This past spring, Timothy Blais wrote his masters thesis at McGill University in Montreal. Titled “A new quantization condition for parity-violating three-dimensional gravity,” the thesis clocks in at 74 pages and gets into some serious physics. The first line reads: “(2+1)-dimensional gravity with a negative cosmological constant is a topological theory with no local degrees of freedom.” I have to admit that Tim lost me right there. But he has made some amends with Bohemian Gravity, a potentially viral video that explores string theory with the help of an a cappella parody of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. I have to admit that I don’t quite understand the substance of the video either. But I am thoroughly entertained and that counts for something.
Blais previously recorded “Rolling in the Higgs,” a scientific riff on Adele’s song. According to his Facebook page, these “science-parody creations are 100% originally recorded and made out of unaltered sounds from his mouth, throat and vocal cords.” Keep an eye on his YouTube Channel, acapellascience, for more videos (we hope) in the future.
For years now, the buzzword “Neuroplasticity” has crossed the lips of many major thinkers in psychology, neurology, and educational theory. Maybe, as some allege, it is a “dirty word”—vague and in need of specific clarification. Maybe. But the contexts in which it arises point to an important idea: that we are capable of learning new things, all the time, at any stage of life, and that those new learning experiences change and renew our brains in ways we can’t predict or imagine. So today, for those students returning to school and those lifelong learners for whom every season beckons with new opportunities to acquire new skills and knowledge, we present to you our collections of free online courses, books, films, language lessons, textbooks, and other resources to exercise your neuroplastic mind.
Free Online Courses: This list brings together over 750 free online courses from leading universities, including Stanford, Yale, MIT, UC Berkeley, Oxford and more. These courses range across all disciplines – history, physics, philosophy, psychology and beyond. Most all of these courses are available in audio, and roughly 75% are available in video. In total, you will find over 2o,000 hours of free lectures from world-class institutions here.
Free MOOCs: Whatever you’re into (philosophy?, behavioral economics?, music history?), you’ll likely find a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) to suit you in our list of classes from leading universities. Many MOOCs offer certificates of completion (though rarely course credits that will actually transfer to universities). 125 MOOCs will be launching between now and the end of October. See our complete list.
Free Language Lessons: Perhaps learning a new language is high on your list this fall. Well, here is a great way to do it. Take your pick of 46 languages including, Spanish, French, Italian, Mandarin, English, Russian, Dutch, even Finnish, Yiddish and Esperanto. The lessons are all free and ready to download.
Free Audio Books: What better way to spend your free time than listening to some of the greatest books ever written? Our collection 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free includes works by Arthur Conan Doyle, James Joyce, Jane Austen, Edgar Allan Poe, George Orwell and more recent writers — Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov, Raymond Carver, etc. You can download these classic books straight to your gagdets, then listen as you go.
[Note: If you’re looking for a contemporary book, you can download one free audio book from Audible.com. Find details on Audible’s no-strings-attached deal here.]
Free eBooks: You have always wanted to read the great works. And now is your chance. When you dive into our collection of 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices you will find great works by some classic writers (Dickens, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare and Tolstoy) and more modern writers (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, and Kurt Vonnegut). The collection also gives you access to the 51-volume Harvard Classics.
Free Textbooks: We have scoured the web and pulled together a list of 150 Free Textbooks. It’s a great resource particularly if you’re looking to learn math, computer science or physics on your own. There might be a diamond in the rough here for you.
Free Movies: With a click of a mouse, or a tap of your touch screen, you will have access to 500 great movies. The collection hosts many classics, westerns, indies, documentaries, silent films and film noir favorites. It features work by some of our great directors (Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Andrei Tarkovsky and David Lynch) and performances by cinema legends: John Wayne, Jack Nicholson, Audrey Hepburn, Charlie Chaplin, and beyond. On this one page, you will find thousands of hours of cinema bliss.
Enjoy stretching your brains in new and interesting ways this season.
At least a few of you — more than a few, I’d wager — think of David Lynch as your favorite filmmaker. Back when we posted about the greatest films of all time as named by Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, and Quentin Tarantino, you probably wondered what selections the Eraserhead auteur would make. You can get an idea from the interview clip above, in which Lynch considers the questions “Whose work do you admire?” and “What movies have you watched over and over and could still watch a hundred times more?” Well-asked, since the movies we actually watch most often reveal more about us than the movies we happen to call “favorites.” “I love Stanley Kubrick,” he replies. “I can watch his movies over and over. I love Billy Wilder, Sunset Boulevard in particular, and I’ve watched it over and over. I loved the world Billy Wilder created.”
