Appearing at Oxford’s Sheldonian Theater in 2013, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins fielded a question that’s now being asked unnervingly often in our anti-Enlightenment age.
Audience member: “The question is about the nature of scientific evidence. You both said, and I think most people here would agree with you, that we’re justified in holding a belief if there is evidence for it, or there are logical arguments we can find that support it. But it seems like this in itself is a belief, which would require some form of evidence. If so, I’m wondering what you think would count as evidence in favour of that and, if not, how do we justify choosing that heuristic without appealing to the same standard that we are trying to justify?”
Dawkins: “How do we justify, as it were, that science would give us the truth? It works. Planes fly, cars drive, computers compute. If you base medicine on science, you cure people; if you base the design of planes on science, they fly; if you base the design of rockets on science, they reach the moon. It works … bitches.”
The Open Culture audience, by my estimation, divides into two basic groups: those who’ve read the collected works of the likes of Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, and Plato, and those who’d like to. Whichever body of oft-referenced ideas you’ve been wanting to dig deep into yourself, getting a brief, concept-distilling primer beforehand can make the task easier, improving your understanding and ability to contextualize the original texts when you get around to them. Online education company Macat has produced 138 such primers in the form of animated videos freely available on YouTube which can put you in the right frame of mind to study a variety of ideas in literature, economics, sociology, politics, history, and philosophy.
De Beauvoir, in Macat’s analysis, argued in The Second Sex that “the views of individuals are socially and culturally produced. Femininity is not inherent,” but a societal mechanism long used “to keep men dominant.”
According to their video on Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, that famous book “explores the evolution of power since the Middle Ages,” culminating in the argument that “modern states have moved away from exploring their authority physically to enforcing it psychologically,” a phenomenon exemplified as much by late 18th- and early 19th-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon as by modern closed-circuit television urban omni-surveillance (a technology now spread far beyond the infamously CCTV-zealous London all the way to Seoul, where I live). In The Republic, Plato asks more basic questions about society: “What would an ideal state look like, and how would it work?”
For that ancient Greek, says the video’s narrator, “the ideal society offered the guarantee of justice and would be ruled over not by a tyrant, but by an all-powerful philosopher-king.” Whether or not that strikes you as an appealing prospect, or indeed whether you agree with de Beauvoir and Foucault’s bold propositions, you stand to sharpen your mind by engaging with these and other influential ideas, including (as covered in Macat’s other three- to four-minute analyses) those of Machiavelli, David Hume, Edward Said, and Thomas Piketty. “Critical thinking is about to become one of the most in-demand set of skills in the global jobs market,” insists Macat’s marketing. “Are you ready?” Whether or not you’ll ever reference these thinkers on the job, preparing yourself to read them with an active mind will put you on the fast track to the examined life.
A couple days ago, a visually compelling thread on Twitter exploded with thousands of shares and likes and dozens of users submitting their own contributions. The thread (a series of connected tweets for the Twitter uninitiated) has become an evolving photo essay of women activists standing up to walls of militarized riot police and mobs of angry bigots. The photos feature subjects like Tess Asplund, Leshia Evans, and Saffiyah Khan, and historical inspirations like Gloria Richardson and Bernadette Devlin. Many of the subjects are unknown or unnamed, but no less iconic. These images, from all over the world, of women standing defiantly and often alone, against heavily armed and armored, mostly male power structures inspire and, in the case of children like Ruby Bridges, can break your heart.
Photos like these serve as powerful and necessary testaments to the fact that in social movements throughout history, women have held the front lines. And photographers have captured their activist spirit since the early days of the medium. In the 19th century, long exposures and fragile, finicky equipment made action shots difficult-to-impossible, and for a variety of cultural reasons, many women were far less likely to confront armed men on the streets. Therefore, the portraits of women activists from the time tend toward traditional seated poses. But as famous photographs of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth demonstrate, these images do not show us passive observers of history.
