View image | gettyimages.com Stephen King has given writers a lot to think about these past few years in his numerous interviews and in his statement of craft, On Writing. He deems one of his most salient pieces of advice on writing so important that he repeats it twice in his Top 20 Rules for Writers: writers, he says, "learn best by reading a lot…. If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write." To help his readers discover the right tools, King attached a list of 96 books at the end of On Writing, of which he said, "In some way or other, I suspect each book in the list had an influence on the books I wrote…. a good many of these might show you some new ways of doing your work." King’s original list of 96 books for aspiring writers generated a fair amount of comment on Aerogramme Writer’s Studio, who brought it to our attention last year. Later, the same web site brought us another list of 82 books, which King published in the 10th anniversary edition of On Writing. With King’s second list, as with the first, you’ll find that best-selling genre writers sit comfortably next to lit-class staples. In this list, the spectrum of accessibility is a little narrower. We have fewer classic writers like Dickens or Conrad and fewer commercial novelists like Nelson DeMille. Instead the list is mostly twentieth century literary fiction by mostly living contemporaries, with little genre fiction save perhaps sci-fi/fantasy writer Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver, thriller author Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series, hugely popular mystery writer Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and Patrick O’Brian’s adventure series. Below, we’ve excerpted a list of 15 books King recommends—books, he says, "which entertained and taught me." Kate Atkinson, One Good Turn Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake Robert Bolaño, 2666 Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Neil Gaiman, American Gods Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke Sue Monk Kid, The Secret Life of Bees Elmore Leonard, Up in Honey’s Room Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes Philip Roth, American Pastoral Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children Donna Tartt, The Little Friend Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace  King almost shrugs in his short introduction, writing, "you could do worse." I expect many readers of this post might have suggestions for how they think you could also do better, especially given the five years that have passed since this list’s compilation and some of the blind spots that seem to persist in King’s reading habits. I doubt he would object much to any of us adding to, or subtracting from, his lists—or ignoring them altogether. It seems clear he thinks that like him, we should read what we like, as long as we’re always reading something. See the full list of 82 titles here. Related Content: Stephen King Creates a List of 96 Books for Aspiring Writers to Read Stephen King’s Top 10 All-Time Favorite Books Stephen King’s Top 20 Rules for Writers 7 Free Stephen King Stories: Presented in Text, Audio, Web Comic & a Graphic Novel Video Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Stephen King Creates a List of 82 Books for Aspiring Writers (to Supplement an Earlier List of 96 Recommend Books) 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.

Two years ago, a series of animated science videos began to pop up on a Vimeo account called HarvardX Neuroscience. As its name suggests, it’s coming out of Harvard University, and, with the help of animators, they originally created a series of scientific shorts pitched between the layman and the serious scientist. In the last month, however, they’ve stepped further into the arts realm with a mini-series of animations (five and counting as of this writing) that look to poetry to explain what science renders dry and academic. The new video series features "representations of perception and sensation" as realized through the poems of Walt Whitman, America’s great transcendentalist poet, Emily Dickinson, and William Carlos Williams (whose own reading is used as the audio for a video). Opening all the senses to the wonders of the world is "the origin of all poems" according to Whitman, and this curation focuses on smell, taste, sight, touch, and sound to prove his point. The readers you hear in this videos, collectively entitled Poetry of Perception, include poet/artist Peter Blegvad, Anna Martine, Harvard’s own Sarah Jessop, and artist/animator Nak Yong Choi. And the animations are brought to you by Sophie Koko Gate, Hannah Jacobs, Lily Fang, Isaac Holland, Brian Smee, all who bring a tactile, mutable quality to these short poems. There will be another three videos in the series, so please bookmark the Vimeo account. Related Content: Walt Whitman’s Poem "A Noiseless Patient Spider" Brought to Life in Three Animations William Carlos Williams Reads His Poetry (1954) Marilyn Monroe Reads Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1952) The Second Known Photo of Emily Dickinson Emerges Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based 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. Watch "The Poetry of Perception": Harvard Animates Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson & William Carlos Williams 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.

A couple days ago, we featured some intriguing clips from the new animated Edgar Allan Poe film, Extraordinary Tales. Directed by animator Raul Garcia, the film draws on the voice talents of several classic horror actors and directors, including the late Christopher Lee, Roger Corman, and—in an archival reading of Poe’s "The Tell Tale Heart"—the legendary Bela Lugosi. You can hear his reading above, a recording that seems to date from 1946. The Hungarian actor, who struggled to find work late in his career, and wrestled with a morphine addiction, likely "recorded it for his agent," writes Ronald L. Smith, "who would have been deputized to make copies and send them out to anyone interested in booking Bela’s solo stage act (which included an enactment of the Poe tale)." All of the great horror stars of the early twentieth century cut their teeth on Poe, and performed his macabre stories throughout their careers. Lugosi was no exception. After his typecasting as an exotic villain in the stage adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in the late 20s, then in Tod Browning’s famous 1931 film, Lugosi would remark, "I am definitely typed, doomed to be an exponent of evil." He appeared the following year as the mad scientist in Universal’s adaptation of Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue (watch here). Then, in 1935, Lugosi played yet another crazed doctor, who is obsessed with all things Poe, in The Raven (view here), a film that also features Universal’s other major horror star of the time, Boris Karloff. The two had teamed up the year previous in Edgar G. Ulmer’s Poe adaptation, The Black Cat, a huge hit for Universal, in which Lugosi plays yet another evil doctor. After Lugosi’s successes with Poe-inspired films in the thirties, his career precipitously declined, and by the forties, when he made the "Tell Tale Heart" recording at the top of the post, he’d been reduced to playing parodies of his Dracula character, notably in 1948’s Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Lugosi attempted to bank on earlier successes with Poe, or Poe-like, characters. Before Ed Wood found and resurrected him in now-classic fifties B-movies like Glen or Glenda, Bride of the Monster, and—posthumously—Plan 9 from Outer Space, Lugosi made one final appearance onscreen in a Poe adaptation. Click here and see him in an adaptation of "The Cask of Amontillado," an episode from television series Suspense. Set in Italy during World War II, this version of "Amontillado" casts Lugosi as Nazi officer "General Fortunato," whom one fan describes as a "ruthless, amoral roué, with equally ruthless storm troopers at his beck and call." It’s not Lugosi’s greatest performance, but it’s "Bela doing his 1949 best," and an important entry in his catalog of Poe performances, if only because it’s the last of them. Happy Halloween! Related Content: New Film Extraordinary Tales Animates Edgar Poe Stories, with Narrations by Guillermo Del Toro, Christopher Lee & More Iggy Pop Reads Edgar Allan Poe’s Classic Horror Story, "The Tell-Tale Heart" 5 Hours of Edgar Allan Poe Stories Read by Vincent Price & Basil Rathbone Bela Lugosi Discusses His Drug Habit as He Leaves the Hospital in 1955 Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space: "The Worst Movie Ever Made," "The Ultimate Cult Flick," or Both? Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Hear Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Tell Tale Heart" Read by the Great Bela Lugosi (1946) 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.

