Alice’s Restaurant. It’s now a Thanksgiving classic, and something of a tradition around here. Recorded in 1967, the 18+ minute counterculture song recounts Arlo Guthrie’s real encounter with the law, starting on Thanksgiving Day 1965. As the long song unfolds, we hear all about how a hippie-bating police officer, by the name of William “Obie” Obanhein, arrested Arlo for littering. (Cultural footnote: Obie previously posed for several Norman Rockwell paintings, including the well-known painting, “The Runaway,” that graced a 1958 cover of The Saturday Evening Post.) In fairly short order, Arlo pleads guilty to a misdemeanor charge, pays a $25 fine, and cleans up the thrash. But the story isn’t over. Not by a long shot.
Later, when Arlo (son of Woody Guthrie) gets called up for the draft, the petty crime ironically becomes a basis for disqualifying him from military service in the Vietnam War. Guthrie recounts this with some bitterness as the song builds into a satirical protest against the war: “I’m sittin’ here on the Group W bench ’cause you want to know if I’m moral enough to join the Army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after bein’ a litterbug.” And then we’re back to the cheery chorus again: “You can get anything you want, at Alice’s Restaurant.”
We have featured Guthrie’s classic during past years. But, for this Thanksgiving, we give you the illustrated version. As a sad post script, Alice Brock, the owner of Alice’s Restaurant–died last week at the age of 83.
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
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!
“Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28, 1986” first appeared in print inTornado Alley, a chapbook published by William S. Burroughs in 1989. Two years later, Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting, My Own Private Idaho, Milk) shot a montage that brought the poem to film, making it at least the second time the director adapted the beat writer to film.
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
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!
If you’re not in the market for fancy letters, you can also browse the Plantin-Moretus woodcut archive through the categories of plants, animals, and sciences. Some of these illustrations are technical, and others more fanciful; in certain cases, the centuries have probably rendered them less realistic-looking than once they were.
Not all the more than 14,000 woodcuts now in the archive would seem to fit neatly in one of those categories, but if you take a look at particular entries, you’ll find that the museum has also labeled them with more specific tags, like “classical antiquity,” “map/landscape,” or “aureole” (the bright medieval-looking halo that marks a figure as holy).
All these woodcuts, in any case, have been made free to download (just click the cloud icon in the upper-right of the window that opens after you click on the image itself) and use as you please. Back in the sixteenth century, Christophe Plantin and Jan Moretus, for whom the Plantin-Moretus Museum was named, were well-placed to collect such things. The Plantin-Moretus Museum’s website describes them as “a revolutionary duo.
They were the first printers on an industrial scale — the Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg of their day.” And if these decontextualized artifacts of the print revolution strike us as a bit strange to us today, just imagine how our surviving internet memes will look four centuries hence. Enter the woodblock collection here.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
A quick heads up: The filmmaker Ken Burns has just released his new documentary on Leonardo da Vinci. Running nearly four hours, the film offers what The New York Times calls a “thorough and engrossing biography” of the 15th-century polymath. Currently airing on PBS, the film can be streamed online through December 17th. If you reside in the US, you can watch Part 1 here, and Part 2 here. The film’s trailer appears above.
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
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!
If you happen to visit the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, do take the time to see the Musée Méliès located inside it. Dedicated to la Magie du cinéma, it contains artifacts from throughout the history of film-as-spectacle, which includes such pictures as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner. Its focus on the evolution of visual effects guarantees a certain prominence to science fiction, which, as a genre of “the seventh art,” has its origins in France: specifically, in the work of the museum’s namesake Georges Méliès, whose A Trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la lune) from 1902 we now recognize as the very first sci-fi movie.
Everyone has seen at least one image from A Trip to the Moon: that of the landing capsule crashed into the irritated man-on-the-moon’s eye. But if you watch the film at its full length — which, in the version above, runs about fifteen minutes — you can better understand its importance to the development of cinema.
For Méliès didn’t pioneer just a genre, but also a range of techniques that expanded the visual vocabulary of his medium. Take the approach to the moon (played by the director himself) immediately before the landing, a kind of shot never before seen in those days of practically immobile movie cameras — and one that necessitated real technical inventiveness to pull off.
