Read 700 Free eBooks Made Available by the University of California Press

in Books, e-books, History, Literature | January 12th, 2014

The Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia Press e‑books col­lec­tion holds books pub­lished by UCP (and a select few print­ed by oth­er aca­d­e­m­ic press­es) between 1982–2004. The gen­er­al pub­lic cur­rent­ly has access to 770 books through this ini­tia­tive. The col­lec­tion is dynam­ic, with new titles being added over time.

Read­ers look­ing to see what the col­lec­tion holds can browse by sub­ject. The cura­tors of the site have kind­ly pro­vid­ed a sec­ond brows­ing page that shows only the pub­licly acces­si­ble books, omit­ting any frus­trat­ing off-lim­its titles.

The collection’s strengths are in his­to­ry (par­tic­u­lar­ly Amer­i­can his­to­ry and the his­to­ry of Cal­i­for­nia and the West); reli­gion; lit­er­ary stud­ies; and inter­na­tion­al stud­ies (with strong selec­tions of Mid­dle East­ern Stud­ies, Asian Stud­ies, and French Stud­ies titles).

A quick browse yields a mul­ti­tude of inter­est­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties for future read­ing: Shel­ley Streeby’s 2002 book about sen­sa­tion­al lit­er­a­ture and dime nov­els in the nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry Unit­ed States; Luise White’s intrigu­ing-look­ing Speak­ing with Vam­pires: Rumor and His­to­ry in Colo­nial Africa (2000); and Karen Lystra’s 2004 re-exam­i­na­tion of Mark Twain’s final years. (The image above comes from anoth­er Twain text by Ran­dall Knop­er.) Two oth­er note­wor­thy texts include Roland Barthes’ Inci­dents and Hugh Ken­ner’s Chuck Jones: A Flur­ry of Draw­ings.

Sad­ly, you can’t down­load the books to an e‑reader or tablet. Hap­pi­ly, there is a “book­bag” func­tion that you can use to store your titles, if you need to leave the site and come back.

As always, we’d encour­age you to vis­it our col­lec­tion of 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices, where we recent­ly added texts by Vladimir Nabokov, Philip K. Dick and oth­ers. Also find free cours­es in our list of 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Rebec­ca Onion is a writer and aca­d­e­m­ic liv­ing in Philadel­phia. She runs Slate.com’s his­to­ry blog, The Vault. Fol­low her on Twit­ter:@rebeccaonion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free: The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art and the Guggen­heim Offer 474 Free Art Books Online

Read 18 Short Sto­ries From Nobel Prize-Win­ning Writer Alice Munro Free Online

30 Free Essays & Sto­ries by David Fos­ter Wal­lace on the Web

Down­load 14 Great Sci-Fi Sto­ries by Philip K. Dick as Free Audio Books and Free eBooks

Down­load 20 Pop­u­lar High School Books Avail­able as Free eBooks & Audio Books

Watch a Super Cut of Wes Anderson’s Signature Slo-Mo Shots

in Film | January 12th, 2014

When you watch a director’s work for a while, you get to know his/her sig­na­ture tricks — the themes and cam­era work that appear again and again. A cou­ple years ago, we fea­tured a video called Wes Ander­son // FROM ABOVE, a mon­tage cap­tur­ing Anderson’s pen­chant for the aer­i­al shot, a move that con­tributes to the light­ness, play­ful­ness and quirk­i­ness of his films. Now comes a super cut of Ander­son­’s slo-mo shots, com­piled by Ale­jan­dro Prul­lan­sky, set to The Shins’ song, “New Slang.” If you’re look­ing for a good overview of Wes Ander­son­’s fil­mog­ra­phy, we’d encour­age you to watch this series: 7 Video Essays on Wes Anderson’s Films: Rush­more, The Roy­al Tenen­baums & More.

Don’t miss any­thing from Open Cul­ture. Sign up for our Dai­ly Email or RSS Feed. And we’ll send cul­tur­al curiosi­ties your way, every day.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wes Anderson’s First Short Film: The Black-and-White, Jazz-Scored Bot­tle Rock­et (1992)

Watch Wes Anderson’s Charm­ing New Short Film, Castel­lo Cav­al­can­ti, Star­ring Jason Schwartz­man

Has Wes Ander­son Sold Out? Can He Sell Out? Crit­ics Take Up the Debate

The Curious Story of London’s First Coffeehouses (1650–1675)

in Food & Drink, History | January 12th, 2014

In his 1621 opusThe Anato­my of Melan­choly, Robert Bur­ton wrote, “The Turks have a drink called cof­fa (for they use no wine), so named of a berry as black as soot, and as bit­ter … which they sip still of, and sup as warm as they can suf­fer; they spend much time in those cof­fa-hous­es, which are some­what like our ale­hous­es or tav­erns…”

Sev­er­al decades lat­er, read­ers would require no such expla­na­tions: Eng­land would be awash in cof­fee­hous­es, num­ber­ing in the thou­sands. The curi­ous sto­ry of how the British swapped much of their dai­ly ale con­sump­tion for this “syrop of soot, or essence of old shoes,” is told by Matthew Green in “The Lost World of The Lon­don Cof­fee House,” on the Pub­lic Domain Review.

