A Young Janis Joplin Plays a Passionate Set at One of Her First Gigs in San Francisco (1963)

in Music | May 20th, 2021

From her early, unhappy teen years in Port Arthur, Texas, Janis Joplin seemed to know she wanted to be a blues singer. She once said she decided to become a singer when a friend “loaned her his Bessie Smith and Leadbelly records,” writes biographer Ellis Amburn. “Ten years later, Janis was hailed as the premier blues singer of her time. She paid tribute to Bessie by buying her a headstone for her unmarked grave.” She was devoted to the blues, from her earliest encounters with the music in her youth to her last recorded song, the lonely, a capella blues, “Mercedes Benz.”

But when Joplin first appeared on the San Francisco scene in 1963, she did so as a Dylan-influenced folkie fresh from the University of Texas, Austin. The year before, she had been described by a profile in The Daily Texan as an artist who “goes barefooted when she feels like it, wears Levis to class because they’re more comfortable, and carries her autoharp with her everywhere she goes so that in case she gets the urge to break into song, it will be handy.” The article was titled “She Dares to Be Different.”

Joplin’s folk persona was hardly unique in either San Francisco or Austin in the early 60s. “In fact, her love of Dylan and folk simply marked her out as a rider of the zeitgeist,” writes music journalist Chris Salewicz. “When, for example, a former University of Texas alumnus called Chet Helms passed through [Austin] he was astonished at the wealth of folk music.” Helms, who had already moved west, promised Joplin gigs in San Francisco. The pair hitchhiked to the city “midway through January 1963, with considerable trepidation… a trek in which they spent 50 hours on the road.”

Once in North Beach, a neighborhood defined by City Lights bookstore and the Beats, Helms found Joplin gigs at Coffee and Confusion, then the Coffee Gallery, where she “was just one of many future rockers to play the Coffee Gallery as a folkie,” writes Alice Echols. In South Bay coffeehouses, she met Jerry Garcia and future Jefferson Airplane guitarist Jorma Kaukonen. Everyone made the coffeehouse rounds, acoustic guitar in hand. It was the way to make a name in the scene, which Janis did quickly, appearing the same year she arrived in San Francisco on the side stage at the Monterey Folk Festival.

But Janis brought something different than other students of Dylan — bigger and bolder and louder and deeply rooted in a Southern blues tradition Joplin spread to astonished beatniks like a “Blues Historian,” one commenter notes, “turning a small audience on to some obscure and forgotten performers, whose music would serve as the foundation for an entire genre yet to come.” You can hear her do just that in the gig above at the Coffee Gallery in 1963: “no drums, no crowds. Just Janis and a small group of people gathered to hear some samples of rural blues, done by an enthusiast from Texas.”

See the full setlist below. Other performers on the recording, according to the YouTube uploader, are Larry Hanks on acoustic guitar and vocals, and Billy Roberts (or possibly Roger Perkins) on acoustic guitar, as well as banjo, vocals, and harmonica.

Leaving’ This Morning (K.C. Blues)
Daddy, Daddy, Daddy
Careless Love
Bourgeois Blues
Black Mountain Blues
Gospel Ship
Stealin’

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

The First Cellphone: Discover Motorola’s DynaTAC 8000X, a 2-Pound Brick Priced at $3,995 (1984)

in History, Technology | May 20th, 2021

We get the culture our technology permits, and in the 21st century no technological development has changed culture like that of the smartphone. As with every piece of personal technology that we struggle to remember how we lived without, it evolved into being from a series of simpler predecessors that, no matter how clunky they seem now, were received as technological marvels in their day. Take it from Martin Cooper, the Motorola Engineer who invented the first handheld cellular mobile phone. “We didn’t know it was going to be historic in any way at all,” he says of the first publicly demonstrated cellphone call in 1973 in the Bloomberg video above. “We were only worried about one thing: is the phone going to work when we turn it on?”

