A couple years ago, we brought you a post on the history of the “Amen Break,” six seconds of sampled drums from a gospel instrumental that—since sampling began in the 80s—has became a ubiquitous rhythmic element in virtually every popular genre of rhythm-based music, from hip-hop, to drum and bass, to EDM. While the technology that enabled the “Amen Break” may be unique to the digital era, the sample’s endless iterations show us something timeless about how music evolves.
Picking up on Richard Dawkins’ 1976 coining of the term “meme,” Susan Blackmore argued in The Meme Machine that “what makes us different” from other animals “is our ability to imitate…. When you imitate ssomeone else, something is passed on. This ‘something’ can then be passed on again, and again, and so take on a life of its own.” In this theoretical schema, the meme is a fundamental unit of culture, and the “Amen Break” is indeed a perfect example of how such units guide cultural evolution. So is another very widely imitated melodic element in jazz and rock and roll. Variously transcribed as “Doo Ba Doo Pee Dwee Doo Ahh” or “Doo ba dih bee dWee doo daah” or other nonsense syllabic sequences, it is just as often referred to simply as “The Lick.”
Licks are, in general, part of the standard vocabulary of every musician. They come in all forms, writes saxophonist, composer, and music theorist Joe Santa Maria—“Cool, Skanky, Soft, Crunchy, Salty, Dirty, Screamin’, Sultry, Tasty”—and they get repeated again and again. But there is one lick in particular, as you can see and hear in the supercut above, that—like the “Amen Break”—has managed to seed itself everywhere. “The Lick,” it seems, “pervades music history.” It shows up in Stravinsky’s “Firebird,” Player’s “Baby Come Back,” Christina Aguilera’s “Get Mine, Get Yours.” Writes Santa Maria, “Everyone from Coltrane to Kenny G has put this hot lick to the test.” It even has its own Facebook page, where users submit example after example of appearances of “The Lick.”
Unlike the “Amen Break,” which can be definitively traced to a single source (the B‑side of a 1969 single called “Color Him Father”), no one seems to know where exactly “The Lick” came from. At some point, its origin ceased to matter. While certain licks are played very self-consciously, Santa Maria admits, “to wow and mystify,” or “entrance groupies like the pied piper,” the archetypal, definitively named “The Lick” seems to have worked itself so deeply into our musical unconscious that many players and composers likely have no idea they’re reproducing a musical quotation. For whatever reason, and your guess is as good as mine, “The Lick” has become a genuine musical meme, a “unit of imitation” that propagates musical culture wherever it lands.
When it comes to theories of artistic lineage, few have been as influential as Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, in which the august literary critic argues, “Poetic Influence—when it involves two strong, authentic poets—always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation.” This kind of misreading—what Bloom calls “misprision”—often takes place between two artists separated by vast gulfs of time and space: the influence of Dante on T.S. Eliot, for example, or of Shakespeare on Herman Melville.
When we come to a study of James Joyce (1882–1941), however, we find the groundbreaking modernist corresponding directly with one of his foremost literary heroes, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906), whom Maria Popova calls Joyce’s “spiritual and mental ancestor.” As Bloom points out, Joyce described Ibsen’s work as being “of universal import.” He extolled and defended Ibsen’s then-controversial work in his student days, both in a 1900 lecture he delivered at University College, Dublin, and in an essay he published that same year in the London journal Fortnightly Review. (See the young Joyce above in 1902, at 20 years of age.)
Joyce’s article, “Ibsen’s New Drama,” focused on the playwright’s latest, When We Dead Awaken, and was warmly received by Ibsen himself, who—through his English translator William Archer—described the essay as “velvillig,” or “benevolent.” Archer conveyed Ibsen’s sentiments in a letter soon after the essay’s publication, and thereafter, Joyce’s essay—writes the James Joyce Centre—was “no longer just a review but a review that Ibsen had read and praised.”
