Albert Einstein’s Grades: A Fascinating Look at His Report Cards

in Education, Physics | June 3rd, 2025

Albert Ein­stein was a pre­co­cious child.

At the age of twelve, he fol­lowed his own line of rea­son­ing to find a proof of the Pythagore­an The­o­rem. At thir­teen he read Kant, just for the fun of it. And before he was fif­teen he had taught him­self dif­fer­en­tial and inte­gral cal­cu­lus.

But while the young Ein­stein was engrossed in intel­lec­tu­al pur­suits, he did­n’t much care for school. He hat­ed rote learn­ing and despised author­i­tar­i­an school­mas­ters. His sense of intel­lec­tu­al supe­ri­or­i­ty was resent­ed by his teach­ers.

In Sub­tle is the Lord: The Sci­ence and Life of Albert Ein­stein, author Abra­ham Pais tells a fun­ny sto­ry from Ein­stein’s days at the Luit­pold Gym­na­si­um, a sec­ondary school in Munich now called the Albert-Ein­stein-Gym­na­si­um:

At the Gym­na­si­um a teacher once said to him that he, the teacher, would be much hap­pi­er if the boy were not in his class. Ein­stein replied that he had done noth­ing wrong. The teacher answered, “Yes, that is true. But you sit there in the back row and smile, and that vio­lates the feel­ing of respect that a teacher needs from his class.”

The same teacher famous­ly said that Ein­stein “would nev­er get any­where in life.”

What both­ered Ein­stein most about the Luit­pold was its oppres­sive atmos­phere. His sis­ter Maja would lat­er write:

“The mil­i­tary tone of the school, the sys­tem­at­ic train­ing in the wor­ship of author­i­ty that was sup­posed to accus­tom pupils at an ear­ly age to mil­i­tary dis­ci­pline, was also par­tic­u­lar­ly unpleas­ant for the boy. He con­tem­plat­ed with dread that not-too-dis­tant moment when he will have to don a sol­dier’s uni­form in order to ful­fill his mil­i­tary oblig­a­tions.”

When he was six­teen, Ein­stein’s par­ents moved to Italy to pur­sue a busi­ness ven­ture. They told him to stay behind and fin­ish school. But Ein­stein was des­per­ate to join them in Italy before his sev­en­teenth birth­day. “Accord­ing to the Ger­man cit­i­zen­ship laws,” Maja explained, “a male cit­i­zen must not emi­grate after his com­plet­ed six­teenth year; oth­er­wise, if he fails to report for mil­i­tary ser­vice, he is declared a desert­er.”

So Ein­stein found a way to get a doc­tor’s per­mis­sion to with­draw from the school on the pre­text of “men­tal exhaus­tion,” and fled to Italy with­out a diplo­ma. Years lat­er, in 1944, dur­ing the final days of World War II, the Luit­pold Gym­na­si­um was oblit­er­at­ed by Allied bomb­ing. So we don’t have a record of Ein­stein’s grades there. But there is a record of a prin­ci­pal at the school look­ing up Ein­stein’s grades in 1929 to fact check a press report that Ein­stein had been a very bad stu­dent. Wal­ter Sul­li­van writes about it in a 1984 piece in The New York Times:

With 1 as the high­est grade and 6 the low­est, the prin­ci­pal report­ed, Ein­stein’s marks in Greek, Latin and math­e­mat­ics oscil­lat­ed between 1 and 2 until, toward the end, he invari­ably scored 1 in math.

After he dropped out, Ein­stein’s fam­i­ly enlist­ed a well-con­nect­ed friend to per­suade the Swiss Fed­er­al Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy, or ETH, to let him take the entrance exam, even though he was only six­teen years old and had not grad­u­at­ed from high school. He scored bril­liant­ly in physics and math, but poor­ly in oth­er areas. The direc­tor of the ETH sug­gest­ed he fin­ish prepara­to­ry school in the town of Aarau, in the Swiss can­ton of Aar­gau. A diplo­ma from the can­ton­al school would guar­an­tee Ein­stein admis­sion to the ETH.

At Aarau, Ein­stein was pleas­ant­ly sur­prised to find a lib­er­al atmos­phere in which inde­pen­dent thought was encour­aged.  “When com­pared to six years’ school­ing at a Ger­man author­i­tar­i­an gym­na­si­um,” he lat­er said, “it made me clear­ly real­ize how much supe­ri­or an edu­ca­tion based on free action and per­son­al respon­si­bil­i­ty is to one rely­ing on out­ward author­i­ty.”

