Study Less, Study Smart: A Longtime Psych Professor Explains How to Study (or Do Any Intellectual Work) Effectively

in Education | December 11th, 2020

If you’ve left for­mal edu­ca­tion, you no doubt retain a few good mem­o­ries from your years as a stu­dent. None of them, safe to say, involve study­ing — assum­ing you man­aged to get any study­ing done in the first place. The unfor­tu­nate fact is that few of us ever real­ly come to grips with what it means to study, apart from sit­ting by one­self with a text­book for hours on end. Despite its obvi­ous inef­fi­cien­cy as a learn­ing method, we’ve all found our­selves doing that kind of “study­ing” at one time or anoth­er. Hav­ing taught psy­chol­o­gy class­es for 40 years, Pierce Col­lege pro­fes­sor Mar­ty Lob­dell has seen thou­sands of stu­dents labor­ing, indeed suf­fer­ing, under sim­i­lar study­ing-relat­ed assump­tions, and in his 8.7‑million-times-viewed talk “Study Less, Study Smart,” he sets out to cor­rect them. He has also dis­pensed his wis­dom in a book by the same title.

Not many of us can get much out of a text­book after a few hours with it, or indeed, after more than about thir­ty min­utes. It’s thus at such an inter­val that Lob­dell sug­gests tak­ing a reg­u­lar five-minute break to lis­ten to music, play a game, talk to a friend, med­i­tate — to do any­thing but study — in order to recharge your abil­i­ty to focus and head off these dimin­ish­ing returns of absorp­tion. At the end of each entire study ses­sion, you’d do well to sched­ule a big­ger reward in order to rein­force the behav­ior of engag­ing in study ses­sions in the first place. Ide­al­ly, you’ll enjoy this reward in a dif­fer­ent place than you do your study­ing, which itself should­n’t be a room that comes with its own dis­tract­ing pri­ma­ry use, like the bed­room, kitchen, or liv­ing room.

Even if you have a ded­i­cat­ed study area (and bet­ter yet, a ded­i­cat­ed study lamp that you turn on only while hit­ting the books), you won’t get much accom­plished there if you rely on sim­ply read­ing texts over and over again in hopes of even­tu­al­ly mem­o­riz­ing their con­tents. Lob­dell rec­om­mends focus­ing pri­mar­i­ly on not facts but the broad­er con­cepts that orga­nize those facts. An effec­tive means of check­ing whether you under­stand a con­cept is to try explain­ing it in your own words: Richard Feyn­man premised his “note­book tech­nique” for learn­ing, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, on just such a process. You’ll also want to make use of the notes you take in class, but only if you take them in a use­ful way, which neces­si­tates a process of expan­sion and revi­sion imme­di­ate­ly after each class.

Lob­dell has much more advice to offer through­out the full, hour­long talk. In it he also cov­ers the val­ue of study groups; the more ques­tion­able val­ue of high­light­ing; gen­uine remem­ber­ing ver­sus sim­ple recog­ni­tion; the neces­si­ty of a good night’s sleep; the “sur­vey, ques­tion, read, recite, review” approach to text­books; and the use­ful­ness of mnemon­ics (even, or per­haps espe­cial­ly, sil­ly ones). If you’re a stu­dent, you can make use of Lob­del­l’s tech­niques right away, and if you once were a stu­dent, you may find your­self wish­ing you’d known about them back then. But prop­er­ly adapt­ed, they can ben­e­fit the intel­lec­tu­al work you do at any stage of life. Nev­er, after all, does con­cen­tra­tion become less valu­able, and nev­er can we claim to have learned some­thing unless we can first make it under­stood to oth­ers – or indeed, to our­selves.

If you want the cliff notes ver­sion of the Study Less, Study Smart lec­ture, watch the video below:

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Craft of Writ­ing Effec­tive­ly: Essen­tial Lessons from the Long­time Direc­tor of UChicago’s Writ­ing Pro­gram

How to Speak: Watch the Lec­ture on Effec­tive Com­mu­ni­ca­tion That Became an MIT Tra­di­tion for Over 40 Years

The Cor­nell Note-Tak­ing Sys­tem: Learn the Method Stu­dents Have Used to Enhance Their Learn­ing Since the 1940s

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

The “Feyn­man Tech­nique” for Study­ing Effec­tive­ly: An Ani­mat­ed Primer

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

What’s a Sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly-Proven Way to Improve Your Abil­i­ty to Learn? Get Out and Exer­cise

Wyn­ton Marsalis Gives 12 Tips on How to Prac­tice: For Musi­cians, Ath­letes, or Any­one Who Wants to Learn Some­thing New

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

The Power of Empathy: A Quick Animated Lesson from Brené Brown

in Psychology | December 3rd, 2020

Sev­er­al years back, the RSA (Roy­al Soci­ety of the Arts) cre­at­ed a series of dis­tinc­tive ani­mat­ed shorts where well-known intel­lec­tu­als pre­sent­ed big ideas, and a tal­ent­ed artist rapid­ly illus­trat­ed them on a white­board. Some of those talks fea­tured the likes of Slavoj Zizek, Car­ol Dweck, Steven Pinker and Bar­bara Ehren­re­ich. Now RSA presents a video series cre­at­ed in an entire­ly dif­fer­ent aes­thet­ic. Above, you can watch the first of many “espres­so shots for the mind.” This clip fea­tures Dr. Brené Brown, a well-known research pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Hous­ton Grad­u­ate Col­lege of Social Work, pro­vid­ing some quick insights into the dif­fer­ence between sym­pa­thy and empa­thy, and explain­ing why empa­thy is much more mean­ing­ful. To learn more about The Pow­er of Empa­thy, you can watch Brown’s com­plete RSA lec­ture below . You can also watch her very pop­u­lar TED Talk on The Pow­er of Vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty here.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in Decem­ber, 2013.

