Every filmmaker, no matter how mainstream or underground, has to get the inspiration to become a filmmaker somewhere. “I used to watch the programme Jonathan Ross did in the late 80s called The Incredibly Strange Film Show and they did a whole hour on Sam Raimi,” remembersShaun of the Dead and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World director Edgar Wright, who in those days couldn’t imagine what it took to enter the impossibly distant world known as Hollywood. “I definitely hadn’t seen The Evil Dead as it was banned on video at the time – but I saw the Jonathan Ross documentary and I was staggered. I thought, ‘That’s what I want to do.’ ”
Although the show only ran 12 episodes, The Incredibly Strange Film Show featured documentaries on not just Sam Raimi but David Lynch, John Waters, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and other directors with filmographies as distinctive as their personalities. (You’ll find other episodes on this Youtube playlist.) Ross and his team go all out, interviewing not just the auteurs behind Eraserhead, Pink Flamingos, and The Holy Mountain themselves but their friends, family members, and collaborators in various locations important to their work and their lives. (Ross even takes the step of dressing like his subjects, buttoning his shirt all the way up in the Lynch episode and so on.)
The Incredibly Strange Film Show originally aired in 1988 and 1989, but after decades of celebration in cinema culture, does the work of the likes of Lynch, Waters, and Jodorowsky still count as “incredibly strange”? Their movies certainly do endure, but not by sheer oddity alone. We’ve seen plenty of stranger or more extreme images than theirs committed to celluloid in the years since, but we’ve arguably seen far fewer equally coherent and personal visions successfully make the transition from obscurity to influence. These elder statesmen of famous fringe film, in other words, each in his own way made the zeitgeist itself a little more incredibly strange. Long may that achievement inspire.
If you’re of a certain vintage, you may at various times have grooved to The Orb’s chill-out classic “Little Fluffy Clouds,” the spaced-out soundscapes of DJ Spooky, the avant-psych of Sonic Youth, the locked grooves of Tortoise, the bubbling fugues of Björk, or the ominous rumblings of postrock godfathers Godspeed You! Black Emperor. And if so, you very likely know at least some of the work of minimalist composer Steve Reich, which these artists either sampled or drew on for musical inspiration. Like many of his avant-garde colleagues, Reich has “influenced generations of pop, jazz and classical musicians over the last half-century,” writes Tom Service at The Guardian.
While many artists mention minimalists like Terry Riley, Philip Glass, or John Cage as seminal influences, few of those composers have been as directly woven into the fabric of modern music through collaboration, sampling, and remixing as Reich. Service goes so far as to speculate, “if you were to subtract Steve Reich from the total sum of today’s musical culture, I think you’d notice more of a difference than if you took away any other single figure.” That’s debatable—Reich’s influence on popular culture is oblique. But it does describe the degree to which his musical innovations have permeated experimental, indie, and electronic music and “given the contemporary musical world a license to groove” while still getting plenty heady and pushing conceptual boundaries.
Reich’s use of phasing effects, drone notes, polyrhythmic patterns, and “process music” lend each of his compositions a trance-like atmosphere that might be most familiar from his 1976 piece “Music for 18 Musicians” (top). Here, the “percussionists, string players, clarinetists, singers and pianists” create “an ever-changing, kaleidoscopic soundworld” that expands and augments all of Reich’s previous techniques for sculpting in time. If the piece sounds familiar, though you’ve never heard it before, that’s because of the thorough incorporation of Reich into so much modern music, including perhaps several dozen soundalike film scores and Brian Eno’s pioneering first manifestations of what came to be called ambient music.
Reich conceived of music as a “perceptible process,” writing in 1968, “I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music… a musical process should happen extremely gradually.” Indeed, students of his music have found ways to take apart and duplicate those processes in their own work, something Reich, who has worked with remix artists and Radiohead, appreciates. (Just above, see Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood perform a solo version of Reich’s Electric Counterpoint in 2011.) Like many of the artists he appreciates and inspires, much of Reich’s work deals directly with sociopolitical themes, as Service notes, including “the Holocaust, Middle Eastern history and politics, and contemporary conflict” like the beheading of American journalist Daniel Pearl.
