The Grateful Dead’s groundbreaking fusion of music, counterculture, and community engagement forged an enduring legacy that transcends generations while shaping the evolution of music and cultural expression. Fresh off the farewell performance of Dead & Company in San Francisco in July, this course invites students to delve into the phenomenon that is the Grateful Dead through a captivating exploration of the band’s history, music, and cultural impact.
The course will start by tracing the band’s evolution, from its humble beginnings to its legendary status as one of the most influential bands in music history. We will explore the band’s formation, the early San Francisco music scene, its unique approach to touring, and the various eras of its existence. We’ll next embark on a sonic journey through the band’s diverse and ever-evolving musical catalog. Students will dissect the distinctive blend of rock, folk, blues, and improvisation that defined the Grateful Dead’s sound.
Finally, we’ll examine the band’s cultural impact on society, diving into the band’s connection to art, literature, and social change, as well as its unique fan culture and the phenomenon of the “Deadhead.” By the end of the course, students will have a well-rounded appreciation for the roots, struggles, and milestones that shaped the Grateful Dead’s trajectory, an understanding of its profound impact on music and culture, and insight into a legacy that still resonates deeply today.
Guest speakers for this course will include Steve Silberman, who was featured in the documentary Long Strange Trip and is a regular voice on the Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast. He is also a co-author of Skeleton Key: A Dictionary for Deadheads.
Again, the course starts on Monday, January 22. Tuition is $405. You can enroll here.
Stanford Continuing Studies also offers many other courses online, across many disciplines, at a reasonable price. Check out the catalogue here.
In 1966, Paul McCartney famously sang of “all the lonely people,” wondering aloud where they come from. Nearly six decades later, their numbers seem only to have increased; as for their origin, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and Zen priest Robert Waldinger has made it a longtime professional concern. “Starting in the nineteen fifties, and going all the way through to today, we know that people have been less and less invested in other people,” he says in the Big Think video above. “In some studies, as many as 60 percent of people will say that they feel lonely much of the time,” a feeling “pervasive across the world, across all age groups, all income groups, all demographics.”
“Having an extensive network of friends is no guarantee against loneliness,” writes the late sociologist Ray Oldenburg in The Great Good Place. “Nor does membership in voluntary associations, the ‘instant communities’ of our mobile society, ensure against social isolation and attendant feelings of boredom and alienation. The network of friends has no unity and no home base.” He names as a key factor the disappearance, especially in American life since World War II, of “convenient and open-ended socializing — places where individuals can go without aim or arrangement and be greeted by people who know them and know how to enjoy a little time off.”
Oldenburg’s elegy for and defense of “cafés, coffee shops, community centers, general stores, bars,” and other engines of community life, was published in 1989, well before the rise of social media — which Waldinger frames as the latest stage in a process that began with television. As more American homes acquired sets of their own, “there was a decline in investing in our communities. People went out less, they joined clubs less often. They went to houses of worship less often. They invited people over less often.” Then, “the digital revolution gave us more and more screens to look at, and software that was designed specifically to grab our attention, hold our attention, and therefore keep it away from the people we care about.”
We also know, he continues, that “people with strong social bonds are much less likely to die in any given year than people without strong social bonds.” This is a credible claim, given that he happens to direct the now 85-year-long Harvard Study of Adult Development. In 2016, we featured Waldinger’s TED Talk on some of its findings here on Open Culture. Before that, we posted a PBS BrainCraft video that considers the Harvard Study of Adult Development along with other research on the contributing factors to happiness, a body of work that, taken together, points to the importance of love — which, even if it isn’t all you need, is certainly something you need. And thus one more Beatles lyric continues to resonate.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
From the guy who brought you 51 Propaganda Techniques Explained in 11 Minutes comes this: Every Political Ideology Explained in 8 Minutes. You get the usual suspects–conservatism, liberalism, socialism, communism and fascism. And then some less frequently encountered ideologies: transhumanism, syndicalism, and communitarianism. By the end, he covers 23 different belief systems that organize our political and economic lives. The video is brief, necessarily superficial. But it’s a place to start. To take a deeper dive, you can explore Andrew Heywood’s book, Political Ideologies: An Introduction.
