Watch James Earl Jones Read Kurt Vonnegut’s Letter Urging High-School Students to Create Art & “Make Your Soul Grow”

As cul­tur­al fig­ures, the late James Earl Jones and Kurt Von­negut would seem to have had lit­tle in com­mon, but each could eas­i­ly be rec­og­nized by his voice. Jones’ will come to mind as soon as you think of Darth Vad­er, Sim­ba’s father, or “This is CNN.” Von­negut’s dis­tinc­tion was the voice evi­dent on any giv­en page of nov­els like Cat’s Cra­dle, Break­fast of Cham­pi­ons, and of course Slaugh­ter­house-Five — a voice many of us have known since ado­les­cence. They come togeth­er in the Let­ters Live video above with Jones read­ing a Von­negut let­ter to the stu­dents of Ms. Lock­wood’s Eng­lish class at New York’s Xavier High School in 2006.

Von­negut was writ­ing in response to five such stu­dents, who’d cho­sen him when assigned to write to their favorite author. We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured his let­ter here on Open Cul­ture as read aloud by Sir Ian McK­ellen, but its mes­sage bears repeat­ing by any­one who will speak it, beloved actor or oth­er­wise. “Prac­tice any art, music, singing, danc­ing, act­ing, draw­ing, paint­ing, sculpt­ing, poet­ry, fic­tion, essays, reportage, no mat­ter how well or bad­ly,” he writes. The idea is “not to get mon­ey and fame, but to expe­ri­ence becom­ing, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.”

The cel­e­brat­ed nov­el­ist even hands down an assign­ment to his teenage fans: “Write a six line poem, about any­thing, but rhymed. No fair ten­nis with­out a net. Make it as good as you pos­si­bly can. But don’t tell any­body what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to any­body, not even your girl­friend or par­ents or what­ev­er, or Ms. Lock­wood.” After thor­ough­ly dis­pos­ing of this entire­ly pri­vate piece of art, know that “you have expe­ri­enced becom­ing, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.”

None of this con­flicts with the stan­dard advice about writ­ing, which tends to empha­size just get­ting start­ed, work­ing under restric­tions, and not mak­ing an undue rush to pub­li­ca­tion. But they make a dif­fer­ent kind of impact when rec­om­mend­ed by Von­negut in what would turn out to be the last year of life, and with his char­ac­ter­is­tic ten­den­cy to reach for the heav­ens while nev­er depart­ing from the mun­dane, even sil­ly things of this earth. “Dance home after school, and sing in the show­er and on and on,” he sug­gests. “Make a face in your mashed pota­toes. Pre­tend you’re Count Drac­u­la.” There writes a grand old man of Amer­i­can let­ters who knew how com­mu­ni­cate across a dis­tance of gen­er­a­tions.

Relat­ed con­tent:

James Earl Jones (RIP) Reads Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” and Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”

James Earl Jones Reads Oth­el­lo at White House Poet­ry Jam

Fred­er­ick Douglass’s Fiery 1852 Speech, “The Mean­ing of July 4th for the Negro,” Read by James Earl Jones

Darth Vader’s Voice: The Orig­i­nal Voice Ver­sus the Vocals of James Earl Jones

Kurt Von­negut Urges Young Peo­ple to Make Art and “Make Your Soul Grow”

Sir Ian McK­ellen Reads Kurt Vonnegut’s Let­ter to High School Stu­dents: Make Art and “Make Your Soul Grow”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

What It Takes to Pass “the Knowledge,” the “Insanely Hard” Exam to Become a London Taxicab Driver

Any­one who’s fol­lowed the late Michael Apt­ed’s Up doc­u­men­taries knows that becom­ing a Lon­don cab dri­ver is no mean feat. Tony Walk­er, one of the series’ most mem­o­rable par­tic­i­pants, was select­ed at the age of sev­en from an East End pri­ma­ry school, already dis­tin­guished as a char­ac­ter by his ener­getic man­ner, clas­sic cock­ney accent, and enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly expressed ambi­tion to become a jock­ey. By 21 Up, how­ev­er, he’d got off the horse and into a taxi­cab — or was aim­ing to do so, hav­ing immersed him­self in the stud­ies required for the nec­es­sary licens­ing exams. For many non-British view­ers, this con­sti­tut­ed an intro­duc­tion to what’s known as “the Knowl­edge,” the for­mi­da­ble test­ing process licensed Lon­don taxi­cab dri­vers have under­gone since 1865.