In the Spotify playlist further up, you’ll find a broad sampling of performances of Reich’s lesser-known early work—like the 1965 tape loop piece “It’s Gonna Rain”—and more famous compositions like The Cave, Different Trains, Music for 18 Musicians, Electric Counterpoint, Drumming, Clapping Music, and much more. Just as we can hear the musical processes developing within each composition, we can hear the process of Reich’s development over the course of his career as he incorporates influences from Bach to Coltrane to the songs of Kid A. As a consequence of both his grooviness and his appeal to modernists of every decade, Reich, writes Ivan Hewett at The Telegraph, is “both achingly hip and a grand old man”—and a seemingly endless source of musical inspiration since the 1960s.
If you need Spotify’s free software, download it here. Below, you can see Reich talking about his most influential works in a CBC interview recorded earlier this year.
Aleister Crowley—English magician and founder of the religion of Thelema—has been admired as a powerful theorist and practitioner of what he called “Magick,” and reviled as a spoiled, abusive buffoon. Falling somewhere between those two camps, we find the opinion of Crowley’s bitter rival, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, who once passionately wrote that the study of magic was “the most important pursuit of my life….. The mystical life is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.”
Crowley would surely say the same, but his magic was of a much darker, more obsessive variety, and his success as a poet insignificant next to Yeats. “Crowley was jealous,” argues the blog Rune Soup, “He was never able to speak the language of poetic symbol with the confidence of a native speaker in the way Yeats definitely could.” In a 1948 Partisan Review essay, literary critic and Yeats biographer Richard Ellmann tells the story differently, drily reporting on the conflict as its participants saw it—as a genuine war between competing forms of practical magic.
Having been ejected from the occult Theosophical society for his magical experiments, writes Jamie James at Lapham’s Quarterly, Yeats joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, “an even more exotic cult, which claimed direct descent from the hermetic tradition of the Renaissance and into remote antiquity.” At various times, the order included writers Arthur Machen and Bram Stoker, Yeats’ beloved Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne, and famous magicians Arthur Edward Waite and Crowley. (Just below, see a page from Yeats’ Golden Dawn journal. See several more here.)
“When Crowley showed a tendency to use his occult powers for evil rather than for good,” Ellmann writes, “the adepts of the order, Yeats among them, decided not to allow him to be initiated into the inner circle; they feared that he would profane the mysteries and unleash powerful magic forces against humanity.” Crowley’s ouster lead to a confrontation in 1900 that might make you think—depending on your frame of reference—of the warring magicians on South Park or of Susanna Clark’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, or both. “Crowley refused to accept their decision,” writes Ullmann, and after some astral attacks on Yeats,
.… in Highlander’s tartan, with a black Crusader’s cross on his breast… Crowley arrived at the Golden Dawn temple in London. Making the sign of the pentacle inverted and shouting menaces at the adepts, Crowley climbed the stairs. But Yeats and two other white magicians came resolutely forward to meet him, ready to protect the holy place at any cost. When Crowley came within range the forces of good struck out with their feet and kicked him downstairs.
This almost slapstick vanquishing became known as “the Battle of Blythe Road” and has been immortalized in a publication of that very name, with accounts from Crowley, Yeats, and Golden Dawn adepts William Westcott, Florence Farr and others. But the war was not won, Ellmann notes, and Crowley went looking for converts—or victims—in London, while Yeats attempted to stop him with “the requisite spells and exorcisms.” One such spell supposedly sent a vampire that “bit and tore at his flesh” as it lay beside Crowley all night. Despite Yeats’ supernatural interventions, one of Crowley’s targets, a young painter named Althea Gyles, was “finally forced to give way entirely to his baleful fascination.”
Ellmann’s both humorous and unsettling narrative shows us Crowley-as-predator, a characterization the wealthy Englishman had apparently earned, as “responsible governments excluded him from one country after another lest he bring to bear upon their inhabitants his hostile psychic ray.” [Brenda Maddox at The Guardian gives a slightly different account of the Battle, in which “Yeats, with a bouncer, saw him off the premises, called in the police and ended up (victorious) in court.” ] Yeats and the other members’ distaste for Crowley surely had something to do with his predatory behavior. But the rivalry was also indeed a poetic one, albeit extremely one-sided.