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:

Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy Cours­es (Part of our list of Free Online Cours­es)

Med­i­ta­tion 101: A Short, Ani­mat­ed Beginner’s Guide

The Psy­chol­o­gy of Blame: Anoth­er Ani­mat­ed Les­son That Can Make You a Bet­ter Per­son

Watch How to Be at Home, a Beautiful Short Animation on the Realities of Social Isolation in 2020

in Animation, Books, Film, Life, Poetry | November 23rd, 2020

I think, as social pri­mates, we want to feel a strong sense of belong­ing either in a rela­tion­ship or to a community—or both. But also intrin­sic to our human­i­ty is a feel­ing that we are tru­ly alone.

—Film­mak­er Andrea Dorf­man, 2010

When they first became friends, poet Tanya Davis and film­mak­er Andrea Dorf­man talked a lot about the plea­sures and hard­ships of being alone. Davis had just gone through a break up, and Dorf­man was just embark­ing on a rela­tion­ship after four years of fly­ing solo.

These con­ver­sa­tions led to a col­lab­o­ra­tion, 2010’s How to Be At Alone (see below), a whim­si­cal videopo­em that com­bines live action and ani­ma­tion to con­sid­er some of soli­tude’s sweet­er aspects, like sit­ting on a bench as sig­nal to the uni­verse that one is avail­able for impromp­tu con­ver­sa­tion with a stranger.

That bench reap­pears in their 2020 fol­low up, How to Be At Home, above. Now it is cor­doned off with black and yel­low cau­tion tape, a famil­iar pub­lic health mea­sure in 2020.

As with the ear­li­er project, a large part of Davis’ pur­pose was to reflect and reas­sure, both her­self, and by exten­sion, oth­ers.

Although she has become a poster child for the joys of soli­tude, she also rel­ish­es human con­tact, and found her­self miss­ing it ter­ri­bly while shel­ter­ing alone in the ear­ly days of the pan­dem­ic. Writ­ing the new poem gave her “an anchor” and a place to put her anx­i­ety.

Dorf­man notes that the project, which was com­mis­sioned by the Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da as part of a short film col­lec­tion about Cana­di­ans nav­i­gat­ing life dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, was “essen­tial­ly cat­alyzed by COVID.”

As she embarked on the project, she won­dered if the pan­dem­ic would be over by the time it was com­plete. As she told the CBC’s Tom Pow­er:

There was this feel­ing that this could go away in a month, so this bet­ter be fin­ished soon, so it’s still rel­e­vant. So as an artist, as a film­mak­er, I thought, “I have to crank this out” but there’s no fast and easy way to do ani­ma­tion. It just takes so long and as I got into it and real­ized that this was going to be a marathon, not a sprint, the images just kept com­ing to me and I real­ly just made it up as I went along. I’d go into my stu­dio every day not know­ing what lay ahead and I’d think, “Okay, so, what do we have up next? What’s the next line? And I’d spend maybe a week on a line of the poem, ani­mat­ing it. 

It appears to have been an effec­tive approach.

Dorfman’s paint­ed images rip­ple across the fast turn­ing pages of an old book. The titles change from time to time, and the choic­es seem delib­er­ate—The Lone Star Ranger, Le Secret du Manoir Han­té, a chap­ter in The Bro­ken Halo—“Rose­mary for Remem­brance.”

“It’s almost as though the way the poem is writ­ten there are many chap­ters in the book. (Davis) moves from one sub­ject to anoth­er so com­plete­ly,” Dorf­man told the Uni­ver­si­ty of King’s Col­lege stu­dent paper, The Sig­nal.

In the new work, the absence of oth­er peo­ple proves a much heav­ier bur­den than it does in How To Be Alone.

Davis flirts with many of the first poem’s set­tings, places where a lone indi­vid­ual might have gone to put them­selves in prox­im­i­ty to oth­er humans as recent­ly as Feb­ru­ary 2020:

Pub­lic trans­porta­tion

The gym

A dance club

A descrip­tion from 2010:

The lunch counter, where you will be sur­round­ed by chow-down­ers, employ­ees who only have an hour and their spous­es work across town, and they, like you, will be alone.

Resist the urge to hang out with your cell phone.

In 2020, she strug­gles to recre­ate that expe­ri­ence at home, her phone serv­ing as her most vital link to the out­side world, as she scrolls past images of a Black Lives Mat­ter protests and a masked essen­tial work­er:

I miss lunch coun­ters so much I’ve been eat­ing [pick­les and] toast­ed sand­wich­es while hang­ing unabashed­ly with my phone.

See How to Be at Home and the 29 oth­er films that com­prise The Curve, the Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da series about life in the era of COVID-19 here.

How to be at Home

By Tanya Davis

If you are, at first, real­ly fuck­ing anx­ious, just wait. It’ll get worse, and then you’ll get the hang of it. Maybe. 

