Google & Coursera Launch New Career Certificates That Prepare Students for Jobs in 2–6 Months: Business Intelligence & Advanced Data Analytics
Back in 2021, Google launched a series of online courses designed to help students earn a professional certificate in six months and also land an entry-level job. In its original offering, Google developed certificate programs in five professional areas: User Experience (UX) Design, Data Analytics, Project Management, IT Support and IT Automation. Now, the tech company has added two new programs to its lineup, each offered through Coursera’s online education platform.
First, the Google Advanced Data Analytics Professional Certificate builds on the original Data Analytics Certificate and “delves into machine learning, predictive modeling, and experimental design to collect and analyze large amounts of data.” Featuring seven courses in total, the program takes roughly six months to complete and aims to teach students how to 1) build regression and machine learning models to analyze and interpret data, 2) create data visualizations and apply statistical methods to investigate data, and 3) communicate insights from data analysis to stakeholders. Essentially, it teaches many tools of the trade needed to become a senior data analyst or junior data scientist.
With the Google Business Intelligence Professional Certificate, students can participate in a shorter program that focuses on transforming data into actionable insights for organizations. Consisting of three courses (and lasting about two months), the program helps students learn skills like data modeling, data visualization, and dashboarding–skills that have wide applicability in our data-driven age.
Students can actually take individual courses in these professional certificate programs for free. However, if you would like to receive the certificates, Coursera charges $49 per month (after an initial 7‑day free trial period). That means that the Advanced Data Analytics Professional Certificate, if completed in 6 months, will cost less than $300. And the Business Intelligence Professional Certificate would run about $100. Once students complete a certificate, they can add the credential to their LinkedIn profile, resume, or CV. Likewise, they can connect with 150+ U.S. hiring organizations in Google’s Employer Consortium. If you would like to learn more about Google Career Certificates, you can read this handy page on University of Texas’ website.
Update: Google has also added a new certificate program focused on Cybersecurity. Find out more about the program here.
You can sign up for the programs by clicking on the links in bold above. Each program has a 7‑day free trial.
Note: Open Culture has a partnership with Coursera. If readers enroll in certain Coursera courses and programs, it helps support Open Culture.
Read More...DJ Cummerbund’s Astonishing Mashups Create Unexpected Collaborations Between Rock, Soul & Hip Hop Icons
“History in the making,” Jay‑Z calls out a few bars into Beyoncé’s debut solo single “Crazy in Love.”
The sentiment may be even more germane, when he does it in remix master DJ Cummerbund’s irresistible mashup “Crazy Together,” above.
The recent assemblage finds Queen Bey splitting screen time with The Beatles, as DJ Cummerbund weaves “Crazy in Love” together with “Come Together.”
The video is as much fun as the seamless audio, with a hammy cameo from Ringo Starr, courtesy of the 1981 comedy Caveman, and Yoko Ono and James Brown doing some heavy lifting.
John Lennon’s take as Brown fires up his Sex Machine is priceless. It really feels as if these unlikely collaborators were active, rather than passive contributors.
Here’s a peek into how DJ Cummerbund arranged the audio clips.
Asked in a 2020 interview with Digital Journal about the source of his inspiration, he responded:
I’m not sure if you can call it inspiration exactly, but I have a neurological condition that causes me to hear and feel melodies and frequencies where most cannot (in the wind, the soil, celestial bodies, etc.) This ultimately causes me to constantly hear songs on top of other songs to the point of extreme frustration and the only way to subdue that is to actually create what I’m hearing in my head. It’s almost therapeutic for me, and I was even told I could die if I don’t continue to create my works. It’s definitely like a curse sometimes but can also be a blessing as my music seems to bring a great deal of joy to millions of people.
An undersung element of these crowd pleasing remixes is how skillfully DJ Cummerbund ties things together by recording supplemental vocals and instrumentals.
Ozzy Osbourne fronts “Earth, Wind and Ozzys,” which marries his 1980 solo hit “Crazy Train” with Earth Wind & Fire’s evergreen “September” so successfully, it’s a let down to remember that a gorgeous, harmonized “I’m going off the rails on a crazy train” is an invented, not sampled disco chorus.
