Pretty Much Pop #2: Binge Watching

This post con­tin­ues Open Cul­ture’s cura­tion of a new pod­cast series about pop­u­lar media and how (and why) we con­sume it. You may wish to lis­ten to the intro­duc­to­ry episode first.

What counts as binge watch­ing? Why do we do it? Is it bad for us?

Mark, Eri­ca, and Bri­an reveal their watch­ing habits (grow­ing up and now) and mar­vel at crazy-high stats about how much peo­ple watch. We think about what peo­ple get out of this activ­i­ty, what shows work do and don’t taste good in bulk, and whether watch­ing is best done in soli­tary despair or as a bond­ing expe­ri­ence as you waste the pre­cious hours of your life sit­ting next to anoth­er per­son.

We touch on many shows includ­ing The Office, Game of Thrones, Bat­tlestar Galac­ti­ca (by way of Port­landia), Jane the Vir­gin, Pret­ty Lit­tle Liars, Arrow, CSI, and Cher­nobyl (which we’ll devote the whole of Ep. 5 to).

Arti­cles we bring up:

“I like to watch, Eri­ca. I like to watch.”

This episode includes BONUS CONTENT that you can only get by becom­ing a $1+ sup­port­er at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is pro­duced by the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life Pod­cast Net­work.

A New Interactive Visualization of the 165,000 Most-Frequently Assigned Texts in College Courses

For some of us, it’s been a lit­tle while since col­lege days. For oth­ers of us, it’s been a lit­tle while longer. We might find our­selves ask­ing, if we hear news of on-cam­pus activism and unrest (sure­ly unheard of in our day)—

“Do they still read the clas­sics down at old Alma Mater U.?”

Maybe that’s the prob­lem, eh? Too much Marx­ist the­o­ry, not enough Pla­to? Well, you may be pleased, or not, to learn that clas­sics still regularly—routinely, even—appear on col­lege syl­labi, includ­ing both The Repub­lic and the Com­mu­nist Man­i­festo, in cours­es taught all over the world, from San Anto­nio to Tokyo to Karl­skro­na, Swe­den.

As we informed Open Cul­ture read­ers in 2016, Colum­bia University’s Open Syl­labus Project culled data from over 1,000,000 syl­labi from uni­ver­si­ty web­sites world­wide, to find out which books have been most fre­quent­ly taught over the past decade or so. Since then, that num­ber has risen to 6,000,000 syl­labi. Still, the most-taught books at the top of the list remain large­ly unchanged.

As two of the project’s direc­tors point­ed out soon after the site’s launch, “tra­di­tion­al West­ern canon dom­i­nates the top 100, with Plato’s Repub­lic at No. 2, The Com­mu­nist Man­i­festo at No. 3, and Franken­stein at No. 5, fol­lowed by Aristotle’s Ethics, Hobbes’s Leviathan, Machiavelli’s The Prince, [Sopho­cles’] Oedi­pus and [Shakespeare’s] Ham­let.” These num­bers have moved a lit­tle, edged down­ward by writ­ing and research guides, but not by very much.

William Strunk­’s clas­sic writ­ing guide Ele­ments of Style sits at num­ber one. Oth­er top titles include cal­cu­lus and anato­my text­books, oth­er works of Enlight­en­ment phi­los­o­phy, and texts now cen­tral to the West­ern crit­i­cal tra­di­tion like Mar­tin Luther King, Jr.’s “Let­ter from Birm­ing­ham Jail,” Michel Foucault’s Dis­ci­pline and Pun­ish, and Edward Said’s Ori­en­tal­ism.

The top 50 is almost total­ly dom­i­nat­ed by male writ­ers, though some of the most fre­quent­ly-taught nov­el­ists include Jane Austen, Toni Mor­ri­son, Anne Moody, Leslie Mar­mon Silko, and Alice Walk­er. The most-taught books tend to fall into either phi­los­o­phy, lit­er­a­ture, text­book, or guide­book, but the over­all range in this list of 165,000 texts encom­pass­es the entire scope of acad­e­mia around the globe, with more con­tem­po­rary study areas like gen­der stud­ies, media stud­ies, dig­i­tal cul­ture, and envi­ron­men­tal stud­ies promi­nent along­side tra­di­tion­al depart­ments like physics and psy­chol­o­gy.