The Great Big Sto­ry video at the top of the post pro­vides an intro­duc­tion to this “insane­ly hard test,” which demands the mem­o­riza­tion of 320 routes around Lon­don, involv­ing 25,000 streets and roads, with­in a six-mile radius of Trafal­gar Square. “Its rig­ors have been likened to those required to earn a degree in law or med­i­cine,” writes Jody Rosen in a 2014 New York Time Style Mag­a­zine piece on the Knowl­edge.

“It is with­out ques­tion a unique intel­lec­tu­al, psy­cho­log­i­cal and phys­i­cal ordeal, demand­ing unnum­bered thou­sands of hours of immer­sive study.” For the Tony Walk­ers of the world, it has also long offered a route to sta­ble, well-com­pen­sat­ed, and even pres­ti­gious work: every­one, regard­less of social class, acknowl­edges the exper­tise of Lon­don that the black-taxi­cab dri­ver pos­sess­es.

In recent years, those clas­sic black cabs have faced great­ly inten­si­fied com­pe­ti­tion from rideshare and “mini­cab” ser­vices, whose dri­vers aren’t required to pass the Knowl­edge. Instead, they rely on the same thing the rest of us do: GPS-enabled devices that auto­mat­i­cal­ly com­pute the route between point A and point B. Though one would imag­ine this tech­nol­o­gy hav­ing long since ren­dered the Knowl­edge redun­dant, the flow of aspi­rants to the sta­tus of black-cab dri­ver has­n’t dried up entire­ly. Take Tom the Taxi Dri­ver, a full-fledged Lon­don cab­bie who’s also mil­len­ni­al enough to have elab­o­rate tat­toos and his own Youtube chan­nel, on which he explains not just the expe­ri­ence of dri­ving a taxi in Lon­don, but also of tak­ing the tests to do so, which involve plot­ting Point-A-to-Point‑B routes ver­bal­ly, on the spot.

The ques­tion of whether the Knowl­edge beats the GPS is set­tled on the chan­nel of anoth­er, sim­i­lar­ly named Eng­lish Youtu­ber: Tom Scott, who in the video above, dri­ves one route through Lon­don using his mobile phone while Tom the Taxi Dri­ver does anoth­er of the same length while con­sult­ing only his own men­tal map of the city. This mod­ern-day John Hen­ry show­down is less inter­est­ing for its out­come than for what we see along the way: Tom the Taxi Dri­ver’s per­cep­tion and expe­ri­ence of Lon­don dif­fer con­sid­er­ably from that of Tom the non-taxi dri­ver, and as neu­ro­sci­en­tif­ic research has sug­gest­ed, that dif­fer­ence is prob­a­bly reflect­ed in the phys­i­cal nature of his brain.

“The pos­te­ri­or hip­pocam­pus, the area of the brain known to be impor­tant for mem­o­ry, is big­ger in Lon­don taxi dri­vers than in most peo­ple, and that a suc­cess­ful Knowl­edge candidate’s pos­te­ri­or hip­pocam­pus enlarges as he pro­gress­es through the test,” writes Rosen. The appli­cants’ hav­ing to mas­ter fine-grained detail both geo­graph­ic and his­tor­i­cal (over a peri­od of near­ly three years on aver­age) also under­scores that “the Knowl­edge stands for, well, knowl­edge — for the Enlight­en­ment ide­al of ency­clo­pe­dic learn­ing, for the human­ist notion that dili­gent intel­lec­tu­al endeav­or is ennobling, an end in itself.” For any of us, habit­u­al­ly offload­ing the men­tal work of not just wayfind­ing but remem­ber­ing, cal­cu­lat­ing, and much else besides onto apps may well induce a kind of men­tal obe­si­ty, one we can only fight off by mas­ter­ing the Knowl­edge of our own pur­suits, what­ev­er those pur­suits may be.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Growth of Lon­don, from the Romans to the 21st Cen­tu­ry, Visu­al­ized in a Time-Lapse Ani­mat­ed Map

