The Gandhi of history doesn’t line up with the Gandhi of legend, just as the beatified Mother Teresa presents a very different picture in certain astute critics’ estimation. But as with most saints, ancient and modern, people tend to ignore Gandhi’s many contradictions and troublingly racist and casteist views. He comes to us more as myth and martyr than deeply flawed human individual. An indispensable part of the mythmaking, Richard Attenborough’s 1982 biopic, Gandhi, may be "over-sanitized," as The Guardian writes, but Ben Kingsley’s performance as the anti-colonial leader is genuinely "sublime" in his evocation of Gandhi’s "intensity… wit and even the distinctive, determined walk." It’s these personal qualities—and of course Gandhi’s defeat of the largest empire on the planet with nonviolent action and a spiritual philosophy—that continue to inspire movements for justice and civil rights. We see a little of that determined walk in the short newsreel interview above, the very first "talking picture" made of Gandhi, and we also hear his intensity and wit, though much subdued by his physical frailty after years of fasting. Taken in 1947 by Fox Movietone News, the film marks a pivotal period in the Indian leader’s life. Very shortly after this Parliament passed the Indian Independence Act. That year also marked the start of a bloody new struggle, instigated by another colonial intervention, as the British partitioned India into two warring countries, an act so poignantly dramatized in Salmon Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. This year of turmoil was also Gandhi’s last; he was assassinated in 1948 by a Hindu nationalist who accused him of siding with Pakistan. In the interview, we hear what we might think of as some of Gandhi’s final public pronouncements on such subjects as child marriage, prohibition, his deeply held convictions about an authentic Indian cultural identity, and the lengths that he would go for his country’s independence. At the end of the short interview, the American reporter asks Gandhi, presciently, "would you be prepared to die in the cause of India’s Independence?" to which Gandhi replies, "this is a bad question." Related Content: Tolstoy and Gandhi Exchange Letters: Two Thinkers’ Quest for Gentleness, Humility & Love (1909) Albert Einstein Expresses His Admiration for Mahatma Gandhi, in Letter and Audio Hear Gandhi’s Famous Speech on the Existence of God (1931) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Watch Gandhi Talk in His First Filmed Interview (1947) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

We got a nice tip from one of our readers, and wanted to pass it along. Paramount Pictures has launched an official, verified YouTube channel — called The Paramount Vault — where you can watch full length films for free [update: if you’re based in the US]. You won’t find Paramount’s best-known films in The Vault, but nonetheless there are some quality, if not entertaining, picks among the 150 films. The movies are grouped into the following playlists: Classics, Comedy, Action/Adventure, Drama, Horror, Westerns, Science Fiction, and Thrillers. And they include motion pictures like 1987’s Ironweed with Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, Hamlet (1990) with Glenn Close and Mel Gibson, Paris When It Sizzles (1964) with William Holden and Audrey Hepburn, Elvis in King Creole (1958), Charlton Heston in the 1950 noir film Dark City, Gene Wilder in Funny About Love (1990), and Margot at the Wedding (2007) with Nicole Kidman, Jack Black and Jennifer Jason Leigh. The Paramount Vault has been verified by YouTube, so it looks like it’s the real deal. There is also an accompanying verified Facebook page. If you stream the playlist embedded at the top, you can watch 43 dramas in a row, starting with Ironweed and Hamlet. The selections above will be added to our list, 725 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. Enjoy! Update: it looks like you need to be based in the US to view these films — something that wasn’t apparent to me beforehand since I’m based here. My apologies to anyone who’s geoblocked. h/t David Related Content: 101 Free Silent Films: The Great Classics Columbia U. Launches a Free Multimedia Glossary for Studying Cinema & Filmmaking Stream 100+ Free Movies from Paramount Pictures on YouTube is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

"One of the many remarkable things about Charlie Chaplin," wrote Roger Ebert, "is that his films continue to hold up, to attract and delight audiences." Richard Brody described Chaplin as not just "alone among his peers of silent-comedy genius," but also as a maker of "great talking pictures." Jonathan Rosenbaum asked, "Has there ever been another artist — not just in the history of cinema, but maybe in the history of art — who has had more to say, and in such vivid detail, about what it means to be poor?" Andrew Sarris called Chaplin "arguably the single most important artist produced by the cinema, certainly its most extraordinary performer and probably still its most universal icon." "For me," wrote Leonard Maltin, "comedy begins with Charlie Chaplin." And so we see that Chaplin, nearly forty decades after his death, maintains his high critical reputation — while also having enjoyed the absolute height of movie-stardom back in the silent era. Vanishingly few artists of any kind manage to combine such blockbusting commercial success with such flying-colors critical success. That alone might give you good enough reason to plunge into Chaplin’s filmography, but know that you can begin that cinematic adventure for free right here on Open Culture in our archive of more than 60 Charlie Chaplin films on the web. There you’ll find short comedies like 1914’s Kids Auto Race at Venice, which introduced his famous penniless protagonist "The Tramp"; the following year’s The Tramp, which made it into a phenomenon; 1919’s Sunnyside, in which we find out what happens when Chaplin’s gracefully hapless comedic persona winds up on the farm; and 1925’s The Gold Rush, the film Chaplin most wanted to be remembered for. But though Chaplin’s oeuvre couldn’t be easier to start watching and laughing at, coming to appreciate the full scope of his craft — in the way that the critics quoted above have spent careers doing — may take time. After all, the man made 80 movies over his 75-year entertainment career, a kind of productivity that, even leaving the considerable artistry aside, cinema may never see again. You can dive into our collection of Chaplin films here. Related Content: 101 Free Silent Films: The Great Classics Colorized Photos Bring Walt Whitman, Charlie Chaplin, Helen Keller & Mark Twain Back to Life Charlie Chaplin Does Cocaine and Saves the Day in Modern Times (1936) Watch Charlie Chaplin Demand 342 Takes of One Scene from City Lights; And Then Watch 65 Free Chaplin Films Online 725 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc. Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Discover the Cinematic & Comedic Genius of Charlie Chaplin with 60+ Free Movies Online is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

To my knowledge, Bob Dylan has only appeared in a handful of TV commercials over the decades, including most notably a bizarre ad for Victoria’s Secret back in 2004. Now you can add another to the small list. Last night, IBM debuted a new ad with the iconic singer-songwriter. And this time around, Dylan isn’t peddling bras. Rather, it’s IBM’s cognitive system called "Watson," which promises to analyze data for corporations in all kinds of interesting ways. Says IBM: Humans create a staggering amount of information. Poetry, equations, films, selfies, diagnoses, discoveries. Data pours from our mobile devices, social networks, from every digitized and connected system we use. 80% of this data is virtually invisible to computers—including nearly all the information captured in language, sight and sound. Until now. IBM Watson applies its cognitive technologies to help change how we approach and understand all of this information. Everything that is digital has the potential to become cognitive, and, in a sense, be able to "think." Watson can bring cognition to everything and everyone. To evolve in this data-driven culture, every business will need to become a cognitive business. To demonstrate its analytical powers, IBM asked Watson to analyze Dylan’s lyrics, and it concluded that the major themes of Dylan’s songs are "time passes and love fades". It’s a conclusion, I’m sure, that never dawned on casual or ardent fans of Dylan’s music. Related Content: Bob Dylan’s Controversial 2004 Victoria’s Secret Ad: His First & Last Appearance in a Commercial "They Were There" — Errol Morris Finally Directs a Film for IBM Andy Warhol’s ‘Screen Test’ of Bob Dylan: A Classic Meeting of Egos Bob Dylan Reads From T.S. Eliot’s Great Modernist Poem The Waste Land Bob Dylan and The Grateful Dead Rehearse Together in Summer 1987. Listen to 74 Tracks. Bob Dylan Appears in Rare TV Ad: Watch IBM’s Super Computer Offer a Literary Analysis of His Songs is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Founded and directed by physicist Lawrence Krauss, Arizona State’s Origins Project has for several years brought together some of the biggest minds in the sciences and humanities for friendly debates and conversations about "the 21st Century’s greatest challenges." Previous all-star panels have included Krauss, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, Brian Greene, and Richard Dawkins. Stephen Hawking has graced the ASU Origins Project stage, as has actor and science communicator Alan Alda. And this past March, in a sold-out, highly-anticipated Origins Project event, Krauss welcomed Noam Chomsky to the stage for a lengthy interview, which you can watch above. Although Krauss says he’s wary of hero worship in his laudatory introduction, he nonetheless finds himself asking "What Would Noam Chomsky Do" when faced with a dilemma. He also points out that Chomsky has been "marginalized in U.S. media" for his anti-war, anarchist political views. Those views, of course, come widely into play during the conversation, which ranges from the theory and purpose of education—a subject Chomsky has expounded on a great deal in books and interviews—to the fate of political dissidents