Stream 160 In-Depth Radio Interviews with Clive James, Pico Iyer, Greil Marcus & Other Luminaries from the Marketplace of Ideas Archive

in Archives, Podcasts, Radio | June 15th, 2021

Would you like to to hear a long-form con­ver­sa­tion about the his­to­ry of the vinyl LP? Or about the his­to­ry of human rights? About the plight of book review­ing in Amer­i­ca? The wild excess­es of the art mar­ket? The nature of bore­dom? The true mean­ing of North Kore­an pro­pa­gan­da? What it’s like to live in Bangkok? What it’s like to go on a road trip with David Fos­ter Wal­lace? The answer to all of the above: of course you do. And now you can hear these con­ver­sa­tions and many more besides in the com­plete archive of the pub­lic radio show The Mar­ket­place of Ideas, which has just now come avail­able to stream on Youtube.

How, you may won­der, did I get such ear­ly word of this inter­view tro­ve’s avail­abil­i­ty? Because, in the years before I began writ­ing here on Open Cul­ture, I cre­at­ed, pro­duced, and host­ed the show myself. The project grew, in a sense, out of my dis­sat­is­fac­tion with the radio inter­views I’d been hear­ing, the vast bulk of which struck me as too brief, frag­men­tary, and pro­gram­mat­ic to be of any real val­ue.

What’s more, it was often painful­ly obvi­ous how lit­tle inter­est in the sub­ject under dis­cus­sion the inter­view­ers had them­selves. With The Mar­ket­place of Ideas, I set out to do the oppo­site of prac­ti­cal­ly every­thing I’d heard done on the radio before.

Like all worth­while goals, mine was para­dox­i­cal: to con­duct inter­views of the deep­est pos­si­ble depth as well as the widest pos­si­ble breadth. On one week the top­ic might be evo­lu­tion­ary eco­nom­ics, on anoth­er the philo­soph­i­cal quar­rel between David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on anoth­er the his­to­ry of Amer­i­can film com­e­dy, on anoth­er the lega­cy of Robert Pir­sig’s Zen and the Art of Motor­cy­cle Main­te­nance, and on anoth­er still the ascent of Cal­i­forn­ian wine over French. (This prin­ci­ple also applied to the polit­i­cal spec­trum: I delight­ed in bring­ing on, say, the grand­daugh­ter of Bar­ry Gold­wa­ter as well as a for­mer mem­ber of the Weath­er Under­ground.) An inter­est­ing per­son is, as they say, an inter­est­ed per­son, and through­out the show’s run I trust­ed my lis­ten­ers to be inter­est­ing peo­ple.

The same went for my inter­vie­wees, what­ev­er their cul­tur­al domain: nov­el­ists like Alexan­der Ther­oux, Tom McCarthy, Joshua Cohen, and Geoff Dyer; sci­en­tists like David P. Barash, Alan Sokal (he of the “Sokal Hoax”), and Sean Car­roll; crit­ics like James Wood, Greil Mar­cus, Jonathan Rosen­baum, Dave Kehr, and J. Hober­man; econ­o­mists like Tyler Cowen (twice), Robin Han­son, Steven E. Lands­burg, and Tim Har­ford (twice); biog­ra­phers of Bri­an Eno, Nick Drake, and Michel de Mon­taigne;  trans­la­tors of Jorge Luis Borges, César Aira, and Robert Walser; broad­cast­ers like Peter Sagal, Robert Pogue Har­ri­son (of Enti­tled Opin­ions), Jesse Thorn, and Michael Sil­verblatt; philoso­phers like Kwame Antho­ny Appi­ah and Simon Black­burn; tech­nol­o­gists like Steve Woz­ni­ak and Kevin Kel­ly; film­mak­ers like Ramin Bahrani (direc­tor of the exis­ten­tial Wern­er Her­zog-nar­rat­ed plas­tic-bag short pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture), So Yong Kim, Andrew Bujal­s­ki, Aaron Katz; and musi­cians like Nick Cur­rie, a.k.a Momus (twice), Jack Hues of Wang Chung, and Chaz Bundick of Toro y Moi.