A new inter­ac­tive visu­al­iza­tion from Open Syl­labus turns this trove of data into a col­or-cod­ed stip­pling of dif­fer­ent-sized dots, each one rep­re­sent­ing a par­tic­u­lar text. Float over each dot and a box appears in the cor­ner of the screen, show­ing the num­ber of syl­labi that have assigned the text, and a link to a pro­file page with more detailed analy­sis. Called the “Co-Assign­ment Galaxy,” the info­graph­ic does what a list can­not: draws con­nec­tions between all these works and their respec­tive fields of study.

The Open Syl­labus Project was already an impres­sive achieve­ment, a huge aggre­ga­tion of freely acces­si­ble data for schol­ars and curi­ous laypeo­ple alike. The addi­tion of this user-friend­ly clus­ter map makes the site an even more indis­pens­able resource for the study of how high­er edu­ca­tion has changed over the past decade or so, and how it has, in some respects, remained the same. Enter the Open Syl­labus Project’s Co-Assign­ment Galaxy map here.

via John Over­holt

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Open Syl­labus Project Gath­ers 1,000,000 Syl­labi from Uni­ver­si­ties & Reveals the 100 Most Fre­quent­ly-Taught Books

The 20 Most Influ­en­tial Aca­d­e­m­ic Books of All Time: No Spoil­ers

How to Read Many More Books in a Year: Watch a Short Doc­u­men­tary Fea­tur­ing Some of the World’s Most Beau­ti­ful Book­stores

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

Mister Rogers Creates a Prime Time TV Special to Help Parents Talk to Their Children About the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy (1968)

Near­ly three min­utes into a patient blow-by-blow demon­stra­tion of how breath­ing works, Fred Rogers’ tim­o­rous hand pup­pet Daniel Striped Tiger sur­pris­es his human pal, Lady Aber­lin, with a wham­my: What does assas­si­na­tion mean?

Her answer, while not exact­ly Web­ster-Mer­ri­am accu­rate, is both con­sid­ered and age-appro­pri­ate. (Daniel’s for­ev­er-age is some­where in the neigh­bor­hood of four.)

The exchange is part of a spe­cial prime­time episode of Mis­ter Rogers’ Neigh­bor­hood, that aired just two days after Sen­a­tor Robert F. Kennedy’s assas­si­na­tion.

Rogers, alarmed that America’s chil­dren were being exposed to unfil­tered descrip­tions and images of the shock­ing event, had stayed up late to write it, with the goal of help­ing par­ents under­stand some of the emo­tions their chil­dren might be expe­ri­enc­ing in the after­math:

I’ve been ter­ri­bly con­cerned about the graph­ic dis­play of vio­lence which the mass media has been show­ing recent­ly. And I plead for your pro­tec­tion and sup­port of your young chil­dren. There is just so much that a very young child can take with­out it being over­whelm­ing.

Rogers was care­ful to note that not all chil­dren process scary news in the same way.

To illus­trate, he arranged for a vari­ety of respons­es through­out the Land of Make Believe. One pup­pet, Lady Elaine, is eager to act out what she has seen: “That man got shot by that oth­er man at least six times!”

Her neigh­bor, X the Owl, does­n’t want any part of what is to him a fright­en­ing-sound­ing game.

And Daniel, who Rogers’ wife Joanne inti­mat­ed was a reflec­tion “the real Fred,” pre­ferred to put the top­ic on ice for future discussions—a lux­u­ry that the grown up Rogers would not allow him­self.

The episode has become noto­ri­ous, in part because it aired but once on the small screen. (The 8‑minute clip at the top of the page is the longest seg­ment we were able to truf­fle up online.)

Writer and gameshow his­to­ri­an Adam Ned­eff watched it in its entire­ty at the Paley Cen­ter for Media, and the detailed impres­sions he shared with the Neigh­bor­hood Archive web­site pro­vides a sense of the piece as a whole.

Mean­while, the Paley Center’s cat­a­logue cred­its speak to the dra­ma-in-real-life imme­di­a­cy of the turn­around from con­cep­tion to air­date:

Above is some of the footage Rogers feared unsus­pect­ing chil­dren would be left to process solo. Read­ers, are there any among you who remem­ber dis­cussing this event with your par­ents… or chil­dren?

