Horror writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft was a man who lived his life in fear—of people of other races and nationalities, of women, of reality itself. In a recent New York Review of Books write-up, Charles Baxter somewhat derisively characterizes Lovecraft as a disenchanted adolescent (and favorite of disenchanted adolescents), who "never really grew up. ‘Adulthood is hell,’ he once wrote in a letter." Yet his fiction depicts more than a tormented adult world, but an entire universe brimming with nameless ancient horrors—and occasionally named ones like the creature Cthulhu, whose likeness he once sketched out in a letter to a friend. The cephalopod-faced monster crystalizes Lovecraft’s disgust with reality in all its strangeness and, for him, all its variety. It’s a perfect image of alienation (just this past week we saw tongue-in-cheek speculation over whether octopuses are aliens; a plausible conceit) and presents us with an elemental uncanniness that characterizes his entire body of work. "Fiction like Lovecraft’s can be brutally hypnotic," writes Baxter, "the young reader, intellectually undefended and easily shaken enters the writer’s fear-drenched universe and can’t easily get out of it." The Call of Cthulhu - Part 1 The Call of Cthulhu - Part 2 Whether you discovered Lovecraft as a young reader or an older one, you may have found yourself similarly entrapped by the horrors of his imagination. And you could count yourself in the company of not only hermetic, misanthropic, death-obsessed young men in punk bands but also of media friendly, death-obsessed writers like Stephen King and Joyce Carol Oates. And, of course, thousands upon thousands of horror fans across the world, including a great many actors, writers, and directors who over the years have adapted Lovecraft’s fiction as old-fashioned radio drama of the kind the author himself might have consumed while isolated from the wicked world in his New England home. You can hear some choice examples here: at the top of the post we have Richard Coyle’s reading of the novella At the Mountains of Madness. (You can also hear his reading of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" here.)  Next, we have a 1945 dramatization of "The Dunwich Horror," performed by Academy Award-winning actor Ronald Colman. And then hear the infamous "Call of Cthulhu," parts one and two, produced by the Atlanta Radio Theatre Company, who have recorded no small number of Lovecraft radio plays. Just above, listen to a reading of "Behind the Wall of Sleep" from old-time radio sci-fi readings archive Mind Webs (which we’ve covered in a previous post). Finally, below, listen on Spotify to the HP Lovecraft Radio Hour Vol 1, a collection of dramatized Lovecraft stories.  Should you happen to tear through these recordings and find yourself in desperate need of more to feed your Lovecraft obsession, fear not; you would have a very hard time exhausting all the options. The World’s Largest H.P. Lovecraft Audio Links Gateway, for example, delivers exactly what it promises. Should that expansive database somehow leave out a reading or dramatization, you’ll perhaps find it over at the H.P. Lovecraft Archive’s sizeable collection. And you must, if you’re a Lovecraft fan, visit the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, who host plenty of Lovecraft merch, and links to much more Lovecraft audio, including albums inspired by his work and a podcast. And on the off chance you knew little or not at all of Lovecraft before reading this post, beware. You may, after listening to some of his weird tales of horror, come away a devoted Lovecraft cultist. Related Content: H.P. Lovecraft’s Classic Horror Stories Free Online: Download Audio Books, eBooks & More H.P. Lovecraft’s Monster Drawings: Cthulhu & Other Creatures from the "Boundless and Hideous Unknown" Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown (Free Documentary) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/hear-dramatizations-of-h-p-lovecrafts-stories-on-his-birthday-the-call-of-cthulhu-the-dunwich-horror-more.html 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. %%POST_LINK%% 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 often hears lamented the lack of well-spoken public intellectuals in America today. Very often, the lamenters look back to James Baldwin, who in the 1950s and 1960s wrote such powerful race-, class-, and sex-examining books as Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, and The Fire Next Time, as one of the greatest figures in the field. Though Baldwin expatriated himself to France for much of his life, he seems never to have let the state of his homeland drift far from his mind, and his opinions on it continued to put a charge into the grand American debate. Upon one return from Paris in 1957, Baldwin found himself wrapped up in the controversy around the Civil Rights Act and the related movements across the south. He wrote several high-profile essays on the subject, even ending up himself the subject of a 1963 Time magazine cover story on his views. That same year, he went on a lecture tour on race in America which put him in close contact with a variety of student movements and other protests, whose efficacy he and Malcolm X debated in the broadcast above. "While Malcolm X criticized the sit-in movement as passive," writes Rhonda Y. Williams in Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power in the 20th Century, "Baldwin argued that ‘maintaining calm in the face of vitriol demands a tremendous amount of power.'" He goes on to say that "when the sit-in movement started or when a great many things started in the western world, I think it had a great deal less to do with equality than with power." This got him wondering about what he saw as the all-important distinction between "power and equality" and "power and freedom." Two years later, Baldwin appeared in another high-profile debate with about as different an interlocutor from Malcolm X as one can imagine: Firing Line host William F. Buckley, across from whom every well-spoken public intellectual in America of that era must have sat at one time or another. They discussed whether the American Dream comes "at the expense of the American negro." Buckley, as Josh Jones wrote here in 2012, "had come out four years earlier against desegregation and Civil Rights legislation" and could ably defend his positions, but "Baldwin proved the more persuasive voice." Dissecting the skills of Baldwin the debater, John Warner of Inside Higher Education writes that "Baldwin’s remarks display all the skill and moves of an expert persuader" such as "the attendance to audience, the acknowledgement of their needs, the combination of both emotional and logical argument." His arguments also have their roots not in "attitudes or beliefs, which are varied and changeable, but values, which are widely shared and immutable." Baldwin, Warner continues, "reminds us that America is the land of the free, the home of the brave, that all men are created equal, that we are here to pursue life, liberty, happiness," but "while these values are powerful and timeless, our understanding of how they may be best achieved, the conditions under which they can be fostered change all the time." Whether on the air or in text, against Malcolm X, William F. Buckley, or anyone else, his performance in debate shows that "the best and most lasting persuasion is simply the act of reminding people of what they already believe to be true." Related Content: James Baldwin Bests William F. Buckley in 1965 Debate at Cambridge University James Baldwin: Witty, Fiery in Berkeley, 1979 Malcolm X, Debating at Oxford, Quotes Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1964) Malcolm X at Oxford University 1964 Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/james-baldwin-debates-malcolm-x-1963-and-william-f-buckley.html 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. %%POST_LINK%% 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.

Punk rock and its accoutrements—including the handmade, Xeroxed ‘zine—pass into history, replaced by Taylor Swift and Snapchat, or whatever. But as a piece of history, the ‘zine will always stand as a marker of a particular era, of the 80s/early 90s explosion of critical consciousness fostered by young kids reading Nietzsche, Foucault, and Camus, then forming their own bands, labels, and networks. Crucial to the period is the emergence of Riot Grrrl bands like Bikini Kill and their assault on oppressive gender politics, in punk rock and everywhere else. And crucial to many such punks’ understanding of gender was the work of critical theorist Judith Butler. "Riot Grrrl didn’t herald the beginnings of third wave feminism," writes Sophia Satchell Baeza in Canvas, "we’ll give that to the emergence of post-structuralist Queer theory, and the work of Judith Butler—but it did help define it aesthetically as much as formally for a new generation of indignant feminists." An essential part of that aesthetic—the ‘zine—spread the tenets of Riot Grrrl anger, determination, and irony to cities far and wide. And, in 1993, a group of intellectual scenesters created the ultimate punk homage to Butler’s undeniable influence: Judy!, an honest-to-goodness Judith Butler fanzine, complete with murky, mimeographed photo spreads and serial killer typescript. (See the cover at the top, with photo of Judy Garland.) "Let’s talk about that real glamour gal of theory, Judy Butler," begins one free-form introductory essay. She’s especially good to see live, if you can. Her performances are rife with witty repartee about her mom or whatever and the three times I’ve seen her, she’s been sporting little tailored black jackets. She’s a bit Gap but she’s still a fox. This cavalier hipster tone hides the voice of a likely grad student, who mentions M.L.A. (the Modern Language Association’s conference), and other post-structuralist theorists like Gayatri Spivak, Eve Sedgwick, and Julia Kristeva. There are footnotes and references to Butler’s classic Gender Trouble amidst much more irreverent, catty rhetoric like "Judy is the number one dominator, and the only thing you or I can do is submit gladly." It’s great fun, if that’s what you’re into—and if you get the combo of ‘zine aesthetic and academic feminist theory. There’s even a quiz to test your knowledge of the latter’s high priestess professors and inscrutable argot: "are you a theory-fetishizing biscuithead?" As much as it knowingly pokes fun at itself, in both form and content the artifact represents a perfect hybridization of streetwise mid-nineties punk rock and challenging mid-nineties high feminist theory. Central to the latter, Judith Butler challenges cultural norms in ways that very much inform our popular understanding of gender and sexuality today. And ‘zine culture, though it may appear mostly in museums and retrospectives these days, lives on in spirit in the work of hip, cultural mavens like Rookie’s Tavi Gevinson. Above, see Butler discuss her theory of gender performativity. And Read the entire issue of Judy!, the fanzine, here. via Progressive Geographies Read Chez Foucault, the 1978 Fanzine That Introduced Students to the Radical French Philosopher 44 Essential Movies for the Student of Philosophy Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness. http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/judy-1993-judith-butler-fanzine-gives-us-an-irreverent-punk-rock-take-on-the-post-structuralist-gender-theorist.html 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. %%POST_LINK%% 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.

