Bob Woodward Is Now Teaching an Online Course on Investigative Journalism–a Course for Our Time

FYI: If you sign up for a Mas­ter­Class course by click­ing on the affil­i­ate links in this post, Open Cul­ture will receive a small fee that helps sup­port our oper­a­tion.

Bob Wood­ward made his bones as an inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ist when he and fel­low Wash­ing­ton Post reporter Carl Bern­stein blew open the Water­gate scan­dal in 1972. Their report­ing exposed the “dirty tricks” of Richard Nixon’s re-elec­tion com­mit­tee. Gov­ern­ment inves­ti­ga­tions fol­lowed and the pres­i­dent even­tu­al­ly resigned.

Today we’re liv­ing in anoth­er age when inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ism is of para­mount impor­tance. Only now it’s under attack. But, take heart, Bob Wood­ward is now teach­ing an online course on inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ism. In 24 video lessons, he’ll teach you the impor­tance of human sources, how to gath­er infor­ma­tion, how to inter­view peo­ple, estab­lish facts, and build a sto­ry. He reminds us, “This is the time when we’re being test­ed. Let’s tell the truth, let’s not be chick­en­shit.” Amen to that.

You can now enroll in his course, which costs $90. But, for $180, you can get an annu­al pass to every course in the Mas­ter­Class cat­a­logue. Oth­er cours­es in the Mas­ter­class cat­a­logue include:

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How to Down­load Bob Woodward’s Fear: Trump in the White House as a Free Audio­book

Bob Wood­ward: How Inves­tiga­tive Jour­nal­ism Gets Done

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MIT Is Digitizing a Huge Archive of Noam Chomsky’s Lectures, Papers and Other Documents & Will Put Them Online

If you’re a lin­guist, you’ve read Noam Chomsky—no way of get­ting around that. There may be rea­sons to dis­agree with Chomsky’s lin­guis­tic the­o­ries but—as Newton’s the­o­ries do in physics—his break­throughs rep­re­sent a par­a­dig­mat­ic shift in the study of lan­guage, an implic­it or explic­it ref­er­ence point for near­ly every lin­guis­tic analy­sis in the past few decades.

If you’re on the polit­i­cal left, you’ve read Chom­sky, or you should. Even if there are sig­nif­i­cant rea­sons to dis­agree with what­ev­er con­tro­ver­sial stance he’s tak­en over the years, few polit­i­cal the­o­rists have approached their sub­ject with the degree of dogged­ness, intel­lec­tu­al integri­ty, and eru­di­tion as he has. Chom­sky began his sec­ond career as a polit­i­cal activist and philoso­pher in the late six­ties, speak­ing out in oppo­si­tion to the Viet­nam war. Since then, he’s writ­ten major­ly influ­en­tial works on mass media pro­pa­gan­da, Cold War pol­i­tics and inter­ven­tion­ist war, eco­nom­ic impe­ri­al­ism, anar­chism, etc.

Now an emer­i­tus pro­fes­sor from MIT, where he began teach­ing in 1955, and a lau­re­ate pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ari­zona, Chom­sky has reached that stage in every pub­lic intellectual’s career when archivists and cura­tors begin con­sol­i­dat­ing a doc­u­men­tary lega­cy. Librar­i­ans at MIT start­ed doing so a few years ago when, in 2012, the MIT Libraries Insti­tute Archives received over 260 box­es of Chomsky’s per­son­al papers. You can hear the man him­self dis­cuss the archive’s impor­tance in the short inter­view at the top. And at the MIT Library site unBox Chom­sky Archive, you’ll find slideshow pre­views of its con­tents.

Those con­tents include the 1953 paper “Sys­tems of Syn­tac­tic Analy­sis,” which “appears to be Chomsky’s first for­ay in print of what would become trans­for­ma­tion­al gen­er­a­tive gram­mar.” Also archived are notes from a 1984 talk on “Man­u­fac­tur­ing Con­sent” giv­en at Rut­gers Uni­ver­si­ty, out­lin­ing the ideas Chom­sky and Edward S. Her­man would ful­ly explore in the 1988 book of the same name on “the polit­i­cal econ­o­my of the mass media.” And in the cat­e­go­ry of “activism,” we find mate­ri­als like the newslet­ter below, pub­lished by an anti-war orga­ni­za­tion Chom­sky co-found­ed in the 60s called RESIST.

