How to Make Sure You Get Open Culture in Your Facebook Newsfeed: Now You Can Take Control
For the longest time, Facebook gave you no ability to control what content you see in your Facebook newsfeed. Some 378,000 people have “liked” our Facebook page. But only a fraction actually see Open Culture posts in their newsfeed. That’s because a Facebook algorithm started making the decisions for you, showing you material from some people/publishers, and not others.
Now, Facebook has finally introduced a new feature that will let you control what you see. Please check out the instructions below. When you’re done reading them, consider giving us a Like on Facebook, and then set your newsfeed accordingly. (You get bonus points if you Follow us on Twitter too!)
- If you’re using a mobile phone, open the Facebook app, click the “More” icon along the bottom of the app, then scroll down and click “Newsfeed preferences,” then click “Prioritize who to see first,” and make your picks. (You can select more than one item.)
- If you’re using Facebook on a computer, click on the downward facing arrow on the top nav bar, then click “Newsfeed preferences,” locate one of the people or publishers you follow, and change the setting from “Following” to “See First.”
Hope all of that makes sense.
Read More...Open Culture Goes Mobile: Your Feedback Requested
A quick note for our readers: This week, we soft launched a new mobile web site for Open Culture – one designed to give our readers the ability to access Open Culture content with far greater ease on their smartphones. If you have an iPhone, iPod Touch, Android phone (or any phone with an advanced web browser), you should be able to read our posts, watch videos, and listen to audio much more cleanly, no matter where you are. Simply pick up your phone, visit any page on openculture.com, and you will see what I mean.
This mobile site is still in “beta.” So if you experience any problems, or have any feedback, please send it our way. We want your input. And, if you don’t prefer the mobile site, you can always turn it off. Just scroll to the bottom of the mobile page and click “Switch to Standard View.”
Finally, as you can imagine, this project required some time and expense. If you can comfortably afford it, please consider making a donation via PayPal to support this initiative and others like it. And if you can’t swing it, that’s a‑okay. Maybe just tell a friend about the site (or about our Free iPhone app) and otherwise enjoy the ride.
Thanks for any feedback you might have, and hope you enjoy the mobile version of Open Culture.
Read More...The New Design and Your Feedback
As you probably know, Open Culture launched a new look last week, and it seemed worth devoting a few words to it. With the new design, I was hoping to give the site a more inviting look and streamline the overall navigation. I was also hoping to make it clear that user contributions are always welcome. If you have tips on good media, send them our way. And if you ever want to write a guest blog post, please feel free to let me know what you have in mind. The more individual readers contribute, the more our community of readers benefits.
I definitely want to send a word of thanks to the folks at Rolling Orange, who handled all of the design and implementation. An excellent group to work with. Also, I want to thank Eric Oberle who has been very generous with his tech support since the beginning.
Lastly, this is a great time to ask you what you would like to see from Open Culture in the future. What should the site do more of? What should it do less of? What good things haven’t we thought about? Your input would be really appreciated. Feel free to send thoughts from the contact page, or add any thoughts in the comments section below. Thanks in advance to all…
Read More...Open Culture Podcast Directories Viewable in Feed Readers
The only downside to using a feed reader (Bloglines, Google Reader, MyYahoo, etc.) to access Open Culture
is that you won’t be able to see our podcast directories which reside
in our left nav bar. To assist you, we have pasted links below that
will give you direct access to the podcast collections. We’ll post this reminder from time to time.
- Arts & Culture Podcasts
- Audio Book Podcasts
- Foreign Language Lesson Podcasts
- News & Information Podcasts
- Technology Podcasts
- University Podcasts- All
- University Podcasts — Business School
If you like what we’re doing here, please email your friends and let them know about Open Culture.
If you need a new/bigger iPod or iPod Gear to listen to our podcasts, visit our new Amazon store.
Read More...Open Culture Podcast Directories Viewable in Feed Readers
The only downside to using a feed reader (Bloglines, Google Reader, MyYahoo, etc.) to access Open Culture is that you won’t be able to see our podcast directories which reside in our left nav bar. To assist you, we have pasted links below that will give you direct access to the podcast collections. Bookmark & enjoy.