The Old­est Known Footage of Lon­don (1890–1920) Fea­tures the City’s Great Land­marks

“The Won­der­ground Map of Lon­don Town,” the Icon­ic 1914 Map That Saved the World’s First Sub­way Sys­tem

Meet Madame Inès Decour­celle, One of the Very First Female Taxi Dri­vers in Paris (Cir­ca 1908)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Oscar-Winning Director Frank Capra Made an Educational Science Film Warning of Climate Change in 1958

In 2015, we high­light­ed for you The Strange Case of the Cos­mic Rays, a large­ly-for­got­ten 1957 edu­ca­tion­al sci­ence film. The pro­duc­tion is notable part­ly because it was shot by Frank Capra, the influ­en­tial direc­tor who had won not one, not two, but three Oscars for best direc­tor. And also because the film fea­tured pup­pets of Fyo­dor Dos­to­evsky, Charles Dick­ens & Edgar Allan Poe. Don’t believe me? Then watch here.

But the sub­ject of today’s post is not The Strange Case of the Cos­mic Rays. It’s anoth­er of the four films that Capra cre­at­ed for “The Bell Lab­o­ra­to­ry Sci­ence Series.” It’s called The Unchained God­dess, and it has its own rea­sons for get­ting high­light­ed here.

Shown on Amer­i­can TV and lat­er in US class­rooms, The Unchained God­dess explains what weath­er is, and how weath­er works. And, real­ly quite pre­scient­ly, it talks about the risk of man-made cli­mate change … in 1958. One of the nar­ra­tors declares:

Even now, man may be unwit­ting­ly chang­ing the world’s cli­mate through the waste prod­ucts of its civ­i­liza­tion. Due to our releas­es in fac­to­ries and auto­mo­biles every year of more than six bil­lion tons of car­bon diox­ide, which helps the air absorb heat from the sun, our atmos­phere may be get­ting warmer.

And is that bad, the ques­tion gets asked?:

Well, it’s been cal­cu­lat­ed a few degrees rise in the Earth’s tem­per­a­ture would melt the polar ice caps. And if this hap­pens, an inland sea would fill a good por­tion of the Mis­sis­sip­pi val­ley. Tourists in glass bot­tom boats would be view­ing the drowned tow­ers of Mia­mi through 150 feet of trop­i­cal water. For in weath­er, we’re not only deal­ing with forces of a far greater vari­ety than even the atom­ic physi­cist encoun­ters, but with life itself.

Inter­est­ing dia­logue, to be sure. But what makes it all the more intrigu­ing is this: Frank Capra co-wrote the script for the film, and he was no lib­er­al. He was a con­ser­v­a­tive Repub­li­can, who strong­ly opposed F.D.R. and cel­e­brat­ed Amer­i­can indi­vid­u­al­ism. But Capra stud­ied chem­i­cal engi­neer­ing at Cal­tech and put stock in sci­en­tif­ic research — before it became ide­o­log­i­cal­ly anath­e­ma to do so.

You can watch the key cli­mate change scene from The Unchained God­dess up top, and the full film below. It’s also added to our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More:

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Carl Sagan Warns Con­gress about Cli­mate Change (1985)

Pup­pets of Dos­to­evsky, Dick­ens & Poe Star in 1950s Frank Capra Edu­ca­tion­al Film

Open Plan­et Lets You Down­load & Use 4,500 Free Videos That Doc­u­ment Nature & Cli­mate Change

 

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Isaac Asimov Predicts the Future of Online Education in 1988–and It’s Now Coming True in the Age of AI & Smartphones

“I have nev­er let my school­ing inter­fere with my edu­ca­tion.” Though that line prob­a­bly orig­i­nat­ed with  a Cana­di­an nov­el­ist called Grant Allen, it’s long been pop­u­lar­ly attrib­uted to his more col­or­ful nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry con­tem­po­rary Mark Twain. It isn’t hard to under­stand why it now has so much trac­tion as a social media-ready quote, though dur­ing much of the peri­od between Allen’s day and our own, many must have found it prac­ti­cal­ly unin­tel­li­gi­ble. The indus­tri­al­ized world of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry attempt­ed to make edu­ca­tion and school­ing syn­ony­mous, an ambi­tion suf­fi­cient­ly wrong­head­ed that, by the nine­teen-eight­ies, no less pow­er­ful a mind than Isaac Asi­mov was lament­ing it on nation­al tele­vi­sion.

