See Ugly Thrift Store Paintings through Artist Wayne White’s Pretty Eyes

in Art | October 15th, 2012

It reads like Hip­ster 101. Cre­ative mis­fit teen makes a con­scious choice to be a freak, grows up, sticks it to the main­stream, gains acclaim paint­ing fun­ny words and phras­es on ugly thrift store “art”. Except Wayne White, the man respon­si­ble in large part for the look of Pee­Wee’s Play­house and the sub­ject of a recent doc­u­men­tary, Beau­ty is Embar­rass­ing, isn’t much inter­est­ed in mock­ing easy prey. Pity. With those bed­room eyes and that ban­jo, he’d make a great a char­ac­ter on HBO’s Girls (pro­vid­ed, of course, he were thir­ty years younger).

Age has con­ferred a num­ber of lessons that he imparts on the thrift store ride-along above. For instance, those squares with whom less sea­soned artists are so pre­oc­cu­pied don’t give a hoot what the likes of him does or does­n’t do. Also, there’s no prof­it to be had in paint­ing on orig­i­nals. “That would be a com­ment on the artists.” Instead he trawls for repro­duc­tions, which he views as prod­ucts that have had all the pret­ty sucked out of them.

His plea­sure in find­ing a suit­ably unlove­ly Venet­ian scene in an ornate frame is refresh­ing, know­ing that it’s not pow­ered by snide irony. The only irony he acknowl­edges is that the uni­verse has seen fit to let him pros­per as an artist in this econ­o­my. Whether this will prove a last­ing lega­cy remains to be seen, but a few min­utes with Wayne White should be enough to per­ma­nent­ly alter your per­cep­tion of that hideous cov­ered bridge scene on your local Sal­va­tion Army’s wall.

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of The East Vil­lage Inky zine, and author of sev­en books, includ­ing the forth­com­ing graph­ic nov­el, Peanut.

A List of 60 Free Courses Granting Certificates from Great Universities (Some Starting This Week!)

in Online Courses | October 15th, 2012

Ear­li­er this year we began telling you about a poten­tial rev­o­lu­tion in edu­ca­tion — the birth of MOOCs, or Mas­sive Open Online Cours­es. As explained above, these cours­es let stu­dents, thou­sands at a time, take cours­es from great uni­ver­si­ties for free online. What’s more, most of these cours­es offer stu­dents a cre­den­tial — some­thing like a cer­tifi­cate of com­ple­tion — if they mas­ter the mate­r­i­al cov­ered in the class. Some of the MOOC providers are well known: Cours­era, Udac­i­ty, and edX. Oth­ers, like Class2Go, Google Course Builder and Ven­ture Lab, are just emerg­ing. But, togeth­er, they’re pro­duc­ing cours­es at break­neck speed, and we thought it was time to start orga­niz­ing a list for you.

Today, we’re rolling out a list of 60 Free Cours­es Grant­i­ng Cer­tifi­cates from Great Uni­ver­si­ties. The list orga­nizes cours­es chrono­log­i­cal­ly by start date, and it indi­cates the kind of cre­den­tial the cours­es offer — for exam­ple, Cer­tifi­cates of Com­ple­tion, State­ments of Accom­plish­ment, or Cer­tifi­cates of Mas­tery. The list, which hap­pens to include anoth­er 15 cours­es not bear­ing cer­tifi­cates, will be reg­u­lar­ly updat­ed. You can expect it to grow rapid­ly, and you can always access it by click­ing Cer­tifi­cate Cours­es in the top nav­i­ga­tion of our web site. Below we have list­ed a num­ber of online cours­es start­ing this week:

• Finance — Stan­ford on Ven­ture Lab — Octo­ber 15 (10 weeks)
• Intro­duc­tion to Com­put­er Sci­ence — Har­vard on edX — Octo­ber 15 (24 weeks)
• Start­up Boards: Advanced Entre­pre­neur­ship — Stan­ford on Ven­ture Lab — Octo­ber 15 (9 weeks)
• Design­ing a New Learn­ing Envi­ron­ment — Stan­ford on Ven­ture Lab — Octo­ber 15 (9 weeks)
• Tech­nol­o­gy Entre­pre­neur­ship — Stan­ford on Ven­ture Lab — Octo­ber 15 (9 weeks)
• Exper­i­men­tal Genome Sci­ence — Duke on Cours­era — Octo­ber 15 (12 weeks)
• A Crash Course on Cre­ativ­i­ty — Stan­ford on Ven­ture Lab — Octo­ber 17 (10 weeks)

Get the full list here. It includes 75 Mas­sive Open Cours­es in total.