“I love Fellini,” Lynch continues. “Watched ’em over and over. If you want to see some great comedies, check out Jacques Tati’s Mr. Hulot’s Holiday. I like W.C. Fields. I like the movie It’s a Gift. I like Hitchcock, particularly Rear Window.” And after a moment of reflection: “I like a lot of different filmmakers, but those are… some of them.” MUBI.com also offers a post on Lynch’s favorite films, drawn from Lynch on Lynch, Chris Rodley’s book-length interview with the director, and Catching the Big Fish, Lynch’s own volume on meditating your way to interesting ideas.
Here he provides more details on his fellow filmmakers of choice:
In 8½, “Fellini manages to accomplish with film what mostly abstract painters do – namely, to communicate an emotion without ever saying or showing anything in a direct manner, without ever explaining anything, just by a sort of sheer magic.”
In Sunset Boulevard, Wilder “manages to accomplish pretty much the same abstract atmosphere, less by magic than through all sorts of stylistic and technical tricks. The Hollywood he describes in the film probably never existed, but he makes us believe it did, and he immerses us in it, like a dream.”
Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday wins his favor “for the amazing point of view that Jacques Tati casts at society through it. When you watch his films, you realize how much he knows about – and loved – human nature, and it can only be an inspiration to do the same.”
Rear Window does the same “for the brilliant way in which Alfred Hitchcock manages to create – or rather, re-create – a whole world within confined parameters. James Stewart never leaves his wheelchair during the film, and yet, through his point of view, we follow a very complex murder scheme. Hitchcock manages to take something huge and condense it into something really small. And he achieves that through a complete control of film making technique.”
Communicating without directly saying, showing, or explaining? Crafting abstract atmosphere? Evoking a dreamlike version of Hollywood? Casting an eye on society that sees things differently? Creating worlds in tight confines? Seems to me, as someone who’s experienced more than his share of screenings of such films as Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive, that you could ascribe new versions of not one but all of these cinematic tendencies to Lynch himself. We call imitation the sincerest form of flattery, but surely it counts as a whole other order of compliment to take the accomplishments of the creators who inspire you and somehow make them completely your own. It takes, as the man says, a sort of sheer magic.
In an excerpt from her memoir published in Salon last month, Najla Said—daughter of literary critic and Palestinian-American political activist Edward Said—recalls her father’s legacy:
To very smart people who study a lot, Edward Said is the “father of postcolonial studies” or, as he told me once when he insisted I was wasting my college education by taking a course on postmodernism and I told him he didn’t even know what it was:
“Know what it is, Najla? I invented it!!!”
I still don’t know if he was joking or serious.
Most likely Said was only half serious, but it’s impossible to overstate the impact of his 1978 book Orientalism on the generations of students and activists that followed. As Najla writes, it’s “the book that everyone reads at some point in college, whether in history, politics, Buddhism, or literature class.” Said’s “postmodernism,” unlike that of Francois Lyotard or many others, avoided the pejorative baggage that came to attach to the term, largely because while he called into doubt certain ossified and pernicious categorical distinctions, he never stopped believing in the positive intellectual enterprise that gave him the tools and the position to make his critiques. He stubbornly called himself a humanist, “despite,” as he writes in the preface to the 2003 edition of his most famous book, “the scornful dismissal of the term by sophisticated post-modern critics”:
It isn’t at all a matter of being optimistic, but rather of continuing to have faith in the ongoing and literally unending process of emancipation and enlightenment that, in my opinion, frames and gives direction to the intellectual vocation.
In that same preface Said also writes of his aging, of the recent death of two mentors, and of “the necessary diminutions in expectations and pedagogic zeal which usually frame the road to seniority.” He does not write about the leukemia that would take his life that same year at the age of 67, ten years ago this month.
For the interview above, however, Said’s last, he speaks candidly about his illness. Fittingly, the video opens with a quote from Roland Barthes: “The only sort of interview that one could, if forced to, defend would be where the author is asked to articulate what he cannot write.” Said tells interviewer Charles Glass that his main preoccupation in the past few months had been his illness, something he thought he had “mastered” but which had forced him to confront the incontrovertible fact of his mortality and sapped him of his will to work.