throughout history. Chomsky also gives us his views on science and technology, particularly in the Q&A portion of the talk above, in which he answers questions about artificial intelligence—another subject he’s touched on in the past—and animal experimentation, among a great many other topics. Krauss mostly hangs back during the initial discussion but takes a more active role in the session above, offering views on medical and scientific ethics that will be familiar to those who follow his atheist activism and championing of rationality over religious dogma. What you won’t see in the video above is a conversation Chomsky and Krauss had with Motherboard’s Daniel Oberhaus, who caught up with both thinkers during the ASU event to get their take on what he calls "another great space race." As Oberhaus makes clear, the current competition is not necessarily between global superpowers, but—as with so much modern research and development—between public and private entities, such as NASA and Space X. As we briefly discussed in a post yesterday on the huge amount of public domain space photography freely available for use, private space exploration makes research proprietary, mitigating the potential public benefits of government programs. As Chomsky puts it, "the environment, the commons… they’re a common possession, but space is even more so. For individuals to allow institutions like corporations to have any control over it is devastating in its consequences. It will also almost certainly undermine serious research." He refers to the example of most modern computing—developed under publicly-funded government programs, then marketed and sold back to us by corporations. Krauss makes a case for unmanned space exploration as the cost-effective option, and both thinkers discuss the problem of militarizing space, the ultimate goal of Cold War space programs before the fall of the Soviet Union. The conversation is rich and revealing and makes an excellent supplement to the already rich discussion Krauss and Chomsky have in the videos above. Related Content: The Origins Project Brings Together Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Bill Nye, Ira Flatow, and More on One Stage Noam Chomsky Spells Out the Purpose of Education Noam Chomsky Explains Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Watch Noam Chomsky & Lawrence Krauss Talk About Education, Political Activism, Technology & More Before a Sold-Out Crowd is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

The lag time between our imagining of social equality and its arrival can be significantly long indeed, or it least it can seem so, given the limitations of human mortality. 113 years may not be an especially long time for a tree, say, or even a very healthy Galapagos tortoise, but if you or I had been alive in 1902, chances are we’d never know that in 2015 the president of Europe’s most powerful nation is a woman, as are two major presidential candidates in the United States. Given the amount of inequality we still see worldwide, this may not always feel like a triumph. In 1902, it might have seemed like "nothing but fantasy." And yet even then, it was certainly possible to foresee women occupying all the roles that men did, through the lenses, writes Laura Hudson at Boing Boing, of "fantasy and science fiction," which "can often help us open our minds behind the limitations of the world we live in and imagine a better one instead." In 1902, artist Albert Bergeret was commissioned to create the trading cards you see here—just a small selection of twenty total photographs called "Les Femmes de l’Avenir"—Women of the Future. Only one theme among many in a series of different sets of cards, this "retrofuturistic attempt to expand the role of women in society" showed us a "small and fashionable world" where "women were given a more equal role in society, not to mention spectacular hats." That may be so, but just as we can never accurately see the future, we can also never reach consensus on the meaning of the past. The Daily Mail’s Maysa Rawi agrees with Hudson about the "pin-up quality to many of the images," which show "an awful lot of arm."  And yet Rawi disparages the entire set as "meant to capture men’s fantasies rather than be part of any feminist movement." I’ll admit, I don’t see the cards this way at all, nor do I think the categories are mutually exclusive. Pin-up girls have also represented social power, albeit mainly sexual power. Scantily-clad female superheroes like Wonder Woman, though crafted to appeal to the fantasies of teenage boys, are also powerful because… well, they have superpowers. Perhaps that’s one way to look at Bergeret’s cards. He is not mocking his subjects, nor hyper-sexualizing them, but presenting, as each card indicates, advanced futuristic beings who didn’t yet exist in his time. The Daily Mail captions several of the photos with factoids about women’s advances in French history. In some cases, Bergeret did not have to extrapolate far. Women could practice law in 1900; women served in the army during the French Revolution, but did not fight. Colleges had been open to women since 1879. A few women worked as doctors and journalists in Bergeret’s time. Marie Curie, you’ll recall, had discovered polonium, coined the term "radioactivity,"  and would win the Nobel Prize in 1903. Queen Victoria had ruled over half the world. But French women would have to wait several more decades to enter most of the professions represented. No matter how sexy—and in some cases ridiculous—some of the costumes in these photos, Bergeret shot the models with poise, style, and dignity. Perhaps he and many in his audience could easily imagine female generals, mayors, firewomen, soldiers, etc. Yet one particular card stands out. It portrays a self-satisfied, Bohemian model labeled "rapin"—which a reader below informs us is "an argot word for (bad) painter." via Boing Boing Related Content: In 1900, Ladies’ Home Journal Publishes 28 Predictions for the Year 2000 How French Artists in 1899 Envisioned Life in the Year 2000: Drawing the Future Mark Twain Predicts the Internet in 1898: Read His Sci-Fi Crime Story, "From The ‘London Times’ in 1904" Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness 1902 French Trading Cards Imagine "Women of the Future" is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

One my very first acts as a new New Yorker many years ago was to make the journey across three boroughs to Woodlawn cemetery in the Bronx. My purpose: a pilgrimage to Herman Melville’s grave. I came not to worship a hero, exactly, but—as Fordham University English professor Angela O’Donnell writes—"to see a friend." Professor O’Donnell goes on: "It might seem presumptuous to regard a celebrated 19th-century novelist so familiarly, but reading a great writer across the decades is a means of conducting conversation with him and, inevitably, leads to intimacy." I fully share the sentiment. I promised Melville I would visit regularly but, alas, the pleasures and travails of life in the big city kept me away, and I never returned. No such petty distraction kept away a friend-across-the-ages of another 19th-century American author. "For decades," writes the Baltimore Sun, "Edgar Allan Poe’s birthday was marked by a mysterious visitor to his gravesite in Baltimore. Beginning in the 1930s, the ‘Poe Toaster’ placed three roses at the grave every Jan. 19 and opened a bottle of cognac, only to disappear into the night." The tradition, which continued until 2009, is currently being revived with an American Idol-style competition (do you have what it takes?). The identity of the original "Poe Toaster"—who may have been succeeded by his son—remains a tantalizing mystery. Today, October 7th, marks Poe’s death-day, and in honor of his macabre sensibility, we visit another morbid mystery—the mystery of how Edgar Allan Poe died. Most of you have probably heard some version of the story. On October 3, 1849, a compositor for the Baltimore Sun, Joseph Walker, found Poe lying in a gutter. The poet had departed Richmond, VA on September 27, bound for Philadelphia "where he was to edit a volume of poetry for Mrs. St. Leon Loud," the Poe Museum tells us. Instead, he ended up in Baltimore, "semiconscious and dressed in cheap, ill-fitting clothes so unlike Poe’s usual mode of dress that many believe that Poe’s own clothing had been stolen." He never became lucid enough to explain where he had been or what happened to him: "The father of the detective story has left us with a real-life mystery which Poe scholars, medical professionals, and others have been trying to solve for over 150 years." Most people assume that Poe drank himself to death. The rumor was partly spread by Poe’s friend, editor Joseph Snodgrass, whom the poet had asked for in his semi-lucid state. Snodgrass was "a staunch temperance advocate" and had reason to recruit the writer posthumously into his campaign against drink, despite the fact that Poe had been sober for six months prior to his death and had refused alcohol on his deathbed. Poe’s attending physician, John Moran, dismissed the binge drinking theory, but that did not help clear up the mystery. Moran’s "accounts vary so widely," writes Biography.com, "that they are not generally considered reliable." So what happened? Doctors at the University of Maryland Medical Center theorize that Poe may have contracted rabies from one of his own pets—likely a cat. This diagnosis accounts for the delirium and other reported symptoms, though "no one can say conclusively," admits the Center’s Dr. Michael Benitez, "since there was no autopsy after his death." As with any mystery, the frustrating lack of evidence has sparked endless speculation. The Poe Museum offers the following list of possible causes-of-death, with dates and sources, including the rabies and alcohol (both overimbibing and withdrawal) theories: Beating (1857) The United States Magazine Vol.II (1857): 268. Epilepsy (1875) Scribner’s Monthly Vo1. 