As Crowley biographer Lawrence Sutin writes, “the earnestness of the young Crowley could not compensate, in Yeats’ mind, for the technical difficulties and rhetorical excesses of his verse.” Yeats’ opinion “infuriated Crowley,” who indulged in the magic of projection, writing “What hurt him [Yeats] was the knowledge of his own incomparable inferiority.” Crowley’s remarks are both “ridiculous,” Sutin comments, and apply “far more convincingly to Crowley himself.” Nevertheless, Crowley’s “Magick,” continued to make Yeats uneasy, and he may have invoked Crowley in his famous line about the “rough beast” slouching toward Bethlehem in 1919’s “The Second Coming.”
While the magical battle between them might provoke more laughter than curiosity about their different brands of magic, Sutin notes a crucial difference that distinguishes the two men: “whereas Crowley placed himself in the services of the Antichrist ‘the savage God’ of the new cycle, Yeats’s fidelity was to ‘the old king,’ to ‘that unfashionable gyre.’” The gyre, so central an image in “The Second Coming,” stands for Yeats’ theory of time and history, and it belongs to an old mysticism and folklore that for him were synonymous with poetry.
Crowley viewed the occult as a source of personal power—his revelations filled books devoted to explaining the philosophy of Thelema (“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Love is the law, love under will); ” Yeats was certainly more of an “organization man… in his occult activities,” writes Maddox, and sought to practice magic as a holistic activity, fully integrated into his social, political, and aesthetic life. His “public philosophy,” as he called it, writes James, “propounds an extraordinarily convoluted system that aims to integrate the human personality with the cosmos.”
To understand Crowley’s magical thinking, we can probably skip his poetry and attempt as best we can to the decipher his several arcane, technical books full of invented terms and symbols. To understand Yeats, as much as that’s possible, we need to read his poetry, the purest expression of his mystical system and symbolic thought.
Earlier this year, Leigh Haber, book editor ofO, The Oprah Magazine, reached out to Murray to see if he’d share some of his favorite poems in celebration of National Poetry Month. In true Murray-esque fashion, he waited until deadline to return her call, suggesting that they meet in his room at the Carlyle, where he would recite his choices in person.
At the top of the page, Murray reads the poem at a benefit for New York’s Poets House, adopting a light accent suggested by the dialect of the narrator, a mirror full of appreciation for the poet’s womanly body. Clifton said that the “germ” of the poem was visiting her husband at Harvard, and feeling out of place among all the slim young coeds. Thusly does Murray position himself as a hero to every female above the age of … you decide.
Kinnell, who sought to enliven a dreary bowl of oatmeal with such dining companions as Keats, Spenser and Milton, shared Murray’s playful sensibility. In an interview conducted as part of Michele Root-Bernstein’s Worldplay Project he remarked:
… it doesn’t seem like play at the time of doing it, but part of the whole construct of the work, and even though the work might be extremely serious and even morose, still there’s that element of play that is just an inseparable part of it.
Murray told O, which incorrectly reported the poem’s title as “I Love You Sweetheart” that he experienced this one as a vibration on the inside of his ribs “where the meat is most tender.” It would make a terrific scene in a movie, and who better to play the lover risking his life to misspell a term of endearment on a bridge than Bill Murray?
Alas, we could find no footage of Nye reading her lovely poem aloud, but you can read it in full over at The Poetry Foundation. It’s easy to see why it speaks to Murray.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play Zamboni Godot is opening in New York City in March 2017. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Last year, fans of modernist Irish literature and impressionist art saw a must-own volume go under the hammer at Bonhams. “In 1935 the French artist, Henri Matisse, was commissioned to illustrate an edition of Ulysses for subscribers to the Limited Edition Club in America,” announced Artlyst. “Each of the 1,000 copies was signed by Matisse and 250 were also signed by James Joyce. A copy of the book signed by both men is estimated at £6,000 to £8,000.”