Next time I make it to Oslo, the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design ranks high on my to-do list. The next time I make it to Oslo will also count as the first time I make it to Oslo, since the tendency of the city itself to rank high on the world’s-most-expensive places lists (and at the very top of some of those lists) has thus far scared me off of booking a flight there. But if you can handle Oslo’s formidable cost of living, the National Museum’s branches only charge you the equivalent of five bucks or so for admission. And now they’ve offered an even cheaper alternative: 30,000 works of art from their collection, viewable online for free. If it all seems overwhelming, you can view the National Museum’s digital collection in sections of highlights: one of pre-1945 works, one of post-1945 works, and one of Edvard Munch. While few of us could confidently call ourselves experts in Norwegian art, all of us know the work of Munch — or at least we know a work of Munch, 1893’s The Scream (Skrik), whose black-garbed central figure, clutching his gaunt features twisted into an expression of pure agony, has gone on to inspire countless homages, parodies, and ironic greeting cards. But Munch, whose career lasted well over half a century and involved printmaking as well as painting, didn’t become Norway’s best-known artist on the strength of The Scream alone. The National Museum’s digital collection offers perhaps your best opportunity to begin to get a sense of the scope of Munch’s art. There you can take an up-close look at (and even download) such pieces as the less agonized Melancholy (Melankoli), painted one year before The Scream; 1901’s The Girls on the Bridge, a more placid treatment of a similar setting; and even, so you can get to know the artist better still, Munch’s 1895 self-portrait with a cigarette. He may not exactly look happy in it, but at least he hasn’t become a visual shorthand for all-consuming pain like the poor fellow he painted on the bridge. (If you want my guess as to what made the subject of The Scream so unhappy, I’d say he just finished looking into average Oslo rents.) A big thanks to Joakim for making us aware of this collection. If any other readers know of great resources we can feature on the site, please send us a tip here. Related Content: Edvard Munch’s Famous Painting The Scream Animated to the Sound of Pink Floyd’s Primal Music The Guggenheim Puts Online 1600 Great Works of Modern Art from 575 Artists Download 35,000 Works of Art from the National Gallery, Including Masterpieces by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Rembrandt & More Rijksmuseum Digitizes & Makes Free Online 210,000 Works of Art, Masterpieces Included! Download 100,000 Free Art Images in High-Resolution from The Getty 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. 30,000 Works of Art by Edvard Munch & Other Artists Put Online by Norway’s National Museum of Art 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.

Frida Kahlo’s legacy is definitely informed by her careful husbandry of own image. She understood its currency, and how to leverage it. Even when caught out of uniform or having a seemingly unaware laugh, she stayed true to what in modern parlance would be called her brand. So it is with gallery owner Julien Levy’s 1938 (technically not-safe-for-work) photographs of the artist, taken the year before he hosted her first solo show, an event that caused Time magazine to rhapsodize that "the flutter of the week in Manhattan was caused by the first exhibition of paintings by famed muralist Diego Rivera’s…wife, Frida Kahlo." Rivera’s wife was also Levy’s lover, as these artfully posed, semi-clad photos suggest. They show a less public side of Kahlo, to be sure, but one that’s in keeping with the face she presented to the world. Frankly, the revelation of her partially loosed hair seems more intimate than her dishabille. Click here to see the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s collection of Levy’s Kahlo portraits, both with and without rebozo. To learn a little more about Julien Levy ("a gallery owner who committed his charisma, connections, and personal resources to establishing photography’s importance in the field of modern art") and the collection bequeathed to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, click here. Related Content: 1933 Article on Frida Kahlo: "Wife of the Master Mural Painter Gleefully Dabbles in Works of Art" Frida Kahlo’s Colorful Clothes Revealed for the First Time & Photographed by Ishiuchi Miyako Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera Visit Leon Trotsky in Mexico, 1938 Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play, Fawnbook, is now playing in New York City. Follow her @AyunHalliday The Artist as Artist’s Model: Au Naturel Portraits of Frida Kahlo Taken by Art Patron Julien Levy (1938) 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.

Herk Harvey had a successful career as a director and producer of educational and industrial movies in Lawrence, Kansas, but he longed for something more. After all, fellow Kansas filmmaker Robert Altman had made the leap from industrial flicks to Hollywood, so why couldn’t he? The resulting movie, Carnival of Souls (1962), became a cult classic influencing the likes of George Romero, James Wan and David Lynch. Mary (played by Candace Hilligoss, the only trained actor in the cast) mysteriously surfaces after an ill-fated drag race sends her car off a bridge and into a deep river. Unmoored and unable to remember what happened, she flees her hometown and ends up in Salt Lake City where she takes a gig as a church organist. She tries to make a life there but is plagued by an otherworldly stranger with a paper white mask of evil (played by Harvey himself.) Now in the public domain, Carnival is a slow burn of dread that relies on few cheap jumps and little gore. Instead, Harvey creates a sparse world of alienation and creeping hysteria like an Edward Hopper painting gone psychotic. Harvey’s inspirations were clearly more art house than Hammer horror. Echoes of F. W. Murnau, Ingmar Bergman and Jean Cocteau abound. Yet the curiously somnambulate acting exhibited by most of the cast along with the movie’s freaky organ soundtrack gives the film the vibe of a particularly nightmarish Ed Wood movie. Carnival made a modest showing on the drive-in circuit when it came out but it didn’t become a cult classic until later in the 60s when it started playing on late-night TV. Harvey, however, never made another feature. You can watch the complete movie above, or find it in our collection, 725 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. Related Content: Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space: "The Worst Movie Ever Made," "The Ultimate Cult Flick," or Both? The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: See the Restored Version of the 1920 Horror Classic with Its Original Color Tinting Time Out London Presents The 100 Best Horror Films: Start by Watching Four Horror Classics Free Online Martin Scorsese Names the 11 Scariest Horror Films: Kubrick, Hitchcock, Tourneur & More 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. Watch the Cult Classic Horror Film Carnival of Souls (1962) 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.

