“Calling Bullshit”: Watch Lectures for the College Course Designed to Combat the BS in our Information Age

in Current Affairs, Online Courses | May 15th, 2017

This past Jan­u­ary, we high­light­ed a syl­labus for a ten­ta­tive course called “Call­ing Bull­shit,” designed by two pro­fes­sors at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton, Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West.

The course–also some­times called “Call­ing Bull­shit in the Age of Big Data”–ended up being offered this spring. And now you can see how it unfold­ed in the class­room. The 10 video lec­tures from the class are avail­able online. Watch them above, or at this YouTube playlist. Also find them housed in our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Accord­ing to The Seat­tle Times, the course “achieved the aca­d­e­m­ic ver­sion of a chart-top­ping pop sin­gle: At the UW [Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton], it reached its 160-stu­dent capac­i­ty short­ly after reg­is­tra­tion opened this spring.” And now col­leges “in Cana­da, France, Por­tu­gal, Eng­land and Aus­tralia have con­tact­ed the pro­fes­sors about teach­ing a ver­sion of the course this fall.”

The course itself was premised on this basic idea: “Bull­shit is every­where, and we’ve had enough. We want to teach peo­ple to detect and defuse bull­shit wher­ev­er it may arise.”

A longer overview of the course appears below. It was cit­ed in our orig­i­nal post. And it’s worth high­light­ing again:

The world is awash in bull­shit. Politi­cians are uncon­strained by facts. Sci­ence is con­duct­ed by press release. High­er edu­ca­tion rewards bull­shit over ana­lyt­ic thought. Start­up cul­ture ele­vates bull­shit to high art. Adver­tis­ers wink con­spir­a­to­ri­al­ly and invite us to join them in see­ing through all the bull­shit — and take advan­tage of our low­ered guard to bom­bard us with bull­shit of the sec­ond order. The major­i­ty of admin­is­tra­tive activ­i­ty, whether in pri­vate busi­ness or the pub­lic sphere, seems to be lit­tle more than a sophis­ti­cat­ed exer­cise in the com­bi­na­to­r­i­al reassem­bly of bull­shit.

We’re sick of it. It’s time to do some­thing, and as edu­ca­tors, one con­struc­tive thing we know how to do is to teach peo­ple. So, the aim of this course is to help stu­dents nav­i­gate the bull­shit-rich mod­ern envi­ron­ment by iden­ti­fy­ing bull­shit, see­ing through it, and com­bat­ing it with effec­tive analy­sis and argu­ment.

What do we mean, exact­ly, by the term bull­shit? As a first approx­i­ma­tion, bull­shit is lan­guage, sta­tis­ti­cal fig­ures, data graph­ics, and oth­er forms of pre­sen­ta­tion intend­ed to per­suade by impress­ing and over­whelm­ing a read­er or lis­ten­er, with a bla­tant dis­re­gard for truth and log­i­cal coher­ence.

While bull­shit may reach its apogee in the polit­i­cal domain, this is not a course on polit­i­cal bull­shit. Instead, we will focus on bull­shit that comes clad in the trap­pings of schol­ar­ly dis­course. Tra­di­tion­al­ly, such high­brow non­sense has come couched in big words and fan­cy rhetoric, but more and more we see it pre­sent­ed instead in the guise of big data and fan­cy algo­rithms — and these quan­ti­ta­tive, sta­tis­ti­cal, and com­pu­ta­tion­al forms of bull­shit are those that we will be address­ing in the present course….

Our aim in this course is to teach you how to think crit­i­cal­ly about the data and mod­els that con­sti­tute evi­dence in the social and nat­ur­al sci­ences.

If you’re inter­est­ed in watch­ing the course, get start­ed with Lec­ture 1: Intro­duc­tion to Bull­shit.

To learn more about the course, please vis­it this web­site.

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:

“Call­ing Bull­shit”: See the Syl­labus for a Col­lege Course Designed to Iden­ti­fy & Com­bat Bull­shit

How to Spot Bull­shit: A Primer by Prince­ton Philoso­pher Har­ry Frank­furt

Hear the 10 Best Albums of the 1960s as Selected by Hunter S. Thompson

in Music | May 15th, 2017

Image  via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Hunter S. Thomp­son, the writer who gave vivid, inim­itable form to “gonzo jour­nal­ism,” honed his lit­er­ary chops the hard way, using rig­or­ous tech­niques includ­ing but not lim­it­ed to retyp­ing the entire texts of The Great Gats­by and A Farewell to Arms him­self. But he would let no one claim that his artis­tic appre­ci­a­tion extend­ed only to the print­ed word: “I resent your assump­tion that Music is Not My Bag,” he wrote in late 1970 to Rolling Stone edi­tor John Lom­bar­do, “because I’ve been argu­ing for the past few years that music is the New Lit­er­a­ture, that Dylan is the 1960s’ answer to Hem­ing­way, and that the main voice of the ’70s will be on records & video­tape instead of books.”