Little known fact, during his high school days, Stephen Colbert was the front man of a Rolling Stones cover band. And, appearing on Howard Stern on Tuesday, just weeks before taking over The Late Show, Colbert proved it, singing and doing a jig to "Brown Sugar." He moves like Jagger, and it’s fun to watch. The Late Show with Stephen Colbert starts Tuesday, September 8th — right after Labor Day. Related Content Stephen Colbert & Neil deGrasse Break Down Our Awesome 3 Billion-Mile Journey to Pluto Stephen Colbert Reads Ray Bradbury Classic Sci-Fi Story "The Veldt" Stephen Colbert & Louis CK Recite The Gettysburg Address, With Some Help from Jerry Seinfeld http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/karaoke-style-stephen-colbert-sings-and-struts-to-brown-sugar.html 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. %%POST_LINK%% 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.

My pile of nightstand books at the moment includes Tim Ferriss’ The Four-Hour Chef (available as a free audiobook here), a flashy tome meant in part to teach the simplest cooking techniques that yield high degrees of versatility, impressiveness, and deliciousness. But its real interest lies in the subject of learning itself, and so it also covers reasonable-investment-high-return techniques for mastering other things, like languages. As I read Ferriss’ account of his own experience developing strategies to quickly learn the Japanese language right next to so many photographs of food and the preparation thereof, my brain couldn’t help but combine those two chunks of information — and then proceed to make me hungry. I had a mind to go straight to Cookpad, Japan’s biggest general recipe site that we featured back in 2013, when it had just launched an English-language version. Now we have another rich recipe resource in the form of The New York Times Cooking database, an archive of 17,000 recipes, also accessible through its very own free iPhone app. Call up Japanese food, and you get a variety of appealing dishes and sauces from the simple and easy (chicken teriyaki, yakisoba, eggplant with miso) to the more elaborate (squid salad with cucumbers, almonds, and pickled plum dressing; and Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s fried sushi cakes) to the new-wave (miso butterscotch, Nakagawa’s California sushi, and Japanese burgers with wasabi ketchup). Above, we have a video that accompanies the Yakisoba With Pork and Cabbage recipe. Have a look around, and you’ll see that the site also offers a number of useful functions for those who make a free account there, such as the ability to save the recipes you want to make later and a recommendation engine to give you suggestions as to what to make next. But still, even though sites like these guarantee that none of us will ever go hungry for lack of a recipe, we can only do as well by any of them as our actual, physical cooking skills allow. Fortunately, the Times also has our back on that: as we posted last year, you can get a handle on all of that with their 53 instructional videos on essential cooking techniques. And so we really have no excuses left not to learn how to make Japanese food — or any other kind. As for all those languages, now… Related Content: Cookpad, the Largest Recipe Site in Japan, Launches New Site in English 53 New York Times Videos Teach Essential Cooking Techniques: From Poaching Eggs to Shucking Oysters Michael Pollan Explains How Cooking Can Change Your Life; Recommends Cooking Books, Videos & Recipes MIT Teaches You How to Speak Italian & Cook Italian Food All at Once (Free Online Course) Science & Cooking: Harvard Profs Meet World-Class Chefs in Unique Online Course How to Make Instant Ramen Compliments of Japanese Animation Director Hayao Miyazaki Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/the-new-york-times-makes-17000-tasty-recipes-available-online.html 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. %%POST_LINK%% 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.

For a certain period of time, it became very hip to think of classic tattoo artist Norman "Sailor Jerry" Collins as the epitome of WWII era retro cool. His name has become a prominent brand, and a household name in tattooed households—or those that watch tattoo-themed reality shows. But I submit to you another name for your consideration to represent the height of vintage rebellion: Maud Wagner (1877-1961). No, "Maud" has none of the rakish charm of "Sailor Jerry," but neither does the name Norman. I mean no disrespect to Jerry, by the way. He was a prototypically American character, tailor-made for the marketing hagiography written in his name. But so, indeed, was Maud Wagner, not only because she was the first known professional female tattoo artist in the U.S., but also because she became so, writes Margo DeMello in her history Inked, while "working as a contortionist and acrobatic performer in the circus, carnival, and world fair circuit" at the turn of the century. Aside from the cowboy perhaps, no spirit is freer in our mythology than that of the circus performer. The reality of that life was of course much less romantic than we imagine, but Maud’s life—as a side show artist and tattooist—involves a romance fit for the movies. Or so the story goes. She learned to tattoo from her husband, Gus Wagner, an artist she met at the St. Louis World’s Fair, who offered to teach her in exchange for a date. As you can see in her 1907 picture at the top, after giving her the first tattoo, he just kept going (see the two of them above). "Maud’s tattoos were typical of the period," writes DeMello, "She wore patriotic tattoos, tattoos of monkeys, butterflies, lions, horses, snakes, trees, women, and had her own name tattooed on her left arm." Unfortunately there seem to be no images of Maud’s own handiwork about, but her legacy lived on in part because Gus and Maud had a daughter, given the endearing name Lovetta (see the family above), who also became a tattoo artist. Unlike her mother, however, Lovetta did not become a canvas for her father’s work or anyone else’s. According to tattoo site Let’s Ink, "Maud had forbidden her husband to tattoo her and, after Gus died, Lovetta decided that if she could not be tattooed by her father she would not be tattooed by anyone." Like I said, romantic story. Unlike Sailor Jerry, the Wagner women tattooed by hand, not machine. Lovetta gave her last tattoo, in 1983, to modern-day celebrity artist, marketing genius, and Sailor Jerry protégée Don Ed Hardy. The cultural history of tattooed and tattooing women is long and complicated, as Margot Mifflin documents in her 1997 Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo. For the first half of the twentieth century, heavily-inked women like Maud were circus attractions, symbols of deviance and outsiderhood. Mifflin dates the practice of displaying tattooed white women to 1858 with Olive Oatman (above), a young girl captured by Yavapis Indians and later tattooed by the Mohave people who adopted and raised her. At age nineteen, she returned and became a national celebrity. Tattooed Native women had been put on display for hundreds of years, and by the turn of the 20th century World’s Fair, "natives… whether tattooed or not, were shown," writes DeMello, in staged displays of primitivism, a "construction of the other for public consumption." While these spectacles were meant to represent for fairgoers "the enormous progress achieved by the West through technological advancements and world conquest," another burgeoning spectacle took shape—the tattooed lady as both pin-up girl and rebellious thumb in the eye of imperialist Victorianism and its cult of womanhood. And here I submit another name for your consideration: Jessie Knight (above, with a tattoo of her family crest), Britain’s first female tattoo artist and also onetime circus performer, who, according to Jezebel, worked in her father’s sharp shooting act before striking out on her own as a tattooist. The Mary Sue quotes an unnamed source who writes that her job was "to stand before [her father] so that he could hit a target that was sometimes placed on her head or on an area of her body." Supposedly, one night he "accidentally shot Jesse in the shoulder," sending her off to work for tattoo artist Charlie Bell. As the narrator in the short film below from British Pathe puts it, Knight (1904-1994), "was once the target in a sharp shooting act. Now she’s at the business end of the target no more." The remark sums up the kind of agency tattooing gave women like Knight and the independence tattooed women represented. Popular stereotypes have not always endorsed this view. "Over the last 100 years," writes Amelia Klem Osterud in Things & Ink magazine, "a stigma has developed against tattooed women—you know the misconceptions, women with tattoos are sluts, they’re ‘bad girls,’ just as false as the myth that only sailors and criminals get tattoos." Jesse Knight—as you can see from the Pathe film and the photo above from 1951—was portrayed as a consummate professional, and in fact won 2nd place in a "Champion Tattoo Artist of all England" in 1955. See several more photos of her at work at Jezebel, and see a gallery of tattooed—and tattooist—ladies from Mifflin’s book at The New Yorker, including such characters as Botticelli and Michelangelo-tattooed Anna Mae Burlington Gibbons, Betty Broadbent, the tattooed contestant in the first televised beauty pageant, and Australian tattoo artist Cindy Ray, "The Classy Lassy with the Tattooed Chassis." Now there’s a name to remember. Related Content: A Dazzling Gallery of Clockwork Orange Tattoos Why Tattoos Are Permanent? New TED Ed Video Explains with Animation Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/meet-the-first-female-tattoo-artists.html 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. %%POST_LINK%% 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 most of us, engineer Destin Sandlin, creator of the educational science website Smarter Every Day, learned how to ride a bike as a child. Archival footage from 1987 shows a confident, mullet-haired Sandlin piloting a two-wheeler like a boss. Flash forward to the present day, when a welder friend threw a major wrench in Sandlin’s cycling game by tweaking a bike’s handlebar/front wheel correspondence. Turn the handlebars of the "backwards bike" to the left, and the wheel goes to the right. Steer right, and the front wheel points left. Sandlin thought he’d conquer this beast in a matter of minutes, but in truth it took him eight months of daily practice to conquer his brain’s cognitive bias as to the expected operation. This led him to the conclusion that knowledge is not the same thing as understanding. He knew how to ride a normal bike, but had no real grasp of the complex algorithm that kept him upright, a simultaneous ballet of balance, downward force, gyroscopic procession, and navigation. As he assures fans of his Youtube channel, it’s not a case of the stereotypical uncoordinated science geek—not only can he juggle, when he took the backwards bike on tour, a global roster of audience volunteers’ brains gave them the exact same trouble his had. Interestingly, his 6-year-old son, who’d been riding a bike for half his young life, got the hang of the backwards bike in just two weeks. Children’s brain’s possess much more neuroplasticity than those of adults, whose seniority means habits and biases are that much more ingrained. It couldn’t have hurt that Sandlin bribed the kid with a trip to Australia to meet an astronaut. Did the arduousness of mastering the backwards bike ruin Sandlin for normally configured bicycles? Watch the video above all the way to the end for an incredible spontaneous moment of mind over matter. Related Content: The Physics of the Bike The Mysterious Physics Behind How Bikes Ride by Themselves Science Behind the Bike: Four Videos from the Open University on the Eve of the Tour de France The Neuroscience of Drumming: Researchers Discover the Secrets of Drumming & The Human Brain Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/the-backwards-brain-bicycle.html 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. %%POST_LINK%% 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.

