The Social Lives of Trees: Science Reveals How Trees Mysteriously Talk to Each Other, Work Together & Form Nurturing Families

In addi­tion to its ham-hand­ed exe­cu­tion, maybe one of the rea­sons M. Night Shyamalan’s The Hap­pen­ing failed with crit­ics is that its premise seemed inher­ent­ly pre­pos­ter­ous. Who could sus­pend dis­be­lief? Trees don’t talk to each oth­er, act in groups, make cal­cu­la­tions, how fool­ish! But they do, forester Suzanne Simard aims to con­vince us in the TED video above.

Trees aren’t just trees. They are the vis­i­ble man­i­fes­ta­tions of “this oth­er world” under­ground, “a world of infi­nite bio­log­i­cal path­ways that con­nect trees and allow them to com­mu­ni­cate, and allow the for­est to behave as if it’s a sin­gle organ­ism. It might remind you of a sort of intel­li­gence.” One shared not only by trees but by all of the beings that live in and among them. Forests are alive, though per­haps they are not plot­ting their revenge on us, even if we’ve earned it.

Simard tells the sto­ry of grow­ing up in British Colum­bia among the inland rain­forests. Old wet tem­per­ate forests crawl­ing with ancient ferns like giant green hands; cities of mush­rooms grow­ing around cen­turies-old fall­en trees; whole planes of bird and insect exis­tence in the canopies, Amer­i­can megafau­na, the elk, the bear…. On a recent hike deep into the Olympia Nation­al For­est in Wash­ing­ton, I found myself think­ing some sim­i­lar thoughts. It’s not that unusu­al to imag­ine, in the throes of “for­est bathing,” that “trees are nature’s inter­net,” as Simard says in a Seat­tle TED talk.

The dif­fer­ence is that Simard has had these thoughts all her life, devot­ed 30 years of research to test­ing her hypothe­ses, and used radioac­tive car­bon iso­topes to find two-way com­mu­ni­ca­tion between dif­fer­ent species of tree while being chased by angry griz­zly bears. Like­wise, most of us have not­ed the glar­ing sci­en­tif­ic absur­di­ties in the book of Gen­e­sis, but few may see the prob­lem with Noah’s Ark that Ital­ian botanist Ste­fano Man­cu­so does in his talk above. No one thought to bring any plants? God some­how neglect­ed to men­tion that all those ani­mals would need ecosys­tems, and fast? We laugh about an old man lit­er­al­ly load­ing repro­duc­ing pairs of every ani­mal on a boat… imag­ine him try­ing to fit entire forests….

Mancuso’s charm­ing accent and self-dep­re­cat­ing humor make his obser­va­tions seem light­heart­ed, but no less dev­as­tat­ing to our idea of our­selves as self-suf­fi­cient alpha crea­tures and of plants as bare­ly alive, inan­i­mate stuff scat­tered around us like nature’s fur­ni­ture, one step above the foun­da­tion­al rocks and stones. The idea is not lim­it­ed to the Bible; it has “accom­pa­nied human­i­ty” he says. Yet, just as pro­fes­sors do not belong at the top of a hier­ar­chy of life—as medieval schol­ars liked to imagine—plants do not belong at the bot­tom. Let Man­cu­so con­vince you that plants exhib­it “won­der­ful and com­plex behav­ior that can be con­sid­ered intel­li­gence.”

Isn’t this all a lit­tle pre­sump­tu­ous? Does any­one, after all, speak for the trees? Might their lan­guage be for­ev­er alien to us? Can we talk about “what plants talk about,” as ecol­o­gist J.C. Cahill asserts? Can we make soap opera spec­u­la­tions about “the hid­den life of trees,” as the title of Ger­man forester Peter Wohlleben’s book promis­es? Per­haps human lan­guage is nec­es­sar­i­ly anthropomorphic—we insist on see­ing our­selves at the cen­ter of every­thing. Maybe we need to think of trees as peo­ple to con­nect to them—as near­ly every ancient human civ­i­liza­tion has talked to nature through the inter­me­di­aries of spir­its, gods, devas, sprites, nymphs, ances­tors, etc.