In the event it went for £6,250, not a bad deal considering the hands that wrote those signatures and the rarity, signed or unsigned, of this unusual book itself. (It certainly beats, say, $37,000.) Brainpickings’ Maria Popova writes that, after first spotting the Matisse-illustrated Ulysses here on Open Culture, “I gathered up my year’s worth of lunch money and was able to grab one of the last copies available online — a glorious leather-bound tome with 22-karat gold accents, gilt edges, moire fabric endpapers, and a satin page marker.” Versions signed by Matisse are apparently available–at a steep price–on Amazon.
Popova adds that “the Matisse drawings inside it, of course, are the most priceless of its offerings — doubly so because, for all their beauty, they’re a tragicomedy of quasi-collaboration.” From whence the tragicomedy? Publishing lore has it that, despite the provision of a full French translation of the Ulysses text, Matisse made his illustrative etchings — in the fashion of many an undergraduate with a paper due — without ever having got around to reading the book himself.
“I’ve never ‘read’ Joyce’s Ulysses, and it’s quite plausible that I never will,” Matisse’s countryman Pierre Bayard would write seventy years later in his bestselling How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. Yet “I feel perfectly comfortable when Ulysses comes up in conversation, because I can situate it with relative precision in relation to other books. I know, for example, that it is a retelling of the Odyssey, that its narration takes the form of a stream of consciousness, that its action unfolds in Dublin over the course of a single day, etc.” — all things that Matisse, too, probably knew about Ulysses.
He certainly knew that it supposedly retold the story of the Odyssey, and so, in a now-ingenious-looking strategy to not just talk about an unread book but to illustrate it, he went to the source. Or rather, he went to one of the countless cultural, literary, historical, and linguistic sources upon which Joyce drew to compose his masterpiece, basing his art directly on Homer’s epic poem, in its own way a work more talked about than read. Joyce himself, who once described much of the textual content of Ulysses as intended to “keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant,” may well have admired Matisse’s clarity of vision, no matter how much-non reading it took to refine.
Karyn Tripp, a homeschooling mother of four, was inspired by her eldest’s love of science to create Periodic Table Battleship. I might suggest that the game is of even greater value to those who don’t naturally gravitate toward the subject.
Rules of engagement are very similar to the original. Rather than calling out positions on a grid, players set their torpedoes for specific element names, abbreviations or coordinates. Advanced players might go for the atomic number. the lingo is the same: “hit,” “miss” and—say it with me—“you sunk my battleship!”
The winner is the player who wipes out the other’s fleet, though I might toss the loser a couple of reinforcement vessels, should he or she demonstrate passing familiarity with various metals, halogens, and noble gases.
To make your own Periodic Table Battleship set you will need:
4 copies of the Periodic Table (laminate them for reuse)
2 file folders
paper clips, tape or glue
2 markers (dry erase markers if playing with laminated tables
To Assemble and Play:
As you know, the Periodic Table is already numbered along the top. Label each of the four tables’ vertical rows alphabetically (to help younger players and those inclined to fruitless searching for the elements designated by their opponent)
Fasten two Periodic Tables to each folder, facing the same direction.
Uses markers to circle the position of your ships on the lower Table:
5 consecutive spaces: aircraft carrier
4 consecutive spaces: battleship
3 consecutive spaces: destroyer or submarine
2 consecutive spaces: patrol boat
Prop the folders up with books or some other method to prevent opponents from sneaking peeks at your maritime strategy.
Take turns calling out coordinates, element names, abbreviations or atomic numbers:
When a turn results in a miss, put an X on the corresponding spot on the upper table.
When a turn results in a hit, circle the corresponding spot on the upper table.
Continue play until the battle is won.
Repeat until the Table of Elements is mastered.
Supplement liberally with Tom Lehrer’s Elements song.
Those not inclined toward arts and crafts can purchase a pre-made Periodic Table Battleship set from Tripp’s Etsy shop.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker, secular homeschooler and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play Zamboni Godot is opening in New York City in March 2017. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
This fall, Harvard has been rolling out videos from the 2016 edition of Computer Science 50 (CS50), the university’s introductory coding course designed for majors and non-majors alike. Taught by David Malan, a perennially popular professor (you’ll immediately see why), the one-semester course (taught mostly in C) combines courses typically known elsewhere as “CS1” and “CS2.”