In this same let­ter, col­lect­ed in his sec­ond vol­ume of cor­re­spon­dence Fear and Loathing in Amer­i­ca, Thomp­son includ­ed a list of the best albums of the “rock age” of the 1960s, “because the ’60s are going to go down like a repeat, some­how, of the 1920s; the par­al­lels are too gross for even his­to­ri­ans to ignore.”

The list did­n’t come from Thomp­son, strict­ly speak­ing, but “from Raoul Duke,” the hard-liv­ing alter-ego who would star in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, pub­lished the fol­low­ing year. You can find a slight­ly cleaned-up ver­sion of the list in this Beat­dom post by David S. Willis:

1. Her­bie Mann’s 1969 Mem­phis Under­ground (“which may be the best album ever cut by any­body”)
2. Bob Dylan’s 1965 Bring­ing It All Back Home
3. Dylan’s 1965 High­way 61 Revis­it­ed
4. The Grate­ful Dead’s 1970 Workingman’s Dead (“the heav­i­est thing since High­way 61 and ‘Mr. Tam­bourine Man‘”)
5. The Rolling Stones’ 1969 Let it Bleed
6. Buf­fa­lo Springfield’s 1967 Buf­fa­lo Spring­field
7. Jef­fer­son Airplane’s 1967 Sur­re­al­is­tic Pil­low
8. Roland Kirk’s “var­i­ous albums”
9. Miles Davis’s 1959 Sketch­es of Spain
10. Sandy Bull’s 1965 Inven­tions

You can also hear most of Thompson/Duke’s Best Albums of the 1960s selec­tions gath­ered in the Spo­ti­fy playlist embed­ded above. (If you don’t have Spo­ti­fy’s free soft­ware, you can down­load it here.) Unfor­tu­nate­ly, Spo­ti­fy has­n’t yet incor­po­rat­ed into its col­lec­tion the work of exper­i­men­tal solo folk gui­tarist Sandy Bull, whose 1965 Inven­tions takes tenth place. (You can hear it on YouTube, how­ev­er.) Bull, whose life was as abun­dant with cre­ativ­i­ty as it was with sub­stances, cut some­thing of a Thomp­son­ian — or Dukean? — fig­ure him­self. His long-form com­po­si­tions “Blend” and “Blend II,” the lat­ter of which opens Inven­tions, will give you a sense of how far he pushed the bound­aries of his tra­di­tion.

“Jesus, what a has­sle to even think quick­ly about a list like that,” wrote Thomp­son, bring­ing the char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly expan­sive let­ter to a close, still try­ing to con­vince Lom­bar­di that such a then-untest­ed con­cept as a 1960s top-ten-albums list could work. “Even now I can think of 10 more I might have added… but what the fuck, it’s only a rude idea. But a good one, I think.”

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:

Hunter S. Thomp­son Inter­views Kei­th Richards, and Very Lit­tle Makes Sense

Hunter S. Thompson’s Har­row­ing, Chem­i­cal-Filled Dai­ly Rou­tine

Hunter S. Thompson’s Ball­sy & Hilar­i­ous Job Appli­ca­tion Let­ter (1958)

Hunter S. Thomp­son, Exis­ten­tial­ist Life Coach, Gives Tips for Find­ing Mean­ing in Life

Read 10 Free Arti­cles by Hunter S. Thomp­son That Span His Gonzo Jour­nal­ist Career (1965–2005)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Franz Kafka’s Unfinished Novel, The Castle, Gets Turned Into an Album by Czech Musicians: Watch a Music Video for the Song, “The Grave”

in Animation, Comics/Cartoons, Literature, Music, Theatre | May 15th, 2017

If, for some unfath­omable rea­son, author Franz Kaf­ka should emerge from his grave to direct a music video, the result would most cer­tain­ly resem­ble the one for “The Grave” by The Kaf­ka Band, above.

The air of futil­i­ty and social fore­bod­ing…

The chilly bro­ken land­scape, ren­dered in black and white…

Biki­nis and bling…

(Kid­ding! Over­coats and hag­gard expres­sions.)