Pictures of Tubman and Truth have made their way into every elementary school history textbook. Far less well-known are the many other African-American women activists of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who fought for the rights of black Americans in education, at the voting booth, and everywhere else. During Reconstruction especially, many such activists rose to prominence in academia, journalism, and civic leadership. Women like Fannie Barrier Williams, at the top, whose wise, direct gaze illustrates her fearlessness as an educational reformer and suffragist, who, despite her maiden name, broke several barriers for black women in higher education and prominent public events like the 1893 Columbian Exposition. Against paternalistic claims that former slaves weren’t ready for citizenship, writes the Rochester Regional Library Council, Williams “called on all women to unite and claim their inalienable rights.”
Above, we see Laura A. Moore Westbrook. Of the first generation to grow up after slavery, Westbrook received a master’s degree in 1880, the only woman in a class of four. She went on to teach and fight fiercely for formerly enslaved students in Texas, earning admiration, as Monroe Alphus Majors wrote in 1893, “in conspicuous instances and under very flattering circumstances” from contemporaries like Frederick Douglass. Majors’ characterization will sound patronizing to our ears, but in the rigid terms of the time, it offers nearly as vivid a portrait as her photograph: “Her motive to do good far surpasses her vanity, except when her race is attacked, then, manlike, she with the pen strikes back, and even goes beyond her loyalty to serve, but makes lasting impressions upon those who are so unfortunate to get within her range.”
These images come from a Library of Congress archive of nineteenth-century African American activists from the collection of William Henry Richards, a professor at Howard University Law School from 1890 to 1928 and a staunch campaigner for civil rights and liberties. Most of the portraits are of the formal, staged variety, but we also have the more relaxed, even playful series of poses from activists Elizabeth Brooks and Emma Hackley, above. Richards’ collection, writes curator Beverly Brannon at the LoC site, includes many “people who joined him and others working in the suffrage and temperance movements and in education, journalism and the arts.” The photographs “show the women at earlier ages than most portraits previously available of them online.”
These portraits date from a time, notes Allison Meier at Hyperallergic, when “rights and opportunities for African Americans, especially women, remained severely limited.” Many “obscure black women writers,” journalists, and teachers “await their biographers,” argues Jonathan Daniel Wells, and perhaps the rediscovery of these photographs will prompt historians to reconsider their prominence. While they did not physically stand up to armed mobs or police battalions, these activists, writes Meier, “spoke out boldly against gender inequality, while at the same time remaining cognizant that especially in the so-called New South, racism, violence and murder were ever-present dangers for African American women and men.”
Alejandro Jodorowsky may have redefined the film-viewing experience for a couple generations of art-house thrillseekers, but he didn’t start his creative journey in cinema. Decades before he sent his audiences on the mind-altering feature-length trips (whether or not they came prepared for them with their own mind-altering substances) like El Topo and The Holy Mountain, he wrote poetry, worked as a clown, founded and directed a theater troupe, and after relocating from his native Chile to France, studied mime and performed with Marcel Marceau. Only then had life prepared him to make his first film, 1957’s La Cravate.
Telling its story in vivid color but without words, the short (which also goes under such titles as Les têtes interverties, The Transposed Heads, and most sensationalistically The Severed Heads) draws on Jodorowsky and his collaborators’ skills developed in the performing arts to convert into cinematic mime Thomas Mann’s 1950 novella The Transposed Heads: A Legend of India. Novelist Rayo Casablanca quotes Jodorowsky describing the tale as one of “a woman who has an intellectual husband, who is very weak physically. She also has a muscular but idiotic lover. She cuts the heads off of the two men and interchanges them. She remains with the muscular body and the head of the intellectual. However, after a certain time, the body of the athlete is softened and the body of the intellectual becomes vigorous and muscular.”