What someone watching A Trip to the Moon in the twenty-first century will first notice, of course, is less the ways in which it feels familiar than the ways in which it doesn’t. In an era when theater was still the dominant form of entertainment, Méliès adhered to theatrical forms of staging: he uses few cuts, and practically no variety in the camera angles. It would hardly seem worth noting that a film from 1902 is silent and in black-and-white, but what few know is that colorized prints — laboriously hand-painted, frame by frame, on an assembly line — existed even at the time of its original release; one such restored version appears just above.
In truth, Méliès opened up much deeper possibilities for cinema than most of us acknowledge. As pointed out in the A Matter of Film video above, the motion pictures made before this amounted to exhibits of daily life: impressive as technological demonstrations (and, so the legend goes, harrowing for the viewers of 1896, who feared a train approaching onscreen would run them over), but nothing as narratives. Like Méliès’ other work, A Trip to the Moon proved that a movie could tell a story. It also proved something more central to the medium’s power: that it could tell that story in such a way that its images linger more than 120 years later, even when the details of what happens have long since lost their interest.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Sir Isaac Newton, arguably the most important and influential scientist in history, discovered the laws of motion and the universal force of gravity. For the first time ever, the rules of the universe could be described with the supremely rational language of mathematics. Newton’s elegant equations proved to be one of the inspirations for the Enlightenment, a shift away from the God-centered dogma of the Church in favor of a worldview that placed reason at its center. The many leaders of the Enlightenment turned to deism if not outright atheism. But not Newton.
In 1936, a document of Newton’s dating from around 1662 was sold at a Sotheby’s auction and eventually wound up at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England. The Fitzwilliam Manuscript has long been a source of fascination for Newton scholars. Not only does the notebook feature a series of increasingly difficult mathematical problems but also a cryptic string of letters reading:
Nabed Efyhik
Wfnzo Cpmfke
If you can solve this, there are some people in Cambridge who would like to talk to you.
But what makes the document really interesting is how incredibly personal it is. Newton rattles off a laundry list of sins he committed during his relatively short life – he was around 20 when he wrote this, still a student at Cambridge. He splits the list into two categories, before Whitsunday 1662 and after. (Whitsunday is, by the way, the Sunday of the feast of Whitsun, which is celebrated seven weeks after Easter.) Why he decided on that particular date to bifurcate his timeline isn’t immediately clear.
Some of the sins are rather opaque. I’m not sure what, for instance, “Making a feather while on Thy day” means exactly but it sure sounds like a long-lost euphemism. Other sins like “Peevishness with my mother” are immediately relatable as good old-fashioned teenage churlishness. You can see the full list below. And you can read the full document over at the Newton Project here.