This week, 1,000 North Koreans witnessed the first live performance by a Western pop act on its soil. And it was perhaps a bit anti-climatic. The East Germans got their first taste of Western rock in 1988 when Bruce Springsteen played a massive gig in East Berlin. (See video here.) The North Koreans had to settle for the Slovenian industrial rock band, Laibach. According to The New York Times, their set included a "‘Sound of Music’ medley. A cover of the Beatles’ ‘Across the Universe.’ [And a] martial-sounding version of the arena rock anthem ‘The Final Countdown.'" You can watch short clips of the concert just below, and John Oliver offers some funny commentary on the spectacle here. Laibach’s historic North Korean gig was apparently arranged by Morten Traavik, a Norwegian artist who previously made the Internet gyrate when he released a clip of young North Korean accordion players performing A-ha’s 1984 hit, "Take On Me." In 2012, Traavik met the musicians from the Kum Song Music School while traveling in North Korea. He told the BBC, "I lent them a CD of Take on Me on a Monday morning. By the following Wednesday morning they had mastered the song, with no annotation and no outside help. It showed incredible skill." And, says Traavik, it all just goes to show, "you can have fun in North Korea." Related Content: Watch 98 Korean Feature Films Free Online, Thanks to the Korean Film Archive Watch Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Voodoo Chile’ Performed on a Gayageum, a Traditional Korean Instrument Pakistani Musicians Play Amazing Version of Dave Brubeck’s Jazz Classic, "Take Five" http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/a-has-take-on-me-performed-by-north-korean-kids-with-accordians.html 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. %%POST_LINK%% 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.

How can a modern educator go about getting a student to connect to poetry? Forget the emo kid pouring his heart out into a spiral journal. Ditto the youthful slam poetess, wielding pronunciation like a cudgel. Think of someone truly hard to reach, a reluctant reader perhaps, or maybe just someone (doesn’t have to be a kid) who’s convinced all poetry sucks. You could stage a rap battle. Take the drudgery out of memorization by finding a pop melody well suited to singing Emily Dickinson stanzas. Or appeal to the YouTube generation via short animations, as educator Justin Moore does in the TED-Ed lesson, above. Animation, like poetry, is often a matter of taste, and Moore’s lesson hedges its bets by enlisting not one, but three animator-narrator teams to interpret Walt Whitman’s "A Noiseless Patient Spider." Originally published as part of the poem "Whispers of Heavenly Death," and included in the 1891 "deathbed edition" of Leaves of Grass, the poem equates the soul’s desperate struggle to connect with something or someone with that of a spider, seeking to build a web in a less than ideal location. Two of the animators, Jeremiah Dickey and Lisa LaBracio launch themselves straight toward the "filament, filament, filament." Seems like a solid plan. An industrious spider industriously squirting threads out of its nether region creates a cool visual that echoes both Charlotte’s Web and the repetition within the poem. Mahogany Browne’s narration of Dickey’s painting on glass mines the stridency of slam. Narrator Rives gives a more low key performance with LaBracio’s scratchboard interpretation. In-between is Joanna Hoffman’s spiderless experimental video, voiced with a wee bit of vocal fry by Joanna Hoffman. Were I to pick the one least likely to capture a student’s imagination… Once the student has watched all three animations, it’s worth asking what the poem means. If no answer is forthcoming, Moore supplies some questions that might help stuck wheels start turning. Question number five strikes me as particularly germane, knowing the ruinous effect the teenage tendency to gloss over unfamiliar vocabulary has on comprehension. Ultimately, I prefer the below interpretation of Kristin Sirek, who uses her YouTube channel to read poetry, including her own, out loud, without any bells or whistles whatsoever. A noiseless patient spider, I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated, Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding, It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself, Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them. And you O my soul where you stand, Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space, Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them, Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold, Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.  Related Content: Hysterical Literature: Art & Sexuality Collide in Readings of Whitman, Emerson & Other Greats (NSFW) Orson Welles Reads From America’s Greatest Poem, Walt Whitman’s "Song of Myself" (1953) Marilyn Monroe Reads Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1952) Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/walt-whitmans-poem-a-noiseless-patient-spider-brought-to-life-in-three-animations.html 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. %%POST_LINK%% 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’ve all seen them, on the boardwalks of Venice Beach or of the Jersey Shore: poop-joke t-shirts that state the gist of various world religions or philosophies by reference to the aforementioned bodily function. Clever they aren’t, but the form adapts to another, more tasteful formulation (pun most definitely intended) in the list above, which briefly describes the philosophical programs of sixteen prominent Western thinkers with reference to that universally beloved food, the donut. To wit: pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus gets summed up with "You can’t eat the same donut twice," a twist on one of his famous few aphorisms. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy becomes an elliptical series of possible donuts in various language games: "Fried Pastry, Zero, Parking lot spin, Spare tire." And so on. No need to point out the oversimplification inherent in this strategy; that’s kind of the point. It’s a joke, after all, but one the author—whoever that is—clearly intends as a means of breaking the ice and getting down to more serious explorations. But what if the donut is the serious exploration? Such is the case in a 2001 article published in the journal Basic Objects: Case Studies in Theoretical Primitives by Columbia philosophy professor Achille C. Varzi. Simply titled (in the British spelling) "Doughnuts," Varzi’s paper explores the donut, or "torus" in the language of topographers, as a theoretical object for an ontological thought experiment. In short, he asks whether or not we can say that the donut hole is an actual existing entity or simply a figure of speech, a "façon de parler." In the traditional view, that of the topographers, who practice "a sort of rubbery geometry…. The only thing that matters is the edible stuff. The hole is a mere façon de parler." On another, more three-dimensional view of the relationship "between void and matter," things look different: "We must be very serious about treating them [donut holes] as fully-fledged entities, on a par with the material objects that surround them." The real existence of the hole cannot be easily dismissed without running into a problem, "the dilemma of every eliminative strategy: if successful, it ends up eliminating everything just in order to eliminate nothings." No hole, no donut. (Though, as Simone De Beauvoir apparently recognized, "Patriarchy is responsible for the shape of the donut.") The donut hole thesis also forms part of the argument in an academic philosophy paper from 2012 entitled "Being Positive About Negative Facts" from Philosophy & Phenomenological Research. On the way to showing that "negative facts exist in the usual sense of existence," authors Stephen Barker and Mark Jago, both of the University of Nottingham, come to similar conclusions about the donut, with reference to earlier work by Varzi: Holes pose something of a philosophical quandary and, perhaps as a result of their mystery, are often treated as immaterial entities (Casati and Varzi 1994). Yet we seem to be able to perceive holes, gaps, dents and the like. The view of holes as immaterial objects is, we think, very much in line with thinking of the negative as the metaphysically undead. Given our acceptance of negative facts, we can offer a story about holes on which they are material entities. If there is a donut hole then there is a spatial region involving the instantiation of donut-dough which is intimately connected with an absence thereof. Make of these claims what you will, but I think what we see in both essays is that serious interest in a frivolous object can produce illuminating discussion. That describes the thesis of the site Improbable Research, who bring us both of these donut examples; their motto—"Research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK." I don’t know if either essay—or even the donut joke at the top of the page—really makes for ha-ha laughs so much, but these arguments about the material existence of the immaterial space of donut holes certainly challenged my thinking. via Improbable Research Related Contents: 140+ Free Online Philosophy Courses Philosophy Referee Hand Signals Monty Python’s Best Philosophy Sketches The Epistemology of Dr. Seuss & More Philosophy Lessons from Great Children’s Stories The History of Philosophy, from 600 B.C.E. to 1935, Visualized in Two Massive, 44-Foot High Diagrams Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/philosophy-explained-with-donuts.html 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. %%POST_LINK%% 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.

