Generative AI is rapidly becoming an essential tool for streamlining work and solving complex challenges. However, knowing how to use GenAI effectively isn’t always obvious. That’s where Google Prompting Essentials comes in. This course will teach you to write clear and specific instructions—known as prompts—for AI. Once you can prompt well, you can unlock generative AI’s potential more fully.
Launched in April, Google Prompting Essentials has become the most popular GenAI course offered on Coursera. The course itself is divided into four modules. First, “Start Writing Prompts Like a Pro” will teach you a 5‑step method for crafting effective prompts. (Watch the video from Module 1 above, and more videos here.) With the second module, “Design Prompts for Everyday Work Tasks,” you will learn how to use AI to draft emails, brainstorm ideas, and summarize documents. The third module, “Speed Up Data Analysis and Presentation Building,” teaches techniques for uncovering insights in data, visualizing results, and preparing presentations. The final module, “Use AI as a Creative or Expert Partner,” explores advanced techniques such as prompt chaining and multimodal prompting. Plus, you will “create a personalized AI agent to role-play conversations and provide expert feedback.”
Offered on the Coursera platform, Google Prompting Essentials costs $49. Once you complete the course, you will receive a certificate from Google to share with your network and employer. Better yet, you will understand how to make GenAI a more useful tool in your life and work. Enroll here.
Note: Open Culture has a partnership with Coursera. If readers enroll in certain Coursera courses and programs, it helps support Open Culture.
As Christmastime approaches, few novelists come to mind as readily as Charles Dickens. This owes mainly, of course, to A Christmas Carol, and even more so to its many adaptations, most of which draw inspiration from not just its text but also its illustrations. That 1843 novella was just the first of five books he wrote with the holiday as a theme, a series that also includes The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, andThe Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain. Each “included drawings he worked on with illustrators,” writes BBC News’ Tim Stokes, though “none of them displays quite the iconic merriment of his initial Christmas creation.”
“Anyone looking at the illustrations to the Christmas books after A Christmas Carol and expecting similar images to Mr Fezziwig’s Ball is going to be disappointed,” Stokes quotes independent scholar Dr. Michael John Goodman as saying.
Primarily concerned less with Christmas as a holiday and more “with the spirit of Christmas and its ideals of selflessness and forgiveness, as well as being a voice for the poor and the needy,” Dickens “had to create some very dark scenarios to give this message power and resonance, and these can be seen in the illustrations.”
Goodman’s name may sound familiar to dedicated Open Culture readers, since we’ve previously featured his online Charles Dickens Illustrated Gallery, whose digitized art collection has been growing ever since. It now contains over 2,100 illustrations, including not just A Christmas Carolandallitssuccessors, but all of Dickens’ books from his early collection of observational pieces Sketches by Boz to his final, incomplete novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood. And those are just the originals: every true Dickens enthusiast sooner or later gets into the differences between the waves of editions that have been published over the better part of two centuries.
The Charles Dickens Illustrated Gallery has entire sections dedicated to the posthumous “Household Edition,” which have even more art than the originals; the later “Library Edition,” from 1910, featuring the work of esteemed and prolific illustrator Harry Furniss; and even the 1912 “Pears Edition” of the Christmas books, put out by the eponymous soap company in celebration of the centenary of Dickens’ birth. But none of them quite matched the lavishness of that first Christmas Carol, on which Dickens had decided to go all out: as Goodman writes, “it would have eight illustrations, four of which would be in color, and it would have gilt edges and colored endpapers.” Alas, this extravagance “left Dickens with very little profit” — and with an unusually pragmatic but nevertheless unforgettable Christmas lesson about keeping costs down. Enter the Charles Dickens Illustrated Gallery 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 the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
When Jon Pertwee reincarnated into Tom Baker in 1974, the Fourth Doctor of the popular sci-fi show Doctor Who ditched the foppish look of velvet jackets and frilly shirts, and went for the “Romantic adventurer” style, with floppy felt hat, long overcoats and, most iconically, his multicolored scarf.
