When William S. Burroughs Appeared on Saturday Night Live: His First TV Appearance (1981)

in Comedy, Literature, Television | February 17th, 2025

Though he nev­er said so direct­ly, we might expect that Sit­u­a­tion­ist Guy Debord would have includ­ed Sat­ur­day Night Live in what he called the “Spec­ta­cle”—the mass media pre­sen­ta­tion of a total­iz­ing real­i­ty, “the rul­ing order’s non­stop dis­course about itself, its nev­er-end­ing mono­logue of self-praise.” The slick­ness of TV, even live com­e­dy TV, masks care­ful­ly orches­trat­ed maneu­vers on the part of its cre­ators and adver­tis­ers. In Debor­d’s analy­sis, noth­ing is exempt­ed from the spec­ta­cle’s con­sol­i­da­tion of pow­er; it co-opts every­thing for its pur­pos­es. Even seem­ing con­tra­dic­tions with­in the spectacle—the skew­er­ing of polit­i­cal fig­ures, for exam­ple, to their seem­ing displeasure—serve the pur­pos­es of pow­er: The spec­ta­cle, wrote Debord, “is the oppo­site of dia­logue.”

So I won­der, what he might have made of the appear­ance of cult writer and Beat pio­neer William S. Bur­roughs on the com­e­dy show in 1981? Was Burroughs—a mas­ter­mind of the counterculture—co-opted by the pow­ers that be? The author of Junkie, Naked Lunch, and Cities of the Red Night also appeared in a Nike ad and sev­er­al films and music videos, becom­ing a “pres­ence in Amer­i­can pop cul­ture,” writes R.U. Sir­ius in Every­body Must Get Stoned.

David Seed notes that Bur­roughs “is remem­bered by many mem­bers of the intel­li­gentsia and glit­terati as din­ner part­ner for the likes of Andy Warhol, David Bowie, and Mick Jag­ger,” though he had “been a mod­el for the polit­i­cal and social left.” Had he been neutered by the 80s, his out­ra­geous­ly anar­chist sen­ti­ments turned to rad­i­cal kitsch?

Or maybe Bur­roughs dis­rupt­ed the spec­ta­cle, his dron­ing, monot­o­nous deliv­ery giv­ing view­ers of SNL exact­ly the oppo­site of what they were trained to expect. The appear­ance was his widest expo­sure to date (imme­di­ate­ly after­ward, he moved from New York to Lawrence, Kansas). One of the show’s writ­ers con­vinced pro­duc­er Dick Eber­sol to put Bur­roughs on. In rehearsal, writes Bur­roughs’ biog­ra­ph­er Ted Mor­gan, Eber­sol “found Bur­roughs ‘bor­ing and dread­ful,’ and ordered that his time slot be cut from six to three and a half min­utes. The writ­ers, how­ev­er, con­spired to let his per­for­mance stand as it was, and on Novem­ber 7, he kicked off the show sit­ting behind a desk, the light­ing giv­ing his face a sepul­chral gaunt­ness.”

In the grainy video above, Bur­roughs reads from Naked Lunch and cut-up nov­el Nova Express, bring­ing the sadis­tic Dr. Ben­way into Amer­i­ca’s liv­ing rooms, as the audi­ence laughs ner­vous­ly. Sound effects of bombs and strains of the nation­al anthem play behind him as he reads. It stands as per­haps one of the strangest moments in live tele­vi­sion. “Bur­roughs had posi­tioned him­self as the Great Out­sider,” writes Mor­gan, “but on the night of Novem­ber 7 he had reached the posi­tion where the actress Lau­ren Hut­ton could intro­duce him to an audi­ence of 100 mil­lion view­ers as Amer­i­ca’s great­est liv­ing writer.” I’m sure Bur­roughs got a kick out of the descrip­tion. In any case, the clip shows us a SNL of bygone days that occa­sion­al­ly dis­rupt­ed the usu­al state of pro­gram­ming, as when it had punk band Fear on the show.