The combinations the DJ comes up with can’t help but force a fresh perspective on artists who would never in a million years have shared a stage or fanbase.
Step into a no man’s land where the rapid fire punk brattiness of the Ramones can coexist with the Hanson brothers’ lemon fresh, Tulsa wholesomeness, and Cotton Eye Joe comes in out of nowhere.
When a title like “Me and Coolio Down by the Schoolyard” pops into your head, it arrives as a self-thrown gauntlet. You can’t not see it through to fruition.
The late rapper’s “Fantastic Voyage” infuses Paul Simon’s gently nostalgic “Me And Julio Down By The School Yard” with some NSFW lyrics and a much harder outlook.
The lo-fi joys of double dutch and playground hoops from the original Julio video present a plausible vision of a “place where (Coolio’s) kids can play outside without livin’ in fear of a drive-by.”
This being a DJ Cummerbund production, baseball Hall of Famer, Mickey Mantle and football coach John Madden, who were on hand for Julio, have to make room for his ever present muse, the late wrestling superstar Randy “Macho Man” Savage.
DJ Cummerbund is willing to consider requests, particularly if you do a bit of homework to ensure that your chosen songs’ keys match up and their BPMs inhabit the same realm.
See more of his mash ups, including Shaxicula, the MTV Video Music Award-winning B‑52s/Britney Spears remix here.
In recent weeks, DJ Cummerbund has been opening for the B‑52s during their residency at the Venetian.
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50 Songs from a Single Year, Mixed Together Into One 3‑Minute Song (1979–89)
The History of Rock Told in a Whirlwind 15-Minute Video
– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...Behold the International Ink Library Created by the U.S. Secret Service: Features A Collection of 12,000 Ink Samples
Late though it may be in the age of print, we still envision ransom or other threatening notes in the same way we have for generations, with their demands incongruously spelled out with individual letters, each one a different size and font, taken from the pages of newspapers and magazines. This classic cut-and-paste method of ransom note construction presumably emerged as means of evading minds like that of Trista Ginsberg, a document analyst specializing in handwriting at the Secret Service. She appears in the Great Big Story above, which comes to focus on one facility at the Service’s headquarters in particular: the International Ink Library.
“The Secret Service has the largest ink library in the world,” says the video’s narrator. Its more than 12,000 samples of different inks include “pens, bottled ink, and printer cartridges.” These come in handy when, say, “someone writes a threatening letter to the president.”
A document analyst like Irina Geiman samples the letter’s ink, and then, by comparing it to the inks in the library, “she can figure out what kind of ink was used, and, hopefully, it can help solve the case.” Geiman also explains a less dramatic type of case that comes across her desk rather more often: at-home inkjet counterfeiting of $20 bills.
Though that may not be the highest example of the counterfeiter’s art, the art itself motivated the creation of the Secret Service in 1865 as a branch of the U.S. Treasury Department. “Following the Civil War,” says the Secret Service’s FAQ, “it was estimated that one-third to one-half of the currency in circulation was counterfeit.” It was in 1901, after the McKinley assassination, that “the Secret Service was first tasked with its second mission: the protection of the president.” Hence the cultural currency of the image of the would-be president assassin evading governmental pursuit while laboriously assembling his missives one letter at a time — surely reason enough for the Secret Service to have put together a top-secret International Glue Library.
Related content:
How Ink is Made: The Process Revealed in a Mouth-Watering Video
Books Made with Disappearing Ink Strategically Fade Away
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Hear Ryuichi Sakamoto’s “Last Playlist,” Which He Created for His Own Funeral: Erik Satie, Bill Evans, Debussy, Ravel & More
Ryuichi Sakamoto died last March, three months after his final live performance, and two months after the release of his final album 12. It’s safe to say that life, for him, was more or less synonymous with music, and indeed he prepared music to extend even beyond his life’s end. A prolific recording artist, both solo and in collaboration, he no doubt left a great deal of unreleased material in the vault (or so his fans all hope). He also curated the music of others, an occasional pursuit that culminated in the newly released playlist that Sakamoto created to be played at his own funeral.