Pri­or to 1652, when Pasqua Rosée estab­lished a small cof­fee­house in St. Michael’s Alley in Lon­don, cof­fee was vir­tu­al­ly unknown in Eng­land. Rosée, a ser­vant of a cof­fee-lov­ing trad­er to the Lev­ant, found tremen­dous suc­cess with his ven­ture and, accord­ing to Green, was soon sell­ing over 600 serv­ings a day. Above, read­ers can view Rosée’s orig­i­nal hand­bill, where the entre­pre­neur adver­tised both the ther­a­peu­tic and pro­phy­lac­tic effects of his wares on diges­tion, headaches, rheuma­tism, con­sump­tion, cough, drop­sy, gout, scurvy, and mis­car­riages. It’s a won­der any­one ever drink­ing the stuff got sick.

Cof­fee­hous­es quick­ly became pop­u­lar places for men to con­verse and con­gre­gate, and Green notes that women soon grew tired of their absence. This exas­per­a­tion mount­ed until the 1674 Women’s Peti­tion Against Cof­fee, which claimed that “Exces­sive use of that New­fan­gled, Abom­inable, Hea­then­ish Liquor called COFFEE” led to England’s falling birthrate, mak­ing men “as unfruit­ful as the sandy deserts, from where that unhap­py berry is said to be brought.” Men, as they are wont to do, expressed their dis­agree­ment, and stat­ed in Men’s Answer to the Women’s Peti­tion Against Cof­fee that cof­fee made “the erec­tion more vig­or­ous, the ejac­u­la­tion more full, add[ing] a spir­i­tu­al ascen­den­cy to the sperm.”

A year lat­er, cof­fee­hous­es found more for­mi­da­ble oppo­si­tion in the form of King Charles II, who issued the “Procla­ma­tion for the sup­pres­sion of Cof­fee Hous­es” in 1675. Charles, how­ev­er, was more inter­est­ed in their polit­i­cal effects than the spir­i­tu­al ascen­den­cy of his sub­jects’ sperm. Cof­fee­hous­es pro­vid­ed an oppor­tu­ni­ty for more mind­ful and seri­ous con­ver­sa­tions than did ale­hous­es, and allowed any­one who paid the sin­gle pen­ny entrance charge to par­tic­i­pate in dis­cus­sions — to Charles, these were the ide­al cir­cum­stances for plot­ting sedi­tion and trea­son among the pop­u­lace. Despite the King’s procla­ma­tion, the cof­fee­hous­es, buoyed by a sup­port­ive pub­lic, pre­vailed.

To read Green’s fas­ci­nat­ing essay in full, includ­ing a descrip­tion of the cof­fee­house fre­quent­ed by Alexan­der Pope, Jonathan Swift, Joseph Addi­son, and Richard Steele, head over to the Pub­lic Domain Review.

Ilia Blin­d­er­man is a Mon­tre­al-based cul­ture and sci­ence writer. Fol­low him at @iliablinderman.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hon­oré de Balzac Writes About “The Plea­sures and Pains of Cof­fee,” and His Epic Cof­fee Addic­tion

Men In Com­mer­cials Being Jerks About Cof­fee: A Mashup of 1950s & 1960s TV Ads

The His­to­ry of Cof­fee and How It Trans­formed Our World

Black Cof­fee: Doc­u­men­tary Cov­ers the His­to­ry, Pol­i­tics & Eco­nom­ics of the “Most Wide­ly Tak­en Legal Drug”

Behold Pablo Picasso’s Illustrations of Balzac’s Short Story “The Hidden Masterpiece” (1931)

in Art, Literature | January 10th, 2014

Pablo Picas­so had a long and com­plex rela­tion­ship with book illus­tra­tion. The mod­ern painter hat­ed to work on spec and resist­ed tak­ing com­mis­sions. Nonethe­less, when it came to lit­er­a­ture, he made well over 50 excep­tions, illus­trat­ing the work of scores of authors he admired. As John Gold­ing writes in The Inde­pen­dent, Picas­so had always grav­i­tat­ed toward the lit­er­ary; he wrote pro­lif­i­cal­ly, was “attract­ed to art that had a lit­er­ary fla­vor,” and “pre­ferred the com­pa­ny of writ­ers, par­tic­u­lar­ly poets, to that of oth­er painters and sculp­tors.” Gold­ing writes of the artist’s par­tic­u­lar love for the Span­ish Baroque poet Luis de Gongo­ra, whose work he illus­trat­ed in a 1948 edi­tion, and who was to “affect the future devel­op­ment of Picasso’s art in a way that his oth­er lit­er­ary col­lab­o­ra­tions did not.” But this may be a hasty judg­ment. As it turned out, Picasso’s 1931 illus­tra­tion of a short sto­ry by Hon­oré de Balzac, “The Hid­den Mas­ter­piece” (Le Chef‑d’oeuvre incon­nu), would affect him great­ly, and indi­rect­ly con­tributed to the cre­ation of his most famous work, the enor­mous anti-war can­vas Guer­ni­ca.