In Ein­stein’s first semes­ter at Aarau, the school still used the old method of scor­ing from 1 to 6, with 1 as the high­est grade. In the sec­ond semes­ter the sys­tem was reversed, with 6 becom­ing the high­est grade. Bar­ry R. Park­er talks about Ein­stein’s first-semes­ter grades in his book, Ein­stein: The Pas­sions of a Sci­en­tist:

His grades over the first few months were: Ger­man, 2–3; French, 3–4; his­to­ry, 1–2; math­e­mat­ics, 1; physics, 1–2; nat­ur­al his­to­ry, 2–3; chem­istry, 2–3; draw­ing, 2–3; and vio­lin, 1. (The range is 1 to 6, with 1 being the high­est.) Although none of the grades, with the excep­tion of French, were con­sid­ered poor, some of them were only aver­age.

The school head­mas­ter, Jost Win­tel­er, who had wel­comed Ein­stein into his home as a board­er and had become some­thing of a sur­ro­gate father to him dur­ing his time at Aarau, was con­cerned that a young man as obvi­ous­ly bril­liant as Albert was receiv­ing aver­age grades in so many cours­es. At Christ­mas in 1895, he mailed a report card to Ein­stein’s par­ents. Her­mann Ein­stein replied with warm thanks, but said he was not too wor­ried. As Park­er writes, Ein­stein’s father said he was used to see­ing a few “not-so-good grades along with very good ones.”

In the next semes­ter Ein­stein’s grades improved, but were still mixed. As Toby Hendy of the YouTube chan­nel Tibees shows in the video above, Ein­stein’s final grades were excel­lent in math and physics, but clos­er to aver­age in oth­er areas.

Ein­stein’s uneven aca­d­e­m­ic per­for­mance con­tin­ued at the ETH, as Hendy shows. By the third year his rela­tion­ship with the head of the physics depart­ment, Hein­rich Weber, began to dete­ri­o­rate. Weber was offend­ed by the young man’s arro­gance. “You’re a clever boy, Ein­stein,” said Weber. “An extreme­ly clever boy. But you have one great fault. You’ll nev­er allow your­self to be told any­thing.” Ein­stein was par­tic­u­lar­ly frus­trat­ed that Weber refused to teach the ground­break­ing elec­tro­mag­net­ic the­o­ry of James Clerk Maxwell. He began spend­ing less time in the class­room and more time read­ing up on cur­rent physics at home and in the cafes of Zurich.

Ein­stein increas­ing­ly focused his atten­tion on physics, and neglect­ed math­e­mat­ics. He came to regret this. “It was not clear to me as a stu­dent,” he lat­er said, “that a more pro­found knowl­edge of the basic prin­ci­ples of physics was tied up with the most intri­cate math­e­mat­i­cal meth­ods.”

Ein­stein’s class­mate Mar­cel Gross­mann helped him by shar­ing his notes from the math lec­tures Ein­stein had skipped. When Ein­stein grad­u­at­ed, his con­flict with Weber cost him the teach­ing job he had expect­ed to receive. Gross­mann even­tu­al­ly came to Ein­stein’s res­cue again, urg­ing his father to help him secure a well-paid job as a clerk in the Swiss patent office. Many years lat­er, when Gross­mann died, Ein­stein wrote a let­ter to his wid­ow that con­veyed not only his sad­ness at an old friend’s death, but also his bit­ter­sweet mem­o­ries of life as a col­lege stu­dent:

“Our days togeth­er come back to me. He a mod­el stu­dent; I untidy and a day­dream­er. He on excel­lent terms with the teach­ers and grasp­ing every­thing eas­i­ly; I aloof and dis­con­tent­ed, not very pop­u­lar. But we were good friends and our con­ver­sa­tions over iced cof­fee at the Metropol every few weeks belong among my nicest mem­o­ries.”

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2020.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Einstein’s The­o­ry of Rel­a­tiv­i­ty Explained in One of the Ear­li­est Sci­ence Films Ever Made (1923)

Albert Ein­stein Appears in Remark­ably Col­orized Video & Con­tem­plates the Fate of Human­i­ty After the Atom­ic Bomb (1946)

Hear Albert Ein­stein Read “The Com­mon Lan­guage of Sci­ence” (1941)

When Albert Ein­stein & Char­lie Chap­lin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