Rare 1946 Film: The Great Russian Composer Sergei Prokofiev Plays Piano, Discusses His Music

in Music | October 15th, 2012

In 1946 the great Russ­ian com­pos­er Sergei Prokofiev was at the height of his suc­cess in the Sovi­et cul­tur­al world, but the state of his health was falling.

Only a year before, in the Great Hall of the Moscow Con­ser­va­to­ry, Prokofiev had con­duct­ed the glo­ri­ous pre­mier per­for­mance of his wide­ly praised Fifth Sym­pho­ny. “The hall was prob­a­bly lit as usu­al,” remem­bered the pianist Svi­atoslav Richter, who was there, “but when Prokofiev stood up, it seemed as though the light poured down on him from on high. He stood there, like a mon­u­ment on a pedestal.” But a few days lat­er Prokofiev faint­ed and took a ter­ri­ble fall, injur­ing his head and near­ly dying as a result. The diag­no­sis was severe high blood pres­sure. Prokofiev’s doc­tors advised him to move away from Moscow to some­place qui­et, so in the sum­mer of 1946 he pur­chased a dacha in the wood­ed sub­urb of Nikoli­na Gora.

A short time lat­er a gov­ern­ment film crew vis­it­ed the 55-year-old Prokofiev at his new home. The clip above is one of two sur­viv­ing takes, accord­ing to Simon Mor­ri­son of Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty, author of The Peo­ple’s Artist: Prokofiev’s Sovi­et Years. In the film, Prokofiev sits at the piano and plays a selec­tion from one of the waltzes in his bal­let Cin­derel­la, which had pre­miered the pre­vi­ous fall at the Bol­shoi The­atre. The com­pos­er then walks over to his desk and is asked to say a few words about what he is work­ing on. His reply, as trans­lat­ed on YouTube:

Well, right now I am work­ing on a sym­phon­ic suite of waltzes, which will include three waltzes from Cin­derel­la, two waltzes from War and Peace and one waltz from the movie score Ler­mon­tov. The War and Peace has just been bril­liant­ly pro­duced in Leningrad, where the com­pos­er Cheshko made an espe­cial­ly note­wor­thy appear­ance as a tenor, giv­ing a superb per­for­mance in the role of Pierre Bezukhov. Besides this suite, I am work­ing on a sonata for vio­lin and piano [No. 1 in F minor], upon com­ple­tion of which I will resume work on the Sixth Sym­pho­ny, which I had start­ed last year. I have just com­plet­ed thre suites from the Cin­derel­la bal­let and I am now turn­ing the score over to copy­ists for writ­ing the parts, so that most like­ly the suites will already be per­formed at the begin­ning of the fall sea­son.

The video con­cludes with a frag­ment of silent footage which, accord­ing to Mor­ri­son, shows Prokofiev play­ing the caden­za of the finale of his Third Piano Con­cer­to at Moscow in 1927 with “Per­sim­fans,” an ear­ly Sovi­et orches­tra that oper­at­ed with­out a con­duc­tor, in keep­ing with the pro­le­tar­i­an ideals of the rev­o­lu­tion. The rare films offer a fas­ci­nat­ing glimpse of the great com­poser’s play­ing tech­nique. As Mor­ri­son told us in an email:

The footage tak­en at Nikoli­na Gora clear­ly shows that he had mas­sive hands, flu­id (if a lit­tle rusty) tech­nique, and awk­ward­ly rigid pos­ture. He plays from the fore­arms down, metro­nom­i­cal­ly, with an ease and finesse that indis­putably con­tributed to his tech­nique of chro­mat­ic dis­place­ment (play­ing music in one key or tonal­i­ty but then inflect­ing it with pitch­es from oth­er tonal areas). His was an intu­itive man­ner of com­po­si­tion, influ­enced by the nat­ur­al feel of the key­board under his hands–slide-slipping between black and white keys, as shad­ows of one anoth­er.