Thus began a three-year correspondence between Joyce and Archer, and a friendly relationship—at some remove—between Joyce and Ibsen. In 1901, on the playwright’s 73rd birthday, Joyce wrote a letter to Ibsen directly. He mentions the circumstances of the review and expresses much youthful admiration, self-confidence, and gratitude for Ibsen’s response. The young Joyce laments that his “immature and hasty article” came to Ibsen’s attention first, “rather than something better,” and boasts, “I have claimed for you your rightful place in the history of drama.”
Read the letter in full below, in all its exuberant egotism. According to James Joyce A to Z: The Essential Reference to the Life and Work, as he matured, the novelist “drew upon Ibsen less for creative encouragement than for psychological inspiration. In Joyce’s mind, Ibsen remained the model of the artist who defies conventional creative approaches and who remains true to the demands of an individual aesthetic.” Whether Joyce “misread” and “creatively corrected” Ibsen is a question I leave for others. You can read many more “fan letters” written by other famous authors to their literary heroes—including George R.R. Martin to Stan Lee, Charles Dickens to George Eliot, and Ray Bradbury to Robert Heinlein—at Flavorwire.
Honoured Sir,
I write to you to give you greeting on your seventy-third birthday and to join my voice to those of your well-wishers in all lands. You may remember that shortly after the publication of your latest play ‘When We Dead Awaken’, an appreciation of it appeared in one of the English reviews — The Fortnightly Review — over my name. I know that you have seen it because some short time afterwards Mr. William Archer wrote to me and told me that in a letter he had from you some days before, you had written, ‘I have read or rather spelled out a review in the Fortnightly Review by Mr. James Joyce which is very benevolent and for which I should greatly like to thank the author if only I had sufficient knowledge of the language.’ (My own knowledge of your language is not, as you see, great but I trust you will be able to decipher my meaning.) I can hardly tell you how moved I was by your message. I am a young, a very young man, and perhaps the telling of such tricks of the nerves will make you smile. But I am sure if you go back along your own life to the time when you were an undergraduate at the University as I am, and if you think what it would have meant to you to have earned a word from one who held so high a place in your esteem as you hold in mine, you will understand my feeling. One thing only I regret, namely, that an immature and hasty article should have met your eye, rather than something better and worthier of your praise. There may not have been any willful stupidity in it, but truly I can say no more. It may annoy you to have your work at the mercy of striplings but I am sure you would prefer even hotheadedness to nerveless and ‘cultured’ paradoxes.
What shall I say more? I have sounded your name defiantly through a college where it was either unknown or known faintly and darkly. I have claimed for you your rightful place in the history of the drama. I have shown what, as it seemed to me, was your highest excellence — your lofty impersonal power. Your minor claims — your satire, your technique and orchestral harmony — these, too, I advanced. Do not think me a hero-worshipper. I am not so. And when I spoke of you, in debating-societies, and so forth, I enforced attention by no futile ranting.
But we always keep the dearest things to ourselves. I did not tell them what bound me closest to you. I did not say how what I could discern dimly of your life was my pride to see, how your battles inspired me — not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead — how your willful resolution to wrest the secret from life gave me heart, and how in your absolute indifference to public canons of art, friends and shibboleths you walked in the light of inward heroism. And this is what I write to you of now.
Your work on earth draws to a close and you are near the silence. It is growing dark for you. Many write of such things, but they do not know. You have only opened the way — though you have gone as far as you could upon it — to the end of ‘John Gabriel Borkman’ and its spiritual truth — for your last play stands, I take it, apart. But I am sure that higher and holier enlightenment lies — onward.
As one of the young generation for whom you have spoken I give you greeting — not humbly, because I am obscure and you in the glare, not sadly because you are an old man and I a young man, not presumptuously, nor sentimentally — but joyfully, with hope and with love, I give you greeting.
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Wylie Overstreet and Alex Gorosh set out to create something you’ve never seen before — our solar system drawn to actual scale. Forget what you’ve seen in books, or on web sites. To depict things accurately, you need a bigger surface. A really large canvas. Like a seven-mile expanse in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert (which otherwise hosts The Burning Man Festival). It’s on this dry lakebed that Overstreet and Gorosh built “the first scale model of the solar system with complete planetary orbits” and it’s a sight to behold. Creative, industrious, and humbling. Enjoy.