Picas­so accept­ed the Balzac com­mis­sion from art deal­er Ambroise Vol­lard (see the title page and fron­tispiece at top, Picasso’s por­traits of Balzac above) and com­plet­ed the thir­teen etch­ings in 1931 for a cen­ten­ni­al edi­tion (see ten of the illus­tra­tions here). Many have con­sid­ered these etch­ings “land­marks in the his­to­ry of engrav­ing.” Balza­c’s sto­ry, admired by oth­er painters like Cézanne and Matisse, is among oth­er things a tale of an artist ahead of his time. Set in the 17th cen­tu­ry, “The Hid­den Mas­ter­piece” tells of an aging painter named Fren­hofer, who obses­sive­ly labors over a work he has kept secret for years. When two younger admir­ers, painters Poussin and Por­bus, final­ly man­age to see Fren­hofer­’s secret can­vas, they are appalled—it appears to them noth­ing more than an indis­tinct mess of lines, col­ors and shapes—and they mock the old­er artist and assume their cel­e­brat­ed friend has gone insane. The next day, Fren­hofer destroys all his work and kills him­self.

Picas­so, writes Thomas Ganzevoort, “had faced some­thing of the same dumb­found­ed reac­tion from fel­low artists upon show­ing them his ground­break­ing pro­to-Cubist mas­ter­piece Les Demoi­selles d’Avignon.” He lat­er claimed that the ghost of Balzac haunt­ed him, and he found him­self so com­pelled by the sto­ry that in 1937, he chose for his new stu­dio a 17th cen­tu­ry town­house locat­ed at 7 Rue des Grands-Augustin, the very house many believed to be the set­ting of the open­ing scene in “The Hid­den Mas­ter­piece.” In April of that year, Ger­man war­planes bombed the Span­ish Basque city of Guer­ni­ca, and Picas­so aban­doned all oth­er projects and set to work on his famous large can­vas, which he com­plet­ed in June of that same year (below, see him in his Grands-Augustin stu­dio, at work on Guer­ni­ca). Like his ear­li­er, cubist work, Guer­ni­ca divid­ed crit­ics and per­plexed some of his peers. At its unveil­ing in the 1937 Paris Exhi­bi­tion, the paint­ing “gar­nered lit­tle atten­tion.” Unlike the trag­ic Fren­hofer of Balzac’s sto­ry, how­ev­er, Picas­so did not suc­cumb to self-doubt and lived to see his work vin­di­cat­ed. See this site to learn more about Balzac and Picas­so, includ­ing dis­cus­sion of a dis­put­ed 1934 draw­ing some believe to be Picasso’s own “hid­den mas­ter­piece.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

See Pablo Picasso’s Spare, Ten­der Illus­tra­tions For a Lim­it­ed Edi­tion of Aristo­phanes’ Lysis­tra­ta (1934)

Watch Picas­so Cre­ate Entire Paint­ings in Mag­nif­i­cent Time-Lapse Film (1956)

A 3D Tour of Picasso’s Guer­ni­ca

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

Free Online Religion Courses

in | January 10th, 2014

Get free Reli­gion cours­es online from the world’s lead­ing uni­ver­si­ties. You can down­load these audio & video cours­es straight to your com­put­er or mp3 play­er. For more online cours­es, vis­it our com­plete col­lec­tion of Free Cours­es.