1980s Metalhead Kids Are Alright: Scientific Study Shows That They Became Well-Adjusted Adults

in Music, Psychology | May 20th, 2025

In the 1980s, The Par­ents Music Resource Cen­ter (PMRC), an orga­ni­za­tion co-found­ed by Tip­per Gore and the wives of sev­er­al oth­er Wash­ing­ton pow­er bro­kers, launched a polit­i­cal cam­paign against pop music, hop­ing to put warn­ing labels on records that pro­mot­ed Sex, Vio­lence, Drug and Alco­hol Use. Along the way, the PMRC issued “the Filthy Fif­teen,” a list of 15 par­tic­u­lar­ly objec­tion­able songs. Hits by Madon­na, Prince and Cyn­di Lau­per made the list. But the list real­ly took aim at heavy met­al bands from the 80s — name­ly, Judas Priest, Möt­ley Crüe, Twist­ed Sis­ter, W.A.S.P., Def Lep­pard, Black Sab­bath, and Ven­om. (Inter­est­ing foot­note: the Sovi­ets sep­a­rate­ly cre­at­ed a list of black­balled rock bands, and it looked pret­ty much the same.)

Above, you can watch Twist­ed Sis­ter’s Dee Snider appear before Con­gress in 1985 and accuse the PMRC of mis­in­ter­pret­ing his band’s lyrics and wag­ing a false war against met­al music. The evi­dence 40 years lat­er sug­gests that Snider per­haps had a point.

A study by psy­chol­o­gy researchers at Hum­boldt State, Ohio State, UC River­side and UT Austin “exam­ined 1980s heavy met­al groupies, musi­cians, and fans at mid­dle age” — 377 par­tic­i­pants in total — and found that, although met­al enthu­si­asts cer­tain­ly lived riski­er lives as kids, they were nonethe­less “sig­nif­i­cant­ly hap­pi­er in their youth and bet­ter adjust­ed cur­rent­ly than either mid­dle-aged or cur­rent col­lege-age youth com­par­i­son groups.” This left the researchers to con­tem­plate one pos­si­ble con­clu­sion: “par­tic­i­pa­tion in fringe style cul­tures may enhance iden­ti­ty devel­op­ment in trou­bled youth.” Not to men­tion that heavy met­al lyrics don’t eas­i­ly turn kids into dam­aged goods.

You can read the report, Three Decades Lat­er: The Life Expe­ri­ences and Mid-Life Func­tion­ing of 1980s Heavy Met­al Groupies here. And, right above, lis­ten to an inter­view with one of the researchers, Tasha Howe, a for­mer head­banger her­self, who spoke yes­ter­day with Michael Kras­ny on KQED radio in San Fran­cis­co.

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

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 Dev­il­ish His­to­ry of the 1980s Parental Advi­so­ry Stick­er: When Heavy Met­al & Satan­ic Lyrics Col­lid­ed with the Reli­gious Right

Sovi­et Union Cre­ates a List of 38 Dan­ger­ous Rock Bands: Kiss, Pink Floyd, Talk­ing Heads, Vil­lage Peo­ple & More (1985)

Watch Heavy Met­al Park­ing Lot, the Cult Clas­sic Film That Ranks as One of the “Great Rock Doc­u­men­taries” of All Time

A Blue­grass Ver­sion of Metallica’s Heavy Met­al Hit, “Enter Sand­man”

The Hu, a New Break­through Band from Mon­go­lia, Plays Heavy Met­al with Tra­di­tion­al Folk Instru­ments and Throat Singing

How Eyes Evolved: A Fascinating Tour Through the Animal Kingdom

in Biology | May 2nd, 2025

Above, Lars Schmitz, a pro­fes­sor at Clare­mont McKen­na Col­lege, guides us “through a giant tree of life map­ping the evo­lu­tion of eyes in the ani­mal king­dom: how they work, why they’ve tak­en the form they have, and the evo­lu­tion­ary advan­tages they’ve unlocked across species.” The video comes cour­tesy of Wired. It’s 36 min­utes and down­right fas­ci­nat­ing.

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 

Ani­mals Laugh Too: UCLA Study Finds Laugh­ter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows

16,000 Pages of Charles Darwin’s Writ­ing on Evo­lu­tion Now Dig­i­tized and Avail­able Online

Carl Sagan Explains Evo­lu­tion in an 8‑Minute Ani­ma­tion

Free Online Biol­o­gy Cours­es

What Is Kafkaesque?: The Philosophy of Franz Kafka

in Literature | April 10th, 2025

It’s dif­fi­cult to imag­ine that there was ever a time with­out the word “Kafkaesque.” Yet the term would have meant noth­ing at all to any­one alive at the same time as Franz Kaf­ka — includ­ing, in all prob­a­bil­i­ty, Kaf­ka him­self. Born in Prague in 1883, he grew up under a stern, demand­ing, and per­pet­u­al­ly dis­ap­point­ed father, then made his way through col­lege and entered the work­force. He end­ed up at the Work­ers’ Acci­dent Insur­ance Insti­tute, where he was “sub­ject to long hours, unpaid over­time, mas­sive amounts of paper­work, and absurd, com­plex, bureau­crat­ic sys­tems,” says the nar­ra­tor of the Pur­suit of Won­der video above. But it was dur­ing that same peri­od that he wrote The Tri­al, The Cas­tle, and Ameri­ka.