Most of us have internalized the content of a fair few of Aesop’s fables but have long since forgotten the source — if, indeed, we read it close to the source in the first place. Whether or not we’ve had any real awareness of the ancient Greek storyteller himself, we’ve certainly encountered his stories in countless much more recent interpretations over the decades. My personal favorite renditions came, skewed, in the form of the "Aesop and Son" segments on Rocky and Bullwinkle, but this 1925 Japanese edition of Aesop’s Fables, illustrated by hugely respected children’s artist Takeo Takei, must certainly rank in the same league. Takei began his career in the early 1920s, illustrating children’s magazine covers, collections of Japanese folktales and original stories, and even youngster-oriented writings of his own. Even in that early period, he showed a professional interest in giving new aesthetic life to not just old stories but old non-Japanese stories, such as The Thousand and One Nights and Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales. It was during that time that he took on the challenge of putting his own aesthetic stamp on Aesop. You can see quite a few of Takei’s Aesop illustrations at the book design and illustration site 50watts, whose author notes that he found the images in the database of Japan’s National Diet Library. Even if you can’t read the Japanese, you’ll know the fables in question — "The Tortoise and the Hare," "The North Wind and the Sun," "The Wolf and the Crane" — after nothing more than a glance at Takei’s lively artwork, which takes Aesop’s well-known characters (often animals or natural forces personified) and dresses them up in the natty style of jazz-age Tokyo high society. Takei would go on to enjoy a long career after illustrating Aesop’s Fables. A decade after its publication, he would begin producing his best-known series of works, the "kampon" (in Japanese, "published book"). With these 138 volumes, he explored the form of the illustrated children’s book in every way he possibly could, using, according to rarebook.com, "traditional methods of letterpress, woodblock, wood engraving, stencil, etching and lithography," as well as clay block-prints and "definitely non-traditional images of woven labels, painted glass, ceramic, and cello-slides - transparencies composed of bright cellophane paper." He would continue working working right up until his death in 1983, leaving a legacy of influence on Japanese visual culture as deep as the one Aesop left on storytelling. via 50watts Related Content: Early Japanese Animations: The Origins of Anime (1917-1931) Advertisements from Japan’s Golden Age of Art Deco Glorious Early 20th-Century Japanese Ads for Beer, Smokes & Sake (1902-1954) Vintage 1930s Japanese Posters Artistically Market the Wonders of Travel Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/a-wonderfully-illustrated-1925-japanese-edition-of-aesops-fables-by-legendary-childrens-book-illustrator-takeo-takei.html 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. %%POST_LINK%% 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.

Image via EricMcluhan.com Six years before Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt designed their first pack of Oblique Strategies cards—a set of random aphorisms meant to clear creative blocks—communication theorist and philosopher Marshall McLuhan had designed a very similar deck in 1969, this one with a more direct nod to the classic playing card deck. The name of the card deck, Distant Early Warning, was a reference to the 3,000 mile long DEW Line, a system of 63 radar stations that acted as an early detection invasion buffer during the Cold War. And in his 1964 book Understand Media, McLuhan explained, "I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it." And so with help from advertising and publishing guru Eugene Schwartz, The Marshall McLuhan DEW-Line Newsletter and its spinoff deck of cards was born. Schwartz saw the newsletter much like we see blogs today: a very immediate way of disseminating information, deeper than television and faster than books. The newsletter lasted only two years, came in several forms (one issue was a set of slides, another a record), and represents the height of "McLuhan Mania" in American culture. Business and thought leaders were its target audience. Much like Oblique Strategies (you can still find vintage versions online), the instructions for Distant Early Warning (also available online here) suggest that the user think of a personal or business problem, shuffle the deck, choose a card and interpret its meaning. Although divinatory cards have long been a part of western culture, the idea of indeterminacy and consulting the I Ching was very much in vogue through artists like John Cage. The cards contain plays on aphorisms, like "The Victor Belongs to the Spoils" or "Thanks for the Mammaries." Sometimes they quote Victorian novelist Samuel Butler, like "The chicken was the egg’s idea for getting more eggs" or W.C. Fields ("How do you like kids?" "Well cooked," he said sternly), or John Cage ("Silence is all the sounds of the environment at once.") Many are McLuhan’s own quotes. McLuhan and Schwartz’ ideas can still be felt in any number of TED talks or whenever a business leader talks about thinking outside the box. Steve Jobs was a walking deck of these cards. Should you feel like pushing your brain laterally, check out the full deck here at this Flickr feed, and if you long to own a physical copy, it can still be had for $65 Canadian dollars at the site run by McLuhan’s son. via Flashbak Related content: The Visionary Thought of Marshall McLuhan, Introduced and Demystified by Tom Wolfe McLuhan Said "The Medium Is The Message"; Two Pieces Of Media Decode the Famous Phrase Norman Mailer & Marshall McLuhan Debate the Electronic Age 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. http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/marshall-mcluhans-1969-deck-of-cards-designed-for-out-of-the-box-thinking.html 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. %%POST_LINK%% 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.