Your hosts Mark, Lawrence, Sarahlyn, and Al explore the characteristics of Jewish comedy with stand-up/graphic novelist Daniel, whose film Reconquistador explores his ancestors being kicked out of Spain. What’s the connection of Jewish humor to anti-semitism?
We talk about relating as a creator to your identity, Jewish people seeing themselves in film and TV, the experience of literally seeing yourself in a film, Jewish comedy as philosophy or social commentary, and “Jewish humor” vs. humor by people who happen to be Jewish.
We touch on Mel Brooks, Larry David, Adam Sandler, Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, and feminist Jewish comedy shows such as Broad City, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and Inside Amy Schumer.
FYI this was recorded back in early November when the Gaza war and its accompanying flurry of anti-Semitism was a bit more raw.
Hear more Pretty Much Pop, including many recent episodes that you haven’t seen on this site. Support the show and hear bonus talking for this and nearly every other episode at patreon.com/prettymuchpop or by choosing a paid subscription through Apple Podcasts. This week our supporter-exclusive Aftertalk includes our stories of seeing elderly performers; should you run out and see so-and-so before they’re dead?
“When I first encountered Wright’s work as an eight-year-old boy, it was the space and the light that got me all excited,” says Stuart Graff in the Architectural Digest video above. “I now understand why that gives us the feeling that it does, why we feel different in a Frank Lloyd Wright house. That’s because he uses space and light to create this sense of intimacy with the world around us.” As luck would have it, Graff has grown up to become president and CEO of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, and it is in that capacity that he leads us through one of the renowned American architect’s last projects, a 1955 house along the Noroton River in New Canaan, Connecticut called Tirranna.
“While Tirranna was being built, Wright was in New York City working on his largest commission, the Guggenheim Museum,” says Graff. Also known as the Rayward–Shepherd House, Tirranna is certainly less widely known than the Guggenheim, and indeed, less widely known than some of Wright’s other residential work.
But as his private houses go, Tiranna’s “setting rivals even perhaps Wright’s most famous work, Fallingwater, in the way that house engages nature.” Built along a curve that “follows the movement of the sun through the day” and textured with contrasting concrete block and Philippine mahogany — not to mention plenty of glass through which to take in the landscape outside — it stands as a rich example of late Wright.
And rich is what you’d better be if you want to live it: according to a notice published in Architectural Digest, Tirranna went on the market last year for an asking price of $8 million. Its 7,000 square feet make it one of Wright’s “largest and most expansive residential projects”; the “low-slung main home is designed in a hemicycle style — a uniquely Wright shape — and features seven bedrooms, eight bathrooms, a rooftop observatory, and a wine cellar that has been converted into a bomb shelter.” It even boasts the distinction of Wright himself having stayed there, during the time he was still working on the Guggenheim. For a deep-pocketed enthusiast of twentieth-century American architecture, there could hardly be a more intriguing prospect in New Canaan — as least since the Glass House isn’t for sale.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
During the 1940s and 50s, Hollywood entered a “noir” period, producing riveting films based on hard-boiled fiction. These films were set in dark locations and shot in a black & white aesthetic that fit like a glove. Hardened men wore fedoras and forever smoked cigarettes. Women played the femme fatale role brilliantly. Love was the surest way to death. All of these elements figured into what Roger Ebert calls “the most American film genre” in his short Guide to Film Noir.
If you head over to this list of Noir Films, you can find 60 films from the noir genre, including some classics by John Huston, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang and Ida Lupino. The list also features some cinematic legends like Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson, and even Frank Sinatra. Hope the collection helps you put some noir entertainment into 2024!
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From the time that a nameless genius in either Ethiopia or Yemen decided to dry, crush and strain water through a berry known for making goats nervous and jumpy, coffee has been loved and worshiped like few other beverages. Early Arab doctors proclaimed the stuff to be a miracle drug. Thoroughly caffeinated thinkers from Voltaire to Jonathan Swift to Jack Kerouac debated literature, philosophy and everything in between at coffee houses. Author Honoré Balzac even reportedly died because of excessive coffee drinking (it was either that or the syphilis.)