10 (1875): 691. Dipsomania (1921) Robertson, John W. Edgar A. Poe A Study. Brough, 1921: 134, 379. Heart (1926) Allan, Hervey. Israfel. Doubleday, 1926: Chapt. XXVII, 670. Toxic Disorder (1970) Studia Philo1ogica Vol. 16 (1970): 41-42. Hypoglycemia (1979) Artes Literatus (1979) Vol. 5: 7-19. Diabetes (1977) Sinclair, David. Edgar Allan Poe. Roman & Litt1efield, 1977: 151-152. Alcohol Dehydrogenase (1984) Arno Karlen. Napo1eon’s Glands. Little Brown, 1984: 92. Porphryia (1989) JMAMA Feb. 10, 1989: 863-864. Delerium Tremens (1992) Meyers, Jeffrey. Edgar A1lan Poe. Charles Scribner, 1992: 255. Rabies (1996) Maryland Medical Journal Sept. 1996: 765-769. Heart (1997) Scientific Sleuthing Review Summer 1997: 1-4. Murder (1998) Walsh, John E., Midnight Dreary. Rutgers Univ. Press, 1998: 119-120. Epilepsy (1999) Archives of Neurology June 1999: 646, 740. Carbon Monoxide Poisoning (1999) Albert Donnay The Smithsonian adds to this list the possible causes of brain tumor, heavy metal poisoning, and the flu. They also briefly describe the most popular theory: that Poe died as a result of a practice called "cooping." A site called The Medical Bag expands on the cooping theory, a favorite of "the vast majority of Poe biographies." The term refers to "a practice in the United States during the 19th century by which innocent people were coerced into voting, often several times, for a particular candidate in an election." Oftentimes, these people were snatched unawares off the streets, "kept in a room, called the coop" and "given alcohol or drugs in order for them to follow orders. If they refused to cooperate, they would be beaten or even killed." One darkly comic detail: victims were often forced to change clothes and were even "forced to wear wigs, fake beards, and mustaches as disguises so voting officials at polling stations wouldn’t recognize them." This theory is highly plausible. Poe was, after all, found "on the street on Election Day," and "the place where he was found, Ryan’s Fourth Ward Polls, was both a bar and a place for voting." Add to this the notoriously violent and corrupt nature of Baltimore elections at the time, and you have a scenario in which the author may very well have been kidnapped, drugged, and beaten to death in a voter fraud scheme. Ultimately, however, we will likely never know for certain what killed Edgar Allan Poe. Perhaps the "Poe Toaster" was attempting all those years to get the story from the source as he communed with his dead 19th century friend year after year. But if that mysterious stranger knows the truth, he ain’t talking either. Related Content: 5 Hours of Edgar Allan Poe Stories Read by Vincent Price & Basil Rathbone Édouard Manet Illustrates Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, in a French Edition Translated by Stephane Mallarmé (1875) Download The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Macabre Stories as Free eBooks & Audio Books Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness The Mystery of Edgar Allan Poe’s Death: 19 Theories on What Caused the Poet’s Demise 166 Years Ago Today is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

As you know if you saw our previous posts featuring Leonard Nimoy’s readings of stories by Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, the late Star Trek icon could — unsurprisingly, perhaps — tell a science-fiction tale with the best of them. It turns out that he could also give masterful readings of science fiction from other eras too, as far back as the earliest works to define the genre, which we’ve discovered after hearing his performance of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, an out-of-print edition recently digitized from cassette tape and posted to Youtube in two parts. With this story of Earth invaded from "across the gulf of space" by aliens with "minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic," Wells did much to help give science fiction the form we recognize today. The War of the Worlds came out in book form in 1898, preceded by such similarly speculative and innovative works as The Time Machine and The Invisible Man, and then followed by the likes of The First Men in the Moon and The Shape of Things to Come. (Find most of these works neatly packaged in the HG Wells Classic Collection.) This Leonard Nimoy recording originally came out in 1976, published by the record label Caedmon, known for doing plenty of innovation of their own in the then-yet-unnamed field of audiobooks. Caedmon put out not just this album and the one with Nimoy reading Bradbury, but others featuring Kurt Vonnegut, Vincent Price, Tennessee Williams, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and Sylvia Plath. As much as science-fiction die-hards will enjoy hearing this pairing of Nimoy and Wells here, some will certainly want to track down the actual LP — not just for the collectors’ value, but because it features liner notes by none other than that other vastly influential creator of sci-fi as we know it, Isaac Asimov. It looks like there’s one used copy on Amazon. The reading, we should note, is an abridged version of the original text. Related Content: Leonard Nimoy Reads Ray Bradbury Stories From The Martian Chronicles & The Illustrated Man (1975-76) Isaac Asimov’s Favorite Story "The Last Question" Read by Isaac Asimov— and by Leonard Nimoy Leonard Nimoy Narrates Short Film About NASA’s Dawn: A Voyage to the Origins of the Solar System Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. The Great Leonard Nimoy Reads H.G. Wells’ Seminal Sci-Fi Novel The War of the Worlds is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Back in June we highlighted Neil Halloran’s 15 minute film, The Fallen of World War II, which used "innovative data visualization techniques to put the human cost of WW II into perspective, showing how some 70 million lives were lost within civilian and military populations across Europe and Asia, from 1939 to 1945." It’s a pretty staggering illustration of the deadliest war. As the film went viral, Halloran raised money that would enable him to develop new films exploring "other trends of war and peace - from drones and terrorism to democracy and peacekeeping." He has also translated the film into six different languages. They all went online in the last few weeks. Here they are: Russian, Japanese, Polish, French, German, and Serbian. Above, you can watch the original in English (certainly worth doing if you were vacationing in June), and you might also explore the accompanying interactive web site here. Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. And if you want to make sure that our posts definitely appear in your Facebook newsfeed, just follow these simple steps. Related Content: Free Online History Courses Watch World War II Rage Across Europe in a 7 Minute Time-Lapse Film: Every Day From 1939 to 1945 31 Rolls of Film Taken by a World War II Soldier Get Discovered & Developed Before Your Eyes Dramatic Color Footage Shows a Bombed-Out Berlin a Month After Germany’s WWII Defeat (1945) Innovative Film Visualizing the Destruction of World War II Now Available in 7 Languages is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Like many American stories, the story of the National Parks begins with pillage, death, deep cultural misunderstanding, and venture capitalism. According to Ken Burns’ film series The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, we can date the idea back to 1851, with the "discovery" of Yosemite by a marauding armed battalion who entered the land "searching for Indians, intent on driving the natives from their homelands and onto reservations." The Mariposa Battalion, led by Captain James D. Savage, set fire to the Indians’ homes and storehouses after they had retreated to the mountains, "in order to starve them into submission." One member of the battalion, a doctor named Lafayette Bunnell, found himself entranced by the scenery amidst this destruction. "As I looked, a peculiar exalted sensation seemed to fill my whole being," he wrote in his later accounts, "and I found myself in tears with emotion." He named the place "Yosemite," thinking it was the name of the Indian tribe the soldiers sought to force out or eradicate. The word, it turned out "meant something entirely different," referring to people who should be feared: "It means, ‘they are killers.’" In 1855, a failed English gold prospector turned the place into a tourist attraction, and people flooded West to see it, prompting New York worthies like Horace Greeley and Frederick Law Olmsted to lobby for its federal protection. In 1864, Abraham Lincoln deeded Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove, with its giant sequoias, to the state of California. Ever since then, National Parks have been threatened—if not by the occasional political candidate and his billionaire backers hoping to privatize the land, then by oil and gas drilling, and by fire, rising seas, or other effects of climate change. Though the U.S. emptied many of the parks of their inhabitants, it is ironically only the actions of the federal government that prevents the process begun by the Mariposa Battalion from reaching its conclusion in the total despoliation of these landscapes. It is these landscapes that have most come to symbolize the national character, whether as background in Frederic Remington’s paintings of the Indian Wars or in the photographs of Ansel Adams, who began and sustained his career in Yosemite Valley. "Yosemite National Park," writes the National Park Service’s website," was Adams’ chief inspiration." Adams first became interested in visiting the National Park when he read In the Heart of the Sierras by James Hutchings—that failed English gold prospector. Thereafter, Adams photographed National Parks almost ritually, and in 1941, the National Park Service commissioned Adams to create a photo mural for the Department of the Interior Building in DC. The theme, the National Archives tells us, was to be "nature as exemplified and protected in the U.S. National Parks. The project was halted because of World War II and never resumed." It must have felt like an especially sacred duty for Adams, who traveled the country photographing the Grand Canyon, Grand Teton, Kings Canyon, Mesa Verde, Rocky Mountain, Yellowstone, Yosemite, Carlsbad Caverns, Glacier, and Zion National Parks; Death Valley, Saguro, and Canyon de Chelly National Monuments," and other locations like the Boulder (now Hoover) Dam and desert vistas in New Mexico. The photographs you see here are among the 226 taken by Adams for the project. They are now housed at the National Archives, and you can freely view