Jared Diamond is a true polymath. He got his start researching how the gall bladder absorbed salt and then moved on to other fields of study - ornithology, anthropology, linguistics. His wildly diverse interests have given him a unique perspective of how and why our species evolved. His Pulitzer Prize-winning book Germs, Guns and Steel makes a pretty convincing argument about why Europe - and not China or South America - ended up dominating the world. The answer, it turns not, has everything to do with geography and little to do with any kind of cultural superiority. Back in 2013, Diamond spoke at The Royal Institution about how we think of risk in the first world versus those who live in remote New Guinea. The RI has taken a portion of that hour and a half talk and set it to some glorious animation. You can watch it above. Early in Diamond’s career, he was in the jungle with his New Guinean guides. He found what he thought was a perfect spot to pitch camp - under a massive dead tree. His guides refused to sleep there, fearing that the tree might fall in the middle of the night. He thought that they were being overly paranoid until he started seeing things from their perspective. Every night you’re in New Guinea sleeping in a forest, you hear a tree fall somewhere and then you go do the numbers. Suppose the risk of that tree falling on me tonight is 1 in 1000. If I sleep under dead trees for 1000 nights, in three years I’m going to be dead. … The New Guinea attitude is sensitive to the risks of things you are going to do regularly. Each time they carry a low risk but if you are not cautious it will catch up with you. Diamond then extrapolated this realization to modern life. He notes that he is 76 years old and will statistically speaking probably live another 15 or so years. Yet if the risk of taking a fall in the shower is roughly the same as getting brained by a dead tree in the jungles of New Guinea (1 in 1000), then Diamond figures he could kill himself 5 ½ times over his the course of those 15 years. "And so I’m careful about showers," he says in the full video of the talk. "I’m careful about sidewalks. I’m careful about stepladders. It drives many of my American friends crazy but I will survive and they won’t." People in the first world are terrified by the wrong things, Diamond argues. The real danger isn’t terrorism, serial killers or sharks, which kill a very, very small percentage of people annually. The real risks are those things that we do daily that carry a low risk but that eventually catch up with you - driving, taking stairs, using step ladders. You can watch the full interview, which is fascinating, below. Related Content: Jared Diamond Explains Haiti’s Enduring Poverty The Evolution of Religions: A Talk by Jared Diamond "Professor Risk" at Cambridge University Says "One of the Biggest Risks is Being Too Cautious" MIT’s Introduction to Poker Theory: A Free Online Course 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. http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/jared-diamond-underscores-the-real-risks-in-everyday-life.html 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. %%POST_LINK%% 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 think of the most astute minds of our time, you might well think of Ray Bradbury’s — but you probably don’t think of him as one of the most astute terrorist minds of our time. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, however, saw things differently. Collaborative news site MuckRock found that out through files "released to former MuckRocker Inkoo Kang [which] document the decade the Bureau spent trying to determine if Bradbury was, if not a card-carrying Communist, at least a sympathetic ‘fellow traveler.'" See snippets of documents here from 1959. You can view the files themselves, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, at MuckRock. There, the site’s JPat Brown also summarizes the organization’s basis for suspicion against the author: his "membership in the Screen Writer’s Guild, as well as his vocal opposition to McCarthyism, drew particular attention," as did the use in The Martian Chronicles of the "repeated theme that earthmen are despoilers and not developers." Not just Bradbury’s work but the whole of science fiction, which informant Martin Berkeley calls a possibly "lucrative field for the introduction of Communist ideology," comes in for an indictment. "Communists have found fertile opportunities for development," Berkeley says, "for spreading distrust and lack of confidence in America [sic] institutions in the area of Science Fiction writing." Another, unsurprisingly clearer view of the genre comes from Bradbury himself, quoted disapprovingly in the file from a 1959 Women’s Legislative Action Bulletin. There, he said he uses the medium of science fiction to "try to bring to light some of the current fallacies in human values today" — the one thing, as the author of Fahrenheit 451 must have known full well, that the powers that be least want anybody to do. Get more at MuckRock. via Metafilter Related Content: Ray Bradbury: "I Am Not Afraid of Robots. I Am Afraid of People" (1974) Ray Bradbury: Literature is the Safety Valve of Civilization Soviet Animations of Ray Bradbury Stories: ‘Here There Be Tygers’ & ‘There Will Comes Soft Rain’ FBI’s "Vault" Web Site Reveals Declassified Files on Hemingway, Einstein, Marilyn & Other Icons Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/who-was-afraid-of-ray-bradbury-science-fiction-the-fbi-it-turns-out-1959.html 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. %%POST_LINK%% 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 early seventies, at the height of their powers, unforgettable hits seemed to tumble out one after another from The Rolling Stones, solidifying Jagger and Richards’ reputation for elemental, immediate songwriting that seemed to cut through more baroque studio productions of the late sixties and seventies and deliver the goods raw. As Brian Jones’ influence waned, Richards’ dark, raunchy riffs took over the band’s sound, and even when Jagger’s vocals are near incomprehensible, as in much of Exile on Main Street, his peculiar intonation—part fake Delta bluesman, part sneering delinquent schoolboy—gets across everything you need to know about the Rolling Stones’ ethos. The immediacy of the Stones’ recordings is largely an artifact of their trial-and-error method in the studio. Unafraid of last-minute inspiration and unorthodox technical experiments, they built songs like "Gimme Shelter" from inspired demos to powerful anthems over the course of many versions and mixes. We’ve told the story of that song’s last-minute inclusion of Merry Clayton’s stirring vocal performance. Now, at the top, hear an early demo of the song lacking not only her voice, but Jagger’s as well—at least in the lead spot. Everything else is there: the tremolo-soaked opening riff, the haunting, reverb-drenched "Oooo"’s. But instead of Jagger’s faux-Southern drawl suddenly breaking the tension, we get the much more subdued voice of Richards, pushed rather far back in the mix and sounding pretty underwhelming next to the final album version. It’s not that Richards is a bad singer—here he almost captures the cadences of Jagger, if not the projection (we do hear Jagger’s voice backing his). It’s just that we’ve come to associate the song so closely with Jagger’s quirks that hearing anyone else deliver the lyrics is a little jarring. On the other hand, Richard’s unadorned acoustic demo of "Wild Horses," above, gets right to the heart of the song, sounding more like his friend Gram Parsons’ mournful early version than the later 1971 release on Sticky Fingers. (Hear another acoustic demo here, with Jagger on vocals.) These two tracks represent rare opportunities to hear Richards take the vocal lead on Stones tracks, though he would begin releasing solo work in 1978 and fronted his own band, the X-pensive Winos, in 1987, assembled in tribute to his hero Chuck Berry. Just the year previous, the Stones released Dirty Work, a high point in an otherwise creative slump for the band. The album’s first track, "One Hit (to the Body)," became its second big hit, and you can hear a scratchy, lo-fi demo version, with Keith on lead vocals, above. A thread at the Steve Hoffman Music Forums points us toward many more demos of Stones songs with Keith’s vocals, from outtakes and demos of Voodoo Lounge, Talk is Cheap and other albums. Many of these recordings show how much Richards was responsible for the band’s vocal melodies as well their signature guitar tones and rhythms. Amidst all these demos—of varying degrees of sound quality and states of inebriation—one song in particular stands out, and it’s not a Stones song. Above, Richards’ delivers a Bourbon Street take on "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." His quiet voice haunts the song, again pushed so far back in the mix you have to strain to hear him at all as he trails in and out. The recording, from 1977, leaked in 2008, along with Richards covers of other standards by Hoagy Carmichael and Perry Como. "The songs," writes The Guardian, "feature melancholy piano, an even more melancholy Keef and sound like he’s doing an impression of early Tom Waits." Fitting, then, that Richards would collaborate with Waits in 2006, on a recording that sounds like he’d been practicing for it his entire career. Related Content: Tom Waits and Keith Richards Sing Sea Song "Shenandoah" for New Pirate-Themed CD: Listen Online The Rolling Stones Release a Soulful, Never-Heard Acoustic Version of "Wild Horses" Mick Jagger Tells the Story Behind ‘Gimme Shelter’ and Merry Clayton’s Haunting Background Vocals Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/hear-demos-of-keith-richards-singing-lead-vocals-on-rolling-stones-classics-gimme-shelter-wild-horses-more.html 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. %%POST_LINK%% 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 Chris Stone There’s no shortage of Grateful Dead concerts freely available on the web. Indeed, head over to Archive.org and you’ll find hundreds of Dead shows, some going as far back as the 1960s. But when you start rummaging