Kye Smith, a drummer based in Newcastle, Australia, recently hauled his drum kit to a nearby rooftop (an homage to The Beatles’ 1969 rooftop gig?) and started banging out a pretty wonderful tribute to Ringo Starr, playing drum parts from 71 Beatles songs in 5 quick minutes. Smith moves chronologically, playing the songs in the order they were released (not recorded). We start in 1962, move through 1969, and even momentarily visit 1995. On his Facebook page, Smith had this to say: Way before I found out about punk rock or even knew what a snare drum was I spent my childhood playing vinyl records at my grandparents place spinning artists such as Slim Dusty, ELVIS PRESLEY and The Beatles. This chronology called for some special treatment and got me out of the studio and onto the rooftop of The Great Northern Hotel - Newcastle, Australia for a pretty stunning view of Newcastle, New South Wales in the background. Thanks to everyone at The Great Northern for letting me make some noise up there and to Eluminate for helping me shoot it and lug heaps of gear up 7 storeys of stairs! Below the jump, you can find the list of songs that appear in the video, complete with corresponding time stamps. And keep in mind that Smith, as he mentions on Youtube, is "available for studio and live work and will be opening up some slots for drum lessons shortly." Contact him here. PS: If you can name one of the drum parts that was originally played by Paul McCartney, you get bonus points. 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. (1962) 0:06 - Love Me Do 0:09 - P.S. I Love You (1963) 0:13 - Please Please Me 0:17 - I Saw Her Standing There 0:20 - Do You Want to Know a Secret? 0:22 - From Me to You 0:24 - Thank You Girl 0:27 - She Loves You 0:30 - All My Loving 0:33 - I Want to Hold Your Hand (1964) 0:36 - Can’t Buy Me Love 0:40 - A Hard Day’s Night 0:43 - I Should Have Known Better 0:46 - If I Fell 0:52 - I’m Happy Just to Dance With You 0:55 - And I Love Her 0:59 - I’ll Cry Instead 1:01 - You Can’t Do That 1:04 - I Feel Fine 1:07 - She’s a Woman 1:10 - Eight Days a Week 1:13 - I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party (1965) 1:18 - Ticket to Ride 1:22 - Yes it Is 1:29 - Help! 1:33 - Yesterday 1:41 - Day Tripper 1:45 - We Can Work it Out 1:47 - Drive My Car 1:51 - Norwegian Wood 1:55 - Nowhere Man 2:01 - Michelle 2:03 - What Goes On 2:08 - Girl 2:10 - In My Life (1966) 2:14 - Paperback Writer 2:18 - Rain 2:22 - Taxman 2:24 - Eleanor Rigby 2:29 - Yellow Submarine 2:33 - Good Day Sunshine 2:37 - Got to Get You Into My Life (1967) 2:41 - Strawberry Fields Forever 2:47 - Penny Lane 2:51 - Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band 2:56 - With a Little Help From My Friends 2:58 - Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds 3:05 - A Day in the Life 3:11 - All You Need is Love 3:15 - Baby You’re a Rich Man 3:20 - Hello Goodbye 3:23 - I Am the Walrus (1968) 3:24 - Lady Madonna 3:29 - Hey Jude 3:34 - Revolution 3:39 - Back in the U.S.S.R. 3:41 - Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da 3:46 - While My Guitar Gently Weeps (1969) 3:50 - Get Back 3:54 - Don’t Let Me Down 3:58 - The Ballad of John and Yoko 4:02 - Come Together 4:07 - Something 4:12 - Octopus’s Garden 4:15 - Here Come’s the Sun 4:19 - The End (1970) 4:24 - Let it Be 4:32 - You Know My Name (Look Up the Number) 4:37 - For You Blue 4:39 - The Long and Winding Road (1995) 4:50 - Free as a Bird Musician Plays Signature Drum Parts of 71 Beatles Songs in 5 Minutes: A Whirlwind Tribute 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 first video recordings of a David Lynch interview dates from 1979," writes The New Yorker‘s Dennis Lim. "The twenty-minute black-and-white segment was produced for a television course at the University of California, Los Angeles, and conducted in the oil fields of the Los Angeles Basin, one of the locations that constituted the barren wasteland of his first feature, Eraserhead (1977)." And it is Eraserhead these UCLA students, in what Lim calls "the moment of Lynch’s first brush with cult fame," want to know about, putting a variety of questions to the young filmmaker, and putting his ability to answer them concretely to the test. You may well learn more about Eraserhead in the theater-lobby audience responses collected for the video, wherein the viewers — viewers, remember, from a now hard-to-imagine time when the name David Lynch carried no meaning at all — exiting a screening express reactions ranging from great pleasure (some of them boast of having seen it as many as eight times already) to predictable bewilderment ("I’ve gotta think about it for a while") and even more predictable distaste: "The weirdest thing I’ve ever seen." "It’s terrible. I didn’t like it." "Some inane, bizarre person with a disturbed mind wrote that film." But does the man standing there submitting to a student interview in the middle of an oil field seem so bizarre, so disturbed? Some of Lynch’s answers, as when he describes Eraserhead as "not like thrown-together abstract" but "meant-to-be-that-way abstract," may strike you as inane at first, but certainly nothing he says crosses the line from inanity to insanity. In the almost 40 years since the film’s first showing, Eraserhead has grown more artistically divisive even as its fan base spans a wider and wider range of generations and nationalities. Both its promoters and its detractors may sometimes wonder if even Lynch himself understands it, but to my mind, this early interview hints that he does. He made what he calls "an open-feeling film," a fount of an infinitude of interpretations, and for that reason an enduring work of art. And he meant it to be that way. Related Content: The Paintings of Filmmaker/Visual Artist David Lynch David Lynch’s Unlikely Commercial for a Home Pregnancy Test (1997) David Lynch Teaches You to Cook His Quinoa Recipe in a Weird, Surrealist Video What David Lynch Can Do With a 100-Year-Old Camera and 52 Seconds of Film 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. A Young David Lynch Talks About Eraserhead in One of His First Recorded Interviews (1979) 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.

Filmmaker Jacob T. Swinney’s First and Final Frames, Part II, above, is a rare sequel that upholds the quality of the original. As he did in its predecessor, Swinney screens the opening and closing shots of dozens of recent and iconic films side by side, providing viewers with a crash course in the editorial eye. What is being communicated when the closing shot replicates—or inverts—the opening shot? Will the opening shot become freighted with portent on a second viewing, after one has seen how the film will end? (Shakespeare would say yes.) Swinney is deeply conversant in the nonverbal language of film, as evidenced by his numerous compilations and video essays for Slate on such topics as the Kubrick Stare and the facial expressions of emotionally revelatory moments. Most of the films he chooses for simultaneous cradle-and-grave-shot replay qualify as art, or serious attempts thereat. You’d never know from the formalism of its opening and closing shots that Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train at the 1:00 mark is a comedy. To be fair, Clint Mansell’s universally applied score could cloak even Animal House in a veil of wistful, cinematic yearning. Given the comic sensibility Swinney’s brought to such supercuts as a Concise Video History of Teens Climbing Through Each Others’ Windows  and a Tiny History of Shrinking Humans in Movies, I’m hoping there will be a third installment wherein he considers the first and final moments of comedies. Any you might recommend for inclusion? (Hold the Pink Flamingos, por favor…) Films featured in First and Final Frames, Part II in order of appearance: Sunshine Snowpiercer Biutiful 21 Grams The Prestige All is Lost Take Shelter The Impossible United 93 Vanilla Sky Ex Machina Inside Llewyn Davis Dead Man Mystery Train Melvin and Howard Fury Full Metal Jacket A Clockwork Orange Eyes Wide Shut Eraserhead The Elephant Man The Fall The Thin Red Line The New World Road to Perdition Snow Falling on Cedars The Bourne Ultimatum The Imitation Game Flight Hard Eight Inherent Vice World War Z Wild The Double The Machinist Born on the Fourth of July Brideshead Revisited Maps to the Stars The Skeleton Twins Mommy A Scanner Darkly 10 Years Milk Lost Highway Boxcar Bertha Badlands Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai Ratcatcher Ida Raise the Red Lantern Gattaca Kundun Bringing Out the Dead A Most Wanted Man The Curious Case of Benjamin Button The Social Network Jack Goes Boating Submarine Half Nelson Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Babel Django Unchained True Grit Vertigo Oldboy Apocalypto Dawn of the Planet of the Apes Gladiator Mad Max: Fury Road World’s Greatest Dad Related Content: A Mesmerizing Supercut of the First and Final Frames of 55 Movies, Played Side by Side Watch 7 New Video Essays on Wes Anderson’s Films: Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums & More How Akira Kurosawa Used Movement to Tell His Stories: A Video Essay Discover the Life & Work of Stanley Kubrick in a Sweeping Three-Hour Video Essay Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play, Fawnbook, is now playing at The Brick Theater in New York City. Follow her @AyunHalliday A Spellbinding Supercut of the First & Final Frames of 70 Iconic Films, Played Side by Side 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.