MIT hopes to “dig­i­tize the hun­dreds of thou­sands of pieces” in the col­lec­tion, “to make it acces­si­ble to the pub­lic.” Such a mas­sive under­tak­ing exceeds the library’s bud­get, so they have asked for finan­cial sup­port. At unBox­ing the Chom­sky Archive, you can make a dona­tion, or just peruse the slideshow pre­views and con­sid­er the lega­cy of one of the U.S.’s most for­mi­da­ble liv­ing sci­en­tif­ic and polit­i­cal thinkers.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Noam Chomsky’s Man­u­fac­tur­ing Con­sent and How the Media Cre­ates the Illu­sion of Democ­ra­cy

Noam Chom­sky Explains the Best Way for Ordi­nary Peo­ple to Make Change in the World, Even When It Seems Daunt­ing

Read 9 Free Books By Noam Chom­sky Online

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

What Is Fair Use?: A Short Introduction from the Maker of Everything is a Remix

Back in 2010, we began fea­tur­ing a series of videos from film­mak­er Kir­by Fer­gu­son. Called Every­thing is a Remix, the four-part video series explored the idea that (to quote from one of my ear­li­er posts) “great art doesn’t come out of nowhere. Artists inevitably bor­row from one anoth­er, draw­ing on past ideas and con­ven­tions, and then turn these mate­ri­als into some­thing beau­ti­ful and new.” That applies to musi­cians, film­mak­ers, tech­nol­o­gists, and real­ly any­one in a cre­ative space.

If you would like to watch the orig­i­nal series in its total­i­ty, I would refer you to the video below. Above, you can now watch a new Kir­by Fer­gu­son video that delves into the con­cept of Fair Use–a con­cept defined by the Stan­ford Copy­right and Fair Use web­site essen­tial­ly as “any copy­ing of copy­right­ed mate­r­i­al done for a lim­it­ed and ‘trans­for­ma­tive’ pur­pose, such as to com­ment upon, crit­i­cize, or par­o­dy a copy­right­ed work.” They go on to say:  “Such uses can be done with­out per­mis­sion from the copy­right own­er. In oth­er words, fair use is a defense against a claim of copy­right infringe­ment. If your use qual­i­fies as a fair use, then it would not be con­sid­ered an infringe­ment.”

Need­less to say, fair use is an impor­tant con­cept if you’re mak­ing your own videos on Youtube, or if you’re a teacher using media in the class­room.

By the end of his short video, if you’re still not clear what Fer­gu­son means by Fair Use, you’re in luck. He’s giv­ing you the oppor­tu­ni­ty to sub­mit ques­tions to be answered by “a real live lawyer in a fol­low up video.” He also includes extra resources at the end of the seg­ment.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

The Case for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts & Doing Valuable “Deep Work” Instead, According to Computer Scientist Cal Newport

A famil­iar ding comes from your pock­et, you look up from what you’re doing and reach for the smart­phone. Before you can think, “it can wait,” you’ve dis­ap­peared into the screen like lit­tle Car­ol Anne Freel­ing in Pol­ter­geist. Tak­en by a ghost­ly pres­ence with designs upon your soul—your time, emo­tion­al well-being, cre­ativ­i­ty—Face­book. Some­one has request­ed my friend­ship! You like my video? I like you! Why, I’ve got an opin­ion about that, and that, and that, and that…. All the lit­tle per­for­ma­tive ges­tures, imprint­ed in the fin­gers and the thumbs.

Twit­ter, Snapchat, Insta­gram, Tum­blr, What­sApp, VKon­tact, Sina Wei­bo…. Just maybe, social media addic­tion is a glob­al epi­dem­ic, a col­lec­tion of emo­tion­al­ly, social­ly, and polit­i­cal­ly, tox­ic behav­iors. As Suren Rama­sub­bu reports, “social media engage­ment has been found to trig­ger three key net­works in the brain” that make us think intense­ly about our self-image and pub­lic per­cep­tion, cre­ate new neur­al path­ways, and release dopamine and oxy­tocin, which keep us com­ing back for more lit­tle red hearts, tiny thumbs-ups, and diminu­tive gold stars (good job!).

