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

in Education, Psychology, Science, Yale | October 13th, 2023

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.

The Fantastic Women Of Surrealism: An Introduction

in Art, Gender, Psychology | October 10th, 2023

When André Bre­ton, a leader of the Sur­re­al­ist move­ment and author of its first man­i­festo, wrote that “the prob­lem of woman is the most mar­velous and dis­turb­ing prob­lem in all the world,” he was not allud­ing to the unfair lack of recog­ni­tion expe­ri­enced by his female peers.

Mar­quee name Sur­re­al­ists like Bre­ton, Sal­vador Dalí, Man Ray, René Magritte, and Max Ernst posi­tioned the women in their cir­cle as mus­es and sym­bols of erot­ic fem­i­nin­i­ty, rather than artists in their own right.

As Méret Oppen­heim, sub­ject of a recent ret­ro­spec­tive at the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art, is seen remark­ing at the out­set of Behind the Mas­ter­piece’s intro­duc­tion to “the fan­tas­tic women of Sur­re­al­ism”, above, it was up to female Sur­re­al­ists to free them­selves of the nar­row­ly defined role soci­ety — and their male coun­ter­parts — sought to impose on them:

A woman isn’t enti­tled to think, to express aggres­sive ideas.

The first artist Behind the Mas­ter­piece pro­files needs no intro­duc­tion. Fri­da Kahlo is sure­ly one of the best known female artists in the world, a woman who played by her own rules, turn­ing to poet­ic, often bru­tal imagery as she delved into her own phys­i­cal and men­tal suf­fer­ing:

I paint self-por­traits, because I paint my own real­i­ty. I paint what I need to. Paint­ing com­plet­ed my life. I lost three chil­dren and paint­ing sub­sti­tut­ed for all of this… I am not sick, I am bro­ken. But I am hap­py to be alive as long as I can paint.

The Nation­al Muse­um of Women in the Arts notes that Reme­dios Varo —  the sub­ject of a cur­rent exhi­bi­tion at the Art Insti­tute of Chica­go- and Leono­ra Car­ring­ton “were seen as the ‘femmes-enfants’ to the famous and much old­er male artists in their lives.”

Their friend­ship was ulti­mate­ly more sat­is­fy­ing and far longer last­ing then their roman­tic attach­ments to Sur­re­al­ist lumi­nar­ies Ernst and poet Ben­jamin Péret. Car­ring­ton paid trib­ute to it in her nov­el, The Hear­ing Trum­pet.

The pair’s work reveals a shared inter­est in alche­my, astrol­o­gy and the occult, approach­ing them from char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly dif­fer­ent angles, as per Ste­fan van Raay, author of Sur­re­al Friends: Leono­ra Car­ring­ton, Reme­dios Varo, and Kati Hor­na:

Carrington’s work is about tone and col­or and Varo’s is about line and form.

The name of Dorothea Tan­ning, like that of Leono­ra Car­ring­ton, is often linked to Max Ernst, though she made no bones about her desire to keep her artis­tic iden­ti­ty sep­a­rate from that of her hus­band of 30 years.

Her work evolved sev­er­al times over the course of a career span­ning sev­en decades, but her first major muse­um sur­vey was a posthu­mous one.

Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge art his­to­ry pro­fes­sor, Alyce Mahon, co-cura­tor of that Tate Mod­ern exhib­it, touch­es on the nature of Tanning’s decep­tive­ly fem­i­nine soft sculp­tures:

If I asked for two words that you asso­ciate with pin cush­ions, you would say sewing and craft, and you would asso­ciate those with the female in the house. Tan­ning played with the idea of wife­ly skills and took a very hum­ble object and turned it into a fetish. She craft­ed her first one out of vel­vet in 1965 and ran­dom­ly placed pins in it and aligned it with a voodoo doll. She says it ‘bris­tles’ with images. So she takes some­thing fab­u­lous­ly famil­iar and makes it uncan­ny and strange to encour­age us to think dif­fer­ent­ly.

Tan­ning reject­ed the label of ‘woman artist’, view­ing it as “just as much a con­tra­dic­tion in terms as ‘man artist’ or ‘ele­phant artist’.”

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Sig­mund Freud!

The famed psychoanalyst’s con­cept of the sub­con­scious mind was cen­tral to Sur­re­al­ism, but he also wrote that “women oppose change, receive pas­sive­ly, and add noth­ing of their own.”

One won­ders what he would have made of Object, the fur lined teacup, saucer and spoon that is Oppenheim’s best known work, for bet­ter or worse.

