Monday, May 13th, 2019

Time	Event
2:00p	Watch the World’s First Animated Cartoon, 1908’s Trippy, Funny Fantasmagorie Trying to describe the plot of Fantasmagorie, the world’s first animated cartoon, is a folly akin to putting last night’s dream into words: I was dressed as a clown and then I was in a theater, except I was also hiding under this lady’s hat, and the guy behind us was plucking out the feathers, and I was maybe also a jack in the box? And I had a fishing pole that turned into a plant that ripped my head off, but only for a few seconds. And then there was a giant champagne bottle and an elephant, and then, suddenly I was on an operating table, and you know how sometimes in a dream, it’s like you’re being crushed to death? Except I escaped by blowing myself up like a balloon and then I hopped onto the back of this horse and then I woke up. The brainchild of animation pioneer Émile Cohl (1857 – 1938), the trippy silent short from 1908 is composed of 700 drawings, photographed onto negative film and double-exposed. Clocking in at under two minutes, it's definitely more diverting than listening to your bed mate bumble through their subconscious’ latest incoherent narrative. The film’s title is an homage to a mid-19th century variant of the magic lantern, known as the fantasmograph, while its playful, nonsensical content is in the spirit of the Incoherent Movement of the 1880s. Cohl, who cut his teeth on political caricature and Guignol puppet theatre went on to create over 250 films over the next 15 years, expanding his explorations to include the realms of live action and stop motion animation. The crashing modern score giving such urgency to Fantasmagorie, above, was composed by Fabio Napodano. Fantasmagorie has been added to our list of Free Animations, a subset of our larger collection, 1,150 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. For the definitive biography of Emile Cohl, read Emile Cohl, Caricature, and Film by Donald Crafton (Notre Dame). Related Content: Take a Free Animation Course from a Renowned French Animation School Early Japanese Animations: The Origins of Anime (1917 to 1931) Watch The Idea, the First Animated Film to Grapple with Big, Philosophical Ideas (1932) Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine.  Join her in New York City tonight, May 13, for the next installment of her book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain. Follow her @AyunHalliday. Watch the World’s First Animated Cartoon, 1908’s Trippy, Funny Fantasmagorie 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. (Comment on this)
6:00p	An Animated Introduction to the World’s Five Major Religions: Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity & Islam No matter the strength of particular beliefs, or disbeliefs, religions of every kind are all equally fundamental to the human experience. This was so for thousands of years before the advent of the world’s big five religions, and for thousands of years after. “Religion has been an aspect of culture for as long as it has existed, and there are countless variations of its practice,” says Episcopal priest and anthropologist John Bellaimey in the TED-Ed video above. “Common to all religions is an appeal for meaning beyond the empty vanities and lowly realities of existence.” Religions particularize a set of archetypal human responses to universal metaphysical questions like “Where do we come from?” and “How do I live a life of meaning?” and “What happens to us after we die?” Such questions find answers outside the boundaries of religious faith. For an increasing number of people, science and secular philosophy offer comforting, even beautiful naturalistic explanations. And millions more feel the pull of intuitions about a higher power or “a source from which we all come and to which we must return.” Religion gives the big questions faces and names, of divinities, demons, and holy men (in the five big, it has been almost entirely men). Whether these figures existed or not, their legends shape culture and history and are shaped and changed in turn. Bellamy surveys the big five world religions with an overview of their central narratives, illustrated with montages of religious art. The information is at the level of a 101 course introduction, but the number of people in the world who know little to nothing about other religions is likely quite high, given the numbers of people who know so little about their own. We can probably all learn something here we didn’t know before. Bellamy’s approach broadly suggests that what matters most in religion is story. But to dismiss religions as “just stories” misses the point. Purely at the level of narrative, we can think of religions as creative ways to tell the stories we find untellable. This says nothing about religion’s effects on the world. Is it a force for good or ill? Given its role in every stage of human cultural development, both positive and negative, maybe the question is unanswerable. There are too many varieties of religious experience over too great a span of time to reckon with. Bellamy’s charitable explanations of the major five religions highlight their contingent nature—he locates each faith in its particular time and place of origin. But he also shows the universalizing tendencies of each tradition, qualities that made them so portable. He does not, however, mention that more inclusive interpretations usually came from revolts against more limited original designs. Religions and cultures evolved together, materially and culturally. As they spread and occupied more territory with wider populations, they grew and adapted. In his book The Tree of World Religions, Bellamy develops such historical material into an exploration of twenty world religions from Hinduism to Rastafarianism, showing each one as a collective act of storytelling. Compiled from a 25-year high school world religions class Bellamy taught, the book covers the Mayans, the Norse, and Socrates, Laozi, the Hebrew Prophets, and the Buddha. In what Karl Jaspers called “the Axial Age,” writes Amazon, these later sages “moved religion from mostly-supernatural to mostly-humanistic, shifting the focus on God’s inscrutable otherness to God’s increasing insistence on ethical behavior as the highest form of worship.” Related Content: A Visual Map of the World’s Major Religions (and Non-Religions) Christianity Through Its Scriptures: A Free Course from Harvard University  Take Harvard’s Introductory Course on Buddhism, One of Five World Religions Classes Offered Free Online Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness An Animated Introduction to the World’s Five Major Religions: Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity & Islam 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. (Comment on this)