I have not seen the second two of a promised seven films based on the novels in C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia series. But I tend to agree with several critics of the first filmed adaptation, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: "The PG-rated movie feels safe and constricted," Peter Travers observed, "in a way the story never does on the page." Although Lewis "did nothing to hide his devout Christianity" in his allegorical Narnia books for young adults, nor in his grown-up sci-fi fantasy series, The Space Trilogy, Lewis on the page comes across as a rigorous writer first and a Christian apologist second. Except, I’d argue, for his work of explicitly populist, and rather facile, apologetics, Mere Christianity (originally a series of radio lectures), his fiction and popular non-fiction alike present readers—whatever their beliefs—with challenging, inventive, witty, and moving ways to think about the human condition. http://audio.ancientfaith.com/grapevine/con001_pc.mp3 Lewis’ immersion in European Medieval and Renaissance literature in his day-job role as an Oxford don—and his ecumenical, almost Jungian, approach to literature generally—gives his fiction a serious archetypal depth that most modern religious novelists lack, making him, along with fellow "Inkling" J.R.R. Tolkien, something of a literary saint in modern Christianity. Though it may offend the orthodox to say so, Lewis’ novels capture a "deep magic" at the heart of all mythological and literary traditions. And they do so in a way that makes exploring heavy, grown-up themes exciting for both children and adults. Though I’ve personally left behind the beliefs that animated my first readings of his books, I can still return to The Chronicles of Narnia and find in them deep magic and mystery. There’s no denying the enormous influence these books have had on children’s fantasy literature, from Harry Potter to Lewis’ atheist antagonist Philip Pullman. I look forward to sharing his books with my daughter, whatever she ends up making of their religiosity. I’ve still got my tattered paperback copies, and I’ll gladly read them to her before she can tackle them herself, but I’m also grateful for the complete audio recordings of The Chronicles of Narnia, available free online and read by English child psychologist and author Chrissi Hart. In installments of two chapters at a time, Hart reads all seven of the Narnia books, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Silver Chair, The Horse and His Boy, The Magician’s Nephew, and The Last Battle. You can hear the first two chapters of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe above, and stream or download the remaining chapters, and the remaining six books, at Ancientfaith.com. Although Hart and the Ancient Faith site who host her readings clearly approach the novels from an explicitly Orthodox perspective, I don’t think readers need to share their beliefs, or Lewis’, to enjoy and appreciate the storytelling magic of The Chronicles of Narnia. And it should be noted that CS Lewis Pte. Ltd. granted permission to put these recordings online, according to the Ancient Faith web site. The recordings are therefore listed in our collection, 700 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free. Enjoy. Related Content: C.S. Lewis’ Prescient 1937 Review of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien: It "May Well Prove a Classic" Watch Hand-Drawn Animations of 7 Stories & Essays by C.S. LewisWatch Hand-Drawn Animations of 7 Stories & Essays by C.S. LewisWatch Hand-Drawn Animations of 7 Stories & Essays by C.S. Lewis The Only Known Recordings of C.S. Lewis (1944-1948) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Hear All of C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia Novels as Free Audio Books 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 latest installment from The School of Life’s animated video series introduces us to Jean-Paul Sartre‘s concept of bad faith, a concept integral to his philosophy, Existentialism. As Mark Linsenmayer, one of the founders of The Partially Examined Life podcast, explained on our site back in 2011, "bad faith" is a tendency we have to "disassociate ourselves from our actions," or more commonly, to claim we have "more limited choices [in life] than we actually do." He went on to say: Bad faith is possible because of the nature of the self… There is no predetermined ‘human nature’ or ‘true you,’ but instead you are something built over time, by your own freely chosen actions, too often using the roles and characteristics others assign to you. As is their wont, The School of Life takes Sartre’s notion of bad faith and applies it to everyday life, showing how it can help you create the life you want to live-from entering into more satisfying relationships, to getting out of dead-end jobs. For anyone looking to get a fairly accessible introduction to Sartre’s philosophy, you might want to start with his 1946 lecture, Existentialism is a Humanism. And down below, in the Relateds section, we have more helpful introductions to Sartre’s liberating philosophy. Related Content: Jean-Paul Sartre Breaks Down the Bad Faith of Intellectuals Sartre, Heidegger, Nietzsche: Documentary Presents Three Philosophers in Three Hours Download Walter Kaufmann’s Lectures on Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre & Modern Thought (1960) 140+ Free Online Philosophy Courses Simone de Beauvoir Explains "Why I’m a Feminist" in a Rare TV Interview (1975) How Jean-Paul Sartre’s Philosophy Can Empower You to Live the Life You Truly Want 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 the United States and the UK, we’ve seen the emergence of a multibillion-dollar brain training industry, premised on the idea that you can improve your memory, attention and powers of reasoning through the right mental exercises. You’ve likely seen software companies and web sites that market games designed to increase your cognitive abilities. And if you’re part of an older demographic, worried about your aging brain, you’ve perhaps been inclined to give those brain training programs a try. Whether these programs can deliver on their promises remains an open question-especially seeing that a 2010 scientific study from Cambridge University and the BBC concluded that there’s "no evidence to support the widely held belief that the regular use of computerised brain trainers improves general cognitive functioning in healthy participants…" And yet we shouldn’t lose hope. A number of other scientific studies suggest that physical exercise-as opposed to mental exercise-can meaningfully improve our cognitive abilities, from childhood through old age. One study led by Charles Hillman, a professor of kinesiology and community health at the University of Illinois, found that children who regularly exercise, writes The New York Times: displayed substantial improvements in … executive function. They were better at "attentional inhibition," which is the ability to block out irrelevant information and concentrate on the task at hand … and had heightened abilities to toggle between cognitive tasks. Tellingly, the children who had attended the most exercise sessions showed the greatest improvements in their cognitive scores. And, hearteningly, exercise seems to confer benefits on adults too. A study focusing on older adults already experiencing a mild degree of cognitive impairment found that resistance and aerobic training improved their spatial memory and verbal memory. Another study found that weight training can decrease brain shrinkage, a process that occurs naturally with age. If you’re looking to get the gist of how exercise promotes brain health, it comes down to this: Exercise triggers the production of a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, which helps support the growth of existing brain cells and the development of new ones. With age, BDNF levels fall; this decline is one reason brain function deteriorates in the elderly. Certain types of exercise, namely aerobic, are thought to counteract these age-related drops in BDNF and can restore young levels of BDNF in the age brain. That’s how The Chicago Tribune summarized the findings of a 1995 study conducted by researchers at the University of California-Irvine. You can get more of the nuts and bolts by reading The Tribune’s recent article, The Best Brain Exercise May be Physical. (Also see Can You Get Smarter?) You’re perhaps left wondering what’s the right dose of exercise for the brain? And guess what, Gretchen Reynolds, the phys ed columnist for The Times’ Well blog, wrote a column on just that this summer. Although the science is still far from conclusive, a new study conducted by The University of Kansas Alzheimer’s Disease Center found that small doses of exercise could lead to cognitive improvements. Writes Reynolds, "the encouraging takeaway from the new study … is that briskly walking for 20 or 25 minutes several times a week — a dose of exercise achievable by almost all of us — may help to keep our brains sharp as the years pass." via New York Times Related Content: This Is Your Brain on Jane Austen: The Neuroscience of Reading Great Literature New Research Shows How Music Lessons During Childhood Benefit the Brain for a Lifetime Free Online Psychology & Neuroscience Courses This Is Your Brain on Exercise: Why Physical Exercise (Not Mental Games) Might Be the Best Way to Keep Your Mind Sharp 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.