Fan legend has it that costume designer James Acheson picked up a load of multi-color wool and asked knitter Begonia Pope to create a scarf, and Pope, perhaps mishearing, used *all* the wool, resulting in a scarf that ran 12 feet long. The mistake was perfect, and suddenly many UK grandmothers were being asked by their grandchildren to recreate their hero’s look.
The above memo isn’t dated, but comes from sometime in the early ‘80s when the BBC sent detailed instructions to a fan’s mother on making the scarf. (Click here, then click again, to view the document in a larger format.) The colors include camel, rust, bronze, mustard, grey, green and purple and should be knitted with size four needles (that’s #9 US size). The requests must have come regularly, because a similar memo is reprinted from many years later to another fan’s family.
The original scarf only lasted a few episodes, then was altered, replaced, and subtly changed as the show went on. There were stunt scarves for stand-ins.
Come Season 18, costume designer June Hudson rethought the entire costume and streamlined the colors to three: rust, wine, and purple, to match the Doctor’s more swashbuckling look. It also became the longest scarf of the series, some 20 feet.
The following year, the Doctor reincarnated again into a cricket-jumper and striped trouser-wearing young blonde man. The Scarf Years were over.
For a very in-depth look at the scarves, including Pantone color references and wool brands, there is nothing better than DoctorWhoScarf.com. So, get knitting, Who-vians!
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
If ZZ Top have a favorite ancient Egyptian deity, that deity is surely Bes, whom the New York Times’ Alexander Nazaryan quotes curator and scholar Branko van Oppen de Ruiter as calling “a beer drinker and a hell-raiser.” In a paper published last month in Scientific Reports, Van Oppen and fifteen collaborators call the rowdy but apparently benevolent Bes “one of the most fascinating and wildly popular figures of ancient Egyptian religion,” and he’s come to modern public attention thanks to the subject of that paper: a 2,000-year-old cup molded in the shape of his head that has tested positive for traces of psychedelic substances — as well as alcohol and bodily fluids.
Their analysis of the mug, a 3D model of which you can examine above, “yielded evidence of two plants known to have hallucinogenic properties: Syrian rue and the blue water lily,” writes Nazaryan, and it also bore traces of “a fermented alcoholic liquid derived from fruit,” then sweetened with pine nuts, honey, and licorice.
Those were the sorts of ingredients ancient Egyptians had at hand to make the medicine go down — if medicine it was. Nazaryan quotes digital archaeologist Davide Tanasi, whose lab performed the research, citing the traces of substances like blood and breast milk as underscoring that “this is a magical potion,” rather than one intended as purely curative.
Bes, as Van Oppen and his collaborators write, “emerged from the magical realm of the world of demons as a guardian figure,” and by the Roman Imperial age “sporadically acquired divine worship.” He “provided protection from danger, while simultaneously averting harm” — and also “had a certain regenerative importance contributing to the fulfillment and happiness of family life in all facets of reproduction, from virility and sexuality, via fertility and fecundity, to childbirth and growth.” Hence the speculation that women hoping to become pregnant would drink the potion from his head in order to take a psychedelic journey that would set them on the path to motherhood. That’s hardly the most efficient means to the end, as we’d see it today, but given the birthrates of increasingly many societies across the world, we moderns may find ourselves in need of Bes’ assistance yet.
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 the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Edgar Allan Poe achieved almost instant fame during his lifetime after the publication of The Raven(1845), but he never felt that he received the recognition he deserved. In some respects, he was right. He was, after all, paid only nine dollars for the poem, and he struggled before and after its publication to make a living from his writing.
Poe was one of the first American writers to do so without independent means. His work largely met with mixed reviews and he was fired from job after job, partly because of his drinking. After his death, however, Poe’s influence dominated emerging modernist movements like that of the decadent poetry of Charles Baudelaire (who called Poe his “twin soul”) and his symbolist disciple Stéphane Mallarmé.