“In the old days you used to have tutors for chil­dren,” Asi­mov tells Bill Moy­ers in a 1988 World of Ideas inter­view. “But how many peo­ple could afford to hire a ped­a­gogue? Most chil­dren went une­d­u­cat­ed. Then we reached the point where it was absolute­ly nec­es­sary to edu­cate every­body. The only way we could do it is to have one teacher for a great many stu­dents and, in order to orga­nize the sit­u­a­tion prop­er­ly, we gave them a cur­ricu­lum to teach from.” And yet “the num­ber of teach­ers is far greater than the num­ber of good teach­ers.” The ide­al solu­tion, per­son­al tutors for all, would be made pos­si­ble by per­son­al com­put­ers, “each of them hooked up to enor­mous libraries where any­one can ask any ques­tion and be giv­en answers.”

At the time, this was­n’t an obvi­ous future for non-sci­ence-fic­tion-vision­ar­ies to imag­ine. “Well, what if I want to learn only about base­ball?” asks a faint­ly skep­ti­cal Moy­ers. “You learn all you want about base­ball,” Asi­mov replies, “because the more you learn about base­ball the more you might grow inter­est­ed in math­e­mat­ics to try to fig­ure out what they mean by those earned run aver­ages and the bat­ting aver­ages and so on. You might, in the end, become more inter­est­ed in math than base­ball if you fol­low your own bent.” And indeed, sim­i­lar­ly equipped with a per­son­al-com­put­er-as-tutor, “some­one who is inter­est­ed in math­e­mat­ics may sud­den­ly find him­self very enticed by the prob­lem of how you throw a curve ball.”

The trou­ble was how to get every house­hold a com­put­er, which was still seen by many in 1988 as an extrav­a­gant, not nec­es­sar­i­ly use­ful pur­chase. Three and a half decades lat­er, you see a com­put­er in the hand of near­ly every man, woman, and child in the devel­oped coun­tries (and many devel­op­ing ones as well). This is the tech­no­log­i­cal real­i­ty that gave rise to Khan Acad­e­my, which offers free online edu­ca­tion in math, sci­ences, lit­er­a­ture, his­to­ry, and much else besides. In the inter­view clip above, its founder Sal Khan remem­bers how, when his inter­net-tutor­ing project was first gain­ing momen­tum, it occurred to him that “maybe we’re in the right moment in his­to­ry that some­thing like this could become what Isaac Asi­mov envi­sioned.”

More recent­ly, Khan has been pro­mot­ing the edu­ca­tion­al use of a tech­nol­o­gy at the edge of even Asi­mov’s vision. Just days ago, he pub­lished the book Brave New Words: How AI Will Rev­o­lu­tion­ize Edu­ca­tion (and Why That’s a Good Thing) and made a video with his teenage son demon­strat­ing how the lat­est ver­sion of Ope­nAI’s Chat­G­PT — sound­ing, it must be said, uncan­ni­ly like Scar­lett Johans­son in the now-prophet­ic-seem­ing Her — can act as a geom­e­try tutor. Not that it works only, or even pri­mar­i­ly, for kids in school: “That’s anoth­er trou­ble with edu­ca­tion as we now have it,” as Asi­mov says. “It is for the young, and peo­ple think of edu­ca­tion as some­thing that they can fin­ish.” We may be as relieved as gen­er­a­tions past when our school­ing ends, but now we have no excuse ever to fin­ish our edu­ca­tion.

Find a tran­script of Asi­mov and Moy­ers’ con­ver­sa­tion here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts the Future in 1982: Com­put­ers Will Be “at the Cen­ter of Every­thing;” Robots Will Take Human Jobs

Arthur C. Clarke Pre­dicts the Future in 1964 … And Kind of Nails It

Noam Chom­sky Spells Out the Pur­pose of Edu­ca­tion

The Pres­i­dent of North­west­ern Uni­ver­si­ty Pre­dicts Online Learn­ing … in 1934!