Ever vig­i­lant, Rogers returned in the days imme­di­ate­ly fol­low­ing the 2001 attack on the World Trade Cen­ter, with a spe­cial mes­sage for par­ents who had grown up watch­ing him.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mr. Rogers’ Nine Rules for Speak­ing to Chil­dren (1977)

When Fred Rogers and Fran­cois Clem­mons Broke Down Race Bar­ri­ers on a His­toric Episode of Mis­ter Rogers’ Neigh­bor­hood (1969)

All 886 episodes of Mis­ter Roger’s Neigh­bor­hood Stream­ing Online (for a Lim­it­ed Time)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inkyzine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Sep­tem­ber 9 for anoth­er sea­son of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

What Happens When Artificial Intelligence Listens to John Coltrane’s Interstellar Space & Starts to Create Its Own Free Jazz

Some enjoy free jazz as soon as they first hear it; oth­ers think it sounds like music from an alien civ­i­liza­tion, a lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ence fit only for a jazz fan as high as a kite. But how about as high as a space probe? Out­er­he­lios, a 24/7 stream of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence-gen­er­at­ed free jazz, comes designed for broad­cast into out­er space by Dad­abots, a col­lab­o­ra­tion between musi­cians-turned-pro­gram­mers CJ Carr and Zack Zukows­ki (or, accord­ing to their about page, “a cross between a band, a hackathon team, and an ephemer­al research lab”). Hav­ing pre­vi­ous­ly built an AI-gen­er­at­ed death met­al stream (about whose cre­ation you can read in this com­put­er sci­ence paper), they’ve looked to the skies and trained their neur­al net­work on John Coltrane’s Inter­stel­lar Space.

“These duets between Coltrane on tenor (and bells) and Rashied Ali on drums sound like an annoy­ance until you con­cen­trate on them,” writes Robert Christ­gau in his orig­i­nal review of the 1974 album, “at which point the inter­ac­tions take on pace and shape.” The neur­al net­work “lis­tened to the album 16 times,” says the offi­cial Data­bots descrip­tion on the Out­er­he­lios stream, “then con­tin­ued to make music in the style.”

The project draws inspi­ra­tion from NASA’s probes Voy­ager 1 and 2, which “launched in 1977 car­ry­ing a mix­tape Carl Sagan made called The Sounds of Earth. It fea­tured Blind Willie John­son, Chuck Berry, record­ings of laugh­ter, Beethoven, Bach, Stravin­sky, along with dia­grams of human repro­duc­tive organs,” all “intend­ed for an audi­ence of intel­li­gent extrater­res­tri­al life­forms.”

Where­as The Sounds of Earth “used a sta­t­ic music for­mat pre­vi­ous­ly record­ed by peo­ple,” Out­er­he­lios fol­lows on Bri­an Eno’s ideas about gen­er­a­tive music by invent­ing a Coltrane album that nev­er sounds the same twice. “For a few min­utes, it’ll pro­duce plau­si­ble-sound­ing free jazz,” writes Futurism.com’s Jon Chris­t­ian. “Then the drums will segue into an inhu­man trill, or the horns will dis­in­te­grate into a cacoph­o­nous wash of sound. Let’s just say that it’s not your dad’s jazz” — even if your dad hap­pens to be John Coltrane, or indeed Bri­an Eno. But per­haps it will give NASA just the inspi­ra­tion it needs to get the next Voy­ager launched. The sound of the orig­i­nal Inter­stel­lar Space got Christ­gau think­ing beyond nations: “Euro­pean, Ori­en­tal, African — I don’t know. But amaz­ing.” Could the likes of Out­er­he­lios get us think­ing beyond the solar sytem?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Carl Sagan Sent Music & Pho­tos Into Space So That Aliens Could Under­stand Human Civ­i­liza­tion (Even After We’re Gone)

Hear the Declas­si­fied, Eerie “Space Music” Heard Dur­ing the Apol­lo 10 Mis­sion (1969)

The Secret Link Between Jazz and Physics: How Ein­stein & Coltrane Shared Impro­vi­sa­tion and Intu­ition in Com­mon

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Pro­gram Tries to Write a Bea­t­les Song: Lis­ten to “Daddy’s Car”

Nick Cave Answers the Hot­ly Debat­ed Ques­tion: Will Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Ever Be Able to Write a Great Song?