Start with the rea­son­able feel­ings – dis­com­fort, lack of focus, the sad­ness of alone

you can try to do yoga

you can shut off the radio when it gets to you

you can mes­sage your fam­i­ly or your friends or your col­leagues, you’re not sup­posed to leave your home any­way, so it’s safe for you

There’s also the gym

you can’t go there but you could pre­tend to

you could bendy by your­self in your bed­room

And there’s pub­lic trans­porta­tion

prob­a­bly best to avoid it

but there’s prayer and med­i­ta­tion, yes always

employ it

if you have pains in your chest ‘cause your anx­i­ety won’t rest

take a moment, take a breath

Start sim­ple

things you can han­dle based on your inter­ests

your issues and your trig­gers

and your inner logis­tics 

I miss lunch coun­ters so much I’ve been eat­ing [pick­les and] toast­ed sand­wich­es while hang­ing unabashed­ly with my phone

When you are tired, again of still being alone

make your­self a din­ner

but don’t invite any­body over

put some­thing green in it, or maybe orange

chips are fine some­times but they won’t keep you charged 

feed your heart

if peo­ple are your nour­ish­ment, I get you

feel the feel­ings that undo you while you have to keep apart

Watch a movie, in the dark

and pre­tend some­one is with you 

watch all of the cred­its

because you have time, and not much else to do

or watch all of the cred­its to remem­ber 

how many peo­ple come togeth­er

just to tell a sto­ry

just to make a pic­ture move

And then, set your­self up danc­ing

like it’s a club where every­one knows you

and they’re all gonna hold you

all night long

they’re gonna dance around you and with you and on their own

it’s your favourite song 

with the hard­est bass and the cathar­tic drums

your heart pumps along/hard, you belong

you put your hands up to feel it

With the come down comes the weep­ing

those down­cast eyes and feel­ings

the truth is you can’t go danc­ing, not right now

not at any club or par­ty in any town

The heart­break of this astounds you

it joins old aches way down in you

you can vis­it them, but please don’t stay there

Go out­side if you’re able, breathe the air

there are trees for hug­ging

don’t be embar­rassed

it’s your friend, it’s your moth­er, it’s your new crush

lay your cheek against the bark, it’s a liv­ing thing to touch

Sad­ly, leave all bench­es emp­ty

appre­ci­ate the kind­ness in the dis­tance of strangers

as you pine for com­pa­ny and wave at your neigh­bours

savour the depths of your con­ver­sa­tions

the lay­ers uncov­ered

in this strange space and time

Soci­ety is afraid of change

and no one wants to die

not now, from a tiny virus

not lat­er from the world on fire

But death is a truth we all hate to know

we all get to live, and then we all have to go

In the mean­time, we’re sur­round­ed, we’re alone

each a thread woven in the fab­ric, unrav­el­ling in moments though

each a solo enti­ty spin­ning on its axis, for­get­ting that the galaxy includes us all

Here­in our fall

from grace from each oth­er from god what­ev­er, doesn’t mat­ter

the dis­as­ter is that we believe we’re sep­a­rate 

we’re not

As evi­denced by virus­es tak­ing down soci­eties

as proven by the lone­li­ness inher­ent in no gath­er­ings

as pal­pa­ble as the vacan­cy in the space of one per­son hug­ging

If this dis­rup­tion undoes you

if the absence of peo­ple unrav­els you

if touch was the teth­er that held you togeth­er

and now that it’s sev­ered you’re frag­ile too 

lean into lone­li­ness and know you’re not alone in it 

lean into lone­li­ness like it is hold­ing you

like it is a gen­er­ous rep­re­sen­ta­tive of a glar­ing truth

oh, we are con­nect­ed

we for­get this, yet we always knew.

How to Be at Home will be added to the Ani­ma­tion sec­tion of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch 66 Oscar-Nom­i­nat­ed-and-Award-Win­ning Ani­mat­ed Shorts Online, Cour­tesy of the Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da

Watch “Ryan,” Win­ner of an Oscar and 60 Oth­er Awards

2020: An Iso­la­tion Odyssey–A Short Film Reen­acts the Finale of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, with a COVID-19 Twist

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

A Free Stanford Course on How to Teach Online: Designed for Middle & High School Teachers

in K-12, Online Courses | November 17th, 2020

Update: You can find the video record­ing of the work­shop here.

This past spring, teach­ers and stu­dents every­where got an abrupt intro­duc­tion to online learn­ing. When class­rooms moved online in March, many teach­ers exper­i­ment­ed with online ped­a­gogy for the first time, often with­out much train­ing or sup­port. To help ease this tran­si­tion, the Stan­ford Online High School–an inde­pen­dent high school that oper­ates entire­ly online–launched a free course designed to help teach­ers get com­fort­able teach­ing in this new medi­um. 7,000 teach­ers signed up. To con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing sup­port, an updat­ed ver­sion of this free course will be offered again this week­end.

“Teach­ing Your Class Online” will take place this Sat­ur­day (Novem­ber 21) and Sun­day (Novem­ber 22),  and run from 9:00 am — 11:00 am Pacif­ic time each day. (Update: The lec­tures are now avail­able online.) Designed main­ly for instruc­tors teach­ing grades 7–12, the course can be help­ful for ele­men­tary and col­lege instruc­tors as well. Top­ics cov­ered will include “chal­lenges [such] as stu­dent engage­ment and dis­cus­sion (includ­ing for large groups, break­out rooms, and hybrid groups), effec­tive com­mu­ni­ca­tion with stu­dents and par­ents, assess­ment and cur­ricu­lum adap­ta­tion for online ped­a­gogy, and strate­gies for sup­port­ing both stu­dents and your­selves.”

