Offered on the Coursera platform, the Digital Marketing & E‑Commerce Professional Certificate consists of seven courses, all collectively designed to help students “develop digital marketing and e‑commerce strategies; attract and engage customers through digital marketing channels like search and email; measure marketing analytics and share insights; build e‑commerce stores, analyze e‑commerce performance, and build customer loyalty.” The courses include:
In total, this program “includes over 190 hours of instruction and practice-based assessments, which simulate real-world digital marketing and e‑commerce scenarios that are critical for success in the workplace.” Along the way, students will learn how to use tools and platforms like Canva, Constant Contact, Google Ads, Google Analytics, Hootsuite, HubSpot, Mailchimp, Shopify, and Twitter. The courses also focus on some timely AI topics–like how to kickstart marketing strategy ideas with AI, or use AI to help you understand your audience.
You can start a 7‑day free trial and explore the courses. If you continue beyond that, Google/Coursera will charge $49 USD per month. That translates to about $300 after 6 months.
Note: Open Culture has a partnership with Coursera. If readers enroll in certain Coursera courses and programs, it helps support Open Culture.
A 600-year-old manuscript—written in a script no one has ever decoded, filled with cryptic illustrations, its origins remaining to this day a mystery…. It’s not as satisfying a plot, say, of a National Treasure or Dan Brown thriller, certainly not as action-packed as pick-your-Indiana Jones…. The Voynich Manuscript, named for the antiquarian who rediscovered it in 1912, has a much more hermetic nature, somewhat like the work of Henry Darger; it presents us with an inscrutably alien world, pieced together from hybridized motifs drawn from its contemporary surroundings.
The Voynich Manuscriptis unique for having made up its own alphabet while also seeming to be in conversation with other familiar works of the period, such that it resembles an uncanny doppelganger of many a medieval text.
A comparatively long book at 234 pages, it roughly divides into seven sections, any of which might be found on the shelves of your average 1400s European reader—a fairly small and rarefied group. “Over time, Voynich enthusiasts have given each section a conventional name” for its dominant imagery: “botanical, astronomical, cosmological, zodiac, biological, pharmaceutical, and recipes.”
Scholars can only speculate about these categories. The manuscript’s origins and intent have baffled cryptologists since at least the 17th century, when, notes Vox, “an alchemist described it as ‘a certain riddle of the Sphinx.’” We can presume, “judging by its illustrations,” writes Reed Johnson at The New Yorker, that Voynich is “a compendium of knowledge related to the natural world.” But its “illustrations range from the fanciful (legions of heavy-headed flowers that bear no relation to any earthly variety) to the bizarre (naked and possibly pregnant women, frolicking in what look like amusement-park waterslides from the fifteenth century).”
The manuscript’s “botanical drawings are no less strange: the plants appear to be chimerical, combining incompatible parts from different species, even different kingdoms.” These drawings led scholar Nicholas Gibbs to compare it to the Trotula, a Medieval compilation that “specializes in the diseases and complaints of women,” as he wrote in a Times Literary Supplement article. It turns out, according to several Medieval manuscript experts who have studied the Voynich, that Gibbs’ proposed decoding may not actually solve the puzzle.
The degree of doubt should be enough to keep us in suspense, and therein lies the Voynich Manuscript’s enduring appeal—it is a black box, about which we might always ask, as Sarah Zhang does, “What could be so scandalous, so dangerous, or so important to be written in such an uncrackable cipher?” Wilfred Voynich himself asked the same question in 1912, believing the manuscript to be “a work of exceptional importance… the text must be unraveled and the history of the manuscript must be traced.” Though “not an especially glamorous physical object,” Zhang observes, it has nonetheless taken on the aura of a powerful occult charm.
But maybe it’s complete gibberish, a high-concept practical joke concocted by 15th century scribes to troll us in the future, knowing we’d fill in the space of not-knowing with the most fantastically strange speculations. This is a proposition Stephen Bax, another contender for a Voynich solution, finds hardly credible. “Why on earth would anyone waste their time creating a hoax of this kind?,” he asks. Maybe it’s a relic from an insular community of magicians who left no other trace of themselves. Surely in the last 300 years every possible theory has been suggested, discarded, then picked up again.