Of course, Kaf­ka did­n’t actu­al­ly pub­lish those even­tu­al­ly acclaimed books in his life­time. After his death, that task would fall to Max Brod, the writer’s only real friend, and it entailed vio­lat­ing the author’s explic­it­ly stat­ed wish­es. On his deathbed, Kaf­ka “instruct­ed Max Brod to burn all of his unpub­lished man­u­scripts”; instead, Brod “spent the fol­low­ing year or so work­ing to orga­nize and pub­lish his notes and man­u­scripts.” Now that he’s been gone more than a cen­tu­ry, Kafka’s rep­u­ta­tion as one of the great­est lit­er­ary fig­ures of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry is more than secure, and it would take a ded­i­cat­ed con­trar­i­an indeed to argue that Brod did wrong not to toss his papers onto the bon­fire.

Per­haps Kafka’s rep­u­ta­tion would have found a way to grow one way or anoth­er, respond as his writ­ing does to a psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­com­fort we’ve all felt to one degree or anoth­er, in one set­ting or anoth­er: doing our tax­es, wait­ing in air­port secu­ri­ty lines, call­ing tech sup­port. On such occa­sions, we reach for the term “Kafkaesque,” which “tends to refer to the bureau­crat­ic nature of cap­i­tal­is­tic, judi­cia­ry, and gov­ern­ment sys­tems, the sort of com­plex, unclear process­es in which no one indi­vid­ual ever has a com­pre­hen­sive grasp on what is going on, and the sys­tem does­n’t real­ly care.” Typ­i­cal Kaf­ka pro­tag­o­nists are “faced with sud­den, absurd cir­cum­stances. There are no expla­na­tions, and in the end, there is no real chance of over­com­ing them.”

These char­ac­ters are “out­matched by the arbi­trary, sense­less obsta­cles they face, in part because they can’t under­stand or con­trol any of what is hap­pen­ing.” They feel “the unyield­ing desire for answers in con­quest over the exis­ten­tial prob­lems of anx­i­ety, guilt, absur­di­ty, and suf­fer­ing, paired with an inabil­i­ty to ever real­ly under­stand or con­trol the source of the prob­lems and effec­tive­ly over­come them.” Yet “even in the face of absurd, despair­ing cir­cum­stances, Kafka’s char­ac­ters don’t give up. At least ini­tial­ly, they con­tin­ue on and fight against their sit­u­a­tions, try­ing to rea­son, under­stand, or work their way out of the sense­less­ness, but in the end, it is ulti­mate­ly to no avail.” To Kaf­ka, it was all part of anoth­er day in moder­ni­ty. Here in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, it seems we may need to start look­ing for an even more pow­er­ful adjec­tive.

Relat­ed con­tent:

What Does “Kafkaesque” Real­ly Mean? A Short Ani­mat­ed Video Explains

Franz Kafka’s Kafkaesque Love Let­ters

Under­ground Car­toon­ist Robert Crumb Cre­ates an Illus­trat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Franz Kafka’s Life and Work

Franz Kaf­ka Ago­nized, Too, Over Writer’s Block: “Tried to Write, Vir­tu­al­ly Use­less;” “Com­plete Stand­still. Unend­ing Tor­ments” (1915)

“Lynchi­an,” “Kubrick­ian,” “Taran­ti­noesque” and 100+ Film Words Have Been Added to the Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary

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.

How Dave Brubeck’s Time Out Changed Jazz

in Music | March 24th, 2025

Music video essay mae­stro Poly­phon­ic is back. What I dig about his videos is that he takes on some of the true warhors­es of mod­ern pop­u­lar music and man­ages to find some­thing new to say. Or at least he presents famil­iar sto­ries in a new and mod­ern way to an audi­ence who may be hear­ing ELO, Queen, or Neil Young for the first time.

His upload explores Dave Brubeck’s ground­break­ing jazz album Time Out. This is an album that reg­u­lar­ly tops best-of lists, gets reis­sued con­stant­ly, and is so ubiq­ui­tous in some cir­cles that it’s hard, like Led Zeppelin’s fourth album, to hear the album with fresh ears.