Per­haps Bur­roughs’ com­mer­cial appear­ances also show us how the coun­ter­cul­ture gets co-opt­ed and repack­aged for mid­dle-class tastes. Then again, one of the great ironies of Bur­roughs’ life is that he both began and end­ed it as “a true mem­ber of the mid­west­ern tax-pay­ing mid­dle class.” The fol­low­ing year in Lawrence, Kansas, he “caught up on his cor­re­spon­dence.” One stu­dent in Mon­tre­al wrote, imag­in­ing him in “a male whore­house in Tang­i­er.” Bur­roughs replied, “No… I live in a small house on a tree-lined street in Lawrence, Kansas, with my beloved cat Rus­ki. My hob­bies are hunt­ing, fish­ing, and pis­tol prac­tice.” Did Bur­roughs, who spent his life destroy­ing mass cul­ture with cut-ups and curs­es, sell out—as he once accused Tru­man Capote of doing—by becom­ing a celebri­ty?

Per­haps we should let him answer the charge. In answer to a fan from Eng­land who called him “God,” Bur­roughs wrote, “You got me wrong, Ray­mond, I am but a hum­ble prac­ti­tion­er of the scriven­er’s trade. God? Not me. I don’t have the qual­i­fi­ca­tions. Old Sarge told me years ago: ‘Don’t be a vol­un­teer, kid.’ God is always try­ing to foist his lousy job not some­one else. You got­ta be crazy to take it. Just a Tech Sergeant in the Shake­speare Squadron.” Bur­roughs may have used his celebri­ty sta­tus to his lit­er­ary advan­tage, and used it to pay the bills and work with artists he admired and vice-ver­sa, but he nev­er saw him­self as more than a writer (and per­haps lay magi­cian), and he abjured the hero wor­ship that made him a cult fig­ure.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2016.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Beat Writer William S. Bur­roughs Spreads Coun­ter­cul­ture Cool on Nike Sneak­ers, 1994

When John Belushi Booked the Punk Band Fear on SNL, And They Got Banned from the Show: A Short Doc­u­men­tary

William S. Bur­roughs Sends Anti-Fan Let­ter to In Cold Blood Author Tru­man Capote: “You Have Sold Out Your Tal­ent”

How William S. Bur­roughs Used the Cut-Up Tech­nique to Shut Down London’s First Espres­so Bar (1972)

The “Priest” They Called Him: A Dark Col­lab­o­ra­tion Between Kurt Cobain & William S. Bur­roughs

Google Unveils a Digital Marketing & E‑Commerce Certificate: 7 Courses Will Help Prepare Students for an Entry-Level Job in 6 Months

in Google, Online Courses | January 30th, 2025

Sev­er­al years ago, Google launched a series of Career Cer­tifi­cates that will “pre­pare learn­ers for an entry-lev­el role in under six months.” Their first cer­tifi­cates focused on Project Man­age­ment, Data Ana­lyt­ics, User Expe­ri­ence (UX) Design, IT Sup­port and IT Automa­tion. And they have since released a cer­tifi­cate ded­i­cat­ed to Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing & E‑Commerce, which incor­po­rates train­ing on lever­ag­ing AI to enhance mar­ket­ing strate­gies and e‑commerce oper­a­tions.

Offered on the Cours­era plat­form, the Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing & E‑Commerce Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate con­sists of sev­en cours­es, all col­lec­tive­ly designed to help stu­dents “devel­op dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing and e‑commerce strate­gies; attract and engage cus­tomers through dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing chan­nels like search and email; mea­sure mar­ket­ing ana­lyt­ics and share insights; build e‑commerce stores, ana­lyze e‑commerce per­for­mance, and build cus­tomer loy­al­ty.” The cours­es include:

• Foun­da­tions of Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing and E‑commerce
• Attract and Engage Cus­tomers with Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing
• From Likes to Leads: Inter­act with Cus­tomers Online
• Think Out­side the Inbox: Email Mar­ket­ing
• Assess for Suc­cess: Mar­ket­ing Ana­lyt­ics and Mea­sure­ment
• Make the Sale: Build, Launch, and Man­age E‑commerce Stores 
• Sat­is­fac­tion Guar­an­teed: Devel­op Cus­tomer Loy­al­ty Online

In total, this pro­gram “includes over 190 hours of instruc­tion and prac­tice-based assess­ments, which sim­u­late real-world dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing and e‑commerce sce­nar­ios that are crit­i­cal for suc­cess in the work­place.” Along the way, stu­dents will learn how to use tools and plat­forms like Can­va, Con­stant Con­tact, Google Ads, Google Ana­lyt­ics, Hoot­suite, Hub­Spot, Mailchimp, Shopi­fy, and Twit­ter. The cours­es also focus on some time­ly AI topics–like how to kick­start mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy ideas with AI, or use AI to help you under­stand your audi­ence.