Salman Khan Returns to MIT, Gives Com­mence­ment Speech, Likens School to Hog­warts

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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.

Discover the World’s Oldest University, Which Opened in 427 CE, Housed 9 Million Manuscripts, and Then Educated Students for 800 Years

In the Bud­dhist Asia of a dozen cen­turies ago, the equiv­a­lent of going off to study at an Ivy League school was going off to study at Nalan­da. It was found­ed in the year 427 in what’s now the Indi­an state of Bihar, mak­ing it “the world’s first res­i­den­tial uni­ver­si­ty,” as Sug­a­to Mukher­jee writes at BBC trav­el. As it devel­oped, Nalan­da became a “home to nine mil­lion books that attract­ed 10,000 stu­dents from across East­ern and Cen­tral Asia. They gath­ered here to learn med­i­cine, log­ic, math­e­mat­ics and – above all – Bud­dhist prin­ci­ples from some of the era’s most revered schol­ars.”

Alas, despite being much old­er than the famous­ly ven­er­a­ble uni­ver­si­ties of Bologna, Oxford, or Cam­bridge, Nalan­da can’t claim to have been in con­tin­u­ous oper­a­tion since the fifth cen­tu­ry. Destroyed by maraud­ers dur­ing Turko-Afghan gen­er­al Bakhti­yar Khilji’s con­quest of north­ern and east­ern India in the 1190s, its vast cam­pus lay in obscure ruins until Scot­tish sur­vey­or Fran­cis Buchanan-Hamil­ton and British Army engi­neer Sir Alexan­der Cun­ning­ham redis­cov­ered and iden­ti­fied it, respec­tive­ly, in the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry.

In its near­ly eight cen­turies of ini­tial activ­i­ty, writes Mukher­jee, Nalan­da attract­ed pro­to-inter­na­tion­al stu­dents from all over Asia, and “reg­u­lar­ly sent some of its best schol­ars and pro­fes­sors to places like Chi­na, Korea, Japan, Indone­sia and Sri Lan­ka to prop­a­gate Bud­dhist teach­ings and phi­los­o­phy.” Its notable fac­ul­ty mem­bers includ­ed Aryab­ha­ta, “the father of Indi­an math­e­mat­ics,” who may have been its head in the sixth cen­tu­ry, and Chi­nese Bud­dhist monk Xuan­zang, who returned to his home­land in 645 with “a wag­onload of 657 Bud­dhist scrip­tures from Nalan­da.” Lat­er “he would trans­late a por­tion of these vol­umes into Chi­nese to cre­ate his life’s trea­tise.”

Image by Sum­it­surai, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Of the nine mil­lion hand­writ­ten Bud­dhist man­u­scripts in Nalan­da’s library at the time of its destruc­tion, “only a hand­ful” sur­vived. Some of them even­tu­al­ly made their way to the Los Ange­les Coun­ty Muse­um of Art, a fit­ting enough trib­ute to the world-span­ning out­look of the insti­tu­tion. Not far from its orig­i­nal loca­tion, now a UNESCO World Her­itage site, Nalan­da is mak­ing a come­back as an inter­na­tion­al place of learn­ing for the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry. You can get a sense of how that project is shap­ing up from the BBC Reel video above. “I think we are already a uni­ver­si­ty of the future,” says its Vice Chan­cel­lor Sunaina Singh, and indeed, a promis­ing vision of the future needs noth­ing quite so much as a suf­fi­cient­ly deep past.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Intro­duc­tion to Indi­an Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Online Course

The Most Dis­tant Places Vis­it­ed by the Romans: Africa, Scan­di­navia, Chi­na, India, Ara­bia & Oth­er Far-Flung Lands

Learn the His­to­ry of Indi­an Phi­los­o­phy in a 62 Episode Series from The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps: The Bud­dha, Bha­gavad-Gita, Non Vio­lence & More

One of the Old­est Bud­dhist Man­u­scripts Has Been Dig­i­tized & Put Online: Explore the Gand­hara Scroll

How 99% of Ancient Lit­er­a­ture Was Lost

The Largest Free Kitchen in the World: Dis­cov­er India’s Gold­en Tem­ple Which Serves 100,000 Free Meals Per Day

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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.