Should you care to take a crack at sleuthing out the Voynich mystery—or just to browse through it for curiosity’s sake—you can find the manuscript scanned at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, which houses the vellum original. Or flip through the Internet Archive’s digital version above. Another privately-run site contains a history and description of the manuscript and annotations on the illustrations and the script, along with several possible transcriptions of its symbols proposed by scholars. Good luck!
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.
Several generations of American students have now had the experience of being told by an English teacher that they’d been reading Robert Frost all wrong, even if they’d never read him at all. Most, at least, had seen his lines “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference” — or in any case, they’d heard them quoted with intent to inspire. “ ‘The Road Not Taken’ has nothing to do with inspiration and stick-to-it-iveness,” writes The Hedgehog Review’s Ed Simon in a reflection on Frost’s 150th birthday. Rather, “it’s a melancholic exhalation at the futility of choice, a dirge about enduring in the face of meaninglessness.”
Similarly misinterpreted is Frost’s second-known poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” whose wagon-driving narrator declares that “the woods are lovely, dark and deep, / But I have promises to keep / And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep.” You can hear the whole thing read aloud by Frost himself in the new video above from Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter. “What draws me in is the crystalline clarity of the imagery,” says Puschak. “You instantly picture this quiet, wintry evening scene that Frost conjures,” one that feels as if it belongs in “a liminal space” where “time and nature are not divided and structured in human ways.”
Frost evokes this feeling “precisely by structuring time and space in a human way” — that is, using the structures of poetry. Puschak breaks down the relevant techniques like its rhythm, meter, and rhyme scheme (rhyming being a quality of his work that once got him labeled, as Simon puts it, “a jingle man out of step with the prosodic conventions of the twentieth century”). But “the seeming simplicity of the imagery, phrasing, and structure of this poem conceal a lot of subtlety,” and the more you look at it, “the more you see the real world intruding on the narrator’s meditative moment.”
“It’s hard not to read ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ as concerning self-annihilation (albeit self-annihilation avoided),” writes Simon. After all, why place that “But” after “the observation of the dark, lovely finality of the woods, of that frozen lake so amenable to drowning oneself, if only then to reaffirm that here are promises to keep, miles to go before he sleeps, responsibilities and duties that must be fulfilled before death can be entertained?” This is hardly the kind of subject you’d expect from “the Norman Rockwell of verse,” as Frost’s sheer accessibility led many to perceive him. But as with poetry of any culture or era, sufficiently close reading is what really makes all the difference.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
In 590 AD, Pope Gregory I unveiled a list of the Seven Deadly Sins – lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride – as a way to keep the flock from straying into the thorny fields of ungodliness. These days, though, for all but the most devout, Pope Gregory’s list seems less like a means to moral behavior than a description of cable TV programming.
So instead, let’s look to one of the saints of the 20th century–Mahatma Gandhi. On October 22, 1925, Gandhi published a list he called the Seven Social Sins in his weekly newspaper Young India.
Politics without principles.
Wealth without work.
Pleasure without conscience.
Knowledge without character.
Commerce without morality.
Science without humanity.
Worship without sacrifice.
The list sprang from a correspondence that Gandhi had with someone only identified as a “fair friend.” He published the list without commentary save for the following line: “Naturally, the friend does not want the readers to know these things merely through the intellect but to know them through the heart so as to avoid them.”
Unlike the Catholic Church’s list, Gandhi’s list is expressly focused on the conduct of the individual in society. Gandhi preached non-violence and interdependence and every single one of these sins are examples of selfishness winning out over the common good.
It’s also a list that, if fully absorbed, will make the folks over at the US Chamber of Commerce and Ayn Rand Institute itch. After all, “Wealth without work,” is a pretty accurate description of America’s 1%. (Investments ain’t work. Ask Thomas Piketty.) “Commerce without morality” sounds a lot like every single oil company out there and “knowledge without character” describes half the hacks on cable news. “Politics without principles” describes the other half.
In 1947, Gandhi gave his fifth grandson, Arun Gandhi, a slip of paper with this same list on it, saying that it contained “the seven blunders that human society commits, and that cause all the violence.” The next day, Arun returned to his home in South Africa. Three months later, Gandhi was shot to death by a Hindu extremist.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.