While the nature of addic­tion is a con­tro­ver­sial top­ic, it will arouse lit­tle dis­agree­ment to say that we live—as George­town Uni­ver­si­ty Com­put­er Sci­ence Pro­fes­sor Calvin New­port writes in the sub­ti­tle of his book Deep Work—in a “dis­tract­ed world.” (The full title is Deep Work: Rules for Focused Suc­cess in a Dis­tract­ed World.) Newport’s pre­scrip­tion will go down less eas­i­ly. Quit, drop out, tune out, opt out, get out of the Matrix, New­port argues, more or less, in his book and his TEDx talk above. He acknowl­edges the odd­i­ty of being a “mil­len­ni­al com­put­er sci­en­tist book author, stand­ing on a TED stage” who nev­er had a social media account and urges oth­ers to give up theirs.

Any one of his over­lap­ping demo­graph­ics is like­ly to have a sig­nif­i­cant web pres­ence. Put all of them togeth­er and we expect New­port to be pitch­ing a start­up net­work to an audi­ence of ven­ture cap­i­tal­ists. Even the sto­ry about why he first abstained could have made him a minor char­ac­ter in The Social Net­work. But feel­ings of pro­fes­sion­al jeal­ousy soon turned to wari­ness and alarm. “This seems dan­ger­ous,” he says, then lets us know—because we sure­ly wondered—that he’s okay. “I still have friends. I still know what’s going on in the world.” Whether you’re con­vinced he’s hap­pi­er than the rest of us poor saps is up to you.

As for the claim that we should join him in the wilder­ness of the real—his argu­ment is per­sua­sive. Social media, says New­port, is not a “fun­da­men­tal tech­nol­o­gy.” It is akin to the slot machine, an “enter­tain­ment machine,” with an insid­i­ous added dimension—the soul steal­ing. Para­phras­ing tech guru and icon­o­clast Jaron Lanier, New­port says, “these com­pa­nies offer you shiny treats in exchange for min­utes of your atten­tion and bytes of your per­son­al data, which can then be pack­aged up and sold.” But like the slot machine, the social media net­work is a “some­what unsa­vory source of enter­tain­ment” giv­en the express intent of its engi­neers to make their prod­uct “as addic­tive as pos­si­ble,” com­pa­ra­ble to what dieti­tians now call “ultra-processed foods”—all sug­ar and fat, no nutri­ents.

New­port names anoth­er objec­tion to quitting—the neces­si­ty of social media as an essen­tial busi­ness tool—then piv­ots to his book and his com­mit­ment to what he calls “deep work.” What is this? You can read the book to find out, or get a Cliff’s Notes ver­sion in Bri­an Johnson’s video above. John­son begins by con­trast­ing deep work with “shal­low work,” where we spend most of our time, “con­stant­ly respond­ing to the lat­est and loud­est email and push noti­fi­ca­tion for social media, or text mes­sages or phone ring­ing, what­ev­er.”

While we may get lit­tle endor­phin boosts from all of this heav­i­ly medi­at­ed social activ­i­ty, we pay a high price in stress, anx­i­ety, and lost time in our per­son­al, pro­fes­sion­al, and cre­ative lives. The research on over­work and dis­trac­tion sup­ports New­port’s con­clu­sions. The real rewards come from deep work, he argues, that which we do when we have total focus and emo­tion­al invest­ment in a project. With­out get­ting too spe­cif­ic, such work, New­port says, is not only per­son­al­ly ful­fill­ing, but valu­able “in a 21st cen­tu­ry econ­o­my” for its rar­i­ty.

Social media, on the oth­er hand, he claims, con­tributes lit­tle to our work lives. And as you (or maybe it’s me) scan the open social media tabs in your over­loaded brows­er, and tune in to the clut­tered state of your mind, you might find your­self agree­ing with his hereti­cal propo­si­tion. You might even share his talk on social media. Or decide to fol­low us on Face­book and/or Twit­ter.