Meet Jason Arday, the Cambridge Professor Who Didn’t Learn to Talk Until Age 11, or to Read Until Age 18

When Jason Arday became a pro­fes­sor at Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge at the age of 37, he also became the youngest black per­son ever appoint­ed to a pro­fes­sor­ship there. That’s impres­sive, but it becomes much more so when you con­sid­er that he did­n’t learn to speak until he was eleven years old and read until he was eigh­teen. Diag­nosed with Autism Spec­trum Dis­or­der at the age of three, he had to find dif­fer­ent ways to devel­op him­self and his life than most of us, and also to take advan­tage of help from the right col­lab­o­ra­tors: his moth­er, for instance, who learned the val­ue of rep­e­ti­tion to the autis­tic mind, and intro­duced her son to the high­ly repet­i­tive game of snook­er to get him used to mas­ter­ing tasks.

“It’s hard to say if it worked or not,” Arday says in the Great Big Sto­ry video above. “Well, in terms of snook­er, it did, because I became a real­ly good snook­er play­er.” An inter­est­ed high school teacher, Chris Trace, and lat­er a col­lege tutor named San­dro San­dri, encour­aged Arday to use his strong focus to not just catch up with but far sur­pass the aver­age stu­dent.

“I don’t con­sid­er myself to be intel­li­gent,” Arday says in the Black in Acad­e­mia video below, “but I would bet that I’m one of the hard­est-work­ing peo­ple in the world.” In the Soci­ol­o­gy of Edu­ca­tion depart­ment, he’s direct­ed his own work toward improv­ing the sit­u­a­tion of stu­dents pos­sessed of sim­i­lar dri­ve in sim­i­lar­ly dif­fi­cult start­ing con­di­tions.

Among Arday’s projects, accord­ing to the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge’s web site, “a book with Dr. Chantelle Lewis (Uni­ver­si­ty of Oxford) about the chal­lenges and dis­crim­i­na­tion faced by neu­ro­di­verse pop­u­la­tions and stu­dents of col­or,” a pro­gram “to sup­port the men­tal health of young peo­ple from eth­nic minor­i­ty back­grounds,” research into “the role of the arts and cul­tur­al lit­er­a­cy in effec­tive men­tal health inter­ven­tions,” and “a book about Paul Simon’s 1986 album, Grace­land, focus­ing on the eth­i­cal dilem­mas the singer-song­writer con­front­ed by break­ing cul­tur­al apartheid in South Africa to involve mar­gin­al­ized black com­mu­ni­ties in its pro­duc­tion.”

Here on Open Cul­ture, we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured work on how music has helped autis­tic young peo­ple. It’s cer­tain­ly helped Arday, who cred­its cer­tain songs with help­ing him along in his quest for knowl­edge and aca­d­e­m­ic cre­den­tials. He makes ref­er­ence to David Bowie’s song “Gold­en Years,” because “there was a peri­od of five years where it felt like every­thing I touched turned to gold — and I had anoth­er peri­od of five years where it was just real­ly, real­ly dif­fi­cult.” Over­com­ing dis­ad­van­tages seems to have con­sti­tut­ed half of Arday’s bat­tle, but no less impor­tant, in his telling, has been his sub­se­quent deci­sion to focus on his dis­tinc­tive set of strengths. Despite the young age at which he made pro­fes­sor, none of this came quick­ly — but then, he’d been psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly pre­pared for that by anoth­er of his major musi­cal touch­stones: AC/DC’s “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wan­na Rock ‘N’ Roll).”

Relat­ed con­tent:

Cheap Trick’s Bassist Tom Peters­son Helps Kids With Autism Learn Lan­guage With Rock ‘n’ Roll: Dis­cov­er “Rock Your Speech”

“Pro­fes­sor Risk” at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty Says “One of the Biggest Risks is Being Too Cau­tious”

Blondie Drum­mer Clem Burke and Sci­en­tif­ic Researchers Show That Drum­ming Can Help Kids with Autism Learn More Effec­tive­ly in School

The Wis­dom & Advice of Mau­rice Ash­ley, the First African-Amer­i­can Chess Grand­mas­ter

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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.