Ernest Hemingway seemed to feud with most of the prominent male artists of his time, from Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot to F. Scott Fitzgerald. He had a "very strange relationship" with Orson Welles—the two came to blows at least once—and he reportedly slapped Max Eastman in the face with a book. All his bluster and bravado makes his warm friendship with James Joyce seem all the more remarkable. They are a literary odd couple if ever there was one: Joyce the labyrinthine thinker of Byzantine thoughts and creator of symbolic systems so dense they constitute an entire field of study; physically weak and—despite his infamous carnal appetites—intellectually monkish, Joyce exemplifies the artist as a reclusive contemplative. Hemingway, on the other hand, well… we know his reputation. Hemingway’s 1961 obituary in The New York Times characterized Joyce as "a thin, wispy and unmuscled man with defective eyesight" (perhaps the result of a syphilis infection), and also notes that the two writers "did a certain amount of drinking together" in Paris. As the narrator of the rare film clip of Joyce informs us above, the Ulysses author would pick drunken fights, then duck behind his burly friend and say, "Deal with him, Hemingway. Deal with him." (That scene also gets mentioned in The Times obituary.) Hemingway, who convinced himself at one time he had the makings of a real pugilist, was likely happy to oblige. Joyce, writes Hemingway biographer James R. Mellow, "was an admirer of Hemingway’s adventurous lifestyle" and worried aloud that his books were too "suburban" next to those of his friend, of whom he said in a Danish interview, "he’s a good writer, Hemingway. He writes as he is… there is much more behind Hemingway’s form than people know." Joyce, notes Kenneth Schyler Lynn in Hemingway, realized that "neither as a man nor as an artist was [Hemingway] as simple as he seemed," though he also remarked that Hemingway was "a big powerful peasant, as strong as a buffalo. A sportsman. And ready to live the life he writes about. He would never have written it if his body had not allowed him to live it." One detects more than a hint of Hemingway in Joycean characters like Dubliners‘ Ignatious Gallaher or Ulysses’ Hugh "Blazes" Boylan—strong, adventurous types who overawe introverted main characters. That’s not to say that Joyce explicitly drew on Hemingway in constructing his fiction, but that in the boastful, outgoing American, he saw what many of his semi-autobiographical characters did in their more bullish counterparts—a natural foil. Hemingway returned Joyce’s compliments, writing to Sherwood Anderson in 1923, "Joyce has a most god-damn wonderful book" and pronouncing Joyce "the greatest writer in the world." He was "unquestionably… staggered," writes Lynn, "by the multilayered richness" of Ulysses. But its density may have proven too much for him, as "his interest in the story gave out well before he finished it." In Hemingway’s copy of the novel, "only the pages of the first half and of Molly Bloom’s concluding soliloquy are cut." Hemingway tempered his praise with some blunt criticism; unlike Joyce’s praise of his writing, the American did not admire Joyce’s tendency towards autobiography in the character of Stephen Dedalus. "The weakness of Joyce," Hemingway opined, was his inability to understand that "the only writing that was any good was what you made up, what you imagined… Daedalus [sic] in Ulysses was Joyce himself, so he was terrible. Joyce was so damn romantic and intellectual." Of course Stephen Dedalus was Joyce—that much is clear to anyone. How Hemingway, who did his utmost to enact his fictional adventures and fictionalize his real life, could fault Joyce for doing the same is hard to reckon, except perhaps, as Joyce certainly felt, Hemingway led the more adventurous life. Related Content: James Joyce Reads a Passage From Ulysses, 1924 Ernest Hemingway’s Very First Published Stories, Free as an eBook Virginia Woolf Writes About Joyce’s Ulysses, "Never Did Any Book So Bore Me," and Quits at Page 200 Ernest Hemingway: T.S. Eliot "Can Kiss My Ass As a Man" Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness James Joyce Picked Drunken Fights, Then Hid Behind Ernest Hemingway; Hemingway Called Joyce "The Greatest Writer in the World" 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.

Any fan of samurai movies knows the elaborate lengths some productions can go to in order to recreate the look and feel of old Japan, but globetrotting Italian-British photographer Felice Beato (1832 - 1909) actually managed to capture those days on celluloid first-hand. He arrived in Japan in 1863, at the very twilight of the era of the samurai, a time he documented evocatively with a series of hand-colored photographs of subjects like "kimonos, parasols, baby’s toys, basket sellers, courtesans at rest and a samurai gang ready for action," as the Guardian lists them in their gallery of Beato’s Japanese work. "After spending over two hundred years in seclusion, Japan was being forced by the Americans — under a mission led by Commodore Matthew C. Perry — to expand its trade with the west," writes Dangerous Minds’ Paul Gallagher, describing the unprecedented moment of Japanese history in which Beato found himself, one that provided the opportunity to photograph not just the last of the samurais but also the courtesans they loved. But all this had its risks: "Travel was dangerous in Japan," Gallagher adds, "with many of the Shogunate samurai warriors killing westerners," a fate Beato narrowly avoided at least once. Having photographed in Constantinople, India, and China before Japan, Beato moved on after it to other parts of Asia, including Korea and Burma, before returning to his native Italy at the very end of his life. But his pictures of Japan remain among the most striking of his entire career, perhaps because of their artistic use of color, perhaps because of a historical time and place that we think we’ve come to know through so many sword-and-suicide epics. Their characters, from the honor-bound samurai to the sly courtesan to the simple merchant, can seem to us a bit theatrical as a result, but Beato’s photographs remind us that they all began as very real people. Who might they inspire to make a film about their real lives? via The Guardian/Dangerous Minds Related Content: Hand-Colored Photographs of 19th Century Japan Advertisements from Japan’s Golden Age of Art Deco Glorious Early 20th-Century Japanese Ads for Beer, Smokes & Sake (1902-1954) Early Japanese Animations: The Origins of Anime (1917-1931) A Photographic Tour of Haruki Murakami’s Tokyo, Where Dream, Memory, and Reality Meet 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. Hand-Colored 1860s Photographs Reveal the Last Days of Samurai Japan 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.