Mann, in Jodorowsky’s reading, “wanted to thus say that it is the intellect which makes the body,” but for nearly fifty years, his own visual interpretation went unseen. Not long after its premiere at Rome’s Cinema Auteur Festival in 1957 it went missing, presumed lost, until the sole print’s rediscovery in a German attic in 2006. Finally, Jodorowsky’s fans could see not just his directorial debut but his first starring role onscreen, with a supporting cast that included the Belgian surreal humorist Raymond Devos. The film’s moral, writes Dangerous Minds’ Paul Gallagher, “is never to lose your head over unrequited love, but find someone who loves you as you are,” but as with all of Jodorowsky’s works, feel free to take from it whatever message finds its way into your head.
They are greeted like celebrities, with huge cheers and applause from the audience on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, for example, and it is well-deserved—they’re stars in their own right—but you probably won’t recognize their names. They’re American Sign Language interpreters of pop music, and their craft involves not only a mastery of ASL, but also empathy, creativity, spontaneity, dance, and some of the vivid interpretive moves of an air guitar champion (a rare art form indeed).
In the video explainer from Vox above, we meet one of the most talented of such interpreters, the poised yet highly animated Amber Galloway Gallego. She has interpreted over 400 artists—“literally every artist you could think of”—including stadium fillers like Adele, Kendrick Lamar, Drake, and, as you can see below in video from last year’s Lollapalooza, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, whose melancholy “Under the Bridge” takes on an entirely new energy through Gallego’s expressive hands, face, and body (she first appears at 1:22).
As she explains to Vox, ASL interpreters have for years communicated music to their audiences by drily making the sign in English for “Music” and leaving it at that. For Gallego, this was totally insufficient. The deaf community includes “a diverse group of people,” the Vox narrator says, “who have a wide range of residual hearing” across the audible spectrum. And everyone can feel music at certain volumes, especially in a live concert setting. But an interpreter, Gallego suggests, should be prepared not only to translate the lyrics of a song, but also the rhythm and, to a certain degree, the melody and harmony, as well as the general vibe, allowing deaf concert goers to be part of the total experience, as she puts it. (She can even interpret beatboxing.)
Since ASL already incorporates emotive gestures and facial expressions, Gallego simply adapted and expanded these into a repertoire of dance and musical sign. She interprets frequency, bringing her arms and hands closer to her waist for lower sounds and at her shoulders and above for high notes. She communicates pitch and rhythm with her face and hands in ways that both mimic the movement of sound waves and communicate how much she herself is grooving to a tune. “If we merely show the sign for music,” Gallego insists, “then we are doing an injustice as an interpreter.” Be warned, ASL interpreters, she sets the bar high.
To convey the meaning of a song’s lyrical content, a music interpreter must translate a tremendous amount of wordplay, rhyme, and metaphor into a visual form of communication. In the Vox video, Gallego shows how she does this effectively at the speed of Eminem’s motor mouth in a song like “The Monster,” and, though I can’t speak to the experience of someone from the deaf community, it’s impressive.
Gallego’s enthusiastic innovation and embrace of music signing has generated dozens of video interpretations on her YouTube channel (including classics of both Christmas and kids’ music and the irresistible glee of Chewbacca mom). And she has also promoted her rock-star-worthy work to millions on TV shows like Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell and, as I mentioned, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, where, as you can see above, she tag teams (for the win) with two fellow music interpreters in a battle against rapper Wiz Khalifa.
Back in the day, Americans could watch an occasional British TV show on PBS or UHF. A little Benny Hill. Some Upstairs Downstairs, but not a whole lot more.
Those days of scarcity are now long gone. Last month, BBC Worldwide and ITV launched Britbox, a streaming service that features the biggest collection of British TV shows ever. And, according to Nerdist, that collection now includes 550 classic Doctor Who episodes, originally aired between 1963 and 1989. For those not familiar with Doctor Who, Den of Geek has a handy guide that will help you get started.