around, you’ll discover that some nights were magic, while many others fell far short. That’s why we can be thankful that Dick’s Picks came along. Named after the band’s tape archivist Dick Latvala, Dick’s Picks (released between 1993 and 2005) featured 36 volumes/albums of Grateful Dead concerts, all sourced from soundboard recordings captured on two-track master tapes. The recordings, as Tony Sclafani notes in The Grateful Dead FAQ, gave everyone a chance to "experience what going to a classic Dead show was like" — "to easily access recordings of legendary shows." Caught up in some Grateful Dead nostalgia myself, I quickly realized that all 36 volumes of Dick’s Picks are available on Spotify — at no cost. As much for my own musical edification as for yours, I’ve created a list below. (Some of you might have a beef with Spotify, or want to own your own copies, so I’ve included Amazon links too.) You can register for Spotify and download the free software here. Dead fans will surely argue over which Dick’s Picks are the best. But, from what I’ve seen, Vol. 4 (above), Vol. 8, Vol. 10, and Vol. 12. offer great places to begin. And although it doesn’t appear in the Dick’s Picks series, you can find on Archive.org what’s often considered one of the Dead’s finest live recordings — their May 8, 1977 concert in Barton Hall, at Cornell University. Also, if you’re looking for a good introduction to the Dead’s musical career, listen to this recent episode of the Sound Opinions podcast, coming out of WBEZ in Chicago. Enjoy. Vol. 1, 1993 : Tampa, 12/19/73 - Spotify - Amazon Vol. 2, 1995 : Columbus, 10/31/71 - Spotify - Amazon Vol. 3, 1995 : Pembroke Pines, 5/22/77 - Spotify - Amazon Vol. 4, 1996 : Fillmore East, 2/13-14/70 - Spotify - Amazon Vol. 5, 1996 : Oakland, 12/26/79 - Spotify - Amazon Vol. 6, 1996 : Hartford, 10/14/83 - Spotify - Amazon Vol. 7, 1997 : London, 9/9-11/74 - Spotify - Amazon Vol. 8, 1997 : Binghamton, 5/2/70 - Spotify - Amazon Vol. 9, 1997 : Madison Square Gardens, 9/16/90 - Spotify - Amazon Vol. 10, 1998 : Winterland, 12/29-30/77 - Spotify - Amazon Vol. 11, 1998 : Jersey City, 9/27/72 - Spotify - Amazon Vol. 12, 1998 : Providence & Boston, 6/26 & 28/74 - Spotify - Amazon Vol. 13, 1999 : Nassau Coliseum, 5/6/81 - Spotify - Amazon Vol. 14, 1999 : Boston, 11/30/73 & 12/2/73 - Spotify - Amazon Vol. 15, 1999 : Englishtown, 9/3/77 - Spotify - Amazon Vol. 16, 2000 : Fillmore Aud, 11/8/69 - Spotify - Amazon Vol. 17, 2000 : Boston, 9/25/91 - Spotify - Amazon Vol. 18, 2000 : Madison & Cedar Falls, 2/3 & 5/78 - Spotify - Amazon Vol. 19, 2000 : Oklahoma City, 10/19/73 - Spotify - Amazon Vol. 20, 2001 : Landover & Syracuse, 9/25 & 28/76 - Spotify - Amazon Vol. 21, 2001 : Richmond, 11/1/85 - Spotify - Amazon Vol. 22, 2001 : Lake Tahoe, 2/23 & 24/68 - Spotify - Amazon Vol. 23, 2001 : Baltimore, 9/17/72 - Spotify - Amazon Vol. 24, 2002 : Cow Palace, 3/23/74 - Spotify - Amazon Vol. 25, 2002 : New Haven & Springfield, 5/10-11/78 - Spotify - Amazon Vol. 26, 2002 : Chicago & Minneapolis, 4/26-27/69 - Spotify - Amazon Vol. 27, 2003 : Oakland, 12/16-17/92 - Spotify - Amazon Vol. 28, 2003 : Lincoln & Salt Lake City, 2/26 & 28/73 - Spotify - Amazon Vol. 29, 2003 : Atlanta & Lakeland, 5/19 & 21/77 - Spotify - Amazon Vol. 30, 2003 : Academy of Music, NYC, 3/25 & 28/72 - Spotify - Amazon Vol. 31, 2004 : Philadelphia & Jersey City, 8/4-6/74 - Spotify - Amazon Vol. 32, 2004 : Alpine Valley, East Troy , 8/7/82 - Spotify - Amazon Vol. 33, 2004 : Oakland, 10/9 & 10/76 - Spotify - Amazon Vol. 34, 2005 : Rochester, 11/5/77 - Spotify - Amazon Vol. 35, 2005 : San Diego, Chicago and Hollywood, August 1971 - Spotify - Amazon Vol. 36, 2005 : Philadelphia 9/21/72 - Spotify - Amazon Related Content: The Grateful Dead’s "Ripple" Played by Musicians Around the World Bob Dylan and The Grateful Dead Rehearse Together in Summer 1987. Listen to 74 Tracks. The Grateful Dead Play at the Egyptian Pyramids, in the Shadow of the Sphinx (1978) http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/stream-36-recordings-of-legendary-grateful-dead-concerts-free-online.html 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. %%POST_LINK%% 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 a confession to make. This may anger some people, but I have to get it off my chest. I actually like the Harrison Ford voiceover in the 1983 theatrical release of Blade Runner, though I do revile the hokey, happy ending. I guess I’m in pretty good company. Even the movie’s screenwriter, Hampton Fancher, went on record to say "the old voiceover in the first version I sort of like better than all the rest of them." In this regard, Fancher and I exist in what Colin Marshall called "a curious minority" in a recent post on yet another recut of Blade Runner, a definitive reference for almost every android/robot/AI movie made since. It’s okay to like the theatrical cut, or the 1992 director’s cut, or the 2007 "final cut"—let a thousand Blade Runner fans bloom, I say, as long as the film remains a critical reference for sci-fi cinema for many years to come. But part of the reason for all these later versions, besides that tacked-on ending, is the voiceover, which director Ridley Scott hated, and Harrison Ford hated, and even the studio executives, who forced him to record it, hated. The studio hated almost everything about the movie, and the critics were mostly unimpressed. Siskel called it "a waste of time"; Ebert gave it an unenthusiastic thumbs up. (Philip K. Dick, on the other hand, made some prophetic predictions based on the little he saw of the film.) Audiences didn’t cozy up to Blade Runner either. They went to see E.T. instead. Blade Runner opened at the box office with a disappointing $6 million weekend. Sensing all this trouble even before the film’s release, executives commissioned M.K. Productions to shoot the promotional film above, a behind-the-scenes short documentary that circulated at horror and sci-fi conventions in 1982. Introduced by a bored-looking Ridley Scott (and some cheesy seventies funk), the 16mm short gave potential fans a glimpse of Blade Runner’s heavily Tokyo-accented future Los Angeles, its classic noir plot elements, and its visual effects by masterminds Syd Mead and Douglas Trumbull, both of whom appear here. Those of us fans now living in the future may find the footage of the movie’s production and the detailed explanations of its set design fascinating. It’s hard to know what the original viewers of this extended trailer/promotional vehicle might have thought, though it clearly didn’t move enough of them to fill the theater seats. I can imagine, though, that many a science fiction lover and Blade Runner fan who missed the movie’s first run might regret it now. Voiceover, sappy ending and all, it would have been a treat to be one of the first to see this now ubiquitous—and deservedly so—sci-fi detective story. Related Content: Blade Runner: The Pillar of Sci-Fi Cinema that Siskel, Ebert, and Studio Execs Originally Hated Blade Runner’s Miniature Props Revealed in 142 Behind-the-Scenes Photos Philip K. Dick Previews Blade Runner: "The Impact of the Film is Going to be Overwhelming" (1981) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/the-behind-the-scenes-blade-runner-promo-film.html 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. %%POST_LINK%% 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.

By the end of 1960, Marilyn Monroe was coming apart. She spent much of that year shooting what would be her final completed movie - The Misfits (see a still from the trailer above). Arthur Miller penned the film, which is about a beautiful, fragile woman who falls in love with a much older man. The script was pretty clearly based on his own troubled marriage with Monroe. The production was by all accounts spectacularly punishing. Shot in the deserts of Nevada, the temperature on set would regularly climb north of 100 degrees. Director John Huston spent much of the shoot ragingly drunk. Star Clark Gable dropped dead from a heart attack less than a week after production wrapped. And Monroe watched as her husband, who was on set, fell in love with photographer Inge Morath. Never one blessed with confidence or a thick skin, Monroe retreated into a daze of prescription drugs. Monroe and Miller announced their divorce on November 11, 1960. A few months later, the emotionally exhausted movie star was committed by her psychoanalyst Dr. Marianne Kris to the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic in New York. Monroe thought she was going in for a rest cure. Instead, she was escorted to a padded cell. The four days she spent in the psych ward proved to be among the most distressing of her life. In a riveting 6-page letter to her other shrink, Dr. Ralph Greenson, written soon after her release, she detailed her terrifying experience. There was no empathy at Payne-Whitney — it had a very bad effect — they asked me after putting me in a "cell" (I mean cement blocks and all) for very disturbed depressed patients (except I felt I was in some kind of prison for a crime I hadn’t committed. The inhumanity there I found archaic. They asked me why I wasn’t happy there (everything was under lock and key; things like electric lights, dresser drawers, bathrooms, closets, bars concealed on the windows — the doors have windows so patients can be visible all the time, also, the violence and markings still remain on the walls from former patients). I answered: "Well, I’d have to be nuts if I like it here." Monroe quickly became desperate. I sat on the bed trying to figure if I was given this situation in an acting improvisation what would I do. So I figured, it’s a squeaky wheel that gets the grease. I admit it was a loud squeak but I got the idea from a movie I made once called "Don’t Bother to Knock". I picked up a light-weight chair and slammed it, and it was hard to do because I had never broken anything in my life — against the glass intentionally. It took a lot of banging to get even a small piece of glass - so I went over with the glass concealed in my hand and sat quietly on the bed waiting for them to come in. They did, and I said to them "If you are going to treat me like a nut I’ll act like a nut". I admit the next