- Arts & Culture Podcasts
- Audio Book Podcasts
- Foreign Language Lesson Podcasts
- News & Information Podcasts
- Technology Podcasts
- University Podcasts
Hear Seven Hours of Women Making Electronic Music (1938–2014)
Image via Wikimedia Commons
A number of years ago, in a post on the pioneering composer of the original Doctor Who theme, we wrote that “the early era of experimental electronic music belonged to Delia Derbyshire.” Derbyshire—who almost gave Paul McCartney a version of “Yesterday” with an electronic backing in place of strings—helped invent the early electronic music of the sixties through her work with the Radiophonic Workshop, the sound effects laboratory of the BBC. She went on to form one of the most influential, if largely obscure, electronic acts of the decade, White Noise. And yet, calling the early eras of electronic music hers is an exaggeration. Of course her many collaborators deserve mention, as well as musicians like Bruce Haack, Pierre Henry, Kraftwerk, Brian Eno, and so many others. But what gets almost completely left out of many histories of electronic music, as with so many other histories, is the prominent role so many women besides Derbyshire played in the development of the sounds we now hear around us all the time.
In recognition of this fact, musician, DJ, and “escaped housewife/schoolteacher” Barbara Golden devoted two episodes of her KPFA radio program “Crack o’ Dawn” to women in electronic music, once in 2010 and again in 2013. She shares each broadcast with co-host Jon Leidecker (“Wobbly”), and in each segment, the two banter in casual radio show style, offering history and context for each musician and composer. Highlighted on Ubu’s former Twitter stream, the first show, “Women in Electronic Music 1938–1982 Part 1” (above) gives Derbyshire her due, with three tracks from her, including the Doctor Who theme.
It also includes music from twenty one other composers, beginning with Clara Rockmore, a refiner and popularizer of the theremin, that weird instrument designed to simulate a high, tremulous human voice. Also featured is Wendy Carlos’s “Timesteps,” an original piece from her A Clockwork Orange score.
The second show, above, fills in several gaps in the original broadcast and “could easily be six hours” says co-host Leidecker, given the sheer amount of electronic music out there composed and recorded by women over the past seventy years. This show includes one of our host Golden’s own compositions, “Melody Sumner Carnahan,” as well as music from Laurie Anderson and musique concrete composer Doris Hays. These two broadcasts alone cover an enormous range of stylistic and technological ground, but for even more discographical history of women in electronic music, see the playlist below, compiled by “Nerdgirl” Antye Greie-Ripatti. Commissioned by Club Transmediale Berlin, the mix includes such well-known names as Yoko Ono, Bjork, and M.I.A., as well as foremothers Derbyshire and Carlos, and dozens more.
In lieu of the radio-show chatter of Golden and Leidecker, we have Greie-Ripatti’s post detailing each artist’s time period, country of origin, and contributions to electronic music history. Many of the composers represented here worked for major radio and film studios, scored feature films (like 1956’s Forbidden Planet), invented and innovated new instruments and techniques, wrote for orchestras, and passed on their knowledge as educators and producers. Greie-Ripatti’s page quotes a Danish electronic producer and performer saying “there is a lot of women in electronic music… invisible women.” Thanks to efforts like hers and Golden’s, these pioneering creators need no longer go unseen or, more importantly, unheard.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.
Related Content:
Watch Composer Wendy Carlos Demo an Original Moog Synthesizer (1989)
Thomas Dolby Explains How a Synthesizer Works on a Jim Henson Kids Show (1989)
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.
Read More...The Futurist Cookbook (1930) Tried to Turn Italian Cuisine into Modern Art
With the savage cuts in arts funding, perhaps we’ll return to a system of noblesse oblige familiar to students of The Gilded Age, when artists needed independent wealth or patronage, and wealthy industrialists often decided what was art, and what wasn’t. Unlike fine art, however, haute cuisine has always relied on the patronage of wealthy donors—or diners. It can be marketed in premade pieces, sold in cookbooks, and made to look easy on TV, but for reasons both cultural and practical, given the nature of food, an exquisitely-prepared dish can only be made accessible to a select few.