Space Jazz, a Son­ic Sci-Fi Opera by L. Ron Hub­bard, Fea­tur­ing Chick Corea (1983)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Every Harrowing Second of the Apollo 11 Landing Revisited in a New NASA Video: It Took Place 50 Years Ago Today (July 20, 1969)

The idea that human beings might not only fly to the moon, but land on its puck­ered sur­face and walk around, seemed like an absolute fan­ta­sy for near­ly all of human his­to­ry. In the exact­ly fifty years since that that very thing hap­pened, â€śmoon shot” has become an almost com­mon­place ref­er­ence for grand, his­toric ges­tures. “Fifty years after Neil Arm­strong walked on the moon, plant­ed an Amer­i­can flag, and flew home,” writes Alex Davies at Wired, “the term moon shot has become short­hand for try­ing to do some­thing that’s real­ly hard and maybe a bit crazy.”

The prob­lem with this, Davies argues, is that the all-eggs-in-one-bas­ket approach does not apply today’s most press­ing, yet most neb­u­lous and glob­al, prob­lems. A “moon shot” cli­mate ini­tia­tive suf­fers from a lack of speci­fici­ty. What exact­ly would it tar­get? How would it mea­sure suc­cess or fail­ure in an unam­bigu­ous way when the prob­lem per­me­ates the econ­o­my, ener­gy, agri­cul­ture, man­u­fac­tur­ing, gov­ern­ment…? A very dif­fer­ent kind of think­ing is required.

Maybe the dualisms of the Cold War made some things sim­pler, in a way. In 1961, John F. Kennedy’s famous artic­u­la­tion of “the goal,” as he put it, could not have been more clear: “land­ing a man on the moon and return­ing him safe­ly to Earth.” You either achieve this, or you don’t. There are no half-mea­sures, and no con­fu­sion about what con­sti­tutes suc­cess. Which brings us to anoth­er prob­lem with turn­ing “moon shot” into a cliché for doing some­thing hard. We for­get just how damned hard it actu­al­ly was.

Land­ing Neil Arm­strong, Buzz Aldrin, and pilot Michael Collins on the moon required an expen­di­ture unthink­able today: “NASA spent $25 bil­lion on the Apol­lo pro­gram,” Davies points out, “more than $150 bil­lion in today’s dol­lars.” The U.S. may spend almost sev­en times that on its mil­i­tary in a year, but it’s unthink­able that this nation, or any oth­er, would invest Apol­lo dol­lars in a com­plete­ly unsure thing, with no imme­di­ate poten­tial for con­trol or exploita­tion.

The same might be said of major cor­po­ra­tions. The space­far­ing ambi­tions of today’s titans seem con­ser­v­a­tive by 1961 stan­dards: “More than 400,000 Amer­i­cans worked on [Apol­lo 11] in some capac­i­ty, near­ly all of them in pri­vate indus­try,” writes Davies. The project absolute­ly depend­ed on this coor­di­nat­ed, col­lec­tive lev­el of human inge­nu­ity and exper­tise because the total com­put­ing pow­er of NASA was sev­er­al mil­lions of times less than that of a smart­phone.

From the human “com­put­ers” who plot­ted Apol­lo 11’s course, to the astro­nauts who flew the craft, humans not only designed, mon­i­tored, and exe­cut­ed the mis­sion, but they also had to impro­vise when things went wrong. And they did, in some ter­ri­fy­ing, life-threat­en­ing ways. “The prob­lems began imme­di­ate­ly upon sep­a­ra­tion from the Com­mand Mod­ule in which Arm­strong, Aldrin and Michael Collins had rid­den to the moon,” explains Rod Pyle at Space.com—but, so too did the prob­lem-solv­ing.