Frank Lloyd Wright is unlikely to be displaced as the archetype of the genius architect anytime soon, at least in America, but even he had to start somewhere. At nine years old, as architecture YouTuber Stewart Hicks explains in the video above, Wright received a set of blocks from his mother, who hoped that “her son would grow up to become a great architect, and she thought the creativity unlocked and practiced with these blocks could kick-start his journey.” Evidently, she wasn’t wrong: “by the time Wright attempted to design his first building years later, he spent countless hours arranging the blocks,” familiar as he was with “proportion, symmetry, balance, and other principles of design well before he ever picked up a pencil.”
Of course, most of us played with blocks in childhood, and few of us now bear much comparison to the man who designed Fallingwater and the Guggenheim. But his mother’s toy selection was just one of many factors that influenced the architectural development that continued throughout Wright’s long life.
In fifteen minutes, Hicks explains as many of them as possible: his early opportunity to work on “shingle-style” homes, whose cruciform layout he would adapt into his own designs; his arrival in a Chicago that was still rebuilding after its great fire of 1871, when there were vast skyscraper interiors to be created; the new Midwestern manufacturing money prepared to commission homes from him; and his inspiring encounters with Japanese aesthetics, both at home and in Japan itself.
After returning from a 1905 Japan trip, Wright got to work on Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois. He had it built with the relatively new material of reinforced concrete, thus getting “in on the ground floor of a technology that could completely transform what buildings could do,” making possible “soaring cantilevers, graceful curves,” and other elements that would become part of his architectural signature. A few decades later, the United States’ suburb-building boom made Wright’s rural-urban “Usonian” homes and “Broadacre City” plan look prescient; indeed, “almost every single house inside of a postwar suburb bears his trace.” His willingness to appear in print and on film, radio, and television kept him in the American public consciousness, and he made sure to instill his principles into generations of students. Frank Lloyd Wright may be long gone, but he made sure that his vision of America would live on.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Even if you don’t speak Italian, you can make a decent guess at the meaning of the word mangiamaccheroni. The tricky bit is that maccheroni refers not to the pasta English-speakers today call macaroni, tubular and cut into small curved sections, but to pasta in general. Or at least it did around the turn of the twentieth century, when i mangiamaccheroni still had currency as a nickname for the inhabitants of the pasta-production center that was Naples. That identity had already been long established even then: Atlas Obscura’s Adee Braun quotes Goethe’s observation, on a trip there in 1787, that pasta “can be bought everywhere and in all the shops for very little money.”
Some especially hard-up Neapolitans could even eat it for free, or indeed get paid to eat it, provided they were prepared to do so at great speed, in full public view — and, as was the custom at the time, with their bare hands. “Many tourists took it upon themselves to organize such spectacles,” Braun writes. “Simply tossing a coin or two to the lazzaroni, the street beggars, would elicit a mad dash to consume the macaroni in their characteristic way, much to the amusement of their onlooking benefactors.” As you can see in the Edison film above, shot on the streets of Naples in 1903, their maccheroni came in long strands, more like what we know as spaghetti. (Fortunately, if that’s the word, tomato sauce had yet to catch on.)
“On my first visit there, in 1929, I acquired a distaste for macaroni, at least in Naples, for its insalubrious courtyards were jungles of it,” writes Waverley Root in The Food of Italy. “Limp strands hung over clotheslines to dry, dirt swirled through the air, flies settled to rest on the exposed pasta, pigeons bombed it from overhead,” and so on. By that time, what had been an aristocratic dish centuries earlier had long since become a staple even for the poor, owing to the proto-industrialization of its production (which Mussolini would relocate and greatly increase in scale). Nowadays, it goes without saying that Italy’s pasta is of the highest quality. And though Italians may not have invented the stuff, which was originally brought over from the Middle East, perhaps they did invent the mukbang.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
We have featured Benedict Cumberbatch reading letters by Kurt Vonnegut, Alan Turing, Albert Camus, and Nick Cave, along with passages from Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Melville’s Moby Dick. It’s all pretty heady stuff. And now it’s time for something completely different. Above, we have Mr. Cumberbatch reading, with classic British understatement, a comical letter written by Ross Beeley, back in 2011. The reading will help you get through another dystopian day.
Cumberbatch read this letter at an event called Letters Live, held in London’s Royal Albert Hall, in December 2024.