As a forester with a lum­ber com­pa­ny, Wohlleben says, he “knew about as much about the hid­den life of trees as a butch­er knows about the emo­tion­al life of ani­mals.” They were already dead to him. Until he began to wake up to the silent com­mu­ni­ca­tion all around him. Trees can count, can learn, can remem­ber, he found. Trees have fam­i­lies. They nurse their chil­dren. As he says in the inter­view above, “I don’t claim this, that is actu­al research. But the sci­en­tists nor­mal­ly use lan­guage than can­not be under­stood. So I trans­lat­ed this, and sur­prise, sur­prise! Trees are liv­ing beings, trees are social, trees have feel­ings.” For most peo­ple, says Wohh­leben, this real­ly does come as a sur­prise.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

This 392-Year-Old Bon­sai Tree Sur­vived the Hiroshi­ma Atom­ic Blast & Still Flour­ish­es Today: The Pow­er of Resilience

Graph­ic Shows the House Plants That Nat­u­ral­ly Clean the Air in Your Home, Accord­ing to a NASA Study

Shel Silverstein’s The Giv­ing Tree: The Ani­mat­ed Film Nar­rat­ed by Shel Him­self (1973)

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

Every Academy Award Winner for Best Cinematography in One Supercut: From 1927’s Sunrise to 2016’s La La Land

A list of chrono­log­i­cal Oscar win­ners often tells you more about the state of the cul­ture than the state of the art. That is very true when it comes to Best Pic­ture, with musi­cals and epics tak­ing home the Acad­e­my Award dur­ing one decade, but being large­ly for­got­ten the next. So too is the award for Best Cin­e­matog­ra­phy, as seen in the sev­en-minute super­cut above. Show­ing every Acad­e­my Award win­ning cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er and their films, the super­cut’s choic­es for the one or two shots that sum up a bril­liant­ly lit pic­ture do make the Academy’s deci­sion at least jus­ti­fied. But it is sur­pris­ing how quick­ly so many of these films have slipped from the public’s con­scious­ness. (Like 2003’s Mas­ter and Com­man­der–when’s the last time you thought about that film?)

When the Acad­e­my first start­ed giv­ing awards for cin­e­matog­ra­phy, it went to the per­son first, not the pic­ture and the per­son involved. So when Karl Struss and Charles Rosh­er were nom­i­nat­ed for–ostensibly–their work on F.W. Murnau’s clas­sic Sun­rise–they also got cred­it­ed for the five oth­er films they had shot that year.

The cur­rent sys­tem was worked out in 1931, although up to 1967 awards went–and I think right­ly so!–to col­or and black and white sep­a­rate­ly. (And, to fur­ther com­pli­cate things, the col­or award was con­sid­ered a “spe­cial achieve­ment” award for a while until Gone with the Wind pret­ty much neces­si­tat­ed a change in pri­or­i­ties.) After 1967, the only black and white film to win was Schindler’s List.

Some­body with way more view­ing expe­ri­ence should weigh in on what makes a lot of these films Oscar-wor­thy in their cin­e­matog­ra­phy, but it does seem that at least through the 1960s, the Acad­e­my loved bold use of sat­u­rat­ed col­ors for one cat­e­go­ry, and an almost abstract use of high con­trast shad­ow and light for the oth­er.

Oth­er nota­bles: Alfred Hitch­cock­’s To Catch a Thief (a rather minor work) and Rebec­ca (a much bet­ter one) were his only two films to get the nod, with awards going to Robert Burks (but not for his work on Ver­ti­go, Rear Win­dow, North by North­west) and George Barnes respec­tive­ly. Stan­ley Kubrick has had two of his films win, with Rus­sell Met­ty for Spar­ta­cus and John Alcott for Bar­ry Lyn­don. (But not Gilbert Tay­lor for Dr. Strangelove!)

Stan­ley Kubrick has done slight­ly bet­ter, with Rus­sell Met­ty for Spar­ta­cus and John Alcott for Bar­ry Lyn­don. (But not Gilbert Tay­lor for Dr. Strangelove!) Mar­tin Scorsese’s Hugo and The Avi­a­tor both earned stat­ues for Robert Richard­son (who also won for Oliv­er Stone’s JFK). Roger Deakins has nev­er won, though he’s been nom­i­nat­ed 13 times, twice in 2007 for both No Coun­try for Old Men and The Assas­si­na­tion of Jesse James by the Cow­ard Robert Ford.