You can start a 7‑day free tri­al and explore the cours­es. If you con­tin­ue beyond that, Google/Coursera will charge $49 USD per month. That trans­lates to about $300 after 6 months.

Explore the Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing & E‑Commerce Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate.

Note: Open Cul­ture has a part­ner­ship with Cours­era. If read­ers enroll in cer­tain Cours­era cours­es and pro­grams, it helps sup­port Open Cul­ture.

The Story of How Quentin Tarantino Became a Filmmaker and Created Pulp Fiction, as Told by Quentin Tarantino

in Film | January 21st, 2025

For a film, explained a young Quentin Taran­ti­no in one inter­view, “the real test of time isn’t the Fri­day that it opens. It’s how the film is thought of thir­ty years from now.” It just so hap­pens that Pulp Fic­tion, which made Taran­ti­no the most cel­e­brat­ed direc­tor in Amer­i­ca prac­ti­cal­ly on its open­ing day, came out thir­ty years ago last fall. That pro­vid­ed the occa­sion for the video essay from YouTu­ber Dod­ford above, which tells the sto­ry of how Taran­ti­no became a film­mak­er, assem­bled for the most part out of Taran­ti­no’s own words — and in the not-quite-lin­ear chronol­o­gy with which peo­ple still asso­ciate him.

As Taran­ti­no’s body of work has grown, it’s come to seem less defined by such sliced-and-diced time­lines, or even by the obses­sions with pop cul­ture or graph­ic vio­lence the media tend­ed to exag­ger­ate when first he rose to fame. “They thought it was far more vio­lent than it was,” he says of the pub­lic reac­tion to his first fea­ture Reser­voir Dogs in a Char­lie Rose inter­view from which this video draws. He could take that as a tes­ta­ment to his under­stand­ing of cin­e­ma, a form that draws its pow­er just as often from what it does­n’t show as what it does.

Taran­ti­no began cul­ti­vat­ing that under­stand­ing ear­ly, through­out his movie-sat­u­rat­ed child­hood and his stint as a video-store clerk in Man­hat­tan Beach. Con­trary to pop­u­lar belief, how­ev­er, Video Archives did­n’t make him a movie expert: “I was already a movie expert; that’s how I got hired.” It was dur­ing that peri­od that he com­menced work on My Best Friend’s Birth­day, which he meant to be his first film. Though he nev­er com­plet­ed it even after three years of work, he did notice the artis­tic devel­op­ment evi­dent in a com­par­i­son between its ama­teur­ish ear­ly scenes and its more effec­tive lat­er ones.

That failed project turned out to be “the best film school a per­son could pos­si­bly have,” and it pre­pared him to seize the oppor­tu­ni­ties that would come lat­er. After writ­ing and sell­ing the script for True Romance, he was in a posi­tion to work on Reser­voir Dogs, which even­tu­al­ly made it to pro­duc­tion thanks to the inter­est of Har­vey Kei­t­el, who would play Mr. White. When that pic­ture got atten­tion at Sun­dance and became an indie hit, Taran­ti­no went off on a Euro­pean sojourn, osten­si­bly in order to work on his next script — and to fig­ure out how to beat “the dread­ed sopho­more curse,” some­thing with which he’d had much sec­ond-hand expe­ri­ence as a dis­ap­point­ed movie­go­er.

The fruit of those labors, a crime-sto­ry anthol­o­gy called Pulp Fic­tion, first seemed, incred­i­bly, to promise lit­tle box-office poten­tial. But one sens­es that Taran­ti­no knew exact­ly what he had, because he knew his audi­ence. It’s not that he’d com­mis­sioned inten­sive mar­ket research, but that, as he once put it, “It’s me; I’m the audi­ence.” And so he’s remained over the past three decades, draw­ing ever clos­er to com­plet­ing what, as he’s often said, will ulti­mate­ly con­sti­tute a ten-pic­ture fil­mog­ra­phy. Actu­al­ly stop­ping there would, of course, risk the dis­ap­point­ment of his many fans, who only want more. But when a film­mak­er keeps at it too long, as the cinephile in Taran­ti­no well under­stands, he runs the far more dire risk of dis­ap­point­ing him­self.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Quentin Taran­ti­no Explains How to Write & Direct Movies

My Best Friend’s Birth­day, Quentin Tarantino’s 1987 Debut Film

An Analy­sis of Quentin Tarantino’s Films Nar­rat­ed (Most­ly) by Quentin Taran­ti­no