• A Jour­ney through West­ern Chris­tian­i­ty: from Per­se­cut­ed Faith to Glob­al Reli­gion (200 — 1650) — Mas­sive Open Online Course (MOOC) — Yale Uni­ver­si­ty
• Ancient Israel — Free Online Video — Daniel Flem­ing, NYU
• Bud­dhism and Cog­ni­tive Sci­ence — Free Online Video — John Ver­vaeke, U Toron­to
• Bud­dhism and Mod­ern Psy­chol­o­gy — Free Online Video — Robert Wright, for­mer­ly Prince­ton
• Bud­dhism Through its Scrip­tures — Free Online Video — Charles Hal­lisey, Har­vard
• Bud­dhist Psy­chol­o­gy — Free Online Audio — Eleanor Rosch, UC Berke­ley
• Chris­tian­i­ty and Ethics — Free Online Video — Lynn Mitchell, U. of Hous­ton
• Chris­tian­i­ty Through Its Scrip­tures — Free Online Video — Karen L. King, Har­vard
• Faith and Glob­al­iza­tion — Free iTunes Video — Tony Blair, Miroslav Volf, Yale
• From Israelite to Jew — Free iTunes Audio, Michael Sat­low, Brown Uni­ver­si­ty
• Hin­duism Through Its Scrip­tures — Mas­sive Open Online Course (MOOC) — Har­vard
• His­tor­i­cal Jesus — Free iTunes Audio — Thomas Shee­han, Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty
• His­to­ry of Chris­t­ian Phi­los­o­phy - Free Online Video — Daniel Bonevac, UT Austin
• His­to­ry of Islam­ic Soci­ety — Free Online Video — Richard Bul­li­et, Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty
• His­to­ry and Nature of Apolo­get­ics — Free iTunes Audio — Cor­nelius Van­Til, West­min­ster The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary
• Intro­duc­tion to the Old Tes­ta­ment (Hebrew Bible) — Free Online Course — Chris­tine Hayes, Yale.
• Intro­duc­tion to the Quran: The Scrip­ture of Islam — Mas­sive Open Online Course (MOOC) — Notre Dame, Gabriel Said Reynolds
• Intro­duc­tion to New Tes­ta­ment His­to­ry and Lit­er­a­ture — Free Online Course — Dale B. Mar­tin, Yale
• Intro­duc­tion to Reli­gion — Free Online Video — Lora Hobbs, Mis­souri State
• Islam Through Its Scrip­tures — Mas­sive Open Online Course (MOOC) — Har­vard
• Judaism Through Its Scrip­tures — Mas­sive Open Online Course (MOOC) — Har­vard
• Medieval Church — Free iTunes Audio — Carl True­man, West­min­ster The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary
• Phi­los­o­phy of Reli­gion — Free Online Audio — T. J. Maw­son, Oxford
• Phi­los­o­phy, Sci­ence and Reli­gion: Sci­ence and Phi­los­o­phy — Mas­sive Open Online Course (MOOC) — Uni­ver­si­ty of Edin­burgh
• Reli­gious Lit­er­a­cy: Tra­di­tions and Scrip­tures — Mas­sive Open Online Course (MOOC) — Har­vard
• Sci­ence, Mag­ic and Reli­gion: From Antiq­ui­ty to Present — Free Online Video — Courte­nay Raia, UCLA
• Sci­ence & Reli­gion 101 — Mas­sive Open Online Course (MOOC) — Uni­ver­si­ty of Alber­ta
• Sci­ence vs. Reli­gion — Web Video — Mark Ver­non, Journalist/Philosopher
• The Bible and Eng­lish Lit­er­a­ture — Free Online Video (+ More Back­ground) — Northrop Frye, U. of Toron­to
• The Cen­tral Phi­los­o­phy of Tibet - Free Online Audio — Robert Thur­man, Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty
• The Hebrew Bible — Free Video — Shaye J.D. Cohen, Har­vard
• The Hebrew Scrip­tures in Judaism & Chris­tian­i­ty - Free Video — Shaye J.D. Cohen, Har­vard
• The Ref­or­ma­tion — Free Video - Carl True­man, West­min­ster The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary
• Reli­gion, Con­flict and Peace — Mas­sive Open Online Course (MOOC) — Har­vard
• The Tal­mud: A Method­olog­i­cal Intro­duc­tion — Mas­sive Open Online Course (MOOC) — North­west­ern Uni­ver­si­ty
• The­ol­o­gy of Hebrews — Free iTunes Audio — R. Gafin, West­min­ster The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary

For a com­plete list of online cours­es, please vis­it our com­plete col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

For a list of online cer­tifi­cate pro­grams, vis­it 200 Online Cer­tifi­cate & Micro­cre­den­tial Pro­grams from Lead­ing Uni­ver­si­ties & Com­pa­nies, which fea­tures pro­grams from our part­ners Cours­era, Udac­i­ty, Future­Learn and edX.

And if you’re inter­est­ed in Online Mini-Mas­ters and Mas­ter’s Degrees pro­grams from uni­ver­si­ties, see our col­lec­tion: Online Degrees & Mini Degrees: Explore Mas­ters, Mini Mas­ters, Bach­e­lors & Mini Bach­e­lors from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Against All Odds: A Gentle Introduction to Statistics Hosted by Harvard Geneticist Pardis Sabeti (Free Online Course)

in Harvard, Math | January 10th, 2014

Worth a quick men­tion: Dr. Par­dis Sabeti, a media-savvy com­pu­ta­tion­al geneti­cist at Har­vard, has teamed up with the Annen­berg Foun­da­tion, to cre­ate a new intro­duc­tion to sta­tis­tics. In 31 nice­ly-pro­duced videos, Against All Odds: Inside Sta­tis­tics guides “view­ers through the wide range of sta­tis­ti­cal appli­ca­tions used by sci­en­tists, busi­ness own­ers, and even Shake­speare schol­ars, in their work and dai­ly lives.” It’s all about “real peo­ple work­ing on real prob­lems.”

The series starts with What Is Sta­tis­tics?. And then, along the way, the course cov­ers top­ics like Stan­dard Devi­a­tion, Cor­re­la­tion, Sam­ples and Sur­veys, and more. The clip above comes from the unit called Check­ing Assump­tion of Nor­mal­i­ty. And do note that each video mod­ule is com­ple­ment­ed by a Stu­dent Guide and Fac­ul­ty Guide spe­cif­ic to the unit.