And the most award­ed cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er? That’s a tie at four Oscars each for Leon Sham­roy (The Black Swan, Wil­son, Leave Her to Heav­en, and the stu­dio-destroy­ing bomb Cleopa­tra); and Joseph Rut­ten­berg (The Great Waltz, Mrs. Miniv­er, Some­body Up There Likes Me, and Gigi).

Make of this list what you will. (And feel free to do so in the com­ments!)

via Indiewire

Relat­ed Con­tent:

100 Years of Cin­e­ma: New Doc­u­men­tary Series Explores the His­to­ry of Cin­e­ma by Ana­lyz­ing One Film Per Year, Start­ing in 1915

Sig­na­ture Shots from the Films of Stan­ley Kubrick: One-Point Per­spec­tive

The His­to­ry of the Movie Cam­era in Four Min­utes: From the Lumiere Broth­ers to Google Glass

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

Albert Einstein’s Elegant Theory of Happiness: It Just Sold for $1.6 Million at Auction, But You Can Use It for Free

Albert Ein­stein had a the­o­ry of gen­er­al rel­a­tiv­i­ty. Turns out, he had a the­o­ry of hap­pi­ness, too.

While trav­el­ing in Japan in 1922, Ein­stein learned that he had won the Nobel Prize. Sud­den­ly the object of unwant­ed pub­lic­i­ty, he seclud­ed him­self inside the Impe­r­i­al Hotel in Tokyo. And while there, explains NPR, “a couri­er came to the door to make a deliv­ery.” In lieu of giv­ing the couri­er a small tip, Ein­stein hand­ed the couri­er two hand­writ­ten notes, one of which read: “A calm and mod­est life brings more hap­pi­ness than the pur­suit of suc­cess com­bined with con­stant rest­less­ness.“ ‘

Ein­stein also gave the bell­hop anoth­er use­ful piece of advice: Don’t lose those hand­writ­ten notes. They might be worth some­thing some­day.

Sure enough, Ein­stein’s scrawled the­o­ry of hap­pi­ness sold for $1.6 mil­lion at an auc­tion on Tues­day.

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:

Albert Ein­stein Tells His Son The Key to Learn­ing & Hap­pi­ness is Los­ing Your­self in Cre­ativ­i­ty (or “Find­ing Flow”)

The Musi­cal Mind of Albert Ein­stein: Great Physi­cist, Ama­teur Vio­lin­ist and Devo­tee of Mozart

Albert Ein­stein on Indi­vid­ual Lib­er­ty, With­out Which There Would Be ‘No Shake­speare, No Goethe, No New­ton’

Lis­ten as Albert Ein­stein Calls for Peace and Social Jus­tice in 1945

Albert Ein­stein Reads ‘The Com­mon Lan­guage of Sci­ence’ (1941)

Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy Cours­es

Illustrations Of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit from the Soviet Union (1976)

Until I read J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of The Rings, my favorite book grow­ing up was, by far, The Hob­bit. Grow­ing up in Rus­sia, how­ev­er, meant that instead of Tolkien’s Eng­lish ver­sion, my par­ents read me a Russ­ian trans­la­tion. To me, the trans­la­tion eas­i­ly matched the pace and won­der of Tolkien’s orig­i­nal. Look­ing back, The Hob­bit prob­a­bly made such an indeli­ble impres­sion on me because Tolkien’s tale was alto­geth­er dif­fer­ent than the Russ­ian fairy tales and children’s sto­ries that I had pre­vi­ous­ly been exposed to. There were no child­ish hijinks, no young pro­tag­o­nists, no par­ents to res­cue you when you got into trou­ble. I con­sid­ered it an epic in the truest lit­er­ary sense.

As with many Russ­ian trans­la­tions dur­ing the Cold War, the book came with a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent set of illus­tra­tions. Mine, I remem­ber regret­ting slight­ly, lacked pic­tures alto­geth­er. A friend’s edi­tion, how­ev­er, was illus­trat­ed in the typ­i­cal Russ­ian style: much more tra­di­tion­al­ly styl­ized than Tolkien’s own draw­ings, they were more angu­lar, friend­lier, almost car­toon­ish.

In this post, we include a num­ber of these images from the 1976 print­ing. The cov­er, above, depicts a grin­ning Bil­bo Bag­gins hold­ing a gem. Below, Gan­dalf, an osten­si­bly harm­less soul, pays Bil­bo a vis­it.

Next, we have the three trolls, argu­ing about their var­i­ous eat­ing arrange­ments, with Bil­bo hid­ing to the side.