Before Whitsunday 1662
1. Vsing the word (God) openly
2. Eating an apple at Thy house
3. Making a feather while on Thy day
4. Denying that I made it.
5. Making a mousetrap on Thy day
6. Contriving of the chimes on Thy day
7. Squirting water on Thy day
8. Making pies on Sunday night
9. Swimming in a kimnel on Thy day
10. Putting a pin in Iohn Keys hat on Thy day to pick him.
11. Carelessly hearing and committing many sermons
12. Refusing to go to the close at my mothers command.
13. Threatning my father and mother Smith to burne them and the house over them
14. Wishing death and hoping it to some
15. Striking many
16. Having uncleane thoughts words and actions and dreamese.
17. Stealing cherry cobs from Eduard Storer
18. Denying that I did so
19. Denying a crossbow to my mother and grandmother though I knew of it
20. Setting my heart on money learning pleasure more than Thee
21. A relapse
22. A relapse
23. A breaking again of my covenant renued in the Lords Supper.
24. Punching my sister
25. Robbing my mothers box of plums and sugar
26. Calling Dorothy Rose a jade
27. Glutiny in my sickness.
28. Peevishness with my mother.
29. With my sister.
30. Falling out with the servants
31. Divers commissions of alle my duties
32. Idle discourse on Thy day and at other times
33. Not turning nearer to Thee for my affections
34. Not living according to my belief
35. Not loving Thee for Thy self.
36. Not loving Thee for Thy goodness to us
37. Not desiring Thy ordinances
38. Not long {longing} for Thee in {illeg}
39. Fearing man above Thee
40. Vsing unlawful means to bring us out of distresses
41. Caring for worldly things more than God
42. Not craving a blessing from God on our honest endeavors.
43. Missing chapel.
44. Beating Arthur Storer.
45. Peevishness at Master Clarks for a piece of bread and butter.
46. Striving to cheat with a brass halfe crowne.
47. Twisting a cord on Sunday morning
48. Reading the history of the Christian champions on Sunday
Since Whitsunday 1662
49. Glutony
50. Glutony
51. Vsing Wilfords towel to spare my own
52. Negligence at the chapel.
53. Sermons at Saint Marys (4)
54. Lying about a louse
55. Denying my chamberfellow of the knowledge of him that took him for a sot.
56. Neglecting to pray 3
57. Helping Pettit to make his water watch at 12 of the clock on Saturday night
“This is a work of fiction,” declares the disclaimer we’ve all noticed during the end credits of movies. “Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.” In most cases, this may seem so trivial that it hardly merits a mention, but the very same disclaimer also rolls up after pictures very clearly intended to represent actual events or persons, living or dead. Most of us would write it all off as one more absurdity created by the elaborate pantomime of American legal culture, but a closer look at its history reveals a much more intriguing origin.
As told in the Cheddar video above, the story begins with Rasputin and the Empress, a 1932 Hollywood movie about the titular real-life mystic and his involvement with the court of Nicholas II, the last emperor of Russia. Having been killed in 1916, Rasputin himself wasn’t around to get litigious about his villainous portrayal (by no less a performer than Lionel Barrymore, incidentally, acting alongside his siblings John and Ethel as the prince and czarina). It was actually one of Rasputin’s surviving killers, an exiled aristocrat named Felix Yusupov, who sued MGM, accusing them of defaming his wife, Princess Irina Yusupov, in the form of the character Princess Natasha.
The film casts Princess Natasha as a supporter of Rasputin, writes Slate’s Duncan Fyfe, “but the mystic, wary of her husband, hypnotizes and rapes her, rendering Natasha — by his logic, with which she agrees — unfit to be a wife. Yusupov contended that as viewers would equate Chegodieff with Yusupov, so would they link Natasha with Irina,” though in reality Irina and Rasputin never even met. In an English court, “the jury found in her favor, awarding her £25,000, or about $125,000. MGM had to take the film out of circulation for decades and purge the offending scene for all time,” though a small piece of it remains in Rasputin and the Empress’ original trailer.
Things might have gone in MGM’s favor had the film not included a title card announcing that “a few of the characters are still alive — the rest met death by violence.” The studio was advised that they’d have done well to declare the exact opposite, a practice soon implemented across Hollywood. It didn’t take long for the movies to start having fun with it, introducing jokey variations on the soon-familiar boilerplate. Less than a decade after Rasputin and the Empress, one nonsensical musical comedy previously featured here on Open Culture) opened with the disclaimer that “any similarity between HELLZAPOPPIN’ and a motion picture is purely coincidental” — a tradition more recently upheld by South Park.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
It’s possible to look at Pablo Picasso’s many formal experiments and periodic shifts of style as a kind of self-portraiture, an exercise in shifting consciousness and trying on of new aesthetic identities. The Spanish modernist made a career of sweeping dramatic gestures, announcements to the world that he was going to be a different kind of artist now, and everyone had better catch up. Even in his most abstract periods, his work radiated with an emotional energy as outsized as the man himself.
18 years old (1900)
Picasso’s animus and vitality even permeate his least inviting painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, a brothel scene with five geometrical women, two with African and Iberian masks; “a painting of nudes in which there is scarcely a curve to be seen,” writes The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones, “elbows sharp as knives, hips and waists geometrical silhouettes, triangle breasts.” The 1907 self-portrait of Picasso at age 25 (below) comes from this period, when the artist began his radical Cubist break with everything that had gone before.
20 years old (1901)
An older version Les Demoiselles d’Avignon contained a male figure, “a stand-in for the painter himself.” Even when he did not appear, at least not in a final version, in his own work, Picasso saw himself there: his moods, his heightened perceptions of reality as he imagined it.
The somber Blue Period paintings, with their moodiness and “themes of poverty, loneliness, and despair,” correspond with his mourning over the suicide of a friend, Catalan artist Carlos Casagemas. The Picasso in the 1901 portrait further up looks gaunt, broken, decades older than his 20 years. In the 1917 drawing further down, however, the artist at 35 looks out at us with a haughty, smooth-cheeked youthful gaze.