The device Cooper had in hand was the prototype that would eventually become the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, the first commercial portable cellular phone. (This as distinct from the existing car-phone systems that Cooper credits with inspiring him to develop an entirely handheld version.) Brought to market in 1983, it weighed about two pounds, took ten hours to charge a battery that lasted only 30 minutes, could store no more than 30 phone numbers, and cost nearly $10,000 in today’s dollars.

Yet “consumers were so impressed by the concept of being always accessible with a portable phone that waiting lists for the DynaTAC 8000X were in the thousands,” says Motorola design master Rudy Krolopp as quoted by the Project Management Institute. “In 1983, the notion of simply making wireless phone calls was revolutionary.”

38 years after “the brick,” as the 8000X was known, we’ve grown so used to that notion that many of us hardly ever make wireless phone calls anymore, preferring to communicate on our phones through text messages or an ever-expanding universe of internet-based apps — to say nothing of the other aspects of our lives increasingly handled through palm-sized touchscreens. “The modern smartphone is a technological marvel,” says Cooper. “It really is incredible, all the stuff that is squeezed into that cellphone.” Yet despite the astonishing evolution of his invention it represents, he’s not satisfied. “We think that we can make a smartphone that does all things for all people, and yet we know that it doesn’t do any of those things perfectly. We’ve still got a ways to go.” If you’re reading this on a smartphone, know that you hold in your hand the “brick” of 2059.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts 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 @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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The Great Wave Off Kanagawa by Hokusai: An Introduction to the Iconic Japanese Woodblock Print in 17 Minutes

in Art | May 20th, 2021

When woodcut artist Katsushika Hokusai made his famous print The Great Wave off Kanagawa in 1830 — part of the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji — he was 70 years old and had lived his entire life in a Japan closed off from the rest of the world. In the 19th century, however, “the rest of the world was becoming industrialized,” James Payne explains above in his Great Art Explained video, “and the Japanese were concerned about foreign invasions.” The Great Wave shows “an image of Japan fearful that the sea — which has protected its peaceful isolation for so long — would become its downfall.”

It’s also true, however, that The Great Wave would not have existed without a foreign invasion. Prussian blue, the first stable blue pigment, accidentally invented around 1705 in Berlin, arrived in the ports of Nagasaki on Dutch and Chinese ships in the 1820s. Prussian Blue would start a new artistic movement in Japan, aizuri-e, woodcuts printed in bright, vivid blues.

“Hokusai was one of the first Japanese printmakers to boldly embrace the colour,” Hugh Davies writes at The Conversation, “a decision that would have major implications in the world of art.” When the country’s isolationist policies ended in the 1850s, “a showcase at the inaugural Japanese Pavilion elevated the artistic status of woodblock prints and a craze for their collection quickly followed.”

Chief among the works collected in the European and American fervor for Japanese prints were those from Hokusai, his contemporary Hiroshige, and other aizuri-e artists. So famous was The Great Wave in the West by 1891 that French graphic artist Pierre Bonnard would satirize its stylish spray in an advertisement for champagne. A print of The Great Wave hung on Claude Debussy’s wall, and the first edition of his La Mer bore an adaptation of a detail from the print. As Michael Cirigliano writes for the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

Cultural circles throughout Europe greatly admired Hokusai’s work…. Major artists of the Impressionist movement such as Monet owned copies of Hokusai prints, and leading art critic Philippe Burty, in his 1866 Chefs-d’oeuvre des Arts industriels, even stated that Hokusai’s work maintained the elegance of Watteau, the fantasy of Goya, and the movement of Delacroix. Going one step further in his lauded comparisons, Burty wrote that Hokusai’s dexterity in brush strokes was comparable only to that of Rubens.