Here, Gol­lum, née Smeagol, pad­dles his raft in the depths of the moun­tains.

Final­ly, here’s Bil­bo, ful­fill­ing his role as a bur­glar in Smaug’s lair.

For more of the Sovi­et illus­tra­tions of The Hob­bit, head on over to Mash­able.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in March, 2015

Ilia Blin­d­er­man is a Mon­tre­al-based cul­ture and sci­ence writer. Fol­low him at @iliablinderman, or read more of his writ­ing at the Huff­in­g­ton Post.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Largest J.R.R. Tolkien Exhib­it in Gen­er­a­tions Is Com­ing to the U.S.: Orig­i­nal Draw­ings, Man­u­scripts, Maps & More

Hear J.R.R. Tolkien Read from The Lord of the Rings and The Hob­bit in Vin­tage Record­ings from the Ear­ly 1950s

Down­load a Free Course on The Hob­bit by “The Tolkien Pro­fes­sor,” Corey Olsen

Dis­cov­er J.R.R. Tolkien’s Per­son­al Book Cov­er Designs for The Lord of the Rings Tril­o­gy

The Only Draw­ing from Mau­rice Sendak’s Short-Lived Attempt to Illus­trate The Hob­bit

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The Art of Explaining Hard Ideas: Scientists Try to Explain Gene Editing & Brain Mapping to Young Kids & Students

If you’ve seen Bong Joon-ho’s film Okja, about an Agribusi­ness-engi­neered gar­gan­tu­an mutant pig and her young Kore­an girl side­kick, you may have some very spe­cif­ic ideas about CRISPR, the sci­ence used to edit and manip­u­late genes. In fact, the mad­cap fic­tion­al adventure’s world may not be too far off, though the sci­ence seems to be mov­ing in the oth­er direc­tion. Just recent­ly, Chi­nese sci­en­tists have report­ed the cre­ation of 12 pigs with 24 per­cent less body fat than the ordi­nary vari­ety. It may not be front-page news yet, but the achieve­ment is “a big issue for the pig indus­try,” says the lead researcher.

There’s much more to CRISPR than bio­engi­neer­ing lean bacon. But what is it and how does it work? I couldn’t begin to tell you. Let biol­o­gist Neville San­jana explain. In the Wired video above, he under­takes the ulti­mate chal­lenge for sci­ence communicators—explaining the most cut­ting-edge sci­ence to five dif­fer­ent peo­ple: a 7‑year-old, 14-year-old, col­lege stu­dent, grad stu­dent, and—to real­ly put him on the spot—a CRISPR expert. CRISPR is “a new area of bio­med­ical sci­ence that enables gene edit­ing,” San­jana begins in his short intro for view­ers, “and it’s help­ing us under­stand the basis of many genet­ic dis­eases like autism and can­cer.”

That’s all well and good, but does he have any­thing to say about the pig busi­ness? Watch and find out, begin­ning with the adorable 7‑year-old Teigen Riv­er, who may or may not have been primed with per­fect respons­es. Play it for your own kids and let us know how well the expla­na­tion works. San­jara runs quick­ly through his oth­er stu­dents to arrive, halfway through the video, at Dr. Matthew Can­ver, CRISPR expert.

From there on out you may wish to refer to oth­er quick ref­er­ences, such as the Har­vard and MIT Broad Institute’s short guide and video intro above from mol­e­c­u­lar biol­o­gist Feng Zhang, who explains that CRISPR, or “Clus­tered Reg­u­lar­ly Inter­sperced Short Palin­dromic Repeats,” is actu­al­ly the name of DNA sequences in bac­te­ria. The gene edit­ing tech­nol­o­gy itself is called CRISPR-Cas9. Just so you know how the sausage is made.

Enough of pig puns. Let’s talk about brains, with neu­ro­sci­en­tist Dr. Bob­by Kasthuri of the Argonne Nation­al Lab­o­ra­to­ry. He faces a sim­i­lar chal­lenge above—this time explain­ing high con­cept sci­ence to a 5‑year-old, 13-year-old, col­lege stu­dent, grad stu­dent, and a “Con­nec­tome entre­pre­neur.” A what? Con­nec­tome is the prod­uct of the NIH’s Human Con­nec­tome Project, which set out to “pro­vide an unpar­al­leled com­pi­la­tion of neur­al data” and “achieve nev­er before real­ized con­clu­sions about the liv­ing human brain.” This brain-map­ping sci­ence has many objec­tives, one of which, in the 5‑year-old ver­sion, is “to know where every cell in your brain is, and how it can talk to every oth­er cell.”