“The Grave” was direct­ed by ani­ma­tor, Noro Hold­er, but the lyrics are cred­it­ed to Kaf­ka, drawn direct­ly from his unfin­ished nov­el, The Cas­tle. As the band’s name might imply, this is no fick­le flir­ta­tion with the author’s sen­si­bil­i­ties.

“The Grave” is actu­al­ly part of a ten-song album inspired by The Cas­tle. (Stream it on Spo­ti­fy below.) As band­mate, author Jaroslav Rudiš, observed:

Kaf­ka is often deemed as a dark author, yet we strive to chal­lenge this cliché. The nov­el pos­sess­es plen­ty of black and absurd humour, which we reflect­ed in some of our com­po­si­tions.

The album led to a col­lab­o­ra­tion with Germany’s The­ater Bre­men on a the­atri­cal adap­ta­tion that fea­tured the music played live.

The moody wood­cut-inspired visu­als seen above come from a graph­ic nov­el adap­ta­tion of The Cas­tle illus­trat­ed by Rudiš’ band­mate, Jaromír 99, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with David Zane Mairowitz, an Amer­i­can play­wright who pre­vi­ous­ly tack­led Kafka’s The Tri­al. 

At the point where anoth­er group might decide to take a detour into sun­nier territory—a pop romp through the oeu­vre of Milan Kun­dera perhaps—the Kaf­ka Band is dou­bling down on anoth­er copro­duc­tion with The­ater Bre­men, an adap­ta­tion of Kafka’s nov­el Ameri­ka (or The Man Who Dis­ap­peared), slat­ed to open this fall.

The Grave

I’m dream­ing of

Being with you

With­out inter­rup­tion

On earth

There is no space

For our love

Not in the vil­lage

Not any­where else.

Deep in the earth / around us only death / the liv­ing won’t find us.

I’m imag­in­ing a grave

Deep and tight

We hold each oth­er

My face next to yours

Yours next to mine

Nobody will ever see us

On earth there is no space

For our love.

Deep in the earth / around us only death / the liv­ing won’t find us.

Watch the video for “Arrival,” anoth­er track inspired by The Cas­tle, with draw­ings by Jaromír 99 here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Meta­mor­fo­s­is: Franz Kafka’s Best-Known Short Sto­ry Gets Adapt­ed Into a Tim Bur­tonesque Span­ish Short Film

Four Franz Kaf­ka Ani­ma­tions: Enjoy Cre­ative Ani­mat­ed Shorts from Poland, Japan, Rus­sia & Cana­da

Franz Kafka’s Exis­ten­tial Para­ble “Before the Law” Gets Brought to Life in a Strik­ing, Mod­ern Ani­ma­tion

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and the­ater mak­er, soon to be appear­ing in a clown adap­ta­tion of Faust, inspired by the cur­rent admin­is­tra­tion and open­ing in New York City this June. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Discover “The Ghost Club,” the Historic Paranormal Society Whose Members Included Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle & W.B. Yeats

in History, Literature | May 15th, 2017

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Japanese Computer Artist Makes “Digital Mondrians” in 1964: When Giant Mainframe Computers Were First Used to Create Art

in Art, Technology | May 12th, 2017

In the 21st cen­tu­ry, most of us have tried our hand at mak­ing some kind of dig­i­tal art or anoth­er — even if only touch­ing up cell­phone pho­tos of our­selves — but imag­ine the task of pro­duc­ing it 50 years ago. To make dig­i­tal art before the world had bare­ly heard the term “dig­i­tal” required access to a main­frame com­put­er, those huge­ly expen­sive hulks that filled rooms and print­ed out reams and reams of paper data, and the con­sid­er­able tech­ni­cal know-how to oper­ate it.

But the achieve­ment also, to go by the very ear­ly exam­ple of Hiroshi Kawano, required a back­ground in phi­los­o­phy. A grad­u­ate of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Tokyo major­ing in aes­thet­ics and the phi­los­o­phy of sci­ence before becom­ing a research assis­tant at that school and then a lec­tur­er at the Tokyo Met­ro­pol­i­tan Col­lege of Air-Tech­nol­o­gy, Kawano mar­shaled his knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence to cre­ate these “dig­i­tal Mon­dri­ans,” so described because of their com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed resem­blance to that Dutch painter’s most rig­or­ous­ly angu­lar, solid­ly col­ored work.