Said, as always, is articulate and engaging, and the conversation soon turns to his other preoccupations: the situation of the Palestinian people and the politics and personal toll of living “between worlds.” He also expresses his disappointment in friends who had become “mouthpieces of the status quo,” banging the drums for war and Western Imperialism in this, the first year of the war in Iraq. One suspects that he refers to Christopher Hitchens, among others, though he is too discreet to name names. Said has a tremendous amount to say on not only the current events of the time but on his entire career as a writer and thinker. Though he’s given dozens of impassioned interviews over the decades, this may be the most honest and unguarded, as he unburdens himself during his final days of those things, perhaps, he could not bring himself to write.
Thanks to Stephanos for sending this video our way.
In 1971, a year before Last Tango in Paris was released in the US, Bette Davis went on The Dick Cavett Show to dish on a career’s worth of onscreen kisses. Four decades on, when access to Netflix is all that’s required to enjoy a visual intimacy bordering on the gynecological with Halle Berry or Maria Bello, Davis still captivates. Watch the above excerpt and don’t feel ashamed if you spend the rest of the day trying to guess the identity of the actor who—in Cavett’s words—“was so repulsive that you just couldn’t stand to do it.”
Whoever he was, she cashed her paycheck and took one for the team, just as she did in 1930, when under contract to Universal, the self-described “Yankee-ist, modest virgin that ever walked the earth” was pressed into service as a “test girl.” This involved lying on a couch as a succession of 15 auditioning actors demonstrated their passionate kissing abilities.
That session was filmed, but evidence has yet to surface on the Internet. Fans will just have to content themselves with sneaking onto a three-acre private arboretum in Massachusetts for a glimpse of an Anna Colman Ladd fountain featuring four frolicsome nudes. Word has it a certain modest virgin Yankee served as the model for one of these figures while still in her teens. Or so a legendary actress revealed to Playboy at the age of 74.
Gregory Corso was kind of the Joey Bishop of the Beats—a member of the inner circle of Kerouac, Burroughs, and Ginsberg, but never quite achieving their degree of notoriety. Nevertheless, he outlived them all, and he was also arguably the biggest comedian in a group of inveterate pranksters (see him crack up an interviewer in this clip). A streetwise Greenwich Village kid, Corso learned his craft on the streets of Little Italy, and briefly in a psych ward and a prison cell, as much as in Harvard classes and the San Francisco poetry scene, where he relocated along with Allen Ginsberg in 1955, arriving just one day too late for Ginsberg’s historic Six Gallery reading of “Howl.”
Perhaps in order to make up for his absence then, Corso decided to make his presence decidedly known nearly twenty years later in a Ginsberg reading at New York’s 92nd St. Y in February of 1973. Ginsberg is captivating as always, reading in that almost hypnotic cadence, with elliptical conversational asides, that he and Kerouac both mastered. Listen to the whole reading above. You won’t be disappointed. But for a laugh, skip ahead to 5:50.
Corso interrupts the solemn proceedings with some wiseguy heckling, calling out Ginsberg’s “poesy bullshit.” Ginsberg takes it in stride, improvising and tossing back banter. Ginsberg’s father Louis is also onstage, and he takes up a muttering defense against Corso’s verbal siege as Ginsberg begins singing around 10:30.
Whether the whole thing was staged or a spontaneous outburst by Corso is anyone’s guess, but the two lifelong friends could put on quite a show when they wanted to, like this happening in 1981. Wherever Ginsberg and Corso lived and breathed poetry—as Michelle Dean writes at The Rumpus—heckling was “an integral part of poetry reading.”
Didn’t we used to hear all sorts of grumbling about the disappearance of the handwritten letter? What a relief those complaints seem now to have subsided, leaving us in peace to efficiently type to one another about how we find pieces of longhand correspondence fascinating purely as artifacts of our favorite historical figures. If you share that fascination, have a look at The Art of Handwriting, an exhibit from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art now on display through October 27 at Washington D.C.‘s Lawrence A. Fleischman gallery, which showcases not only the artistic aspects of handwriting, but the handwriting of actual artists. “An artist might put pen to paper just as he or she would apply a line to a drawing,” says the exhibition’s site. “For each artist, a leading authority interprets how the pressure of line and sense of rhythm speak to that artist’s signature style. And questions of biography arise: does the handwriting confirm assumptions about the artist, or does it suggest a new understanding?” Plus, we have here the ideal test of those handwriting analysis booths at county fairs — could they detect these artistic personalities?