The Mar­ket­place of Ideas aired between 2007 and 2011, and the pas­sage of a decade since the show’s end prompt­ed me to take a look — or rather a lis­ten — back at it. So  did the fact that a fair few of its guests have since shuf­fled off this mor­tal coil: Arts & Let­ters Dai­ly founder Denis Dut­ton, film crit­ic Peter Brunette, lit­er­ary schol­ar Angus Fletch­er, doc­u­men­tar­i­an Pepi­ta Fer­rari, writer and edi­tor Daniel Menaker, cul­tur­al poly­math Clive James. That inter­view with James was a dream ful­filled, due not just to my per­son­al enthu­si­asm for his writ­ing but the ide­al of intel­lec­tu­al omniv­o­rous­ness he rep­re­sent­ed — an ide­al toward which I strove on the show, and con­tin­ue to strive in my pur­suits today.  Even more than our con­ver­sa­tion itself, I fond­ly remem­ber an exchange after we fin­ished record­ing but before we hung up the phone. He thanked me for actu­al­ly read­ing his book, and I told him I’d thought all inter­view­ers did the same. His response: “That’s the first naïve thing you’ve said all hour.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The New Studs Terkel Radio Archive Will Let You Hear 5,000+ Record­ings Fea­tur­ing the Great Amer­i­can Broad­cast­er & Inter­view­er

Enti­tled Opin­ions, the “Life and Lit­er­a­ture” Pod­cast That Refus­es to Dumb Things Down

An Archive of 1,000 “Peel Ses­sions” Avail­able Online: Hear David Bowie, Bob Mar­ley, Elvis Costel­lo & Oth­ers Play in the Stu­dio of Leg­endary BBC DJ John Peel

The 135 Best Pod­casts to Enrich Your Mind: An Intro­duc­tion to Our New List

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.

Watch an Accurate Reconstruction of the World’s Oldest Computer, the 2,200 Year-Old Antikythera Mechanism, from Start to Finish

in Astronomy, History, Science | June 14th, 2021

There’s noth­ing like an ancient mys­tery, espe­cial­ly one as seem­ing­ly insol­u­ble as the ori­gins of “the world’s first com­put­er,” the Antikythera mech­a­nism. Dis­cov­ered off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera in 1901, the cor­rod­ed col­lec­tion of gears and dials seemed fake to sci­en­tists at first because of its inge­nious­ness. It has since been dat­ed to 100 to 150 BC and has inspired decades of research and spec­u­la­tive recon­struc­tion. Yet, no one knows who made it, and more impor­tant­ly, no one knows how it was made.

“The dis­tance between this device’s com­plex­i­ty and oth­ers made at the same time is infi­nite,” says Adam Woj­cik, a mate­ri­als sci­en­tist at the Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege of Lon­don. “Frankly, there is noth­ing like it that has ever been found. It’s out of this world.”

The expres­sion should not make us think of ancient aliens — the Antikythera mech­a­nism con­tains more than enough evi­dence of human lim­i­ta­tion, show­ing a geo­cen­tric mod­el of the cos­mos with the only five plan­ets its mak­er would have known.

The 2,000-plus year-old device con­tin­ues to reveal its secrets, includ­ing hid­den inscrip­tions found dur­ing CT scans of the object, as Smith­son­ian report­ed in 2015. The mech­a­nism is “sim­i­lar in size to a man­tel clock, and bits of wood found on the frag­ments sug­gest it was housed in a wood­en case. Like a clock, the case would’ve had a large cir­cu­lar face with rotat­ing hands. There was a knob or han­dle on the side, for wind­ing the mech­a­nism for­ward or back­ward. And as the knob turned, trains of inter­lock­ing gear­wheels drove at least sev­en hands at var­i­ous speeds. Instead of hours and min­utes, the hands dis­played celes­tial time.”

If the Antikythera mech­a­nism is a “celes­tial clock,” who bet­ter to design and build its recon­struc­tion than a clock­mak­er? That is exact­ly what we see in the videos above, cre­at­ed for the clock­mak­ing YouTube chan­nel Click­spring. Using the best sci­en­tif­ic mod­el of the mech­a­nism to date — pub­lished this year by Dr. Tony Freeth and col­leagues of the Antikythera Mech­a­nism Research Project — Click­spring shows how the device might have fit togeth­er and makes edu­cat­ed guess­es about the right place­ment of its dozens of small parts.