Everyone remembers their first kung-fu movie — or everyone remembers their first wave of kung-fu movies, anyway. For some, they came late at night on the less-explored frequencies of the television broadcasting spectrum; for others, they came on sparsely attended double- and triple-bills at the local discount theater. They looked faded and muddy, but somehow still vivid; they felt cheaply produced, yet full of life and energy; and as for how they sounded, time has turned their both hollow and theatrical English-language dubbing into an art form with connoisseurs of its own. They came from faraway lands, which rendered them exotic, but we experienced them almost as dreams, products of another reality altogether. And some of them you can experience again as public domain films.
We still call them “kung fu movies” even though, having grown older and wiser — or at least more culturally aware — we now know their heroes didn’t always defeat their enemies with the Chinese martial arts covered by that umbrella term. But the label applies well enough to 1977’s Legend of Shaolin, the Hong Kong-made epic at the top of the post set in the 13th-century Yuan Dynasty and dealing with that most kung-fu of all themes, revenge. But such historical “kung fu” pictures could also come from countries like Japan, an example of which you can thrill to just above: 1983’s Legend of the Eight Samurai features Sonny Chiba, living embodiment of the 1970s martial-arts film, under the direction of the prolific and respected provocateur Kinji Fukasaku, best known today as the maker of the controversial Battle Royale.
Next in this public-domain martial-arts marathon, we have another Hong Kong movie, Guy with the Secret Kung Fufrom 1981, whose title alone strikes me as recommendation enough. And for our final selection, we move to a more contemporary setting with 1987’s Four Robbers, wherein the titular quartet—pursued by both the police and a malevolent crime syndicate that at first wants to recruit them and later wants revenge against them—have to flee from Hong Kong to Thailand without gambling away the fruits of their labor or compromising their principles. This movie, and many others of its kind, give the lie to the notion that there’s no honor among thieves. Most all of the wanderers, samurai, rebels, aristocrats, cops, and robbers you see in them have one kind of honor or another — but when they come into conflict, it tends to take some old-fashioned kung-fu fighting to settle things. You can find these films added to our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More, which includes more 23 Free Kung Fu and Martial Arts Movies Online.
William S. Burroughs, like Christopher Walken, has one of those voices that casts anything he reads in a new light. No matter who the author, if Burroughs reads it, the text sounds like one more missive from the Interzone. In 1995, Burroughs took on the master of the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe, reading “The Masque of the Red Death” and the poem Annabel Lee for a little known PC game called The Dark Eye.
Ignored during its release, the game has since gained cult status, and playthroughs can be found on YouTube (see below). Similar in style to Myst, players point and clicked their way through three narratives based on Poe stories, with little interaction. In the end it was more about mood and design, and the creep of Burroughs’ drawl. (He also voiced the old man character in the game.)
Accompanying Burroughs’ reading was a slideshow that popped up in the middle of the game, with art directed (and possibly drawn) by Bruce Heavin, best known these days as the co-founder of Lynda.com. Thomas Dolby composed the gloomy soundtrack. The Dark Eye was the second game from Inscape, which debuted with the equally ambitious Bad Day on the Midway, a game featuring weird music giants The Residents. Two years after The Dark Eye, the sort of CD-ROM games the company made fell behind due to advances in technology, and the fall of the house of Inscape came inevitably in 1997.
The Internet continues to excavate what’s left of these boundary pushing games, and for those who want an audio version of “Masque”, an mp3 can be enjoyed here.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Some of the U.S.‘s greatest secular sages also happen to be some of its greatest cranks, contrarians, and critics. I refer to a category that includes Ambrose Bierce, H.L. Mencken, and Hunter S. Thompson. The many differences between these characters don’t eclipse a fundamental similarity: not a one embraced any of the usual pieties about the inherent, infallible greatness of Western Civilization, though each one in his own way made a significant contribution to the Western canon. We would be greatly remiss if we did not include among them perhaps the greatest American satirist of all, Mark Twain.