“Teach­ing Your Class Online” is sup­port­ed by Stan­ford Online High School and Stan­ford Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies. You can enroll in the course on the Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies web­site here.

If you know any teach­ers who could ben­e­fit from this free course, please feel free to share this post with them.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

200 Free Kids Edu­ca­tion­al Resources: Video Lessons, Apps, Books, Web­sites & More

“I Will Sur­vive,” the Coro­n­avirus Ver­sion for Teach­ers Going Online

How to Teach and Learn Phi­los­o­phy Dur­ing the Pan­dem­ic: A Col­lec­tion of 450+ Phi­los­o­phy Videos Free Online

Martin Luther King: “You Know Who to Vote For. I’m Just Asking You to Vote!” (1964)

in History | November 3rd, 2020

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

At anoth­er turn­ing point in U.S. history–when LBJ ran against Bar­ry Gold­wa­ter in the 1964 pres­i­den­tial election–Martin Luther King, Jr. urged vot­ers to stand up and be count­ed. To set the scene, the UCLA Film & Tele­vi­sion Archive writes:

King, who had just been named the win­ner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his com­mit­ment to non­vi­o­lent resis­tance, embarked on a cross-coun­try get-out-the-vote cam­paign in sup­port of incum­bent Demo­c­rat Lyn­don B. John­son. Repub­li­can chal­lenger Bar­ry Gold­wa­ter opposed the Civ­il Rights Act of 1964 in favor of states’ rights and rep­re­sent­ed, for King, a set­back for the civ­il rights move­ment and “a great dark night of social destruc­tion” (Los Ange­les Times). King also advo­cat­ed for more African Amer­i­can rep­re­sen­ta­tion in Con­gress and spoke against bal­lot mea­sures that would per­pet­u­ate dis­crim­i­na­tion. To vote was not only a civic duty, it was a moral imper­a­tive.

His words speak to our moment today as much, if not more, than they did to the events of 56 years ago. Speak­ing to a crowd in LA, King said:

“Suf­fice it to say that we stand in one of the most momen­tous peri­ods of human his­to­ry. And in these days of emo­tion­al ten­sion, when the prob­lems of the world are gigan­tic in extent and chaot­ic in detail, all men of good will must make the right deci­sions.”

“We must decide whether … we will allow our nation to be rel­e­gat­ed to a sec­ond-rate pow­er in the world with no moral voice.”

“We must decide next Tues­day whether Amer­i­ca will take the high road of jus­tice and peace, com­pas­sion for the poor and under­priv­i­leged, or whether this nation will tread the low road of man’s inhu­man­i­ty to man, of injus­tice, of short-sight­ed­ness.”

“Each of us has a moral respon­si­bil­i­ty, if we are of vot­ing age and if we are reg­is­tered, to par­tic­i­pate in that deci­sion. I come here to urge every per­son under the sound of my voice to go to the polls on the 3rd of Novem­ber and vote your con­vic­tions.”

Amen.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Mar­tin Luther King, Jr. Used Niet­zsche, Hegel & Kant to Over­turn Seg­re­ga­tion in Amer­i­ca

Mar­tin Luther King Jr. Explains the Impor­tance of Jazz: Hear the Speech He Gave at the First Berlin Jazz Fes­ti­val (1964)

Mar­tin Luther King, Jr.’s Hand­writ­ten Syl­labus & Final Exam for the Phi­los­o­phy Course He Taught at More­house Col­lege (1962)

The Craft of Writing Effectively: Essential Lessons from the Longtime Director of UChicago’s Writing Program

in Writing | October 27th, 2020

Aca­d­e­m­ic writ­ing has a bad rep­u­ta­tion. “When a scholar’s vanity/insecurity leads him to write pri­mar­i­ly to com­mu­ni­cate and rein­force his own sta­tus as an Intel­lec­tu­al,” as David Fos­ter Wal­lace diag­nosed the prob­lem near­ly two decades ago, “his Eng­lish is deformed by pleonasm and pre­ten­tious dic­tion (whose func­tion is to sig­nal the writer’s eru­di­tion) and by opaque abstrac­tion (whose func­tion is to keep any­body from pin­ning the writer down to a def­i­nite asser­tion that can maybe be refut­ed or shown to be sil­ly).” Indeed. But the dis­or­ders behind the kind of prose that inspires provo­ca­tions like Phi­los­o­phy and Lit­er­a­ture’s “Bad Writ­ing Con­test” are, if you believe Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go Writ­ing Pro­grams direc­tor Lar­ry McEner­ney, even more basic than that.

“You think that writ­ing is com­mu­ni­cat­ing your ideas to your read­ers,” McEner­ney declares to a room­ful of aca­d­e­mics in the video above. “It is not.” In this 80-minute talk, titled “The Craft of Writ­ing Effec­tive­ly,” he iden­ti­fies the core mis­con­cep­tions that cause aca­d­e­m­ic writ­ing to be bad — or more to the point, unin­ter­est­ing, unin­flu­en­tial, unread. Most all of us grow up learn­ing to write in school, where we need not give much con­sid­er­a­tion to our audi­ence: a teacher, or in col­lege per­haps a teach­ing assis­tant, who’s paid to read what we’ve writ­ten. But when nobody’s next meal is com­ing from read­ing our papers any­more, we come face to face with an essen­tial mis­match between our assumed goals as a writer and the desires of an unpaid read­er.