You can see a pre­view of the Antikythera recon­struc­tion project at the top, watch the full project above, and see indi­vid­ual episodes show­cas­ing dif­fer­ent phas­es of con­struc­tion on YouTube. The mod­el “con­forms to all the phys­i­cal evi­dence,” Freeth writes, “and match­es the descrip­tions in the sci­en­tif­ic inscrip­tions engraved on the mech­a­nism itself.” What no one can fig­ure out, how­ev­er, is just how the ancient Greek arti­sans who made it shaped pre­ci­sion met­al parts with­out lath­es and oth­er mod­ern tools of the machine-mak­ers trade. Researchers, and clock­mak­ers, may have pieced togeth­er the Antikythera puz­zle, but the mys­tery of how it came into exis­tence at all remains unsolved.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the World’s Old­est Com­put­er Worked: Recon­struct­ing the 2,200-Year-Old Antikythera Mech­a­nism

Researchers Devel­op a Dig­i­tal Mod­el of the 2,200-Year-Old Antikythera Mech­a­nism, “the World’s First Com­put­er”

Mod­ern Artists Show How the Ancient Greeks & Romans Made Coins, Vas­es & Arti­sanal Glass

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

Wikipedia’s Surprising Power in Shaping Science: A New MIT Shows How Wikipedia Shapes Scientific Research

in Science, Wikipedia | June 14th, 2021

If you were in high school or col­lege when Wikipedia emerged, you’ll remem­ber how stren­u­ous­ly we were cau­tioned against using such an “unre­li­able source” for our assign­ments. If you went on to a career in sci­ence, how­ev­er, you now know how impor­tant a role Wikipedia plays in even pro­fes­sion­al research. It may thus sur­prise you to learn that stu­dents still get more or less the same warn­ing about what, two decades lat­er, has become the largest ency­clo­pe­dia and fifth most-vis­it­ed web site in the world. “Many of us use Wikipedia as a source of infor­ma­tion when we want a quick expla­na­tion of some­thing,” say MIT’s cita­tion guide­lines. “How­ev­er, Wikipedia or oth­er wikis, col­lab­o­ra­tive infor­ma­tion sites con­tributed to by a vari­ety of peo­ple, are not con­sid­ered reli­able sources for aca­d­e­m­ic cita­tion.”

That quo­ta­tion appears, some­what iron­i­cal­ly, in a recent MIT research paper called “Sci­ence is Shaped by Wikipedia: Evi­dence From a Ran­dom­ized Con­trol Tri­al.” Its authors, Neil C. Thomp­son from MIT and Dou­glas Han­ley from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Pitts­burgh, use both “Big Data” and exper­i­men­tal approach­es to sup­port their claim that “incor­po­rat­ing ideas into a Wikipedia arti­cle leads to those ideas being used more in the sci­en­tif­ic lit­er­a­ture.”

Test­ing the exis­tence of an under­ly­ing causal rela­tion­ship, they “com­mis­sioned sub­ject mat­ter experts to cre­ate new Wikipedia arti­cles on sci­en­tif­ic top­ics not cov­ered in Wikipedia.” Half of these arti­cles were added to Wikipedia, and half retained as a con­trol group. “Review­ing the rel­e­vant jour­nal arti­cles pub­lished lat­er, they find that “the word-usage pat­terns from the treat­ment group show up more in the prose in the sci­en­tif­ic lit­er­a­ture than do those from the con­trol group.”

In oth­er words, Wikipedia does indeed appear to shape sci­ence — or as Whar­ton pro­fes­sor Ethan Mol­lick put it on Twit­ter, “The secret heart of acad­e­mia is… Wikipedia.” Expand­ing on the idea, he added that “Wikipedia is used like a review arti­cle,” which sur­veys the cur­rent state of a par­tic­u­lar sci­en­tif­ic field. “Review arti­cles are extreme­ly influ­en­tial on the direc­tion of sci­en­tif­ic research, and while Wikipedia arti­cles are gen­er­al­ly less influ­en­tial, there are more of them, they are more up-to-date, and they are free.” That last point — and the implied con­trast to tra­di­tion­al, sci­en­tif­ic jour­nals with their often shock­ing­ly high sub­scrip­tion fees — becomes a key point in Thomp­son and Han­ley’s advo­ca­cy for pub­lic repos­i­to­ries of knowl­edge in gen­er­al, with their pow­er to gal­va­nize research across the whole world. The pow­er of open cul­ture is con­sid­er­able; the pow­er of open sci­ence, per­haps even more so.