Twain skewered all comers, usually with such wit and invention that we smile and nod even when we feel the sting ourselves. Such was his talent, to deflate puffery in Western literature, politics, religion, and… as we will see, in art. “Throughout his career”—writes UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library—“Twain expressed his strong reactions to Western painting and sculpture, particularly the Old Masters, both in his published works and in private.” He offered up some hilariously irreverent takes on some of the most revered works of art in history: “his opinions are often passionate, sometimes eccentric, and always lively.” Take for example Twain’s tepid assessment of that most recognizable of Renaissance masterpieces, the Mona Lisa. In an unpublished draft called “The Innocents Adrift,” an account of an 1891 boat trip down the Rhone River, Twain “admitted to being puzzled by the adulation accorded” the painting.
To Twain, the Mona Lisa seemed “merely a good representation of a serene & subdued face… The complexion was bad; in fact it was not even human; there are no people of that color.” The painting’s greenish hue prompted one of Twain’s companions, possibly an invention of the author’s, to exclaim in response, “that smoked haddock!” “After some discussion,” write the UC Berkeley librarians, “the travelers concede that it requires a ‘trained eye’ to appreciate certain aspects of art.” Such training in art appreciation seemed to Twain as much genuine education as instruction in studied, insincere poses.
The author took his first “grand tour” in 1867—travelling through Europe and the Levant on the cruise ship Quaker City in the company of many “prosperous—and very proper—passengers.” Unlike these bourgeois travelling companions’ “conventional appreciation for all that they saw,” Twain—writing as a correspondent for the San Francisco Alta California—confessed himself underwhelmed. In particular, he described another Da Vinci, The Last Supper—“the most celebrated painting in the world”—as a “mournful wreck.” (The work was then unrestored; see it above as it looked 100 years later in the 1970s.) Twain later revised his observations for his first full-length book, 1869’s Innocents Abroad, a caricature of ugly American tourists filled with what William Dean Howells called “delicious impudence.” While the others marveled at Da Vinci’s crumbling fresco, Twain, in the current parlance, expressed a great big “meh.”
The world seems to have become settled in the belief, long ago, that it is not possible for human genius to outdo this creation of Da Vinci’s.… The colors are dimmed with age; the countenances are scaled and marred, and nearly all expression is gone from them; the hair is a dead blur upon the wall, and there is no life in the eyes.… I am satisfied that the Last Supper was a very miracle of art once. But it was three hundred years ago.
Twain and the professional critics did not always disagree. Take J.M.W. Turner’s famously riotous canvas Slave Ship (or Slavers Overthrowing the Dead and Dying: Typhoon Coming On), above. John Ruskin may have praised the work as the “noblest sea… ever painted by man” and it has come down to us as a violent representation of the horrors of the slave trade, occasioned in part, writes Stephen J. May, by Turner’s sense of “shared guilt about his own role and England’s role in condoning and perpetuating slavery’s malevolent legacy.” The anti-slavery, anti-imperialist Twain would surely have appreciated the sentiment; the painting, however, not so much. Other critics felt similarly, one calling Slave Ship a “gross outrage on nature.” Twain’s summation in an 1878 notebook is much more colorful, a piece of vintage Samuel Clemens undercutting: “Slave Ship—Cat having a fit in a platter of tomatoes.”
For all his snide portraits of conventional middle-class attitudes toward art, Twain could also be a bit of a prig, as we see in his response to Titian’s Venus of Urbino. In this, he was not so far removed from our own cultural attitudes (or Facebook and Google’s attitudes) about nudity. The censored version of the painting above (see the original here) comes to us via Buzzfeed, who write “Remember kids, blood and gore are fine but boobs will make you blind.” Twain seemed to have unironically agreed, railing in his 1880 travel book A Tramp Abroad against the “indecent license” afforded artists and calling Titian’s suggestive reclining nude “the foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses.” (Ah, if only he had lived to see the internet’s foulest depths.)