Even if you’re not a Harvard student, you’re welcome to follow CS50 online by heading over to this site here. There you will find video lectures (stream them all above or access them individually here), problem sets, quizzes, and other useful course materials. Once you’ve mastered the material covered in CS50, you can start branching out into new areas of coding by perusing our big collection of Free Online Computer Science Courses, a subset of our larger collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.
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Christopher Walken, writes Arifa Akbar in the Independent, is a “sinister-looking man who has made a living from looking — and acting — sinister,” but he didn’t start out that way. His “career trajectory – starting benignly enough in children’s commercials, musicals, and dance – took a darker turn two years after his near-miss with Star Wars,” when he’d almost landed the Han Solo role that went to Harrison Ford. Instead he played “the emotionally decimated Vietnam veteran in Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter, and was immortalized in the ‘Russian roulette’ scene as a gaunt, bug-eyed madman aiming a shaking revolver to his own head. The role won him an Oscar and led to assembly-line casting in an array of deranged, demonic parts.”
Of course, when an actor becomes synonymous with a grim but artful intensity, he must sooner or later interpret the work of a writer synonymous with grim but artful intensity: Edgar Allan Poe. And so on this day, the 167th anniversary of Poe’s death under still-unexplained circumstances, we give you Walken’s performance of “The Raven.”
The 1845 poem stands today as Poe’s best-known work by far, as he seemed to intend: he wrote it, so he later claimed in a magazine essay, with “the intention of composing a poem that should suit at once the popular and the critical taste” and pack an emotional punch as well.
Walken, for his part, has variously appealed to both popular and critical tastes in the roughly 130 roles he has played over his sixty-year career, somehow earning both respect as a serious dramatic actor and almost instinctive audience laughter as a figure of fun. At his best, Walken’s darkness contains a lightness and his lightness a darkness, all of which you can hear in his nine-minute recitation, accompanied by music and sound effects, of the words of this nameless man tormented by a talking bird while pining for his lost love Lenore. If anybody can credibly stare into the abyss Poe’s work opens up, Christopher Walken can — after all, he knows what it means not to fear the reaper.
Call them proto-punk, call them avant-garde, but the American ex-pat group the Monks would have been a tiny footnote in rock music history if it wasn’t for a slow rediscovery of the group’s work. The above video is from their summer 1966 appearance on Beat Club, a live pop music show broadcast in Germany.
Enthusiastic teens bop away to the repetitive stomp of “Monk Chant,” with its tribal drums from Roger Johnston, a multi-tamborine attack, and a solo section which features both Larry Clark’s manic organ and three band members attacking the strings of a prone guitar. There’s a sense that anything can happen. These guys are gleefully crazy. (On other songs, band member Dave Day Havliceck would further freak out audiences with his electric banjo.)
Neither ur-hippies nor beatniks, the guys behind the Monks were five American G.I.s who were stationed in Germany and first started a more traditional garage rock band called the Five Torquays (not to be confused with the surf band from Orange County). After one single, they dropped the cover songs and trying to ape popular trends and turned into the Monks, shaving their heads in a monastic style and dressing in monk’s clothing.
Their brutal, repetitive songs and anti-Vietnam war lyrics were ahead of their time, but the latter was one of the main reasons they found it hard to break into the American market after they released Black Monk Time on Polydor Germany. That and internal conflict within the band led to the band breaking up in 1967. You can hear a lot of the Monks in the Velvet Underground, but it’s hard to say one was an influence on the other. It’s more like one great idea was in the air and only certain people had their antennas up.
The influence of the Monks popped up in the abrasive and hypnotic sounds of Krautrock several years later, and by the late 1980s post-punk band The Fall were covering their songs “I Hate You,” “Oh, How to Do Now,” and “Shut Up.”
Jon Spencer, Mike D. of the Beastie Boys, Genesis P. Orridge of Psychic T.V., and Stephen Malkmus of Pavement would all credit the Monks as an influence.
In 1997, their sole album was rereleased and two years later the band reunited for a New York concert to promote a retrospective compilation. In 2004, band member Roger Johnston passed from lung cancer, and after Transatlantic Feedback, a 2006 documentary on the group, several other members had passed away.