You can read Han­ley and Thomp­son’s study on the pow­er of Wikipedia free online: “Sci­ence is Shaped by Wikipedia: Evi­dence From a Ran­dom­ized Con­trol Tri­al.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lis­ten to Wikipedia: A Web Site That Turns Every Wikipedia Edit Into Ambi­ent Music in Real Time

NASA’s New Online Archive Puts a Wealth of Free Sci­ence Arti­cles Online

Roy­al Soci­ety Opens Online Archive; Puts 60,000 Papers Online

Free Online Cours­es: The Sci­ences

200 Free Text­books: A Meta Col­lec­tion

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.

The Age of Cathedrals: A Free Online Course from Yale University

in Art, History, Online Courses | June 13th, 2021

Image by Rafes­mar, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

From Yale pro­fes­sor Howard Bloch comes Age of Cathe­drals, an online course that offers “an intro­duc­tion to some of the most aston­ish­ing archi­tec­tur­al mon­u­ments the world has ever known—Gothic cathe­drals,” includ­ing Notre Dame, Chartres, and Saint-Denis. The course descrip­tion adds: “We shall study the art, lit­er­a­ture, intel­lec­tu­al life, eco­nom­ics, and new social arrange­ments that arose in the shad­ow of the cathe­drals and that were such an impor­tant part of the revival of cities in the twelfth and thir­teenth cen­turies. The goal of the course is a bet­ter appre­ci­a­tion of the High Mid­dle Ages, a world that is still rec­og­niz­ably our own.”

You can take Age of Cathe­drals for free by select­ing the audit option upon enrolling. If you want to take the course for a cer­tifi­cate, you will need to pay a fee.

Age of Cathe­drals has been added to our list of Free His­to­ry Cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

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:

Enroll in Harvard’s Free Online Archi­tec­ture Course: An Intro­duc­tion to the His­to­ry & The­o­ry of Archi­tec­ture

Mak­ing Archi­tec­ture: A Free Online Course from the IE School of Archi­tec­ture and Design

Euro­pean Paint­ings: From Leonar­do to Rem­brandt to Goya–A Free Online Course from the Uni­ver­si­dad Car­los III de Madrid (UC3M

Free Course: An Intro­duc­tion to the Art of the Ital­ian Renais­sance

Blockchain and Money: A Free Online Course from MIT

in Finance, MIT, Online Courses, Technology | June 13th, 2021

Taught by MIT pro­fes­sor Gary Gensler, Blockchain and Mon­ey is “for stu­dents wish­ing to explore blockchain tech­nol­o­gy’s poten­tial use—by entre­pre­neurs and incumbents—to change the world of mon­ey and finance. The course begins with a review of Bit­coin and an under­stand­ing of the com­mer­cial, tech­ni­cal, and pub­lic pol­i­cy fun­da­men­tals of blockchain tech­nol­o­gy, dis­trib­uted ledgers, and smart con­tracts. The class then con­tin­ues on to cur­rent and poten­tial blockchain appli­ca­tions in the finan­cial sec­tor.”

You can watch all 23 lec­tures above, or on YouTube. A syl­labus and oth­er course mate­ri­als can be found on MIT’s web­site. More relat­ed cours­es are list­ed below.

Blockchain and Mon­ey has been added to our list of Free Busi­ness Cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

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 

What Actu­al­ly Is Bit­coin? Princeton’s Free Online Course “Bit­coin and Cur­ren­cy Tech­nolo­gies” Pro­vides Much-Need­ed Answers

Bit­coin and Cryp­tocur­ren­cy Tech­nolo­gies: A Free Course from Prince­ton

Cryp­tocur­ren­cy and Blockchain: An Intro­duc­tion to Dig­i­tal Currencies–A Free Online Cours­es from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia

The Prince­ton Bit­coin Text­book Is Now Free Online

Agile Meets Design Thinking: A Free Online Course from the University of Virginia

in | June 13th, 2021

From Alex Cow­an, a pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­gini­a’s Dar­d­en School of Busi­ness, comes a free online course called Agile Meets Design Think­ing. The short course descrip­tion reads as fol­lows:

Despite every­one’s good inten­tions, hard work and sol­id ideas, too many teams end up cre­at­ing prod­ucts that no one wants, no one can use, and no one buys. But it does­n’t have to be this way. Agile and design think­ing offer a different–and effective–approach to prod­uct devel­op­ment, one that results in valu­able solu­tions to mean­ing­ful prob­lems. In this course, you’ll learn how to deter­mine what’s valu­able to a user ear­ly in the process–to front­load value–by focus­ing your team on testable nar­ra­tives about the user and cre­at­ing a strong shared per­spec­tive.