To get a bet­ter sense of why the endeav­or was so earth­shak­ing, and how it almost didn’t hap­pen, watch the video above, “Apol­lo 11: The Com­plete Descent.” Part of NASA’s Apol­lo Flight Jour­nal col­lec­tion, the 20-minute nar­rat­ed doc­u­men­tary of the descent and land­ing pro­vides a “detailed account of every sec­ond of the Apol­lo 11 descent and land­ing.” It “com­bines data from the onboard com­put­er for alti­tude and pitch angle, 16mm film that was shot through­out the descent at 6 frames per sec­ond,” and audio trans­mis­sions from the astro­nauts and mis­sion con­trol.

“Most peo­ple knew that going to the moon was risky,” Pyle writes, “but few, very few, knew the scope of the dan­gers that the crew faced.” Fifty years lat­er, we can almost—with only the devices in our pockets—see and hear the orig­i­nal moon shot the way those first few did.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Apol­lo 11 in Real Time: A New Web Site Lets You Take a Real-Time Jour­ney Through First Land­ing on the Moon

NASA Dig­i­tizes 20,000 Hours of Audio from the His­toric Apol­lo 11 Mis­sion: Stream Them Free Online

David Bowie’s “Space Odd­i­ty” and the Apol­lo 11 Moon Land­ing Turn 50 This Month: Cel­e­brate Two Giant Leaps That Took Place 9 Days Apart

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

Alexis de Tocqueville’s Prediction of How American Democracy Could Lapse Into Despotism, Read by Michel Houellebecq

Michel Houelle­bec­q’s third nov­el Plat­form, which involves a ter­ror­ist bomb­ing in south­east Asia, came out the year before a sim­i­lar real-life inci­dent occurred in Thai­land. His sev­enth nov­el Sub­mis­sion, about the con­ver­sion of France into a Mus­lim coun­try, came out the same day as the mas­sacre at the offices of Islam-pro­vok­ing satir­i­cal week­ly Char­lie Heb­do. His most recent nov­el Sero­tonin, in which farm­ers vio­lent­ly revolt against the French state, hap­pened to come out in the ear­ly stages of the pop­ulist “yel­low vest” move­ment. Houelle­becq has thus, even by some of his many detrac­tors, been cred­it­ed with a cer­tain pre­science about the social and polit­i­cal dan­gers of the world in which we live today.

So too has a coun­try­man of Houelle­bec­q’s who did his writ­ing more than 150 years ear­li­er: Alex­is de Toc­queville, author of Democ­ra­cy in Amer­i­ca, the endur­ing study of that then-new coun­try and its dar­ing­ly exper­i­men­tal polit­i­cal sys­tem. And what does per­haps France’s best-known liv­ing man of let­ters think of Toc­queville, one of his best-known pre­de­ces­sors? “I read him for the first time long ago and real­ly found it a bit bor­ing,” Houelle­becq says in the inter­view clip above, with a flat­ness rem­i­nis­cent of his nov­els’ dis­af­fect­ed nar­ra­tors. “Then I tried again two years ago and I was thun­der­struck.”

As an exam­ple of Toc­queville’s clear-eyed assess­ment of democ­ra­cy, Houelle­becq reads aloud this pas­sage about its poten­tial to turn into despo­tism:

I seek to trace the nov­el fea­tures under which despo­tism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the obser­va­tion is an innu­mer­able mul­ti­tude of men, all equal and alike, inces­sant­ly endeav­or­ing to pro­cure the pet­ty and pal­try plea­sures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, liv­ing apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his chil­dren and his pri­vate friends con­sti­tute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fel­low cit­i­zens, he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touch­es them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in him­self and for him­self alone; and if his kin­dred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his coun­try.

Above this race of men stands an immense and tute­lary pow­er, which takes upon itself alone to secure their grat­i­fi­ca­tions and to watch over their fate. That pow­er is absolute, minute, reg­u­lar, prov­i­dent, and mild. It would be like the author­i­ty of a par­ent if, like that author­i­ty, its object was to pre­pare men for man­hood; but it seeks, on the con­trary, to keep them in per­pet­u­al child­hood: it is well con­tent that the peo­ple should rejoice, pro­vid­ed they think of noth­ing but rejoic­ing. For their hap­pi­ness such a gov­ern­ment will­ing­ly labors, but it choos­es to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that hap­pi­ness; it pro­vides for their secu­ri­ty, fore­sees and sup­plies their neces­si­ties, facil­i­tates their plea­sures, man­ages their prin­ci­pal con­cerns, directs their indus­try, reg­u­lates the descent of prop­er­ty, and sub­di­vides their inher­i­tances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of think­ing and all the trou­ble of liv­ing?

