The Rolling Stones “Shattered” Covered by Eddie Vedder & Julie Andrews (Ok, It’s Really Jeanne Tripplehorn)
Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder and actress Jeanne Tripplehorn (Basic Instinct, The Firm, Big Love) performed this delightful cover of The Rolling Stones’ 1978 hit “Shattered” at a recent fundraiser for a non-profit called Heal EB. EB stands for Epidermolysis Bullosa, a disease that causes blisters (sometimes potentially fatal ones) to erupt on the skin after the mildest trauma. You can listen to The Rolling Stones’ original recording here, and follow along with the lyrics here. Or, better yet, you can close your eyes and simply imagine Julie Andrews singing these risqué lines. Yeah, on second thought, do that. H/T Marc
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Read More...Download 100 Free Philosophy Courses and Start Living the Examined Life
The Philosophy section of our big Free Online Courses collection just went through another update, and it now features 100 courses. Enough to give you a soup-to-nuts introduction to a timeless discipline. You can start with one of several introductory courses.
- Philosophy for Beginners – iTunes – Web Video – Marianne Talbot, Oxford
- Critical Reasoning for Beginners - iTunes Video – iTunes Audio – Web Video – Oxford
- A Romp through Ethics for Complete Beginners — iTunes Video – Web Video – Oxford
- Introduction to Political Philosophy – YouTube – iTunes – Web Video — Steven B. Smith, Yale
- The Art of Living — Web Video – Stanford
- The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps - Multiple Formats– Peter Adamson, King’s College London
Then, once you’ve found your footing, you can head off in some amazing directions. As we mentioned many moons ago, you can access courses and lectures by modern day legends – Michel Foucault, Bertrand Russell, John Searle, Walter Kaufmann, Leo Strauss, Hubert Dreyfus and Michael Sandel. Then you can sit back and let them introduce you to the thinking of Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Hobbes, Hegel, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Kant, Nietzsche, Sartre and the rest of the gang. The courses listed here are generally available via YouTube, iTunes, or the web.
Explore our collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities, to find topics in many other disciplines — History, Literature, Physics, Computer Science and beyond. As we like to say, it’s the most valuable single page on the web.
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Michel Foucault: Free Lectures on Truth, Discourse & The Self
Take First-Class Philosophy Lectures Anywhere with Free Oxford Podcasts
Walter Kaufmann’s Lectures on Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Sartre (1960)
Leo Strauss: 15 Political Philosophy Courses Online
Read More...Teacher Helps His Student Overcome Stuttering and Read Poetry, Using the Sound of Music
Musharaf Asghar, a student at Thornhill Academy in northeast England, overcame an acute stammer when his teacher, Matthew Burton, borrowed an idea from The King’s Speech. The teacher asked his student to put on some headphones playing the music of Ben Howard, and to start reciting a poem called ‘The Moment.’ Suddenly, for the first time, the words began to flow. All of this was captured in a documentary series, Educating Yorkshire, that aired on the BBC. The segment above concludes with Mushy, as he’s known, giving a short talk in front of his class, at what looks like a graduation ceremony. It didn’t take long for his fellow students to break down in tears.
Writing recently in The Guardian, the student recalls. “My nerves over speaking in assembly were TERRIBLE though. I didn’t realise how big 200 people looks like. I was sweating and I had a little wobble but eventually, I managed to get through it. I was excited, if nervous, about the whole thing going out. But I’m really happy and proud to be on telly as I hope it gives other people with a stammer the confidence to have a go at public speaking. My speech is getting better every week. Everyone at college gives me time, but I’m getting quicker anyway so they don’t miss their bus while they are listening to me. I still won’t be applying for any call-centre jobs yet though.” Find more information on how music therapy can help people overcome stuttering here.
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via @courosa
Read More...French Café Adds Extra Charge for Rude Customers
A couple of days ago, we highlighted a delightfully Illustrated Etiquette Guide Explaining How to Ride the Paris Metro in a Civilized Way. It comes to you courtesy of the RATP, the government organization that makes the subways and trains run in Paris (sometimes on time).
Let’s now head 600 miles south, to the Riviera city of Nice, where some café owners opted for another way to keep bad behavior in check. At the Petite Syrah, they’ve implemented a simple pricing scheme that works like this:
If you ask for “a coffee” (it’s most likely an espresso), it will run you 7 euros, or $9.50.
If you ask for a “coffee please,” the charge drops to €4.25/$5.80.
But if you start your order by saying “Hello, may I have a coffee, please,” the bill becomes a manageable €1.40.
