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Wednesday, May 31st, 2017
- Academic and Business Writing - University of California, Berkeley on edX - June 1 (5 weeks)
- Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential - McMaster University on Coursera - June 5
- Behind the Scenes at the 21st Century Museum - University of Leicester on FutureLearn - June 12 (6 weeks)
- Human Origins - Arizona State University on edX - June 12 (8 weeks)
- Propaganda and Ideology in Everyday Life - The University of Nottingham on FutureLearn - June 12 (5 weeks)
- Teaching Literacy Through Film - The British Film Institute on FutureLearn - June 12 (4 weeks)
- Logical and Critical Thinking - University Of Auckland on FutureLearn - June 12 (8 weeks)
- Humanity and Nature in Chinese Thought - The University of Hong Kong on edX - June 13 (9 weeks)
- Justice with Michael Sandel - Harvard University on edX - June 15 (12 weeks)
- Introduction to Philosophy: God, Knowledge and Consciousness - Massachusetts Institute of Technology on edX - June 20 (11 weeks)
| Time | Event |
| 5:09a | LinkedIn Co-Founder Reid Hoffman Creates a New Podcast Offering Wisdom on Nurturing & Scaling New Businesses
How do you create and eventually scale a successful business? It's a complicated question. And you can do worse than get answers from Reid Hoffman. He's currently a partner at the venture capital firm Greylock Partners. But you probably know him best as the co-founder of LinkedIn, the professional social network site recently acquired by Microsoft for $26 billion dollars. In his new podcast, Masters of Scale, Hoffman looks at how companies grow from zero users to a gazillion by interviewing fellow Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who have crossed that bridge. Guests include Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg & Sheryl Sandberg, Netflix’s Reed Hastings, and Google’s Eric Schmidt, among others. Even if you work in a business with more modest aspirations, there's some wisdom you can take away from these wide-ranging conversations. Hoffman's conversation with Airbnb's CEO Brian Chesky (above) about hand-crafting customer experiences would help you run almost any business. You can find the Masters of Scale podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Entrepreneur.com, Spotify, and Google Play. Also find courses from other seasoned entrepreneurs right below. Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. If you'd like to support Open Culture and our mission, please consider making a donation to our site. It's hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us provide the best free cultural and educational materials. Related Content: How to Start a Start-Up: A Free Course from Y Combinator Taught at Stanford Seth Godin’s Startup School: A Free Mini-Course for New Entrepreneurs Peter Thiel’s Stanford Course on Startups: Read the Lecture Notes Free Online Start Your Startup with Free Stanford Courses and Lectures Download Marc Andreessen’s Influential Blog (“Pmarca”) as a Free eBook 150 Free Online Business Courses
LinkedIn Co-Founder Reid Hoffman Creates a New Podcast Offering Wisdom on Nurturing & Scaling New Businesses 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.  |
| 4:13p | Stevie Ray Vaughan Plays the Acoustic Guitar in Rare Footage, Letting Us See His Guitar Virtuosity in Its Purest Form
Ask accomplished blues and southern rock guitarists who they listen to and you’ll hear a number of names come up: Duane Allman, Albert King, Buddy Guy... the list of guitarists’ guitarists could go on and on. One name you’ll hear from nearly everyone: Stevie Ray Vaughan, the king of Texas blues, before whom even the very best players stand in awe, a guitarist whose legend has only grown in stature since the music world lost him in a tragic, fatal helicopter crash in 1990. The most iconic guitarists get associated with their instruments of choice, and Vaughan is no exception. The Flying V defines the look and sound of Albert King; the custom black Gibson 335 (“Lucille”) that of B.B. King. And when we think of Vaughan, we may immediately think of “Number One,” the beat up Fender Stratocaster he loved so much he called it the “first wife.” One of a number of Strats Vaughan played throughout his too-brief career, “Number One” has become “a centerpiece” at the Texas State History Museum, and for very good reason. Almost no guitarist before or since has ripped such raw emotion and searing power from an instrument, with the exception perhaps of Vaughan’s hero, Jimi Hendrix. Like Hendrix, Vaughan is known entirely as an electric guitarist, his tone so legendary it has inspired a cult following all its own. But give SRV, as his fans call him, an acoustic guitar and you’ll see right away why the most the distinctive feature of that mythic tone is how sparkling clean it is. Vaughan needed no effects to produce his massive sound, though he used a few on occasion (most notably a classic Vox wah pedal that once belonged to Jimi). The tone, as older guitarists will forever tell aspiring newbies, was in his fingers—in the dynamics of his picking, his bends and slides, his intimate, forceful engagement with the fretboard. In the rare acoustic sessions here, see just why Vaughan is so revered. Above watch him launch into a six-string 12-bar acoustic blues.