“The 33-track playlist features some of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s favorite music,” writes NME’s Surej Singh, “including works from Bach, Debussy and Ravel, and opens with an 11-minute piece ‘Haloid Xerrox Copy 3 (Paris)’ from Sakamoto’s frequent collaborator Alva Noto.”
Its two and a half hours of music also include the work of others with whom Sakamoto worked in life, like David Sylvian, as well as other composers and performers spanning various eras and genres: Ennio Morricone, Bill Evans, Laurel Halo, Nino Rota, and Erik Satie.
Whatever the obvious differences between all the pieces Sakamoto chose to play for those who came to pay their respects, the serious listener can hear resonances both between them and with Sakamoto’s own oeuvre. As those who’ve listened to his discography understand, Sakamoto worked in an ever-widening range of forms — pop, dance, ambient, orchestral, and many more besides — yet always came up with music that was immediately recognizable as his own. While he lived, he never stopped assimilating new influences. Even though he’s now gone, the influence of his work will exert itself for generations to come, as will its power as a gateway to vast and diverse musical realms.
You can hear the playlist above, or via this Spotify playlist.
Related content:
Ryuichi Sakamoto, RIP: Watch Him Create Groundbreaking Electronic Music in 1984
A 3,350-Song Playlist of Music from Haruki Murakami’s Personal Record Collection
62 Psychedelic Classics: A Free Playlist Created by Sean Lennon
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...
Take Carl Jung’s Word Association Test, a Quick Route Into the Subconscious (1910)
We’ve all, at one time or another, been asked to say the first thing that pops into our heads in response to a certain word or phrase. It may have happened to us in school, in a market research group, or perhaps in a job interview at a company that regards itself as somewhat outside-the-box. Most such exercises, and the theories supporting their efficacy as a tool for revealing the speaker’s inner self, originate with the work of the Swiss psychiatrist-psychoanalyst and then-protégé of Sigmund Freud Carl Jung.
Jung published his description of this “association method” in the American Journal of Psychology in 1910, and you can see the story of its creation — animated in the usual Monty Python-esque paper-cutout style — told in the new School of Life video above. In his word-association test, says narrator Alain de Botton, “doctor and patient were to sit facing one another, and the doctor would read out a list of one hundred words. On hearing each of these, the patient was to say the first thing that came into their head.” The patient must “try never to delay speaking and that they strive to be extremely honest in reporting whatever they were thinking of, however embarrassing, strange, or random it might seem.”
Trial runs convinced Jung and his colleagues that “they had hit upon an extremely simple yet highly effective method for revealing parts of the mind that were normally relegated to the unconscious. Patients who in ordinary conversation would make no allusions to certain topics or concerns would, in a word association session, quickly let slip critical aspects of their true selves.” The idea is that, under pressure to respond as quickly and “unthinkingly” as possible, the patient would deliver up contents from the instinct-driven subconscious mind rather than the more deliberate conscious mind.
Jung used 100 words in particular to provoke these deep-seated reactions, the full list of which you can see below. While some of these words may sound fairly charged — angry, abuse, dead — most could hardly seem more ordinary, even innocuous: salt, window, head. “When the experiment is finished I first look over the general course of the reaction times,” Jung writes in the original paper. “Prolonged times” mean that “the patient can only adjust himself with difficulty, that his psychological functions proceed with marked internal frictions, with resistances.” He found, as de Botton puts it, that “it was precisely where there were the longest silences that the deepest conflicts and neuroses lay.” In Jung’s worldview, there were the quick, and there were the neurotic: a drastic simplification, to be sure, but as he showed us, sometimes the simplest language goes straight to the heart of the matter.