In an essay for Khan Academy’s AP/College Art His­to­ry course Josh Rose describes how Muse­um of Mod­ern Art patrons declared it the “quin­tes­sen­tial” Sur­re­al­ist object when it was fea­tured in the influ­en­tial 1936–37 exhi­bi­tion “Fan­tas­tic Art, Dada, and Sur­re­al­ism:”

But for Oppen­heim, the pres­tige and focus on this one object proved too much, and she spent more than a decade out of the artis­tic lime­light, destroy­ing much of the work she pro­duced dur­ing that peri­od. It was only lat­er when she re-emerged, and began pub­licly show­ing new paint­ings and objects with renewed vig­or and con­fi­dence, that she began reclaim­ing some of the intent of her work. When she was giv­en an award for her work by the City of Basel, she touched upon this in her accep­tance speech, (say­ing,) “I think it is the duty of a woman to lead a life that express­es her dis­be­lief in the valid­i­ty of the taboos that have been imposed upon her kind for thou­sands of years. Nobody will give you free­dom; you have to take it.”

Relat­ed Con­tent

Dis­cov­er Leono­ra Car­ring­ton, Britain’s Lost Sur­re­al­ist Painter

A Brief Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Life and Work of Fri­da Kahlo

The For­got­ten Women of Sur­re­al­ism: A Mag­i­cal, Short Ani­mat­ed Film

– 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.

Sylvia Plath’s Ten Back to School Commandments (1953)

in Life, Literature | September 22nd, 2023

Before her lit­er­ary fame, her stormy rela­tion­ship with Ted Hugh­es and her crip­pling bat­tles with depres­sion, Sylvia Plath was an enthu­si­as­tic stu­dent at Smith Col­lege. “The world is split­ting open at my feet like a ripe, juicy water­mel­on,” she wrote to her moth­er. “If only I can work, work, work to jus­ti­fy all of my oppor­tu­ni­ties.”

Dur­ing her junior year, she broke her leg on a ski­ing trip in upstate New York. The acci­dent land­ed her briefly in the hos­pi­tal and she wound up with a cast on her leg. Her mood dark­ened.

Psych­ing her­self out for her return to col­lege, she wrote in her diary a pair of lists.

The first list is a short series of rules about how to behave around her new beau, Myron Lotz. All three points are good advice for any­one who is utter­ly smit­ten, par­tic­u­lar­ly num­ber two – “I will not throw myself at him phys­i­cal­ly.” In the end, Plath’s rela­tion­ship with Lotz didn’t amount to much. She report­ed­ly com­mem­o­rat­ed him with­in her poem “Mad Girl’s Love Song” with the refrain “I think I made you up inside my head.”

The sec­ond list is a col­lec­tion of “Back to School Com­mand­ments.” These com­mand­ments includ­ed ask­ing her Eng­lish prof Robert Gorham Davis for an exten­sion; con­sult­ing with her Ger­man teacher Marie Schnieders (“Be calm,” she writes mys­te­ri­ous­ly, “even it is a mat­ter of life & death.”); and com­plet­ing her appli­ca­tion to be a guest edi­tor for Made­moi­selle mag­a­zine. (She nailed that last task.)

The list’s final com­mand­ment comes off bleak­er than the mild­ly pan­icky moti­va­tion­al tone of the rest of the list. “Atti­tude is every­thing: so KEEP CHEERFUL, even if you fail your sci­ence, your unit, get a hate­ful silence from Myron, no dates, no praise, no love, noth­ing. There is a cer­tain clin­i­cal sat­is­fac­tion in see­ing just how bad things can get.”

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

via The Excel­lent Lists of Note book

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Why Should We Read Sylvia Plath? An Ani­mat­ed Video Makes the Case

Christo­pher Hitchens Cre­ates a Revised List of The 10 Com­mand­ments for the 21st Cen­tu­ry

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

Coffee Connoisseur James Hoffmann Reviews a $20,000 Espresso Maker

in Food & Drink | September 13th, 2023

It costs rough­ly $20,000, weighs near­ly 100 pounds, and looks like a high-end micro­scope. Hand­made in Switzer­land, the MANUMENT Leva Machine makes espres­so. How well does it make espres­so? How do the shots taste?: Accord­ing to cof­fee expert James Hoffmann–he’s the author of The World Atlas of Cof­fee–the shots have a tex­ture that is “very enjoy­able.” The tex­ture is “silky, but­tery and soft.” That ver­dict is sand­wiched in the mid­dle of a 20-minute review of the machine, which you can watch above.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent 

The Birth of Espres­so: The Sto­ry Behind the Cof­fee Shots That Fuel Mod­ern Life