Being a writer, Houelle­becq nat­u­ral­ly points out the deft­ness of Toc­queville’s style: “It’s mag­nif­i­cent­ly punc­tu­at­ed. The dis­tri­b­u­tion of colons and semi­colons in the sec­tions is mag­nif­i­cent.” But he also has com­ments on the pas­sage’s phi­los­o­phy, pro­nounc­ing that it “con­tains Niet­zsche, only bet­ter.” The oper­a­tive Niet­zschean con­cept here is the “last man,” described in Thus Spoke Zarathus­tra as the pre­sum­able end point of mod­ern soci­ety. If con­di­tions con­tin­ue to progress in the way they have been, each and every human being will become this last man, a weak, com­fort­able, com­pla­cent indi­vid­ual with noth­ing left to fight for, who desires noth­ing more than his small plea­sure for the day, his small plea­sure for the night, and a good sleep.

Safe to say that nei­ther Niet­zsche nor Toc­queville looked for­ward, nor does Houelle­becq look for­ward, to the world of ener­vat­ed last men into which democ­ra­cy could deliv­er us. Houelle­becq also reads aloud anoth­er pas­sage from Democ­ra­cy in Amer­i­ca, one that now appears on the Wikipedia page for soft despo­tism, describ­ing how a demo­c­ra­t­ic gov­ern­ment might gain absolute pow­er over its peo­ple with­out the peo­ple even notic­ing:

After hav­ing thus suc­ces­sive­ly tak­en each mem­ber of the com­mu­ni­ty in its pow­er­ful grasp and fash­ioned him at will, the supreme pow­er then extends its arm over the whole com­mu­ni­ty. It cov­ers the sur­face of soci­ety with a net­work of small com­pli­cat­ed rules, minute and uni­form, through which the most orig­i­nal minds and the most ener­getic char­ac­ters can­not pen­e­trate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shat­tered, but soft­ened, bent, and guid­ed; men are sel­dom forced by it to act, but they are con­stant­ly restrained from act­ing. Such a pow­er does not destroy, but it pre­vents exis­tence; it does not tyr­an­nize, but it com­press­es, ener­vates, extin­guish­es, and stu­pe­fies a peo­ple, till each nation is reduced to noth­ing bet­ter than a flock of timid and indus­tri­ous ani­mals, of which the gov­ern­ment is the shep­herd.

“A lot of what I’ve writ­ten could be sit­u­at­ed with­in this sce­nario,” Houelle­becq says, adding that in his gen­er­a­tion the “defin­i­tive trans­for­ma­tion of soci­ety into indi­vid­u­als” has been more com­plete than Toc­queville or Niet­zsche would have imag­ined.

In addi­tion to lack­ing a fam­i­ly, Houelle­becq (whose sec­ond nov­el was titled Atom­ized) also men­tions hav­ing “the impres­sion of being caught up in a net­work of com­pli­cat­ed, minute, and stu­pid rules” as well as “of being herd­ed toward a uni­form kind of hap­pi­ness, toward a hap­pi­ness which does­n’t real­ly make me hap­py.” In the end, adds Houelle­becq, the aris­to­crat­ic Toc­queville “is in favor of the devel­op­ment of democ­ra­cy and equal­i­ty, while being more aware than any­one else of its dan­gers.” That the 19th-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca Toc­queville knew avoid­ed them he cred­it­ed to the “habits of the heart” of the Amer­i­can peo­ple. We cit­i­zens of demo­c­ra­t­ic coun­tries, whichev­er demo­c­ra­t­ic coun­try we live in, would do well to ask where the habits of our own hearts will lead us next.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Alex­is De Tocqueville’s Democ­ra­cy in Amer­i­ca: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Most Insight­ful Study of Amer­i­can Democ­ra­cy

How to Know if Your Coun­try Is Head­ing Toward Despo­tism: An Edu­ca­tion­al Film from 1946

George Orwell’s Final Warn­ing: Don’t Let This Night­mare Sit­u­a­tion Hap­pen. It Depends on You!