To this aston­ish­ing expla­na­tion you may reply like Daniel Dod­son, 5‑year-old, with a stunned “Oh.” And then you may think of Philip K. Dick, or Black Mir­ror’s “San Junipero” episode. Espe­cial­ly after hear­ing from “Con­nec­tome Entre­pre­neur” Rus­sell Han­son, founder and CEO of a com­pa­ny called Brain Back­ups, or after lis­ten­ing to Sebas­t­ian Seung—“leader in the field of connectomics”—give his TED talk, “I am my con­nec­tome.” Want anoth­er short, but grown-up focused, expla­na­tion of the total­ly sci­ence-fic­tion but also com­plete­ly real Con­nec­tome? See Kasthuri’s 2‑minute ani­mat­ed video above from Boston Uni­ver­si­ty.

Relat­ed Video:

Real­i­ty Is Noth­ing But a Hal­lu­ci­na­tion: A Mind-Bend­ing Crash Course on the Neu­ro­science of Con­scious­ness

Richard Feyn­man Cre­ates a Sim­ple Method for Telling Sci­ence From Pseu­do­science (1966)

125 Great Sci­ence Videos: From Astron­o­my to Physics & Psy­chol­o­gy 

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

Why Should You Read James Joyce’s Ulysses?: A New TED-ED Animation Makes the Case

There may be innu­mer­able moral and philo­soph­i­cal rea­sons why we should read cer­tain books, hear cer­tain sym­phonies, see cer­tain paint­ings…. Those rea­sons are most­ly intan­gi­ble, which makes them nobler, I sup­pose, than the rea­sons we should buy a lux­u­ry car or vaca­tion home. Nev­er­the­less, the sales­man­ship of high cul­ture can some­times feel of a piece, mak­ing sub­tle, or not so sub­tle, appeals to safe­ty, sta­tus, and invest­ment val­ue. What of pure enjoy­ment? The immer­sion in a work of art because it sim­ply feels good? To allow for plea­sure alone to guide our aes­thet­ic tastes, some might feel, would be amoral; would cheap­en cul­ture and ele­vate some sup­pos­ed­ly vul­gar prod­ucts to the sta­tus of high art. Can’t have that.

Of course, how much high art was once con­sid­ered a haz­ard to good taste and pub­lic moral­i­ty? Mod­ernism puffs out its chest with pride for hav­ing fos­tered many cre­ative works that shocked and tit­il­lat­ed their first mass audi­ences. James Joyce’s Ulysses ranks quite high­ly upon that list. The novel’s ini­tial rep­u­ta­tion as high­brow smut seems at odds with Sam Slote’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of it in the TED-Ed video above as “both a lit­er­ary mas­ter­piece and one of the hard­est works of lit­er­a­ture to read.” But it can be all those things and more. Inside the dense exper­i­men­tal epic is a charm­ing­ly detailed trav­el­ogue of Dublin, a the­o­log­i­cal trea­tise on heresy, a series of Freudi­an jokes with the kinds of sopho­moric punch­lines “state­ly, plump Buck Mul­li­gan” would appre­ci­ate….

Not for noth­ing has Joyce inspired a cult fol­low­ing, if not some­thing of a down­right cult, whose mem­bers gath­er all over the world on June 16th for “Blooms­day”—the sin­gle day on which the nov­el takes place, and on which Joyce met his life­long part­ner Nora Bar­na­cle in 1904. Dressed in peri­od cos­tume, Joyce fans read the nov­el aloud, and hun­dreds make the pil­grim­age to Dublin to fol­low the per­am­bu­la­tions of pro­tag­o­nists Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. “What is it,” asks Slote, an Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor at Trin­i­ty Col­lege Dublin’s School of Eng­lish, “about this famous­ly dif­fi­cult nov­el that inspires so many peo­ple?” Pro­fes­sor Slote is no dilet­tante but an expert who has pub­lished six books on Joyce and an anno­tat­ed edi­tion of Ulysses. He admits “there’s no one sim­ple answer to that ques­tion.”