thing is corny but I really did it in the movie except it was with a razor blade. I indicated if they didn’t let me out I would harm myself — the furthest thing from my mind at that moment since you know Dr. Greenson I’m an actress and would never intentionally mark or mar myself. I’m just that vain. During her four days there, she was subjected to forced baths and a complete loss of privacy and personal freedom. The more she sobbed and resisted, the more the doctors there thought she might actually be psychotic. Monroe’s second husband, Joe DiMaggio, rescued her by getting her released early, over the objections of the staff. You can read the full letter (where she also talks about reading the letters of Sigmund Freud) over at Letters of Note. And while there, make sure you pick up a copy of the very elegant Letters of Note book. Related Content: The 430 Books in Marilyn Monroe’s Library: How Many Have You Read? Marilyn Monroe Reads Joyce’s Ulysses at the Playground (1955) Marilyn Monroe Reads Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1952) Marilyn Monroe Explains Relativity to Albert Einstein (in a Nicolas Roeg Movie) 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. http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/marilyn-monroe-recounts-her-harrowing-experience-in-a-psychiatric-ward-in-a-1961-letter.html 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. %%POST_LINK%% 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 of us grade the books we read, but Kurt Vonnegut graded the books he wrote. Letters of Note once tweeted out a list of the thirteen grades he applied to thirteen of his novels, prefaced with his disclaimer that "the grades I hand out to myself do not place me in literary history. I am comparing myself with myself." With that out of the way, he gives 1969’s Slaughterhouse-Five, his sixth novel and best-known work, an A-plus, and puts his fourth novel, Cat’s Cradle from 1963, in the very same league. But you don’t have to take Vonnegut’s word for it. You can, of course, read these books yourself — or you can hear them read aloud, at least in abridged versions, for free on Spotify. What’s more, you can hear Vonnegut, clearly not a man to distance himself from his finished work, read them aloud in his own voice. The recordings come from the label Caedmon, pioneers of the vinyl-album proto-audiobook beginning in the 1950s with a record of Dylan Thomas reading his poetry. Their Vonnegut-reading-Vonnegut releases came out through the 1970s. You might as well begin by listening to the readings of Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut’s "A-plus" books. They also put out audio versions of Welcome to the Monkey House, which the author graded a bit more harshly with a B-minus, and Breakfast of Champions, which, with a C, he ranked down among what he considered his lesser works. But that disdain doesn’t affect his characteristic richly weary delivery of the text, and besides, some of his fans love Breakfast of Champions best of all. Bonus: Stories from Welcome to the Monkey House is also an option. If you don’t yet have the free software needed to play these or other recordings on Spotify, download it here, start listening to these classically satirical, inventive, and cynical midcentury American novels, and prepare to hand out some grades of your own. Related Content: Kurt Vonnegut Maps Out the Universal Shapes of Our Favorite Stories Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Tips on How to Write a Good Short Story Kurt Vonnegut Explains "How to Write With Style" Kurt Vonnegut Urges Young People to Make Art and "Make Your Soul Grow" Hear Hemingway Read Hemingway, and Faulkner Read Faulkner (90 Minutes of Classic Audio) Listen to 60+ Free, High-Quality AudioBooks of Classic Literature on Spotify: Austen, Dickens, Tolstoy & More Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/hear-kurt-vonnegut-read-slaughterhouse-five-cats-cradle-other-novels.html 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. %%POST_LINK%% 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.

Later this year, Hurricane Films will release A Quiet Passion, a film about Emily Dickinson, which will be directed by Terence Davies and star Cynthia Nixon as the great American poet. But that’s not where their ambitions end. If they can get your support on Kickstarter, Hurricane Films also hopes to make a documentary (narrated by Nixon) that will take everyone deeper into Dickinson’s life & times. You can learn more about the promising film-tentatively to be called Phosphorescence: A Film about the Life of Emily Dickinson-in the video above, or the text down below. Please note: If you’re inclined to support this kind of enriching project, please do so now. There are only a few short days left in the Kickstarter campaign: The documentary will be an essential companion piece to the narrative. Narrated by Cynthia Nixon (who plays Emily in the feature film) PHOSPHORESCENCE will take us on a journey through the seasons of Emily’s life in mid 1800’s New England as we engage with her passionate relationships via her letters and poems. Emily’s deep love of horticulture and music as well as her closeness to her family and friends will form a rich tapestry - combining elements of a natural history film and a Koyaanisqatsi-esque travelogue. Together with an ensemble cast of highly recognized actors lending their voices to her many correspondences not dissimilar in tone and feel to Ken Burns’ American Civil War. And with the differing views and interpretations of her poetry by contemporary experts we aim to weave a story that will both surprise, delight and throw light on some controversial opinion from unexpected quarters. The documentary will endeavor to reflect qualities inspired by its subject, Emily Dickinson - deft words, passionate beliefs, searing individuality and a great story well told. The film has the support of the Emily Dickinson Museum and will be completed in mid 2016. Get more information and make a contribution over on Kickstarter. Dan Colman is the founder/editor of Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn 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. Related Content: The Online Emily Dickinson Archive Makes Thousands of the Poet’s Manuscripts Freely Available Emily Dickinson’s Handwritten Coconut Cake Recipe Hints at How Baking Figured Into Her Creative Process The Second Known Photo of Emily Dickinson Emerges Watch an Animated Film of Emily Dickinson’s Poem ‘I Started Early-Took My Dog’ Free Online Literature Courses http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/kickstart-a-documentary-on-emily-dickinson-narrated-by-cynthia-nixon.html 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. %%POST_LINK%% 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 many of you know, the final version of the Next Generation Science Standards were just released in early April. Over the past few weeks, our team has been working feverishly to align Steve Spangler’s hands-on science curriculum from Science in the Rockies with these newly released standards. In addition to the science standards, we know that many of you are looking for creative strategies for connecting more hands-on science with the Common Core reading, writing and math objectives. That’s why we are very excited to share these integration strategies and creative methods for making science even more fun and meaningful for your students in the coming years. Next Generation Science Standards are a voluntary set of rigorous and internationally benchmarked standards for K-12 science education. Twenty-six states and their teams joined 41 writers and partners to compile science and engineering content that all students should learn to prepare for college and the real world. "The Next Generation of Science Standards promise to help students understand why is it that we have to know science and help them use scientific learning to develop critical thinking skills-which may be applied throughout their lives, no matter the topic. Today, students see science as simply a list of facts and ideas that they are expected to memorize. In contrast to that approach education researchers have learned, particularly in the last 15 to 20 years, that if we cover fewer ideas, but go into more depth, students come away with a much richer understanding," said Joseph S. Krajcik, Professor of Science Education in the College of Education at Michigan State University and a member of the writing team. Common Core State Standards are standards set across states to create a clear understanding of what students are expected to learn, and to put both parents and teachers on the same education team. These standards provide skills and knowledge students need to prepare for college and beyond. Please join us in Denver July 9th through 11th for Steve Spangler’s Science in the Rockies. Not familiar with Science in the Rockies? Every July, 150 teachers from around the world come together for three days with a team of instructors who are over-the-top excited about teaching science. The workshop focuses on ways to bring wonder, discovery, and exploration back into your classroom through Halloween activities, electricity, things that glow, or even launching a potato out of PVC pipes. This is not a "sit-and-watch" teacher training… this is a "get-up-and-do" learning experience featuring over 75 engaging activities that you can take home and immediately share with your students. You’ll leave the workshop with all the tools you need to become the best science teacher possible, including over $300 of gizmos, gadgets, hands-on learning materials for your students, hard-to-find supplies, and cool resources that accompany the Science in the Rockies curriculum. You’ll also receive a 250-page training manual that details every aspect of your learning experience, from the detailed instructions and recipes to the in-depth explanations and real-world applications. The enthusiasm for making science fun spreads like a virus! Steve Spangler and his staff will change the way you teach science… forever.   The post Science in the Rockies Teacher Training Now Aligned to Next Gen and Common Core appeared first on Steve Spangler.

