Learn How to Play Chess Online: Free Chess Lessons for Beginners, Intermediate Players & Beyond

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...

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88 Philosophy Podcasts to Help You Answer the Big Questions in Life

The big questions of philosophy, simmering since antiquity, still press upon us as they did the Athenians of old (and all ancient people who have philosophized): what obligations do we really owe to family, friends, or strangers? Do we live as free agents or beings controlled by fate or the gods (or genes or a computer simulation)? What is a good life? How do we create societies that maximize freedom and happiness (or whatever ultimate values we hold dear)? What is language, what is art, and where did they come from? These questions may not be...

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Salvador Dalí Gets Surreal with 1950s America: Watch His Appearances on What’s My Line? (1952) and The Mike Wallace Interview (1958)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXT2E9Ccc8A When was the last time you saw a Surrealist (or even just a surrealist) painter appear on national television? If such a figure did appear on national television today, for that matter, who would know? Perhaps surrealist painting does not, in our time, make the impact it once did, but nor does national television. So imagine what a spectacle it must have been in 1950s America, cradle of the “mass media” as we once knew them, when Salvador Dalí turned up on a major U.S. television network....

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Quentin Tarantino’s Copycat Cinema: How the Postmodern Filmmaker Perfected the Art of the Steal

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9I1J36rdoc You can call Quentin Tarantino a thief. Call him unoriginal, a copycat, whatever, he doesn’t care. But if you really want to get him going, call him a tribute artist. This, he insists, is the last thing he has ever been: great directors, Tarantino declares, “don’t do homages.” They outright steal, from anyone, anywhere, without regard to intellectual property or hurt feelings. But great directors don’t plagiarize in the Tarantino school of filmmaking. (Pay attention students, this is important.)...

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Japanese Art Installation Lets People Play Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédie No. 1” As They Walk on Socially-Distanced Notes on the Floor

The global pandemic has revealed the depths of systematic cruelty in certain places in the world that have refused to commit resources to protecting people from the virus or refused to even acknowledge its existence. Other responses show a different way forward, one in which everyone contributes meaningfully through the principled actions of wearing masks and social distancing or the principled non-action of staying home to slow the spread. Then there’s the critical role of art, design, and music in our survival. As we have seen—from spontaneous...

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What Ancient Egyptian Sounded Like & How We Know It

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-K5OjAkiEA If you’ve seen any Hollywood movie set in ancient Egypt, you already know how its language sounded: just like English, but spoken with a more formal diction and a range of broadly Middle-Eastern accents. But then there are many competing theories about life that long ago, and perhaps you’d prefer to believe the linguistic-historical take provided in the video above. A production of Joshua Rudder’s NativLang, a Youtube channel previously featured here on Open Culture for its videos on ancient Latin...

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The Internet Archive is Saving Classic Flash Animations & Games from Extinction: Explore Them Online

Flash is finally dead, and the world… does not mourn. Because the announcement of its end actually came three years ago, “like a guillotine in a crowded town square,” writes Rhett Jones at Gizmodo. It was a slow execution, but it was just. So useful in Web 1.0 days for making animations, games, and serious presentations, Flash had become a vulnerability, a viral carrier that couldn’t be patched fast enough to keep the hackers out. “Adobe’s Flash died many deaths, but we can truly throw some dirt on its grave and say our final goodbyes because...

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