Still, we would be mistaken, suggested Futurist poet and theorist F.T. Marinetti (1876–1944), should we neglect to see cooking as an art form akin to all the others in its moral and intellectual influence on us. While hardly the first or the last artist to publish a cookbook, Marinetti’s Futurist Cookbook seems at first glance deadly, even aggressively, serious, lacking the whimsy, impractical weirdness, and surrealist art of Salvador Dali’s Les Diners de Gala, for example, or the eclectic wistfulness of the MoMA’s Artist’s Cookbook.
Just as he had sought with his earlier Futurist Manifesto to revolutionize art, Marinetti intended his cookbook to foment a “revolution of cuisine,” as Alex Revelli Sorini and Susanna Cutini point out. You might even call it an act of war when it came to certain staples of Italian eating, like pasta, which he thought responsible for “sluggishness, pessimism, nostalgic inactivity, and neutralism” (anticipating scads of low and no-carb diets to come).
Believing that people “think, dream and act according to what they eat and drink,” Marinetti formulated strict rules not only for the preparation of food, but also the serving and eating of it, going so far as to call for abolishing the knife and fork. A short excerpt from his introduction shows him applying to food the techno-romanticism of his Futurist theory—an ethos taken up by Benito Mussolini, whom Marinetti supported:
The Futurist culinary revolution … has the lofty, noble and universally expedient aim of changing radically the eating habits of our race, strengthening it, dynamizing it and spiritualizing it with brand-new food combinations in which experiment, intelligence and imagination will economically take the place of quantity, banality, repetition and expense.
In hindsight, the fascist overtones in Marinetti’s language seem glaring. In 1932, when the Futurist Cookbook was published, his Futurism seemed like a much-needed “jolt to all the practical and intellectual activities,” note Sorini and Cutini. “The subject [of cooking] needed a good shake to reawaken its spirit.” And that’s just what it got. The Futurist Cookbook acted as “a preview of Italian-style Nouvelle Cuisine,” with such innovations as “additives and preservatives added to food, or using technological tools in the kitchen to mince, pulverize, and emulsify.”
Yet, for all the high seriousness with which Marinetti seems to treat his subject, “what the media missed” at the time, writes Maria Popova, “was that the cookbook was arguably the greatest artistic prank of the twentieth century.” In an introduction to the 1989 edition, British journalist and historian Lesley Chamberlain called the Futurist Cookbook “a serious joke, revolutionary in the first instance because it overturned with ribald laughter everything ‘food’ and ‘cookbooks’ held sacred.” Marinetti first swept away tradition in favor of creative dining events the Futurists called “aerobanquets,” such as one in Bologna in 1931 with a table shaped like an airplane and dishes called “spicy airport” (Olivier salad) and “rising thunder” (orange risotto). Lambrusco wine was served in gas cans.
It’s performance art worthy of Dali’s bizarre costumed dinner parties, but fueled by a genuine desire to revolutionize food, if not the actual eating of it, by “bringing together elements separated by biases that have no true foundation.” So remarked French chef Jules Maincave, a 1914 convert to Futurism and inspiration for what Marinetti calls “flexible flavorful combinations.” See several such recipes excerpted from the Futurist Cookbook at Brain Pickings, read the full book in Italian here, and, just below, see Marinetti’s rules for the perfect meal, first published in 1930 as the “Manifesto of Futurist Cuisine.”
Futurist cuisine and rules for the perfect lunch
1. An original harmony of the table (crystal ware, crockery and glassware, decoration) with the flavors and colors of the dishes.
2. Utter originality in the dishes.
3. The invention of flexible flavorful combinations (edible plastic complex), whose original harmony of form and color feeds the eyes and awakens the imagination before tempting the lips.
4. The abolition of knife and fork in favor of flexible combinations that can deliver prelabial tactile enjoyment.
5. The use of the art of perfumery to enhance taste. Each dish must be preceded by a perfume that will be removed from the table using fans.
6. A limited use of music in the intervals between one dish and the next, so as not to distract the sensitivity of the tongue and the palate and serves to eliminate the flavor enjoyed, restoring a clean slate for tasting.