Poly­phon­ic touch­es on some­thing right at the begin­ning of the video that deserves a full video essay of its own–the State Department’s mis­sion to send Amer­i­can jazz musi­cians around the world as cul­tur­al ambas­sadors. This is a part of his­to­ry that has reced­ed from mem­o­ry, but had a major influ­ence not just on Brubeck, but so many records at that time. Brubeck joined Ben­ny Good­man, Louis Arm­strong, and Dizzy Gille­spie on a musi­cal tour that reached many coun­tries behind the Iron Cur­tain, and were able to cri­tique America’s racist his­to­ry while also pro­mot­ing its musi­cal cul­ture. (PBS made a fine doc­u­men­tary on the mis­sion in 2018.) But for the pur­pos­es of this video essay, and regard­ing Brubeck’s career, it was the polyrhythms and folk music that he heard while trav­el­ing through coun­tries like Turkey (from which he devel­oped “Blue Ron­do a la Turk”) that remained with him on his return.

Time Out was Brubeck’s four­teenth album for Colum­bia Records, but his break­through. Up to that point he and his quar­tet had released a num­ber of live albums record­ed at col­leges (which pro­mot­ed a safe but hip stu­dious kind of jazz) and sev­er­al albums of jazz cov­ers, such as Dave Digs Dis­ney. But Time Out was a ful­ly formed con­cept album of sorts: an explo­ration into time sig­na­tures that jazz hadn’t real­ly touched yet.

As Poly­phon­ic points out, Joe Morel­lo, Brubeck’s drum­mer, was indeed well versed in com­pli­cat­ed time sig­na­tures from his clas­si­cal back­ground as a vio­lin­ist. It was Morel­lo who exper­i­ment­ed with a groove in 5/4 time that became the back­bone of “Take Five.” Brubeck knew a good thing when he heard it and gives Morel­lo one of the best solos of the entire LP.

Best of all, Time Out is one those clas­sic albums because of how it mix­es the exper­i­men­tal with the com­mer­cial, a hard feat in any era, but even more impres­sive in that best of all jazz years, 1959. Brubeck con­tin­ued to explore time sig­na­tures on this album’s sequel Time Fur­ther Out, which is also rec­om­mend­ed.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2019.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pak­istani Musi­cians Play an Enchant­i­ng Ver­sion of Dave Brubeck’s Jazz Clas­sic, “Take Five”

Louis Arm­strong Plays His­toric Cold War Con­certs in East Berlin & Budapest (1965)

Dave Brubeck’s Sur­prise Duet: A Mag­i­cal Moment at the Moscow Con­ser­va­to­ry (1997)

Watch an Incred­i­ble Per­for­mance of “Take Five” by the Dave Brubeck Quar­tet (1964)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts.

Why “The Girl from Ipanema” Is a Richer & Weirder Song Than You Realized

in Music | March 10th, 2025

Say what you want about YouTube’s neg­a­tive effects (end­less soy faces, influ­encers, its devi­ous and fas­cist-lean­ing algo­rithms) but it has offered to cre­ators a space in which to indulge. And that’s one of the rea­sons I’ve been a fan of Adam Neely’s work. A jazz musi­cian and a for­mer stu­dent at both the Berklee Col­lege of Music and the Man­hat­tan School of Music, his YouTube chan­nel is a must for those with an inter­est in the how and why of music the­o­ry. If not for Neely’s tal­ent and YouTube’s plat­form we wouldn’t have the above: a 30 minute (!) explo­ration of the bossa nova stan­dard, “The Girl from Ipane­ma.” And it is worth every sin­gle minute. (Even the com­pos­er Anto­nio Car­los Jobim him­self could not have con­vinced tra­di­tion­al tele­vi­sion execs to give him that long an indul­gence.)

See­ing we haven’t fea­tured Neely on Open Cul­ture before, let this be a great intro­duc­tion, because this is one of his bet­ter videos. It also helps that the sub­ject mat­ter just hap­pens to be one of the most cov­ered stan­dards in pop his­to­ry.

Its lega­cy is one of lounge lizards and kitsch. Neely shows it being used as a punch­line in The Blues Broth­ers and as mood music in V for Vendet­ta. I remem­ber it being hummed by two pep­per­pots (Gra­ham Chap­man and John Cleese) in a Mon­ty Python skit. And Neely gives us the “tl;dw” (“too long, did­n’t watch”) sum­ma­ry up front: the song’s his­to­ry con­cerns blues music, Amer­i­can cul­tur­al hege­mo­ny, and the influ­ence of the Berklee College’s “The Real Book.” There’s also loads of music the­o­ry thrown in too, so it helps to know just a lit­tle going in.