Kawano had drawn inspi­ra­tion, accord­ing to a Deutsche Welle arti­cle on his dona­tion of his archives to Ger­many’s Cen­ter for Media Art, from “the writ­ings of the Ger­man philoso­pher Max Bense, who pro­posed (among oth­er things) the idea of mea­sur­ing beau­ty using sci­en­tif­ic rules. At the same time, Kawano heard that sci­en­tists were using com­put­ers to cre­ate music. Putting the two togeth­er, he decid­ed to explore the pos­si­bil­i­ty of using a com­put­er to pro­gram beau­ty.”

Doing so required “writ­ing pro­grams in com­plex com­put­er lan­guages, then labo­ri­ous­ly punch­ing these pro­grams into hun­dreds of cards before feed­ing them into the machine.” And “while the design of his works pro­duced dur­ing the 1960s might look sim­ple — they’re not. They are the result of com­plex math­e­mat­i­cal algo­rithms pro­grammed so that, although Kawano sets the rules for how the pic­ture could look, he can’t deter­mine exact­ly what will appear on the print­er.”

Just before Kawano passed away in 2012, the ZKM (or Cen­ter for Art and Media Karl­sruhe), cel­e­brat­ed his pio­neer­ing dig­i­tal art with the exhi­bi­tion “The Philoso­pher at the Com­put­er,” some of which you can see in this Ger­man-lan­guage video clip. “The ret­ro­spec­tive empha­sizes Kawano’s spe­cial role in the cir­cle of pio­neers in ‘com­put­er art,’ ” says its intro­duc­tion. “He was nei­ther artist, who dis­cov­ered the com­put­er as a new pro­duc­tion medi­um and theme, nor engi­neer who came to art via the new machine, but a philoso­pher, who left his desk for the com­put­er cen­ter to exper­i­ment with the­o­ret­i­cal mod­els.”

Can com­put­ers cre­ate art? Can they even be used to cre­ate art? These ques­tions now have prac­ti­cal­ly obvi­ous answers in the affir­ma­tive, but back in 1964 when Kawano pro­duced the first of these pieces, work­ing through tri­al and error with the advice of the curi­ous staff of his uni­ver­si­ty’s com­put­er cen­ter, the ques­tions must have sound­ed impos­si­bly philo­soph­i­cal. Today, writes Over­head Com­part­men­t’s Clau­dio Rivera, Kawano’s dig­i­tal Mon­dri­ans “sug­gest them­selves as an odd­ly ephemer­al tran­si­tion in the nexus of tech­nol­o­gy and art. The famil­iar col­ors and forms are flash-frozen in crys­talline pix­e­la­tion, almost as if seized up in the final, over­heat­ed throes of a sud­den­ly-too-old com­put­er.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Andy Warhol’s Lost Com­put­er Art Found on 30-Year-Old Flop­py Disks

Watch the Dutch Paint “the Largest Mon­dri­an Paint­ing in the World”

Arti­fi­cial Neur­al Net­work Reveals What It Would Look Like to Watch Bob Ross’ The Joy of Paint­ing on LSD

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Sigmund Freud, Father of Psychoanalysis, Introduced in a Monty Python-Style Animation

in Neuroscience, Psychology | May 12th, 2017

Pity the hedge­hog. The freez­ing tem­per­a­tures of win­ter com­pel them to cozy up to oth­ers of its kind, but the prick­ly spines cov­er­ing their bod­ies pre­vent them from sus­tain­ing the easy, ongo­ing inti­ma­cy they so crave.

It’s a hell of a metaphor for human rela­tion­ships, com­pli­ments of 19th-cen­tu­ry philoso­pher Arthur Schopen­hauer. It cer­tain­ly spoke to Sig­mund Freud, who devot­ed his life try­ing to fig­ure out why so many of us resort to pet­ty behav­iors, spurn­ing those we love, and sab­o­tag­ing our­selves at every turn.

Pop­u­lar rep­re­sen­ta­tions would have us believe that the father of psy­cho­analy­sis was a detached sort of know-it-all, emo­tion­al­ly supe­ri­or to the bas­ket cas­es snivel­ing on his couch. Not so. As he not­ed in 1897:

I have been through some kind of neu­rot­ic expe­ri­ence, curi­ous states… twi­light thoughts, veiled doubts… The chief patient I am pre­oc­cu­pied with is myself… my lit­tle hys­te­ria… the analy­sis is more dif­fi­cult than any oth­er. Some­thing from the deep­est depths of my own neu­ro­sis sets itself against any advance in under­stand­ing neu­roses…

We feel ya’, doc, and so does The School of Life, the Lon­don-based orga­ni­za­tion for devel­op­ing emo­tion­al intel­li­gence, co-found­ed by philo­soph­i­cal essay­ist, Alain de Bot­ton:

… con­sult­ing a psy­chother­a­pist should be as acces­si­ble and as nor­mal as devel­op­ing your career, get­ting help for a phys­i­cal prob­lem, or going to the gym to get healthy. Just as we take care of our bod­ies and phys­i­cal health, a vital ele­ment of self-care is devot­ing focused time and ener­gy to explor­ing and under­stand­ing our thoughts and feel­ings.