Less than two years after the Nikoli­na Gora news­reel footage was made, Prokofiev’s life took a bad turn. On Feb­ru­ary 10, 1948 he was accused, along with Dmitri Shos­tokovich and oth­ers, of “for­mal­ism,” which the pianist and Prokofiev schol­ar Boris Berman describes as “a polit­i­cal libel in the guise of an aes­thet­ic term.” For­mal­ist art was viewed as being elit­ist and “unde­mo­c­ra­t­ic” for its pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with form over con­tent. As a result, Prokofiev and the oth­ers were unable to per­form or broad­cast their work. And just ten days after his denun­ci­a­tion, Prokofiev’s wife Lina was arrest­ed and charged with “espi­onage” for try­ing to send mon­ey to her moth­er in Spain. She was sen­tenced to 20 years in prison. Stress from the crises caused Prokofiev’s health to dete­ri­o­rate fur­ther, and on March 5, 1953 he died from a cere­bral hem­or­rhage. Joseph Stal­in died the same day.

h/t Matthew Barnes

Relat­ed con­tent:

Tchaikovsky’s Voice Cap­tured on an Edi­son Cylin­der (1890)

The Uncensored Andy Warhol-Directed Video for The Cars’ Hit “Hello Again” (NSFW)

in Art, Music | October 15th, 2012

Andy Warhol was many things to many peo­ple in his long and event­ful career: painter and provo­ca­teur, pro­mot­er and direc­tor. But it sur­prised me to learn that he also made music videos. Well, he made one music video, for The Cars sin­gle “Hel­lo Again” from their 1984 album Heart­beat City. The biggest hit from that album, “You Might Think,” was a mas­sive MTV video hit and one of the first music videos to use com­put­er graph­ics. Warhol plays on much of the aes­thet­ic of the “You Might Think” video, which kind of epit­o­mized the cheesy, slight­ly sex­ist, mid-eight­ies look The Cars made big: giant, scant­i­ly-clad women, rudi­men­ta­ry com­put­er graph­ics scenes fea­tur­ing sun­glass­es and cock­tails, and, of course, plen­ty of cars. But there’s also lots of sig­na­ture Warhol here: lots of par­ties, lots of bod­ies, lots of sex (and nudi­ty).

Pop music always played a sig­nif­i­cant role in Warhol’s work, so it seems only nat­ur­al that he would align him­self with the cut­ting-edge mid-eight­ies syn­th­pop of the Cars. What’s more, he appears in a cameo as a bar­tender in the video, which also fea­tures a very young Gina Ger­shon. For obvi­ous rea­sons, the extend­ed, uncen­sored ver­sion of Warhol’s video (watch it here) didn’t make the rounds on MTV. The cen­sored ver­sion is, you might say, just a lit­tle less sexy, and a lot less Warhol. Since Warhol died in 1987, this video rep­re­sents one of the last pieces of the artist’s work. Warhol, an ear­ly adopter of dig­i­tal graph­ics tech­nol­o­gy, had pre­vi­ous­ly used Ami­ga com­put­ers to ani­mate images of Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe and cre­ate com­put­er art of his friend Deb­bie Har­ry. See him “paint” the “first com­put­er art­work,” a por­trait of Har­ry, on an Ami­ga com­put­er below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Three “Anti-Films” by Andy Warhol: Sleep, Eat & Kiss

Andy Warhol’s ‘Screen Test’ of Bob Dylan: A Clas­sic Meet­ing of Egos

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

60-Second Adventures in Religion: Watch New Animations by The Open University

in Religion | October 15th, 2012

Amer­i­can friends who went study­ing abroad in the Great Britain of the 70s all have a sto­ry about dis­cov­er­ing the Open Uni­ver­si­ty. They usu­al­ly did so late at night, more than a lit­tle ine­bri­at­ed, and well into a bout of semi-exot­ic chan­nel-flip­ping. Sud­den­ly they’d stum­ble upon a plaid-jack­et­ed lec­tur­er intro­duc­ing psy­chol­o­gy, say, or biol­o­gy, or some branch of lit­er­a­ture, and find them­selves sur­prised and trans­fixed. Back then, the OU had to lean on tele­vi­sion and radio as con­tent dis­tri­b­u­tion sys­tems, but now that they can make use of the inter­net, they’ve put out all sorts of edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als of great inter­est to Open Cul­ture read­ers. We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured their 60-Sec­ond Adven­tures in Thought and 60-Sec­ond Adven­tures in Eco­nom­ics. Now you can watch and learn about anoth­er sub­ject from the lat­est in their series of ani­mat­ed, joke-filled intel­lec­tu­al primers, 60-Sec­ond Adven­tures in Reli­gion.