Under­stand­ing Espres­so: A Six-Part Series Explain­ing What It Takes to Pull the Ide­al Shot

Cof­fee Col­lege: Every­thing You Want­ed to Know about Cof­fee Mak­ing in One Lec­ture

How to Make Cof­fee in the Bialet­ti Moka Pot: The “Ulti­mate Techique”

The Psychedelic Animated Video for Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn” (1979)

in Animation, Music | August 22nd, 2023

Ah, yes, “Auto­bahn.” From the moment the door slams and the igni­tion starts, prog rock­ers and pre-new wavers know a jour­ney is afoot. Though the mem­bers of Kraftwerk made three albums before this, the mem­bers still look­ing like well mean­ing book­ish hip­pies, 1974’s “Auto­bahn” is con­sid­ered Year Zero for the denizens of the elec­tric cafe, the four Ger­man robots who made human music with machines.

Cre­at­ed in 1979, but bop­ping around again in pop cul­ture orbit is this cel-drawn ani­ma­tion by Roger Main­wood, cre­at­ed to pro­mote “Auto­bahn” after most of the cul­ture had caught up. By that last year of the ’70s Omni mag­a­zine was a year old, music was sift­ing through the shock­waves left by Bowie’s Low and Heroes, ana­log was flirt­ing with dig­i­tal, and the world was ready to dri­ve on that long, elec­tric high­way.

Mainwood’s pro­tag­o­nist is part alien, part human, and he begins look­ing around in awe in his hip gog­gles, then set­ting off for a run straight out of a Muy­bridge loop, only to wind up float­ing, fly­ing, sail­ing and swim­ming through a land­scape indebt­ed to Peter Max, Push­Pin Stu­dios, under­ground comix, and 1930 mod­ernism.

Main­wood had just grad­u­at­ed from London’s Roy­al Col­lege of Art Film and Tele­vi­sion School, and was com­mis­sioned by John Halas, the Hun­gar­i­an immi­grant who became known as the Father of British Ani­ma­tion, for Kraftwerk’s record label. The label want­ed to put out one of the first music Laserdiscs. (Halas, by the way, direct­ed a very UPA-influ­enced short called “Auto­ma­nia” in 1963). Accord­ing to Main­wood, he still doesn’t know if the band liked the short or even if they watched it.

Main­wood avoid­ed any direct rep­re­sen­ta­tion of dri­ving or auto­mo­biles, much to his cred­it, which may be why the film holds its fas­ci­na­tion. The ani­ma­tor con­tin­ued in his field, wind­ing up a pro­duc­er of sev­er­al clas­sics of British ani­ma­tion, includ­ing The Snow­man and the chill­ing When the Wind Blows. As for the mean­ing of “Auto­bahn,” we’ll let Main­wood have the last word:

Think­ing back to my thought process­es at that time, I remem­ber want­i­ng to specif­i­cal­ly not have con­ven­tion­al cars in the film. I want­ed a sense of a repet­i­tive jour­ney, and alien­ation, which I took to be what the music was about…hence the soli­tary futur­is­tic fig­ure, pro­tect­ed by large gog­gles, mov­ing through and try­ing to con­nect with the jour­ney he is tak­ing. The auto­mo­bile “mon­sters” are delib­er­ate­ly threat­en­ing (I have nev­er been a big fan of cars or motor­ways!) and when our “hero” tries to make human con­tact (with dif­fer­ent coloured clones of him­self) he can nev­er do it. In the end he realis­es he is mak­ing the repet­i­tive and cir­cu­lar jour­ney alone but strides for­ward pur­pose­ful­ly at the end as he did in the begin­ning. All of which sounds rather pretentious…but I was a young thing in those days!

You can read more of an inter­view with Main­wood here.

Find more ani­ma­tions in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kraftwerk’s First Con­cert: The Begin­ning of the End­less­ly Influ­en­tial Band (1970)

When Kraftwerk Issued Their Own Pock­et Cal­cu­la­tor Syn­the­siz­er — to Play Their Song “Pock­et Cal­cu­la­tor” (1981)

Kraftwerk’s “The Robots” Per­formed by Ger­man 1st Graders in Cute Card­board Robot Cos­tumes

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

How to Spot Bullshit: A Manual by Princeton Philosopher Harry Frankfurt (RIP)

in Philosophy | July 18th, 2023

Note: Over the week­end, the Prince­ton philoso­pher Har­ry Frank­furt passed away at the age of 94. After a long career, he became the author of the sur­prise best­selling book, On Bull­shit, which we fea­tured in 2016. Please revis­it our orig­i­nal post below.