Related content:
Carl Jung Offers an Introduction to His Psychological Thought in a 3‑Hour Interview (1957)
How Carl Jung Inspired the Creation of Alcoholics Anonymous
Carl Jung Explains His Groundbreaking Theories About Psychology in a Rare Interview (1957)
The Visionary Mystical Art of Carl Jung: See Illustrated Pages from The Red Book
Face to Face with Carl Jung: ‘Man Cannot Stand a Meaningless Life’ (1959)
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Watch Young David Attenborough Encounter Animals in Their Natural Habitats: Video from the 1950s and 1960s
Experience long ago conferred the mantle of authority on broadcaster, biologist, natural historian and author David Attenborough, age 97.
In his late 20s, he landed at the BBC, producing live studio broadcasts that ran the gamut from children’s shows, ballet performances and archeological quizzes to programs focused on cooking, religion and politics.
When an educational show starring animals from the London Zoo became a hit with viewers, the powers that be built on its popularity with a fresh take — a show that sent the intrepid young Attenborough around the world, seeking animals in their native habitats. He was accompanied by cameraman Charles Lagus and two zoologists, whom he quickly supplanted as host.
It made for thrilling viewing in an era when wildlife tourism was available to a very few.
The New York Times notes that many of the creatures who cropped up onscreen in these early Zoo Quest episodes were shipped back to London Zoo:
It is not the kind of mission we approve of nowadays, but without it the West might never have gotten interested in wildlife to begin with. We started by shooting exotic species for their skins and bones and trapping them for our zoos, and only recently moved to worrying about their survival in the wild and the health of the planet in general. This history is symbolized by the transformation of Attenborough himself from a talking and writing crocodile hunter to the greatest living advocate of the global ecosystem.
In Borneo in 1956, in search for Komodo dragons, he paused for an encounter with an orangutan, above, and also a big whiff of durian, the spiky, odiferous fruit whose aroma famously got it banned from Singapore’s elegant Raffles Hotel, with taxis, planes, subways, and ferries following suit.
Soon thereafter, the six-episode hunt for the Komodo dragon finds Attenborough in Java, masking his nerves as he uses a cutlass, a willingness to climb trees, and a cloth sack to get the better of a fully grown python.
(Once the serpent was settled at the London Zoo, he made the trek to the BBC for an in-studio appearance.)
You’ll note that this episode is in color.
Although Zoo Quest filmed in color, it aired ten years before color broadcasts were available to UK viewers, so most of the folks watching at home assumed it had been shot in black and white.
In 1960, Attenborough used the latest — now severely outmoded-looking– technology to capture the first audio recording of the indri, Madagascar’s largest lemur for Attenborough’s Wonder of Song.
This audio victory led him to wonder if he could be the first to film an indri.
Frustrated by the thick canopy overhead, Attenborough resorted to playback, successfully tempting the animals to not only come closer, but do so while vocalizing.
Mating calls?
No. Attenborough deduced that they were the indris’ “battle songs”, issued as a warning to the perceived threat of unfamiliar indris.
In 2011, Attenborough returned to Madagascar, listening respectfully to Joseph, a local hunter turned conservationist, who explains how the local populace no longer think of indri as a food source, but rather a symbol of their commitment to preserving the natural world around them. Joseph’s relationship with the indri affords Sir David a rare opportunity, as the indri feed from his hand:
Fifty years ago, I spent days and days and days searching through the forest, with these firing their noise overhead but now this group is so accustomed to seeing people around that I have been right close up to them, something I never believed could have be possible.
Read more about David Attenborough’s Zoo Quest experiences in his memoir, Adventures of a Young Naturalist, and watch a playlist of documentaries for the BBC here.
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– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...James Brown’s Historic Concert, Staged 24 Hours After Martin Luther King’s Assassination, Is Now Restored and Free to Watch Online
Thanks to James Brown’s official YouTube channel, you can now watch a remastered and restored version of a historic concert. The channel prefaces the concert with these words:
On April 5th 1968, James Brown gave a free concert at The Boston Garden which became a thing of legend. Only 24 hours earlier civil rights activist Dr Martin Luther King had been assassinated resulting in widespread violence across the United States. The mayor of Boston was persuaded to let the concert go ahead and it was broadcast live across the city by WGBH-TV. Featuring inspiring speeches and legendary performances, James Brown’s concert is said to have contributed majorly to maintaining calm and peace throughout the city that night.