them online or order prints at their site. At the top, we see a snow-covered tree from an apple orchard in Half Dome, Yosemite, where Adams had his first photographic "visualization" in 1927. Below it, the "Court of the Patriarchs" in Zion National Park, Utah. Further down, we have a breathtaking vision of the serpentine Grand Canyon, and just above, one of the few manmade structures, "Cliff Palace" at Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado. And here can you see a photograph of the Snake River in Grand Teton National Park. The mural project may have been abandoned, but Adams never stopped photographing the parks, nor advocating for their protection and, in fact, the protection of "the entire environment," as he told a Playboy interviewer in 1983. "Only two and a half percent of the land in this country is protected," said Adams then: "Not only are we being fought in trying to extend that two and a half percent to include other important or fragile areas but we are having to fight to protect that small two and a half percent. It is horrifying that we have to fight our own Government to save our environment." You can peruse the collection of Ansel Adams’ national park photos here. Related Content: Ansel Adams Reveals His Creative Process in 1958 Documentary 200 Ansel Adams Photographs Expose the Rigors of Life in Japanese Internment Camps During WW II How to Take Photographs Like Ansel Adams: The Master Explains The Art of "Visualization" Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness 226 Ansel Adams Photographs of Great American National Parks Are Now Online is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

If you want to prepare for a career practicing law, you could do much worse than joining Harvard University’s debate team. But if, far on the other end of the spectrum of the American experience, you end up deep on the wrong side of the law, going to prison rather than college, you need not relinquish your dreams of excelling at this traditional intellectual sport. We now have the precedent to prove it: "Months after winning a national title," reports the Guardian‘s Lauren Gambino, "Harvard’s debate team has fallen to a group of New York prison inmates." "The showdown," which revolved around the question of whether public schools should be allowed to turn away undocumented students, "took place at the Eastern correctional facility in New York, a maximum-security prison where convicts can take courses taught by faculty from nearby Bard College, and where inmates have formed a popular debate club." They call this program the Bard Prison Initiative, under which inmates have the chance to earn a Bard College degree (through a non-vocational "liberal arts curriculum, including literature, foreign language, philosophy, history and the social sciences, mathematics, science, and the arts") at satellite campuses established in six New York state prisons. You can see this selective, rigorous and highly unusual educational institution in action in the Washington Post video above. And also in a 2011 PBS News Hour profile below. The Bard Prison Initiative’s debate victory over Harvard made for a notable event in the program’s history indeed. "But it’s also worth pointing out," writes Peter Holley, author of the Post article, "the fallacy of our underlying assumptions about such a matchup — the first (and most pernicious) being that criminals aren’t smart. If a definitive link between criminality and below-average intelligence exists, nobody has found it." The Bard Prison Initiative has operated on that premise since 2001, and its debate team’s previous high-profile win saw it beating that of West Point — all, you may hardly believe, through old-fashioned research, without any kind of access to the internet. If you’d like to leave your condolences for the Harvard College Debating Union, you may do so at their Facebook page. You can also make a worthwhile financial contribution to the Bard Prison Initiative here. Related Content: James Baldwin Debates Malcolm X (1963) and William F. Buckley (1965): Vintage Video & Audio Norman Mailer & Marshall McLuhan Debate the Electronic Age Clash of the Titans: Noam Chomsky & Michel Foucault Debate Human Nature & Power on Dutch TV, 1971 The Historic LSD Debate at MIT: Timothy Leary v. Professor Jerome Lettvin (1967) 1150 Free Online Courses from Top Universities Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Inmates in New York Prison Defeat Harvard’s Debate Team: A Look Inside the Bard Prison Initiative is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

UK film monthly magazine Sight & Sound’s most recent issue is dedicated to "The Female Gaze: 100 Overlooked Films Directed by Women." The list of 100 films runs some 20 pages, and the edition also collects mini essays from actors like Greta Gerwig, Isabelle Huppert, and Tilda Swinton; directors like Jane Campion and Claire Denis, and critics like Amy Taubin and Camille Paglia, all focusing on female-directed films that deserve a second look. Many of the filmmakers are fairly obscure, but even better known directors are represented here with lesser-known selections, like Ida Lupino’s Outrage (and not her noir classic The Hitchhiker) and Kathryn Bigelow’s The Loveless, her first feature co-directed with Monty Montgomery and featuring a young Willem Dafoe. (Fact: Until Bigelow won for The Hurt Locker in 2010, no woman had earned a Best Director Oscar). Presented in chronological order, the list of 100 Overlooked Films Directed by Women features many landmarks in film history, like Lotte Reiniger’s 1926 The Adventures of Prince Achmed, the first feature-length animated film, which we recently highlighted here. Open Culture has also previously discussed Germaine Dulac’s 1928 surrealist film The Seashell and the Clergyman. Lois Weber’s 1913 Suspense, her short film co-directed with Philippe Smalley (view it at the top of the post), is one of the first examples of cross-cutting to create tension, and it even features a three-way split frame. Cross-cutting is a technique all thrillers have used since. (And Weber stars in the film as well.) Sight & Sound also profiles Stephanie Rothman, the first female director to work for Roger Corman, and her 1971 film The Velvet Vampire, a West Coast take on a gothic genre. Jessie Maple, who made Will in 1981, was the first African-American woman to become a part of New York’s camera operator’s union. Then there’s the careers of filmmakers whose lives were cut short: Soviet director Larisa Shepitko died in a car crash at 40, leaving behind two masterpieces, while Elia Kazan’s wife Barbara Loden made her debut with Wanda in 1970 and passed away soon after, too young. Many of these films are difficult or impossible to find, and Sight & Sound includes an online article of eight more films that might be lost for good, like the aforementioned Lois Weber’s only color film White Heat, or the only film actor Lillian Gish directed, Remodeling Her Husband. The Sight & Sound issue is available on newsstands and as a digital edition to subscribers. As noted at the end of the article’s introduction, "a season related to this project will take place next year at BFI Southbank, London." Readers interested in the contributions of women filmmakers will want to explore the Women Film Pioneers website hosted by Columbia University. Related Content: The Groundbreaking Silhouette Animations of Lotte Reiniger: Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, and More An Ambitious List of 1400 Films Made by Female Filmmakers Alice Guy-Blaché: The First Female Director & the Cinematic Trailblazer You Likely Never Heard Of 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. 100 Overlooked Films Directed by Women: See Selections from Sight & Sound Magazine’s New List is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

When you learned about The Periodic Table of Elements in high school, it probably didn’t look like this. Above, we have a different way of visualizing the elements. Created by Professor William F. Sheehan at Santa Clara University in 1970, this chart takes the elements (usually shown like this) and scales them relative to their abundance on the Earth’s surface. In the small print beneath the chart, Sheehan notes "The chart emphasizes that in real life a chemist will probably meet O, Si, Al [Oxygen, Silicon and Aluminum] and that he better do something about it." Click here to see the chart — and the less abundant elements — in a larger format. Below we have a few more creative takes on the Periodic Table. Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. via Pickover Related Content: "The Periodic Table Table" — All The Elements in Hand-Carved Wood World’s Smallest Periodic Table on a Human Hair "The Periodic Table of Storytelling" Reveals the Elements of Telling a Good Story Chemistry on YouTube: "Periodic Table of Videos" Wins SPORE Prize Free Online Chemistry Courses   The Periodic Table of Elements Scaled to Show The Elements’ Actual Abundance on Earth is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