We live in an age of truthi­ness. Come­di­an Stephen Col­bert coined the word to describe the Bush administration’s ten­den­cy to fudge the facts in its favor.

Ten years after the Amer­i­can Dialect Soci­ety named it Word of the Year, for­mer pres­i­dent Bush’s cal­en­dar is packed with such leisure activ­i­ties as golf and paint­ing por­traits of world lead­ers, but “truthi­ness” remains on active duty.

It’s par­tic­u­lar­ly ger­mane in this elec­tion year, though politi­cians are far from its only prac­ti­tion­ers.

Take glob­al warm­ing. NASA makes a pret­ty rock sol­id case for both its exis­tence and our role in it:

97 per­cent or more of active­ly pub­lish­ing cli­mate sci­en­tists agree: Cli­mate-warm­ing trends over the past cen­tu­ry are extreme­ly like­ly due to human activ­i­ties. In addi­tion, most of the lead­ing sci­en­tif­ic orga­ni­za­tions world­wide have issued pub­lic state­ments endors­ing this posi­tion.

In view of such num­bers, it’s under­stand­able that a sub­ur­ban Joe with a freez­er full of fac­to­ry-farmed beef and mul­ti­ple SUVs in his garage would cling to the posi­tion that glob­al warm­ing is a lie. It’s his last resort, real­ly.

But such self-ratio­nal­iza­tions are not truth. They are truthi­ness.

Or to use the old-fash­ioned word favored by philoso­pher Har­ry Frank­furt, above: bull­shit!

Frank­furt–a philoso­pher at Prince­ton and the author of On Bull­shit–allows that bull­shit artists are often charm­ing, or at their very least, col­or­ful. They have to be. Achiev­ing their ends involves engag­ing oth­ers long enough to per­suade them that they know what they’re talk­ing about, when in fact, that’s the oppo­site of the truth.

Speak­ing of oppo­sites, Frank­furt main­tains that bull­shit is a dif­fer­ent beast from an out-and-out lie. The liar makes a spe­cif­ic attempt to con­ceal the truth by swap­ping it out for a lie.

The bull­shit artist’s approach is far more vague. It’s about cre­at­ing a gen­er­al impres­sion.

There are times when I admit to wel­com­ing this sort of manure. As a mak­er of low bud­get the­ater, your hon­est opin­ion of any show I have Lit­tle Red Hen’ed into exis­tence is the last thing I want to hear upon emerg­ing from the cramped dress­ing room, unless you tru­ly loved it.

I’d also encour­age you to choose your words care­ful­ly when dash­ing a child’s dreams.

But when it comes to mat­ters of pub­lic pol­i­cy, and the pub­lic good, yes, trans­paren­cy is best.

It’s inter­est­ing to me that film­mak­ers James Nee and Chris­t­ian Brit­ten trans­formed a por­tion of their learned subject’s thoughts into voiceover nar­ra­tion for a light­ning fast stock footage mon­tage. It’s divert­ing and fun­ny, fea­tur­ing such omi­nous char­ac­ters as Nos­fer­atu, Bill Clin­ton, Char­lie Chaplin’s Great Dic­ta­tor, and Don­ald Trump, but isn’t it also the sort of mis­di­rec­tion sleight of hand at which true bull­shit­ters excel?

Frank­furt expands upon his thoughts on bull­shit in his apt­ly titled best­selling book, On Bull­shit and its fol­lowup On Truth.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Noam Chom­sky Schools 9/11 Truther; Explains the Sci­ence of Mak­ing Cred­i­ble Claims

Young T.S. Eliot Writes “The Tri­umph of Bullsh*t” and Gives the Eng­lish Lan­guage a New Exple­tive (1910)

“Call­ing Bull­shit”: See the Syl­labus for a Col­lege Course Designed to Iden­ti­fy & Com­bat Bull­shit

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

The Three Punctuation Rules of Cormac McCarthy (RIP), and How They All Go Back to James Joyce

in Literature, Writing | June 13th, 2023

Note: Today nov­el­ist Cor­mac McCarthy (All the Pret­ty Hors­es, The Road and No Coun­try for Old Men) passed away at the age of 89. Below, we’re revis­it­ing a favorite post from our archive that focus­es on punc­tu­a­tion, a dis­tinc­tive ele­ment of McCarthy’s writ­ing.