“Karl Marx was a Ger­man philoso­pher-econ­o­mist, and the least fun­ny of the Marx­es,” says the nar­ra­tor of the first adven­ture, “Reli­gion as Social Con­trol.” “He famous­ly called reli­gion ‘the opi­um of the peo­ple,’ in that reli­gion was not only used by those in pow­er to oppress the work­ers, but it also made them feel bet­ter about being oppressed when they could­n’t afford real opi­um.” The oth­er three adven­tures approach reli­gion as rit­u­al, reli­gion as moth­er, and reli­gion as virus. Each video (watch them below) ref­er­ences a dif­fer­ent the­o­rist and takes their views as seri­ous­ly as such a humor­ous project can, though they all avoid ascrib­ing absolute author­i­ty to any­one in par­tic­u­lar. The fourth install­ment, for instance, opens by quot­ing Richard Dawkins, whom the nar­ra­tor intro­duces as “an athe­ist, evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gist, and prob­a­bly not some­one you should ask to be a god­fa­ther.” But hear­ing about his thoughts on the virus of reli­gion will cer­tain­ly get you curi­ous about what else OU has to offer on the sub­ject.

(You can also down­load 60-Sec­ond Adven­tures in Reli­gion on iTunes.)

Reli­gion as Rit­u­al

Reli­gion as Moth­er

Reli­gion as Virus

Relat­ed Con­tent:

60-Sec­ond Adven­tures in Eco­nom­ics: An Ani­mat­ed Intro to The Invis­i­ble Hand and Oth­er Eco­nom­ic Ideas

60-Sec­ond Adven­tures in Thought

Sci­ence Behind the Bike: Four Videos from the Open Uni­ver­si­ty on the Eve of the Tour de France

540 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Philosophy Made Fun: Read the Free Preview Edition of the Action Philosophers! Comic

in Art, Books, Philosophy | October 13th, 2012

“Imag­ine Pla­to as a wrestling super­star of ancient Greece, Niet­zsche as the orig­i­nal uber­men­sch, and Bohid­har­ma as the grand mas­ter of kung fu. These are not just great thinkers they also make great comics. Action Philoso­phers! details the lives and thoughts of his­to­ry’s A‑list brain trust in hip and humor­ous com­ic book fash­ion. ”

That’s how the Action Philoso­phers! com­ic book was pitched when its cre­ators, Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey, pub­lished it in 2009. The com­ic book is still in print, and you can read the fun pre­view edi­tion online. It starts, of course, with the Pre-Socrat­ics — Thales, Anax­i­man­der, Par­menides, and the gang. Enjoy.

Bonus — Read more Action Philoso­phers! online:

• Rene Descartes
• John Stu­art Mill
• Carl Jung

via Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

55 Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Mon­ty Python’s Best Phi­los­o­phy Sketch­es

Ancient Greek Pun­ish­ments: The Retro Video Game

Behold Charles Laughton Delivering the Gettysburg Address in its Entirety in Ruggles of Red Gap

in Comedy, Film, History, Video - Arts & Culture | October 13th, 2012

The Get­tys­burg Address is the sort of elo­quent speech school­child­ren were once expect­ed to com­mit to mem­o­ry, much as they were required to bring apples for the teacher and dip each oth­ers’ pig­tails in ink. Nowa­days, with ever more his­tor­i­cal ground clam­or­ing to be cov­ered, it’s real­ly only those cel­e­brat­ed open­ing lines that tend to stick. No doubt they’ll show up in the Stephen Spiel­berg-direct­ed Lin­coln bio-pic slat­ed to open lat­er this fall.

Stray back in time for a real refresh­er course, cour­tesy of erst­while Hunch­back of Notre Dame and Shake­speare­an wun­derkind, Charles Laughton. His soup-to-nuts recita­tion of the cel­e­brat­ed speech is the unex­pect­ed high­light of Rug­gles of Red Gap, a 1935 screw­ball West­ern that time has rel­e­gat­ed to the semi-shad­ows. It’s a beau­ti­ful­ly under­stat­ed per­for­mance that man­ages to illu­mi­nate the mean­ing of each and every word. (It also makes me more for­giv­ing of the film’s ear­ly min­utes, when Laughton’s por­tray­al of a very prop­er Eng­lish but­ler suc­cumbs to a sil­ver-can­de­labra-up-the-hein­er lev­el of broad­ness.)

Just as impres­sive is direc­tor Leo McCarey’s deci­sion to set the scene atop a gid­dy vaude­ville rou­tine fea­tur­ing a saloon full of clue­less cow­boys and bar­keeps. It’s a ton of fun.