Britbox currently offers a one-week free trial. Ergo, you can start binge-watching some Doctor Who shows for the next 168 hours. After the free trial, the service costs $6.99 per month, and you can cancel, hassle free, whenever you want.
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In the age of Banksy, anonymity, energy, and acting without permission combine to make a potent brew. Those whose work springs up in a public setting overnight, without prior announcement or transaction, are freely assumed to be passionate swashbucklers, brimming with talent and sly social commentary.
But what about an anonymous middle-aged man who roams the streets of Bristol, armed not with stencils and spray paint, but a sponge-tipped broom handle that allows him to correct the improper punctuation on local businesses’ awnings and out-of-reach signage?
The so-called “grammar vigilante,” above, became an Internet sensation after a BBC reporter trailed him on one of his nightly rounds, watching him apply adhesive-backed apostrophes where needed and eradicate incorrectly placed ones with blank, color-matched stickers.
While the manager of Cambridge Motors (formerly known as Cambridge Motor’s) hailed the unknown citizen who muscled his splintery wooden sign into compliance with the King’s English, elsewhere, the backlash has been brutal and swift.
The chairman of the Queen’s English Society shares the anonymous crusader’s pain, but frowns on his uncredited execution.
The Telegraph is one of several publications to have called him a “pedant.”
And the owner of Tux & Tails, whose website persists in describing the business as a “gentlemans outfitters,” is angry over what he says will be the cost of restoring a large vinyl sign, installed less than a year ago. “It looks like bird shit,” he declared to The Bristol Post.
It is not a kindness—it’s abhorrent behavior…It also gives the world a misguided idea about what professional editors, who are also passionate about language, do. We don’t go around slapping our authors’ wrists in public and telling them how wrong and stupid they are.
Those with reason to fear vigilante justice for their public punctuation should be advised that the web abounds with apostrophe usage videos, one of which is above.
Watch a longer segment on the Grammar Vigilante here.
Having the watched the film just last weekend, I’ll say this: Gimme Danger is worth the watch. But it just scratches the surface of what Pop and the Stooges were all about. To go deeper, I’d recommend picking up a copy of Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk (now released in a 20th anniversary edition), which gives you a more complete and raw account of the rise and fall of this influential band.
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Romance of the Three Kingdoms is considered one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature, and its literary influence in East Asia rivals that of Shakespeare in the English speaking world. “Written 600 years ago,” writes the BBC, “it is an historical novel that tells the story of a tumultuous period in Chinese history, the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD. Partly historical and partly legend, it recounts the fighting and scheming of the feudal lords and the three states which came to power as the Han Dynasty collapsed.”
And now the ancient meets the modern…
If you listen to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms podcast, you can hear John Zhu’s attempt to retell this epic tale and make it accessible to a Western audience. The first 110 episodes are available on YouTube, the web, and iTunes–with at least another 10 to come. Quite a feat. Have a listen.
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Pink Floyd will always be known for their massively successful concept albums, and David Gilmour and Roger Waters’ tense, and personally explosive, dynamic on albums like Dark Side of the Moonseems reminiscent of another masterful songwriting duo known for rock high concepts. Indeed, “there would have been no Dark Side of the Moon, and no dragons-and-warlocks-themed prog-rock epics,” writes Jody Rosen at Slate, “had the Beatles not decided to don epaulets for their lark of an album cover and impersonate a vaudeville band.”
But where The Beatles’ loose conceptual masterpieces had their stormy and sad moments, they generally kept things chipper on albums like Sgt. Pepper’s. Pink Floyd seemed determined to do precisely the opposite, setting a template for entire genres of metal to follow. 1977’s Animals especially reminds me of nothing so much as an album by Megadeth or Mastodon. Musical and thematic similarities abound: epic, booming, doomy songs with lyrics completely uninterested in charming their listeners. “Sheep,” for example, contains a modified version of the 23rd Psalm: “The Lord is my shepherd. He maketh me to hang on hooks in high places and coverteth me to lamb cutlets.”