How to Be Happier in 5 Research-Proven Steps, According to Popular Yale Professor Laurie Santos

Nature doesn’t care if you’re hap­py, but Yale psy­chol­o­gy pro­fes­sor Lau­rie San­tos does.

As Dr. San­tos points out dur­ing the above appear­ance on The Well, the goals of nat­ur­al selec­tion have been achieved as long as humans sur­vive and repro­duce, but most of us crave some­thing more to con­sid­er life worth liv­ing.

With depres­sion ris­ing to near epi­dem­ic lev­els on col­lege cam­pus­es and else­where, it’s worth tak­ing a look at our ingrained behav­ior, and maybe mak­ing some mod­i­fi­ca­tions to boost our hap­pi­ness lev­els.

Psy­chol­o­gy and the Good Life, Dr. San­tos’ mas­sive twice week­ly lec­ture class that active­ly tack­les ways of edg­ing clos­er to hap­pi­ness, is the most pop­u­lar course in Yale’s more than 300-year his­to­ry.

Do we detect some resis­tance?

Pos­i­tive psy­chol­o­gy — or the sci­ence of hap­pi­ness — is a pret­ty crowd­ed field late­ly, and the over­whelm­ing demand cre­at­ed by great throngs of peo­ple long­ing to feel bet­ter has attract­ed a fair num­ber of grifters will­ing to impart their proven method­olo­gies to any­one enrolling in their paid online cours­es.

By con­trast, Dr. San­tos not only has that Yale pedi­gree, she also cites oth­er respect­ed aca­d­e­mics such as the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chicago’s Nicholas Epley, a social cog­ni­tion spe­cial­ist who believes under­so­cial­i­ty, or a lack of face-to-face engage­ment, is mak­ing peo­ple mis­er­able, and Harvard’s Dan Gilbert and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Virginia’s Tim­o­thy Wil­son, who co-authored a paper on “mis­want­i­ng”, or the ten­den­cy to inac­cu­rate­ly pre­dict what will tru­ly result in sat­is­fac­tion and hap­pi­ness.

Yale under­grad Mick­ey Rose, who took Psy­chol­o­gy and the Good Life in the spring of 2022 to ful­fill a social sci­ence cred­it, told the Yale Dai­ly News that her favorite part of the class was that “every­thing was cit­ed, every­thing had a cred­i­ble source and study to back it up:”

I’m a STEM major and it’s kind of my over­all per­son­al­i­ty type to ques­tion claims that I find not very believ­able. Obvi­ous­ly the class made a lot of claims about mon­ey, grades, hap­pi­ness, that are coun­ter­in­tu­itive to most peo­ple and to Yale stu­dents espe­cial­ly.

With Psy­chol­o­gy and the Good Life now avail­able to the pub­lic for free on Cours­era, even skep­tics might con­sid­er giv­ing Dr. San­tos’ rec­om­mend­ed “re-wire­ment prac­tices” a peek, though be fore­warned, you should be pre­pared to put them into prac­tice before mak­ing pro­nounce­ments as to their effi­ca­cy.

It’s all pret­ty straight­for­ward stuff, start­ing with “use your phone to actu­al­ly be a phone”, mean­ing call a friend or fam­i­ly mem­ber to set up an in per­son get togeth­er rather than scrolling through end­less social media feeds.

Oth­er com­mon sense adjust­ments include look­ing beyond your­self to help by vol­un­teer­ing, resolv­ing to adopt a glass-is-half-full type atti­tude, cul­ti­vat­ing mind­ful­ness, mak­ing dai­ly entries in a grat­i­tude jour­nal, and becom­ing less seden­tary.

(You might also give Dr. San­tos’ Hap­pi­ness Lab pod­cast a go…)

Things to guard against are mea­sur­ing your own hap­pi­ness against the per­ceived hap­pi­ness of oth­ers and “impact bias” — over­es­ti­mat­ing the dura­tion and inten­si­ty of hap­pi­ness that is the expect­ed result of some hot­ly antic­i­pat­ed event, acqui­si­tion or change in social stand­ing.

Below Dr. San­tos gives a tour of the Good Life Cen­ter, an on-cam­pus space that stressed out, social­ly anx­ious stu­dents can vis­it to get help putting some of those re-wire­ment prac­tices into play.