24 years old (1906)
During this time, as World War I ended, he had begun to design sets for Diaghilev’s famed Ballets Russes, where he met his wife, ballerina Olga Khokhlova, and moved in comfortable circles, though he was himself desperate for money. Each portrait delivers us a different Picasso, as he sheds one mask and puts on another. Tracing his creative evolution through his portraiture means never moving in a straight line. But we do see his demeanor soften and round progressively over time in his portraits. He seems to grow younger as he ages.
25 years old (1907)
The severe youth of 15, further up, brooding, world-weary, and already an accomplished draughtsman and painter; the grimly serious romantic at 18, above—these Picassos give way to the wide-eyed maturity of the artist at 56 in 1938, at 83, 89, and 90, in 1972, the year before his death. That year he produced an intriguing series of eclectic self-portraits unlike anything he had done before. See these and many others throughout his life below.
In an age when many of us could hardly make our way to an unfamiliar grocery store without relying on a GPS navigation system, we might well wonder how the Romans could establish and sustain their mighty empire without so much as a proper map. That’s the question addressed by the Historia Militumvideo above, “How Did Ancient People Travel Without Maps?” Or more to the point, how did they travel without scaled maps — that is, ones “in which the map’s distances were proportional to their actual size in the real world,” like almost all those we consult on our screens today?
The surviving maps from the ancient Roman world tend not to take great pains adhering to true geography. Yet as the Roman Empire expanded, laying roads across three continents, more and more Romans engaged in long-distance travel, and for the most part seem to have arrived at their intended destinations.
To do so, they used not maps per se but “itineraries,” which textually listed towns and cities along the way and the distance between them. By the fourth century, “all main Roman roads along with 225 stopping stations were compiled in a document called the Itinerarium Antonini, the Itinerary of Emperor Antonius Pius.”
This highly practical document includes mostly roads that “passed through large cities, which provided better facilities for housing, shopping, bathing, and other traveler needs.” With this information, “a traveler could copy the specific distances and stations they needed to reach their destination.” Still today, some seventeen centuries later, “most people wouldn’t use a paper scaled map for travel, but would instead break their journey down into a list of subway stations, bus stops, and intersections.” And if you were to attempt to drive across Europe, making a modern-day Roman Empire road trip, you’d almost certainly rely on the distances and points of interest provided by the synthesized voice reading aloud from the vast Itinerarium Antonini of the twenty-first century.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Charles Mingus, the innovative jazz musician, was known for having a bad temper. He once got so irritated with a heckler that he ended up trashing his $20,000 bass. Another time, when a pianist didn’t get things right, Mingus reached right inside the piano and ripped the strings out with his bare hands — a true story mentioned in the BBC documentary, 1959: The Year that Changed Jazz.
But Mingus had a softer, nurturing side too. If you head to the official Charles Mingus website, you will find a copy of the Charles Mingus Cat Toilet Training Program, a loving little guide created for cat owners everywhere. The trick to potty training your cat comes down to edging the litter box closer to the bathroom, eventually placing the box on the potty, and then cutting a hole in the center of the box. Expect to spend about three weeks making the transition. And who knows, Mingus says, your cat may even learn to flush. The full guide appears here. Or read it below:
1
First, you must train your cat to use a home-made cardboard litter box, if you have not already done so. (If your box does not have a one-piece bottom, add a cardboard that fits inside, so you have a false bottom that is smooth and strong. This way the box will not become soggy and fall out at the bottom. The grocery store will have extra flat cardboards which you can cut down to fit exactly inside your box.)
Be sure to use torn up newspaper, not kitty litter. Stop using kitty litter. (When the time comes you cannot put sand in a toilet.)
Once your cat is trained to use a cardboard box, start moving the box around the room, towards the bathroom. If the box is in a corner, move it a few feet from the corner, but not very noticeably. If you move it too far, he may go to the bathroom in the original corner. Do it gradually. You’ve got to get him thinking. Then he will gradually follow the box as you move it to the bathroom. (Important: if you already have it there, move it out of the bathroom, around, and then back. He has to learn to follow it. If it is too close to the toilet, to begin with, he will not follow it up onto the toilet seat when you move it there.) A cat will look for his box. He smells it.
2
Now, as you move the box, also start cutting the brim of the box down, so the sides get lower. Do this gradually.