The school puts your mon­ey where its mouth is by retain­ing a ros­ter of licensed psy­chother­a­pists who can be booked for in-per­son or Skype ses­sions.

It’s not for every­one. There are those who are deter­mined to pur­sue the path to con­tent­ment and self-knowl­edge solo, imper­vi­ous to Freud’s belief that “No one who dis­dains the key will ever be able to unlock the door.”

The ther­a­py-averse can still learn some­thing from the video above. Nar­ra­tor de Bot­ton charms his way through an eas­i­ly digest­ed overview of Freud’s per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al life, and the result­ing tenets of psy­cho­analy­sis.

And film­mak­er Mad Adam ensures that this brief trip through the infant phases—oral, anal, phallic—will be a jol­ly one, replete with droll, most­ly vin­tage images.

Release more mon­sters of the id with the School of Life’s psy­chother­a­py playlist.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

20,000 Let­ters, Man­u­scripts & Arti­facts From Sig­mund Freud Get Dig­i­tized and Made Avail­able Online

Down­load Sig­mund Freud’s Great Works as Free eBooks & Free Audio Books: A Dig­i­tal Cel­e­bra­tion on His 160th Birth­day

What is Love? BBC Phi­los­o­phy Ani­ma­tions Fea­ture Sartre, Freud, Aristo­phanes, Dawkins & More

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

A Free Course on Machine Learning & Data Science from Caltech

in Computer Science, Data, Online Courses | May 12th, 2017

Right now, Machine Learn­ing and Data Sci­ence are two hot top­ics, the sub­ject of many cours­es being offered at uni­ver­si­ties today. Above, you can watch a playlist of 18 lec­tures from a course called Learn­ing From Data: A Machine Learn­ing Course, taught by Cal­tech’s Feyn­man Prize-win­ning pro­fes­sor Yas­er Abu-Mostafa. The course is sum­ma­rized as fol­lows:

This is an intro­duc­to­ry course in machine learn­ing (ML) that cov­ers the basic the­o­ry, algo­rithms, and appli­ca­tions. ML is a key tech­nol­o­gy in Big Data, and in many finan­cial, med­ical, com­mer­cial, and sci­en­tif­ic appli­ca­tions. It enables com­pu­ta­tion­al sys­tems to adap­tive­ly improve their per­for­mance with expe­ri­ence accu­mu­lat­ed from the observed data. ML has become one of the hottest fields of study today, tak­en up by under­grad­u­ate and grad­u­ate stu­dents from 15 dif­fer­ent majors at Cal­tech. This course bal­ances the­o­ry and prac­tice, and cov­ers the math­e­mat­i­cal as well as the heuris­tic aspects. The lec­tures fol­low each oth­er in a sto­ry-like fash­ion.

A real Cal­tech course (it’s not watered down at all), the course assumes a famil­iar­i­ty with basic prob­a­bil­i­ty, matri­ces, and cal­cu­lus.

The lec­tures can be found on YouTube, iTunes U and this Cal­tech web­site, which hosts slides and oth­er course mate­ri­als. The pro­fes­sor wrote the course text­book, also called Learn­ing from Data.

Learn­ing From Data will be per­ma­nent­ly added to our list of Free Online Com­put­er Sci­ence Cours­es, part of our ever-grow­ing 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:

Down­load 243 Free eBooks on Design, Data, Soft­ware, Web Devel­op­ment & Busi­ness from O’Reilly Media

The Pio­neer­ing Physics TV Show, The Mechan­i­cal Uni­verse, Is Now on YouTube: 52 Com­plete Episodes from Cal­tech

The Neu­ronal Basis of Con­scious­ness Course: A Free Online Course from Cal­tech

The History of the World in 20 Odd Minutes

in History | May 11th, 2017

Last year, we flagged Bill Wurtz’s “His­to­ry of Japan,” an idio­syn­crat­ic video that cov­ered 40,000 years of Japan­ese his­to­ry in 9 minutes–everything from the rise of tech­nol­o­gy and reli­gion, to the influ­ence of Chi­na on Japan’s lan­guage and brand of bud­dhism, the emer­gence of the samu­rai, the country’s vexed rela­tion­ship with the West, and the bomb­ing of Nagasa­ki and Hiroshi­ma. Although quan­ti­ty isn’t every­thing, the video clocked more than 25 mil­lion views on YouTube–pretty impres­sive con­sid­er­ing that Wurtz cre­at­ed the video as “a pro­to­type to see if I could do a long video in the first place.”