Imagine how many times someone born in the eighteen-sixties could ever expect to hear music. The number would vary, of course, depending on the individual’s class and family inclinations. Suffice it to say that each chance would have been more precious than those of us in the twenty-first century can easily understand. Our ability to hear practically any song we could possibly desire on command has changed our relationship to the art itself. Most of us now relate to it not as we would a special, even momentous event, but as we do to the water and electricity that come out of our walls — or, to put it in mid-nineteenth-century terms, as we do to our furniture.
Despite having been born in 1866 himself, Erik Satie understood humanity’s need to listen to music without really listening to it. The Inside the Score video above tells the story of how he developed musique d’ameublement, or “furniture music.” The artist Fernand Léger, a friend of Satie’s, recalled that after the two of them had been subjected to “unbearable vulgar music” in a restaurant, Satie spoke of the need for “music which would be part of the ambience, which would take account of it. I imagine it being melodic in nature: it would soften the noise of knives and forks without dominating them, without imposing itself.” The result was five deliberately ignorable compositions, each tailored to an ordinary space, which he wrote between 1917 and 1923.
Regarded in his lifetime less as a respectable composer than an unserious eccentric, he only managed to get one of those pieces played — and even when he did, everyone ignored his instructions to chat instead of listening. It was well after his death (in 1925) that such also-unconventional musical figures as John Cage and Brian Eno became famous for works similarly premised on a re-imagination of the relationship between music and listener. Eno, in particular, is now credited with the development of “ambient music” thanks to his albums like Music for Airports. Their popularity surely wouldn’t have surprised Satie; whether he could have foreseen ten-hour mixes of “chill lo-fi beats to study to” is another question entirely.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Walter Keane—supposed painter of “Big Eyed Children” and subject of a 2014 Tim Burton film—made a killing, attaining almost Thomas Kinkade-like status in the middlebrow art market of the 1950s and 60s. As it turns out, his wife, Margaret was in fact the artist, “painting 16 hours a day,” according to a Guardian profile. In some part, the story may illustrate how easy it was for a man like Walter to get millions of people to see what they wanted to see in the picture of success—a charismatic, talented man in front, his quiet, dutiful wife behind. Burton may not have taken too much license with the commonplace attitudes of the day when he has Christoph Waltz’s Walter Keane tell Margaret, “Sadly, people don’t buy lady art.”
And yet, far from the Keanes’ San Francisco, and perhaps as far as a person can get from Margaret’s frustrated acquiescence, we have Frida Kahlo creating a body of work that would eventually overshadow her husband’s, muralist Diego Rivera. Unlike Walter Keane, Rivera was a very good painter who did not attempt to overshadow his wife. Instead of professional jealousy, he had plenty of the personal variety. Even so, Rivera encouraged Kahlo’s career and recognized her formidable talent, and she, in turn, supported him. In 1933, when Florence Davies—whom Kahlo biographer Gerry Souter describes as “a local news hen”—caught up with her in Detroit, Kahlo “played the cheeky, but adoring wife” of Diego while he labored to finish his famous Detroit mural project.
That may be so, but she did not do so at her own expense. Quite the contrary. Asked if Diego taught her to paint, she replies, “’No, I didn’t study with Diego. I didn’t study with anyone. I just started to paint.’” At which point, writes Davies, “her eyes begin to twinkle” as she goes on to say, “’Of course, he does pretty well for a little boy, but it is I who am the big artist.’” Davies praises Kahlo’s style as “skillful and beautiful” and the artist herself as “a miniature-like little person with her long black braids wound demurely about her head and a foolish little ruffled apron over her black silk dress.” And yet, despite Kahlo’s confidence and serious intent, represented by a prominent photo of her at serious work, Davies—or more likely her editor—decided to title the article, “Wife of the Master Mural Painter Gleefully Dabbles in Works of Art,” a move that reminds me of Walter Keane’s patronizing attitude.
The belittling headline is quaint and disheartening, speaking to us, like the unearthed 1938 letter from Disney to an aspiring female animator, of the cruelty of casual sexism. Davies apparently filed another article on Rivera the year prior. This time the headline doesn’t mention Frida, though her fierce unflinching gaze, not Rivera’s wrestler’s mug, again adorns the spread. One sentence in the article says it all: “Freda [sic], it must be understood, is Senora Rivera, who came very near to stealing the show.” Davies then goes on to again describe Kahlo’s appearance, noting of her work only that “she does paint with great charm.” Six years later, Kahlo would indeed steal the show at her first and only solo show in the United States, then again in Paris, where surrealist maestro Andre Breton championed her work and the Louvre bought a painting, its first by a twentieth-century Mexican artist.
