Ding, ding, ding, de de, ding, ding--the bassline for Queen and David Bowie's "Under Pressure" is simple and unforgettable. In Sao Paulo, ​British bassist Charles Berthoud paid tribute to John Deacon's riff, performing it with 200 other bassists. Berthoud plays a beautiful lead; the others keep the rhythm going. Evidently, the event was sponsored by Rockin' 1000, a collective that stages gigs where hundreds of musicians perform rock classics together. You can find more of their videos in the Relateds below.

via Laughing Squid

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Listen to Freddie Mercury and David Bowie on the Isolated Vocal Track for the Queen Hit ‘Under Pressure,’ 1981

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It didn't take long after the invention of cinema for its sheer power of spectacle to become clear. Arguably, it was apparent even in the pioneering work of the Lumière brothers, though they attempted only to capture images familiar from everyday life at the time. But in a decade or two emerged auteurs like Fritz Lang, who, having grown up with cinema itself, possessed highly developed instincts for how to use it to captivate large and various audiences. Released in 1927, Lang's Metropolis showed moviegoers an elaborate vision, both fearsome and alluring, of the industrial dystopia that could lay ahead. But it also had dancing girls!

Or rather, it had a dancing girl who's actually a robot — a Maschinenmensch, according to the script — built by the film's villain in an attempt to besmirch the heroine who would liberate the titular city's downtrodden workers. (Both the real woman and her mechanical impersonator are skillfully played by Brigitte Helm.)

In the video above, you can see the scandalous and cinematically innovative spectacle-within-a-spectacle that is Metropolis' dance scene colorized, upscaled to 4K resolution at 60 [...]

The adjective medieval tends to conjure up vivid and sometimes off-putting images, not least when applied to sex. But how many of us have any sense at all of what the real people of the Middle Ages got up to in bed? To get one, we could do worse than asking historian Eleanor Janega, teacher of the course Medieval Gender and Sexuality and host of the History Hit video above, "What Was Sex Really Like For Medieval People?" In it, Janega has first to make clear that, yes, medieval Europeans had sex; if they hadn't, of course, many of us wouldn't be here today. But we'd be forgiven for assuming that the seemingly absolute dominance of the Church quashed any and all of their erotic opportunities.

According to the medieval Church, Janega says, "the only time sex is acceptable is between two married people for procreative purposes." Its many other restrictions included "no sex on Saturdays and Sundays in case you're too turned on during mass; only have sex in the missionary position, because anything else subverts the natural [...]

"Moby-Dick is the great American novel. But it is also the great unread American novel. Sprawling, magnificent, deliriously digressive, it stands over and above all other works of fiction, since it is barely a work of fiction itself. Rather, it is an explosive exposition of one man’s investigation into the world of the whale, and the way humans have related to it. Yet it is so much more than that."

That's how Plymouth University introduces Herman Melville's classic tale from 1851. And it's what set the stage for their web project launched back in 2012. Called The Moby-Dick Big Read, the project featured celebrities and lesser known figures reading all 135 chapters from Moby-Dick -- chapters that you can start downloading (as free audio files) on iTunes, Soundcloud, RSS Feed, or the Big Read web site itself.

The project started with the first chapters being read by Tilda Swinton (Chapter 1), Captain R.N. Hone (Chapter 2), Nigel Williams (Chapter 3), [...]

Literacy in Chinese may now be widely attained, but it isn't easily attained. Just a century ago it wasn't widely attained either, at least not by half of the Chinese speakers alive. As a rule, women once weren't taught the thousands of logographic characters necessary to read and write in the language. But in one particular section of the land, Jiangyong County in Hunan province, some did master the 600 to 700 characters of a phonetic script made to reflect the local dialect and now called Nüshu (女书), or "women's writing."

In its heyday, Nüshu's users had a variety of names for it, "including 'mosquito writing,' because it is a little slanted and with long 'legs,'" writes Ilaria Maria Sala in a Quartz piece on the script's history. Its greatest concentration of practitioners lived in "the village of Shangjiangxu, where young girls exchanged small tokens of friendly affection, such as fans decorated with calligraphy or handkerchiefs embroidered with a few auspicious words."

Other, more formal occasions for the use of Nüshu, included when girls [...]