Now, truth be told, the pricing scheme is more carrot than stick. The café’s manager readily admits that he has never actually charged any of the punitive higher prices. But that’s not to say that the scheme doesn’t work. According to manager/owner Fabrice Pepino, regular customers quickly took note of the sign and began to “say, ‘Hello, your highness, will you serve me one of your beautiful coffees.” Eh voilà, no more coffee jerks.
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Read More...New Art Edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses Features All 265,000 Words Written by Hand on Big Wooden Poles
This week, Stephen Gertz, the editor of Book Tryst, has on display an Incredible Art Edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Here’s how he describes the ambitious project:
James Joyce completed his novel, Ulysses, on October 30, 1921. Ninety years later, on October 30, 2011, Charlene Matthews, the Los Angeles-based book artist and bookbinder recently the subject of a profile in Studios magazine, began work on an extraordinary edition of the book, based upon Sylvia Beach’s true first edition with all its typos included.
Two years later, on October 30, 2013, she completed it: the entire text of Ulysses — all of its approximately 265,000 words in eighteen episodes — transcribed by hand onto thirty-eight seven-foot tall, two-inch diameter poles: Ulysses as a landscape to physically move through; the novel as literary grove, Ulysses as trees of of life with language as fragrant, hallucinatory bark, and trunks reaching toward the sky.
Head over to Booktryst to look over a gallery of images and learn more about Matthews’ grand undertaking. And if you’d like a nice introduction to Ulysses, please see some of the instructive material we’ve listed below.
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James Joyce’s Ulysses: Download the Free Audio Book
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Vladimir Nabokov Creates a Hand-Drawn Map of James Joyce’s Ulysses
Read More...Watch Kids’ Priceless Reactions to Hearing the Timeless Music of The Beatles
Yesterday, John McMillian, assistant professor of history at Georgia State University, appeared on KQED’s Forum in San Francisco (listen here) to talk about his new book Beatles vs. Stones. It offers a new look at how the two British bands co-existed, often helped one another, and strategically defined themselves against each other. The Beatles were everyman’s band. Wholesome, clean-cut, witty, the Fab Four appealed to the young and the old, the rich and the poor. The Stones, trying to make a name for themselves in the wake of Beatlemania, positioned themselves as the anti-Beatles. As the journalist Tom Wolfe once wrote, “The Beatles want to hold your hand, but the Stones want to burn down your town.”
50 years later, The Beatles still have a nearly universal appeal. The Boomers and their now middle-aged children haven’t let dust gather on The Beatles’ discography. And, if you plunk the grandchildren in front of old Beatles’ videos, they’ll love what they see. Just watch above.
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Read More...How to Follow Open Culture Posts: Daily Email & RSS Are Gold, Twitter Is an Option, Forget About Facebook
Readers often ask us, “What’s the best way to make sure that I don’t miss any of your posts?” The answer, right now, is pretty clear: Sign up for our daily email. Each day, you will receive an email that tidily wraps up everything we’ve featured on the site over a 24 hour period. Faithfully it will appear in your inbox each day. The other great option is our trusty RSS feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/OpenCulture
You can always follow us on Twitter (or Google Plus), where we highlight our daily posts, plus many other cultural curiosities found on the web. The only downside is that a river of material flows through Twitter, so you’ll have to keep a pretty close eye on things to spot our posts.
Finally there’s Facebook, but you can almost forget about that. Although nearly a quarter million people have liked our Facebook page, Facebook has historically shown our posts to a fraction of that audience (something they’re candid about). And because of a new algorithm change, the fraction is getting substantially smaller. The unfortunate bottom line is that you can’t rely on Facebook to give you what you want. But you can rely on our daily email and our feed. They’re 100% guaranteed. Now back to our regularly scheduled program.
Read More...Google’s Moving Ad About 1947 Partition of India & Pakistan Tops 10 Million Views
Recently, Wired writer Steve Silberman (aka @stevesilberman) shot us a note on Twitter, saying, “@openculture, do not miss this brilliant ad. Most touching movie (in 3 mins!) I’ve seen in years.” Released on November 13th, the video has already clocked over 10 million views. But chances are you haven’t seen it. And that’s because it’s targeted to the web-enabled middle class of India and Pakistan. As The Dawn, Pakistan’s oldest English newspaper, describes it, the Google-created ad entitled “Reunion” “portrays two childhood friends, now elderly men, who haven’t seen each other since they were separated by the 1947 partition that created India and Pakistan from the old British empire in South Asia. Partition sparked a mass exodus as millions of Muslims and Hindus fled across the new borders amid religious violence.” Now Google search products are helping to bring old friends and neighbors back together.