Cor­mac McCarthy has been—as one 1965 review­er of his first nov­el, The Orchard Keep­er, dubbed him—a “dis­ci­ple of William Faulkn­er.” He makes admirable use of Faulkner­ian traits in his prose, and I’d always assumed he inher­it­ed his punc­tu­a­tion style from Faulkn­er as well. But in his very rare 2008 tele­vised inter­view with Oprah Win­frey, McCarthy cites two oth­er antecedents: James Joyce and for­got­ten nov­el­ist MacKin­lay Kan­tor, whose Ander­son­ville won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955. Joyce’s influ­ence dom­i­nates, and in dis­cus­sion of punc­tu­a­tion, McCarthy stress­es that his min­i­mal­ist approach works in the inter­est of max­i­mum clar­i­ty. Speak­ing of Joyce, he says,

James Joyce is a good mod­el for punc­tu­a­tion. He keeps it to an absolute min­i­mum. There’s no rea­son to blot the page up with weird lit­tle marks. I mean, if you write prop­er­ly you shouldn’t have to punc­tu­ate.

So what “weird lit­tle marks” does McCarthy allow, or not, and why? Below is a brief sum­ma­ry of his stat­ed rules for punc­tu­a­tion:

1. Quo­ta­tion Marks:

McCarthy does­n’t use ’em. In his Oprah inter­view, he says MacKin­lay Kan­tor was the first writer he read who left them out. McCarthy stress­es that this way of writ­ing dia­logue requires par­tic­u­lar delib­er­a­tion. Speak­ing of writ­ers who have imi­tat­ed him, he says, “You real­ly have to be aware that there are no quo­ta­tion marks, and write in such a way as to guide peo­ple as to who’s speak­ing.” Oth­er­wise, con­fu­sion reigns.

2. Colons and semi­colons:

Care­ful McCarthy read­er Oprah says she “saw a colon once” in McCarthy’s prose, but she nev­er encoun­tered a semi­colon. McCarthy con­firms: “No semi­colons.”

Of the colon, he says: “You can use a colon, if you’re get­ting ready to give a list of some­thing that fol­lows from what you just said. Like, these are the rea­sons.” This is a spe­cif­ic occa­sion that does not present itself often. The colon, one might say, gen­u­flects to a very spe­cif­ic log­i­cal devel­op­ment, enu­mer­a­tion. McCarthy deems most oth­er punc­tu­a­tion uses need­less.

3. All oth­er punc­tu­a­tion:

Aside from his restric­tive rationing of the colon, McCarthy declares his styl­is­tic con­vic­tions with sim­plic­i­ty: “I believe in peri­ods, in cap­i­tals, in the occa­sion­al com­ma, and that’s it.” It’s a dis­ci­pline he learned first in a col­lege Eng­lish class, where he worked to sim­pli­fy 18th cen­tu­ry essays for a text­book the pro­fes­sor was edit­ing. Ear­ly mod­ern Eng­lish is noto­ri­ous­ly clut­tered with con­found­ing punc­tu­a­tion, which did not become stan­dard­ized until com­par­a­tive­ly recent­ly.

McCarthy, enam­ored of the prose style of the Neo­clas­si­cal Eng­lish writ­ers but annoyed by their over-reliance on semi­colons, remem­bers par­ing down an essay “by Swift or some­thing” and hear­ing his pro­fes­sor say, “this is very good, this is exact­ly what’s need­ed.” Encour­aged, he con­tin­ued to sim­pli­fy, work­ing, he says to Oprah, “to make it eas­i­er, not to make it hard­er” to deci­pher his prose. For those who find McCarthy some­times mad­den­ing­ly opaque, this state­ment of intent may not help clar­i­fy things much. But lovers of his work may find renewed appre­ci­a­tion for his stream­lined syn­tax.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Wern­er Her­zog Reads From Cor­mac McCarthy’s All the Pret­ty Hors­es

Cor­mac McCarthy Explains Why He Worked Hard at Not Work­ing: How 9‑to‑5 Jobs Lim­it Your Cre­ative Poten­tial

Wern­er Her­zog and Cor­mac McCarthy Talk Sci­ence and Cul­ture

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

Helen Keller Writes a Letter to Nazi Students Before They Burn Her Book: “History Has Taught You Nothing If You Think You Can Kill Ideas” (1933)

in Books, History | May 24th, 2023

Helen Keller achieved noto­ri­ety not only as an indi­vid­ual suc­cess sto­ry, but also as a pro­lif­ic essay­ist, activist, and fierce advo­cate for poor and mar­gin­al­ized peo­ple. She “was a life­long rad­i­cal,” writes Peter Dreier at Yes! mag­a­zine, whose “inves­ti­ga­tion into the caus­es of blind­ness” even­tu­al­ly led her to “embrace social­ism, fem­i­nism, and paci­fism.” Keller sup­port­ed the NAACP and ACLU, and protest­ed strong­ly against patron­iz­ing calls for her to “con­fine my activ­i­ties to social ser­vice and the blind.” Her crit­ics, she wrote, mis­char­ac­ter­ized her ideas as “a Utopi­an dream, and one who seri­ous­ly con­tem­plates its real­iza­tion indeed must be deaf, dumb, and blind.”