There may be no more contentious an issue at the level of local U.S. government than education. All of the socioeconomic and cultural fault lines communities would rather paper over become fully exposed in debates over funding, curriculum, districting, etc. But we rarely hear discussions about educational policy at the national level these days.
You’ll hear no major political candidate deliver a speech solely focused on education. Debate moderators don’t much ask about it. The United States founders’ own thoughts on the subject are occasionally cited—but only in passing, on the way to the latest round of talks on war and wealth. Aside from proposals dismissed as too radical, education is mostly considered a lower priority for the nation’s leaders, or it’s roped into highly charged debates about political and social unrest on university campuses.
Chomsky, however, has no interest in harnessing education to prop up governments or market economies. Nor does he see education as a tool for righting historical wrongs, securing middle class jobs, or meeting any other agenda.
Chomsky, whose thoughts on education we’ve featured before, tells us in the short video interview at the top of the post how he defines what it means to be truly educated. And to do so, he reaches back to a philosopher whose views you won’t hear referenced often, Wilhelm von Humboldt, German humanist, friend of Goethe and Schiller, and “founder of the modern higher education system.” Humboldt, Chomsky says, “argued, I think, very plausibly, that the core principle and requirement of a fulfilled human being is the ability to inquire and create constructively, independently, without external controls.” A true education, Chomsky suggests, opens a door to human intellectual freedom and creative autonomy.
To clarify, Chomsky paraphrases a “leading physicist” and former MIT colleague, who would tell his students, “it’s not important what we cover in the class; it’s important what you discover.” Given this point of view, to be truly educated means to be resourceful, to be able to “formulate serious questions” and “question standard doctrine, if that’s appropriate”… It means to “find your own way.” This definition sounds similar to Nietzsche’s views on the subject, though Nietzsche had little hope in very many people attaining a true education. Chomsky, as you might expect, proceeds in a much more democratic spirit.
In the interview above from 2013 (see the second video), you can hear him discuss why he has devoted his life to educating not only his paying students, but also nearly anyone who asks him a question. He also talks about his own education and further elucidates his views on the relationship between education, creativity, and critical inquiry. And, in the very first few minutes, you’ll find out whether Chomsky prefers George Orwell’s 1984 or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. (Hint: it’s neither.)
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.
Whether or not we believe in auteurhood, we each have our own mental image of what a film director does. But if we’ve never actually seen one at work, we’re liable not to understand what the actual experience of directing feels like: making decision after decision after decision, during the shoot and at all other times besides. (Wes Anderson made light of that gauntlet in an American Express commercial years ago.) Not all of these decisions are easily made, and it can actually be the simplest-sounding ones that cause the worst headaches. Where, for example, do you put the camera?
That’s the subject of the new video essay above from Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou’s YouTube channel Every Frame a Painting, which considers how the decision of camera placement has been approached by such famous directors like Steven Soderbergh, Greta Gerwig, Guillermo del Toro, and Martin Scorsese, as well as master cinematographer Roger Deakins.
Technology may have multiplied the choices available for any given shot, but that certainly hasn’t made the task any easier. Some filmmakers find their way by asking one especially clarifying question: what is this scene about? The answer can suggest what the camera should be looking at, and even how it should be looking at it.
Having become filmmakers themselves during Every Frame a Painting’s hiatus, Ramos and Zhou now understand all this as more than an intellectual inquiry. “Sometimes, the thing in our way is equipment,” says Zhou. “Sometimes it’s the weather. Sometimes it’s a lack of resources. And sometimes, the thing in our way is us.” Any director would do well to bear in mind the bracing advice once given by John Ford to a young Steven Spielberg, as dramatized (with a truly astonishing casting choice) in the latter’s autobiographical picture The Fabelmans: “When the horizon’s at the bottom, it’s interesting. When the horizon’s at the top, it’s interesting.” As for what it is when the horizon is in the middle, well, you’ll have to watch the movie.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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