Mallarmé would write of Poe, “His century appalled at never having heard / That in this voice triumphant death had sung its hymn.” To bring that hymn of death, the raven’s cry of “Nevermore,” to French readers, he made a translation of The Raven, Le Corbeau, in 1875 at age 33.
Poe also had a tremendous influence on the visual arts in France. Illustrating the text was none other than Édouard Manet, the painter credited with the genesis of impressionism. The resulting engravings, rendered in dark, heavy smudges, give us the poem’s unnamed, bereaved speaker as the young Mallarmé, unmistakable with his pushbroom mustache.
The book also illustrates the reciprocal relationship between Poe and French art and literature. Chris Semtner, curator of a Richmond, Virginia exhibit on this mutual influence, remarks that Poe “read Voltaire among other French authors”—such as Alexandre Dumas—“in college” and found them highly influential. Likewise, Poe left his mark not only on Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Manet, but also Paul Gauguin, Odilon Redon, and Henri Matisse.
Even the least religious among us speak, at least on occasion, of the circles of hell. When we do so, we may or may not be thinking of where the concept originated: Dante’s Divina Commedia, or Divine Comedy. We each imagine the circles in our own way — usually filling them with sinners and punishments inspired by our own distastes — but some of Dante’s earlier readers did so with a seriousness and precision that may now seem extreme. “The first cosmographer of Dante’s universe was the Florentine polymath Antonio Manetti,” writes the Public Domain Review’s Hunter Dukes, who “concluded that hell was 3246 miles wide and 408 miles deep.” A young Galileo suggested that “the Inferno’s vaulted ceiling was supported by the same physical principles as Brunelleschi’s dome.”
In 1855, the aristocrat sculptor-politician-Dante scholar Michelangelo Caetani published his own precise artistic renderings of not just the Inferno, but also the Purgatorio and Paradiso, in La materia della Divina commedia di Dante Alighieri dichiarata in VI tavole, or The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri Described in Six Plates.
“The first plate offers an overview of Dante’s cosmography, leading from the lowest circle of the Inferno up through the nine heavenly spheres to Empyrean, the highest level of Paradise and the dwelling place of God,” writes Dukes. “The Inferno is visualized with a cutaway style,” its circles “like geological layers”; terraced like a wedding cake, “Purgatory is rendered at eye level, from the perspective of some lucky soul sailing by this island-mountain.”
In Paradise, “the Inferno and Purgatory are now small blips on the page, worlds left behind, encircled by Mercury, Venus, Saturn, and the other heavenly spheres.” At the very top is “the candida rosa, an amphitheater structure reserved for the souls of heaven” where “Dante leaves behind Beatrice, his true love and guide, to come face-to-face with God and the Trinity.” You can examine these and other illustrations at the Public Domain Review or Cornell University Library’s digital collections, which adds that they come from “a second version of this work produced by Caetani using the then-novel technology of chromolithography” in 1872, “produced in a somewhat smaller format by the monks at Monte Cassino” — a crew who could surely be trusted to believe in the job.
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 the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
I mean, the idea that you would give a psychedelic—in this case, magic mushrooms or the chemical called psilocybin that’s derived from magic mushrooms—to people dying of cancer, people with terminal diagnoses, to help them deal with their — what’s called existential distress. And this seemed like such a crazy idea that I began looking into it. Why should a drug from a mushroom help people deal with their mortality?
Around the same time Albert Hofmann synthesized LSD in the early 1940s, a pioneering ethnobotanist, writer, and photographer named Richard Evan Schultes set out “on a mission to study how indigenous peoples” in the Amazon rainforest “used plants for medicinal, ritual and practical purposes,” as an extensive history of Schultes’ travels notes. “He went on to spend over a decade immersed in near-continuous fieldwork, collecting more than 24,000 species of plants including some 300 species new to science.”