These comparisons are not misplaced, John-Paul Stonard explains in The Guardian: “That the Great Wave became the best known print in the west was in large part due to Hokusai’s formative experience of European art.” Not only did he absorb Prussian blue into his repertoire, but “prints from early in his career show him attempting, rather awkwardly, to apply the lesson of mathematical perspective, learnt from European prints brought into Japan by Dutch Traders.” By the time of The Great Wave, he had perfected his own synthesis of Western and Japanese art, over two decades before European painters would attempt the same in the explosion of Japanophilia of the late 19th and early 20th century.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Why Collect? A Conversation about Collectibles from Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast (#92)

in Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop | May 20th, 2021

What drives someone to collect Star Wars figures or Transformers or LEGOs or whatever else? Your Pretty Much Pop hosts Mark Linsenmayer, Erica Spyres, and Brian Hirt are joined by guest Matt Young of the Hello from the Magic Tavern and Improvised Star Trek podcasts to talk about this potentially expensive and life-eating habit. No kidulting required.

For a little extra information on this topic, you may want to look at Wikipedia on the Psychology of Collecting, this incomplete list of nostalgic collectible IPs (that’s “intellectual property”), or this weird list of collections that includes erasers, confetti, traffic cones and sugar packets.

Most of the literature we found in researching this episode was either about what collections might present a future investment opportunity or other tips for doing this as a financial activity (please don’t try to do this) and surprise that adults buy toys.

After the episode, Matt remained on the line for our Aftertalk, which is typically only available for supporters via patreon.com/prettymuchpop, but this this case we’ve unleashed it to the public:

Hear more of this podcast at prettymuchpop.com. This podcast is part of the Partially Examined Life podcast network.

Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast is the first podcast curated by Open Culture. Browse all Pretty Much Pop posts.

by Mark Linsenmayer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

An Interactive Visualization of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

in Data, Philosophy | May 19th, 2021

2020 was “a year for the (record) books in publishing,” wrote Jim Milliot in Publisher’s Weekly this past January, a surge continuing into 2021. Yet some kinds of print books have so declined in sales there may be no reason to keep publishing them, or buying them, since their equivalents online are superior in almost every respect to any version on paper. As I finally conceded during a recent, aggressive spring cleaning, I personally have no reason to store heavy, bulky, dusty reference books, except in cases of extreme sentiment.

The online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, or the SEP, dispensed with the need for philosophy encyclopedias in print years ago. It’s “the most interesting website on the internet,” wrote Nikhail Sonnad at Quartz in 2015. “Not because of the content — which includes fascinating entries on everything from ambiguity to zombies—but because of the site itself. Its creators have solved one of the internet’s fundamental problems: How to provide authoritative, rigorously accurate knowledge, at no cost to readers. It’s something the encyclopedia, or SEP, has managed to do for two decades.”

Started in 1995 by Stanford philosopher Edward Zalta with only two entries, the SEP is “positively ancient in internet years,” but it is hardly “ossified,” remaining an online source “‘comparable in scope, depth and authority,’” the American Library Association’s Booklist review wrote, “to the biggest philosophy encyclopedias in print.”

I personally think the SEP is just as interesting for its content as its achievement, if not more so — and now, thanks to engineer and developer Joseph DiCastro, that content is more accessible than ever, though an interactive visualization project and search engine called Visualizing SEP.

Visualizing SEP “provides clear visualizations based on a philosophical taxonomy that DiCastro adapted from the one developed by the Indiana University Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO),” Justin Weinberg writes at Daily Nous. “Type a term into the search box and suggested SEP entries will be listed. Click on one of the entry titles, and a simple visualization will appear with your selected entry at the center and related entries surrounding it.” At the top of the page, you can select from a series of “domains.” Each selection produces a similar visualization of various-sized dots.

I found enough entries to keep me busy for hours in the very first domain graph, “Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art.” The last of these, simply titled “Thinker,” links together all of the philosophers mentioned in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, from the most famous household names to the most obscure and scholastic. Just skimming through these names and reading the brief biographies at the left will leave readers with a broader contextual understanding than they could gain from a print encyclopedia. (Click on the “Article Details” button to expand the full article).