Twain’s own meager contributions to the visual arts—consisting of a dozen sketches, like that above, made for A Tramp Abroad—fall somewhat short of the standards he set for other artists. Nevertheless, he recalled in The Innocents Abroad his dismay at the “acres of very bad drawing, very bad perspective, and very incorrect proportions” in the museums and churches across Europe. What, we might wonder, could possibly move such a harsh, unsparing critic? In art, it seems, Twain valued “strict realism, grandeur of theme and scale, and propriety”—all on display in abundance in American artist Frederic Edwin Church’s The Heart of the Andes, below.
After viewing this idealized South American landscape in St. Louis, Twain called the enormous (over five feet high by ten feet wide) canvas a “most wonderfully beautiful painting.” “We took the opera glasses,” he wrote to his brother, “and examined its beauties minutely…. There is no slurring of perspective about it.” He recommended multiple viewings: “Your third visit will find your brain gasping and straining with futile efforts to take all the wonder in… and understand how such a miracle could have been conceived and executed by human brain and human hands.”
Twain, won over by this sublime spectacle, seems to have temporarily surrendered his critical faculties. In reading his response, I found myself wanting to egg him on: C’mon, what about this soft, gauzy lighting, those lumpy mountains, and the kitschy, overly-sentimental look of the whole thing? But there was room enough in Twain’s critical arsenal for genuine awe as for amused contempt at what he saw as phony expressions of the same. And that breadth of character is what made Mark Twain, well, Mark Twain.
And here I’d always considered La Chinoise the only French-language film that used both borrowed Chinese imagery and lofty theory to mount a critique of capitalism. It turns out that six years after Jean-Luc Godard made that movie, Sinologist, Situationist, and filmmaker René Viénet came out with the next important volume in that fascinating minor tradition, La Dialectique Peut-Elle Casser Des Briques?(Can Dialectics Break Bricks?), an entire Hong Kong martial-arts picture entirely repurposed into, as Dangerous Minds’ Richard Metzger puts it, “a critique of class conflicts, bureaucratic socialism, the failures of the French Communist Party, Maoism, cultural hegemony, sexual equality and the way movies prop up Capitalist ideology.”
Using as its visual material 1972’s Crush, Tu Guangqi’s hand-to-hand-combat-intensive tale of Korean rebellion against Japanese imperialism, the film followed the model of Woody Allen’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily? “which re-dubbed humorous dialogue over a Japanese spy movie to make the plot about a recipe for egg salad […] but here the cinematic Situationist provocateur is less out for laughs (although there are plenty of them) and more about the political subversion.” This intersection of lo-fi chop-socky action with high-flown revolutionary jargon and academic name-dropping (“My Foucaults! My Lacans! And if that’s not enough, I’ll even send my structuralists”) has for decades struck its viewers as sublimely ridiculous. But do the images and the dialogues really clash as totally as they would seem to?
“Like many Hong Kong productions of the early seventies,” writes Luke White at Kung Fu with Braudel, “the scenario of the original film is clearly one in which colonial exploitation and resistance are at issue. Set in Korea under the Japanese occupation that lasted much of the first half of the twentieth century, the heroes (those turned by Viénet into ‘the Proletarians’) are the members of a martial arts school who start to resist the colonial violence of the militaristic Japanese forces. However potentially conservative the nationalistic dimension of its narrative, this is also a work about struggle and liberation from tyranny in some of its most typically modern forms.” In its multiplicity of possible interpretations, La Dialectique Peut-Elle Casser Des Briques? joins the ranks of all the most interesting works of art — and it certainly makes for a refreshing break from actually reading your Foucaults, your Lacans, and your structuralists.
One of our favorite curiosities is the The Charles Mingus CAT-alogue for Toilet Training Your Cat–a pamphlet written by the mercurial jazz musician that offers step-by-step advice on how to get your cat to use the loo. The one thing Mingus didn’t provide is video proof that it could actually be done.