Twen­ty years lat­er she found a dif­fer­ent set of read­ers treat­ing her ideas with con­tempt. This time, how­ev­er, the crit­ics were in Nazi Ger­many, and instead of sim­ply dis­agree­ing with her, they added her col­lec­tion of essays, How I Became a Social­ist, to a list of “degen­er­ate” books to be burned on May 10, 1933. Such was the date cho­sen by Hitler for “a nation­wide ‘Action Against the Un-Ger­man Spir­it,’” writes Rafael Med­off, to take place at Ger­man Universities—“a series of pub­lic burn­ings of the banned books” that “dif­fered from the Nazis’ per­spec­tive on polit­i­cal, social, or cul­tur­al mat­ters, as well as all books by Jew­ish authors.”

Books burned includ­ed works by Ein­stein and Freud, H.G. Wells, Hem­ing­way, and Jack Lon­don, Stu­dents hauled books out of the libraries as part of the spec­ta­cle. “The largest of the 34 book-burn­ing ral­lies, held in Berlin,” Med­off notes, “was attend­ed by an esti­mat­ed 40,000 peo­ple.”

Not only were these demon­stra­tions of anti-Semi­tism, but their con­tempt for ideas appealed broad­ly to the Nazi phi­los­o­phy of “Blood and Soil,” a nation­al­ist car­i­ca­ture of rur­al val­ues over a sup­pos­ed­ly “degen­er­ate,” poly­glot urban­ism. “The soul of the Ger­man peo­ple can again express itself,” declared Joseph Goebbels omi­nous­ly at the Berlin ral­ly. “These flames not only illu­mi­nate the final end of an old era; they also light up the new.”

“Some Amer­i­can edi­to­r­i­al respons­es” before and after the burn­ings, “made light of the event,” remarks the Unit­ed States Holo­caust Muse­um, call­ing it “sil­ly” and “infan­tile.”  Oth­ers fore­saw much worse to come. In one very explic­it expres­sion of the ter­ri­ble pos­si­bil­i­ties, artist and polit­i­cal car­toon­ist Jacob Bur­ck drew the image above, evok­ing the obser­va­tion of 19th cen­tu­ry Ger­man writer Hein­rich Heine: “Where one burns books, one will soon burn peo­ple.” Newsweek described the events as “’a holo­caust of books’… one of the first instances in which the term ‘holo­caust’ (an ancient Greek word mean­ing a burnt offer­ing to a deity) was used in con­nec­tion with the Nazis.”

The day before the burn­ings, Keller also dis­played a keen sense for the grav­i­ty of book burn­ings, as well as a “notable… ear­ly con­cern,” notes Rebec­ca Onion at Slate—out­side the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty, that is—for what she called the “bar­bar­i­ties to the Jews.” On May 9, 1933, Keller pub­lished a short but point­ed open let­ter to the Nazi stu­dents in The New York Times and else­where, abjur­ing them to stop the pro­posed burn­ings. She wrote in a reli­gious idiom, invok­ing the “judg­ment” of God and para­phras­ing the Bible. (Not a tra­di­tion­al Chris­t­ian, she belonged to a mys­ti­cal sect called Swe­den­bor­gian­ism.) At the top of the post, you can see the type­script of her let­ter, with cor­rec­tions and anno­ta­tions by Pol­ly Thomp­son, one of her pri­ma­ry aides. Read the full tran­script below:

Keller added the penul­ti­mate para­graph of the pub­lished text lat­er. (See the hand­writ­ten addi­tion at the bot­tom of the typed draft.) Her con­cern for the “griev­ous com­pli­ca­tions” of the Ger­man peo­ple was cer­tain­ly gen­uine. The expres­sion also seems like a tar­get­ed rhetor­i­cal move for a stu­dent audi­ence, con­ced­ing the sit­u­a­tion as “com­plex,” and appeal­ing in more philo­soph­i­cal lan­guage to “jus­tice” and “wis­dom.” The Nazis ignored her protest, as they did the “mas­sive street demon­stra­tions” that took place on the 10th “in dozens of Amer­i­can cities,” the Holo­caust Muse­um writes, “skill­ful­ly orga­nized by the Amer­i­can Jew­ish Con­gress” and spark­ing “the largest demon­stra­tion in New York City his­to­ry up to that date.”