To delve fur­ther into New­port’s think­ing, see his books: Deep Work: Rules for Focused Suc­cess in a Dis­tract­ed World and Dig­i­tal Min­i­mal­ism: Choos­ing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. Both books are also avail­able in audio for­mat on Audible.com. Sign up for a free tri­al here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lyn­da Bar­ry on How the Smart­phone Is Endan­ger­ing Three Ingre­di­ents of Cre­ativ­i­ty: Lone­li­ness, Uncer­tain­ty & Bore­dom

How Infor­ma­tion Over­load Robs Us of Our Cre­ativ­i­ty: What the Sci­en­tif­ic Research Shows

New Ani­ma­tion Explains Sher­ry Turkle’s The­o­ries on Why Social Media Makes Us Lone­ly

The Neu­ro­science & Psy­chol­o­gy of Pro­cras­ti­na­tion, and How to Over­come It

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Marshall McLuhan Explains Why We’re Blind to How Technology Changes Us, Raising the Question: What Have the Internet & Social Media Done to Us?

Image of Mar­shall McLuhan at Cana­da, by Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

So many of us use Face­book every day, but how many of us know that its enor­mous pres­ence in our lives owes, in part, to mod­ern phi­los­o­phy? “In the course of his stud­ies at Stan­ford,” writes John Lan­ches­ter in a recent Lon­don Review of Books piece of Face­book, Sil­i­con Val­ley bil­lion­aire Peter Thiel, an ear­ly investor in the com­pa­ny, “became inter­est­ed in the ideas of the US-based French philoso­pher René Girard, as advo­cat­ed in his most influ­en­tial book, Things Hid­den since the Foun­da­tion of the World,” espe­cial­ly a con­cept he called “mimet­ic desire.”

“Human beings are born with a need for food and shel­ter,” writes Lan­ches­ter. “Once these fun­da­men­tal neces­si­ties of life have been acquired, we look around us at what oth­er peo­ple are doing, and want­i­ng, and we copy them.” Or as Thiel explained it, “Imi­ta­tion is at the root of all behav­ior.” Lan­ches­ter reports that “the rea­son Thiel latched onto Face­book with such alacrity was that he saw in it for the first time a busi­ness that was Girar­dian to its core: built on people’s deep need to copy,” yet few of us, its users, have clear­ly per­ceived that essen­tial aspect of Face­book and oth­er social media plat­forms.

Mar­shall McLuhan, despite hav­ing died decades before their devel­op­ment, would have caught on right away — and he under­stood why even we savvy denizens of the 21st cen­tu­ry haven’t. “For the past 3500 years of the West­ern world, the effects of media — whether it’s speech, writ­ing, print­ing, pho­tog­ra­phy, radio or tele­vi­sion — have been sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly over­looked by social observers,” said the author of Under­stand­ing Media and The Medi­um is the Mes­sage. “Even in today’s rev­o­lu­tion­ary elec­tron­ic age, schol­ars evi­dence few signs of mod­i­fy­ing this tra­di­tion­al stance of ostrich­like dis­re­gard.”

Those words come from an in-depth 1969 inter­view with Play­boy mag­a­zine that broke the celebri­ty lit­er­a­ture pro­fes­sor McLuhan’s ideas to an even wider audi­ence than they’d had before. In it he diag­nosed a “pecu­liar form of self-hyp­no­sis” he called “Nar­cis­sus nar­co­sis, a syn­drome where­by man remains as unaware of the psy­chic and social effects of his new tech­nol­o­gy as a fish of the water it swims in. As a result, pre­cise­ly at the point where a new media-induced envi­ron­ment becomes all per­va­sive and trans­mo­gri­fies our sen­so­ry bal­ance, it also becomes invis­i­ble.”

As McLuhan saw it, “most peo­ple, from truck dri­vers to the lit­er­ary Brah­mins, are still bliss­ful­ly igno­rant of what the media do to them; unaware that because of their per­va­sive effects on man, it is the medi­um itself that is the mes­sage, not the con­tent, and unaware that the medi­um is also the mas­sage — that, all puns aside, it lit­er­al­ly works over and sat­u­rates and molds and trans­forms every sense ratio. The con­tent or mes­sage of any par­tic­u­lar medi­um has about as much impor­tance as the sten­cil­ing on the cas­ing of an atom­ic bomb.”