The border-obsessed map animator known as Emperor Tigerstar views war from a distance. The Emperor leaves such details as journal entries, letters home, and tales of valor and cowardice for other history buffs. His niche is meticulously clocking the defeat and triumph in terms of shifting territories, by year, by fortnight, and, in the case of World War I and World War II, by day. His five minute take on the American Civil War, above, leaves out most of the hair-raising small scale skirmishes familiar from the pages of The Red Badge of Courage. Trans-Mississippi Theater aside, it also makes plain how little ground the Confederates gained after 1861. The Blue and the Gray are here represented by blue and red, with the mustard-colored disputed border states picking sides before the first minute is out. (The Union’s Naval Blockade is in formation within seconds.) Legend: Maroon = Confederate States of America and territories Red = Areas occupied by Confederate forces Pink = Gains for that Day Dark Blue = United States of America and territories Blue = Areas occupied by Union forces. Light blue = Gains for that day Yellow = Border states / disputed areas. The magnitude is moving, especially when paired with ground-level observations, be they fictional, historical or eyewitness. Even the place-names on the map, which now were merely quaint, would take on the sound of crackling flame and distant thunder, the Biblical, Indian and Anglo-Saxon names of hamlets and creeks and crossroads, for the most part unimportant in themselves until the day when the armies came together, as often by accident as on purpose, to give the scattered names a permanence and settle what manner of life future generations were to lead.   Historian Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative Related Content: Watch World War I Unfold in a 6 Minute Time-Lapse Film: Every Day From 1914 to 1918 Watch World War II Rage Across Europe in a 7 Minute Time-Lapse Film: Every Day From 1939 to 1945 "The Civil War and Reconstruction," a New MOOC by Pulitzer-Prize Winning Historian Eric Foner Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play, Fawnbook, opens in New York City later this fall. Follow her @AyunHalliday Animated Map Lets You Watch the Unfolding of Every Day of the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Creative Commons image by Joe Haupt Before the internet became our primary source of information and entertainment—before it became for many companies a primary revenue stream—it promised to revolutionize education. We would see a democratic spread of knowledge, old hierarchies would crumble, ancient divisions would cease to matter in the new primordial cyber-soup where anyone with entry-level consumer hardware and the patience to learn basic HTML could create a platform and a community. And even as that imagined utopia became just another economy, with its own winners and losers, large—and free—educational projects still seemed perfectly feasible. These days, that potential hasn’t exactly evaporated, but we’ve had an increasing number of reasons—the threatened status of net neutrality prominent among them—to curb our enthusiasm. Yet as we remind you daily here at Open Culture, free educational resources still abound online, even if the online world isn’t as radical as some radicals had hoped. Frequently, those resources reside in online libraries like the Internet Archive, who store some of the best educational material from pre-internet times—such as the NBC University Theater, a program that comes from another transitional time for another form of mass media: radio. Before payola and television took over in the fifties, radio also showed great potential for democratizing education. In 1942, at the height of the Golden Age of Radio, NBC "reinaugurated" a previous concept for what it called the NBC University of the Air. "Throughout the mid-1940s," writes the Digital Deli, an online museum of golden age radio, "NBC produced some twenty-five productions specifically designed to both educate and entertain. Indeed, many of those programs were incorporated into the curricula of high schools, colleges and universities throughout the U.S. and Canada." After 1948, the program was retooled as NBC University Theater, then simply NBC Theater. "Irrespective of the title change," however, the program "continued to maintain the same high standards and continued to expand the number of colleges offering college credit for listening to and studying the programs’s offerings." Digital Deli has the full details of this proto-MOOC’s curriculum. It consists of listening to adaptations of "great American stories," great "world" stories-from Voltaire, Swift, and others-and adaptations of modern American and British fiction and "Great Works of World Literature." In short, the NBC University Theater adaptations might substitute for a college-level literary education for those unable to attend a college or university. In the playlist above, you can hear every episode from the show’s final run from 1948 to 1951. We begin with an adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street and end with Thomas Hardy’s "The Withered Arm." In-between hear classic radio drama adaptations of everything from Austen to Faulkner and Hemingway to Ibsen. There are 110 episodes in total. Each episode features commentary from distinguished authors and critics, including Robert Penn Warren, E.M. Forster, and Katherine Anne Porter. "Apart from the obvious academic value" of the series, writes Digital Deli, "it’s clear that considerable thought—and daring—went into the selections as well." Despite the tremendous increase in college attendance through the G.I. Bill, this was a period of "rising hostility towards academics, purely intellectual pursuits, and the free exchange of philosophies in general." The ensuing decade of the fifties might be characterized culturally, writes Digital Deli, as an "intellectual vacuum"—anti-intellectual attitudes swept the country, fueled by Cold War political repression. And radio became primarily a means of entertainment and advertising, competing with television for an audience. Quality radio dramas continued—most notably of excellent science fiction. But never again would an educational program of NBC University Theater‘s scope, ambition, and radical potential appear on U.S. radio waves. Related Content: Hear the Very First Adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 in a Radio Play Starring David Niven (1949) Hear Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and 84 Classic Radio Dramas from CBS Radio Workshop (1956-57) Dimension X: The 1950s SciFi Radio Show That Dramatized Stories by Asimov, Bradbury, Vonnegut & More Free: Listen to 298 Episodes of the Vintage Crime Radio Series, Dragnet Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness NBC University Theater Adapts Great Novels to Radio & Gives Listeners College Credit : Hear 110 Episodes from a 1940s eLearning Experiment is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Sherlock Holmes has become such a cultural fixture since he first appeared in print that all of us have surely, at one time or another, considered reading through the London detective’s complete case files. But where to start? One can always begin at the beginning with that first print appearance, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1887 novel A Study in Scarlet. But how best to progress through the Sherlock Holmes canon, a body of 56 short stories and four novels (and that number counting only the material written by Conan Doyle himself), some more essential than others? You might consider reading the adventures of Sherlock Holmes according to the preferences of Sherlock Holmes’ creator. We know these preferences because of a 1927 competition in The Strand Magazine, where the character’s popularity first blew up, which asked readers to name the twelve best Sherlock Holmes stories. They asked Conan Doyle the same question, and the list he came up with runs as follows: "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" ("a grim story" that "I am sure will be on every list") "The Redheaded League" "The Adventure of the Dancing Men" (due, as with "The Redheaded League," to "the originality of the plot") "The Final Problem" ("we could hardly leave out the story which deals with the only foe who ever really extended Holmes, and which deceived the public (and Watson) into the erroneous inference of his death") "A Scandal in Bohemia" (since, as the first short story in the series, "it opened the path for the others," and "it has more female interest than is usual") "The Adventure of the Empty House" ("the story which esssays the difficult task of explaining away the alleged death of Holmes") "The Five Orange Pips" ("though it is short it has a certain dramatic quality of its own") "The Adventure of the Second Stain" (for its treatment of "high diplomacy and intrigue") "The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot" ("grim and new") "The Adventure of the Priory School" ("worth a place if only for the dramatic moment when Holmes points his finger at the Duke") "The Musgrave Ritual" (for its inclusion of "a historical touch which gives it a little added distinction" and "a memory from Holmes’ early life") "The Reigate Squires" (in which "on the whole, Holmes himself shows perhaps the most ingenuity") He later added seven more favorites, including some he’d written after The Strand‘s contest took place: "Silver Blaze" "The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans" "The Crooked Man" "The Man with the Twisted Lip" "The Greek Interpreter" "The Resident Patient" "The Naval Treaty" "When this competition was first mooted I went into it in a most light-hearted way," wrote Conan Doyle, "thinking that it would be the easiest thing in the world to pick out the twelve best of the Holmes stories. In practice I found that I had engaged myself in a serious task." And those who call themselves Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts know that, though they may have begun reading the stories with an equally light heart, they soon found themselves going deeper and deeper into Holmes’ world in a much more serious way than they’d expected. Starting with Conan Doyle’s selections may set you down the very same path; when you finally come out the other side, feel free to name your own top twelve stories in the comments below. For a quick way to read Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, get The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Related Content: Download the Complete Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Masterpiece Arthur Conan Doyle Discusses Sherlock Holmes and Psychics in a Rare Filmed Interview (1927) Hear the Voice of Arthur Conan Doyle After His Death Read the Lost Sherlock Holmes Story That Was Just Discovered in an Attic in Scotland Watch John Cleese as Sherlock Holmes in The Strange Case of the End of Civilization as We Know It Download 55 Free Online Literature Courses: From Dante and Milton to Kerouac and Tolkien Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Arthur Conan Doyle Names His 19 Favorite Sherlock Holmes Stories is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Creative Commons image by Gorthian Mind Webs, a 1970’s radio series created by WHA Radio in Wisconsin, featured dramatized readings of classic sci fi stories by the likes of Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick. You can learn more about the series, and access a complete set of recordings here. Below, we’ve highlighted for you a dramatization of an Ursula K. Le Guin story, "The End." It’s rare to encounter an audio recording of a Le Guin story online, so we hope you enjoy. "The End" is now added to our collection: 700 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free. And if you’re looking to immerse yourself in Le Guin’s fiction, give her groundbreaking novel The Left Hand of Darkness a try. It won the Hugo and Nebula Awards (the top award for fantasy/sci-fi novels) in 1969. https://archive.org/download/MindWebs_201410/The%20End%20-%20Ursula%20Le%20Guin.mp3 Looking for free, professionally-read audio books from Audible.com? Here’s a great, no-strings-attached deal. If you start a 30 day free trial with Audible.com, you can download two free audio books of your choice. Get more details on the offer here. And note this: Audiobooks.com also has a free trial offer where you can download a free audiobook. Details. Hear Ursula K. Le Guin’s Story, "The End" Dramatized: A Rare Audio Treat is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