“I got no prob­lem with some­body writ­ing an essay because they want to think,” says McEner­ney. “What I have a prob­lem with is when they come to my office and say, ‘My read­ers don’t appre­ci­ate me.’ ” But “they don’t owe you their appre­ci­a­tion,” nor even their atten­tion — not if you neglect your core task as a writer, “to change the way your read­ers think.” This has lit­tle to do with the task of writ­ing back in school, which involved the pre­sen­ta­tion of your ideas and knowl­edge in exchange for a grade. To pro­duce “clear, orga­nized, per­sua­sive, and valu­able” writ­ing, to McEner­ney’s mind, you must “iden­ti­fy the peo­ple with pow­er in your com­mu­ni­ty and give them what they want,” which neces­si­tates mas­ter­ing the “code” of that com­mu­ni­ty.

This does­n’t sim­ply mean suck­ing up to the high­er-ups. While you should, of course, demon­strate famil­iar­i­ty with the work already accom­plished in your field, you’ve also got to tell those high­er-ups — who, like most any­one else, read to have their ideas changed — that some­thing they know is wrong. This requires sav­ing the expla­na­tion of your sub­ject for lat­er, after first set­ting up a prob­lem with the lan­guage of insta­bil­i­ty (words like “but,” “how­ev­er,” “incon­sis­tent,” and “anom­aly”), then offer­ing your own solu­tion. You can see these and oth­er tech­niques in use, as well as exam­ples of what not to do, in the lec­ture’s PDF hand­out. Are there valid objec­tions to McEner­ney’s view of writ­ing?  He acknowl­edges that there are, such as as the moral cri­tique mount­ed by crit­i­cal the­o­rist Homi K. Bhab­ha, then a pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go — and also, as it hap­pens, a sec­ond-plac­er in the Bad Writ­ing Con­test.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How to Speak: Watch the Lec­ture on Effec­tive Com­mu­ni­ca­tion That Became an MIT Tra­di­tion for Over 40 Years

10 Writ­ing Tips from Leg­endary Writ­ing Teacher William Zinss­er

Umber­to Eco’s How To Write a The­sis: A Wit­ty, Irrev­er­ent & High­ly Prac­ti­cal Guide Now Out in Eng­lish

Steven Pinker Uses The­o­ries from Evo­lu­tion­ary Biol­o­gy to Explain Why Aca­d­e­m­ic Writ­ing is So Bad

Mar­tin Amis Explains His Method for Writ­ing Great Sen­tences

Why the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go Reject­ed Kurt Vonnegut’s Master’s The­sis (and How a Nov­el Got Him His Degree 27 Years Lat­er)

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

A Master List of 1,500 Free Courses From Top Universities: 50,000 Hours of Audio/Video Lectures to Enrich Your Mind

in Online Courses | October 18th, 2020

For the past 14 years, we’ve been busy rum­mag­ing around the inter­net and adding cours­es to an ever-grow­ing list of Free Online Cours­es, which now fea­tures 1,500 cours­es from top uni­ver­si­ties. Let’s give you the quick overview: The list lets you down­load audio & video lec­tures from schools like Stan­ford, Yale, MIT, Oxford, Har­vard and many oth­er insti­tu­tions. Gen­er­al­ly, the cours­es can be accessed via YouTube, iTunes or uni­ver­si­ty web sites, and you can lis­ten to the lec­tures any­time, any­where, on your com­put­er or smart phone. We haven’t done a pre­cise cal­cu­la­tion, but there’s about 50,000 hours of free audio & video lec­tures here. Enough to keep you busy for a very long time–something that’s use­ful dur­ing these social­ly dis­tant times.

Right now you’ll find 200 free phi­los­o­phy cours­es, 105 free his­to­ry cours­es, 170 free com­put­er sci­ence cours­es, 85 free physics cours­es and 55 Free Lit­er­a­ture Cours­es in the col­lec­tion, and that’s just begin­ning to scratch the sur­face. You can peruse sec­tions cov­er­ing Astron­o­my, Biol­o­gy, Busi­ness, Chem­istry, Eco­nom­ics, Engi­neer­ing, Math, Polit­i­cal Sci­ence, Psy­chol­o­gy and Reli­gion.

Here are some high­lights from the com­plete list of Free Online Cours­es. We’ve added a few unconventional/vintage cours­es in the mix just to keep things inter­est­ing.