Quentin Taran­ti­no Gives a Tour of Video Archives, the Store Where He Worked Before Becom­ing a Film­mak­er

Quentin Taran­ti­no & Roger Avary Rewatch Cult-Clas­sic Movies on Their New Video Archives Pod­cast

Why Quentin Taran­ti­no Will Only Make 10 Movies

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 the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Explore the Newly-Launched Public Domain Image Archive with 10,000+ Free Historical Images

in Archives, History | January 9th, 2025

We’ve often fea­tured the work of the Pub­lic Domain Review here on Open Cul­ture, and also var­i­ous search­able copy­right-free image data­bas­es that have arisen over the years. It makes sense that those two worlds would col­lide, and now they’ve done so in the form of the just-launched Pub­lic Domain Image Archive (PDIA). The Pub­lic Domain Review invites us to use the site to “explore our hand-picked col­lec­tion of 10,046 out-of-copy­right works, free for all to browse, down­load, and reuse” — and note that the num­ber will grow, giv­en that “this is a liv­ing data­base with new images added every week.”

As with any por­tal of this kind, you can browse by cat­e­go­ry tags, the selec­tion of which includes every­thing from archi­tec­ture to dec­o­ra­tions to occultism to war. But if you’d like to get a sense of the sheer for­mal, aes­thet­ic, cul­tur­al, and his­tor­i­cal vari­ety of the PDIA, you might con­sid­er tak­ing a first look through its “infi­nite view,” which allows you to scroll in all direc­tions through a lim­it­less labyrinth of copy­right-free won­ders: adver­tise­ments, Bib­li­cal scenes, old-time sports­men, out­er-space pho­tos, mush­rooms, medieval musi­cal crea­tures, let­ter­forms, and, well, labyrinths.

You might also rec­og­nize items you’ve seen here on Open Cul­ture before, like the nature draw­ings of Ernst Haeck­el, the mod­ern art-lam­poon­ing chil­dren’s book The Cubies’ ABC, or the ghosts and mon­sters illus­trat­ed by ukiyo‑e mas­ter Hoku­sai. The PDIA pro­vides more con­text than some pub­lic-domain image archives, even link­ing to rel­e­vant Pub­lic Domain Review posts, where you can read about such top­ics as Emi­ly Noyes Vanderpoel’s col­or analy­sis charts (which also inspired a post of ours), the end of books (as pre­dict­ed in 1894), and even “Cats and Cap­tions before the Inter­net Age.” Hav­ing fall­en into the pub­lic domain, all this mate­r­i­al is, of course, avail­able to use for any pur­pose you like — includ­ing just sat­is­fy­ing your own curios­i­ty.

Relat­ed com­ments:

The New York Pub­lic Library Presents an Archive of 860,000 His­tor­i­cal Images: Down­load Medieval Man­u­scripts, Japan­ese Prints, William Blake Illus­tra­tions & More

A Search Engine for Find­ing Free, Pub­lic Domain Images from World-Class Muse­ums

The British Library Puts Over 1,000,000 Images in the Pub­lic Domain: A Deep­er Dive Into the Col­lec­tion

Public.Work: A Smooth­ly Search­able Archive of 100,000+ “Copy­right-Free” Images

Sea-Ser­pents, Vam­pires, Pirates & More: The Pub­lic Domain Review’s Sec­ond Book of Essays

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 the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Why the Tavern Scene in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds Is a Master Class in Filmmaking

in Film | January 7th, 2025

Ide­al­ly, a view­er should be able to iden­ti­fy the work of a par­tic­u­lar auteur from any one scene that the auteur has direct­ed. In real­i­ty, it’s not always pos­si­ble to do so, even in the work of film­mak­ers with high­ly idio­syn­crat­ic styles. But in the case of Quentin Taran­ti­no, it would prob­a­bly be more dif­fi­cult not to rec­og­nize his scenes. Some of them have prop­a­gat­ed so far through pop­u­lar cul­ture that they have a life apart from the films them­selves: the dance in Pulp Fic­tion, say, or more recent­ly, the open­ing of Inglou­ri­ous Bas­ter­ds, a pic­ture that, to video essay­ists look­ing to expli­cate Taran­ti­no’s dis­tinc­tive genius, offers a par­tic­u­lar abun­dance of mate­r­i­al.