The visualizer project carries forth into the data-obsessed 21st century one of the best things about the Internet in its earliest years: access to free, high quality (and highly portable) information with few barriers for entry. Learn more about how to best navigate Visualizing SEP at Daily Nous.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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The Surprising Reason Why Chinatowns Worldwide Share the Same Aesthetic, and How It All Started with the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake

in Architecture, History | May 19th, 2021

Anti-Chinese racism runs deep in American culture and law, beginning in the 19th century as competition intensified in California gold and land rushes. Chinese immigrants were pushed into teeming cities, then denigrated for surviving in overcrowded slums. To get a sense of the scope of the prejudice, we need only consider the 1882 law known as the Chinese Exclusion Act — the only legislation passed to explicitly restrict immigration by one ethnic or national group. The law actually goes back to 1875, when the Page Act banned Chinese women from immigrating. It was only repealed in 1943.

Although routinely evaded, the severe restrictions and outright bans on Chinese immigration under the Exclusion Act drove and were driven by racist ideas still visible today in tropes of dangerous, exoticized “dragon ladies” or sexually submissive concubines: roles given in early Hollywood films to the first Chinese-American movie star, Anna May Wong, who, after 1909 — despite being the most recognizable Chinese-American in the world — had to carry identification at all times to prove her legal status.

Wong was born in Los Angeles, a city that — like every other major metropolis — became home to its own Chinatown, and a famous one at that. But the most famous of the segregated urban areas originated in San Francisco, after the 1906 earthquake that nearly leveled the city and “came on the heels of decades of violence and racist laws targeting Chinese communities in the US,” notes Vox. “The earthquake devastated Chinatown. But in the destruction, San Francisco’s Chinese businessmen had an idea for a fresh start” that would define the look of Chinatowns worldwide.

The new Chinatown was more than a new start; it was survival. As often happens after disasters, proposals for relocating the unpopular immigrant neighborhood appeared “before the dust had settled and smoke cleared,” notes 99 Percent Invisible. “The city’s mayor commissioned architect and urban designer Daniel Burnham to draw up plans aligned with the City Beautiful movement.” Feeling they had to cater to white American stereotypes to gain acceptance, Chinese-American business leaders “hired architect T. Paterson Ross and engineer A.W. Burgren to rebuild—even though neither man had been to China.”

The architects “relied on centuries-old images, primarily of religious vernacular, to develop the look of the new Chinatown,” and the result was to create a genuine tourist attraction — an “iconic look,” the Vox Missing Chapter video explains, that bears little resemblance to actual Chinese cities. The Chinese immigrant community in San Francisco “kept their culture alive by inventing a new one,” a deliberate co-optation of Orientalist stereotypes for a city, its merchants decided, that would be built of “veritable fairy palaces.”

The New Chinatown was “not quite Chinese, not quite American”; safe for middle-class tourism and consumption and safer for Chinese businesses to flourish. The model spread rapidly. Now, in whatever major city we might might visit — outside of China, that is — the Chinatown we encounter is both a unique cultural hybrid and a marketing triumph that offered a measure of protection to beleaguered Chinese immigrant communities around the world.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Largest Free Kitchen in the World: Discover India’s Golden Temple Which Serves 100,000 Free Meals Per Day

in Food & Drink, Religion, Travel | May 19th, 2021

If you find yourself hungry in Amritsar, a major city in the Indian state of Punjab, you could do worse than stopping into the Golden Temple, the largest Sikh house of worship in the world. It thus also operates the largest community kitchen, or langar, in the world, which serves more than 100,000 free meals a day, 24 hours a day. Anyone familiar with Sikhism knows that, for its believers, serving food to the hungry constitutes an essential duty: not just to the poor, and certainly not just to fellow Sikhs, but to all comers. Wherever in the world you may live, if there’s a Sikh temple or shrine in the vicinity, there’s quite possibly a langar you can visit as well.

Of course, no other langar matches the scale of the Golden Temple’s. As explained in the Food Insider video above, it operates with a permanent staff of 300 to 350 employees as well as a large number of volunteers, all of whom work in concert with machines around the clock to produce an unending stream of vegetarian meals, which include daal lentil stew and chapati bread. There’s always been a market for free food, but recent years have seen increases in demand great enough to necessitate the construction of additional dining halls, and total operating expenses come to the equivalent of some US$4 million per year. (Every day, $5,000 goes to ghee, or Indian clarified butter, alone.)

