Arts and Culture

Here’s a holiday season deal worth mentioning. For Cyber Monday, The Great Courses (formerly The Teaching Company) is offering every course for $60 in digital format or less. The sale lasts through the end of December 1. If you’re not familiar with it, the Great Courses provides a very nice service. They travel across the U.S., recording great professors lecturing on great topics that will appeal to any lifelong learner. They then make the courses available to customers in different formats (DVD, CD, Video & Audio Downloads, etc.). The courses are very polished and complete, and they can be quite reasonably priced, especially when they’re on sale, as they are today. Click here  to explore the offer . Note : The Great Courses is a partner with Open Culture. So if you purchase a course, it benefits not just you and Great Courses. It benefits Open Culture too. So consider it win-win-win. Related Content: 1,500 Free Online Courses from Top Universities Masterclass Is Running a “

Are you open to the idea of otherworldly beings moving amongst us, benign but unseen? Director  Gökalp Gönen  seems to be in the above video for jazz innovator  Ilhan Ersahin ’s “Hurri-Mitanni” (Good News). Things kick off in a decidedly low key manner—a young woman sets off for a nighttime stroll through the streets of Istanbul, her face deliberately obscured by a snugly tied black and white cloth. Turning a corner, she passes an anonymous figure, wrapped head to toe in similar stripes. Does this unexpected sight elicit any discernible reaction? Our guess is no, but we can’t say for sure, as the camera loses interest in the young woman, opting to linger with the svelte and exuberant mummy, who’s  dancing like no one is watching . Elsewhere, other increasingly colorful beings perform variations on the mummy’s box step, alone or in groups. As their outfits become more fanciful, Gönen employs CGI and 3D animation to unhitch them from the laws of physics and familiar boundari

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SM2fcenx7KU The most desired Christmas gift of 2020? A chess set. It’s certainly desired, at any rate, by the rapt viewers of The Queen’s Gambit , the acclaimed Netflix miniseries that debuted in October. Created by screenwriter-producers Scott Frank and Allan Scott, its seven episodes tell the story of Beth Harmon, an orphan in 1950s Kentucky who turns out to be a chess prodigy, then goes on to become a world-class player. During the Cold War, the intellectual and geopolitical prospect of American and Soviet masters going head to head stoked public interest in chess; over the past month, the surprise success of The Queen’s Gambit  has had a similar effect. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21L45Qo6EIY Whether or not you feel a sense of kinship with the series’ unrelentingly chess-obsessed young protagonist, you may well feel an urge to learn, or re-learn, to play the game. If so, all the resources you need are online, and today we’ve roun

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DScnnorHEuw FYI. The language in this video is not safe for work. And now, on to our post. In the last couple years of his life, Stan Lee was ill, his health failing, but he stayed engaged and remained his old wisecracking self. His handpicked successor for editor-in-chief at Marvel, Roy Thomas, tells the story of the last time he saw Lee and showed him his then-new biography of the comics legend, The Stan Lee Story . They talked about the Spider-Man comic strip they’d written together for two decades until a couple years back. Other familiar subjects came and went. Lee “was ready to go” and seemed at peace, Thomas says. “But he was still talking about doing more cameos. As long as he had the energy for it and didn’t have to travel, Stan was always up to do some more cameos.” Lee’s cameos continue after his death in 2018, as is the way now with deceased icons. He has made three live-action appearances posthumously , in footage shot before his

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rujxXOmYLUU Several years back, we featured an eleven-year-old Björk reading a nativity story in her native Icelandic, backed by unsmiling older kids from the Children’s Music School in Reykjavík. In this new find, also dating from 1976, you can hear that same eleven-year-old Björk singing in English, in what marks her first recording. Above, she sings the Tina Charles song “I Love to Love” for a school recital. According to Laughing Squid , the “teachers were so impressed with her voice, they sent the recording to the national radio station where it received a great deal of play.” Soon thereafter (in 1977) came her first album , featuring cover art provided by her mom. We’ve previously explored that here on OC. Would you like to support the mission of Open Culture? Please consider making a donation to our site . It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materi

Here’s a holiday season deal worth mentioning. The Great Courses (formerly The Teaching Company) is offering  every course for $40 in digital format (or $60 in DVD format). The deal lasts through midnight on Black Friday. If you’re not familiar with it, the Great Courses provides a very nice service. They travel across the U.S., recording great professors lecturing on great topics that will appeal to any lifelong learner. They then make the courses available to customers in different formats (DVD, CD, Video & Audio Downloads, etc.). The courses are very polished and complete, and they can be quite reasonably priced, especially when they’re on sale, as they are today. Click here  to explore the offer . Separately, it’s also worth mentioning that the Great Courses Plus–which makes courses available in streaming format as part of a monthly subscription service–is  running a Black Friday deal where you can get a free trial for the service, plus 20% of popular plans. Note : The G

FYI: Masterclass is running  a Buy One, Share One Free until November 30. Here’s the gist: If you buy  an All-Access pass to their 90+ courses , you will receive another All-Access Pass to give to someone else at no additional charge. An  All-Access pass costs $180 (or $15 per month), and lasts one year. For that fee, you–and a family member or friend–can watch courses created by Annie Leibovitz, Neil Gaiman, Malcolm Gladwell, Werner Herzog, Martin Scorsese, David Mamet, Jane Goodall, Margaret Atwood, Helen Mirren, Herbie Hancock, Alice Waters, Billy Collins and so many more. If you’re thinking this sounds like a pretty good way to get through quarantine, we’d have to agree. The deal is available now . Note: If you sign up for a MasterClass course by clicking on the links in this post, Open Culture will receive a small fee that helps support our operation. Related Content 1,500 Free Online Courses from Top Universities Use Your Time in Isolation to Learn Everything You’ve Alway