Against All Odds: Inside Sta­tis­tics has been added to our col­lec­tion of Free Math Cours­es, a sub­set of our larg­er 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:

Sta­tis­tics Explained Through Mod­ern Dance: A New Way of Teach­ing a Tough Sub­ject

Cal­cu­lus Life­saver: A Free Online Course from Prince­ton

The Math of Rock Climb­ing

Math: Free Cours­es Online

Stanford Prof Makes Ukuleles from Wood Floor of New Concert Hall

in Music | January 10th, 2014

Last year, Stan­ford opened a glo­ri­ous new con­cert hall. Some­where dur­ing its con­struc­tion, Steven Sano, a pro­fes­sor in the Music Depart­ment, found some extra scraps of Alaskan yel­low cedar, the wood used to build the stage floor. He took the wood known “for its res­o­nance and fine grain” to a luthi­er and came home with two blond-top tenor ukes. They’re on dis­play above. Stan­ford News has more on the sto­ry.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jake Shimabukuro plays “Bohemi­an Rhap­sody” on the Uke

Musi­cians Re-Imag­ine the Com­plete Song­book of the Bea­t­les on the Ukulele

Amaz­ing Fact: Spaghet­ti and Ukulele Strings Actu­al­ly Grow on Trees

An Introduction to the Political Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin Through His Free Writings & Audio Lectures

in Philosophy | January 9th, 2014

Isa­iah Berlin casts a long shad­ow over mod­ern polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy. Ris­ing to promi­nence as a British pub­lic intel­lec­tu­al in the 1950s along­side thinkers like A.J. Ayer and Hugh Trevor-Rop­er, Berlin (writes Joshua Che­miss in The Oxon­ian Review of Books) was at one time a “cold war­rior,” his oppo­si­tion to Sovi­et Com­mu­nism the “lynch­pin” of his thought. But his longevi­ty and intel­lec­tu­al vital­i­ty meant he was much more besides, and he has remained a pop­u­lar ref­er­ence, though, as Che­miss points out, Berlin’s rep­u­ta­tion took a beat­ing from crit­ics on the left and right after his death in 1997. Born into a promi­nent Russ­ian-Jew­ish fam­i­ly, Berlin grew up in mid­dle class sta­bil­i­ty until the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion dis­man­tled the Czarist Rus­sia of his youth and his fam­i­ly relo­cat­ed to Britain in 1921.

Berlin’s child­hood expe­ri­ence of the Bol­she­viks was nev­er far from his mind and pre­cip­i­tat­ed his aver­sion to vio­lence and coer­cion, he con­fess­es above in a 1992 inter­view with his biog­ra­ph­er Michael Ignati­eff (who spent ten years in con­ver­sa­tion with Berlin). Orig­i­nal­ly broad­cast on BBC 2, Ignatieff’s inter­view serves as an intro­duc­tion to both the man him­self and to his past—in lengthy seg­ments that detail Berlin’s his­to­ry through pho­tographs and nar­ra­tion. Refer­ring to Berlin’s huge­ly influ­en­tial cat­e­go­riza­tion of intel­lec­tu­al his­to­ry, The Hedge­hog and the Fox, Ignati­eff tells us: “He once wrote, ‘A fox knows many things, but a hedge­hog knows one, big thing.’ He was a hedge­hog, all his work was a defense of lib­er­ty.… All of his writ­ing can be read as a defense of the indi­vid­ual against the vio­lence of the crowd and the dog­ma of the par­ty line.”

Berlin was enor­mous­ly pro­lif­ic, in print as well as in record­ed media, and we have access to sev­er­al of his lec­tures online. One radio lec­ture series, Free­dom and its Betray­al, exam­ined six thinkers Berlin iden­ti­fied as “anti-lib­er­al.” Per­haps fore­most among these was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In his lec­ture on Rousseau above (con­tin­ued here in Parts 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6), Berlin elab­o­rates on his impor­tant dis­tinc­tion between types of lib­er­ty, a theme he returned to again and again, most famous­ly in a lec­ture, even­tu­al­ly pub­lished as a 57-page pam­phlet, called “Two Con­cepts of Lib­er­ty.” Berlin adapt­ed much of the ideas in these lec­tures from his Polit­i­cal Ideas in the Roman­tic Age—writ­ten between 1950 and 1952 and pub­lished posthumously—a text that Berlin called his “tor­so.”

Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty hosts an exten­sive “Isa­iah Berlin Vir­tu­al Library” that details the com­po­si­tion of “Two Con­cepts of Lib­er­ty,” from its ear­li­est draft stages (above) to its pub­li­ca­tion his­to­ry. You can read the full text of the pub­lished lec­ture here and lis­ten to Berlin’s record­ed dic­ta­tion of an ear­ly draft below.

In the pub­lished ver­sion of “Two Con­cepts of Lib­er­ty,” Berlin suc­cinct­ly sums up his major premise: “To coerce a man is to deprive him of free­dom.” Then he goes on:

free­dom from what? Almost every moral­ist in human his­to­ry has praised free­dom. Like hap­pi­ness and good­ness, like nature and real­i­ty, the mean­ing of this term is so porous that there lit­tle inter­pre­ta­tion that it seems able to resist….[There are] more than two hun­dred sens­es.… of this pro­tean word….