• A His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy in 81 Video Lec­tures: From Ancient Greece to Mod­ern Times — Free Online Video — Arthur Holmes, Wheaton Col­lege
• A Romp Through Ethics for Com­plete Begin­ners - Var­i­ous For­mats – Mar­i­anne Tal­bot, Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty
• Ancient Greek His­to­ry — Var­i­ous For­mats — Don­ald Kagan, Yale
• Cre­ative Read­ing and Writ­ing by William S. Bur­roughs — Free Online Audio — Naropa Uni­ver­si­ty
• Crit­i­cal Rea­son­ing for Begin­ners — Var­i­ous For­mats – Mar­i­anne Tal­bot, Oxford
• Deep Learn­ing — Free Online Video — Vin­cent Van­houcke, Google
• Edi­ble Edu­ca­tion 101 – Free Online Video – Michael Pol­lan, UC Berke­ley
• Finan­cial Mar­kets — Var­i­ous For­mats — Robert Shiller, Yale
• Grow­ing Up in the Uni­verse – Free Online Video – Richard Dawkins, Oxford
• Har­vard’s Intro­duc­to­ry Com­put­er Sci­ence Course - Free Online Course — David Malan, Har­vard
• Hem­ing­way, Fitzger­ald, Faulkn­er – Var­i­ous For­mats – Wai Chee Dimock, Yale
• Heidegger’s Being & Time – Free Online Audio — Hubert Drey­fus, UC Berke­ley
• How to Lis­ten to Music — Var­i­ous For­mats — Craig Wright, Yale
• Human Behav­ioral Biol­o­gy – Var­i­ous For­mats – Robert Sapol­sky, Stan­ford
• Intro­duc­tion to the Old Tes­ta­ment (Hebrew Bible) – Free Online Video — Chris­tine Hayes, Yale.
• Lec­tures on Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy — Free Online Video — Marc Lev­oy, Stanford/Google
• Physics for Future Pres­i­dents – Free Online Video – Richard Muller, UC Berke­ley
• Sci­ence and Cook­ing: From Haute Cui­sine to the Sci­ence of Soft Mat­ter — Var­i­ous For­mats — Team taught, Har­vard
• Speak Ital­ian with Your Mouth Full - Var­i­ous For­mats — MIT, Dr. Pao­la Rebus­co
• The Amer­i­can Nov­el Since 1945 – Var­i­ous For­mats – Amy Hunger­ford, Yale
• The Cen­tral Phi­los­o­phy of Tibet — Free Online Audio – Robert Thur­man, Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty
• The Char­ac­ter of Phys­i­cal Law (1964) - Free Online Video — Richard Feyn­man, Cor­nell
• The Hob­bit – Free iTunes Video – More – Corey Olsen, Wash­ing­ton Col­lege
• The Tem­pest - Free Online Audio — Allen Gins­berg, Naropa
• Wal­ter Kauf­mann Lec­tures on Niet­zsche, Kierkegaard and Sartre — Free Online Audio

The com­plete list of cours­es can be accessed here: 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties. For more enrich­ing mate­r­i­al, see our oth­er col­lec­tions below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Learn 45+ Lan­guages Online for Free: Span­ish, Chi­nese, Eng­lish & More.

200 Online Cer­tifi­cate & Micro­cre­den­tial Pro­grams from Lead­ing Uni­ver­si­ties & Com­pa­nies.

Online Degrees & Mini Degrees: Explore Mas­ters, Mini Mas­ters, Bach­e­lors & Mini Bach­e­lors from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

The Dance Theatre of Harlem Dances Through the Streets of NYC: A Sight to Behold

in Dance, Life | October 16th, 2020

It’s near­ly impos­si­ble to find an unblem­ished square of pave­ment in New York City.

Unless the con­crete was poured with­in the last day or two, count on each square to boast at least one dark pol­ka dot, an echo of casu­al­ly dis­card­ed gum.

Con­firm for your­self with a quick peek beneath the exu­ber­ant feet of the Dance The­atre of Harlem com­pa­ny mem­bers per­form­ing on the plaza of the Adam Clay­ton Pow­ell Jr. State Office Build­ing dur­ing the 46th annu­al Harlem Week fes­ti­val.

For obvi­ous rea­sons, this year’s fes­ti­val took place entire­ly online, but the Dance The­atre’s offer­ing is a far cry from the gloomy Zoom‑y affair that’s become 2020’s sad norm.

Eight com­pa­ny mem­bers, includ­ing co-pro­duc­ers Derek Brock­ing­ton and Alexan­dra Hutchin­son, hit the streets, to be filmed danc­ing through­out Harlem.

Those who gripe about the dis­com­fort of wear­ing a mask while exert­ing them­selves should shut their traps until they’ve per­formed bal­let on the plat­form of the 145th and St. Nicholas Sub­way Sta­tion, where the dancers’ pris­tine white shoes bring fur­ther buoy­an­cy to the pro­ceed­ings.

The City Col­lege of New York—in-state tuition $7,340—provides the Neo-Goth­ic stage for four bal­leri­nas to per­form en pointe.

The Hud­son Riv­er and the George Wash­ing­ton Bridge serve as back­drop as four young men soar along the prom­e­nade in Den­ny Far­rell River­bank State Park. Their casu­al out­fits are a reminder of how com­pa­ny founder Arthur Mitchell, the New York City Ballet’s first black prin­ci­pal dancer, delib­er­ate­ly relaxed the dress code to accom­mo­date young men who would have resist­ed tights.

The piece is an excerpt of New Bach, part of the com­pa­ny’s reper­toire by res­i­dent chore­o­g­ra­ph­er and for­mer prin­ci­pal dancer, Robert Gar­land, described in an ear­li­er New York Times review as “an author­i­ta­tive and high­ly imag­i­na­tive blend of clas­si­cal vocab­u­lary and funk, laid out in hand­some for­mal pat­terns in a well-plot­ted bal­let.”

The music is by J.S. Bach.