Cynics may be quick to judge this a saccharine, manipulative ad. But others are seeing in it something else — a sign that “personal connections between Indians and Pakistanis run deep.” Even if their governments gain something from keeping the conflict alive, everyday people in India and Pakistan are increasingly ready to put history aside.
Note: If you click CC at the bottom of the video, you can use captions to translate the film into nine languages, including French, Malayalam and Urdu. It is preset to English.
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Read More...Turn Your Bike into an Electric Hybrid with MIT’s “Copenhagen Wheel”
Bonaverde’s “Roast-Grind-Brew Coffee Machine” seemed like one of the cooler inventions I’ve recently stumbled upon. But then I came across this: The Copenhagen Wheel. Originally created by researchers at MIT, the Copenhagen Wheel “transforms ordinary bicycles quickly into hybrid e‑bikes.” It allows bike riders to “capture the energy dissipated while cycling and braking and save it for when you need a bit of a boost” — like climbing a hill in San Francisco. The wheel also feeds data to your iPhone, allowing you to monitor pollution levels, traffic congestion, and road conditions in real-time. After spending several years in development, the wheel can now be pre-ordered online and it will ship next spring. It retails for $699.
Get more background information on The Copenhagen Wheel via this MIT web site.
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Read More...
Two Viral Videos Push Against Stereotypical Messages Girls Get From the Media (Mildly NSFW)
The first of two videos circulating on the internet, “Girls Who Read” by UK poet and “Rogue Teacher” Mark Grist (above) hits back at the lad culture that objectifies women according to certain “bits” named above in some mildly NSFW language. In his video performance piece above, Grist, asked which bits he prefers by a lad in a pub, and faced with a looming cadre of both male and female peers putting on the pressure, answers haltingly, “I like a girl… who … reads.” Then, his confidence up, he elaborates:
I like a girl who reads,
Who needs the written word
And who uses the added vocabulary
She gleans from novels and poetry
To hold lively conversation
In a range of social situations
The ideal girl close to Grist’s heart “ties back her hair as she’s reading Jane Eyre” and “feeds her addiction for fiction with unusual poems and plays.” In his infectious slam cadences, Grist’s impassioned paean to female readers offers a charming alternative to the ladmag gaze, though one might argue that he still does a little bit of projecting his fantasies onto an unsuspecting lone female at the bar (who turns out to be not so alone). Maybe “Girl Who Reads” is a trope, like “Manic Pixie Dream Girl,” an idealization that says more about Grist’s desires than about any particular, actual girl, but it’s still a refreshing challenge to the leering of his pubmates, one that communicates to girls that there are men out there, even in the pubs, who value women for their minds.
The video above, for a new line of toys called GoldiBlox, designed by Stanford-educated engineer Debbie Sterling, upends another adolescent male cultural touchstone—this time a by-now classic American one—the Beastie Boys gleefully misogynistic anthem “Girls.” While the original still likely scores many a frat party, it now must compete with the rewrite performed by “Raven.” The re-appropriated “Girls” plays over video of a trio of young girls, bored to death with stereotypical pink tea sets and the like, who build a complicated Rube Goldberg machine from Goldiblox, which resemble plastic tinker toys. I foresee snippets of the updated lyrics (below) making their way onto playgrounds around the country. Hear the original Beastie Boys song, with lyrics, below.
Girls.
You think you know what we want, girls.
Pink and pretty it’s girls.
Just like the 50’s it’s girls.
You like to buy us pink toys
and everything else is for boys
and you can always get us dolls
and we’ll grow up like them… false.
It’s time to change.
We deserve to see a range.
‘Cause all our toys look just the same
and we would like to use our brains.
We are all more than princess maids.
Girls to build the spaceship,
Girls to code the new app,
Girls to grow up knowing
they can engineer that.
Girls.
That’s all we really need is Girls.
To bring us up to speed it’s Girls.
Our opportunity is Girls.
Don’t underestimate Girls.
As with all kids advertising, this is aimed as much at parents—who remember the Beastie Boys’ song—as their kids, who couldn’t possibly. And unlike Grist’s video, which only sells, perhaps, himself, the Goldiblox video aims to get kids hooked on plastic toys as much as any of the ads for products it displaces. Nonetheless, I’ll play it for my daughter in a few years, because lines like “we are all more than princess maids” constitute the perfect retort to the seemingly endless cultural slotting of girls into ridiculously subservient and fantasy roles.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
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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.
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