Five years lat­er, how­ev­er, anoth­er planned book burning—this time in Aus­tria before its annexation—was pre­vent­ed by stu­dents at Williams Col­lege, Yale, and oth­er uni­ver­si­ties in the U.S., where pro- and anti-Nazi par­ti­sans fought each oth­er on sev­er­al Amer­i­can cam­pus­es. U.S. stu­dents were able to push the Aus­tri­an Nation­al Library to lock the books away rather than burn them. Keller “is not known to have com­ment­ed specif­i­cal­ly” on these stu­dent protests, writes Med­off, “but one may assume she was deeply proud that at a time when too many Amer­i­cans did not want to be both­ered with Europe’s prob­lems, these young men and women under­stood the mes­sage of her 1933 letter—that the prin­ci­ples under attack by the Nazis were some­thing that should mat­ter to all mankind.”

Note: This post orig­i­nal­ly appeared on our site in 2017.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent 

The Brook­lyn Pub­lic Library Gives Every Teenag­er in the U.S. Free Access to Books Get­ting Cen­sored by Amer­i­can Schools

The 850 Books a Texas Law­mak­er Wants to Ban Because They Could Make Stu­dents Feel Uncom­fort­able

Mark Twain & Helen Keller’s Spe­cial Friend­ship: He Treat­ed Me Not as a Freak, But as a Per­son Deal­ing with Great Dif­fi­cul­ties

America’s First Banned Book: Dis­cov­er the 1637 Book That Mocked the Puri­tans

Watch the Original Schoolhouse Rock Composers Sing “Conjunction Junction” and “I’m Just a Bill” Live in Concert

in Education, English Language, Jazz, K-12 | May 22nd, 2023

At first blush, School­house Rock!, the inter­sti­tial ani­ma­tions air­ing between ABC’s Sat­ur­day morn­ing car­toon line up from 1973 to 1984, may seem like a catchy, edu­ca­tion­al equiv­a­lent of sneak­ing spinach into pan­cakes (and a major Gen X touch­stone.)

Not so fast! It’s also jazz, baby!

Jazz pianist Bob Dor­ough recalled how an ad exec at a New York ad agency pitched the idea:

My lit­tle boys can’t mem­o­rize their times tables, but they sing along with Jimi Hen­drix and the Rolling Stones, so why don’t you put it to rock music and we’ll call it Mul­ti­pli­ca­tion Rock?

Dor­ough, whose com­po­si­tion­al pref­er­ences ran to “extrav­a­gant love songs” and vocal chal­leng­ing num­bers, real­ized that his first order of busi­ness would be to write a good song:

I hit upon the idea, let’s pick a num­ber. Three! That’s a good num­ber. And I sat down at the piano and start­ed fool­ing around. It took me 2 weeks.

In his hands, three became a mag­ic num­ber, an ear worm to bring even the most reluc­tant ele­men­tary math­e­mati­cians up to speed in no time.

Even­tu­al­ly, Dor­ough was able to bring many of his jazz world friends into the fold, includ­ing, most famous­ly, trum­peter and Merv Grif­fin Show side­kick Jack Shel­don, whose one-of-a-kind deliv­ery is the hands down high­light of “Con­junc­tion Junc­tion.”

(Many School­house Rock! fans, view­ing the excerpt of the duo’s mid-90’s live appear­ance on the KTLA Morn­ing Show, above, pro­fessed dis­be­lief that Sheldon’s soul was of the blue-eyed vari­ety, even though the ani­mat­ed engi­neer who serves as his avatar in that three minute episode is white.)

In an inter­view with the direc­tor of the Fil­lius Jazz Archive at Hamil­ton Col­lege, Shel­don agreed that the series owed a major debt to jazz:

When we made Con­junc­tion Junc­tion, it was me and Ted­dy Edwards and Nick Ceroli and Leroy Vine­gar and Bob Dor­ough played the piano. That’s a jazz band…it was real­ly noth­ing to do with rock. It was always jazz, but we said rock and roll, so every­body loved it for rock and roll.

Anoth­er mem­o­rable col­lab­o­ra­tion between Shel­don and Dor­ough is the much par­o­died “I’m Just a Bill,” in which a weary scroll loi­ters on the steps of the Cap­i­tal Build­ing, explain­ing to a wide eyed young­ster (voiced by his son) the process by which a bill becomes law.