Ishu Patel’s Oscar-Nominated, Animated Films Reveal a Singular, Handcrafted Vision

in Animation, Film | October 12th, 2012

I’m hap­py to date myself and say this: in the days before com­put­er graph­ics, when ani­ma­tors worked painstak­ing­ly by hand (yes, I know, com­put­er ren­der­ing is painstak­ing), ani­mat­ed films just seemed… I don’t know, pret­ti­er, more impres­sive­ly art­ful. I’ll take the heat for say­ing so and give you two short films as evi­dence, both from inno­v­a­tive ani­ma­tor Ishu Patel. Orig­i­nal­ly from Gujarat, India, Patel has made only a hand­ful of short films in his twen­ty-five year career, most of them for the Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da. But six of those films won top hon­ors at inter­na­tion­al film fes­ti­vals and two—Par­adise and The Bead Game—were nom­i­nat­ed for Acad­e­my Awards.

Par­adise (above), made in 1984, uses hand-drawn designs and so-called “under-the-cam­era” ani­ma­tion tech­niques such as cut-out, back-lit plas­ticine, sand, and paint­ed glass to ren­der an exot­ic and shim­mer­ing world. Each frame is a work of art on its own; in fact, Patel includes stills from the films on his site, some show­ing pre­lim­i­nary sketch­es. Much of Par­adise takes place inside a palace that resem­bles an intri­cate chalk draw­ing. There, a lone monarch watch­es as a flam­boy­ant bird (of par­adise?) trans­forms itself into a daz­zling suc­ces­sion of col­or­ful forms. Out­side, in a land­scape right out of Hen­ri Rousseau, a soli­tary black bird lurks, attempt­ing to rival the oth­er bird’s beau­ty, with lit­tle suc­cess. The orig­i­nal score by Ghe­o­rghe Zam­fir (yes, Zam­fir, of the pan flute fame) con­jures Ennio Mor­ri­cone.

In 1977’s The Bead Game (below), Patel’s first ani­mat­ed film, the set­ting is much sparser—a sol­id black back­ground and a spare, per­cus­sive sound­track by J.P. Ghosh. But the activ­i­ty is unre­lent­ing as a col­lec­tion of beads evolve from sin­gle cells, to epithe­lial folds, to a series of crea­tures, each one devour­ing the pre­vi­ous until humans arrive. Once we do, we devel­op pro­gres­sive­ly more destruc­tive ways to kill each oth­er. The finale is a psy­che­del­ic tour-de-force. One can only imag­ine the amount of time and care that went into stop-motion ani­mat­ing these hun­dreds of beads. The effect is sim­ply stun­ning and results in a sin­gu­lar vision one rarely sees in CGI-only work. Again, I’ll take the heat, but I stand by it: ani­ma­tion by hand pro­duced work that no com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed image has yet rivaled.

Patel’s films will be added to the Ani­ma­tion sec­tion of our list of 500 Free Online Movies.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

Learn New Languages (From Arabic to Yiddish) with 150+ Free Podcasts

in Language Lessons, Podcasts | October 12th, 2012

I spend a great deal of time vis­it­ing unfa­mil­iar cities, spend­ing days walk­ing, cycling, or rid­ing trains and bus­es through them. Some­times the peo­ple of these cities speak lan­guages I know; some­times they speak lan­guages I don’t. Either way, dur­ing all these hours in motion, my per­son­al sound­track comes from an iPod loaded with lan­guage-learn­ing pod­casts. If you’d like to engage in this delight­ful­ly men­tal­ly stim­u­lat­ing prac­tice your­self — and I high­ly rec­om­mend it — you can get start­ed by brows­ing Open Cul­ture’s col­lec­tion of Free Lan­guage Lessons avail­able online. The list cov­ers no few­er than 40 tongues, and many of the lessons come in pod­cast form. Should you find your­self in need of shows offer­ing Bul­gar­i­an sur­vival phras­es, instruc­tion in Swedish expres­sions and cul­ture, or Pol­ish in one minute a day, here is the list you want. From my efforts in study­ing Span­ish, Kore­an, and Japan­ese, I can per­son­al­ly (and strong­ly) rec­om­mend sev­er­al of its offer­ings.