In the new video above, YouTu­ber Lan­cel­loti selects a dif­fer­ent scene from Inglou­ri­ous Bas­ter­ds to declare a “mod­ern mas­ter­piece” in itself. It takes place in a base­ment tav­ern in Nazi-occu­pied north­ern France, where three of the tit­u­lar black-ops “Bas­ter­ds,” dis­guised as Ger­man offi­cers, meet Brid­get von Ham­mers­mark, a Ger­man movie star turned under­cov­er Allied agent.

As one might expect, the ten­sion starts high, gets high­er, and even­tu­al­ly explodes in a chaot­ic blood­bath: not an easy sequence to pull off effec­tive­ly, but one that Taran­ti­no and his col­lab­o­ra­tors arrange with con­sum­mate skill, using a host of tech­niques not nec­es­sar­i­ly vis­i­ble on the first view­ing — or even the first few view­ings.

Lan­cel­loti high­lights how the scene grad­u­al­ly reveals its tight space and the many fig­ures who occu­py it; uses dia­logue to reflect core themes of iden­ti­ty and nation­al­i­ty; cre­ates sym­pa­thy even for vil­lain-cod­ed Ger­man sol­diers; keeps shift­ing the bal­ance of pow­er; injects unpre­dictabil­i­ty into the action; fore­shad­ows the ways in which events will even­tu­al­ly go wrong; and hints in many ways at the pres­ence of the char­ac­ter who will light up the tin­der box. Of course, no direc­tor could make all this hap­pen sin­gle-hand­ed­ly, and few direc­tors would be con­scious of all these ele­ments at work in the first place. But giv­en all we’ve learned about Taran­ti­no over the years, he’s sure­ly one of them.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Deep Study of the Open­ing Scene of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglou­ri­ous Bas­ter­ds

An Analy­sis of Quentin Tarantino’s Films Nar­rat­ed (Most­ly) by Quentin Taran­ti­no

How Quentin Taran­ti­no Cre­ates Sus­pense in His Favorite Scene, the Ten­sion-Filled Open­ing Moments of Inglou­ri­ous Bas­ter­ds

Quentin Tarantino’s Copy­cat Cin­e­ma: How the Post­mod­ern Film­mak­er Per­fect­ed the Art of the Steal

How Quentin Taran­ti­no Remix­es His­to­ry: A Brief Study of Once Upon a Time… in Hol­ly­wood

Quentin Tarantino’s World War II Read­ing List

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 the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Unlock AI’s Potential in Your Work and Daily Life: Take a Popular Course from Google

in Artificial Intelligence, Google | December 5th, 2024

Gen­er­a­tive AI is rapid­ly becom­ing an essen­tial tool for stream­lin­ing work and solv­ing com­plex chal­lenges. How­ev­er, know­ing how to use GenAI effec­tive­ly isn’t always obvi­ous. That’s where Google Prompt­ing Essen­tials comes in. This course will teach you to write clear and spe­cif­ic instructions—known as prompts—for AI. Once you can prompt well, you can unlock gen­er­a­tive AI’s poten­tial more ful­ly.

Launched in April, Google Prompt­ing Essen­tials has become the most pop­u­lar GenAI course offered on Cours­era. The course itself is divid­ed into four mod­ules. First, “Start Writ­ing Prompts Like a Pro” will teach you a 5‑step method for craft­ing effec­tive prompts. (Watch the video from Mod­ule 1 above, and more videos here.) With the sec­ond mod­ule, “Design Prompts for Every­day Work Tasks,” you will learn how to use AI to draft emails, brain­storm ideas, and sum­ma­rize doc­u­ments. The third mod­ule, “Speed Up Data Analy­sis and Pre­sen­ta­tion Build­ing,” teach­es tech­niques for uncov­er­ing insights in data, visu­al­iz­ing results, and prepar­ing pre­sen­ta­tions. The final mod­ule, “Use AI as a Cre­ative or Expert Part­ner,” explores advanced tech­niques such as prompt chain­ing and mul­ti­modal prompt­ing. Plus, you will “cre­ate a per­son­al­ized AI agent to role-play con­ver­sa­tions and pro­vide expert feed­back.”

Offered on the Cours­era plat­form, Google Prompt­ing Essen­tials costs $49. Once you com­plete the course, you will receive a cer­tifi­cate from Google to share with your net­work and employ­er. Bet­ter yet, you will under­stand how to make GenAI a more use­ful tool in your life and work. Enroll here.