Steve Spangler Science has an incredible following on our three YouTube channels - The Spangler Effect, Sick Science! Experiments and Spangler Science TV. Our video team is dedicated to bring the best experiments and science programming to our viewers. They work hard every week setting off Mentos Soda Geysers in the parking lot, popsicle sticks in the studio and researching all of the science behind everything we do. The Spangler Effect is our weekly online science show that goes in-depth on some of the most popular and new experiments from Steve Spangler. Sick Science! features easy to do experiments and activities you can do at home or in the classroom. Spangler Science TV offers videos and experiments from all of Steve Spangler’s television appearances. We also enjoy watching and following all of the amazing work that is shared on YouTube education channels everyday. So much so that we thought we’d share some of our favorites for kids, parents and teachers. All offer something different and educational. This is what we watch at the Steve Spangler Labs - Science Giants NASA Television - NASA videos, tv and reports about space. World Science Festival - science news, interviews and information Scientific American - science news and lessons from Scientific American. Nature Videos - Meet the scientists behind the research. NOVA - science news and information. Nat Geo Wild - National Geographic’s channel on animals and ecosystems. Wired - Technology and gadgets from Wired.com Smithsonian - The museums videos on everything and anything. Science Channel - science news, information and stories from around the world. Independent Science Minute Physics - Science questions answered and broken down quickly and thoroughly with drawings to illustrate. ASAP Science - Similar to Minute Physics - mini science lessons illustrated through wipe board drawings. The Slow Mo Guys - 2 guys run video experiments and slow them down to investigate what really happens. Smarter Every Day - science videos exploring the world and answering the question of why. Vsauce - answers to ordinary and astounding science questions, and mind-blowing facts. Sci Show - discussions and questions on science news today. Education and Lifelong Learning Soulpancake - a huge variety of videos and programming to make you open your heart and your mind, including the very popular Kid President. Crash Course - Six courses to learn from - US History, Chemistry, World History, Biology, Literature, and Ecology. Google in Education - News, tips, stories and more PBS - Programming, children’s videos and more Edutopia - for tech-savvy teachers, promoting online learning. TED Talks - lectures, demonstrations and lessons in 18 minutes from icons and geniuses.  incredible lectures, demonstrations and performances spanning every discipline imaginable. Learning Channel - Lessons for grades 7 through 12. Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls - Exploring cultures and the world along with advice from Amy Poehler Teachers Karen Mensing - 2nd grade teacher, YouTube Teacher Star, Arizona’s Gifted Teacher of the Year 2011, Teacher of the Year 2012. WowMath - Mr. Robb’s math lectures on Algebra and Calculus. Kid-Hosted Doctor Mad Science - simple science experiments, hosted by 11-year-old Jordan. Whiz Kid Science Experiments - easy experiments for kids done by a kid. Parents Teach Mama - Tips and advice for parents to help navigate learning everyday with your child.  Inspiration Labs - Encouraging learning through creativity and play. Activities and science experiments. Emma Vanstone - Fun loving mum of three. Play Learn Grow - "A Place for Moms of all ages, nations, Teachers and Children to Play, Learn and Grow together." Want even more YouTube education channels? Check out 100 Incredibly Useful YouTube Channels for Teachers and Edudemic’s Best Video Sites for Teachers.   What have we missed? What are your favorite YouTube Channels? Leave us a comment below with a link and we will consider adding it to our list. The post Best Science and Educational YouTube Channels appeared first on Steve Spangler.

More and more parents, students and lifelong learners are turning to YouTube - not for funny kitty videos or talking dogs - but for education. Teachers are sharing their lessons beyond the classroom. Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy YouTube EDU is becoming increasingly popular for online learning. Lessons from foreign languages to chemistry to algebra are available from top teachers across the world. Earlier this week, we shared our favorite education YouTube channels from the science greats to independent teachers AND students. On their July 1, 2013 broadcast, NBC Nightly News featured some of the most popular teacher channels on YouTube. Steve Spangler’s The Spangler Effect, was one of the top learning channels featured. In The Spangler Effect former teacher Steve Spangler transforms simple do-it-at-home experiments into unforgettable experiences. It’s an in-depth look at the science behind some of today’s most popular science principles. Here are the other teachers featured in the Nightly News story - Rob Tarrou What started off as a way to help students at St. Pete High School has now gone worldwide. Rob Tarrou began filming his energetic math lessons from his house with his wife behind the camera. Those videos have now been seen hundreds of thousands of times, from New York, to Hungary, to Israel. Alex Dainis Alex Dainis is "a biology nerd, music lover, film geek." She gets the ideas for her YouTube videos from conversations she has with her friends, such as: "Why do we get brain freezes when we eat ice cream too fast?" or "Why do we sneeze?" Paul Anderson Paul Anderson started creating videos for the students in his class several years ago.  A friend encouraged him to start uploading them to YouTube, and he says this has brought a whole new virtual classroom of students into his life. Keith Hughes Public school teacher Keith Hughes, who began using video in his social studies classroom in 2002, now has more than 100 videos on YouTube covering topics in U.S. history and government, political science and world history. Kristen Williams Kristen Williams realized that there was an entire YouTube education community when she came across the Vlogbrothers, and got hooked. Loretta Scott Loretta Scott teaches Japanese from Brooklyn, N.Y. Brothers John and Hank Green John Green, YouTube sensation and New York Times bestselling author, has a quirky, fast-paced teaching style as he leads a Crash Course on The Fall of Rome, The Dark Ages and The Mongol Empire. His brother Hank Green explains topics in chemistry, biology, and ecology to name a few. Rachel Smith New Yorker Rachel Smith is a classically trained opera singer and linguist who now teaches ESL on YouTube as a career. Rachel is focused specifically on pronunciation. She has adoring students across the globe. The post The Spangler Effect Spotlighted on NBC Nightly News as Top YouTube Education Channel appeared first on Steve Spangler.

Common Core - the next big thing in education reform - is getting a lot of positive and negative attention these days. Many of it isn’t accurate, like the requiring Grapes of Wrath for second graders. But what is it and what does it mean for the future of education? Here are a few misconceptions and the truth behind Common Core Standards. (We asked our Facebook Fans what they thought about Common Core. We are sharing some of their responses throughout this post.) Misconception Common Core was set by the federal government and is mandated for all schools. Truth Common Core is a state-led effort by state leaders, state commissioners of education, state governors, the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO). Forty-five states have adopted the standards. Nebraska, Alaska, Texas, Minnesota and Virginia have yet to adopt them. They are being led by the states and are not mandatory. Misconception Common Core is mainly focused on high-stakes test scores. Truth Common Core Standards were designed to give every parent, teacher and student a clear idea of what are the standards of success to prepare children for college and the workforce. It is a common understanding of what students are expected to learn in every grade level. That said, Common Core-aligned tests are being developed and planned for the 2014/2015 school year, although some are already taking tests. The high-stakes tests that tie teacher salaries to test scores are the subject of a growing grassroots revolt where teachers are refusing to give them, students refusing to take them and parents keeping their children home on test days. The majority of teachers support Common Core Standards, but take issue with the testing and teaching to the test. This is the most controversial part of Common Core Standards. Misconception Politicians are determining what our students are learning. Truth Gates-funded consultants that included teachers, content and assessment experts, researchers, and standard experts wrote the standards. The drafted standards then received feedback from teachers, postsecondary educators, civil rights groups, English language learners and students with disabilities. They were also opened for public comment and received over 10,000 responses from teachers, parents, school administrators and citizens. Misconception English teachers will have to teach science and social studies in reading material. Truth English teachers will still teach both fiction and non-fiction literature. College and real world careers also demand a command of complex texts outside of literature. The Common Core Standards also include reading, research and writing in history and science. The idea is to integrate the subjects, because in the real world, science involves reading, writing, researching and more. Teachers in other subjects like science and social studies are also encouraged to build these important skills. Misconception All subjects are under strict guidelines from Common Core to tell teachers exactly what to teach in their classrooms. Truth Common Core only covers Math and English Language Arts  and is not a curriculum. Many states and districts are interpreting the standards and molding them to their specific needs. Teachers will still be able to tailor their lesson plans to the needs of the students in their classrooms. The standards provide samples to help guide teachers on appropriate grade-level lessons, but teachers have the flexibility to make their own decisions on what texts or resources they use in the classroom. They do not tell teachers how to teach, they only tell them what students need to learn. Misconception Common Core Standards bring down all standards to the lowest common denominator. States with high standards will take a step back and we will fall even further behind international students. Truth There is an explicit agreement among the states that no state will lower its standards. Common Core builds upon the most advanced standards to help students achieve success in college and beyond. International benchmarking was important in setting the standards. It is supposed to raise expectations for all students vs. lowering them. Common Core has its critics…some say we need less standardization instead of more and some do not like the way they are being implemented and adopted. It is by no way a perfect system or the end-all to education reform. A bigger and very important debate is also being raised - the variation in funding state to state does not level the playing field. For example, Wyoming spends the most per student at $18,068 per year, while Utah spends the least at only $7,217 per student.  This creates huge discrepancies in the resources available to teachers state to state. Districts also spend more or less on education based on socio-economic backgrounds and taxes. Some fear as the standards are raised, the funding will not follow, especially for lower-income schools and their students. But that’s an entirely different debate and post for another time. Where do you fall in the Common Core debate? Teachers - what are your experiences with Common Core so far? Do you agree with it or disagree? Are they easy to understand and implement? What do you think of the standards themselves? Sources and resources for this post - Myths fuel attacks on ‘Common Core’ standards: Our view (USAToday.com) Common Core foes spreading misinformation, Duncan says (Washington Post) Don’t fear Common Core, Nielsen tells local Republicans Report: Most IT Pros Say Common Core Will Be Good for Their District Don’t Fear Common Core - One teacher’s opinion (LA Times) In Push For ‘Common’ Standards, Many Parents Left Uneducated (NPR) CoreStandards.org The post Breaking Down Common Core, the Myths, the Truths, the Debates appeared first on Steve Spangler.