Finally, you reach the bathroom and, eventually, the toilet itself. Then, one day, prepare to put the box on top of the toilet. At each corner of the box, cut a little slash. You can run string around the box, through these slashes, and tie the box down to the toilet so it will not fall off. Your cat will see it there and jump up to the box, which is now sitting on top of the toilet (with the sides cut down to only an inch or so.)
Don’t bug the cat now, don’t rush him, because you might throw him off. Just let him relax and go there for awhile-maybe a week or two. Meanwhile, put less and less newspaper inside the box.
3
One day, cut a small hole in the very center of his box, less than an apple-about the size of a plum-and leave some paper in the box around the hole. Right away he will start aiming for the hole and possibly even try to make it bigger. Leave the paper for awhile to absorb the waste. When he jumps up he will not be afraid of the hole because he expects it. At this point you will realize that you have won. The most difficult part is over.
From now on, it is just a matter of time. In fact, once when I was cleaning the box and had removed it from the toilet, my cat jumped up anyway and almost fell in. To avoid this, have a temporary flat cardboard ready with a little hole, and slide it under the toilet lid so he can use it while you are cleaning, in case he wants to come and go, and so he will not fall in and be scared off completely. You might add some newspaper up there too, while you are cleaning, in case your cat is not as smart as Nightlife was.
4
Now cut the box down completely until there is no brim left. Put the flat cardboard, which is left, under the lid of the toilet seat, and pray. Leave a little newspaper, still. He will rake it into the hole anyway, after he goes to the bathroom. Eventually, you can simply get rid of the cardboard altogether. You will see when he has got his balance properly.
Don’t be surprised if you hear the toilet flush in the middle of the night. A cat can learn how to do it, spurred on by his instinct to cover up. His main thing is to cover up. If he hits the flush knob accidentally and sees that it cleans the bowl inside, he may remember and do it intentionally.
Also, be sure to turn the toilet paper roll around so that it won’t roll down easily if the cat paws it. The cat is apt to roll it into the toilet, again with the intention of covering up- the way he would if there were still kitty litter.
It took me about three or four weeks to toilet train my cat, Nightlife. Most of the time is spent moving the box very gradually to the bathroom. Do it very slowly and don’t confuse him. And, remember, once the box is on the toilet, leave it a week or even two. The main thing to remember is not to rush or confuse him.
Bonus: Below you can hear The Wire’s Reg E. Cathey read “The Charles Mingus CAT-alog for Toilet Training Your Cat.”
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
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!
In 2023, Google launched several online certificate programs designed to help students land an entry-level job, without necessarily having a college degree. This includes a certificate program focused on Cybersecurity, a field that stands poised to grow as companies become more digital and face mounting cyberattacks.
Understand the importance of cybersecurity practices and their impact for organizations.
Identify common risks, threats, and vulnerabilities, as well as techniques to mitigate them.
Protect networks, devices, people, and data from unauthorized access and cyberattacks using Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tools.
Gain hands-on experience with Python, Linux, and SQL.
The Cybersecurity Professional Certificate also now includes six new videos that explain how to use AI in cybersecurity. The videos cover everything from using artificial intelligence to help identify bugs and system vulnerabilities, to refining code and prioritizing alerts with AI.
Students can take individual courses in these professional certificate programs for free. (Above, you can watch a video from the first course in the cybersecurity certificate program, entitled “Foundations of Cybersecurity.”) However, if you would like to receive a certificate, Coursera will charge $49 per month (after an initial 7‑day free trial period). That means that the Cybersecurity Professional Certificate, designed to be completed in 6 months, will cost roughly $300 in total.
Once students complete the cybersecurity certificate, they can add the credential to their LinkedIn profile, resume, or CV. As a perk, students in the U.S. can also connect with 150+employers (e.g., American Express, Colgate-Palmolive, T‑Mobile, Walmart, and Google) who have pledged to consider certificate holders for open positions. According to Coursera, this certificate can prepare students to become an entry-level “cybersecurity analyst and SOC (security operations center) analyst.”
You can start a 7‑day free trial of the Cybersecurity Professional Certificatehere. Alternatively, if you sign up for Coursera Plus, whose price has been reduced by 40% until December 2, 2024, you can enroll in the cybersecurity certificate program at no charge. Find out more here.
Note: Open Culture has a partnership with Coursera. If readers enroll in certain Coursera courses and programs, it helps support Open Culture.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