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.
Feeling irritable, feisty, hostile, even? Feel like getting into an argument? No problem at all! Just hop on the social media platform or comments section of your choice, and within seconds you can be caught in a raging dustup with a total stranger—or several total strangers at once! Isn’t the internet fun?!
But how did the argumentative ever get by before Twitter wars and other contentious online interactions? Needling people in casinos, roadhouses, and cocktail lounges? Ruining holidays with screaming matches over the centerpiece?
Many a barfight and family feud might have been averted had Monty Python’s brilliant idea for an argument clinic existed in real life. In principle, it seems so civilized.
But in the sketch itself, as you can see above, visiting the argument clinic turns out to be a lot like visiting the comments section—only without the racist and sexist slurs and occasional spam. Mild-mannered Michael Palin stops in to have an argument. He first stumbles into the room reserved for “abuse,” where Graham Chapman yells nasty things at him. How familiar. When he reaches the argument room, 12A, he meets John Cleese, who proceeds to flatly contradict everything he says.
Perhaps you’ve had the same experience: Palin patiently explains what an argument is supposed to be, “a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.” To which Cleese replies, “no it isn’t!” It’s like arguing with a child, an especially childish adult, or an internet bot with a very limited set of responses. Or—as you can see at the top in the recreation of the sketch by two vintage voice synthesizers—like an argument between two rudimentary machines.
One of these machines will sound very familiar—the small, black DECTalk Express has provided the voice of Stephen Hawking for many years. The other—the older Intex Talker—is a cruder instrument, and much less intelligible. So it’s rightly cast in the John Cleese role. Can machines think? We’ve yet to satisfactorily answer that question. But we know they can argue—if argument means spitting out abusive phrases and contradictions. However, if we define an argument as Palin/DECTalk Express does—as “an intellectual process”—the machines have likely got ways to go. As do most humans.
The chicken-and-egg, forest/trees question for those who produce educational and public service media is really who are we producing our content for. MIT’s Director of Digital Learning Sanjay Sarma has said that “we” – universities in particular (but also museums, libraries, and other educational and cultural institutions) – “are all sort of Disney, and Sony, and MGM – we produce movies.” But who are we producing our movies for?
The answer is – perhaps obviously – that we are producing for multiple stakeholders, but that many of us are really producing these productions for the world. At a time when so much crap is happening around the globe, it is ever more clear that our real responsibility is to improve the planet while we are on it, and if we can help effect that by sharing our knowledge, so much the better.
Much as U.S. and other national industries of research and scholarly publishing have begun to mandate some form of open or free licensing for the output of grant-funded written work, so now the question arises should video and educational video in particular find its way, too, into the commons. Here, too, the answer is: of course.
The Handbook situates educational video production in the context of more than 100 years of moving-image work at universities and beyond. Indeed, the booklet draws on the work of educational producers from the early 1900s – works such as Charles Urban, The Cinematograph in Science, Education, and Matters of State and the 1920s journal Visual Education.
The impulse to share knowledge in a free environment also is not new. In many ways MOOCs and Open Courseware and Wikipedia and Creative Commons and Google/YouTube are all part of the same project – envisioned by visionaries such as Richard Stallman, media producers behind the start of public broadcasting here and abroad, much earlier, even, by publishers active centuries ago in the Enlightenment, and even earlier, in ancient Alexandria under the Ptolemaic kings. The vision? A giant rich resource: a gigantic global encyclopedia, or Encyclopédie, or library or museum, contributing to universal access to human knowledge. With the Internet upon us now, we can help realize it.
Does the rest of the world have any right to the knowledge that we produce at universities and other cultural and educational institutions? And do we have any obligation to share it? We live once, but our problems live on. And if the work of Richard Hofstadter (an expert on “anti-intellectualism” and what he called “the paranoid style in American politics”) and Edward Said (so wise on the collapse of colonialism and media bias), just to pick two Columbia University examples, could have been recorded and shared – and shared openly – we’d be the richer for it. Disseminating knowledge now through the world’s most powerful medium could be our highest calling.
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