Is Mod­ern Soci­ety Steal­ing What Makes Us Human?: A Glimpse Into Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathus­tra by The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life

The His­to­ry of West­ern Social The­o­ry, by Alan Mac­Far­lane, Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty

Hunter S. Thomp­son Gets in a Gun­fight with His Neigh­bor & Dis­pens­es Polit­i­cal Wis­dom: “In a Democ­ra­cy, You Have to Be a Play­er”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Songs by Joni Mitchell Re-Imagined as Pulp Fiction Book Covers & Vintage Movie Posters

I wish I had more sense of humor

Keep­ing the sad­ness at bay

Throw­ing the light­ness on these things

Laugh­ing it all away 

                           â€” Joni Mitchell, “Peo­ple’s Par­ties”

Joni Mitchell has been show­ered with trib­utes of late, many of them con­nect­ed to her all-star 75th birth­day con­cert last Novem­ber.

The silky voiced Seal, who cred­its Mitchell with inspir­ing him to become a musi­cian, soar­ing toward heav­en on “Both Sides Now”…

“A Case Of You” as a duet for fel­low New­port Folk Fes­ti­val alums Kris Kristof­fer­son and Bran­di Carlile….

Cha­ka Khan inject­ing a bit of funk into “Help Me,” a tune she’s been cov­er­ing for 20 some years…

They’re mov­ing and beau­ti­ful and sen­si­tive, but giv­en that Mitchel­l’s the one behind the immor­tal lyric “laugh­ing and cry­ing, you know it’s the same release…,” shouldn’t some­one aim for the fun­ny bone? Mix things up a lit­tle?

Enter Todd Alcott, who’s been delight­ing us all year with his “mid-cen­tu­ry mashups,” an irre­sistible com­bi­na­tion of vin­tage paper­back cov­ers, celebri­ty per­son­ae, and icon­ic lyrics from the annals of rock and pop.

His homage to “Help Me,” above, is decid­ed­ly on brand. The lurid 1950s EC hor­ror com­ic-style graph­ics con­fer a dishy naugh­ti­ness that was—no disrespect—rather lack­ing in the orig­i­nal.

Per­haps Mitchell would approve of these mon­keyshines?

A 1991 inter­view with Rolling Stone’s David Wild sug­gests that she would have at some point in her life:

When I was a kid, I was a real good-time Char­lie. As a mat­ter of fact, that was my nick­name. So when I first start­ed mak­ing all this sen­si­tive music, my old friends back home could not believe it. They didn’t know – where did this depressed per­son come from? Along the way, I had gone through some pret­ty hard deals, and it did intro­vert me. But it just so hap­pened that my most intro­vert­ed peri­od coin­cid­ed with the peak of my suc­cess.

Alcott hon­ors the intro­vert by ren­der­ing â€śBoth Sides Now” as an angsty-look­ing vol­ume of 60s-era poet­ry from the imag­i­nary pub­lish­ing house Clouds.

“Big Yel­low Taxi” car­ries Alcott from the book­shelf to the realm of the movie poster.

The lyrics are def­i­nite­ly the star here, but it’s fun to note just how much mileage he gets out of the float­ing text box­es that were a strange­ly ran­dom-feel­ing fea­ture of the orig­i­nal.

Also “Ladies of the Canyon” is a great pro­duc­er’s cred­it. Giv­en Alcott’s own screen­writ­ing cred­its on IMDB, per­haps we could con­vince him to mash a bit of Joni’s sen­si­bil­i­ty into some of Paul Schrader’s grimmest Taxi Dri­ver scenes…

That said, it’s worth remem­ber­ing that Alcot­t’s cre­ations are lov­ing trib­utes to the artists who mat­ter most to him. As he told Open Cul­ture:

Joni Mitchell is one of the most crim­i­nal­ly under­val­ued Amer­i­can song­writ­ers of the 20th cen­tu­ry, and that now that I live in LA, every time I dri­ve through Lau­rel Canyon I think about her and that whole absurd­ly fer­tile scene in the late 1960s, when artists could afford to live in Lau­rel Canyon and Joni Mitchell was hang­ing out with Neil Young and Charles Man­son.