Note: Open Cul­ture has a part­ner­ship with Cours­era. If read­ers enroll in cer­tain Cours­era cours­es and pro­grams, it helps sup­port Open Cul­ture.

Scientists Discover that Ancient Egyptians Drank Hallucinogenic Cocktails from 2,300 Year-Old Mug

in History, Religion | December 4th, 2024

If ZZ Top have a favorite ancient Egypt­ian deity, that deity is sure­ly Bes, whom the New York Times’ Alexan­der Nazaryan quotes cura­tor and schol­ar Branko van Oppen de Ruiter as call­ing “a beer drinker and a hell-rais­er.” In a paper pub­lished last month in Sci­en­tif­ic Reports, Van Oppen and fif­teen col­lab­o­ra­tors call the row­dy but appar­ent­ly benev­o­lent Bes “one of the most fas­ci­nat­ing and wild­ly pop­u­lar fig­ures of ancient Egypt­ian reli­gion,” and he’s come to mod­ern pub­lic atten­tion thanks to the sub­ject of that paper: a 2,000-year-old cup mold­ed in the shape of his head that has test­ed pos­i­tive for traces of psy­che­del­ic sub­stances — as well as alco­hol and bod­i­ly flu­ids.

Their analy­sis of the mug, a 3D mod­el of which you can exam­ine above, “yield­ed evi­dence of two plants known to have hal­lu­cino­genic prop­er­ties: Syr­i­an rue and the blue water lily,” writes Nazaryan, and it also bore traces of “a fer­ment­ed alco­holic liq­uid derived from fruit,” then sweet­ened with pine nuts, hon­ey, and licorice.

Those were the sorts of ingre­di­ents ancient Egyp­tians had at hand to make the med­i­cine go down — if med­i­cine it was. Nazaryan quotes dig­i­tal archae­ol­o­gist Davide Tanasi, whose lab per­formed the research, cit­ing the traces of sub­stances like blood and breast milk as under­scor­ing that “this is a mag­i­cal potion,” rather than one intend­ed as pure­ly cura­tive.

Bes, as Van Oppen and his col­lab­o­ra­tors write, “emerged from the mag­i­cal realm of the world of demons as a guardian fig­ure,” and by the Roman Impe­r­i­al age “spo­rad­i­cal­ly acquired divine wor­ship.” He “pro­vid­ed pro­tec­tion from dan­ger, while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly avert­ing harm” — and also “had a cer­tain regen­er­a­tive impor­tance con­tribut­ing to the ful­fill­ment and hap­pi­ness of fam­i­ly life in all facets of repro­duc­tion, from viril­i­ty and sex­u­al­i­ty, via fer­til­i­ty and fecun­di­ty, to child­birth and growth.” Hence the spec­u­la­tion that women hop­ing to become preg­nant would drink the potion from his head in order to take a psy­che­del­ic jour­ney that would set them on the path to moth­er­hood. That’s hard­ly the most effi­cient means to the end, as we’d see it today, but giv­en the birthrates of increas­ing­ly many soci­eties across the world, we mod­erns may find our­selves in need of Bes’ assis­tance yet.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Gold­en Guide to Hal­lu­cino­genic Plants: Explore the 1977 Illus­trat­ed Guide Cre­at­ed by Harvard’s Ground­break­ing Eth­nob­otanist Richard Evan Schultes

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 the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Discover Hannah Arendt’s Syllabus for Her 1974 Course on “Thinking”

in Philosophy | December 2nd, 2024

If you’ve read one work of Han­nah Arendt’s, it’s prob­a­bly Eich­mann in Jerusalem, her account of the tri­al of the epony­mous Nazi offi­cial — and the source of her much-quot­ed phrase “the banal­i­ty of evil.” That book came out in 1963, at which time Arendt still had a dozen pro­duc­tive years left. In fact, at the time of her sud­den death in 1975, she had in her type­writer the first page of what would have been the third vol­ume of her final work, The Life of the Mind. In its two com­plet­ed vol­umes, she inves­ti­gates the nature of thought and action, a pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with the rela­tion­ship between think­ing and moral­i­ty hav­ing been fired up with­in her at the Eich­mann tri­al.

“The Life of the Mind” also appears atop the syl­labus, recent­ly post­ed by Arendt biog­ra­ph­er Saman­tha Rose Hill, for “206: Think­ing,” a class Arendt taught in 1974 at the New School for Social Research. Encom­pass­ing a range of philoso­phers from Aris­to­tle, Cicero, and Pla­to to Niet­zsche, Wittgen­stein, and Hei­deg­ger (a fig­ure with whom she could claim a more inti­mate famil­iar­i­ty than most), it seems to have offered a rea­son­ably thor­ough sur­vey of the fig­ures we think of when we think of think­ing itself.