Even when one is a longtime, jaded denizen of a major city, celebrity sightings can still induce a thrill. During my tenure in New York City, I ran across my share of famous names, though I’ve never been one to bother a stranger, world famous or no. This almost changed when I ran past Ira Glass one evening and found myself sorely tempted to chat him up. I’m sure he’d be glad I resisted the urge, but having heard his voice on the radio every week for well over a decade… well, I felt like I knew him. Since 1995, Glass has hosted This American Life, perhaps the most popular public radio show ever produced and—before its hugely successful spin-off Serial—the most popular podcast in the U.S. The show is quickly approaching its twenty-year anniversary (its first episode aired November 17th; hear it here), and in honor of that milestone, we revisit another: the show’s 500th episode, which aired in 2013. For that occasion, Buzzfeed visited with Glass for a revealing interview. Though he responded to episode 500 with typical understatement—saying it felt "more like an odometer rolling over than anything else"—many fans of the show, myself included, felt a great deal more enthusiasm, as did Los Angeles’ KPCC, who brings us the list below of Glass’ top ten episodes (including one two-parter). Glass noted that his top picks also happen to be fan favorites as well. You can hear all of his favorites at the links below: Notes on Camp Harper High School One and Two The Giant Pool of Money Somewhere in the Arabian Sea — "I love how funny and human-sized everyone is in this show. It’s a surprisingly funny show about the war on terror," Glass writes. Switched at Birth — Glass: "The structure of this show — where the whole episode you wonder how a mom could know for decades she was raising the wrong baby and finally, she answers it in the end — is perfect." Break-Up — "The standout story is Starlee Kine’s essay on breakup songs, which includes an interview with Phil Collins that’s so menschy and real, it changed how I saw him forever." Babysitting — "Especially the interview with Myron Jones, which is the best interview I’ve ever done, mainly because he had so much grace and humor talking about his past. Any question I could think of, he’d come back with an amazing story, which is rare." My Big Break — "David Segal takes a turn in the middle of this story that’s one of my favorite reveals in any radio story ever." Harold Washington — "How can you go wrong when the central figure in your story is funny and cantankerous and bighearted and idealistic and utterly pragmatic and on top of all that, totally charismatic? If you don’t know who Harold is, be prepared for a treat." Heretics — "Carlton Pearson, like Harold, is someone they should make a movie about, for lots of the same reasons. An idealistic preacher whose idealism costs him pretty much everything: the church he runs, his reputation, his fortune, nearly his family." As a special treat, Glass also shared with Buzzfeed the document at the top of the post, a page of ideas for alternate titles for the show originally called Your Radio Playhouse. Before renaming the show in March of 1996, Glass and his crew considered such titles as the uninspiring "American Whatever," weird "Mouth Noise," and goofy "Ira Glass and his Radio Cowboys." I kind of wish they’d gone with the latter, but it’s hard to imagine the show we know as This American Life could ever have been called anything else. (See it penciled in almost as an afterthought above.) The show’s title perfectly sums up the breadth and scope of a program that tackles everything from the trivial to the highly consequential, often back-to-back in the same themed hour. Though Glass would surely balk at such high praise, I think his show has done more to help Americans know and understand ourselves over the last twenty years than nearly anything else on radio, TV, or the podcasting world. via KPCC Related Content: Ira Glass’ Advice on Achieving Creative Excellence Presented in Two Artful, Typographic Videos Ira Glass on the Art and Craft of Telling Great Radio Stories This American Life Demystifies the American Healthcare System Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Listen to Ira Glass’ 10 Favorite Episodes of This American Life 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.

Seventeenth-century Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn may have more name recognition than nearly any other European artist, his popularity due in large part to what art historian Alison McQueen identifies in her book of the same name as "the rise of the cult of Rembrandt." Popular Rembrandt veneration brought us in the 20th century such corporate appropriations of the painter’s legacy as Rembrandt toothpaste and money market firm Rembrandt Funds (particularly ironic, "given the notoriety of Rembrandt’s bankruptcy in 1656"). "In contemporary popular culture," writes McQueen, "Rembrandt’s name has such resonance that the headline of an article in the New York Times Magazine in 1995 referred to the trendy barber Franky Avila as ‘the Rembrandt of Barbers.’" By invoking Rembrandt’s name, the author knew his readers would understand that this connection implies that Avila’s skill with a razor equals that of Rembrandt’s with his paintbrush or etching needle… even if a reader has never actually seen any work by Rembrandt. Indeed, though any person on the street will likely know the artist’s name, most would be hard-pressed to name any of his paintings, except perhaps his well-known self-portraits, which have adorned t-shirts, posters, and iPhone cases. I might not have known much more about Rembrandt than those self-portraits either had I not lived in Washington, DC, where I had free access to many of his paintings at the National Gallery of Art.  The Dutch master was astonishingly prolific, painting, drawing, and etching hundreds of portraits of himself and his patrons, as well as hundreds of still lifes, landscapes, scenes from mythology, and many, many Biblical subjects. Nowadays, you can see Rembrandt’s paintings for free online, whether from the National Gallery of Art’s collection, that of the National Gallery in London, or of the Dutch Rijksmuseum. And for another side of his genius, you can now go to the site of New York’s Morgan Library and Museum, who have digitized "almost 500 images from the Morgan’s exceptional collection of Rembrandt etchings," celebrating his "unsurpassed skill and inventiveness as a master storyteller." There are, of course, plenty of self-portraits, like the 1630 "Self Portrait in a Cap, Open-Mouthed" at the top of the post, and there are portraits of others, like that of the artist’s mother, above, from 1633. There are religious scenes like the 1655 "Abraham’s Sacrifice" below, and landscapes like "The Three Trees," further down, from 1643. These are the four main categories that the Morgan uses to organize this impressive collection, but you’ll also find there more humble, domestic subjects, like the 1640 "Sleeping Puppy," below. Writes Hyperallergic, "The Morgan holds in its collection most of the roughly 300 known etchings by Rembrandt, including rare, multiple versions (hence the discrepancy in number of etchings versus number of images.)" Like his highly accomplished paintings, Rembrandt’s etchings "are famous for their dramatic intensity, penetrating psychology, and touching humanity," as well as, of course, for the extraordinary skill with which the artist made these works of art. Thanks to the "cult of Rembrandt," we all know the artist’s name and reputation; now, thanks to digital collections from National Galleries, the Rijksmuseum, and now the Morgan, we can become experts in his work as well. Related Content: Download 35,000 Works of Art from the National Gallery, Including Masterpieces by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Rembrandt & More Late Rembrandts Come to Life: Watch Animations of Paintings Now on Display at the Rijksmuseum A Final Wish: Terminally Ill Patients Visit Rembrandt’s Paintings in the Rijksmuseum One Last Time Rijksmuseum Digitizes & Makes Free Online 210,000 Works of Art, Masterpieces Included! Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness 300+ Etchings by Rembrandt Now Free Online, Thanks to the Morgan Library & Museum 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.

Two years ago, we highlighted for you the beginning of a promising project — Julian Peters’ comic book adaptation of T.S. Eliot’s 1910 poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." At the time of our post, Peters had only completed the first nine pages of his adaptation. And, about those first pages, our Josh Jones had this to say: Dante is where "Prufrock" begins, with an epigraph from the Inferno. Peters’ first page illustrates the agonized speaker of Dante’s lines, Guido da Montefeltro, a soul confined to the eighth circle, whom you can see at the top of the title page shown above. Peters’ visual choices place us firmly in the hellish emotional realm of "Prufrock," a seeming catalogue of the mundane that harbors a darker import. Peters gives us no hint of when we might expect new pages, but I for one am eager to see more. Happily for Josh … and the rest of us … we can now find out where Peters took the rest of the project. The adaptation is now complete. 24 pages in total. All now on display on Peters’ website here. If you’re not familiar with "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," I’d strongly encourage you to revisit a post in our archive where you can hear "Prufrock" being read by T.S. Eliot himself and also Sir Anthony Hopkins. There you can learn more about Eliot’s modernist masterpiece. Note: Julian is looking for a publisher to help put his comic book in print. If any publishers want to chat with him, you can find his contact info on his web site. 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: T.S. Eliot’s Radical Poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," Read by Anthony Hopkins and Eliot Himself Listen to T.S. Eliot Recite His Late Masterpiece, the Four Quartets T.S. Eliot Reads Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats & Other Classic Poems (75 Minutes, 1955) Bob Dylan Reads From T.S. Eliot’s Great Modernist Poem The Waste Land Read the Entire Comic Book Adaptation of T.S. Eliot’s "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" 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.