Dor­oughs’ School­house Rock! con­tri­bu­tions include the haunt­ing Fig­ure Eight, the folky Lucky Sev­en Samp­son, whose sen­ti­ments Dor­ough iden­ti­fied with most close­ly, and Naughty Num­ber Nine, which his pro­tégé, singer-song­writer Nel­lie McK­ay sin­gled out for spe­cial praise, “cause it was kind of weird and sub­ver­sive:”

(It) made me want to gam­ble and win. I got hooked when I heard Bob’s jazzy rasp of a voice break­ing the rules even as he explained them… this guy had a wild mind, which I fig­ured out lat­er equaled cre­ativ­i­ty.

She also paid the per­pet­u­al­ly sun­ny Dor­ough, whom she first encoun­tered “glow(ing) with health and good cheer, spread­ing sun­shine wher­ev­er he went on the cam­pus of East Strouds­burg Uni­ver­si­ty, the supreme com­pli­ment:

Lou Reed’s idea of hell would be to sit in heav­en with Bob Dor­ough.

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent 

School­house Rock: Revis­it a Col­lec­tion of Nos­tal­gia-Induc­ing Edu­ca­tion­al Videos

I’m Just a Pill: A School­house Rock Clas­sic Gets Reimag­ined to Defend Repro­duc­tive Rights in 2017

Con­spir­a­cy The­o­ry Rock: The School­house Rock Par­o­dy Sat­ur­day Night Live May Have Cen­sored

– 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.

Google & Coursera Launch New Career Certificates That Prepare Students for Jobs in 2–6 Months: Business Intelligence & Advanced Data Analytics

in Business, Online Courses | May 18th, 2023

Back in 2021, Google launched a series of online cours­es designed to help stu­dents earn a pro­fes­sion­al cer­tifi­cate in six months and also land an entry-lev­el job. In its orig­i­nal offer­ing, Google devel­oped cer­tifi­cate pro­grams in five pro­fes­sion­al areas: User Expe­ri­ence (UX) Design, Data Ana­lyt­ics, Project Man­age­ment, IT Sup­port and IT Automa­tion. Now, the tech com­pa­ny has added two new pro­grams to its line­up, each offered through Cours­er­a’s online edu­ca­tion plat­form.

First, the Google Advanced Data Ana­lyt­ics Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate builds on the orig­i­nal Data Ana­lyt­ics Cer­tifi­cate and “delves into machine learn­ing, pre­dic­tive mod­el­ing, and exper­i­men­tal design to col­lect and ana­lyze large amounts of data.” Fea­tur­ing sev­en cours­es in total, the pro­gram takes rough­ly six months to com­plete and aims to teach stu­dents how to 1) build regres­sion and machine learn­ing mod­els to ana­lyze and inter­pret data, 2) cre­ate data visu­al­iza­tions and apply sta­tis­ti­cal meth­ods to inves­ti­gate data, and 3) com­mu­ni­cate insights from data analy­sis to stake­hold­ers. Essen­tial­ly, it teach­es many tools of the trade need­ed to become a senior data ana­lyst or junior data sci­en­tist.

With the Google Busi­ness Intel­li­gence Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate, stu­dents can par­tic­i­pate in a short­er pro­gram that focus­es on trans­form­ing data into action­able insights for orga­ni­za­tions. Con­sist­ing of three cours­es (and last­ing about two months), the pro­gram helps stu­dents learn skills like data mod­el­ing, data visu­al­iza­tion, and dashboarding–skills that have wide applic­a­bil­i­ty in our data-dri­ven age.

Stu­dents can actu­al­ly take indi­vid­ual cours­es in these pro­fes­sion­al cer­tifi­cate pro­grams for free. How­ev­er, if you would like to receive the cer­tifi­cates, Cours­era charges $49 per month (after an ini­tial 7‑day free tri­al peri­od). That means that the Advanced Data Ana­lyt­ics Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate, if com­plet­ed in 6 months, will cost less than $300. And the Busi­ness Intel­li­gence Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate would run about $100. Once stu­dents com­plete a cer­tifi­cate, they can add the cre­den­tial to their LinkedIn pro­file, resume, or CV. Like­wise, they can con­nect with 150+ U.S. hir­ing orga­ni­za­tions in Google’s Employ­er Con­sor­tium. If you would like to learn more about Google Career Cer­tifi­cates, you can read this handy page on Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas’ web­site.

Update: Google has also added a new cer­tifi­cate pro­gram focused on Cyber­se­cu­ri­ty. Find out more about the pro­gram here.

You can sign up for the pro­grams by click­ing on the links in bold above. Each pro­gram has a 7‑day free tri­al.

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