Nev­er­the­less, the answers Slote does pro­vide in the six-minute ani­mat­ed intro to Ulysses relate not to the novel’s moral, social, psy­cho­log­i­cal, or polit­i­cal virtues, but to those qual­i­ties that give read­ers enjoy­ment. Each chap­ter is writ­ten in a dif­fer­ent style,” a play, a “cheesy romance nov­el,” an imi­ta­tion of music. Ulysses is a mod­ern par­o­dy of Homer’s Odyssey and a vir­tu­oso med­ley of tech­ni­cal per­for­mances, includ­ing a chap­ter which “repro­duces the evo­lu­tion of Eng­lish lit­er­ary prose style, from its begin­nings in Anglo Sax­on right up to the 20th cen­tu­ry.” The final chap­ter, Mol­ly Bloom’s stream-of-con­scious­ness solil­o­quy, is a tour-de-force, cap­ping off the “nar­ra­tive gym­nas­tic rou­tines.” The shift­ing styles are aug­ment­ed by “some of the most imag­i­na­tive uses of lan­guage you’ll find any­where.”

As for the novel’s fre­quent pas­sages of “impen­e­tra­ble” den­si­ty? Well, Slote admits that “it’s up to the read­er to let their eyes skim over them or grab a shov­el and dig in.” In the remain­ing few min­utes, he may have you con­vinced that the plea­sure is worth the effort.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

James Joyce: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to His Life and Lit­er­ary Works

The First Blooms­day: See Dublin’s Literati Cel­e­brate James Joyce’s Ulysses in Drunk­en Fash­ion (1954)

James Joyce Reads From Ulysses and Finnegans Wake In His Only Two Record­ings (1924/1929)

Read Joyce’s Ulysses Line by Line, for the Next 22 Years, with Frank Delaney’s Pod­cast

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

Samuel L. Jackson Teaches Acting in a New Online Course, Drawing on His Iconic Pulp Fiction Performance & Others

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.

With an actor as pro­lif­ic and as long in the game as Samuel L. Jack­son, a fan can pick a favorite per­for­mance only with great dif­fi­cul­ty. Should it come from his roles in Hol­ly­wood block­busters like Juras­sic ParkDie Hard with a Vengeance, the Star Wars pre­quels, or the com­ic-book spec­ta­cles of Mar­vel Stu­dios? His roles for icon­o­clas­tic auteurs like Spike Lee, Mar­tin Scors­ese, Steven Soder­bergh, and Paul Thomas Ander­son? His role — immor­tal title line and all — in Snakes on a Place? For many, though, Jack­son attains prime Jack­so­ni­an­ism in only one con­text: his ongo­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion with Quentin Taran­ti­no.

When­ev­er Jack­son appears in a Taran­ti­no film, whichev­er char­ac­ter he plays imme­di­ate­ly becomes one of the most mem­o­rable in cin­e­ma’s past 25 years. But will any ever sur­pass Pulp Fic­tion’s Jheri-curled hit­man Jules Win­n­field for sheer impact per moment onscreen? Taran­ti­no wrote the part espe­cial­ly for Jack­son after see­ing what he could do with a thug­gish char­ac­ter in Tony Scot­t’s True Romance, whose script Taran­ti­no had also writ­ten. Taran­ti­no’s sec­ond fea­ture film (and Jack­son’s thir­ti­eth) rock­et­ed the actor to the top of the zeit­geist, not least on the strength of what we now call the “Ezekiel speech­es,” the scenes in which Jack­son-as-Win­n­field quotes what he describes as the Bible pas­sage Ezekiel 25:17:

Blessed is he who, in the name of char­i­ty and good will, shep­herds the weak through the val­ley of the dark­ness. For he is tru­ly his broth­er’s keep­er and the find­er of lost chil­dren. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furi­ous anger those who attempt to poi­son and destroy my broth­ers. And you will know I am the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you.

Jack­son’s first Ezekiel speech (which owes as much to mar­tial-arts star Son­ny Chi­ba as to any holy text) comes toward the begin­ning of the movie, as he and his part­ner in killing Vin­cent Vega (a role that also did a great deal for its per­former John Tra­vol­ta, return­ing him to his for­mer cul­tur­al promi­nence) turn up to an apart­ment to do a job. He deliv­ers his final one in the high­ly Taran­tin­ian set­ting of a Los Ange­les din­er booth, and both Taran­ti­no and Jack­son do their utmost to make it reveal his char­ac­ter’s trans­for­ma­tion in his jour­ney through the sto­ry.