Apart from the people of Amritsar and pilgrimage-making devotees, the Golden Temple langar has also drawn the attention of culinarily minded travelers. Take the Canadian Youtuber Trevor James, better known as the Food Ranger, to whose taste for extreme scale and quantity the operation no doubt appeals. His visit also affords him the opportunity, before his meal, to be outfitted in traditional dress, up to and including a Sikh turban. (The Golden Temple requires its diners to wear a head-covering of some kind.) James’ stock of travel-vlogger superlatives is nearly exhausted by the splendor of the temple itself before he steps into the kitchen to observe (and even lend a hand in) the cooking process. “Look at this,” he exclaims upon taking his seat on the floor of the hall with a tray of his own. “This is an almost spiritual meal” — an aura exuded whether you believe in Waheguru, the gods of street food, or anything else besides.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts 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 @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

What Karl Marx Meant by “Alienation”: Two Animated Videos Explain

in Economics, Philosophy, Politics | May 19th, 2021

A common political distortion claims that socialists are lazy and want to live off other people’s labor. Never mind that this description best applies to those who do not work but live off rents, dividends, and tax breaks. A bigger problem with the idea lies in its definition of “work,” conflating labor-for-hire with labor for a purpose. In Karl Marx’s theories, work occupies a central position as a human value. We all want to work, he thought. We are not born, however, wanting to maximize shareholder value.

Marx believed that “work, at its best, is what makes us human,” X-Files star Gillian Anderson tells us in the BBC Radio 4 animation above. “‘It fulfills our species essence,’ as he put it. Work allows us “to live, to be creative, to flourish.” Work in the industrial 19th century, however, did nothing of the kind. You only need to imagine for a moment the soot-filled factories, child labor, complete lack of worker protections and benefits to see the kinds of conditions to which Marx wrote in response. “Work,” says Anderson, in brief, “destroyed workers.”

Under capitalism, Marx maintained, workers are “alienated” from their labor, a concept that does not just mean emotionally depressed or creatively unfulfilled. As early as 1844, over twenty years before the first volume of Capital appeared, Marx would elaborate the concept of “estranged labor” in an essay of the same name:

The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things. Labor produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity.

In an economy where things matter more than people, people become devalued things: the “realization of labor appears as loss of realization for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.” Workers are not only spiritually dissatisfied under capitalism, they are alienated from the fruit of their labor “to the point of starving to death.” To be an alienated worker means to be literally kept from things one needs to live.

This is the kind of work Marxists and socialists have opposed, that which grossly enriches a few at the expense of most everyone else. Whether or not we are content with Marxist solutions or feel a need for new theories, every serious student of history, economy, and culture has to come to grips with Marx’s formidable critiques. In the video above, Alain de Botton’s School of Life, a self-described “pro-Capitalist institution,” attempts to do so in ten minutes or less.

“Most people agree that we need to improve our economic system somehow,” says de Botton. “It threatens our planet through excessive consumption, distracts us with irrelevant advertising, leaves people hungry and without healthcare, and fuels unnecessary wars.” It perpetuates, in other words, profound alienation on a massive scale. Of course it does, Marx might respond. That’s exactly what the system is designed to do. Or as he actually wrote, “the only wheels which political economy sets in motion are greed, and the war amongst the greedy — competition.”

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Flash Sale: Get 75% Off Udacity’s Online Courses

in Deals | May 18th, 2021

A quick FYI: Udacity is running a 75% off flash sale through May 25. Founded by computer scientist and entrepreneur Sebastian Thrun, Udacity partners with leading tech companies and offers an array of courses (and Nanodegree programs) in data science, cyber security, machine learning, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and autonomous systems. To get the 75% off discount, click here and select a course/program. The discount should be applied automatically. But in case you have any problems, you could always use the code SAVE75 at checkout.