Among oth­er things, the course will help stu­dents:

• Explain key con­cepts and prac­tices from the agile prod­uct devel­op­ment method­ol­o­gy.
• Cre­ate a strong shared per­spec­tive and dri­ve to val­ue using per­sonas and prob­lem sce­nar­ios.
• Diag­nose what soft­ware to devel­op and why using a set of agile user sto­ries and pro­to­types.
• Facil­i­tate nar­ra­tive col­lab­o­ra­tion with user sto­ries and pro­to­types.

You can take Agile Meets Design Think­ing for free by select­ing the audit option upon enrolling. If you want to take the course for a cer­tifi­cate, you will need to pay a fee.

Agile Meets Design Think­ing has been added to our list of Free Busi­ness Cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

A Beautiful, High-Resolution Map of the Internet (2021)

in Maps | June 11th, 2021

The begin­nings of the Inter­net were unchart­ed ter­ri­to­ry, espe­cial­ly before the days of graph­ic browsers. You had a num­ber, you dialed up to a loca­tion. Cer­tain loca­tions were named after their host uni­ver­si­ties or gov­ern­ment sites and that made sense in an old-school tele­phone exchange way. But the rest was just a vast ocean of data, of strange lands, and many, many bar­ri­ers. How big, exact­ly, is the inter­net? And how do we mea­sure it? What is the “space” of cyber­space?

There have been maps that over­lay the internet’s main land­lines onto the map of the earth—this Vox arti­cle shows the spi­dery web grow­ing from the first four loca­tions of ARPANET until the whole world is con­nect­ed. But that’s not how we think of it. Sure­ly Open Cul­ture is always where you, dear read­er, reside, and this writer’s undis­closed loca­tion has noth­ing to do with it. Maybe the inter­net is real­ly the space that it takes up in our minds, in our lives, and in the amount of inter­net traf­fic.

Ama­teur graph­ic design­er Mar­tin Var­gic visu­al­ized those spaces as coun­tries on a vast globe inspired by Nation­al Geo­graph­ic Mag­a­zine. (Although Nation­al Geo­graph­ic bor­rowed its car­to­graph­ic style from some of the first print­ed maps of the world.) Var­gic first pub­lished his map in 2014 when he was a stu­dent in Slo­va­kia. And now he has decid­ed to update the map for 2021. (See the map in high res­o­lu­tion here.) Large con­ti­nents rep­re­sent the main web­sites of the Inter­net: Face­book, Google, Apple, Ama­zon. The seas rep­re­sent the afore­men­tioned ocean of data under dif­fer­ent names: Ocean of Infor­ma­tion, North Con­nec­tion Ocean, etc. To com­pare his rel­a­tive­ly spare orig­i­nal map to the one he just released is to notice how much more crowd­ed this world has become, and how divid­ed.

First, his method­ol­o­gy.

Var­gic based the rel­a­tive size of each web­site on its aver­age traf­fic between Jan­u­ary 2020 and Jan­u­ary 2021, accord­ing to Alexa Rank, the Ama­zon-owned Alexa Internet’s mea­sure of how pop­u­lar a web­site is, cal­cu­lat­ed by unique users and page views.

How­ev­er, the cen­ter of the map is now dif­fer­ent. This now depicts the “core and back­bone of the Inter­net as we know it,” Var­gic said. This means a core of ser­vice providers sur­round­ed by larg­er islands of web browsers (Chrome, Fire­fox, et al).

While the 2014 map con­sid­ered web­site size as the main orga­niz­er and con­tained around 200 web­sites, this ver­sion con­tains 3,000. The north of the globe fea­tures coun­try clus­ters: a group­ing of aca­d­e­m­ic, research, and free edu­ca­tion sites (wikipedia, archive.org, etc.), gov­ern­men­tal web­sites to the east and con­spir­a­cy QAnon lands to the west.

The Antarc­ti­ca of the map? The Dark Web, where the Onion isn’t a par­o­dy news site and TOR isn’t the sci-fi/­fan­ta­sy pub­lish­er.

