Arts and Culture

Since its launch in 2015, Masterclass has not only expanded the variety of its online course offerings but sought out ever-bigger names for its teachers. Names don’t come much bigger than Metallica in the world of heavy metal, and indeed in the world of rock music in general. Hence the broad title of the new Masterclass “Metallica Teaches Being a Band.”  Having been a band for 40 years now, they presumably know more than a little about everything involved in that enterprise: not just recording hit albums like Master of Puppets and songs like “Enter Sandman,” but also weathering dramatic changes in both the music business and popular culture while cooperating for the good of the group. Not that, to the men of Metallica, such cooperation has always come naturally. “There’ve been times when it’s been fractured and it looks like we were on the verge of breaking up,” says guitarist Kirk Hammett in the trailer for their Masterclass above. He joined the band in 1983, which means

When Kurt Vonnegut first arrived in Dresden, a city as yet untouched by war, crammed into a boxcar with dozens of other POWs, the city looked to him like “Oz,” he wrote in his semi-autobiographical sixth novel  Slaughterhouse-Five . After all, he says, “The only other city I’d ever seen was Indianapolis, Indiana.” When Vonnegut and his fellow GIs emerged from the bowels of the pork plant in which they’d waited out the Allied bombing of the city, they witnessed the aftermath of Dresden’s destruction. The city formerly known as “the Florence of the Elbe” was “like the moon,” as Vonnegut’s “unstuck” protagonist Billy Pilgrim says in the novel: cratered, pitted, leveled…. But the smoking ruins were the least of it. Vonnegut and his fellow prisoners spent the next few days removing and incinerating thousands of bodies, an experience that would forever shape the writer and his stories . Whether mentioned explicitly or not, Dresden became a “death card,” writes Philip Beidler, that Vo

A little more than a month after the terrorist attacks on 9/11, with the nation and world still reeling from that day, Madison Square Garden hosted The Concert for New York City . A benefit concert of the first order, it was also a thank you to the sacrifice of NYC’s fire and police departments, which had lost many members during that day. (The former had lost 343 firefighters.) But like a lot of things about that day twenty years later, it has sort of vanished down the cultural memory hole. However, if you need reminding, the Who came out of retirement and delivered what some considered the set of the night. Tom Watson, writing in Forbes magazine , called it “The Night The Who Saved New York.” The concert was free to any firefighter or policeman who came in uniform. Watson describes the vibe thus: “To say that occupancy laws were stretched that night is to undersell the size of the place. Picture a Knicks game, then double the crowd. From the start, the building ran on a

From MIT comes The Human Brain , a series of 18 lectures presented by Professor Nancy Kanwisher . They’re from a course that “surveys the core perceptual and cognitive abilities of the human mind and asks how they are implemented in the brain. Key themes include the representations, development, and degree of functional specificity of these components of mind and brain. The course will take students straight to the cutting edge of the field, empowering them to understand and critically evaluate empirical articles in the current literature.” Watch all of the lectures above, and find them added to our list of Free Biology Courses , a subset of our collection 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities . The Human Brain: A Free Online Course from MIT is a post from: Open Culture . Follow us on Facebook and  Twitter , 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

Wassily Kandinsky could hear colors. Maybe you can too, but since studies so far have suggested that the underlying condition exists in less than five percent of the population, the odds are against it. Known as synesthesia , it involves one kind of sense perception being tied up with another: letters and numbers come with colors, sequences take on three-dimensional forms, sounds have tactile feelings. These unusual sensory connections can presumably encourage unusual kinds of thinking; perhaps unsurprisingly, synesthetic experiences have been reported by a variety of creators, from Billy Joel and David Hockney to Vladimir Nabokov and Nikola Tesla. Few, however, have described synesthesia as eloquently as Kandinsky did. “Color is the keyboard,” he once said. “The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many strings. The artist is the hand that purposely sets the soul vibrating by means of this or that key.” That quote must have shaped the mission of Play a Kandinsk

Are you irked  when a movie or video you’re attempting to enjoy is constantly interrupted by the commentary of a chatty fellow audience member? If so, don’t watch archivist  Rick Prelinger ’s 2017 assemblage,  Lost Landscapes of New York , in the company of a New Yorker. Unlike Open Culture favorite  NASS’s  five minute sample of  Lost Landscapes of New York ,  above, which adds color and ambient audio to the unvarnished found footage,  Prelinger — described by  the New York Times’   Manohla Dargis  as a “collector extraordinaire…one of the great, undersung historians of 20th century cinema” — relishes such mouthiness from the audience. His black and white compilations are mostly silent. If you are a New Yorker, view that as an invitation  here . For everyone else, on behalf of New Yorkers everywhere, we concede that our confident utterances may indeed drive you out of your gourd… Tourists with just one visit to their name can be forgiven for flaunting their personal brush

For 60 years now, the name Edsel has been synonymous with failure. In a way, this vindicates the position of Henry Ford II, who opposed labeling a brand of cars with the name of his father Edsel Ford. The son of Ford Motor Company founder Henry Ford, Edsel Ford died young in 1943, and thus didn’t live to see “E Day,” the rollout of his namesake line of automobiles. It happened on September 4, 1957, the culmination of two years of research and development on what was for most of that time called the “E car,” the letter having been chosen to indicate the project’s experimental nature. Alas, all seven of Edsel’s first models struck the American public as too conventional to stand out — and at the same time, too odd to buy. You can hear the story of Edsel in the two videos above, one from transportation enthusiast Ruairidh MacVeigh and another from Regular Car Reviews . Both offer explanations of how the brand’s cars were conceived, and what went wrong enough in their exec