Just last month, no less omnipresent an inter­net titan than Google cel­e­brat­ed McLuhan’s 106th birth­day, and a social observ­er called PR Pro­fes­sor saw in it a cer­tain irony: though “it seems like tech­nol­o­gy that extends man’s abil­i­ty to expe­ri­ence and inter­pret the world is pos­i­tive and desir­able,” McLuhan point­ed out “that the inher­ent ten­den­cy to focus on the mes­sages with­in the media make us blind to the lim­its and struc­tures imposed by the medi­ums them­selves.” This blind­ness has con­se­quences indeed, since, accord­ing to McLuhan, each time a soci­ety devel­ops a new media tech­nol­o­gy, “all oth­er func­tions of that soci­ety tend to be trans­mut­ed to accom­mo­date that new form” as that tech­nol­o­gy “sat­u­rates every insti­tu­tion of that soci­ety.”

This went for speech, writ­ing, print, and the tele­graph as well as it goes for “social media plat­forms like Twit­ter, which reduce expres­sive pos­si­bil­i­ties to 140 char­ac­ters of text or express­ing one’s self through the ‘re-tweet­ing’ of posts by oth­ers.” McLuhan believed that at one time only the inter­pre­tive work of the artist, “who has had the pow­er — and courage — of the seer to read the lan­guage of the out­er world and relate it to the inner world,” could allow the rest of us to rec­og­nize the thor­ough­go­ing effects of tech­nol­o­gy on soci­ety, but that “the new envi­ron­ment of elec­tric infor­ma­tion” had made pos­si­ble “a new degree of per­cep­tion and crit­i­cal aware­ness by nonartists.” At least more of us, if we step back, can now under­stand our afflic­tion by mimet­ic desire, Nar­cis­sus nar­co­sis, or any num­ber of oth­er trou­bling con­di­tions. What to do about them remains an open ques­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mar­shall McLuhan Pre­dicts That Elec­tron­ic Media Will Dis­place the Book & Cre­ate Sweep­ing Changes in Our Every­day Lives (1960)

Mar­shall McLuhan in Two Min­utes: A Brief Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the 1960s Media The­o­rist Who Pre­dict­ed Our Present

Has Tech­nol­o­gy Changed Us?: BBC Ani­ma­tions Answer the Ques­tion with the Help of Mar­shall McLuhan

McLuhan Said “The Medi­um Is The Mes­sage”; Two Pieces Of Media Decode the Famous Phrase

Mar­shall McLuhan, W.H. Auden & Buck­min­ster Fuller Debate the Virtues of Mod­ern Tech­nol­o­gy & Media (1971)

New Ani­ma­tion Explains Sher­ry Turkle’s The­o­ries on Why Social Media Makes Us Lone­ly

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Marshall McLuhan Predicts That Electronic Media Will Displace the Book & Create Sweeping Changes in Our Everyday Lives (1960)

“The elec­tron­ic media haven’t wiped out the book: it’s read, used, and want­ed, per­haps more than ever. But the role of the book has changed. It’s no longer alone. It no longer has sole charge of our out­look, nor of our sen­si­bil­i­ties.” As famil­iar as those words may sound, they don’t come from one of the think pieces on the chang­ing media land­scape now pub­lished each and every day. They come from the mouth of mid­cen­tu­ry CBC tele­vi­sion host John O’Leary, intro­duc­ing an inter­view with Mar­shall McLuhan more than half a cen­tu­ry ago.

McLuhan, one of the most idio­syn­crat­ic and wide-rang­ing thinkers of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, would go on to become world famous (to the point of mak­ing a cameo in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall) as a prophet­ic media the­o­rist. He saw clear­er than many how the intro­duc­tion of mass media like radio and tele­vi­sion had changed us, and spoke with more con­fi­dence than most about how the media to come would change us. He under­stood what he under­stood about these process­es in no small part because he’d learned their his­to­ry, going all the way back to the devel­op­ment of writ­ing itself.

Writ­ing, in McLuhan’s telling, changed the way we thought, which changed the way we orga­nized our soci­eties, which changed the way we per­ceived things, which changed the way we inter­act. All of that holds truer for the print­ing press, and even truer still for tele­vi­sion. He told the sto­ry in his book The Guten­berg Galaxy, which he was work­ing on at the time of this inter­view in May of 1960, and which would intro­duce the term “glob­al vil­lage” to its read­ers, and which would crys­tal­lize much of what he talked about in this broad­cast. Elec­tron­ic media, in his view, “have made our world into a sin­gle unit.”