Arendt had appar­ent­ly adapt­ed some of the con­tent from the 1973–1974 Gif­ford Lec­tures she had deliv­ered in Aberdeen, which them­selves con­densed mate­r­i­al from her cours­es on “Basic Moral Propo­si­tions,” “Think­ing,” “The His­to­ry of the Will,” and “Kan­t’s Cri­tique of Judg­ment.”

Arendt’s teach­ing at the New School, in “Think­ing” and oth­er cours­es like “Phi­los­o­phy of the Mind,” sheds a bit of light on what would have gone into the unwrit­ten third vol­ume of The Life of the Mind, or at least into the arc of the tril­o­gy as a whole. Vol­umes one and two, drafts of which she put into cir­cu­la­tion among her grad­u­ate stu­dents, were called Think­ing and Will­ing; the third was to have been Judg­ing, by far the thorni­est men­tal activ­i­ty of the set. It would be worth hear­ing from for­mer New School stu­dents of the mid-sev­en­ties who retain any class­room mem­o­ries of what she had to say on the sub­ject. As for the rest of us, we can at least still do all the read­ing for “Think­ing,” then judge for our­selves. You can find the syl­labus on the Library of Con­gress web­site.

via Saman­tha Rose Hill

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Intro­duc­tion to the Life & Thought of Han­nah Arendt: Pre­sent­ed by the BBC Radio’s In Our Time

Large Archive of Han­nah Arendt’s Papers Dig­i­tized by the Library of Con­gress: Read Her Lec­tures, Drafts of Arti­cles, Notes & Cor­re­spon­dence

Take Han­nah Arendt’s Final Exam for Her 1961 Course “On Rev­o­lu­tion”

A Look Inside Han­nah Arendt’s Per­son­al Library: Down­load Mar­gin­a­lia from 90 Books (Hei­deg­ger, Kant, Marx & More)

Han­nah Arendt Explains How Total­i­tar­i­an Regimes Arise–and How We Can Pre­vent Them

Watch Han­nah Arendt’s Final Inter­view (1973)

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 the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Google Creates a Career Certificate That Prepares Students for Cybersecurity Jobs in 6 Months

in Google, Technology | November 21st, 2024

In 2023, Google launched sev­er­al online cer­tifi­cate pro­grams designed to help stu­dents land an entry-lev­el job, with­out nec­es­sar­i­ly hav­ing a col­lege degree. This includes a cer­tifi­cate pro­gram focused on Cyber­se­cu­ri­ty, a field that stands poised to grow as com­pa­nies become more dig­i­tal and face mount­ing cyber­at­tacks.

Offered on Cours­er­a’s edu­ca­tion­al plat­form, the new Google Cyber­se­cu­ri­ty Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate fea­tures eight online cours­es, which will col­lec­tive­ly help stu­dents learn how to:

• Under­stand the impor­tance of cyber­se­cu­ri­ty prac­tices and their impact for orga­ni­za­tions.
• Iden­ti­fy com­mon risks, threats, and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties, as well as tech­niques to mit­i­gate them.
• Pro­tect net­works, devices, peo­ple, and data from unau­tho­rized access and cyber­at­tacks using Secu­ri­ty Infor­ma­tion and Event Man­age­ment (SIEM) tools.
• Gain hands-on expe­ri­ence with Python, Lin­ux, and SQL.

The Cyber­se­cu­ri­ty Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate also now includes six new videos that explain how to use AI in cyber­se­cu­ri­ty. The videos cov­er every­thing from using arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence to help iden­ti­fy bugs and sys­tem vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties, to refin­ing code and pri­or­i­tiz­ing alerts with AI.

Stu­dents can take indi­vid­ual cours­es in these pro­fes­sion­al cer­tifi­cate pro­grams for free. (Above, you can watch a video from the first course in the cyber­se­cu­ri­ty cer­tifi­cate pro­gram, enti­tled “Foun­da­tions of Cyber­se­cu­ri­ty.”) How­ev­er, if you would like to receive a cer­tifi­cate, Cours­era will charge $49 per month (after an ini­tial 7‑day free tri­al peri­od). That means that the Cyber­se­cu­ri­ty Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate, designed to be com­plet­ed in 6 months, will cost rough­ly $300 in total.