It’s unfortunate, I think, that legions of Beatles fans turned on Yoko Ono with such ferocious animosity after the breakup of the band. Most fans still absolutely despise Yoko. (See the legion of often crudely misogynist comments under every Youtube video in which she appears.) Sure, her voice and music is certainly not to everyone’s taste, but without her artistic and conceptual influence on John Lennon post-Beatles, it’s unlikely his amazing solo albums John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1970) and Imagine (1971) would sound the way they do. Yoko, in fact, more or less gave Lennon the seeds of "Imagine," the song, in her quirky 1964 self-published book, Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings, though she never took the credit for it. Like it or not, if we love solo Lennon, we have no choice but to take the more traditionally great songwriting with the messy, experimental, and sometimes unlistenable. They cannot be completely untangled, to the dismay of a great many people. As Damian Fanelli at Guitar World comments on Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band’s impromptu performance/jam with Eric Clapton in Toronto in 1969, "Yoko screams—very loudly—during the entire otherwise-decent performance." This is not an exaggerated or especially biased characterization. "Someday," Fanelli then goes on, "I’ll vent about how terrible and depressing this is." Fine, but whether we think of her singing as challenging performance art or "depressing" caterwauling, we’re stuck with it. But do the dynamics of John and Yoko onstage change when we add another polarizing weirdo—Frank Zappa—to the mix? See for yourself in the videos here, from an onstage jam session the two did with Zappa and the Mothers of Invention at the Fillmore East in 1971. At the top of the post, Zappa, Lennon, et al. do Walter Ward’s "Well (Baby Please Don’t Go)," which Fanelli declares "the highlight of the jam, for sure." Zappa announces to the band the key and "not standard blues changes," then Lennon introduces the tune as "a song I used to sing while I was in the Cavern in Liverpool. I haven’t done it since." Zappa rips out a fantastic solo at 2:05, and the band—though seemingly in the dark at first—lays down a righteous groove. And Yoko? Well, it’s true, as Fanelli notes, "all she did was scream her head off." In this straight-ahead blues number, I have to say, it’s pretty obnoxious. But her vocal tics play much better in more freeform, oddball, Zappa-lead jams like "Jamrag" and "King Kong," above, and the shouty, repetitive "Scumbag," below, which sounds almost like a Can outtake. Zappa and band, as always, are in top form. Lennon at times looks out of place and uncertain in their improvisatory environment, but he gamely keeps up. Yoko… Yoko does her usual lot of screaming, howling, yodeling, etc. But before you gin up to tear her to pieces in yet another nasty online comment, bear in mind, for what it’s worth, no Yoko, no "Imagine." As Fanelli notes, "the performance was released as part of Lennon and Ono’s poorly received (and not very good at all) 1972 studio/live album, Sometime in New York City." See Allmusic’s review for a much more thorough, fair-minded assessment of that recording, which "found the Lennons in an explicitly political phase." via Guitar World Related Content:   The Night Frank Zappa Jammed With Pink Floyd … and Captain Beefheart Too (Belgium, 1969) Download the John Lennon/Yoko Ono "War is Over (If You Want It)" Poster in 100+ Languages Hear John Lennon’s Final Interview, Taped on the Last Day of His Life (December 8, 1980) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness The Night John Lennon & Yoko Ono Jammed with Frank Zappa at the Fillmore East (1971) 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 grade school, I got into the genre of computer games known as "graphic adventures," narrative experiences — and often quite elaborate ones — through which the player guides the protagonist with points and clicks: games like Maniac Mansion, Space Quest, Mean Streets, Zak McCracken and the Alien Mindbenders. In college I got into the writing of Haruki Murakami, the international superstar of Japanese literature specializing in the kind of stories that, in his words, have undergone "a kind of magical baptism to link the world on this side with the world on the other side." More recently, I’ve cultivated an interest in projects crowdfunded on platforms like Kickstarter. At long last, someone has come up with a creation that unites all three: Memoranda, a Murakami-inspired graphic adventure now raising its budget on Kickstarter. "Three years ago I sat down with a friend to brainstorm for making a game," writes one of Memoranda‘s developers. Murakami’s work "had inspired us profoundly and we thought that the vague, surrealistic reality of his fictional world would have a great potential for being turned into something visual and could lead to the creation of odd characters, an essential element in game design." This led to a "script inspired by more than 20 stories by Murakami" involving a little town (which has "European-like architecture but that doesn’t mean it belongs to somewhere in Europe") "where there are both laptops and bamboo water clocks," a cast of characters from "a WWII surviving soldier to an elephant taking shelter in a man’s house hoping to become human," and a protagonist "who little by little realizes she is forgetting her own name." Kickstarter has proven a viable financing medium for a new wave of graphic adventure games, some of them by the creators of the old wave: Tim Schafer, known for Maniac Mansion‘s beloved sequel Day of the Tentacle, raised $3.3 million for what would become Broken Age, and Space Quest masterminds Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe more recently reunited to raise over $500,000 for SpaceVenture. Memoranda, by comparison, requires no more than a shoestring, and, with ten days to go in its funding drive, it has already raised more than the $13,695 requested by Bit Byterz, its Vancouver-based Iranian developers (how’s that for a demonstration of Murakami’s global appeal?). But you can still contribute at its Kickstarter page, and as a reward could get a copy of the game, its soundtrack, a digital art book, or even — enthusiasts of Murakami tropes, take note — the inclusion of your own cat in the story. No game company ever offered me that in grade school. You can watch a trailer for Memoranda above. via Flavorwire Related Content: In Search of Haruki Murakami: A Documentary Introduction to Japan’s Great Postmodernist Novelist Haruki Murakami’s Advice Column ("Mr. Murakami’s Place") Is Now Online: Read English Translations Haruki Murakami Lists the Three Essential Qualities For All Serious Novelists (And Runners) Haruki Murakami’s Passion for Jazz: Discover the Novelist’s Jazz Playlist, Jazz Essay & Jazz Bar Discover Haruki Murakami’s Advertorial Short Stories: Rare Short-Short Fiction from the 1980s A Photographic Tour of Haruki Murakami’s Tokyo, Where Dream, Memory, and Reality Meet 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. New Video Game Inspired by 20 Haruki Murakami Stories Is Coming Your Way: Help Kickstart It 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 the past, we’ve brought you the creative work of R. Sikoryak. An illustrator who teaches at the Parsons School of Design in NYC, Sikoryak has a penchant for creating comic book adaptations of literary classics. Take for example Dostoyevsky Comics where Batman stars in a comic book version of Crime & Punishment. Or Waiting to Go, which marries Waiting for Godot with Beavis and Butt-Head.  In his latest project, Sikoryak veers sharply away from literature toward language that is much more technical. Now, on his tumblr, you can find iTunes Terms & Conditions: The Graphic Novel. Adding a new page every day, Sikoryak is creating an illustrated version of the "complete, unabridged legal agreement." You can currently view the first 49 pages. Click here. Go to the bottom of the page. Then start scrolling up as you read. 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: Batman Stars in an Unusual Cartoon Adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment Download 15,000+ Free Golden Age Comics from the Digital Comic Museum Comics Inspired by Waiting For Godot, Featuring Tintin, Roz Chast, and Beavis & Butthead iTunes Terms & Conditions Adapted into a Graphic Novel: Read It Free 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.