That’s where another musician steps in. Above, we have video of Thomas Dolby’s cat, “Mozart,” in action. Dolby, best known for his 1982 hit “She Blinded Me with Science,” is a teacher at heart. The son of an Oxford and Cambridge don, he’s now the Professor of the Arts at Johns Hopkins University. And, on his Youtube channel, he explains how he pulled off the seemingly impossible:
This is my cat Mozart, a Cornish Rex, peeing on the toilet. Many believed this was not possible, but it’s 100% real. When he was a kitten we tried to teach him to use the toilet, using a DVD. We thought it was a no go. But then aged about 3 he suddenly started to do it. Now sometimes when I get up in the night to pee Mo nips in ahead of me and I have to wait till he’s done. Next we need to teach him to flush! ~TD
If anyone is familiar with the DVD he’s referencing, please identify it in the comments below.
This year we’ve been featuring short animated videos from BBC Radio 4, all covering the big questions: How did everything begin?What makes us human?What is love?How can I know anything at all? They’ve all come scripted by philosopher Nigel Warburton (he of Philosophy Bites podcast fame) and narrated by a host of notables from both sides of the pond like Stephen Fry, Gillian Anderson, Aidan Turner, and Harry Shearer. They’ve illustrated the philosophical concepts at hand not just with elaborate and joke-filled drawings that come to life before your eyes, but with direct reference to the ideas of history’s best-known thinkers: Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Wittgenstein, de Beauvoir, Sartre, Freud, Chomsky — the list goes on.
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In 1973, the book Sybil - about a young woman struggling with 16 distinct personalities — became a cultural sensation, spawning a hugely successful made-for-TV movie in 1976 and an utterly unnecessary remake in 2007.
The condition of multiple personality disorder (MPD) was so exotic and strange that it soon became fodder for daytime talk shows like Jerry Springer and campy storylines in soap operas. But the case and the controversial treatment prescribed by Sybil’s doctor Cornelia Wilbur had long-term and serious implications for healthcare in this country. Above, you can watch a video by the New York Times that lays out much of the controversy.
MPD was first diagnosed in the early 1950s with a patient named Eve White (above) who seemed to have three personalities. When Wilbur found that one of her own patients, a troubled graduate student named Shirley Mason (later known to the world as “Sybil”) exhibited some of the same symptoms as Eve, she started an aggressive therapy that included hypnosis and the use of sodium thiopental, truth serum. Wilbur suspected that Mason’s problems were the result of some childhood trauma and her therapy aimed at uncovering them.
Under Wilbur’s care, Mason revealed a host of different personalities from the assertive Peggy, to the emotional Marcia, to Mike, who was not only male but also a carpenter. Through the voice of each personality, Wilbur also uncovered what she believed to be terrifying accounts of childhood rape and abuse.
But as Mason wrote in a 1958 letter to Wilbur, the abuse and the multiple disorders were lies. “I am not going to tell you there isn’t anything wrong,” Mason writes. “But it is not what I have led you to believe.… I do not have any multiple personalities .… I do not even have a ‘double.’ … I am all of them. I have been essentially lying.”
Wilbur dismissed Mason’s claims as an excuse to avoid going deeper in her treatment.
The popularity of Sybil’s story soon turned what was previously a very rare condition into a trendy psychological disorder. The video details the case of Jeanette Bartha who states, “I came in for depression and I left with multiple personalities.” Under treatment with hypnotic drugs, Bartha started to believe not only that she had MPD but also her parents abused her as a part of a satanic cult. Years later, Bartha realized to her grief and horror that these memories were false.
Subsequent research has thoroughly debunked the validity of Wilbur’s methods and even her diagnosis. MPD has been replaced with the broader, and less pulpy sounding, dissociative-identity disorder.
“The problem is fragmentation of identity, not that you really are 12 people,” says Dr. David Siegel, a critic of Wilbur. “You have not more than one but less than one personality.”
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
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