7. Abolition of oratory and politics at the table.
8. Measured use of poetry and music as unexpected ingredients to awaken the flavors of a given dish with their sensual intensity.
9. Rapid presentation between one dish and the next, before the nostrils and the eyes of the dinner guests, of the few dishes that they will eat, and others that they will not, to facilitate curiosity, surprise, and imagination.
10. The creation of simultaneous and changing morsels that contain ten, twenty flavors to be tasted in a few moments. These morsels will also serve the analog function […] of summarizing an entire area of life, the course of a love affair, or an entire voyage to the Far East.
11. A supply of scientific tools in the kitchen: ozone machines that will impart the scent of ozone to liquids and dishes; lamps to emit ultraviolet rays; electrolyzers to decompose extracted juices etc. in order to use a known product to achieve a new product with new properties; colloidal mills that can be used to pulverize flours, dried fruit and nuts, spices, etc.; distilling devices using ordinary pressure or a vacuum, centrifuge autoclaves, dialysis machines.
The use of this equipment must be scientific, avoiding the error of allowing dishes to cook in steam pressure cookers, which leads to the destruction of active substances (vitamins, etc.) due to the high temperatures. Chemical indicators will check if the sauce is acidic or basic and will serve to correct any errors that may occur: lack of salt, too much vinegar, too much pepper, too sweet.”
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.
Related Content
When Italian Futurists Declared War on Pasta (1930)
Salvador Dalí’s 1973 Cookbook Gets Reissued: Surrealist Art Meets Haute Cuisine
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.
Read More...RIP Gladys Mae West, the Pioneering Black Mathematician Who Helped Lay the Foundation for GPS
Gladys Mae West was born in rural Virginia in 1930, grew up working on a tobacco farm, and died earlier this month a celebrated mathematician whose work made possible the GPS technology most of us use each and every day. Hers was a distinctively American life, in more ways than one. Seeking an escape from the agricultural labor she’d already gotten to know all too well, she won a scholarship to Virginia State College by becoming her high school class valedictorian; after earning her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mathematics, she taught for a time and then applied for a job at the naval base up in Dahlgren. She first distinguished herself there by verifying the accuracy of bombing tables with a hand calculator, and from there moved on up to the computer programming team.
This was the early nineteen-sixties, when programming a computer meant not coding, but laboriously feeding punch cards into an enormous mainframe. West and her colleagues used IBM’s first transistorized machine, the 7030 (or “Stretch”), which was for a few years the fastest computer in the world.
It cost an equivalent of $81,860,000 in today’s dollars, but no other computer had the power to handle the project of calculating the precise shape of Earth as affected by gravity and the nature of the oceans. About a decade later, another team of government scientists made use of those very same calculations when putting together the model employed by the World Geodetic System, which GPS satellites still use today. Hence the tendency of celebratory obituaries to underscore the point that without West’s work, GPS wouldn’t be possible.
Nor do any of them neglect to point out the fact that West was black, one of just four such mathematicians working for the Navy at Dahlgren. Stories like hers have drawn much greater public interest since the success of Hidden Figures, the Hollywood adaptation of Margot Lee Shetterly’s book about the black female mathematicians at NASA during the Space Race. When that movie came out, in 2016, even West’s own children didn’t know the importance of the once-classified work she’d done. Only in 2018, when she provided that information on a biographical form she filled out for an event hosted by her college sorority, did it become public. She thus spent the last years of her long life as a celebrity, sought out by academics and journalists eager to understand the contributions of another no-longer-hidden figure. But to their questions about her own GPS use, she reportedly answered that she preferred a good old-fashioned paper map.
Related content:
Black History in Two Minutes: Watch 93 Videos Written & Narrated by Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Support Us
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Receive our Daily Email
About Us
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
Advertise With Us
FREE UPDATES!
GET OUR DAILY EMAIL
Get the best cultural and educational resources on the web curated for you in a daily email. We never spam. Unsubscribe at any time.
FOLLOW ON SOCIAL MEDIA
Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
Advertise With Us