Once stu­dents com­plete the cyber­se­cu­ri­ty cer­tifi­cate, they can add the cre­den­tial to their LinkedIn pro­file, resume, or CV. As a perk, stu­dents in the U.S. can also con­nect with 150+ employ­ers (e.g., Amer­i­can Express, Col­gate-Pal­mo­live, T‑Mobile, Wal­mart, and Google) who have pledged to con­sid­er cer­tifi­cate hold­ers for open posi­tions. Accord­ing to Cours­era, this cer­tifi­cate can pre­pare stu­dents to become an entry-lev­el “cyber­se­cu­ri­ty ana­lyst and SOC (secu­ri­ty oper­a­tions cen­ter) ana­lyst.”

You can start a 7‑day free tri­al of the Cyber­se­cu­ri­ty Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate here. Alter­na­tive­ly, if you sign up for Cours­era Plus, whose price has been reduced by 40% until Decem­ber 2, 2024, you can enroll in the cyber­se­cu­ri­ty cer­tifi­cate pro­gram at no charge. Find out more here.

Note: Open Cul­ture has a part­ner­ship with Cours­era. If read­ers enroll in cer­tain Cours­era cours­es and pro­grams, it helps sup­port Open Cul­ture.

The Evolution of Cinema: Watch Nearly 140 Years of Film History Unfold in 80 Minutes

in Film, History | October 24th, 2024

The video above from YouTu­ber Alex Day includes clips from about 500 movies, and you’ve almost cer­tain­ly seen more than a few of them. Bat­tle­ship Potemkin, Dum­bo, Rear Win­dow, Dr. No, The God­fa­ther, E. T. the Extra-Ter­res­tri­al, Top Gun, Brave­heart, Glad­i­a­tor, Incep­tion: we’re not talk­ing about obscu­ri­ties here. Whether or not you count them among your per­son­al favorites, these motion pic­tures have all become near-uni­ver­sal­ly known for good (and/or Oscar-relat­ed) rea­sons, some of which may come back to mind as you watch the his­to­ry of cin­e­ma visu­al­ly retold through a fea­ture-length string of their espe­cial­ly rec­og­niz­able scenes.

Though genre pic­tures dom­i­nate, “I have not select­ed those films that marked the devel­op­ment of a genre or film stream,” Day writes. “I have select­ed the most pop­u­lar and bet­ter known ones by peo­ple. That’s why I’ve includ­ed so many Amer­i­can movies and less of oth­er coun­tries, because a lot of the most famous movies through­out his­to­ry are from the U.S.” (Hence, for exam­ple, the absence of Hideo Nakata’s influ­en­tial piece of “J‑horror” Ringu and the pres­ence of Ringu, its Hol­ly­wood remake from a few years lat­er.) No mat­ter where in the world you hap­pen to be, a ref­er­ence to Rocky, Back to the Future, or Home Alone — or any work of Steven Spiel­berg, a major pres­ence in the video — can go a sur­pris­ing­ly long way.

No mat­ter how pop­u­lar these movies are, it would be the rare view­er indeed who could claim famil­iar­i­ty with each and every one of them. Almost inevitably, the expe­ri­ence of watch­ing this video turns into a game of seen-it-or-not, which sheds light on the most inten­sive peri­ods of your life in film­go­ing. For my part, I must have watched almost every movie includ­ed from around the turn of the mil­len­ni­um, when I was just com­ing of age as a cinephile (and when even main­stream cin­e­ma, coin­ci­den­tal­ly or oth­er­wise, was in an espe­cial­ly inven­tive peri­od). It recent­ly gave me pause to hear that Amer­i­can Psy­cho is now being remade — but then, hav­ing come out near­ly a quar­ter-cen­tu­ry ago, it’s pre­sum­ably set­tled into its place in cin­e­ma his­to­ry.

Relat­ed con­tent:

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

The Most Beau­ti­ful Shots in Cin­e­ma His­to­ry: Scenes from 100+ Films

Take a 16-Week Crash Course on the His­to­ry of Movies: From the First Mov­ing Pic­tures to the Rise of Mul­ti­plex­es & Net­flix

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

Hol­ly­wood: Epic Doc­u­men­tary Chron­i­cles the Ear­ly His­to­ry of Cin­e­ma

Cin­e­ma His­to­ry by Titles & Num­bers

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.