To learn more about the performance, see our separate post: James Brown Saves Boston After Martin Luther King’s Assassination, Calls for Peace Across America (1968)
The setlist, complete with time stamps, appears below:
00:00 Intro
01:57 If I Ruled The World
05:40 James Brown Speech
12:55 Tom Atkins Speech
17:45 Kevin White Speech
20:59 That’s Life
24:22 Kansas City
28:45 Soul Man (Bobby Byrd)
31:08 You’ve Got To Change Your Mind (feat. Bobby Byrd)
35:51 I’m In Love (Bobby Byrd)
38:22 Sweet Soul Music (Bobby Byrd)
40:23 Mustang Sally (Bobby Byrd)
43:36 Medley: It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World / Lost Someone / Bewildered
57:30 Tell Mama (Marva Whitney)
59:36 Check Yourself (Marva Whitney)
01:05:02 Chain Of Fools (Marva Whitney)
01:07:38 I Heard It Through The Grapevine (Marva Whitney)
01:10:24 Maceo Parker Comedy Routine
01:20:20 Get It Together
01:27:30 There Was A Time
01:38:40 I Got The Feelin’
01:42:40 Try Me
01:45:35 Medley: Cold Sweat / Ride The Pony / Cold Sweat
01:57:20 Maybe The Last Time
02:01:32 I Got You (I Feel Good)
02:02:04 Please, Please, Please
02:04:34 I Can’t Stand Myself (When You Touch Me)
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Read More...Leonard Bernstein & Opera Star Christa Ludwig Get Into a Vigorous Creative Disagreement Over the Tempo of Mahler (1972)
In his role as a kind of classical music professor to the television audiences of America, Leonard Bernstein came across as supremely genial and patient. But that doesn’t mean he dedicated his own career as a conductor to agreeableness above all. Here on Open Culture, we’ve previously featured the occasion in 1962 when he conducted Glenn Gould’s performance of Brahm’s First Piano Concerto, but not before officially declaring his lack of “total agreement with Mr. Gould’s conception” of the piece. Another notable moment of discord arose a decade later, between Bernstein and the late mezzo-soprano Christa Ludwig, and it, too, has been preserved for all time.
It happened during rehearsals for Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde. “Ludwig, seen in this clip in her first rehearsal, begins to sing a verse from the fiendish fourth section, ‘Von der Schönheit’ (Of Beauty), but struggles to fit in all the words at Bernstein’s breakneck tempo,” writes Classic FM’s Maddy Shaw Roberts.
“She shakes her head and walks over to his stand, telling the maestro: ‘I can’t keep up.’ The pair then launch into a delightfully awkward, bilingual disagreement. ‘This is so much slower than I ever do it,’ Bernstein retorts. They try one more time, but Ludwig is still forced to stop as she runs out of breath.”
Whatever difficulties arose in the preparation, Bernstein and Ludwig more than acquitted themselves in the final performance, which you can see in full in the video just above. (The key moment comes at the 26:15 minute mark.) And according to Ludwig, their artistic relationship was far from difficult. “With Bernstein it was true love, I must confess,” she told the Italian magazine Musica. “When singing with Lenny there seemed to be an electric current coming from the orchestra, the conductor and the singers on the stage which went out into the public, forming a circle in which love, sensuality and eroticism became mixed. Bernstein didn’t just conduct the music but he seemed to live it physically as though he was composing it at that moment.” It could hardly be much of a stretch to suppose that, on the deepest level, she agreed with him that there are times — as in Das Lied von der Erde — when clarity must give way to passion.