You might find some of Vargic’s deci­sions odd, or you might just spend your time won­der­ing how much of the inter­net is indeed an unknown land, with large “coun­tries” you’ve nev­er heard of, but with mil­lions of “res­i­dents”. It might not be real, but Vargic’s map will put you in an explorato­ry mood while you light off for the ter­ri­to­ries. You can view it in a high res­o­lu­tion for­mat here. Pur­chase it as a poster here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of the Inter­net in 8 Min­utes

How the Inter­net Archive Dig­i­tizes 3,500 Books a Day–the Hard Way, One Page at a Time

The Old­est Known Globe to Depict the New World Was Engraved on an Ostrich Egg, Maybe by Leonar­do da Vin­ci (1504)

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.

A Side Splitting Medieval TikTok Account: Get a Laugh at Medieval Yoga Poses & Much More

in Art, Comedy, Fashion, History | June 11th, 2021

@greedypeasant🧘‍♀️ Medieval Yoga 🧘 #medievaltik­tok #yoga #yogalover #peace­with­in #fyp #fory­ou #fory­oupage♬ orig­i­nal sound — Tyler Gun­ther

Tik­Tok, the short-form video-shar­ing plat­form, is an are­na where the young dom­i­nate — last sum­mer, The New York Times report­ed that over a third of its 49 mil­lion dai­ly users in the US were aged 14 or younger.

Yet some­how, a ful­ly grown medieval peas­ant has become one of its most com­pelling pres­ences, breezi­ly shar­ing his yoga reg­i­men, above, his obses­sion with tas­sels and ornate sleeves, and the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Tran­sit Authority’s plans to upcy­cle his era’s tor­ture devices as New York City sub­way exit gates.

30-year-old Brook­lyn-based artist Tyler Gun­ther views his cre­ation, Greedy Peas­ant, as “the man­i­fes­ta­tion of all the strange medieval art we now enjoy in meme form”:

Often times medieval his­to­ry focus­es on roy­als, wars, popes and plagues. With this peas­ant guide, we get to expe­ri­ence the world through the lens of a queer artist who is just try­ing to make sure every­one is on time for their cos­tume fit­tings for the East­er pageant. 

Ear­li­er, Gunther’s medieval fix­a­tion found an out­let in comics that he post­ed to Insta­gram.

Then last Feb­ru­ary, he found him­self quar­an­ti­ning in an Aus­tralian hotel room for 2 weeks pri­or to per­form­ing in the Ade­laide Fes­ti­val as part of The Plas­tic Bag Store, artist Robin Fro­hardt’s alter­nate­ly hilar­i­ous and sober­ing immer­sive super­mar­ket instal­la­tion:

My quar­an­tine plans had been to work on a mas­sive set of illus­tra­tions and teach myself the entire Adobe Cre­ative Suite. Instead I just wan­dered from one cor­ner of the hotel room to the next and stared at the office build­ing direct­ly out­side my win­dow. About 4 days in, Robin texted, “Now is your time to make a Tik­Tok.” I had avoid­ed it for so long. I always had an excuse and I was gen­uine­ly con­fused about how the app worked. But with no alter­na­tives left I made a few videos “just to test out some of the fil­ters” and I was instant­ly hooked. 

Now, a green screen and a set of box lights are per­ma­nent­ly installed in his Brook­lyn stu­dio so he can film when­ev­er inspi­ra­tion strikes, pro­vid­ed it’s not too steamy to don the tights, cowls, wigs and woolens that are an inte­gral part of Greedy Peasant’s look.

@greedypeasant🕷🕷🕷 (to be con­tin­ued) #medievaltik­tok #fyp #fory­oupage #fory­ou #spi­der­man♬ orig­i­nal sound — Tyler Gun­ther

One of Gunther’s most eye pop­ping cre­ations came about when Greedy Peas­ant answered an ad post in the town square seek­ing a Spi­der Man (i.e., a man with spi­ders) to com­bat a bug infes­ta­tion:

As a for­mer cos­tume design stu­dent, I’m intrigued by how super­hero uni­forms fit with­in the very con­ser­v­a­tive world of West­ern men’s fash­ion. We’re sup­posed to believe these col­or blocked body­suits are ath­let­ic and high tech. These man­ly men don’t wear them just because they look great in them, they wear them for our pro­tec­tion and the greater good.  But what if one super­hero did val­ue style over sub­stance? Would he still retain his author­i­ta­tive qual­i­ties if his super suit was embroi­dered and bead­ed and drip­ping with tas­sels? This medieval­ist believes so. 