Described by Jonathan Kandell as “swashbuckling” in a 2001 New York Times obituary, Schultes was “the last of the great plant explorers in the Victorian tradition.” Or so his student Wade Davis called him in his 1995 bestseller The Serpent and the Rainbow. He was also “a pioneering conservationist,” writes Kandell, “who raised alarms in the 1960’s—long before environmentalism became a worldwide concern.” Schultes defied the stereotype of the colonial adventurer, once saying, “I do not believe in hostile Indians. All that is required to bring out their gentlemanliness is reciprocal gentlemanliness.”
Schultes returned to teach at Harvard, where he reminded his students “that more than 90 tribes had become extinct in Brazil alone over the first three-quarters of the 20th century.” While his research would have significant influence on figures like Aldous Huxley, William Burroughs, and Carlos Castaneda, “writers who considered hallucinogens as the gateways to self-discovery,” Schultes was dismissive of the counterculture and “disdained these self-appointed prophets of an inner reality.”
Described onAmazon as “a nontechnical examination of the physiological effects and cultural significance of hallucinogenic plants used in ancient and modern societies,” the book covers peyote, ayahuasca, cannabis, various psychoactive mushrooms and other fungi, and much more. In his introduction, Schultes is careful to separate his research from its appropriation, dismissing the term “psychedelic” as etymologically incorrect and “biologically unsound.” Furthermore, he writes, it “has acquired popular meanings beyond the drugs or their effects.”
Schultes’ interests are scientific—and anthropological. “In the history of mankind,” he writes, “hallucinogens have probably been the most important of all the narcotics. Their fantastic effects made them sacred to primitive man and may even have been responsible for suggesting to him the idea of deity.” He does not exaggerate. Schultes’ research into the religious and medicinal uses of natural hallucinogens led him to dub them “plants of the gods” in a book he wrote with Albert Hofmann, discoverer of LSD.
Neither scientist sought to start a psychedelic revolution, but it happened nonetheless. Now, another revolution is underway—one that is finally revisiting the science of ethnobotany and taking seriously the healing powers of hallucinogenic plants. It is hardly a new science among scholars in the West, but the renewed legitimacy of research into hallucinogens has given Schultes’ research new authority. Learn from him in his Golden Guide to Hallucinogenic Plants online here.
If you’ve read one work of Hannah Arendt’s, it’s probably Eichmann in Jerusalem, her account of the trial of the eponymous Nazi official — and the source of her much-quoted phrase “the banality of evil.” That book came out in 1963, at which time Arendt still had a dozen productive years left. In fact, at the time of her sudden death in 1975, she had in her typewriter the first page of what would have been the third volume of her final work, The Life of the Mind. In its two completed volumes, she investigates the nature of thought and action, a preoccupation with the relationship between thinking and morality having been fired up within her at the Eichmann trial.
“The Life of the Mind” also appears atop the syllabus, recently posted by Arendt biographer Samantha Rose Hill, for “206: Thinking,” a class Arendt taught in 1974 at the New School for Social Research. Encompassing a range of philosophers from Aristotle, Cicero, and Plato to Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger (a figure with whom she could claim a more intimate familiarity than most), it seems to have offered a reasonably thorough survey of the figures we think of when we think of thinking itself.
Arendt had apparently adapted some of the content from the 1973–1974 Gifford Lectures she had delivered in Aberdeen, which themselves condensed material from her courses on “Basic Moral Propositions,” “Thinking,” “The History of the Will,” and “Kant’s Critique of Judgment.”
Arendt’s teaching at the New School, in “Thinking” and other courses like “Philosophy of the Mind,” sheds a bit of light on what would have gone into the unwritten third volume of The Life of the Mind, or at least into the arc of the trilogy as a whole. Volumes one and two, drafts of which she put into circulation among her graduate students, were called Thinking and Willing; the third was to have been Judging, by far the thorniest mental activity of the set. It would be worth hearing from former New School students of the mid-seventies who retain any classroom memories of what she had to say on the subject. As for the rest of us, we can at least still do all the reading for “Thinking,” then judge for ourselves. You can find the syllabus on the Library of Congress website.