Berlin reduces the more than two hun­dred to two: neg­a­tive liberty—dealing with the areas of life in which one is free from any inter­fer­ence; and pos­i­tive liberty—his term for that which inter­feres in people’s lives for their sup­posed ben­e­fit and pro­tec­tion. Berlin’s con­cep­tions of these two types is anchored in spe­cif­ic geopo­lit­i­cal arrange­ments and philo­soph­i­cal tra­di­tions, as Dwight Mac­Don­ald explained in a 1959 review of the pub­lished text. He saw Com­mu­nism as an abuse of pos­i­tive lib­er­ty and wished to enhance so-called neg­a­tive lib­er­ty as much as pos­si­ble. As such, Berlin is often cit­ed approv­ing­ly by politi­cians and philoso­phers with more clas­si­cal, lim­it­ed under­stand­ings of state pow­er, although these may include lib­er­tar­i­ans as well as lib­er­als, find­ing com­mon ground in val­ues of eth­i­cal plu­ral­ism and robust civ­il lib­er­ties, both of which Berlin defend­ed stren­u­ous­ly.

Berlin draws his account of neg­a­tive lib­er­ty from the work of clas­si­cal lib­er­al polit­i­cal philoso­phers like John Locke, Adam Smith, and John Stu­art Mill. Most of his cri­tique of pos­i­tive lib­er­ty focused on Roman­ti­cism and Ger­man Ide­al­ism, in which he saw the begin­nings of total­i­tar­i­an­ism (above, hear Berlin’s final 1965 lec­ture on the “Roots of Roman­ti­cism,” con­tin­ued in Parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, & 7). Despite his pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with kinds of free­dom, his thought was extra­or­di­nar­i­ly idio­syn­crat­ic, wide-rang­ing, and diverse. Oxford hopes to soon add the text of much of Berlin’s pub­lished work to its Vir­tu­al Library. Now, in addi­tion to “Two Con­cepts of Lib­er­ty,” it also hous­es online text of the essay col­lec­tion Con­cepts and Cat­e­gories. While we await the post­ing of more Berlin texts, we might attend again to Berlin’s con­cep­tion of types of free­dom, and hear them defined by the philoso­pher him­self in a 1962 inter­view:

As in the case of words which every­one is in favour of, ‘free­dom’ has a very great many sens­es – some of the world’s worst tyran­nies have been under­tak­en in the name of free­dom. Nev­er­the­less, I should say that the word prob­a­bly has two cen­tral sens­es, at any rate in the West. One is the famil­iar lib­er­al sense in which free­dom means that every man has a life to live and should be giv­en the fullest oppor­tu­ni­ty of doing so, and that there are only two ade­quate rea­sons for con­trol­ling men. The first is that there are oth­er goods besides free­dom, such as, for exam­ple, secu­ri­ty or peace or cul­ture, or oth­er things which human beings need, which must be giv­en them, apart from the ques­tion of whether they want them or not. Sec­ond­ly, if one man obtains too much, he will deprive oth­er peo­ple of their free­dom – free­dom for the pike means death to the carp – and this is a per­fect­ly ade­quate rea­son for cur­tail­ing free­dom. Still, cur­tail­ing free­dom isn’t the same as free­dom.

The sec­ond sense of the word is not so much a mat­ter of allow­ing peo­ple to do what they want as the idea that I want to be gov­erned by myself and not pushed around by oth­er peo­ple; and this idea leads one to the sup­po­si­tion that to be free means to be self-gov­ern­ing. To be self-gov­ern­ing means that the source of author­i­ty must lie in me – or in us, if we’re talk­ing about a com­mu­ni­ty. And if the source of free­dom lies in me, then it’s com­par­a­tive­ly unim­por­tant how much con­trol there is, pro­vid­ed the con­trol is exer­cised by myself, or my rep­re­sen­ta­tives, or my nation, my peo­ple, my tribe, my Church, and so forth. Pro­vid­ed that I am gov­erned by peo­ple who are sym­pa­thet­ic to me, or under­stand my inter­ests, I don’t mind how much of my life is pried into, or whether there is a pri­vate province which is divid­ed from the pub­lic province; and in some mod­ern States – for exam­ple the Sovi­et Union and oth­er States with total­i­tar­i­an gov­ern­ments – this sec­ond view seems to be tak­en.

Between these two views, I see no pos­si­bil­i­ty of rec­on­cil­i­a­tion.  

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Leo Strauss: 15 Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es Online

Intro­duc­tion to Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Yale Course

Alain de Bot­ton Tweets Short Course in Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy

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

“Lol My Thesis” Showcases Painfully Hilarious Attempts to Sum up Years of Academic Work in One Sentence

in Comedy, Education | January 9th, 2014

Image from Ph.D. Comics

A true fact about the the­sis stage of an advanced degree: What­ev­er the aca­d­e­m­ic field, whether writ­ing a fifty page bachelor’s or master’s the­sis or 250 plus page doc­tor­al dis­ser­ta­tion, at some point, you will need to win­now your argu­ment down to an abstract sum­ma­ry of a cou­ple suc­cinct para­graphs. Then, one inevitably finds—when rid­ing ele­va­tors with col­leagues and men­tors, talk­ing to rel­a­tives over hol­i­day din­ners, jus­ti­fy­ing one’s exis­tence to friends and acquaintances—that the whole damned thing needs to some­how reduce to one intel­li­gi­ble sen­tence or two. It’s all any­one has the patience for, hon­est­ly, and it saves you the trou­ble of try­ing to recon­struct com­plex argu­ments for peo­ple who won’t under­stand or care about them and who gen­er­al­ly only asked out of polite­ness any­way.