And in these frac­tious times, it’s worth not­ing that only one of the dancers is New York City born and bred. The oth­ers hail from Kansas, Texas, Chica­go, Louisiana, Delaware, Orange Coun­ty, and upstate.

The group seizes the oppor­tu­ni­ty to ampli­fy a much need­ed pub­lic health message—wear a mask!—but it’s also a beau­ti­ful trib­ute to the pow­er of the arts and the vibrant neigh­bor­hood where a world-class com­pa­ny was found­ed in a con­vert­ed garage at the height of the civ­il rights move­ment.

Con­tribute to Dance The­ater of Harlem’s COVID-19 Relief Fund here.

via @BalletArchive/@Ted­Gioia

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bal­le­ri­na Misty Copeland Recre­ates the Pos­es of Edgar Degas’ Bal­let Dancers

Watch the 1917 Bal­let “Parade”: Cre­at­ed by Erik Satie, Pablo Picas­so & Jean Cocteau, It Pro­voked a Riot and Inspired the Word “Sur­re­al­ism”

Watch the Ser­pen­tine Dance, Cre­at­ed by the Pio­neer­ing Dancer Loie Fuller, Per­formed in an 1897 Film by the Lumière Broth­ers

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

A Creepy 19th Century Re-Creation of the Famous Ancient Roman Statue, Laocoön and His Sons

in Art, History | October 13th, 2020

Beware of Greeks bear­ing gifts. We’ve all heard that proverb, but few of us could name its source: the Tro­jan priest Lao­coön, a his­tor­i­cal char­ac­ter in the Aeneid. “Do not trust the Horse, Tro­jans,” Vir­gil has him say. “What­ev­er it is, I fear the Greeks even bear­ing gifts.” He was right to do so, as we all know, though his death came not at the hands of the Greek army let into Troy by the sol­diers hid­den inside the Horse, but those of the gods. As Vir­gil has it, an enraged Lao­coön threw a spear at the Horse when his com­pa­tri­ots dis­re­gard­ed words of cau­tion, and in response the god­dess Min­er­va sent forth a cou­ple of sea ser­pents to do him in.

The Aeneid, of course, offers only one account of Lao­coön’s fate. Sopho­cles, for instance, had him spared and only his sons killed, and his osten­si­ble crime — being a priest yet mar­ry­ing — had noth­ing to do with the Tro­jan Horse. But what­ev­er drew the ser­pents Lao­coön’s way, the moment they set upon him and his sons was immor­tal­ized by Rho­di­an sculp­tors Age­sander, Athen­odor­os, and Poly­dorus in Lao­coön and His Sons, among the most famous ancient sculp­tures in exis­tence since its exca­va­tion in 1506. (The sculp­ture was orig­i­nal­ly cre­at­ed some­where between 200 BC and 70 AD.) Var­i­ous trib­utes have been paid to it over the cen­turies, most notably by an Aus­tri­an anatomist named Josef Hyrtl, whose built his high­ly Hal­loween-suit­able recre­ation out of skele­tons — both human and snake.

“Accord­ing to Christo­pher Polt, an assis­tant pro­fes­sor in the clas­si­cal stud­ies depart­ment at Boston Col­lege who tweet­ed a side-by-side com­par­i­son of the two ver­sions, Hyrtl cre­at­ed his take on the sculp­ture at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vien­na around 1850,” writes Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Valenti­na Di Lis­cia. In response, a his­to­ri­an named Gre­go­ry Stringer tweet­ed that Hyrtl must have been able to intu­it the “prop­er pose” of Lao­coön’s right arm, since in the mid-19th cen­tu­ry the sculp­ture’s orig­i­nal arm was still miss­ing, yet to be redis­cov­ered and reat­tached, and since 1510 had been replaced in copies with an incor­rect­ly out­stretched sub­sti­tute. Lao­coön and His Sons now resides at the Vat­i­can (learn more about it in the Smarthis­to­ry video below), but Hyrtl’s skele­tal Lao­coön and His Sons was destroyed in the 1945 Allied bomb­ing of Vien­na.

In 2018, a sim­i­lar project was attempt­ed again for an exhib­it at the Hous­ton Muse­um of Nat­ur­al Sci­ence. The new all-skele­ton ver­sion of Lao­coön and His Sons was cre­at­ed, as the Hous­ton Press’ Jef Rouner reports, by taxi­der­mist Lawyer Dou­glas, taxi­dermy col­lec­tor Tyler Zottarelle, and artist Joshua Ham­mond. “It looks a lot like inter­pre­ta­tive dance,” Rouner quotes Dou­glas as say­ing of Hyrtl’s work. “It’s a beau­ti­ful piece, but I was con­cerned it wasn’t able to cap­ture the orig­i­nal strug­gle of ani­mal ver­sus human.” Though Age­sander, Athen­odor­os, and Poly­dorus’ orig­i­nal is known as a “pro­to­typ­i­cal icon of human agony,” it turns out that “get­ting per­pet­u­al­ly grin­ning skulls to seem in agony is hard­er than you might think.” But if any time of the year is right for grin­ning skulls to express the human expe­ri­ence, sure­ly this is it.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Art & Art His­to­ry Cours­es

19th-Cen­tu­ry Skele­ton Alarm Clock Remind­ed Peo­ple Dai­ly of the Short­ness of Life: An Intro­duc­tion to the Memen­to Mori