In 1919, German architect Walter Gropius founded Bauhaus, the most influential art school of the 20th century. Bauhaus defined modernist design and radically changed our relationship with everyday objects. Gropius wrote in his manifesto Programm des Staatlichen Bauhauses Weimar that "There is no essential difference between the artist and the artisan." His new school, which featured faculty that included the likes of Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy, Josef Albers and Wassily Kandinsky, did indeed erase the centuries-old line between applied arts and fine arts. Bauhaus architecture sandblasted away the ornate flourishes common with early 20th century buildings, favoring instead the clean, sleek lines of industrial factories. Designer Marcel Breuer reimagined the common chair by stripping it down to its most elemental form. Herbert Bayer reinvented and modernized graphic design by focusing on visual clarity. Gunta Stölzl, Marianne Brandt and Christian Dell radically remade such diverse objects as fabrics and tea kettles. Nowadays, of course, getting one of those Bauhaus tea kettles, or even an original copy of Gropius’s manifesto, would cost a small fortune. Fortunately for design nerds, typography mavens and architecture enthusiasts everywhere, the good folks over at Monoskop have posted online a whole set of beautifully designed publications from the storied school. Click here to pick out individual works or here to just get all of them. Sadly, though, you can’t download a teakettle. The list of Books in the Monoskop Bauhaus archive includes: 1. Walter Gropius (ed.), Internationale Architektur, Munich: Albert Langen, 1925. 2. Paul Klee, Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch, Munich: Albert Langen, 1925, 50 pp. Pedagogical Sketchbook, intro. & trans. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1953 (in English) Παιδαγωγικό Σημειωματάριο, trans. Β. Λαγοπούλου, 1976. (in Greek) Pedagogikheskie eskizy, trans. N. Druzhkovoy, 2005. (in Russian) 3. Adolf Meyer (ed.), Ein Versuchshaus des Bauhauses in Weimar, Munich: Albert Langen, 1924. 4. Die Bühne am Bauhaus, Munich: Albert Langen, 1925. The Theater of the Bauhaus, trans. Arthur S. Wensinger, Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1961. (in English) 5. Piet Mondrian, Neue Gestaltung, Neoplastizimus, Nieuwe Beelding, Munich: Albert Langen, 1925. 6. Theo van Doesburg, Grundbegriffe der neuen gestaltenden Kunst, Munich: Albert Langen, 1925. Principles of Neo-Plastic Art, London: Lund Humphries, 1969. (in English) 7. Walter Gropius (ed.), Neue Arbeiten der Bauhauswerkstäffen, Munich: Albert Langen, 1925. 8. L. Moholy-Nagy, Malerei, Fotografie, Film, Munich: Albert Langen, 1925, 115 pp; 2nd ed., 1927, 140 pp. Incl. "Dynamik der Gross-Stadt." Painting Photography Film, trans. Janet Seligman, London: Lund Humphries, 1969. (in English) 9. Kandinsky, Punkt und Linie zu Fläche: Beitrag zur Analyse der malerischen Elemente, Munich: Albert Langen, 1926. Point and Line to Plane: Contribution to the Analysis of the Pictorial Elements, trans. Howard Dearstyne and Hilla Rebay, New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1947, 200 pp. (in English) 10. J.J.P. Oud, Holländische Architektur, Munich: Albert Langen, 1929. 11. Kasimir Malewitsch, Die gegenstandslose Welt, Munich: Albert Langen, 1927. 12. Walter Gropius, Bauhausbauten Dessau, Munich: Albert Langen, 1930. 13. Albert Gleizes, Kubismus, Munich: Albert Langen, 1928. 14. László Moholy-Nagy, Von Material zur Architektur, Munich: Albert Langen, 1929, 241 pp; facsimile repr., Mainz and Berlin: Florian Kupferberg, 1968. The New Vision: From Material to Architecture, trans. Daphne M. Hoffman, New York: Breuer Warren and Putnam, 1930; exp.rev.ed. as The New Vision and Abstract of an Artist, New York: George Wittenborn, 1947, 92 pp. (in English) And here are some key Bauhaus journals: bauhaus 1 (1926). 5 pages, 42 cm. Download (23 MB). bauhaus: zeitschrift für bau und gestaltung 2:1 (Feb 1928). Download (17 MB). bauhaus: zeitschrift für gestaltung 3:1 (Jan 1929). Download (17 MB). bauhaus: zeitschrift für gestaltung 3:2 (Apr-Jun 1929). Download (15 MB). bauhaus: zeitschrift für gestaltung 3:3 (Jul-Sep 1929). Download (16 MB). bauhaus: zeitschrift für gestaltung 2 (Jul 1931). Download (15 MB). Get more in the Monoskop Bauhaus archive. Related Content: The Homemade Hand Puppets of Bauhaus Artist Paul Klee Time Travel Back to 1926 and Watch Wassily Kandinsky Create an Abstract Composition Bauhaus, Modernism & Other Design Movements Explained by New Animated Video Series 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 vice presidents with octopuses on their heads.  The Veeptopus store is here. Download Original Bauhaus Books & Journals for Free: Gropius, Klee, Kandinsky, Moholy-Nagy & More is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Creative Commons image by Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin When one enters the world of The Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest epic poem we know of, one enters a world lost to time. Though its strange gods and customs would have seemed perfectly natural to its inhabitants, the culture of Gilgamesh has so far receded from historical memory that there’s little left with which we might identify. Scholars believe Gilgamesh the demi-god mythological character may have descended from legends (such as a 126-year reign and superhuman strength) told about a historical 5th king of Uruk. Buried under the fantastic stories lies some documentary impulse. On the other hand, Gilgamesh—like all mythology—exists outside of time. Gilgamesh and Enkidu always kill the Bull of Heaven, again and again forever. That, perhaps, is the secret Gilgamesh discovers at the end of his long journey, the secret of Keats’ Grecian Urn: eternal life resides only in works of art. And perhaps the only way to approach some common understanding of myths as both products of their age and as archetypes in realms of pure thought comes through a deep immersion in their historical languages. In the case of Gilgamesh, that means learning the extraordinarily long-lived Akkadian, a Mesopotamian language that dates from about 2,800 BCE to around 100 CE. In order to do so, archeologists and Assyriologists had to decipher fragments of cuneiform stone tablets like those on which Gilgamesh was discovered. The task proved exceptionally difficult, such that when George Smith announced his translation of the epic’s so-called "Flood Tablet" in 1872, it had lain "undisturbed in the [British] Museum for nearly 20 years," writes The Telegraph, since "there were so few people in the world able to read ancient cuneiform." Cuneiform is not a language, but an alphabet. The script’s wedge-shaped letters (cuneus is Latin for wedge) are formed by impressing a cut reed into soft clay. It was used by speakers of several Near Eastern languages including Sumerian, Akkadian, Urartian and Hittite; depending on the language and date of a given script, its alphabet could consist of many hundreds of letters. If this weren’t challenging enough, cuneiform employs no punctuation (no sentences or paragraphs), it does not separate words, there aren’t any vowels and most tablets are fragmented and eroded. Nonetheless, Smith, an entirely self-educated scholar, broke the code, and when he discovered the fragment containing a flood narrative that predated the Biblical account by at least 1,000 years, he reportedly "became so animated that, mute with excitement, he began to tear his clothes off." That story may also be legend, but it is one that captures the passionately obsessive character of George Smith. Thanks to his efforts, those of many other 19th century academics, treasure hunters, and tomb raiders, and modern scholars toiling away at the University of London, we can now hear Gilgamesh read not only in Old Akkadian (the original language), but also later Babylonian dialects, the languages used to record the Code of Hammurabi and a later, more fragmented version of the Gilgamesh epic. The University of London’s Department of the Languages and Cultures of the Ancient Near East hosts on its website several readings in different scholars’ voices of Gilgamesh, The Epic of Anzu, the Codex Hammurabi and other Babylonian texts. Above, you can hear Karl Hecker read the first 163 lines of Tablet XI of the Standard Akkadian Gilgamesh. These lines tell the story of Utnapishtim, the mythical and literary precursor to the Biblical Noah. So important was the discovery of this flood story that it "challenged literary and biblical scholarship and would help to redefine beliefs about the age of the Earth," writes The Telegraph. When George Smith made his announcement in 1872, "even the Prime Minister, William Gladstone, was in attendance." Unfortunately, things did not end well for Smith, but because of his efforts, we can come as close as possible to the sound of Gilgamesh’s world, one that may remind us of a great many modern languages, but that uniquely preserves ancient history and ageless myth. The University of London site also includes translations and transliterations of the cuneiform writing, from Professor Andrew George’s 2003 The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, Critical Edition and Cuneiform Texts. Furthermore, there are answers to Frequently Asked Questions, many of which you may yourself be asking, such as "What are Babylonian and Assyrian?"; "Given they are dead, how can one tell how Babylonian and Assyrian were pronounced?"; "Did Babylonian and Assyrian poetry have rhyme and metre, like English poetry?"; and—for those with a desire to enter further into the ancient world of Gilgamesh and other Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian semi-mythical figures—"What if I actually want to learn Babylonian and Assyrian?" Then, of course, you’ll want to learn about the 20 new lines from Gilgamesh just discovered in Iraq…. Related Content: Listen to the Oldest Song in the World: A Sumerian Hymn Written 3,400 Years Ago Hear the "Seikilos Epitaph," the Oldest Complete Song in the World: An Inspiring Tune from 100 BC Hear Beowulf Read In the Original Old English: How Many Words Do You Recognize? Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Hear The Epic of Gilgamesh Read in its Original Ancient Language, Akkadian is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