Neely first peels back decades of ele­va­tor music cov­ers to get to the birth of the song, and its mul­ti­ple par­ents: the Afro-Brazil­ian music called Sam­ba, the hip night­clubs of Rio de Janeiro dur­ing the 1950s, the hit film Black Orpheus which brought both sam­ba and bossa nova (the “new wave”) to an inter­na­tion­al audi­ence, Jobim and oth­er musi­cians’ inter­est in Amer­i­can blues and jazz chords, and Amer­i­can inter­est from musi­cians like Stan Getz. All this is a back and forth cir­cuit of influ­ences that results in this song, which bor­rows its struc­ture from Tin Pan Alley com­posers like Cole Porter and Irv­ing Berlin, and inserts a sad, self-pity­ing B‑section after two A‑section lyrics about a young woman pass­ing by on a beach (lyrics by Vini­cius de Moraes, who also wrote the screen­play to Black Orpheus).

The key in which you play the song also reveals the cul­tur­al divide. Play it in F and you are tak­ing sides with the Amer­i­cans; play it in Db and you are keep­ing it real, Brazil­ian style. Neely breaks apart the melody and the chord sequences, point­ing out its rep­e­ti­tion (which makes it so catchy) but also its ambi­gu­i­ty, which explains end­less YouTube videos of musi­cians get­ting the chord sequence wrong. And, what exact­ly *is* the true chord sequence? And how is it a riff on, of all things, Duke Ellington’s “Take the A Train”? Neely also shows the pro­gres­sion of var­i­ous cov­ers of the song, and what’s been added and what’s been delet­ed. Leav­ing things out, as he illus­trates with a clip from Leonard Bernstein’s 1973 Har­vard lec­tures, is what gives art its mag­ic.

There’s so much more to this 30 minute clip, but you real­ly should watch the whole thing (and then hit sub­scribe to his chan­nel). This essay is exact­ly what YouTube does best, and Neely is the best of teach­ers, a smart, self-dep­re­cat­ing guy who mix­es intel­lect with humor. Plus, you’ll be hum­ming the song for the rest of the day, just a bit more aware of the rea­son behind the ear worm.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2020.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“The Girl from Ipane­ma” Turns 50; Hear Its Bossa Nova Sound Cov­ered by Sina­tra, Krall, Methe­ny & Oth­ers

Remem­ber­ing the “Father of Bossa Nova” João Gilber­to (RIP) with Four Clas­sic Live Per­for­mances: “The Girl From Ipane­ma,” “Cor­co­v­a­do” & More

Getz and Gilber­to Per­form ‘The Girl from Ipane­ma’ (and the Woman Who Inspired the Song)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

Historian Answers Burning Questions About The Renaissance

in Art, History | March 6th, 2025

Cour­tesy of Wired, his­to­ri­an Alexan­der Bevilac­qua (Williams Col­lege) answers the inter­net’s burn­ing ques­tions about the cul­tur­al rebirth that came to be known as The Renais­sance. In 30+ min­utes, Bevilac­qua cov­ers an array of ques­tions, includ­ing: When did The Renais­sance begin? What exact­ly was the Renais­sance? Why do paint­ings like the Mona Lisa and The Birth of Venus remain so famous cen­turies lat­er? What did peo­ple’s diets con­sist of dur­ing The Renais­sance? How was their hygiene? How did Brunelleschi build a dome in Flo­rence that defied grav­i­ty? What is inside Leonar­do da Vin­ci’s note­books? And the ques­tions go on…

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 

Michelangelo’s David: The Fas­ci­nat­ing Sto­ry Behind the Renais­sance Mar­ble Cre­ation

How the World’s Biggest Dome Was Built: The Sto­ry of Fil­ip­po Brunelleschi and the Duo­mo in Flo­rence

What Makes Leonardo’s Mona Lisa a Great Paint­ing?: An Expla­na­tion in 15 Min­utes

How to Build Leonar­do da Vinci’s Inge­nious Self-Sup­port­ing Bridge: Renais­sance Inno­va­tions You Can Still Enjoy Today

Renais­sance Knives Had Music Engraved on the Blades & Now You Can Hear the Songs Per­formed by Mod­ern Singers

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Note­books Get Dig­i­tized: Where to Read the Renais­sance Man’s Man­u­scripts Online