But how, how, to cram years of research, agony, tur­moil, crush­ing fail­ure and soar­ing epiphany into bite-sized con­ver­sa­tion­al nuggets with­out gross over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tion to the point of tau­to­log­i­cal absur­di­ty? Can it even be done?! The blog “lol my the­sis,” start­ed last year by a Har­vard senior study­ing Human Devel­op­men­tal and Regen­er­a­tive Biol­o­gy, sug­gests that it can, but not with­out hilar­i­ous results. Part of an explod­ing genre of aca­d­e­m­ic par­o­dy (and pro­cras­ti­na­tion) sites, lol my the­sis proud­ly ven­tures forth in its mis­sion of “sum­ming up years of work in one sen­tence” with open sub­mis­sions from cur­rent stu­dents. Many of the sub­mis­sions are from the sci­ences, and many from under­grad­u­ate the­ses, but a fair num­ber also come from human­i­ties and post-grad­u­ate stud­ies. Take, for exam­ple, the fol­low­ing sub­mis­sion from an MFA Cre­ative Non­fic­tion stu­dent at Emer­son Col­lege, which direct­ly address­es the intend­ed audi­ence:

“A col­lec­tion of non­fic­tion essays, which means they’re writ­ten about real peo­ple and events, mom. Remem­ber all those times you accused me of not lis­ten­ing to the things you said?”

A pas­sive aggres­sive exam­ple that most of us who’ve been through the process can relate to at some lev­el. Anoth­er one that hits home is this, from a Vas­sar Polit­i­cal Sci­ence major, who dis­cov­ers too late that the argu­ment doesn’t work: “Oops: Turns out self-pub­lished poet­ry didn’t actu­al­ly affect Indi­an pol­i­tics but I’m 60 pages in, so.”

The sub­mis­sions from the sci­ences do not dis­ap­point. For exam­ple, from a Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land stu­dent of Bio­log­i­cal Sci­ences: “We spent thou­sands of gov­ern­ment dol­lars to cre­ate a mouse mod­el for a dis­ease only 32 peo­ple in the world have.” And a Sci­ence Writ­ing stu­dent at M.I.T. gives us this par­tic­u­lar­ly impres­sive exam­ple of brevi­ty: “Wolves + humans, the ulti­mate fren­e­mies.” Not to be out­done, a Stem Cell Biol­o­gy stu­dent at Har­vard offers a grim­ly terse con­fes­sion­al: “I have killed so many fish.”

The sub­mis­sions are anony­mous, but some good sports have cho­sen to include links to their the­ses, endear­ing­ly hop­ing that some­one besides their advi­sor will actu­al­ly want to read them. Most of the sub­mis­sions, how­ev­er, sim­ply com­bine two qual­i­ties every advanced stu­dent knows all too well: a well-earned feel­ing of futil­i­ty and the mor­dant wit required to keep going any­way.

More wit­ty sum­maries can be found at lol my the­sis.

Relat­ed Con­tents:

The Illus­trat­ed Guide to a Ph.D.

Grad­u­ate School Bar­bie: A New Gift Idea for The Demor­al­ized Grad Stu­dent in Your Life

The Ph.D. Grind: Philip J. Guo’s Free Mem­oir Offers An Insider’s Look at Doc­tor­al Study

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

Four Female Punk Bands That Changed Women’s Role in Rock

in Music | January 8th, 2014

Today I am pleased to bring you sam­plings of a hand­ful of my favorite bands. It so hap­pens they are all most­ly-female or female-front­ed punk bands. This fact to me seems almost inci­den­tal to my enjoyment—these are all fan­tas­tic musi­cians, song­writ­ers, and/or per­son­al­i­ties. And yet their com­mon­al­i­ties are high­ly remark­able all the same. Punk intro­duced aggres­sive, all-female bands like The Slits and front­women like Sioux­ie Sioux who nev­er had to play vul­ner­a­ble objects, des­per­ate seduc­tress­es, jilt­ed lovers, femme fatales, etc. and yet still man­i­fest­ed their pow­er in their sex­u­al­i­ty as well as in their fierce intel­li­gence and fury. In the late ’70s, women strode out in front as lead­ers in punk scenes in the UK and US, and helped to change the gen­der pol­i­tics of rock and roll.

First up, the Run­aways, a band best known today for the lat­er careers of gui­tarists Joan Jett and Lita Ford. The Run­aways tend to get unfair­ly pegged as lit­tle more than wards and projects of man­ag­er Kim Fow­ley, but the L.A. band formed organ­i­cal­ly around Jett and drum­mer Sandy West in 1975 and suc­ceed­ed in their own right after split­ting with Fow­ley in 1977. While they did not tech­ni­cal­ly begin as a punk band, they briefly became asso­ci­at­ed with sev­er­al New York and Lon­don punks, espe­cial­ly due to Jett’s ori­en­ta­tion toward glam, garage, and punk. Ford, known for her flashy gui­tar solos, want­ed to go met­al (and lat­er did), and the band pulled apart in 1978. The Run­aways were so rock n’ roll that they were biggest in Japan, espe­cial­ly their song “Cher­ry Bomb” from their first, self-titled 1976 album. Watch them play the song above on Japan­ese TV in ’77.