About that tas­sel obses­sion…

To me tas­sels rep­re­sent orna­men­ta­tion for ornamentation’s sake at its peak. This dec­o­ra­tive con­cept is so maligned in our cur­rent age. 21^st cen­tu­ry design trends are so sleek and smooth, which does make our lives prac­ti­cal and effi­cient. But soon we’ll all be dead. Medieval arti­sans seemed to under­stand this on some lev­el. I think if iPhones were sold in the mid­dle ages they would have 4 tas­sels on each cor­ner. Why? Because it would look very nice. A tas­sel looks beau­ti­ful as a piece of sta­t­ic sculp­ture. It adds an air of author­i­ty and pol­ish to what­ev­er object it is attached to. If that were all they pro­vid­ed us it would be enough. But then sud­den­ly you give your elbow a lit­tle flick and before you know it your sleeve tas­sels are in flight! They are per­form­ing a per­son­al bal­let with their lit­tle strings going wher­ev­er the chore­og­ra­phy may take them. It’s a gift.

@greedypeasant(not) FACTS. ##medievaltik­tok ##nyc ##newyorkc­i­ty ##nychis­to­ry ##fyp ##fory­ou ##fory­oupage♬ orig­i­nal sound — Tyler Gun­ther

Gunther’s keen eye extends to his green screen back­grounds, many of which are drawn from the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art’s online image col­lec­tion.

He also shoots on loca­tion when the sit­u­a­tion war­rants:

Espe­cial­ly in New York City, where it seems like every neigh­bor­hood has at least one build­ing dressed up to look as if it sur­vived the Black Plague. I love this bla­tant­ly false illu­sion of a hero­ic past. We American’s know it’s a façade. We know the build­ing was built in 1910, not 1410, but some­how it still pleas­es us. Even when I went home to Arkansas to vis­it fam­i­ly, we were con­stant­ly scout­ing film­ing loca­tions which looked con­vinc­ing­ly medieval. Our great­est find were the back rooms and the choir loft of a beau­ti­ful goth­ic revival church in our town.

While Gun­ther is obvi­ous­ly his own star attrac­tion, he alter­nates screen time with a group of “reli­quary ladies,” whose main trio, Brid­gette, Aman­da and Susan are the queen bees of the side aisle. Even before he used a green screen fil­ter to ani­mate them with his eyes, lips, and a hint of mus­tache, he was drawn to their hair­dos and indi­vid­ual per­son­al­i­ties dur­ing repeat vis­its to the Met Clois­ters.

“As reli­quar­ies, they embody such a spe­cif­ic medieval sen­si­bil­i­ty,” he enthus­es. “Each housed a small body part of a deceased saint, which peo­ple would make a pil­grim­age to see. This com­bi­na­tion of the sacred, macabre and beau­ti­ful includes all my favorite medieval ele­ments.”

@greedypeasantWill the real St. Catherine’s low­er jaw please stand up. ##medievaltik­tok ##his­to­ry­tok ##fyp ##fory­ou ##fory­oupage ##reli­quary ##peas­ant ##arthis­to­ry♬ orig­i­nal sound — Tyler Gun­ther

Get to know Tyler Gunther’s Greedy Peas­ant here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

160,000 Pages of Glo­ri­ous Medieval Man­u­scripts Dig­i­tized: Vis­it the Bib­lio­the­ca Philadel­phien­sis

A Free Yale Course on Medieval His­to­ry: 700 Years in 22 Lec­tures

Killer Rab­bits in Medieval Man­u­scripts: Why So Many Draw­ings in the Mar­gins Depict Bun­nies Going Bad

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

The Illuminated Manuscripts of Medieval Europe: A Free Online Course from the University of Colorado

in History, MOOCs, Online Courses | June 11th, 2021

Dr. Roger Louis Martínez-Dávi­la and Ana B. Sanchez-Prieto–two aca­d­e­mics work­ing out of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Col­orado and Uni­ver­si­dad Com­plutense Madrid (Spain)–have teamed up to present Deci­pher­ing Secrets: The Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­scripts of Medieval Europe. The free course cov­ers the fol­low­ing ground:

Per­haps no oth­er rel­ic of the Euro­pean Mid­dle Ages cap­tures our imag­i­na­tion more than illu­mi­nat­ed medieval man­u­scripts, or those doc­u­ments dec­o­rat­ed with images and col­ored pig­ments. Serv­ing as win­dows unto a lost world of kings, ladies, faith, war, and cul­ture, they com­mu­ni­cate com­plex visu­al and tex­tu­al nar­ra­tives of Europe’s col­lec­tive cul­tur­al her­itage and pat­ri­mo­ny. In this fash­ion, illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­scripts are dynam­ic mes­sages from our com­mu­nal past that are still rel­e­vant today in fields like graph­ic design and typog­ra­phy.