How Ancient Greek Stat­ues Real­ly Looked: Research Reveals Their Bold, Bright Col­ors and Pat­terns

An Artist Cro­chets a Life-Size, Anatom­i­cal­ly-Cor­rect Skele­ton, Com­plete with Organs

Cel­e­brate The Day of the Dead with The Clas­sic Skele­ton Art of José Guadalupe Posa­da

3D Scans of 7,500 Famous Sculp­tures, Stat­ues & Art­works: Down­load & 3D Print Rodin’s Thinker, Michelangelo’s David & More

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

The 1937 Experiment in Distance Learning: When Chicago Schools Went Remote, Over Radio, During a Polio Outbreak

in Education, History | October 7th, 2020

As all of us have noticed in recent months, liv­ing in a viral pan­dem­ic real­ly mess­es with your sense of time. A few months feels like a decade. Time slows to a crawl. If you’re a par­ent, how­ev­er, you have before you walk­ing, talk­ing, grow­ing, com­plain­ing reminders that no mat­ter what’s hap­pen­ing in the world, chil­dren still grow up just the same. They need new expe­ri­ences and new clothes just as before, and they need to keep their brains engaged and try, at least, to build on pri­or knowl­edge.

Maybe we’re learn­ing new things, too. (Adult brains also need exer­cise.) Or not. We have some con­trol over the sit­u­a­tion; kids don’t. “Learn­ing loss” over inac­tive months is real, and the gov­ern­ment still has the respon­si­bil­i­ty (for what the word is worth) to edu­cate them. Online learn­ing may feel like a bad com­pro­mise for many fam­i­lies, and its suc­cess seems large­ly dependent—as in reg­u­lar school—on par­ent involve­ment and access to resources. But it’s bet­ter than eight months of the more mind­less kind of screen time.

It may help to know that remote learn­ing isn’t new, even if we’re still adjust­ing to tech­nol­o­gy that lets teach­ers (and boss­es) into our homes with cam­eras and micro­phones. The chal­lenges “may seem unprece­dent­ed,” Stan­ford pro­fes­sor Michael Hines writes at The Wash­ing­ton Post, but “edu­ca­tors may be sur­prised to learn that almost 100 years ago Chicago’s schools faced sim­i­lar cir­cum­stances” dur­ing the polio epi­dem­ic and met them in a sim­i­lar way. In 1937, an out­break forced the city to close schools, and prompt­ed “wide­spread alarm about lost instruc­tion­al time and stu­dents left to their own devices” (so to speak).

Admin­is­tra­tors were “deter­mined to con­tin­ue instruc­tions for the district’s near­ly 325,000 ele­men­tary age stu­dents” through the only remote tech­nol­o­gy avail­able, radio, “still fair­ly new and large­ly untest­ed in edu­ca­tion in the 1930s.” Accord­ing to Hines, a his­to­ri­an of edu­ca­tion in the U.S., the pro­gram was very well orga­nized, the lessons were engag­ing, and edu­ca­tors “active­ly sought to involve par­ents and com­mu­ni­ties” through tele­phone hot­lines they could call with ques­tions or com­ments. On the first day, they logged over 1,000 calls and added five addi­tion­al teach­ers.

You might be wondering—given dig­i­tal divide prob­lems of online learn­ing today—whether all the stu­dents served actu­al­ly owned a radio and tele­phone. Kather­ine Foss, a pro­fes­sor of Media Stud­ies at Mid­dle Ten­nessee State Uni­ver­si­ty, notes that in the late 1930s, “over 80% of U.S. house­holds owned at least one radio, though few­er were found in homes in the south­ern U.S., in rur­al areas and among peo­ple of col­or.” Those who did­n’t were left out, and school author­i­ties had no way to track atten­dance. “Access issues received lit­tle atten­tion” in the media. School Super­in­ten­dent William John­son had no idea how many stu­dents tuned in.

The local pro­gram last­ed less than three weeks before schools reopened. Some felt the instruc­tion moved too quick­ly and “stu­dents who need­ed more atten­tion or reme­di­a­tion strug­gled through one-size-fits-all radio lessons,” notes Hines. Edu­ca­tors today will sym­pa­thize with the over­all sense at the time that those who ben­e­fit­ted most from the radio lessons were stu­dents who need­ed them least.

Learn more about the exper­i­ment in Hines’ his­to­ry les­son (also see Foss’ recent arti­cle), and con­sid­er the lessons we can apply to the present. Remote edu­ca­tion still has flaws, and par­ents still strug­gle to find time for involve­ment, but the tech­nol­o­gy has made it a viable option for much longer than three weeks, and maybe, giv­en future uncer­tain­ties, far longer than that.

via The Con­ver­sa­tion

Relat­ed Con­tent:

NBC Uni­ver­si­ty The­ater Adapt­ed Great Nov­els to Radio & Gives Lis­ten­ers Col­lege Cred­it : Hear 110 Episodes from a 1940s eLearn­ing Exper­i­ment

The His­to­ry of the 1918 Flu Pan­dem­ic, “The Dead­liest Epi­dem­ic of All Time”: Three Free Lec­tures from The Great Cours­es

Dyson Cre­ates 44 Free Engi­neer­ing & Sci­ence Chal­lenges for Kids Quar­an­tined Dur­ing COVID-19

Free Online Draw­ing Lessons for Kids, Led by Favorite Artists & Illus­tra­tors

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