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) was also apparently a coffee enthusiast. So much so that he wrote a composition about the beverage. Although known mostly for his liturgical music, his Coffee Cantata (AKA Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht, BWV 211) is a rare example of a secular work by the composer. The short comic opera was written (circa 1735) for a musical ensemble called The Collegium Musicum based in a storied Zimmerman’s coffee house in Leipzig, Germany. The whole cantata seems very much to have been written with the local audience in mind.
Coffee Cantata is about a young vivacious woman named Aria who loves coffee. Her killjoy father is, of course, dead set against his daughter having any kind of caffeinated fun. So he tries to ban her from the drink. Aria bitterly complains:
Father sir, but do not be so harsh!
If I couldn’t, three times a day,
be allowed to drink my little cup of coffee,
in my anguish I will turn into
a shriveled-up roast goat.
Ah! How sweet coffee tastes,
more delicious than a thousand kisses,
milder than muscatel wine.
Coffee, I have to have coffee,
and, if someone wants to pamper me,
ah, then bring me coffee as a gift!
The copywriters at Starbucks marketing department couldn’t have written it any better. Eventually, daughter and father reconcile when he agrees to have a guaranteed three cups of coffee a day written into her marriage contract. You can watch it in its entirety below, or get a quick taste above. The lyrics in German and English can be read here.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.
Artist Jim Sanborn’s massive sculpture Kryptos may inspire various reactions in its viewers, but there’s definitely a single correct interpretation.
But 78-year-old Sanborn isn’t saying what…
He wants someone else to identify it.
Kryptos’ main mystery — more like “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” to quote Winston Churchill — was hand cut into an S‑shaped copper screen using jigsaws.
Image courtesy of the CIA
Professional cryptanalysts, hobbyists, and students have been attempting to crack the code of its 865 letters and 4 question marks since 1990, when it was installed on the grounds of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
The hands-on part fell well within Sanborn’s purview. But a Masters in sculpture from Pratt Institute does not automatically confer cryptography bonafides, so Sanborn enlisted Edward Scheidt, the retired chairman of the CIA’s Cryptographic Center, for a crash course in late 20th-century coding systems.
Sanborn sampled various coding methods for the finished piece, wanting the act of deciphering to feel like “peeling layers off an onion.”
Gillogly arrived at his solution in 1999, using a Pentium II.
Stein reached the same conclusion a year earlier, after chipping away at it for some 400 hours with pencil and paper, though the CIA kept his achievement on the down low until Gillogly went public with his.
The following year the National Security Agency claimed that four of their employees, working collaboratively, had reached an identical solution in 1992, a fact corroborated by documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
This still leaves the 97-character phrase from the final panel up for grabs. Cracking it will be the penultimate step in solving Kryptos’ puzzle. As Sanborn told NPR in 2020, “that phrase is in itself a riddle:”
It’s mysterious. It’s going to lead to something else. It’s not going to be finished when it’s decoded.
The public is welcome to continue making educated guesses.
Sanborn has leaked three clues over the years, all words that can be found in the final passage of decrypted text.
BERLIN, at positions 64 — 69 (2010)
CLOCK, at positions 70 — 74 (2014)
NORTHEAST, at position 26 — 34
Have you solved it, yet?
No?
Don’t feel bad…
Sanborn has been fielding incorrect answers daily for decades, though a rising tide of aggressive and racist messages led him to charge 50 bucks per submission, to which he responds via e‑mail, with absolutely no hope of hints.
Kryptos’ most dedicated fans, like game developer /cryptologist Elonka Dunin, seen plying Sanborn with copious quantities of sushi above in Great Big Story’s video, find value in working together and, sometimes, in person.
Their dream is that Sanborn might inadvertently let slip a valuable tidbit in their presence, though that seems like a long shot.
The artist claims to have gotten very skilled at maintaining a poker face.
(Wait, does that suggest his interlocutors have been getting warmer?)