7:00p	Oliver Sacks’ Recommended Reading List of 46 Books: From Plants and Neuroscience, to Poetry and the Prose of Nabokov Image by Luigi Novi. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons We remember Oliver Sacks as a neurologist, but we remember him not least because he wrote quite a few books as well. If you read those books, you'll get a sense of Sacks' wide range of interests — invention, perception and misperception, hallucination, and more — few of which lack a connection to the human mind. His passion for ferns, the core subject of a travelogue he wrote in Oaxaca as well as an unexpectedly frequent object of reference in his other writings and talks, may seem an outlier. But for Sacks, ferns offered one more window into the kingdom of nature that produced humanity, and which throughout his life he tried to understand by observing from as many different angles as possible. No small amount of evidence of that pursuit appears in Sacks' list of 46 book recommendations commissioned for The Strand's "Author's Bookshelf" series. (See the full list below.) A fair few of its selections, including William James' The Principles of Psychology, A.R. Luria's The Mind of a Mnemonist, and Antonio Damasio's The Feeling of What Happens, seem like natural favorites for a writer so endlessly fascinated by human cognition and consciousness. Tracing the development of the human brain and mind would, of course, lead to an interest in biology and evolution, here resulting in such picks as Edward O. Wilson's Naturalist, Carl Zimmer's Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, and the journals Charles Darwin kept aboard the Beagle. But Sacks wasn't just an observer of the brain: some of his most interesting writings come out of the times he used himself as a kind of research subject — as when he found out what he could learn on amphetamines and LSD. A similar line of inquiry no doubt showed him the value of Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, and in less altered states the likes of Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams. But whichever paths took Sacks toward his knowledge, he ultimately had to get that knowledge down on paper himself, and the prose of Vladimir Nabokov, the poetry of W.H. Auden and the philosophy of David Hume surely did their part to inspire his incisive and evocative style. We would all, whatever our interests, like to write like Oliver Sacks: if these books shaped him as a writer and thinker, who are we to demur from, say, A Natural History of Ferns? A Natural History of Ferns by Robbin C. Moran A Rum Affair: A True Story of Botanical Fraud by Karl Sabbagh A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine by Mike Jay Actual Minds, Possible Worlds by Jerome Bruner Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande Cannery Row (Steinbeck Centennial Edition (1902-2002)) by John Steinbeck Challenger & Company: the Complete Adventures of Professor Challenger and His Intrepid Team-The Lost World, The Poison Belt, The Land of Mists, The Disintegration Machine and When the World Screamed by Arthur Conan Doyle Collected Poems by W.H. Auden Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond by Robert R. Provine Darwin and the Barnacle: The Story of One Tiny Creature and History's Most Spectacular Scientific Breakthrough by Rebecca Stott Disturbing the Universe by Freeman Dyson Earth Abides by George R. Stewart Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea by Carl Zimmer Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing by Laura J. Snyder God's Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine by Victoria Sweet Ignorance: How It Drives Science by Stuart Firestein Imagining Robert: My Brother, Madness, and Survival by Jay Neugeboren In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind by Eric R. Kandel Inward Bound: Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World by Abraham Pais Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics by Ruth Lewin Sime Lost in America: A Journey with My Father by Sherwin B. Nuland Music, Language, and the Brain by Aniruddh D. Patel Naturalist by Edward O. Wilson Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind by V.S. Ramachandran Plutonium: A History of the World's Most Dangerous Element by Jeremy Bernstein Same and Not the Same by Roald Hoffmann Selected Poems by Thom Gunn Silent Thunder: In the Presence of Elephants by Katy Payne Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited by Vladimir Nabokov Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer by Lynne Cox The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes The Anatomist: A True Story of Gray's Anatomy by Bill Hayes The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell by Aldous Huxley The Elephanta Suite by Paul Theroux The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness by Antonio Damasio The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World by Jenny Uglow The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory by A. R. Luria The Principles of Psychology (Volume Two) by William James The World Without Us by Alan Weisman Thinking in Pictures: And Other Reports from My Life with Autism by Temple Grandin Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior by Jonathan Weiner Voyage of the Beagle: Charles Darwin's Journals of Researches by Charles Darwin What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses by Daniel Chamovitz What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery by Francis Crick Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History by Stephen Jay Gould To purchase books on this list, visit The Strand's website. Related Content: This is What Oliver Sacks Learned on LSD and Amphetamines Oliver Sacks Contemplates Mortality (and His Terminal Cancer Diagnosis) in a Thoughtful, Poignant Letter A First Look at The Animated Mind of Oliver Sacks, a Feature-Length Journey Into the Mind of the Famed Neurologist Oliver Sacks Explains the Biology of Hallucinations: “We See with the Eyes, But with the Brain as Well” Oliver Sacks’ Final Interview: A First Look 29 Lists of Recommended Books Created by Well-Known Authors, Artists & Thinkers: Jorge Luis Borges, Patti Smith, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, David Bowie & More Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram. Oliver Sacks’ Recommended Reading List of 46 Books: From Plants and Neuroscience, to Poetry and the Prose of Nabokov 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. (Comment on this)

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