: See the Syl­labus for a Col­lege Course Designed to Iden­ti­fy & Com­bat Bull­shit

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.


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