And just above, see Vaughan tear it up on a 12-string acoustic guitar in his MTV Unplugged appearance in 1990, the year of his death. Guitarists and serious fans of the blues and country guitar will often namecheck Danny Gatton—the Washington, DC wunderkind so incredibly talented that he earned the nickname “The Humbler”—as the greatest guitarist they’ve ever seen. It’s hard to argue with that assessment. But Vaughan wasn’t just an amazing player, he was also a beautifully understated performer. Here we have the unique opportunity to see his showmanship and skill stripped to their essence. Related Content: B.B. King Changes Broken Guitar String Mid-Song at Farm Aid, 1985 and Doesn’t Miss a Beat Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Version of “Little Wing” Played on Traditional Korean Instrument, the Gayageum Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Stevie Ray Vaughan Plays the Acoustic Guitar in Rare Footage, Letting Us See His Guitar Virtuosity in Its Purest Form 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. |
| 4:57p | 265 MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) Getting Started in June: Enroll Free Today
FYI: This month, 265 MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) will be getting underway, giving you the chance to take courses from top flight universities, at no cost. With the help of Class Central, we've pulled together a complete list of June MOOCS. Below, find a few courses that piqued our interest, or rummage through the list and find your own: The video featured above is the trailer for the course, Justice with Harvard's Michael Sandel. Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. If you'd like to support Open Culture and our mission, please consider making a donation to our site. It's hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us provide the best free cultural and educational materials. 265 MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) Getting Started in June: Enroll Free Today is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 7:00p | Watch Simon & Garfunkel Sing “The Sound of Silence” 45 Years After Its Release, and Just Get Hauntingly Better with Time
The legend of Simon & Garfunkel is bigger than either performer, though only one of them remained a major star after their breakup, while the other became... too often the butt of unkind jokes. At the pinnacle of their fame in 1970, Art Garfunkel, the tall angelic singer with the golden halo of curls, walked away from the duo as their relationship soured. Garfunkel moved to Connecticut and became a math teacher for a spell. “I would talk them through a math problem,” he remembered in 2015, “and ask if anyone had any questions and they would say: ‘What were the Beatles like?’” Paul Simon, Garfunkel recalled of the acrimonious split, “was getting on my nerves. The jokes had run dry.” Perhaps it’s for the best they quit when they were ahead since their friendship never recovered. After their famous Central Park reunion concert in 1981, a planned tour fell apart when they stopped speaking to each other. At their 1990 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the duo played three songs and reportedly left without a word exchanged between them. “Arthur and I agree about almost nothing,” Simon remarked. Their split has all the qualities of a terrible divorce. Luckily for their fans, the two have infrequently given their partnership another shot, staging tours in 1993 and 2004. And in 2009, Garfunkel showed up for three songs during a Simon concert at New York’s Beacon theater. This led to a tour of Asia and Australia and, as you can see up top, an appearance together at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 25th Anniversary Concert at Madison Square Garden, where they played one of their biggest hits—and arguably one of Simon’s greatest songs—“The Sound of Silence” (1964). If you didn’t already know that they can’t stand each other’s company, you’d hardly guess it from the video. After Simon’s gently plucked guitar intro, they exchange brief but genuine smiles, then launch into harmony, their voices blending with all the haunting beauty of their heyday. In fact, it’s possible that—despite the bitterness and wear of several decades—they sound better than they ever did. Compare this performance to that below, a live Canadian TV appearance from 1966. (Simon earnestly, and ironically in hindsight, introduces the song as a comment on strained communication.) The early performance seems rushed and mannered compared to their impassioned reunion in 2009.