Just above, we have a page of abstract expressionist painter Willem de Kooning’s missive in light-blue ink of March 28, 1966 to friend and fellow abstract expressionist Michael Loew. (They’ve even included the envelope.) At the top of the post, you’ll find a page another painter, the famously blossom-focused Georgia O’Keeffe, wrote to New Mexico modernist Cady Wells in 1939. The subject of the letter? “O’Keeffe worries that Wells doesn’t like a painting she has bought and suggests replacements; and describes an argument she had with a friend.” That description comes from the Smithsonian’s catalog, as does this one: “[Jackson] Pollock writes with descriptions of his new home in Springs, on Long Island, and discusses his work and that of other artists.” You can also view both pages of that evidently unscandalous piece of communication on the site. They’ve even got letters composed by hand in other languages, such as Marcel Duchamp writing to his sister Suzanne (below) on January 15, 1916. Don’t worry if you can’t read French, or if you think you can’t contextualize the personal content of any of the letters at all; focus on, as the Archives of American Art suggests, how “every message brims with the personality of the writer at the moment of interplay between hand, eye, mind, pen, and paper.” That, and the that hope schoolchildren won’t have to endure cursive lessons many generations longer.
In the Russian port city of Rostov-on-Don two men were having a beer this weekend and talking about the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (of course), when something went terribly wrong. An argument broke out, critical reason went out the window, and one man ended getting shot with rubber bullets. He’s in the hospital with non life-threatening injuries. The shooter now faces up to 10 years in jail, where he’ll have lots of time to ponder Kant’s theories.
If you would like to contemplate Kant in a more serene manner, we would invite you to check out his texts listed in our Free eBook collection:
One of the treasures of our time, biologist E.O. Wilson, the folksy and brilliant author of two Pulitzer Prize-winning books and the world’s leading authority on ants, is 84 years old and retired from his professorship at Harvard. But even in retirement he came up with one of the most innovative new scientific resources available today: the Encyclopedia of Life, a networked encyclopedia of all the world’s knowledge about life.
Six years ago Wilson announced his vision for such a project while accepting the 2007 TED Prize. He expressed a wish for a collaborative tool to create an infinitely expandable page for each species—all 1.9 million known so far—where scientists around the world can contribute text and images.
Wilson’s dream came true, not long after he announced it, and the EOL was so popular right away that it had to go off-line for a spell to expand its capacity to handle the traffic. The site was redesigned to be more accessible and to encourage contributions from users. It’s vision: to continue to dynamically catalog every living species, as research is completed, and to include the roughly 20,000 new species discovered every year.
Wilson’s vision is manifest in a fun and well-designed site useful for educators, academics, and any curious person with access to the Internet.
Search for a species or just browse. Each EOL taxonomy page features a detailed overview of the species, research, articles and media. Media can be filtered by images, video, and sound. There are 66 different pieces of media about Tasmanian Devils, for example. A group of Tassies, as they’re known, get pretty devilish over their dinner in this video, contributed by an Australian Ph.D. student.
As E.O. Wilson so eloquently puts it, the EOL has the potential to inspire others to search for life, to understand it, and, most importantly, to preserve it.
We rarely think about where F. Scott Fitzgerald’s hard-living, often tragic generation of American writers went to school. This year, however, Fitzgerald’s own almost-alma mater merits a note: the novelist began his studies at Princeton exactly one hundred years ago this fall, beginning classes on his birthday, September 24, 1913. To mark the occasion, that Ivy League institution has digitized their The Great Gatsby-writing alumnus’ manuscripts. Earlier this year, in fact, they completed the process on Fitzgerald’s manuscript, or manuscripts, of Gatsby itself. “We can see Fitzgerald at work on his third novel over a four-year period,” says the announcement from Princeton University Library’s Department of Rare Books and Special Collections (RBSC), which offers “Ur-Gatsby (2‑page fragment), the author’s abandoned effort, conceived in 1922 and written in 1923; The Great Gatsby autograph manuscript (302 pages), which he largely wrote in France and completed by September 1924;” and “corrected galleys of ‘Trimalchio,’ the novel’s working title when it was typeset by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1924, only to be much reworked by the author early in 1925.”