Dunin has relinquished all fantasies of solving Kryptos solo, and now works to help someone — anyone — solve it.
Sanford has put a contingency plan in place in case no one ever manages to get to the bottom of the Kryptos (ancient Greek for “hidden”) conundrum.
He, or representatives of his estate, will auction off the solution. He is content with letting the winning bidder decide whether or not to share what’s been revealed to them.
“I do realize that the value of Kryptos is unknown and that perhaps this concept will bear little fruit,” he told the New York Times, though if one takes the masses of people desperate to learn the solution and factors in Sanford’s intention to donate all proceeds to climate research, it may well bear quite a healthy amount of fruit.
Join Elonka Dunin’s online community of Kryptos enthusiasts here.
To give you a taste of what you’re in for, here are the first two panels, followed by their solutions, with the artist’s intentional misspellings intact.
1. Encrypted Text
EMUFPHZLRFAXYUSDJKZLDKRNSHGNFIVJ
YQTQUXQBQVYUVLLTREVJYQTMKYRDMFD
Decrypted Text
Between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of iqlusion.
Decrypted Text
It was totally invisible Hows that possible? They used the Earths magnetic field X
The information was gathered and transmitted undergruund to an unknown location X
Does Langley know about this? They should Its buried out there somewhere X
Who knows the exact location? Only WW This was his last message X
Thirty eight degrees fifty seven minutes six point five seconds north
Seventy seven degrees eight minutes forty four seconds west ID by rows
View step by step solutions for the first three of Kryptos’ encrypted panels here.
After serving two terms as the first President of the United States of America, George Washington refused to continue on to a third. We now see this action as beginning the tradition of peaceful relinquishment of power that has continued more or less ever since (interrupted, as in recent years, by the occasional troubled transition). At the time, not everyone expected Washington to step down, history having mostly offered examples of rulers who hung on until the bitter end. But the new republic’s creation of not just rules but customs resulted in a variety of unusual political events; even Washington’s election was “weirder than you think.”
So declares history Youtuber Premodernist in the video above, an explanation of the very first United States presidential election in 1789. “There were no official candidates. There was no campaigning for the office. There were no political parties, no nominating conventions, no primary elections. The entire election season was very short, and the major issue of this election was the Constitution itself.” It also took place after thirteen president-free years, the U.S. having been not a single country but “a collection of thirteen separate colonies,” each tied more closely to Britain than to the others; there hadn’t even been a federal government per se.
The U.S. Constitution changed that. Drafted in 1787, it proposed the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government, whose names every American who’s taken a citizenship exam (and every immigrant who’s taken the citizen test) remembers. Setting up those branches in reality would prove no easy task: how, to name just one practical question, would the executive — the president — actually be chosen? Congress, the legislative branch, could theoretically do it, but that would violate the now practically sacred principle of the separation of powers. The voters could also elect the president directly, but the framers rejected that option as both impractical and unwise.
Enter “the famous electoral college,” a body of specialized voters chosen by the individual states in any manner they please. Having rejected the Constitution itself, North Carolina and Rhode Island didn’t participate in the 1789 election. Each of the other states chose their electors in its own way (exemplifying the political laboratory of American federalism as originally conceived), though it didn’t go smoothly in every case: the widespread division between federalists and anti-federalists was pronounced enough in New York to create a deadlock that prevented the state from choosing any electors at all. The electors that did make it cast two votes each, with the first-place candidate becoming President and the second-place candidate becoming Vice President.