It’s a truly haunting experience fitting a truly haunting song, and made all the more poignant by the fact that they may never perform together again. In 2010, what is likely their last reunion ended when Garfunkel’s voice failed him. Diagnosed with a condition called “vocal paresis,” he’s spent the past few years regaining his singing abilities. But, while Simon has ruled out another reunion, Garfunkel, for all his rancor and regret, holds out hope. “When we get together,” he told The Telegraph in 2015, “it’s a delight to both of our ears. A little bubble comes over us and it seems effortless. We blend. So as far as this half is concerned, I would say, ‘Why not, while we’re still alive?’” They may have made a very unhappy couple, but the magic that brought them together clearly hasn't suffered for it. Related Content: A Paul Simon Feelin’-Very-Groovy Moment Paul Simon, Then and Now: Celebrating His 70th Birthday Art Garfunkel Lists 1195 Books He Read Over 45 Years, Plus His 157 Favorites (Many Free) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Watch Simon & Garfunkel Sing “The Sound of Silence” 45 Years After Its Release, and Just Get Hauntingly Better with Time 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. |
| 9:15p | The Gestapo Points to Guernica and Asks Picasso, “Did You Do This?;” Picasso Replies “No, You Did!”  History remembers Pablo Picasso first as an innovative painter, and second as an uninhibited personality. The latter especially generated many an anecdote in his long life, some surely apocryphal but most probably true. A short Guardian editorial on one of his most famous canvases begins with the story of when, "in occupied Paris, a Gestapo officer who had barged his way into Picasso’s apartment pointed at a photo of the mural, Guernica, asking: 'Did you do that?' 'No,' Picasso replied, 'you did', his wit fizzing with the anger that animates the piece" — a piece that took no small amount of boldness to paint in the first place. Guernica, much more of a visceral experience than the average painting, resists straightforward description, but the article offers one: "In black and white, the piece has the urgency of a newspaper photo. Flailing bulls and horses show that the visceral horrors of war are not just an affront to human civilisation, but to life." Painted in June 1937 at Picasso's home in Paris, in response to the bombing by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy of the Basque village from which the work would take its name, Guernica raised awareness of (as well as relief funds for) the Spanish Civil War when it debuted at the 1937 World's Fair in Paris and subsequently toured the world itself.
Calling Picasso's painting "probably the most successful artwork about war ever created," Slate's Noah Charney cites playwright Bertolt Brecht's use of Verfremdungseffekt, or the “alienation effect,” wherein "the idea was to no longer encourage the traditional, Aristotelian approach that the audience of a play (or viewer of an artwork) should engage with the artwork/performance with a 'willing suspension of disbelief,' voluntarily pretending that what is happening on stage is real. Instead, Brecht wanted to make it clear that the audience was looking at a work of art, an artificial performance that nevertheless touches on real human emotions and issues." Both Brecht and Picasso used this technique to effect social change with their work. Guernica also challenges its viewers in the best way, looking almost playful at first glance but almost immediately demanding that they confront the horror it actually contains. "A realistic image of the bombing of the town of Guernica, with corpses and screams in the night, would likely have felt melodramatic, saccharine, difficult to look at," writes Charney. "It might have been Romanticized or it might have been so gritty that our reaction would be to shut down our ability to sympathize, as a defense mechanism. The figures are almost cartoonish, but then of course, when you look more closely, when you know the context, they are not. But the childlike abstraction pulls us in, whereas the same subject, handled as a photorealist blood-fest, would repel us." You can learn more about Guernica, the events that inspired it, and the artist that turned those events into one of the most enduring images from the twentieth century with the short BBC News clip above, and also this chapter in Khan Academy's online art-history course, this video primer and 3D tour, and Alain Resnais and Robert Hessens' 1950 short film, almost as haunting as the painting itself. After all that, the only step that remains is to go see it in person at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, where it has resided since 1992. And though Guernica may now be safe from prying Gestapo hands, the need for vigilance against the kinds of destructive ideology that fired Picasso up to paint it will never go away. Related Content: Guernica: Alain Resnais’ Haunting Film on Picasso’s Painting & the Crimes of the Spanish Civil War A 3D Tour of Picasso’s Guernica How to Understand a Picasso Painting: A Video Primer The Mystery of Picasso: Landmark Film of a Legendary Artist at Work, by Henri-Georges Clouzot Picasso Makes Wonderful Abstract Art Watch Picasso Create Entire Paintings in Magnificent Time-Lapse Film (1956) Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. The Gestapo Points to Guernica and Asks Picasso, “Did You Do This?;” Picasso Replies “No, You Did!” 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. |
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