With this “con­tin­u­al­ly sound­ing trib­al drum” in place, “every­body gets the mes­sage all the time: a princess gets mar­ried in Eng­land, and ‘boom, boom, boom’ go the drums. We all hear about it. An earth­quake in North Africa, a Hol­ly­wood star gets drunk, away go the drums again.” The con­se­quence? “We’re re-trib­al­iz­ing. Invol­un­tar­i­ly, we’re get­ting rid of indi­vid­u­al­ism.” Where “just as books and their pri­vate point of view are being replaced by the new media, so the con­cepts which under­lie our actions, our social lives, are chang­ing.” No longer con­cerned with “find­ing our own indi­vid­ual way,” we instead obsess over “what the group knows, feel­ing as it does, act­ing ‘with it,’ not apart from it.”

Though McLuhan died in 1980, long before the appear­ance of the mod­ern inter­net, many of his read­ers have seen recent tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ments val­i­date his notion of the glob­al vil­lage — and his view of its per­ils as well as its ben­e­fits — more and more with time. At this point in his­to­ry, mankind can seem less unit­ed than ever than ever, pos­si­bly because tech­nol­o­gy now allows us to join any num­ber of glob­al “tribes.” But don’t we feel more pres­sure than ever to know just what those tribes know and feel just what they feel?

No won­der so many of those pieces that cross our news feeds today still ref­er­ence McLuhan and his pre­dic­tions. Just this past week­end, Quartz’s Lila MacLel­lan did so in argu­ing that our media, “while glob­al in reach, has come to be essen­tial­ly con­trolled by busi­ness­es that use data and cog­ni­tive sci­ence to keep us spell­bound and loy­al based on our own tastes, fuel­ing the relent­less rise of hyper-per­son­al­iza­tion” as “deep-learn­ing pow­ered ser­vices promise to become even bet­ter cus­tom-con­tent tai­lors, lim­it­ing what indi­vid­u­als and groups are exposed to even as the uni­verse of prod­ucts and sources of infor­ma­tion expands.” Long live the indi­vid­ual, the indi­vid­ual is dead: step back, and it all looks like one of those con­tra­dic­tions McLuhan could have deliv­ered as a res­o­nant sound bite indeed.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mar­shall McLuhan in Two Min­utes: A Brief Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the 1960s Media The­o­rist Who Pre­dict­ed Our Present

Has Tech­nol­o­gy Changed Us?: BBC Ani­ma­tions Answer the Ques­tion with the Help of Mar­shall McLuhan

McLuhan Said “The Medi­um Is The Mes­sage”; Two Pieces Of Media Decode the Famous Phrase

The Vision­ary Thought of Mar­shall McLuhan, Intro­duced and Demys­ti­fied by Tom Wolfe

Mar­shall McLuhan, W.H. Auden & Buck­min­ster Fuller Debate the Virtues of Mod­ern Tech­nol­o­gy & Media (1971)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

A Complete Digitization of Eros Magazine: The Controversial 1960s Magazine on the Sexual Revolution

Last year we told you about the dig­i­ti­za­tion of Avant Garde mag­a­zine, a short-lived but influ­en­tial 1960s mag­a­zine, which fea­tured lith­o­graphs by John Lennon and artis­tic pho­tographs of Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe. Today, we’re pleased to announce the dig­i­ti­za­tion of Avant Garde’s sis­ter mag­a­zine, Eros. Also a col­lab­o­ra­tion between Ralph Ginzburg (edi­tor) and Herb Lubalin (art direc­tor), Eros posi­tioned itself as a quar­ter­ly mag­a­zine on love and sex in Amer­i­ca. Author­i­ties, how­ev­er, did­n’t take kind­ly to a mag­a­zine cov­er­ing the sex­u­al rev­o­lu­tion. Not in 1962. And when Eros pub­lished its fourth issue, Robert Kennedy, the U.S. Attor­ney Gen­er­al, indict­ed Ginzburg for dis­trib­ut­ing obscene lit­er­a­ture through the mail and vio­lat­ing fed­er­al anti-obscen­i­ty laws. Ginzburg was con­vict­ed (a deci­sion lat­er affirmed by the Supreme Court) and sen­tenced to five years in prison. Ulti­mate­ly, he served eight months.