In modern times, we don’t regard female musicians as in and of themselves unusual. Our rosters of favorite rockers, pop-stars, solo singer-songwriters, and what have you might well feature as many women as men — or, depending on the subgenre, many more women than men. But those of us who listen to a great deal of classical music might feel a tad sheepish about how much more heavily male our playlists slant, at least in terms of the composers. For a variety of historical and cultural reasons, the classical canon can feel like a man’s world indeed. But it doesn’t have to! The Spotify playlist above, "1200 Years of Women Composers: From Hildegard To Higdon," reveals that women started shaping what we now know as classical music far longer ago than most of us realize. (If you don’t have Spotify’s free software, download it here.) The playlist, which contains over 900 pieces and will take you days to listen to, begins in medieval times with the Byzantine abbess, poet, composer, and hymnographer Kassia (shown above) and ends with female composers from around the world not only living but (especially by the standards of those who write orchestral music) still young, like Misato Mochizuki, Helena Tulve, and Lera Auerbach. This comes arranged by Spotify Classical Playlists, whose site describes how the playlist offers not just an anthology of women composers, but also "a brief history of western classical music. It’s really fascinating to hear music constantly reinventing itself from the monophonic and deeply spiritual medieval chant of Hildegard [of Bingen] all the way into Higdon’s lush and ultra-modern percussion concerto." And before you begin this epic listen, bear in mind the quote from Faust that appears there: "Das Ewig Weibliche Zieht ins hinan" — "The eternal feminine leads us upwards." Related Content: Hear Seven Hours of Women Making Electronic Music (1938- 2014) Stream 58 Hours of Free Classical Music Selected to Help You Study, Work, or Simply Relax Hear All of Mozart in a Free 127-Hour Playlist Hear Classical Music Composed by Friedrich Nietzsche: 43 Original Tracks Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. 1200 Years of Women Composers: A Free 78-Hour Music Playlist That Takes You From Medieval Times to Now is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

According to Eva Talmadge, co-author of The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide, Kurt Vonnegut is the big gorilla of lit tattoos (a distinction he shares with poet e.e. cummings). It’s not surprising. Vonnegut’s humor and concision make him one of the most quotable authors of all time, perfectly suited to the task. Repetition is the price Vonnegut tattoo enthusiasts must pay for such enduring popularity. The phrase "so it goes" occurs 106 times in Slaughterhouse-Five, a figure dwarfed many times over by the number of hides upon which it is permanently inked. Recurrence is so frequent that the literary tattoo blog, Contrariwise, recently hosted a round of So It Goes Saturdays. So it goes. The second runner up, also from Slaughterhouse-Five,  is the painfully ironic "Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt." Those who’d rather put a bird on it than present an accessible sentiment to the uninitiated can opt for "poo-tee-weet," the catchphrase of a bird who’s a witness to war.  Certain to confound the folks staring at your triceps in the grocery line. Slaughterhouse Five is not Vonnegut’s only tattoo-friendly novel, of course. Breakfast of Champions is particularly well suited to the form, thanks to the author’s own line drawings. There’s also Slapstick: Hocus Pocus: Cat’s Cradle: God Bless You Mr. Rosewater: And then there’s the infamous asterisk, whose first appearance in Breakfast in Champions is preceded thusly: …to give an idea of the maturity of my illustrations for this book, here is my picture of an asshole" Hardcore fans can can prove their dedication by taking a portrait of the master to the grave with them. Depending on your tolerance for pain, you could squeeze in a longer sentiment: "I wanted all things To seem to make some sense, So we could all be happy, yes, Instead of tense. And I made up lies So that they all fit nice, And I made this sad world A par-a-dise." ― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country Related Content: A Dazzling Gallery of Clockwork Orange Tattoos Meet America & Britain’s First Female Tattoo Artists: Maud Wagner (1877-1961) & Jessie Knight (1904-1994) Why Tattoos Are Permanent? New TED Ed Video Explains with Animation Hear Kurt Vonnegut Read Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat’s Cradle & Other Novels Kurt Vonnegut Creates a Report Card for His Novels, Ranking Them From A+ to D Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play, Fawnbook, opens in New York City later this month. Follow her @AyunHalliday Browse a Gallery of Kurt Vonnegut Tattoos, and See Why He’s the Big Gorilla of Literary Tattoos is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Briefly noted: In 43 lectures, Dr. Vida Hull offers an introduction to the art of the Italian Renaissance. Packed with slides of great paintings, the lectures (all streamable above or available individually here), cover painters like Masaccio and Botticelli, Titian, da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo and more. Hull, who taught the course at East Tennessee State, earned her Ph.D. at Bryn Mawr College. Her course has been added to the Art History section of our collection, 1150 Free Online Courses from Top Universities. Related Content: Discover 100 Great Works of Art with Videos Created by Khan Academy & Google Art Project The British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Public Domain, Making Them Free to Reuse & Remix The Rijksmuseum Puts 125,000 Dutch Masterpieces Online, and Lets You Remix Its Art The History of Western Architecture: From Ancient Greece to Rococo (A Free Online Course) Free Course: An Introduction to the Art of the Italian Renaissance is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

If you’ve ever had any doubt, for some reason or other, that rock and roll descended directly from the blues, the video above, a history of the blues in 50 riffs, should convince you. And while you might think a blues history that ends in rock n roll would start with Robert Johnson, this guitarist reaches back to the country blues of Blind Lemon Jefferson’s "Black Snake Moan" from 1928 then moves through legendarily tuneful players like Skip James and Reverend Gary Davis before we get to the infamous Mr. Johnson. Big Bill Broonzy is, as he should be, represented. Other country blues greats like soft-spoken farmer Mississippi John Hurt and hardened felon Lead Belly, "King of the 12 String Guitar," are not. Say what you will about that. The recordings these artists made with Okeh Records and Alan Lomax, despite their commercial failure in the 30s, midwifed the blues revival of the fifties and sixties. Hear Lead Belly’s version of folk ballad "Gallows Pole" above, a song Led Zeppelin made famous. Lead Belly’s acoustic blues inspired everyone from John Fogerty to Skiffle King Lonnie Donegan, Pete Seeger to Jimmy Page, as did the rootsy country blues of Lightnin’ Hopkins, who is included in the 50 riffs. As are John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and BB King’s electric styles—all of them picked up by blues rock revivalists, including, of course, Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix’s "Red House" riff makes the cut here, as we move slowly into rock and roll. But before we get to Hendrix, we must first check in with two other Kings, Freddie and Albert—especially Albert. Hendrix "was star struck," says Rolling Stone, "when his hero [Albert King] opened for him at the Fillmore in 1967." For his part, King said, "I taught [Hendrix] a lesson about the blues. I could have easily played his songs, but he couldn’t play mine." See King play "Born Under a Bad Sign" in 1981, above, and hear why Hendrix worshipped him. Mississippi blues moved to Memphis, Chicago, New York and to Texas, where by the 70s and 80s, ZZ Top and Stevie Ray Vaughan added their own southwest roadhouse swagger. (No Johnny Winter, alas.) Many people will be pleased to see Irish rocker Rory Gallagher in the mix, and amused that The Blues Brothers get a mention. Many more usual suspects appear, and a few unusual picks. I’m very glad to hear a brief R.L. Burnside riff. The White Stripes, Tedeschi Trucks Band, and Joe Bonamassa round things out into the 2010’s. Everyone will miss their favorite blues player. (As usual, the powerhouse gospel blues guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe gets overlooked.) I would love to see included in any history of blues such obscure but brilliant guitarists as Evan Johns (above), whose rockabilly blues guitar freakouts sound like nothing else. Or John Dee Holeman, below, whose effortless, understated rhythm playing goes unmatched in my book. Like so many of the bluesmen who came before them, these gentlemen seem to represent a dying breed. And yet the blues lives on and evolves in artists like Gary Clark Jr., The Black Keys, and Alabama Shakes. And of course there’s the prodigy Bonamassa, whom you absolutely