Arts and Culture

Image via Wikimedia Commons On the off chance  Lin-Manuel Miranda  is casting around for source material for his next American history-based blockbuster musical, may we suggest  American Cookery  by “poor solitary orphan”  Amelia Simmons ? First published in 1796, at 47 pages (nearly three of them are dedicated to dressing a turtle), it’s a far quicker read than the fateful  Ron Chernow Hamilton biography  Miranda impulsively selected for a  vacation beach read . Slender as it is, there’s no shortage of meaty material: Calves Head dressed Turtle Fashion Soup of Lamb’s Head and Pluck Fowl Smothered in Oysters Tongue Pie Foot Pie Modern chefs may find some of the first American cookbook’s methods and measurements take some getting used to. We like to cook, but we’re not sure we possess the wherewithal to tackle a  Crookneck or Winter Squab Pudding . We’ve never been called upon to “perfume” our “whipt cream” with “musk or amber gum tied in a rag.” And we wouldn’t know a 

Image via Wikimedia Commons On the off chance  Lin-Manuel Miranda  is casting around for source material for his next American history-based blockbuster musical, may we suggest  American Cookery  by “poor solitary orphan”  Amelia Simmons ? First published in 1796, at 47 pages (nearly three of them are dedicated to dressing a turtle), it’s a far quicker read than the fateful  Ron Chernow Hamilton biography  Miranda impulsively selected for a  vacation beach read . Slender as it is, there’s no shortage of meaty material: Calves Head dressed Turtle Fashion Soup of Lamb’s Head and Pluck Fowl Smothered in Oysters Tongue Pie Foot Pie Modern chefs may find some of the first American cookbook’s methods and measurements take some getting used to. We like to cook, but we’re not sure we possess the wherewithal to tackle a  Crookneck or Winter Squab Pudding . We’ve never been called upon to “perfume” our “whipt cream” with “musk or amber gum tied in a rag.” And we wouldn’t know a 

If you’ve ever dreamed about mounting that “Great Gatsby” musical, or writing that sci-fi adaptation based on Gatsby but they’re all androids, there’s some good news: as of January 1, 2021, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel finally entered the public domain . (Read a public domain copy here .) Creatives can now do what they want with the work: reprint or adapt it any way they like, without having to negotiate the rights. Or you could, just like Minneapolis-based artist K. Woodman-Maynard adapt the work into a beautiful graphic novel, pages of which you can glimpse here. Her version is all light and pastel watercolors, with a liberal use of the original text alongside more fantastic surreal imagery, making visual some of Fitzgerald’s word play. At 240 pages, there’s a lot of work here and, as if it needs repeating, no graphic novel is a substitute for the original, just…a jazz riff, if you were. But Woodman-Maynard was one of many waiting for Gatsby to enter the public domain,

Photo via Oregon State University “Color is part of a spectrum, so you can’t discover a color,” says Professor Mas Subramanian , a solid-state chemist at Oregon State University. “You can only discover a material that is a particular color”—or, more precisely, a material that reflects light in such a way that we perceive it as a color. Scientific modesty aside, Subramanian actually has been credited with discovering a color—the first inorganic shade of blue in 200 years. Named “YInMn blue” —and affectionately called “MasBlue” at Oregon State—the pigment’s unwieldy name derives from its chemical makeup of yttrium, indium, and manganese oxides, which together “absorbed red and green wavelengths and reflected blue wavelengths in such a way that it came off looking a very bright blue,” Gabriel Rosenberg notes at NPR . It is a blue, in fact, never before seen, since it is not a naturally occurring pigment, but one literally cooked in a laboratory, and by accident at that. The discovery

FYI, from now until Sunday, the art book publisher Taschen is running a winter sale , letting you enjoy enjoy up to 75% off hundreds of titles–some of which we’ve featured here before. That includes books on t he tarot cards , cookbook & paintings of Salvador Dali, the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat , the rise of David Bowie, the photographs of Linda McCartney , the illustrated books of Andy Warhol, the paintings of Gustav Klimt , and much more. Enter the sale here . And note that Taschen is a partner of ours. So if you purchase a book, it helps support Open Culture. Taschen Running a Sale on Art Books: Dali, Basquiat, Klimt, Warhol & More 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 . from Open Culture https://ift.tt/3otTHns via Ilumina

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0VWroX0gZA Do you think you would recognize a coffee plant if you came across one in the wild? Not that it’s likely outside the so-called “coffee belt,” the region of the world most rich in soil, shade, mild temperatures, and copious rainfall. Farmed coffee plants “are pruned short to conserve their energy,” the National Coffee Association notes , but they “can grow to more than 30 feet (9 meters) high. Each tree is covered with green, waxy leaves growing opposite each other in pairs. Coffee cherries grow along the branches. Because it grows in a continuous cycle, it’s not unusual to see [white] flowers, green fruit and ripe [red] fruit simultaneously on a single tree.” That’s a festive image to call to mind when you brew—or a barista brews—your coffee beverage of choice. After watching the TED-Ed video above, you’ll also have a sense of the “globe-spanning process” between the coffee plant and that first cup of the morning. “How many people do

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89PCYdMRtjQ Even the grittiest, hardest-hitting TV dramas require willing suspension of disbelief to enjoy. This is especially true if you, the viewer, happen to be an expert on such subjects as emergency medicine, police procedures, criminal law, FBI profiling, crime scene investigation, etcetera. Those of us who don’t know anything about these fields may have an easier time of it, provided the writers do their diligence and make the actors sound convincing. I never much questioned the science of Breaking Bad , for example. Surely, the hit show accurately depicted how a desperate high school chemistry teacher would build a meth lab in the desert? How should I know otherwise? I might watch the show with a chemist, for one thing, like Professor Donna Nelson or the University of Nottingham’s Sir Martyn Poliakoff , who had himself refused to watch Breaking Bad until “one day when I’m old.” That day has come at last: he finally sat down with the p