Cof­fee Break Span­ish and the more advanced Show Time Span­ish, both pro­duced by the Radio Lin­gua net­work (out of Scot­land, of all places) start you off from an absolute zero of pre­sumed knowl­edge and pro­ceeds to get you up to “cruis­ing alti­tude,” which I call the point in lan­guage acqui­si­tion at which you become able to learn from real, untrans­lat­ed speech. You might then con­sid­er down­load­ing a show like Notes in Span­ish, and espe­cial­ly the con­ver­sa­tion­al­ly focused Notes in Span­ish Gold. For Japan­ese, few lan­guage pod­casts cater to a wider vari­ety of pro­fi­cien­cy lev­els at once than does JapanesePod101, which I sup­ple­ment with Japan­ese nation­al broad­cast­er NHK’s lessons (which also come taught in quite a few lan­guages besides Eng­lish.) And for Kore­an, the lan­guage that first cul­ti­vat­ed in me this whole intel­lec­tu­al­ly and social­ly thrilling learn­ing addic­tion, you can do no bet­ter than Hyun­woo Sun’s Talk to Me in Kore­an, quite pos­si­bly the most thor­ough, fre­quent, slick, and enter­tain­ing lan­guage-instruc­tion pod­cast of any kind. Lis­ten­ing to these shows has con­vinced me that every moment spent not acquir­ing a new lan­guage is a moment wast­ed. But even if you don’t believe any­thing that extreme, it’s still a lot of fun. And doing it through these free pod­casts, you cer­tain­ly can’t argue with the price.

Here’s our col­lec­tion once again: Learn 40 Lan­guages for Free: Span­ish, Eng­lish, Chi­nese & More

Relat­ed Con­tent:

375 Free eBooks: Down­load to Kin­dle, iPad/iPhone & Nook

450 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free

530 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

500 Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, etc.

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Stephen Fry Friday: His Musings on Life, Swearing, Shakespeare, Nanoscience & More

in Books, Life, Literature, Philosophy, Science | October 12th, 2012

Stephen Fry is a man of many tal­ents. He’s a nov­el­ist, con­trib­u­tor to news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines, TV per­son­al­i­ty, come­di­an, pod­cast­er, lin­guist of sorts. And accord­ing to his Twit­ter pro­file, he’s also a “Lord of Dance, Prince of Swimwear & Blog­ger.” In short, Stephen Fry cov­ers a lot of ground, and, through­out the years, we’ve shown you Fry opin­ing on many sub­jects. But you can’t real­ly appre­ci­ate his intel­lec­tu­al range until you’ve seen his mus­ings placed next to one anoth­er. So we’re pro­claim­ing today “Stephen Fry Fri­day” and we’re pre­sent­ing our favorite Fry clips from years past. We start above with Fry’s take on “The Joys of Swear­ing” and the rest fol­lows:

The Strange New World of Nanoscience

What is nano? And how will nanoscience shape our future? It’s all explained in a snap­py 17 minute video —  NANO YOU — that Fry nar­rat­ed for Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty.

What I Wish I Knew When I Was 18 

It’s a peren­ni­al fan favorite — Fry reflect­ing on his life, all 55 years of it, and offer­ing up life lessons to young­sters. Truth be told, old­er folks will get some­thing out of this video too.

On Phi­los­o­phy and the Impor­tance of Unbe­lief

Get­ting into the nit­ty grit­ty of phi­los­o­phy, Fry gives us one more life les­son: If you assume there’s no after­life, you’ll like­ly have a fuller, more enrich­ing life.

A Kinet­ic Take on Lan­guage

For a brief time in 2008, Fry pro­duced a series of pod­casts – called “Pod­grams” – that drew on his writ­ings, speech­es and col­lec­tive thoughts. In one episode, he med­i­tat­ed on lan­guage — the Eng­lish lan­guage, his own lan­guage, Barthes, Chom­sky, and Pinker — and then Matthew Rogers took that med­i­ta­tion and ran with it, pro­duc­ing a “kinet­ic typog­ra­phy ani­ma­tion” that art­ful­ly illus­trates a six minute seg­ment of Fry’s longer talk.

Shake­speare’s Satir­i­cal Son­net 130, As Read By Stephen Fry

It’s not sur­pris­ing that some­one this immersed in lan­guage would deeply admire the Shake­speare­an tra­di­tion.…

Why Fry Loves Joyce’s Ulysses

And Joyce’s Ulysses too (which you can down­load as a fine free audio book here).

Stay tuned, we’ll have more Stephen Fry in the months and years to come.…