Machiavelli’s The Prince Explained in an Illus­trat­ed Film

The 48 Laws of Power Explained in 30 Minutes: “Never Outshine the Master,” “Re-Create Yourself,” and More

in Books, Politics | February 25th, 2025

Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Pow­er has been a pop­u­lar book since its first pub­li­ca­tion over a quar­ter-cen­tu­ry ago. Judg­ing by the dis­cus­sion that con­tin­ues among its fer­vent (and often pros­e­ly­tiz­ing) fans, it’s easy to for­get that its title isn’t How to Become Pow­er­ful. Grant­ed, it may some­times get filed in the self-help sec­tion, and cer­tain of the laws it con­tains — “Nev­er out­shine the mas­ter,” “Always say less than nec­es­sary,” “Enter action with bold­ness” — read like straight­for­ward rec­om­men­da­tions. Yet like Machi­avel­li, one of the book’s many his­tor­i­cal sources, it’s much more inter­est­ing to read as a study of pow­er itself.

In the video above from Greene’s offi­cial YouTube chan­nel, you can hear all 48 laws accom­pa­nied by brief expla­na­tions in less than 30 min­utes. Some of them may give you pause: are “Get oth­ers to do the work for you, but always take the cred­it,” “Pose as a friend, work as a spy,” and “Crush your ene­my total­ly” real­ly meant to be tak­en straight­for­ward­ly?

Per­haps they both are and aren’t. Descrip­tive of the ways in which indi­vid­u­als have accrued pow­er over the course of human his­to­ry (images of whom pro­vide visu­al accom­pa­ni­ment), they can also be metaphor­i­cal­ly trans­posed into a vari­ety of per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al sit­u­a­tions with­out turn­ing you into some kind of evil mas­ter­mind.

When The 48 Laws of Pow­er came out in 1999, we did­n’t live on the inter­net in the way we do now. Re-read today, its laws apply with an uncan­ny apt­ness to a social-medi­at­ed world in which we’ve all become pub­lic per­son­al­i­ties online. We may not always say less than nec­es­sary, but we do know how impor­tant it can be to “court atten­tion at all costs.” Some of us “cul­ti­vate an air of unpre­dictabil­i­ty”; oth­ers “play to peo­ple’s fan­tasies,” in some cas­es going as far as to “cre­ate a cult-like fol­low­ing.” The most adept put in work to “cre­ate com­pelling spec­ta­cles” in accor­dance with “the art of tim­ing,” tak­ing care to “nev­er appear too per­fect.” Though Machi­avel­li him­self would under­stand prac­ti­cal­ly noth­ing about our tech­nol­o­gy, he would sure­ly under­stand our world.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Machiavelli’s The Prince Explained in an Illus­trat­ed Film

What Does “Machi­avel­lian” Real­ly Mean?: An Ani­mat­ed Les­son

How Machi­avel­li Real­ly Thought We Should Use Pow­er: Two Ani­mat­ed Videos Pro­vide an Intro­duc­tion

Salman Rushdie: Machiavelli’s Bad Rap

Allan Bloom’s Lec­tures on Machi­avel­li (Boston Col­lege, 1983)

The Nature of Human Stu­pid­i­ty Explained by The 48 Laws of Pow­er Author Robert Greene

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.

Flannery O’Connor: Friends Don’t Let Friends Read Ayn Rand

in Literature | February 14th, 2025

In a let­ter dat­ed May 31, 1960, Flan­nery O’Con­nor, the author best known for her clas­sic sto­ry, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (lis­ten to her read the sto­ry here) penned a let­ter to her friend, the play­wright Mary­at Lee. It begins rather abrupt­ly, like­ly because it’s respond­ing to some­thing Mary­at said in a pre­vi­ous let­ter:

I hope you don’t have friends who rec­om­mend Ayn Rand to you. The fic­tion of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fic­tion. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the sub­way and threw it in the near­est garbage pail. She makes Mick­ey Spillane look like Dos­to­evsky.

The let­ter, which you can read online or find in the book The Habit of Being, then turns to oth­er mat­ters.

O’Con­nor’s crit­i­cal appraisal of Ayn Rand’s books is pret­ty straight­for­ward. But here’s one fac­toid worth know­ing. Mick­ey Spillane (ref­er­enced in O’Con­nor’s let­ter) was a huge­ly pop­u­lar mys­tery writer, who sold some 225 mil­lion books dur­ing his life­time. Accord­ing to his Wash­ing­ton Post obit, “his spe­cial­ty was tight-fist­ed, sadis­tic revenge sto­ries, often fea­tur­ing his alco­holic gumshoe Mike Ham­mer and a cast of evil­do­ers.” Crit­ics, appalled by the sex and vio­lence in his books, dis­missed his writ­ing. But Ayn Rand defend­ed him. In pub­lic, she said that Spillane was under­rat­ed. In her book The Roman­tic Man­i­festo, Rand put Spillane in some unex­pect­ed com­pa­ny when she wrote: “[Vic­tor] Hugo gives me the feel­ing of enter­ing a cathedral–Dostoevsky gives me the feel­ing of enter­ing a cham­ber of hor­rors, but with a pow­er­ful guide–Spillane gives me the feel­ing of lis­ten­ing to a mil­i­tary band in a pub­lic park–Tolstoy gives me the feel­ing of an unsan­i­tary back­yard which I do not care to enter.”