In this sev­en-week course, stu­dents will explore the mate­r­i­al cre­ation, con­tent, and his­tor­i­cal con­text of illu­mi­nat­ed medieval Euro­pean man­u­scripts. Stu­dents will acquire an intro­duc­to­ry knowl­edge of their dis­tin­guish­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics, their cat­a­logu­ing and peri­odiza­tion (when they were cre­at­ed), the meth­ods uti­lized to pro­duce them, and their his­tor­i­cal con­text and val­ue.

You can take The Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­scripts of Medieval Europe for free by select­ing the audit option upon enrolling. If you want to take the course for a cer­tifi­cate, you will need to pay a fee.

The Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­scripts of Medieval Europe has been added to our list of Free His­to­ry Cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Dis­cov­er the Great Medieval Man­u­script, the Book of Kells, in a Free Online Course

The Medieval Mas­ter­piece, the Book of Kells, Is Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online

How Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Were Made: A Step-by-Step Look at this Beau­ti­ful, Cen­turies-Old Craft

800 Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Are Now Online: Browse & Down­load Them Cour­tesy of the British Library and Bib­lio­thèque Nationale de France

160,000 Pages of Glo­ri­ous Medieval Man­u­scripts Dig­i­tized: Vis­it the Bib­lio­the­ca Philadel­phien­sis

American Literature, From the Beginnings to the Civil War: A Free Online Course from NYU

in | June 10th, 2021

From Cyrus Patell, pro­fes­sor Eng­lish at NYU, comes Amer­i­can Lit­er­a­ture, From the Begin­nings to the Civ­il War. The 26 lec­ture course is avail­able on YouTube (all stream­able above). Among oth­er things, the course cov­ers Her­man Melville’s Moby Dick, Tran­scen­den­tal­ism, Amer­i­can Goth­ic, Hawthorne and more.

The course descrip­tion reads as fol­lows:

This course is a sur­vey of Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture and lit­er­ary his­to­ry, from the ear­ly colo­nial peri­od to the eve of the Civ­il War. Our goal will be to acquire a grasp of the canon of Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture as it is typ­i­cal­ly con­ceived and the var­i­ous log­ics behind its con­struc­tion. Top­ics to be con­sid­ered include: the rise of “lit­er­a­ture” as a dis­ci­pline unto itself; the mean­ing of Amer­i­can indi­vid­u­al­ism; the con­flict between lib­er­ty and equal­i­ty in Amer­i­can social thought; the mythol­o­gy of Amer­i­can excep­tion­al­ism; the rela­tion between his­to­ry and cul­tur­al mythol­o­gy; the dialec­tic of free­dom and slav­ery in Amer­i­can rhetoric; the Amer­i­can obses­sion with race; the ide­ol­o­gy of domes­tic­i­ty and its link to the sen­ti­men­tal; the aes­thet­ics of Amer­i­can romance; the role of biog­ra­phy in lit­er­ary crit­i­cism and his­to­ri­og­ra­phy; the nature of the “Amer­i­can Renais­sance”; what it means to say “NO in thun­der!” and why so many Amer­i­can writ­ers seem to say it; delib­er­a­tive democ­ra­cy and cos­mopoli­tanism.

Amer­i­can Lit­er­a­ture, From the Begin­nings to the Civ­il War has been added to our list of Free Online Lit­er­a­ture Cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

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 Amer­i­can Nov­el Since 1945: A Free Yale Course on Nov­els by Nabokov, Ker­ouac, Mor­ri­son, Pyn­chon & More

Hear Moby Dick Read in Its Entire­ty by Til­da Swin­ton, Stephen Fry, John Waters & Oth­ers

An Illus­tra­tion of Every Page of Her­man Melville’s Moby Dick