Related Content:
Leonard Bernstein: The Greatest 5 Minutes in Music Education
Leonard Bernstein Demystifies the Rock Revolution for Curious (if Square) Grown-Ups in 1967
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Theoretical Puppets: Salvador Dalí, Sigmund Freud, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, and Other Thinkers Come Back to Life as Hand-Operated Puppets
As children’s television has demonstrated since the beginning of the medium, sometimes the best way to make an unfamiliar concept understandable is to articulate it through the mouth — and the body — of a puppet. Most all of us alive today had some experience with that back when we were still getting our ABCs and 123s down. Yet even in adulthood, we continue to find ourselves confronted with ideas we may find difficult to grasp, especially in the domain of philosophy, with no explanation offering-puppets to be found — or at least there weren’t, not before the launch of Theoretical Puppets on Youtube.
Each month, Theoretical Puppets brings on a notable thinker or two, the current lineup of whom includes the likes of Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault, all of them reconstructed out of cloth and wire.
These puppets are recognizable as the individuals who inspired them, and also recognizable as homages to the puppet aesthetic popularized by a certain long-running program on American television — a form of broadcasting, incidentally, that Benjamin never knew. He did, however, have serious thoughts about radio, the mass media of his day, some of which he — or rather, his puppet — articulates in the video just above.
Other episodes of Theoretical Puppets include Foucault on discourse, Deleuze on Power, Arendt on natality (and smoking), and even the late Bruno Latour on actor-network theory. Among the channel’s most-viewed videos are meetings of the minds both historical and fictional: between Deleuze and Foucault, (a re-creation of a 1963 radio interview), between Foucault and Benjamin, between Sigmund Freud and Salvador Dalí (which includes a discussion of the latter’s depiction of the former’s head as a “snail-like structure”). To varying extents, these dialogues are rooted in the words these figures wrote and spoke in their lifetimes; like most puppet-based productions, they also take place in the realm of fantasy. There’s humor in the incongruity, to be sure, but then, it must have demanded no small amount of imagination to produce such enduring bodies of theory in the first place.
Related content:
When Salvador Dali Met Sigmund Freud, and Changed Freud’s Mind About Surrealism (1938)
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Albert Einstein Holding an Albert Einstein Puppet (Circa 1931)
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...The Story of the Flatiron Building, “New York’s Strangest Tower”
Few outside New York know the Flatiron Building by name, but people everywhere associate it with the city. That owes in part to its tendency to appear in the vintage imagery of New York that adorns the walls of cafés, hotel rooms, and dentists’ offices across the world. And that, in turn, owes in part — in very large part — to the Flatiron’s unusual shape, the result of a design meant to maximize the profit of a triangular plot of land bounded by Fifth Avenue, Broadway, and East 22nd Street. You can hear the story of the building, “New York’s strangest tower,” in the new video from architecture-and-engineering Youtube channel The B1M just above.
We’ve previously featured The B1M here on Open Culture for videos on subjects like Europe’s lack of skyscrapers — a condition that certainly doesn’t afflict Manhattan, though at the time of the Flatiron Building’s construction in the first years of the twentieth century, the skyscraper itself was still a fairly novel concept.
Laws governing construction changed to keep up with developments in the technologies of construction: “Following a recent change in the city’s fire codes,” says the video’s narrator, “this became one of the earliest buildings in New York to shun load-bearing masonry and instead take advantage of steel for its structural frame.”
The Flatiron’s architects were Frederick P. Dinkelberg and Daniel Burnham, the latter of whom is now remembered as the original king of the American skyscraper. In fact, the very term “skyscraper” was coined in response to the Montauk Block, a high-rise he designed in Chicago. But while the Montauk Block stood only between 1883 and 1902, the Flatiron continues to stand proud — if, at 22 stories, no longer relatively tall — on the three-cornered plot where it first arose 120 years ago. Alas, it has also “sat empty since 2019, when its last tenants, Macmillan Publishers, moved out.” After that began a series of renovations, and after that began “multiple disagreements among the building’s current owners and future tenants,” which culminated in a court-ordered auction of the building won by a bidder who subsequently vanished. But however deep the Flatiron plunges into legal limbo, its status as a New York icon will surely remain intact.
Related content:
New York’s Lost Skyscraper: The Rise and Fall of the Singer Tower
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Why Europe Has So Few Skyscrapers
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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