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 the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Let’s rewind the videotape and revisit a classic moment in The Dick Van Dyke Show. In the 1962 episode called “Hustling the Hustler,” Mary Tyler Moore (as Laura Petrie) plays pool and sinks three balls in a single shot. The original plan was to splice in footage of a professional pool player making the shot, but Moore surprised everyone, including herself, by nailing it on the first try. Watching Moore and Van Dyke recover from their astonishment and improvise through the scene is priceless—a perfect way to start your Monday.
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The story of Jean-Michel Basquiat has its unfortunate aspects: not just his premature death, but also the aggressive marketing of his work and persona in the years leading up to it. He became a vogue artist of the eighties in part because he could be taken as an unfiltered voice of the street, crafting his outsider-artistic visions on pure, untutored impulse. But despite genuinely having come from a poor, troubled background — and lived according to what seems to have been a strong anti-academic inclination — Basquiat’s professional development was much more serious and deliberate than many of his buyers could have imagined.
The other was Robert Farris Thompson’s Flash of the Spirit: Afro-American Art & Philosophy, which gave him a “guiding ideology” to get him past the inevitable artistic roadblocks: he could always return to “the under-representation of black art in the established art world,” and “when you have a message, art comes out of you easily.”
But Basquiat also had the advantage of being able to work very quickly indeed, which is what brought him to the attention of Andy Warhol: “When one of the most prolific artists of all time is jealous of your speed, you know you’re doing something right.” Thinking too much interrupts your flow, but if you create as fast as you can, thoughts won’t have a chance to intrude. And remember, “most of the flow that you will have while making art will come from all the things you are doing when you are not making art.” Sadly, Basquiat died before the age of the internet — but if he hadn’t, you can bet he’d be spending his downtime absorbing something more interesting than social media.
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 the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Hip-hop was once a subculture, but by now it’s long since been one of the unquestionably dominant forms of popular music — not just in America, and not just among young people. There are, of course, still a fair few hip-hop holdouts, but even they’ve come to know a thing or two about it through cultural osmosis alone. They’re aware, for example — whether or not they approve of it — that rappers usually perform over music constructed through sampling: that is, stitched together out of pieces of other songs. If you’re not sure how it works, you can see the process clearly visualized in the video above from sample provider Tracklib.
Offering a breakdown of sampling as it’s happened through “fifty years of hip-hop,” the video begins even before the genre really took shape, in 1973. It was then that DJ Kool Herc developed what he called “the ‘Merry-Go-Round’ Technique,” an early example of which involved using dual turntables to switch back and forth between the instrumental breaks of James Brown’s “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose” and the Incredible Bongo Band’s “Bongo Rock.” The original idea was to give dancers more time to do their thing, but when the MCs picked up their microphones and started getting creative, a new music took shape almost immediately.
Mainstream America got its first taste of hip-hop in 1979, with the release of “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang. In its repeating rhythm part, many would have recognized Chic’s “Good Times,” which actually wasn’t a sample but an interpolation, i.e. a re-recording. This drew a lawsuit — hardly the last of its kind in hip-hop — but it also set thousands of DJs-to-be digging through their record collections in search of usable breaks. Disco proved a fount of inspiration for early hip-hop, but so did jazz and even electronic music, as demonstrated by Afrika Bambaataa and the Soul Sonic Force’s “Planet Rock,” which sampled Kraftwerk’s “Trans-Europe Express.”
As sampling goes, nothing is artistically off-limits; in some sense, the less immediately recognizable, the better. With the evolution of audio editing technology, hip-hop artists have long gone even further in making these borrowed clips their own by slowing them down; speeding them up; chopping them into pieces and rearranging them; and layering them one atop another. This sometimes causes problems, as when the difficulty of licensing De La Soul’s many and varied source materials kept their catalog out of official availability. Along with A Tribe Called Quest, also featured in this video, De La Soul are, of course, known as hip-hop groups beloved by music nerds. But if you seriously break down any major work of hip-hop, you’ll find that all its artists are music nerds at heart.
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.
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