As the brutish title alerts us, Animals is an adaptation of George’s Orwell’s Animal Farm (and the origin of Pink Floyd’s giant inflatable pig). The schematic allegory of Orwell’s book lends a high degree of coherence to Waters’ extended songs—only five in total. But he supplies his own characteristic bile (he famously spit on a fan during one tour, an incident that inspired The Wall). It couldn’t be more appropriate. Where Orwell’s novel is a transparent attack on Stalinism, Waters adapts his critique to “the economic and ideological systems within late-twentieth century liberal democracies.” So argues Phil Rose in an in-depth study of Waters’ lyrical ideas. The album’s “primary concern… is to reveal the effects that technocratic capitalist relations have on the nature of human beings and the evident divisions that undemocratic structures of power create among us as individuals.”
Orwell showed the effects of “undemocratic structures” by reducing individuals to animal types, and so does Waters, simplifying the classes further into three (and leaving out humans altogether): the ruling pigs, praetorian and aspiring capitalist dogs, and the sheep, the mindless masses. The opener, “Pigs on the Wing (Part One)” (top), an urgent acoustic strummer that gets picked up at the end of the album in a strangely upbeat reprise, sets a dystopian tone with images that may now seem old hat (bear in mind Animals debuted five years before Blade Runner).
If you didn’t care what happened to me,
And I didn’t care for you,
We would zig zag our way through the boredom and pain
Occasionally glancing up through the rain.
Wondering which of the buggers to blame
And watching for pigs on the wing.
Most of the songs began their lives as a rough collection that came together after Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here. Waters insisted on the literary conceit, against Gilmour’s objections, but the themes had already been very much on his mind. “Dogs,” above, was once a sardonic rant called “You’ve Gotta Be Crazy,” and one of its bleakest stanzas survives from that earlier track:
You gotta keep one eye looking over your shoulder.
You know it’s going to get harder, and harder, and harder as you
get older.
And in the end you’ll pack up and fly down south,
Hide your head in the sand,
Just another sad old man,
All alone and dying of cancer.
There may be no sharper an antithesis to “When I’m 64.” The image is made all the more devastating by the homicidal paranoia surrounding it. Not all of the Orwell overlay works so well, but when it does, it does so with devastating force. Consider these lines from “Sheep,” as terrifying as any late Medieval judgement scene, and more effective for an age that may not believe in hell but has seen the slaughterhouses:
What do you get for pretending the danger’s not real.
Meek and obedient you follow the leader
Down well trodden corridors into the valley of steel.
What a surprise!
A look of terminal shock in your eyes.
Now things are really what they seem.
The band’s “bleakest studio album,” argues Brice Ezell at Consequence of Sound, “feels eerily relevant in these grave times.” I can’t help but agree. Pink Floyd greatly inspired much of the heavy music to follow, doing as much as Black Sabbath or Led Zeppelin, I’d argue, to engage the imaginations of metalheads and prog-rock storytellers. Much of the music that followed them sounds very dated, but forty years after its release, their gloomiest record—which is saying a lot—seems more relevant than ever. Animals ends on an ambivalent note, hopeful but wary. The pigs are still on the wing, and the only remedy at hand, Waters suggests in the last few lines, may be to “know that I care what happens to you / And I know that you care for me.”
Taught by Ben Polak, an economics professor and now Provost at Yale University, this free course offers an introduction to game theory and strategic thinking. Drawing on examples from economics, politics, the movies and beyond, the lectures cover topics essential to understanding Game theory–including “dominance, backward induction, the Nash equilibrium, evolutionary stability, commitment, credibility, asymmetric information, adverse selection, and signaling.”
Since Game Theory offers “a way of thinking about strategic situations,” the course will “teach you some strategic considerations to take into account [when] making your choices,” and “to predict how other people or organizations [will] behave when they are in strategic settings.”
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