When photographers specialize in portraits of famous people, they often speak of finding a visual way to reveal their oft-photographed subject’s rarely exposed nature; to bring their depths, in other words, to the surface. Man Ray (1890-1976), the Surrealist photographer and artist, had his own way of doing most everything, and he certainly had his own approach to celebrity portraiture. Take, for example, his 1923 shot of Ernest Hemingway above, taken just a couple years after both the writer and photographer joined the moveable feast of Paris, which Man Ray would call home for most of his career. That same year and in that same urban bohemia, Man Ray photographed another famed man of letters, the modernist poet Ezra Pound. You can see the somewhat more conventional-looking result of that encounter just above. Below, we have a far less conventional-looking portrait from 1922, which takes as its subject the dancer Bronislava Nijinska, who perhaps only counts as famous to you if you know the history of 20th-century ballet — but I say anyone willing to appear in a portrait looking that frightening has earned all the fame they can get. Marcel Duchamp, who appears below, sat for Man Ray in 1921 looking less scary than silly, but as one of the wittiest and most artistically forward-thinking figures of the era, he surely got the joke. These appear in the book Man Ray: Paris - Hollywood - Paris, which collects 500 of the portraits Man Ray left in his archives when he died in 1976, all of "members of Dadaist and Surrealist circles, of artists and painters, of writers and US emigrants of the Lost Generation, of aristocrats, and paragons of the worlds of fashion and theater." You can sample more such works, which capture as only Man Ray would the natures of such icons as André Breton, Salvador Dalí, and Lee Miller, at Mondo Blogo. You can also find many more works, in general, by Man Ray on the MoMA’s website. via Flavorwire Related Content: Three Essential Dadaist Films: Groundbreaking Works by Hans Richter, Man Ray & Marcel Duchamp Andy Warhol’s 85 Polaroid Portraits: Mick Jagger, Yoko Ono, O.J. Simpson & Many Others (1970-1987) Philosopher Portraits: Famous Philosophers Painted in the Style of Influential Artists Portraits of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Walter Benjamin & Other Literary Legends by Gisèle Freund Coffee Portraits of John Lennon, Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe & Other Icons 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. Man Ray’s Portraits of Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Marcel Duchamp & Many Other 1920s Icons 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 via NASA It shouldn’t be especially controversial to point out that we live in a pivotal time in human history—that the actions we collectively take (or that plutocrats and technocrats take) will determine the future of the human species—or whether we even have a future in the coming centuries. The threats posed by climate change and war are exacerbated and accelerated by rapidly worsening economic inequality. Exponential advances in technology threaten to eclipse our ability to control machines rather than be controlled, or stamped out, by them. It’s also the case that our most well-regarded scientists and technological innovators have not remained silent in the face of these crises. Physicist Stephen Hawking has issued some dire warnings lately when it comes to humanity’s future. Several years ago, he predicted that "our only chance of long term survival" may be to "spread out into space," a la Interstellar. In addition to the worsening climate crisis, the rise of artificial intelligence concerns Hawking. Along with Bill Gates and Elon Musk, he has warned of what futurist Ray Kurzweil has called "the singularity," the point at which machine intelligence surpasses our own. Where Kurzweil has seen this event through an optimistic, New Age lens, Hawking’s view seems more in line with dystopian sci-fi visions of robot apocalypse. "Success in AI would be the biggest event in human history," he wrote in The Independent last year, "Unfortunately it might also be the last." Given the design of autonomous weapons systems and, as he told the BBC, the fact that "Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete and would be superseded," the prospect looks chilling, but it isn’t inevitable. Our tech isn’t actively out to get us. "The real risk with AI isn’t malice but competence," Hawking clarified, in a fascinating Reddit "Ask Me Anything" session last month. Due to the physicist’s physical limitations, readers posted questions and voted on their favorites. From these, Hawking elected the "ones he feels he can give answers to." In response to a top-rated question about the so-called "Terminator Conversation," he wrote, "A superintelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours, we’re in trouble." This problem of misaligned goals is not of course limited to our relationship with machines. Our precarious economic relationships with each other pose a separate threat, especially in the face of massive job loss due to future automation. We’d like to imagine a future where technology frees us of toil and want, the kind of society Buckminster Fuller sought to create. But the truth is that wealth and income inequality, at their highest levels in the U.S. since at least the Gilded Age, may determine a very different path—one we might think of in terms of "The Elysium Conversation." Asked in the same AMA Reddit session, "Do you foresee a world where people work less because so much work is automated? Do you think people will always either find work or manufacture more work to be done?," Hawking elaborated, If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality. For decades after the Cold War, capitalism had the status of an unquestionably sacred doctrine—the end of history and the best of all possible worlds. Now, not only has Hawking identified its excesses as drivers of human decline, but so have other decidedly non-Marxist figures like Bill Gates, who in a recent Atlantic interview described the private sector as "in general inept" and unable to address the climate crisis because of its focus on short-term gains and maximal profits. "There’s no fortune to be made," he said, from dealing with some of the biggest threats to our survival. But if we don’t deal with them, the losses are incalculable. via Huff Po Related Content: 187 Big Thinkers Answer the Question: What Do You Think About Machines That Think? Bertrand Russell & Buckminster Fuller on Why We Should Work Less, and Live & Learn More Seven Questions for Stephen Hawking: What Would He Ask Albert Einstein & More Stephen Hawking: Abandon Earth Or Face Extinction Noam Chomsky Explains Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Stephen Hawking Wonders Whether Capitalism or Artificial Intelligence Will Doom the Human Race 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 19th century witnessed the birth of photography. And, before too long, Victorian society found important applications for the new medium — like memorializing the dead. A recent post on a Dutch version of National Geographic notes that "Photographing deceased family members just before their burial was enormously popular in certain Victorian circles in Europe and the United States. Although adults were also photographed, it was mainly children who were commemorated in this way. In a period plagued by unprecedented levels of infant mortality, post-mortem pictures often provided the only tangible memory of the deceased child." Though unusual by modern standards, the pictures played an important role in a family’s grieving process and often became one of its cherished possessions — cherished because it was likely the only photo of the deceased child that families had. During the early days of photography, portraits were expensive, which meant that most families didn’t take pictures during the course of everyday life. It was only death that gave them a prompt. The practice of taking post mortem pictures peaked in the 19th century, right around the time when "snapshot" photography became more prevalent, allowing families to take portraits at a lower cost, when everyone was in the full swing of life. Hence obviating the need for post-mortem photos. You can learn more about this bygone practice by visiting the Burns Archive or getting the book, Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America. via Dutch Nat Geo/ Science Dump 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.   Poignant and Unsettling Post-Mortem Family Portraits from the 19th Century 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.

Many people still have a major fear of mathematics, having suffered through school and not really having been in the right frame of mind to grasp concepts that we’ve been told will come in handy in our future working lives. When Britons get to the age of 16, many can choose to leave school, escaping the terror of math (or, as they say, maths). But we shouldn’t live in fear, so along comes Citizen Maths, a UK-based free online course that purports to help adults catch up with Level 2 math (aka what a 16-year-old should know) without getting hit with a ruler or a spit wad. The course is funded by the UFI Charitable Trust, which focuses on providing free education for adults. The Citizen Maths course currently consists of three units—Proportion, Uncertainty, and Representation. Additional sections on Pattern and Measurements will soon follow. All units come with videos and tests that take about an hour of the viewer’s time. As the narrator says, you can "learn in safety, without fear of being told off or exposed." The full course takes, on average, about 20 hours. And the tutorials bring in the real world, not just the abstract. Ratios and odds are experienced through roulette, horse racing, and playing dice. Understanding insurance comes into the tutorial on making decisions. Modeling is explained by trying to understand weather patterns. And proportion is explained through baking recipes and making cocktails. You will need a Google Account to get started, though, for those without one, there is a simple guide to get you started. The tutorials feature YouTube instruction along with an embedded app called Scratch. As of this post, three of the five sections are available, with the complete course due up by next year. You can find more advanced Math courses in our collection of Free Online Math Courses. via BoingBoing Related Content: Free Online Math Courses Free Math Textbooks The Unexpected Math Behind Van Gogh’s "Starry Night" 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. Citizen Maths: A Free Online Course That Teaches Adults the Math They Missed in High School 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.