You can find these online in the Princeton University Digital Library. There you can also, naturally, find papers associated with This Side of Paradise, the novel Fitzgerald began, under the working title The Romantic Egoist, while still at Princeton. The book, says the RBSC, “still stands as the most famous literary work about Princeton University. While Fitzgerald was not a good student and never graduated, dropping out in 1917 to join the U.S. Army during World War I, he began learning the craft of writing as an undergraduate and befriended other students who were aspiring authors, Edmund Wilson, Class of 1916, and John Peale Bishop, Class of 1917. Fitzgerald came to form a deep affection for Princeton that lasted until his untimely death in Hollywood.” They’ve digitized the corrected 1918 typescript of The Romantic Egoist, and the manuscript of This Side of Paradise. You can peruse all of these online in the PUDL’s Fitzgerald collection. Some regard Gatsby as a perfect novel; Edmund Wilson called Paradise “one of the most illiterate books of any merit every published.” (“Hastily written” and “somewhat disjointed,” says the RBSC itself.) But seeing how either became the Fitzgerald books we know today will prove instructive to readers and writers, academics and (like Fitzgerald, evidently) non-academics alike.
You can find Gatsby and This Side of Paradise in our collection of 500 Free eBooks.
No one would call this the golden era of teaching, not with school budgets getting slashed, state governors routinely scoring political points at teachers’ expense, and the federal government forcing schools to teach to the test. But if today’s teachers are feeling beleaguered, they can always look back to a set of historical “documents” for a little comfort. For decades, museums and publishers have showcased two lists — one from 1872 (above) and another from 1915 (below) — that highlight the rigorous rules and austere moral codes under which teachers once taught. You couldn’t drink or smoke. In women’s cases, you couldn’t date, marry, or frequent ice cream parlors. And, for men, getting a shave in a barber shop was strictly verboten.
But are these documents real?
On its web site, the New Hampshire Historical Society writes that “the sources for these ‘rules’ are unknown; thus we cannot attest to their authenticity—only to their verisimilitude and charming quaintness.” “The rules from 1872 have been variously attributed to an 1872 posting in Monroe County, Iowa; to a one-room school in a small town in Maine; and to an unspecified Arizona schoolhouse. The 1915 rules are attributed to a Sacramento teachers’ contract and elsewhere to an unspecified 1915 magazine.” According to Snopes, the fact-checking web site, the 1872 list has been “displayed in numerous museums throughout North America,” over the past 50 years, “with each exhibitor claiming that it originated with their county or school district.” Heck, the lists even appeared in the venerated Washington Post not so long ago. Here are the rules:
Rules for Teachers — 1872
1. Teachers will fill the lamps and clean the chimney each day.
2. Each teacher will bring a bucket of water and a scuttle of coal for the day’s sessions.
3. Make your pens carefully. You may whittle nibs to the individual tastes of the pupils.
4. Men teachers may take one evening each week for courting purposes, or two evenings a week if they go to church regularly.
5. After ten hours in school, the teachers may spend the remaining time reading the Bible or other good books.
6. Women teachers who marry or engage in improper conduct will be dismissed.
7. Every teacher should lay aside from each day’s pay a goodly sum of his earnings. He should use his savings during his retirement years so that he will not become a burden on society.
8. Any teacher who smokes, uses liquor in any form, visits pool halls or public halls, or gets shaved in a barber shop, will give good reasons for people to suspect his worth, intentions, and honesty.
9. The teacher who performs his labor faithfully and without fault for five years will be given an increase of twenty-five cents per week in his pay.
Rules for Teachers — 1915
1. You will not marry during the term of your contract.
2. You are not to keep company with men.
3. You must be home between the hours of 8 PM and 6 AM unless attending a school function.
4. You may not loiter downtown in ice cream stores.
5. You may not travel beyond the city limits unless you have the permission of the chairman of the board.
6. You may not ride in a carriage or automobile with any man except your father or brother.
7. You may not smoke cigarettes.
8. You may not dress in bright colors.
9. You may under no circumstances dye your hair.
10. You must wear at least two petticoats.
11. Your dresses may not be any shorter than two inches above the ankles.
12. To keep the classroom neat and clean you must sweep the floor at least once a day, scrub the floor at least once a week with hot, soapy water, clean the blackboards at least once a day, and start the fire at 7 AM to have the school warm by 8 AM.
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