have to see below at age 12, jamming with experimental country speed demon Danny Gatton’s band (he gets going around 1:05). If you’re missing your favorites, give them a shout out below. Who do you think has to be included in any history of the blues—told in riffs or otherwise—and why? Related Content: The Thrill is Gone: See B.B. King Play in Two Electric Live Performances R. Crumb’s Heroes of Blues, Jazz & Country Features 114 Illustrations of the Artist’s Favorite Musicians Watch Rock Pioneer Sister Rosetta Tharpe Wow Audiences With Her Gospel Guitar Zeppelin Took My Blues Away: An Illustrated History of Zeppelin’s "Copyright Indiscretions" Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness   The History of the Blues in 50 Riffs: From Blind Lemon Jefferson (1928) to Joe Bonamassa (2009) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Why must we all work long hours to earn the right to live? Why must only the wealthy have a access to leisure, aesthetic pleasure, self-actualization…? Everyone seems to have an answer, according to their political or theological bent. One economic bogeyman, so-called "trickle-down" economics, or "Reaganomics," actually predates our 40th president by a few hundred years at least. The notion that we must better ourselves—or simply survive—by toiling to increase the wealth and property of already wealthy men was perhaps first comprehensively articulated in the 18th-century doctrine of "improvement." In order to justify privatizing common land and forcing the peasantry into jobbing for them, English landlords attempted to show in treatise after treatise that 1) the peasants were lazy, immoral, and unproductive, and 2) they were better off working for others. As a corollary, most argued that landowners should be given the utmost social and political privilege so that their largesse could benefit everyone. This scheme necessitated a complete redefinition of what it meant to work. In his study, The English Village Community and the Enclosure Movements, historian W.E. Tate quotes from several of the "improvement" treatises, many written by Puritans who argued that "the poor are of two classes, the industrious poor who are content to work for their betters, and the idle poor who prefer to work for themselves." Tate’s summation perfectly articulates the early modern redefinition of "work" as the creation of profit for owners. Such work is virtuous, "industrious," and leads to contentment. Other kinds of work, leisurely, domestic, pleasurable, subsistence, or otherwise, qualifies—in an Orwellian turn of phrase—as "idleness." (We hear echoes of this rhetoric in the language of "deserving" and "undeserving" poor.) It was this language, and its legal and social repercussions, that Max Weber later documented in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Karl Marx reacted to in Das Capital, and feminists have shown to be a consolidation of patriarchal power and further exclusion of women from economic participation. Along with Marx, various others have raised significant objections to Protestant, capitalist definitions of work, including Thomas Paine, the Fabians, agrarians, and anarchists. In the twentieth century, we can add two significant names to an already distinguished list of dissenters: Buckminster Fuller and Bertrand Russell. Both challenged the notion that we must have wage-earning jobs in order to live, and that we are not entitled to indulge our passions and interests unless we do so for monetary profit or have independent wealth. In a New York Times column on Russell’s 1932 essay "In Praise of Idleness," Gary Gutting writes, "For most of us, a paying job is still utterly essential — as masses of unemployed people know all too well. But in our economic system, most of us inevitably see our work as a means to something else: it makes a living, but it doesn’t make a life." In far too many cases in fact, the work we must do to survive robs us of the ability to live by ruining our health, consuming all our precious time, and degrading our environment. In his essay, Russell argued that "there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what has always been preached." His "arguments for laziness," as he called them, begin with definitions of what we mean by "work," which might be characterized as the difference between labor and management: What is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. Russell further divides the second category into "those who give orders" and "those who give advice as to what orders should be given." This latter kind of work, he says, "is called politics," and requires no real "knowledge of the subjects as to which advice is given," but only the ability to manipulate: "the art of persuasive speaking and writing, i.e. of advertising." Russell then discusses a "third class of men" at the top, "more respected than either of the classes of the workers"—the landowners, who "are able to make others pay for the privilege of being allowed to exist and to work." The idleness of landowners, he writes, "is only rendered possible by the industry of others. Indeed their desire for comfortable idleness is historically the source of the whole gospel of work. The last thing they have ever wished is that others should follow their example." The "gospel of work" Russell outlines is, he writes, "the morality of the Slave State," and the kinds of murderous toil that developed under its rule—actual chattel slavery, fifteen hour workdays in abominable conditions, child labor—has been "disastrous." Work looks very different today than it did even in Russell’s time, but even in modernity, when labor movements have managed to gather some increasingly precarious amount of social security and leisure time for working people, the amount of work forced upon the majority of us is unnecessary for human thriving and in fact counter to it—the result of a still-successful capitalist propaganda campaign: if we aren’t laboring for wages to increase the profits of others, the logic still dictates, we will fall to sloth and vice and fail to earn our keep. "Satan finds some mischief for idle hands to do," goes the Protestant proverb Russell quotes at the beginning of his essay. On the contrary, he concludes, …in a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day, every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving, however excellent his pictures may be. Young writers will not be obliged to draw attention to themselves by sensational pot-boilers, with a view to acquiring the economic independence for monumental works, for which, when the time at last comes, they will have lost the taste and capacity. The less we are forced to labor, the more we can do good work in our idleness, and we can all labor less, Russell argues, because "modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all" instead of "overwork for some and starvation for others." A few decades later, visionary architect, inventor, and theorist Buckminster Fuller would make exactly the same argument, in similar terms, against the "specious notion that everybody has to earn a living." Fuller articulated his ideas on work and non-work throughout his long career. He put them most succinctly in a 1970 New York magazine "Environmental Teach-In": It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest…. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. Many people are paid very little to do backbreaking labor; many others paid quite a lot to do very little. The creation of surplus jobs leads to redundancy, inefficiency, and the bureaucratic waste we hear so many politicians rail against: "we have inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors"—all to satisfy a dubious moral imperative and to make a small number of rich people even richer. What should we do instead? We should continue our education, and do what we please, Fuller argues: "The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living." We should all, in other words, work for ourselves, performing the kind of labor we deem necessary for our quality of life and our social arrangements, rather than the kinds of labor dictated to us governments, landowners, and corporate executives. And we can all do so, Fuller thought, and all flourish similarly. Fuller called the technological and evolutionary advancement that enables us to do more with less "euphemeralization." In Critical Path, a visionary work on human development, he claimed "It is now possible to give every man, woman and child on Earth a standard of living comparable to that of a modern-day billionaire." Sound utopian? Perhaps. But Fuller’s far-reaching path out of reliance on fossil fuels and into a sustainable future has never been tried, for some depressingly obvious reasons and some less obvious. Neither Russell nor Fuller argued for the abolition—or inevitable self-destruction—of capitalism and the rise of a workers’ paradise. (Russell gave up his early enthusiasm for communism.) Neither does Gary Gutting, a philosophy professor at the University of Notre Dame, who in his New York Times commentary on Russell asserts that "Capitalism, with its devotion to profit, is not in itself evil." Most Marxists on the other hand would argue that devotion to profit can never be benign. But there are many middle ways between state communism and our current religious devotion to supply-side capitalism, such as robust democratic socialism or a basic income guarantee. In any case, what most dissenters against modern notions of work share in common is the conviction that education should produce critical thinkers and self-directed individuals, and not, as Gutting puts it, "be primarily for training workers or consumers"—and that doing work we love for the sake of our own personal fulfillment should not be the exclusive preserve of a propertied leisure class. Related Content: Charles Bukowski Rails Against 9-to-5 Jobs in a Brutally Honest Letter (1986) Everything I Know: 42 Hours of Buckminster Fuller’s Visionary Lectures Free Online (1975) Bertrand Russell: The Everyday Benefit of Philosophy Is That It Helps You Live with Uncertainty Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Bertrand Russell & Buckminster Fuller on Why We Should Spend Less Time Working, and More Time Living & Learning is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.