See all of Todd Alcott’s work here. (Please note that this is his offi­cial sales site… beware of imposters sell­ing quick­ie knock-offs of his designs on eBay and Face­book.) Find oth­er posts fea­tur­ing his work in the Relat­eds below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

See Clas­sic Per­for­mances of Joni Mitchell from the Very Ear­ly Years–Before She Was Even Named Joni Mitchell (1965/66)

Bea­t­les Songs Re-Imag­ined as Vin­tage Book Cov­ers and Mag­a­zine Pages: “Dri­ve My Car,” “Lucy in the Sky with Dia­monds” & More

Clas­sic Songs by Bob Dylan Re-Imag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers: “Like a Rolling Stone,” “A Hard Rain’s A‑Gonna Fall” & More

Songs by David Bowie, Elvis Costel­lo, Talk­ing Heads & More Re-Imag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inkyzine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Sep­tem­ber 9 for a new sea­son of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

 

Richard Feynman’s Technique for Learning Something New: An Animated Introduction

I some­times won­der: why do peo­ple post ama­teur repair videos, made with smart­phones in kitchens and garages, with no obvi­ous com­mer­cial val­ue and, often, a lev­el of exper­tise just min­i­mal­ly above that of their view­ers? Then I remem­ber Richard Feyn­man’s prac­ti­cal advice for how to learn some­thing new—prepare to teach it to some­body else.

The extra account­abil­i­ty of mak­ing a pub­lic record might pro­vide added moti­va­tion, though not near­ly to the degree of mak­ing teach­ing one’s pro­fes­sion. Nobel-win­ning physi­cist Feyn­man spent the first half of his aca­d­e­m­ic career work­ing on the Man­hat­tan Project, dodg­ing J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI at the begin­ning of the Cold War, and mak­ing major break­throughs in quan­tum mechan­ics.

But he has become as well-known for his teach­ing as for his his­toric sci­en­tif­ic role, thanks to the enor­mous­ly pop­u­lar series of physics lec­tures he devel­oped at Cal­tech; his fun­ny, acces­si­ble, best-sell­ing books of essays and mem­oirs; and his will­ing­ness to be an avun­cu­lar pub­lic face for sci­ence, with a knack for explain­ing things in terms any­one can grasp.

Feyn­man revealed that he him­self learned through what he called a “note­book tech­nique,” an exer­cise con­duct­ed pri­mar­i­ly on paper. Yet the method came out of his ped­a­gogy, essen­tial­ly a means of prepar­ing lec­ture notes for an audi­ence who know about as much about the sub­ject as you did when you start­ed study­ing it. In order to explain it to anoth­er, you must both under­stand the sub­ject your­self, and under­stand what it’s like not to under­stand it.

Learn Feynman’s method for learn­ing in the short ani­mat­ed video above. You do not actu­al­ly need to teach, only pre­tend as if you’re going to—though prepar­ing for an actu­al audi­ence will keep you on your toes. In brief, the video sum­ma­rizes Feynman’s method in a three-step process:

  1. Choose a top­ic you want to under­stand and start study­ing it.
  2. Pre­tend you’re teach­ing the idea to some­one else. Write out an expla­na­tion on the paper…. When­ev­er you get stuck, go back and study.
  3. Final­ly do it again, but now sim­pli­fy your lan­guage or use an anal­o­gy to make the point.

Get ready to start your YouTube chan­nel with home­made lan­guage lessons, restora­tion projects, and/or cook­ing videos. You may not—nor should you, perhaps—become an online author­i­ty, but accord­ing to Fey­man, who learned more in his life­time than most of us could in two, you’ll come away great­ly enriched in oth­er ways.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Richard Feynman’s “Note­book Tech­nique” Will Help You Learn Any Subject–at School, at Work, or in Life

The Feyn­man Lec­tures on Physics, The Most Pop­u­lar Physics Book Ever Writ­ten, Is Now Com­plete­ly Online

The Draw­ings & Paint­ings of Richard Feyn­man: Art Express­es a Dra­mat­ic “Feel­ing of Awe”

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.