It makes sense, then, that Jack­son would break down and recre­ate that din­er scene in the online course “Samuel L. Jack­son Teach­es Act­ing,” new­ly offered (for a fee of $90) by the edu­ca­tion start­up Mas­ter­class. “I made a deci­sion ear­ly in life that I was­n’t going to live and die in Chat­tanooga, Ten­nessee,” he says in its trail­er, a line that could belong to the kind of mono­logue he deliv­ers so pow­er­ful­ly in the movies. “Being able to embody a lot of dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters in film has been very cathar­tic, being able to let go of the anger or the dis­ap­point­ment that I had in my life.” Jack­son’s Mas­ter­class promis­es cov­er­age of script break­down, voice, char­ac­ter­i­za­tion, audi­tion­ing, col­lab­o­ra­tion, and voiceover act­ing — cathar­sis, it seems, comes as a bonus. You can enroll now and get access to the 20-les­son course. Or you can pur­chase an All-Access Annu­al Pass for every course in the Mas­ter­Class cat­a­log for $180.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Quentin Tarantino’s Orig­i­nal Wish List for the Cast of Pulp Fic­tion

Free Audio: Go the F–k to Sleep Nar­rat­ed by Samuel L. Jack­son

Samuel L. Jack­son Stars in “Wake the F**ck Up for Oba­ma,” a NSFW Polit­i­cal Children’s Tale

See Flan­nery O’Connor’s Sto­ry “The Dis­placed Per­son” Adapt­ed to a Film Star­ring a Young Samuel L. Jack­son (1977)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include 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.

Stephen Hawking’s Ph.D. Thesis, “Properties of Expanding Universes,” Now Free to Read/Download Online

Image by NASA, via Flickr Com­mons

Imag­ine being Stephen Hawking’s dis­ser­ta­tion advi­sor? Not that most of us can put our­selves in the shoes of emi­nent Cam­bridge physi­cist Den­nis Scia­ma… but imag­ine a stu­dent suc­ceed­ing so pro­found­ly, after hav­ing over­come such remark­able dif­fi­cul­ty, to become the cel­e­brat­ed Stephen Hawk­ing? One would feel immense­ly proud, I’d guess, and maybe just a lit­tle intim­i­dat­ed. Some grad­u­ate-lev­el pro­fes­sors might even feel threat­ened by such a stu­dent. It’s doubt­ful, how­ev­er, that Sciama—who signed off on Hawking’s the­sis in 1966 and died in 1999—felt this way.

As F.R. Ellis and Roger Pen­rose write, when Hawk­ing announced a sig­nif­i­cant find­ing about black holes in 1974, Scia­ma “quick­ly rec­og­nized the impor­tance… hail­ing it as ini­ti­at­ing a new rev­o­lu­tion in our under­stand­ing.” Despite his por­tray­al by David Thewlis as “a kind of author­i­tar­i­an gate­keep­er” in the Hawk­ing biopic The The­o­ry of Every­thing, Scia­ma “was much more than that pic­ture sug­gests,” writes anoth­er of his high­ly accom­plished mentees, Adri­an Melott; “he was a superb men­tor who brought out the best in his stu­dents.” Ellis and Pen­rose, them­selves esteemed sci­en­tists strong­ly influ­enced by Scia­ma, write of his “aston­ish­ing suc­ces­sion of research stu­dents,” three of whom became fel­lows of the Roy­al Soci­ety.

I men­tion these names because they are just a few of the many peo­ple who inspired, chal­lenged, and guid­ed Hawk­ing, much of whose fame rests on his best­selling pop­u­lar cos­mol­o­gy, A Brief His­to­ry of Time. While he may be talked of as a lone eccen­tric sin­gu­lar­i­ty whose mind oper­ates above our mor­tal plane, like every sci­en­tist, he devel­oped in a com­mu­ni­ty that includes many such minds. The obser­va­tion in no way dimin­ish­es Hawking’s accomplishments–it might, ide­al­ly, spur those of us with an inter­est in his work to look at how it devel­oped in con­ver­sa­tion and debate with oth­ers, like emi­nent Cam­bridge physi­cist Fred Hoyle.