That last proved to be a “bad system,” whose mechanics encouraged a great deal of scheming, intrigue, and strategic voting (even by the subsequently established standards of American politics). Only with the ratification of the twelfth amendment, in 1804, could electors separately designate their choice of President and Vice President. In 1789, of course, “Washington easily got all 69 electoral votes,” and went on reluctantly to prevail again in the next presidential election, which more recently became the subject of its own Premodernist video. Both of them merit a watch in this particular moment, as the run-up to the U.S. contest of 2024 gets into full swing. This election cycle certainly won’t be as short as 1789, but it may well be as weird.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
According to the laws of physics — at least in simplified form — an object in motion will stay in motion, at least if no other forces act on it. That’s all well and good in the realm of theory, but here in the complex reality of Earth, there always seems to be one force or another getting in the way. Not that this has ever completely shut down mankind’s desire to build a perpetual-motion machine. According to Google Arts & Culture, that quest dates at least as far back as seventh-century India, where “the mathematician Brahmagupta, who wanted to represent the cyclical and eternal motion of the heavens, designed an overbalanced wheel whose rotation was powered by the flow of mercury inside its hollow spokes.”
More widely known is the successor design by Brahmagupta’s twelfth-century countryman and colleague Bhāskara, who “altered the wheel design by giving the hollow spokes a curved shape, producing an asymmetrical course in constant imbalance.” Despite this rendition’s memorable elegance, it does not, like the earlier overbalanced wheel, actually keep on turning forever. To blame are the very same laws of physics that have dogged the subsequent 900 or so years of attempts to build perpetual-motion machines, which you can see briefly explained in the TED-Ed video above.
“Ideas for perpetual-motion machines all violate one or more fundamental laws of thermodynamics, the branch of physics that describes the relationship between different forms of energy,” says the narrator. The first law holds that “energy can’t be created or destroyed; you can’t get out more energy than you put in.” That alone would put an end to hopes for a “free” energy source of this kind. But even machines that just keep moving by themselves — much less useful, of course, but still scientifically earth-shattering — would eventually “have to create some extra energy to nudge the system past its stopping point, breaking the first law of thermodynamics.”
Whenever machines seem to overcome this problem, “in reality, they invariably turn out to be drawing energy from some external source.” (Nineteenth-century America seems to have offered endless opportunities for engineering charlatanism of this kind, whose perpetrators made a habit of skipping town whenever their trickery was revealed, some obtaining patents and profits all the while). But even if the first law of thermodynamics didn’t apply, there would remain the matter of the second, which dictates that “energy tends to spread out through processes like friction,” thus “reducing the energy available to move the system itself, until the machine inevitably stopped.” Hence the abandonment of interest in perpetual motion by such scientific minds as Galileo and Leonardo — who must also have understood that mankind would never fully relinquish the dream.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
Six months before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to students at Barratt Junior High School in Philadelphia, and asked What Is Your Life’s Blueprint?
Addressing the students, he observed: “This is the most important and crucial period of your lives. For what you do now and what you decide now at this age may well determine which way your life shall go. Whenever a building is constructed, you usually have an architect who draws a blueprint. And that blueprint serves as the pattern, as the guide, as the model, for those who are to build the building. And a building is not well erected without a good, sound, and solid blueprint.”
So what makes for a sound blueprint? The civil rights leader had some suggestions:
Number one in your life’s blueprint should be: a deep belief in your own dignity, your own worth and your own somebodiness. Don’t allow anybody to make you feel that you are nobody. Always feel that you count. Always feel that you have worth, and always feel that your life has ultimate significance.
Now that means you should not be ashamed of your color. You know, it’s very unfortunate that in so many instances, our society has placed a stigma on the Negro’s color. You know there are some Negros who are ashamed of themselves? Don’t be ashamed of your color. Don’t be ashamed of your biological features…
Secondly, in your life’s blueprint you must have as the basic principle the determination to achieve excellence in your various fields of endeavor. You’re going to be deciding as the days and the years unfold, what you will do in life — what your life’s work will be.
And once you discover what it will be, set out to do it, and to do it well.
You can read a transcript of the speech here. As a postscript, it’s worth highlighting a remarkable comment left on YouTube, from the student who apparently recorded the speech on October 26, 1967. It reads:
I cannot believe that I found this footage. I am the student cameraman that recorded this speech. I remember this like it was yesterday. I have been telling my boys for years about this and now I can show them. I thought this was lost years ago and am so happy that it survived the years. I was 12 or 13 years old when he can to Barrett and was mesmerized by what he was saying. I can’t wait to share this with my family. Wow I am elated that I found this.
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