Sign up for Coursera’s 10-week Sci­ence of Well-Being course here.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

The Sci­ence of Well-Being: Take a Free Online Ver­sion of Yale University’s Most Pop­u­lar Course

Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy & Neu­ro­science Cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

What Are the Keys to Hap­pi­ness? Lessons from a 75-Year-Long Har­vard Study

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Behold a 19th-Century Atlas of the United States, Designed for Blind Students (1837)

In 1835, the New Eng­land Insti­tu­tion for Edu­ca­tion of the Blind (now known as Perkins School for the Blind) acquired a print­ing press.

Under the lead­er­ship of its first direc­tor, Samuel Gri­d­ley Howe, the press was cus­tomized in order to print in raised text that allowed blind and visu­al­ly impaired peo­ple to read unas­sist­ed.

Inclu­siv­i­ty was a prime moti­va­tor for Howe, who strove to make sure his stu­dents would not be “doomed to inequal­i­ty” or regard­ed as “mere objects of pity.”

After inves­ti­gat­ing Euro­pean tac­tile print­ing sys­tems, he devel­oped Boston Line Type, an embossed Roman alpha­bet that could be read with the fin­gers.

It eschewed flour­ish­es and cap­i­tal let­ters, but read­ing it required a lot of train­ing and even then, was like­ly to be slow going. Howe esti­mat­ed that read­ing it would take three times as long as a sight­ed per­son would take to read an equiv­a­lent amount of tra­di­tion­al­ly print­ed text.

Ulti­mate­ly it proved far less user-friend­ly than braille.

Text accom­pa­ny­ing the exhi­bi­tion Touch This Page! Mak­ing Sense of the Ways We Read, notes that braille had been in use in Great Britain and France for decades before being wide­ly adopt­ed in the US:

The amount of time and mon­ey that Perkins and oth­er Amer­i­can schools had invest­ed into Boston Line Type made them resis­tant to adopt­ing a new sys­tem. Boston Line Type was, how­ev­er, much hard­er to learn than braille, and only braille allowed indi­vid­u­als with visu­al impair­ments to read and write tac­tile­ly.

The school used its Boston Line Type press to pub­lish his­to­ry, gram­mar, and spelling books, as well as the New Tes­ta­ment, and a com­plete Bible.

After a vis­it to the school, Charles Dick­ens paid to have 250 Boston Line Type copies of his nov­el The Old Curios­i­ty Shop print­ed for dis­tri­b­u­tion to blind Amer­i­cans.

In light of Touch This Page!’s asser­tion that Boston Line Type’s print forms were “designed to be uni­ver­sal­ly acces­si­ble rather than in those [print forms] most acces­si­ble to the touch”, we sus­pect that the school’s 1837 Atlas of the Unit­ed States offered its read­ers the best val­ue.

While there were many dense descrip­tive pas­sages in Boston Line Type to wade through, it also boast­ed embossed maps to ori­ent geog­ra­phy stu­dents with raised out­lines of each state.

Rivers were chart­ed as sol­id raised lines, while oceans were indi­cat­ed with par­al­lel lines. Sets of tri­an­gles rep­re­sent­ed moun­tains.

Lon­gi­tudes, lat­i­tudes, and city loca­tions were also not­ed, but the pres­ence of neg­a­tive space gave blind and low vision stu­dents the oppor­tu­ni­ty to grasp infor­ma­tion quick­ly.

50 copies were print­ed, of which four sur­vive.

Explore the Atlas of the Unit­ed States Print­ed for the Use of the Blind here.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent 

A Tac­tile Map of the Roman Empire: An Inno­v­a­tive Map That Allowed Blind & Sight­ed Stu­dents to Expe­ri­ence Geog­ra­phy by Touch (1888)

Please Touch the Art: Watch a Blind Man Expe­ri­ence His Own Por­trait for the First Time

Braille Neue: A New Ver­sion of Braille That Can Be Simul­ta­ne­ous­ly Read by the Sight­ed and the Blind

Helen Keller Had Impec­ca­ble Hand­writ­ing: See a Col­lec­tion of Her Child­hood Let­ters

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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