Now comes his new, more expan­sive video–His­to­ry of the World in 20 min­utes. Released on Wednes­day, the video has already sur­passed 4.5 mil­lions views (sure­ly more by the time you read this), and it may teach you a thing … or two … about world his­to­ry. Have fun with it. And if you’re look­ing for meati­er media that cov­ers the big sweep of his­to­ry, check out the items in the Relat­eds below.

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:

Take Big His­to­ry: A Free Short Course on 13.8 Bil­lion Years of His­to­ry, Fund­ed by Bill Gates

The His­to­ry of the World in 46 Lec­tures From Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty

Free Online His­to­ry Cours­es

The Frida Kahlo Action Figure

in Art | May 11th, 2017

Ear­li­er this week, an orga­ni­za­tion called “Today Is Art Day” launched a Kick­starter cam­paign to pro­duce the lat­est in a line of action fig­ures. First came the Vin­cent van Gogh action fig­ure. Now, join­ing him in the ‘Art His­to­ry Heroes Col­lec­tion,’ there will be a Fri­da Kahlo fig­ure. (Yes, they’ve already raised $19,490, sur­pass­ing their $14,585 goal.) Stand­ing 5 inch­es tall, made of high qual­i­ty plas­tic, Fri­da will come with a mon­key attached to her back, and a detach­able sur­re­al­ist heart. Expect deliv­ery in Sep­tem­ber.

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:

1933 Arti­cle on Fri­da Kahlo: “Wife of the Mas­ter Mur­al Painter Glee­ful­ly Dab­bles in Works of Art”

Fri­da Kahlo’s Col­or­ful Clothes Revealed for the First Time & Pho­tographed by Ishi­uchi Miyako

Fri­da Kahlo and Diego Rivera Vis­it Leon Trot­sky in Mex­i­co, 1938

The Artist as Artist’s Mod­el: Au Naturel Por­traits of Fri­da Kahlo Tak­en by Art Patron Julien Levy (1938)

Alfred Hitchcock Recalls Working with Salvador Dali on Spellbound: “No, You Can’t Pour Live Ants All Over Ingrid Bergman!”

in Film | May 11th, 2017

In 1945 Alfred Hitch­cock had to explain one of Hol­ly­wood’s unwrit­ten rules to Sal­vador Dalí: No, you can’t pour live ants all over Ingrid Bergman! Hitch­cock had approached Dalí for help with a dream sequence in his upcom­ing thriller, Spell­bound, star­ring Bergman and Gre­go­ry Peck. He was unhap­py with the fuzzi­ness of Hol­ly­wood dream sequences. “I want­ed to con­vey the dream with great visu­al sharp­ness and clarity–sharper than film itself,” Hitch­cock recalled in a 1962 inter­view with François Truf­faut. “I want­ed Dali because of the archi­tec­tur­al sharp­ness of his work. Chiri­co has the same qual­i­ty, you know, the long shad­ows, the infin­i­ty of dis­tance and the con­verg­ing lines of per­spec­tive. But Dali had some strange ideas. He want­ed a stat­ue to crack like a shell falling apart, with ants crawl­ing all over it. And under­neath, there would be Ingrid Bergman, cov­ered by ants! It just was­n’t pos­si­ble.” The result you can watch below:

Note: This video first appeared on our site in 2011. See­ing that it’s Dal­i’s birth­day today, we’re bring­ing it back!

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 Tarot Card Deck Designed by Sal­vador Dalí

Sal­vador Dalí’s 1973 Cook­book Gets Reis­sued: Sur­re­al­ist Art Meets Haute Cui­sine

Sal­vador Dalí’s Avant-Garde Christ­mas Cards

Walk Inside a Sur­re­al­ist Sal­vador Dalí Paint­ing with This 360º Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Video

Hierony­mus Bosch Fig­urines: Col­lect Sur­re­al Char­ac­ters from Bosch’s Paint­ings & Put Them on Your Book­shelf