All of this goes to show that _____. We’ll let you fill in the blank.

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:

Why Should We Read Flan­nery O’Connor? An Ani­mat­ed Video Makes the Case

When Ayn Rand Col­lect­ed Social Secu­ri­ty & Medicare, After Years of Oppos­ing Ben­e­fit Pro­grams

Christo­pher Hitchens Dis­miss­es the Cult of Ayn Rand: There’s No “Need to Have Essays Advo­cat­ing Self­ish­ness Among Human Beings; It Requires No Rein­force­ment”

Ayn Rand Helped the FBI Iden­ti­fy It’s A Won­der­ful Life as Com­mu­nist Pro­pa­gan­da

Hear Flan­nery O’Connor Read “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (1959)

Ayn Rand Issues 13 Com­mand­ments to Film­mak­ers for Mak­ing Good Cap­i­tal­ist Movies (1947)

Flan­nery O’Connor’s Satir­i­cal Car­toons: 1942–1945

Édouard Manet Illustrates Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, in a French Edition Translated by Stephane Mallarmé (1875)

in Art, Literature | December 4th, 2024

Edgar Allan Poe achieved almost instant fame dur­ing his life­time after the pub­li­ca­tion of The Raven (1845), but he nev­er felt that he received the recog­ni­tion he deserved. In some respects, he was right. He was, after all, paid only nine dol­lars for the poem, and he strug­gled before and after its pub­li­ca­tion to make a liv­ing from his writ­ing.

Poe was one of the first Amer­i­can writ­ers to do so with­out inde­pen­dent means. His work large­ly met with mixed reviews and he was fired from job after job, part­ly because of his drink­ing. After his death, how­ev­er, Poe’s influ­ence dom­i­nat­ed emerg­ing mod­ernist move­ments like that of the deca­dent poet­ry of Charles Baude­laire (who called Poe his “twin soul”) and his sym­bol­ist dis­ci­ple Stéphane Mal­lar­mé.

Mal­lar­mé would write of Poe, “His cen­tu­ry appalled at nev­er hav­ing heard / That in this voice tri­umphant death had sung its hymn.” To bring that hymn of death, the raven’s cry of “Nev­er­more,” to French read­ers, he made a trans­la­tion of The Raven, Le Cor­beau, in 1875 at age 33.

Poe also had a tremen­dous influ­ence on the visu­al arts in France. Illus­trat­ing the text was none oth­er than Édouard Manet, the painter cred­it­ed with the gen­e­sis of impres­sion­ism. The result­ing engrav­ings, ren­dered in dark, heavy smudges, give us the poem’s unnamed, bereaved speak­er as the young Mal­lar­mé, unmis­tak­able with his push­b­room mus­tache.

Sad­ly, the New York Pub­lic Library tells us, “the pub­li­ca­tion was not a com­mer­cial suc­cess.” (See Manet’s design for a poster and the book cov­er at the top of the post.)

The book also illus­trates the rec­i­p­ro­cal rela­tion­ship between Poe and French art and lit­er­a­ture. Chris Semt­ner, cura­tor of a Rich­mond, Vir­ginia exhib­it on this mutu­al influ­ence, remarks that Poe “read Voltaire among oth­er French authors”—such as Alexan­dre Dumas—“in col­lege” and found them high­ly influ­en­tial. Like­wise, Poe left his mark not only on Baude­laire, Mal­lar­mé, and Manet, but also Paul Gau­guin, Odilon Redon, and Hen­ri Matisse.

You can read Le Cor­beau here in a dual lan­guage edi­tion, with all the orig­i­nal illus­tra­tions. View and down­load high-res scans of the engrav­ings here. And just above, lis­ten to The Raven read aloud in Mallarmé’s French, cour­tesy of the Inter­net Archive.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Gus­tave Doré’s Splen­did Illus­tra­tions of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” (1884)

Aubrey Beardsley’s Macabre Illus­tra­tions of Edgar Allan Poe’s Short Sto­ries (1894)

Har­ry Clarke’s Hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry Illus­tra­tions for Edgar Allan Poe’s Sto­ries (1923)

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