Thanks to Mindy Seu, a new­ly-cre­at­ed web­site lets you read dig­i­tal copies of Eros. All four issuesSpring 1962, Sum­mer 1962Autumn 1962, and Win­ter 1962. When you vis­it the site, click the word “Index” in the top right cor­ner, and then you can eas­i­ly nav­i­gate through indi­vid­ual pages.

As you do, keep one thing in mind: Eros was no flim­sy mag­a­zine. Accord­ing to The New York Times, it was a “stun­ning­ly designed hard­cov­er ‘mag­book’,” cov­er­ing “a wide swath of sex­u­al­i­ty in his­to­ry, pol­i­tics, art and lit­er­a­ture” and fea­tur­ing arti­cles by the likes of Nat Hentoff.

Also, if you click on “Resources” once you’re on the new site, you can read arti­cles about Eros mag­a­zine and the con­tro­ver­sial tri­al.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Com­plete Dig­i­ti­za­tion of the 1960s Mag­a­zine Avant Garde: From John Lennon’s Erot­ic Lith­o­graphs to Mar­i­lyn Monroe’s Last Pho­tos

Down­load 336 Issues of the Avant-Garde Mag­a­zine The Storm (1910–1932), Fea­tur­ing the Work of Kandin­sky, Klee, Moholy-Nagy & More

Exten­sive Archive of Avant-Garde & Mod­ernist Mag­a­zines (1890–1939) Now Avail­able Online

2,200 Rad­i­cal Polit­i­cal Posters Dig­i­tized: A New Archive

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Watch a Reading of Steve Bannon’s Screenplay Which Attempted to Turn Shakespeare’s Coriolanus Into a Rap Musical

Some­where between work­ing at Gold­man Sachs, and call­ing the shots for Bre­it­bart and Don­ald Trump, the Volde­mor­t­ian Steve Ban­non went to Hol­ly­wood and made 18 films, many of them polit­i­cal. Described “as the Leni Riefen­stahl of the Tea Par­ty move­ment” (by Andrew Bre­it­bart him­self), Ban­non helped pro­duce the Ronald Rea­gan doc­u­men­tary In the Face of Evil and Fire from the Heart­land: The Awak­en­ing of the Con­ser­v­a­tive Woman. But he’s per­haps best known for writ­ing a treat­ment for the nev­er-made doc­u­men­tary, Destroy­ing the Great Satan: The Rise of Islam­ic Fas­cism in Amer­i­ca. The eight page draft, writes The Wash­ing­ton Post, pro­posed “a three-part movie that would trace ‘the cul­ture of intol­er­ance’ behind sharia law, exam­ine the ‘Fifth Col­umn’ made up of ‘Islam­ic front groups’ and iden­ti­fy the Amer­i­can enablers paving ‘the road to this unique hell on earth.’ ” Look­ing back, it’s no won­der that Ban­non tried to engi­neer a ban of Mus­lims immi­grants upon enter­ing the White House.

For any­one inter­est­ed in revis­it­ing anoth­er unre­al­ized Ban­non pro­duc­tion, you can now watch (above) a table read of his screen­play for The Thing I Am. Co-writ­ten with Julia Jones dur­ing the late 1990s, it’s a “rap musi­cal adap­ta­tion of Shakespeare’s Cori­olanus set in South Cen­tral Los Ange­les dur­ing the 1992 riots after the LAPD beat­ing of Rod­ney King.” Put togeth­er by an orga­ni­za­tion called Now This, the read fea­tures Rob Corddry, Lucas Neff, Parvesh Cheena, Daniele Gaither, Gary Antho­ny Williams, Char­lie Carv­er, Cedric Yarbor­ough, and hip hop artist A.J. Crew. And, as the web­site Refinery29 warns, it’s “full of cussing, the n‑word, and men­tions of crotch grabs.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sin­clair Lewis’ Chill­ing Play, It Can’t Hap­pen Here: A Read-Through by the Berke­ley Reper­to­ry The­atre

A Free Course from Yale on the U.S. Civ­il War: Because Trump Just Gave Us Anoth­er Teach­able Moment

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.