Arts and Culture

“We have to celebrate Columbus because he discovered America.” “No he didn’t. Leif Erikson got there first.” “Nuh-uh.” “Uh-huh….” etc… I paraphrase here from the halls of my elementary school circa sometime in the late 20th century, when many of us were convinced the first Europeans to set foot on the continent were not the Spanish and their bloody-minded, treasure-seeking Italian captain, but what we thought of as bloody-minded, treasure-seeking Vikings. Which side was right? Our grade-school objections to Columbus were not necessarily moral or intellectual. Most of us chose team Viking for the helmets (more on that later). But evidence that Vikings landed in North America dates back hundreds of years to historical accounts and sagas about Leif’s father, Erik the Red . These accounts tell of a place called Vinland , identified as lying somewhere along the Northeastern coastline where the Norse found wild grapes. In the 20th century came the suggestion that Vinland mig...

Few jazz guitarists today could claim to be entirely free of the influence of Django Reinhardt . This despite the fact that he lost the use of two fingers — which ultimately encouraged him to develop a distinctive playing style — and that he died 68 years ago. The unfortunate abbreviation of Reinhardt’s life means that he never built a substantial body of solo work, though he did play on many recorded dates that include performances alongside Coleman Hawkins and Benny Carter. It also means that he left even less in the way of footage, though we do get a crisp and illuminating view of him and his guitar in the 1938 documentary short “Jazz ‘Hot,'” previously featured here on Open Culture . “Jazz ‘Hot'” also features violin-playing from Stéphane Grappelli , who founded the group Quintette du Hot Club de France with Reinhardt in 1934. As they deepened their knowledge of jazz, the two influenced each other so thoroughly as to develop their own style of music. Grappelli l...

As we first mentioned last year , Google has launched a series of Career Certificate programs that allow students to gain expertise in a field, ideally enough to start working without a 4-year college degree. This initiative now includes a Certificate in Project Management , which consists of six courses. Foundations of Project Management Project Initiation: Starting a Successful Project Project Planning: Putting It All Together Project Execution: Running the Project Agile Project Management Capstone: Applying Project Management in the Real World Above, a Program Manager talks about “her path from dropping out of high school and earning a GED, joining the military, and working as a coder, to learning about program management and switching into that career track.” An introduction to the Project Management certificate  appears below. The Project Management program  takes about six months to complete, and should cost about $250 in total. Students get charged $39...

What is fascism? Fascism is an ideology developed and elaborated in early 20th-century Western Europe and enabled by technology, mass media, and weapons of war. Most of us learned the basics of that development from grade school history textbooks. We generally came to appreciate to some degree — though we may have forgotten the lesson — that the phrase “creeping fascism” is redundant. Fascism stomped around in jackboots, smashed windows and burned Reichstags before it fully seized power, but its most important action was the creeping: into language, media, education, and religious institutions . None of these movements arose, after all, without the support (or at least acquiescence) of those in power. There are differences between Italian Fascism, German Nazism, and their various nationalist descendents. Mussolini secured power chiefly through intimidation. But once he was appointed prime minister by the King in 1922 he began consolidating his dictatorship, a process that took ...

“Believe it or not, this was the very first piece of music I started on the cello when I was four years old,” said Yo Yo Ma before playing the “Prelude” from J.S. Bach’s Unaccompanied Cello Suite No. 1 for  NPR’s Tiny Desk concert series in 2018 . That same year, the world-famous cello prodigy released his third recording of all six suites in an album titled  Six Evolutions — Bach: Cello Suites . The “two-and-a-half hours of sounds that map humanity in all its triumphs, joys and sorrows,” write NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly and Tom Huizenga, “has become a lodestar for the celebrated cellist.” Ma made his first recording of the Unaccompanied Cello Suites in 1983, and won a Grammy the following year. “He released another set in 1997,” a recording that shows the musician’s own evolution in collaboration with “architects, ice skaters and Kabuki artists.” But his performance of the suites has always been evolutionary, as a New York Times reviewer noted of a live performance in ...

FYI: Earlier this year, Bill Gates published the New York Times bestseller,  How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need . In the book, Gates explains why we need to work toward net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases, and how we can achieve this goal.  Given that this responsibility will eventually fall to a younger generation of leaders, Gates has decided to make a digital copy of his book available to every college and university student in the world . The book can be downloaded an .epub file which can be opened in a compatible e-reader application on many devices. An email address, along with a name of college/university, is required. Find the book here. Related Content  Bill Gates Describes His Biggest Fear: “I Rate the Chance of a Widespread Epidemic Far Worse Than Ebola at Well Over 50 Percent” (2015) Take Big History: A Free Short Course on 13.8 Billion Years of History, Funded by Bill Gates Bill Gates Recommends ...

When did Americans lose the ability to think and act rationally? Or did they ever, on the whole, have such ability? These are the questions at the heart of the Big Think video above, a supercut of interview clips from public intellectuals — Neil DeGrasse, Michael Shermer,  Tyson, Kurt Andersen, Bill Nye, and Margaret Atwood — opining on the state of the nation’s intellectual health. Unsurprisingly, the prognosis is not good, as Carl Sagan predicted over 25 years ago . Of interest here is the diagnosis: How did the country get to a place where it is unable to defend itself against a deadly virus because millions of citizens refuse to take it seriously? How did Americans let Exxon wreck the climate because millions of Americans refused to believe in human-caused climate change? How did a failed mogul and reality TV star become president? How did Qanon, Pizzagate…. How did any of it happen? The roots are long and deep, says writer and former host of NPR’s Studio 360, Kurt An...