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The best free cultural & educational media on the web - Open Culture The best free cultural & educational media on the web -The best free cultural & educational media on the webOnline Courses Certificates Degrees & Mini-DegreesAudio Books Movies LanguagesPodcasts TextbooksK-12 K-12eBooks Languages Donate A New Analysis of Beethoven’s DNA Reveals That Lead Poisoning Could Have Caused His Deafness in History , Music | May 13th, 2024Despite the intense scruti­ny paid to the life and work of Lud­wig van Beethoven for a cou­ple of cen­turies now, the revered com­pos­er still has cer­tain mys­ter­ies about him. Some of them he sure­ly nev­er intend­ed to clar­i­fy, like the iden­ti­ty of Immor­tal Beloved” ; oth­ers he explic­it­ly request­ed be made pub­lic, like the cause of his death. The trou­ble is that, for gen­er­a­tion after gen­er­a­tion, nobody could quite fig­ure out what that cause was. But recent genet­ic analy­sis of his hair, which we first fea­tured last year here on Open Cul­ture , has shed new light on the mat­ter of what killed Beethoven — or rather, what increas­ing­ly ailed him up until he died at the age of 56. This effort began a few years ago, when researchers real­ized that DNA analy­sis had advanced enough to jus­ti­fy an exam­i­na­tion of hair said to have been clipped from Beethoven’s head by anguished fans as he lay dying,” writes the New York Times ’ Gina Kola­ta . .With the gen­uine sam­ples sep­a­rat­ed from the frauds, a test for heavy met­als revealed that one of Beethoven’s locks had 258 micro­grams of lead per gram of hair and the oth­er had 380 micro­grams”: 64 times and 95 times the nor­mal amount, respec­tive­ly. Chron­ic lead poi­son­ing, pos­si­bly caused by Beethoven’s habit of drink­ing cheap wine sweet­ened with lead sug­ar,” could have caused the unre­lent­ing abdom­i­nal cramps, flat­u­lence and diar­rhea” that plagued him in his life­time. It could also have has­tened the deaf­ness that had become near­ly com­plete by age thir­ty. Over the years, Beethoven con­sult­ed many doc­tors, try­ing treat­ment after treat­ment for his ail­ments and his deaf­ness, but found no relief,” Kola­ta writes. At one point, he was using oint­ments and tak­ing 75 med­i­cines, many of which most like­ly con­tained lead.” Alas, the true dan­ger of lead poi­son­ing, a con­di­tion that had been acknowl­edged since antiq­ui­ty, would­n’t be tak­en seri­ous­ly until the late nine­teenth cen­tu­ry. Accord­ing to the research so far, even this degree of lead expo­sure would­n’t have been fatal by itself. But with a bit less of it, would Beethoven have com­plet­ed his tenth sym­pho­ny , or even con­tin­ued on to an eleventh? Add that to the still-grow­ing list of unan­swer­able ques­tions about him. via NYTimes Relat­ed con­tent: Beethoven’s Genome Has Been Sequenced for the First Time, Reveal­ing Clues About the Great Composer’s Health & Fam­i­ly His­to­ry The Secrets of Beethoven’s Fifth, the World’s Most Famous Sym­pho­ny Did Beethoven Use a Bro­ken Metronome When Com­pos­ing His String Quar­tets? Sci­en­tists & Musi­cians Try to Solve the Cen­turies-Old Mys­tery Beethoven’s Unfin­ished Tenth Sym­pho­ny Gets Com­plet­ed by Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: Hear How It Sounds The Math Behind Beethoven’s Music Read Beethoven’s Lengthy Love Let­ter to His Mys­te­ri­ous Immor­tal Beloved” (1812) Based in Seoul, Col­in M a rshall writes and broad­cas ts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities , the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma . Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinm a rshall or on Face­book . by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) | Jerry Seinfeld Delivers Commencement Address at Duke University: You Will Need Humor to Get Through the Human Experience in Comedy , Life | May 13th, 2024This week­end, Jer­ry Sein­feld gave the com­mence­ment speech at Duke Uni­ver­si­ty and offered the grad­u­ates his three keys to life: 1. bust your ass, 2. pay atten­tion, and 3. fall in love. Then, 10 min­utes lat­er, he added essen­tial­ly a fourth key to life: Do not lose your sense of humor. You can have no idea at this point in your life how much you’re going to need it to get through. Not enough of life makes sense for you to be able to sur­vive it with­out humor.” It is worth the sac­ri­fice of an occa­sion­al dis­com­fort to have some laughs. Don’t lose that.” Humor is the most pow­er­ful, most sur­vival-essen­tial qual­i­ty you will ever have or need to nav­i­gate through the human expe­ri­ence.” Amen. Relat­ed Con­tent John Waters’ RISD Grad­u­a­tion Speech: Real Wealth Is Life With­out A*Holes David Fos­ter Wallace’s Famous Com­mence­ment Speech, This is Water,” Gets Ani­mat­ed on a White­board Conan O’Brien Kills It at Dart­mouth Grad­u­a­tion Jon Stewart’s William & Mary Com­mence­ment Address: The Entire World is an Elec­tive by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) | Aldous Huxley Explains How Man Became the Victim of His Own Technology” (1961) in History , Literature , Technology , Television | May 10th, 2024Just a cou­ple of days ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook tweet­ed out a video pro­mot­ing, the new iPad Pro: the thinnest prod­uct we’ve ever cre­at­ed.” The response has been over­whelm­ing, and over­whelm­ing­ly neg­a­tive: for many view­ers, the ad’s imagery of a hydraulic press crush­ing a heap of musi­cal instru­ments, art sup­plies, and vin­tage enter­tain­ment into a sin­gle tablet inad­ver­tent­ly artic­u­lat­ed a dis­com­fort they’ve long felt with tech­nol­o­gy’s direc­tion in the past cou­ple of decades. As the nov­el­ist Hari Kun­zru put it , Crush­ing the sym­bols of human cre­ativ­i­ty to pro­duce a homog­e­nized brand­ed slab is pret­ty much where the tech indus­try is at in 2024.” One won­ders whether this would have sur­prised Aldous Hux­ley . He under­stood, as he explains in the 1961 BBC inter­view above , that if you plant the seed of applied sci­ence or tech­nol­o­gy, it pro­ceeds to grow, and it grows accord­ing to the laws of its own being. And the laws of its being are not nec­es­sar­i­ly the same as the laws of our being.” .Even six decades ago, he and cer­tain oth­ers had the sense, which has since become fair­ly com­mon, that man is being sub­ject­ed to his own inven­tions, that he is now the vic­tim of his own tech­nol­o­gy”; that the devel­op­ment of recent social and sci­en­tif­ic his­to­ry has cre­at­ed a world in which man seems to be made for tech­nol­o­gy rather than the oth­er way around.” Hav­ing writ­ten his acclaimed dystopi­an nov­el Brave New World thir­ty years ear­li­er, Hux­ley was estab­lished as a seer of pos­si­ble tech­nol­o­gy-dri­ven total­i­tar­i­an futures. He under­stood that we are a lit­tle reluc­tant to embark upon tech­nol­o­gy, to allow tech­nol­o­gy to take over,” but that, in the long run, we gen­er­al­ly suc­cumb,” allow­ing our­selves to be mas­tered by our own cre­ations. In this, he resem­bles the Julia of Byron’s Don Juan , who, whis­per­ing ‘I will ne’er con­sent’ – con­sent­ed.” Hux­ley also knew that it is pos­si­ble to make peo­ple con­tent with their servi­tude,” even more effec­tive­ly in moder­ni­ty than antiq­ui­ty: you can pro­vide them with bread and cir­cus­es, and you can pro­vide them with end­less amounts of dis­trac­tion and pro­pa­gan­da” — deliv­ered, here in the twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry, straight to the device in our hand. Relat­ed con­tent: Aldous Hux­ley Pre­dicts in 1950 What the World Will Look Like in the Year 2000 An Ani­mat­ed Aldous Hux­ley Iden­ti­fies the Dystopi­an Threats to Our Free­dom (1958) Aldous Hux­ley Tells Mike Wal­lace What Will Destroy Democ­ra­cy: Over­pop­u­la­tion, Drugs & Insid­i­ous Tech­nol­o­gy (1958) Aldous Hux­ley to George Orwell: My Hell­ish Vision of the Future is Bet­ter Than Yours (1949) Hear Aldous Hux­ley Nar­rate His Dystopi­an Mas­ter­piece Brave New World Aldous Hux­ley,...