Restored ‘Metropolis’ to Stream Live on Friday
Classic film buffs take note. Roger Ebert writes:
The eagerly awaited restored version of Fritz Lang’s silent classic “Metropolis” will steam live on the internet on Friday Feb. 12. In America, it can be see in the afternoon. It’s said that nearly an hour of footage, long thought to be lost, has been added. The footage was discovered in a film archive in Buenos Aires.… It will be streamed via websites in both German and France. The actual film is scheduled to start playing at 1:40 PM CST, Chicago time.”
The French site streaming the film can be found here, and the German site here.
A Brief History of Pretty Much Everything
This imaginative bit was a student’s final project for an art course. The flipbook, made entirely out of biro pens, was created with 2100 pages of drawings and took about 3 weeks to develop. Needless to say, the student got an A.
Thanks to @kirstinbutler for flagging this one.
10,000 Galaxies in 3D
In 2004, the Hubble Space Telescope captured 10,000 galaxies in an image that’s now called the Ultra Deep Field. It’s our deepest look into the universe. The video above animates the Deep Field image and puts it into 3D. No need to read more. Just watch.
Why You Share
A team of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania spent a good six months studying The New York Times list of most-e-mailed articles, hoping to figure out what articles get shared, and why. And here’s what they essentially found:
People preferred e‑mailing articles with positive rather than negative themes, and they liked to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics… Perhaps most of all, readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe, an emotion that the researchers investigated after noticing how many science articles made the list.
This goes a long way toward explaining why 3.4 million people have watched The Known Universe since mid December. And, as Bill Rankin rightly suggested to me, it says something good about online culture, and what makes Open Culture work as a site. Each day, we try to give you a little awe and challenge. And for our next post: 10,000 Galaxies in 3D.
Bob Dylan at the White House
Once they were part of the counter culture. Now they’re getting the red carpet treatment in the establishment. (Not that I have a problem with that!) Last night, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and others performed in the East Room of the White House. It was all part a program called “A Celebration of Music from the Civil Rights Movement,” which will air on PBS on Feb. 11 at 8 p.m. ET. Above we have an audio recording of Dylan performing the timeless “The Times They Are A‑Changin.” You can also watch a sample of the other performances here.
Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness
Since the late 1990’s, Alain de Botton has been breaking down difficult philosophical and literary ideas and seeing how they apply to people’s everyday lives. He did this with his 1997 bestseller, How Proust Can Change Your Life. And he took things a step further with his television series called Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness. The episode above delves into Nietzsche’s belief that happiness only comes about with great effort and hardship. In the remaining five episodes, de Botton gets into Socrates on self confidence, Seneca on anger, Epicurus on happiness, Montaigne on self-esteem, and Schopenhauer on love. Each episode runs about 25 minutes. You can also find all six episodes neatly displayed on one page here.
Time Travel with Google Earth
Google Earth’s historical imagery feature now includes aerial footage of the aftermath of World War II, allowing users to comprehend the extent of post-war destruction by comparing photos of cities as they are today to those of bombed out cities immediately after the war.
Here’s Warsaw in 1935, devastated in 1943, and restored today. You can click here to see the pictures in a bigger size.
For more imagery, including pictures of Stuttgart, Naples and Lyon, see the Google Earth blog.
Wes Alwan lives in Boston, Massachusetts, where he works as a writer and researcher and attends the Institute for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture. He also participates in The Partially Examined Life, a podcast consisting of informal discussions about philosophical texts by three philosophy graduate school dropouts.
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