We can begin to do that now by going back to Hawking’s grad­u­ate days and read­ing his doc­tor­al the­sis, which has been made avail­able for free down­load by the Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty Library. “Prop­er­ties of Expand­ing Uni­vers­es” has proven so pop­u­lar that it crashed the library web site, with more than 60,000 views yes­ter­day. By con­trast, “oth­er pop­u­lar the­ses might have 100 views per month,” says Stu­art Roberts, deputy head of research com­mu­ni­ca­tions at Cam­bridge.

In a state­ment accom­pa­ny­ing the dissertation’s release, Hawk­ing mat­ter-of-fact­ly sit­u­ates him­self in a vast com­mu­ni­ty of “great” minds:

By mak­ing my PhD the­sis Open Access, I hope to inspire peo­ple around the world to look up at the stars and not down at their feet; to won­der about our place in the uni­verse and to try and make sense of the cos­mos. Any­one, any­where in the world should have free, unhin­dered access to not just my research, but to the research of every great and enquir­ing mind across the spec­trum of human under­stand­ing.

Should we have such open access, all of us could fol­low the debates across aca­d­e­m­ic projects, learn how the most sophis­ti­cat­ed views of the universe’s nature get for­mu­lat­ed and refined. How­ev­er, we’d prob­a­bly also find that few oth­er physi­cists express them­selves with as much clar­i­ty as Hawk­ing. Whether or not we under­stand his sci­en­tif­ic expla­na­tions, we can under­stand his prose, and his direct­ness of expres­sion has won him mil­lions of read­ers who may have nev­er have oth­er­wise read any the­o­ret­i­cal physics. See the first para­graph of Hawking’s intro­duc­tion below:

The idea that the uni­verse is expand­ing is of recent ori­gin. All the ear­ly cos­molo­gies were essen­tial­ly sta­tion­ary and even Ein­stein whose the­o­ry of rel­a­tiv­i­ty is the basis for almost all mod­ern devel­op­ments in cos­mol­o­gy, found it nat­ur­al to sug­gest a sta­t­ic mod­el of the uni­verse. How­ev­er there is a very grave dif­fi­cul­ty asso­ci­at­ed with a sta­t­ic mod­el such as Ein­stein’s which is sup­posed to have exist­ed for an infi­nite time. For, if the stars had been radi­at­ing ener­gy at their present rates for an infi­nite time, they would have need­ed an infi­nite sup­ply of ener­gy. Fur­ther, the flux of radi­a­tion now would be infi­nite. Alter­na­tive­ly, if they had only a lim­it­ed sup­ply of ener­gy, the whole uni­verse would by now have reached ther­mal equi­lib­ri­um which is cer­tain­ly not the case. This dif­fi­cul­ty was noticed by Old­ers who how­ev­er was not able to sug­gest any solu­tion. The dis­cov­ery of the reces­sion of the neb­u­lae by Hub­ble led to the aban­don­ment of sta­t­ic mod­els in favour of ones which were expand­ing.

Whether the remain­der of “Prop­er­ties of Expand­ing Uni­vers­es” is as read­able may be dif­fi­cult to deter­mine for a lit­tle while. As of the writ­ing of this post, at least, both the orig­i­nal link and a sec­ondary URL host­ing a pho­tographed ver­sion of the doc­u­ment have ground to a halt. (Update: Pages are serv­ing fair­ly well again, at least for now.) No doubt many of the vis­i­tors are physi­cists and grad stu­dents them­selves. But their num­bers may be dwarfed by laypeo­ple eager to see Hawking’s pecu­liar genius first emerge into the world, from a com­mu­ni­ty of sim­i­lar­ly bril­liant cos­mol­o­gists.

Relat­ed Con­tents:

Read John Nash’s Super Short PhD The­sis with 26 Pages & 2 Cita­tions: The Beau­ty of Invent­ing a Field

Stephen Hawking’s Lec­tures on Black Holes Now Ful­ly Ani­mat­ed with Chalk­board Illus­tra­tions

Stephen Hawking’s New Lec­ture, “Do Black Holes Have No Hair?,” Ani­mat­ed with Chalk­board Illus­tra­tions

Read John Nash’s Super Short PhD The­sis with 26 Pages & 2 Cita­tions: The Beau­ty of Invent­ing a Field

The Big Ideas of Stephen Hawk­ing Explained with Sim­ple Ani­ma­tion

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

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.