Next (and my order­ing here means noth­ing, by the way), The Slits. When Ger­man-born front­woman Ari Up (step­daugh­ter of John Lydon, as it hap­pens) passed away from can­cer in 2010, many, many peo­ple mourned her death. And many more sent “Slits” trend­ing on all the social net­works. It was long past time then for a more pub­lic pro­file of the band, which reformed in 2005 but most­ly absent much crit­i­cal notice. Aris­ing in 1976 from mem­bers of a band called Flow­ers of Romance (lat­er the name of an album and song by Lydon’s Pub­lic Image Ltd.), the most­ly all-female Slits made a very dif­fer­ent sound from the Run­aways some­what for­mu­la­ic hard rock. Like the Clash, with whom they often played, the Slits evolved from raw street punk to tak­ing reg­gae ideas and mak­ing some­thing new, in their case some­thing weird­er, wob­bli­er, and more angu­lar than most any­one else at the time (though lat­er male post-punk bands like Swell Maps and Lydon’s PIL took much from them). See them do “Typ­i­cal Girls” above in a rare music video, and check out their cov­er of “Heard it Through the Grapevine.”

Siouxsie Sioux, of Siouxsie and the Ban­shees, and lat­er the Crea­tures, began her career in London’s punk scene as a fol­low­er of the Sex Pis­tols. In a scene thronged with inven­tive kids com­pet­ing for atten­tion, she stood out. Once she decid­ed to take the stage her­self (after an impromp­tu jam of “The Lord’s Prayer” with gui­tarist Steve Sev­erin and Sid Vicious on drums) and form her own band, she seemed to Slits gui­tarist Viv Alber­tine to have arrived “ful­ly made, ful­ly in con­trol, utter­ly con­fi­dent.” Siouxsie was “unlike any female singer before or since,” wrote rock jour­nal­ist Jon Sav­age, “com­mand­ing yet aloof, entire­ly mod­ern.” She was also a phe­nom­e­nal song­writer and, along with The Cure, Bauhaus, and The Damned, gets credit—for bet­ter or worse—for the ori­gins of goth rock. See Siouxsie com­mand the stage in 1978 above, doing “Hong Kong Gar­den.”

I feel I would be most remiss if I did not include Wendy O. Williams. As we seem to end­less­ly debate the social val­ue of cer­tain female pop stars clum­sy attempts to shock us, Williams spent most of the ‘70s onstage top­less, saw­ing gui­tars in half with chain­saws, and set­ting cars on fire. Was her band, the Plas­mat­ics, any good? It’s hard to say. They were… uneven. Not much of a singer, Williams and the Plas­mat­ics embraced a more rau­cous ver­sion of the Runaway’s hard rock and even­tu­al­ly moved toward met­al. This is not nec­es­sar­i­ly music you lis­ten to, it’s music you expe­ri­ence, in the sheer amount of bare­ly-con­trolled chaos Williams and the band con­jured onstage. Some of the stunts might look sil­ly in hind­sight, but bear in mind, she pushed the bound­aries of deco­rum over thir­ty years ago with the kind of sex­u­al frank­ness and pow­er that still makes our cul­ture very ner­vous. Williams’ antics made her a prime fig­ure for tele­vi­sion (like gross-out punk provo­ca­teur G.G. Allin, she became some­thing of a nov­el­ty act on the talk-show cir­cuit). See her above with the Plas­mat­ics on Sol­id Gold in 1981, with the added bonus of an inter­view with the “Madame” pup­pet (of Way­land Flow­ers and Madame) after the per­for­mance.

I can­not begin to do jus­tice here to the groundswell of excel­lent female punk bands from the ‘70s and ‘80s (not even to men­tion the ‘90s), and I can’t over­state their impor­tance. Dr. Helen Red­ding­ton, for­mer bassist and singer for ’70s punk band The Chefs, approv­ing­ly quotes jour­nal­ist Car­o­line Coon, one­time man­ag­er of both The Clash and The Slits as say­ing: “it would be pos­si­ble to tell the whole sto­ry of British punk sole­ly through its female bands and artists” (this is much less the case in U.S. punk his­to­ry). You might wish to check out the rather crude­ly made, but inter­est­ing doc­u­men­tary She’s a Punk Rock­er and the data­base on punk77.com for more. I haven’t men­tioned Pat­ti Smith, but we cov­er her body of work fre­quent­ly enough here. Yes, I’ve left off Blondie, and of course X‑Ray Spex, and two more favorites of mine—the sad­ly under­rat­ed but tru­ly awe­some Bush Tetras and the obscure, Devo-like Mo-Dettes. The list, as always, could go on, but per­haps some of you have your own favorite female or female-front­ed punk bands. If so, add them to the com­ments, prefer­ably with a link to audio or video.

via Net­work Awe­some

Relat­ed Con­tent:

CBGB’s: The Roots of Punk Lets You Watch Vin­tage Footage from the Hey­day of NYC’s Great Music Scene

The Art of Punk Presents a New Doc­u­men­tary on The Dead Kennedys and Their Grit­ty Aes­thet­ics

New Doc­u­men­tary Brings You Inside Africa’s Lit­tle-Known Punk Rock Scene

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