Note: Open Culture has a partnership with Udacity. If readers enroll in certain Udacity courses and programs, it helps support Open Culture.

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And if you’re interested in Online Mini-Masters and Master’s Degrees programs from universities, see our collection: Online Degrees & Mini Degrees: Explore Masters, Mini Masters, Bachelors & Mini Bachelors from Top Universities.

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How to Shop Online & Check Your E-Mail on the Go: A 1980s British TV Show Demonstrates

in History, Technology, Television | May 18th, 2021

“Links between computers and television sets are, it is always threatened, about to herald in an age of unbelievable convenience,” announces television presenter Tony Bastable in the 1984 clip above, “where all the sociability of going down to your corner shop to order the week’s groceries will be replaced with an order over the airwaves.” Do tell. Live though we increasingly do with internet-connected “smart TVs,” the only unfamiliar-sounding part of that prediction is its reference to television sets. But back then, most every home computer used them as displays, and when also plugged into the telephone line they granted users the previously unthinkable ability to make instant financial transactions at any hour of the day or night, without leaving the house.

Mundane though it sounds now that many of us both do all our work and get all our entertainment online, paying bills was a draw for early adopters, who could come from unlikely places: Nottingham, for instance, the Nottingham Building Society being one of the first financial institutions in the world to offer online banking to its members.

Closer to Thames Headquarters, North London couple Pat and Julian Green appear in the clip above to demonstrate how to use something called “e-mail.” But first they must hook up their modem and connect to Prestel (a national online network that in the United Kingdom played something like the role Minitel did in France), an “extremely simple” process that will look agonizingly complicated to anyone who grew up in the age of wi-fi.

I myself grew up using the TRS-80 Model 100, an early laptop inherited from my technophile grandfather. Bastable whips out the very same computer in the segment above, shot during Database‘s trip to Japan. “The big advantage of a piece of equipment like this is to be able to couple it up back to my home base over the telephone line using one of these,” he says from his seat on a train, holding up the acoustic coupler designed to connect the Model 100 directly to a standard handset, in this case the pay phone in the front of the carriage. Alas, Bastable finds that “none of us have got enough change to make the call to England,” forcing him to check his messages from his hotel room instead. Would that I could send him a vision of my effortless experience connecting to wi-fi onboard a train crossing South Korea just yesterday. The future, to coin a phrase, is now.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts 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 @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How to Take the Perfect Nap, According to Cognitive Scientist Sara Mednick

in Health, Neuroscience | May 18th, 2021

Napping is serious business, despite the fact that when some of us think of naps, we think about preschool. We’ve been taught to think of naps as something to outgrow. Yet as we age into adulthood, so many of us find it hard to get enough sleep. Millions currently suffer from sleep deprivation, whose effects range from memory loss to, well… death, if we credit the dire warnings of neuroscientist Matthew Walker. “Sleep,” Walker says, “is a non-negotiable biological necessity.”

In light of the latest research, napping begins to seem more like urgent preventive care than an indulgence. In fact, sleep expert Sara Mednick says, naps are a “miracle drug” that “increases alertness, boosts creativity, reduces stress, improves perception, stamina, motor skills, and accuracy, enhances your sex life,” helps you lose weight, feel happier, and so on, all without “dangerous side effects” and with a cost of nothing but time.

If this sounds like hype, consider the quality of the source — Dr. Sara Mednick, a professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) and a fellow at the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. Mednick runs a “seven-bedroom sleep lab at UCI,” notes her site, that works “literally around-the-clock to discover methods for boosting cognition through a range of different interventions, including napping.”

Maybe you’re sold on the benefits and simple pleasures of a nap — but maybe it’s been a few years since you’ve scheduled one. How long, exactly, should a grown-up nap last? The animated TED-Ed lesson above, scripted by Mednick, answers that question with a short course on sleep cycles: how we move through different stages as we snore, reaching the deepest sleep at stage 3 and concluding a cycle with R.E.M. The length of the nap we take can depend on the kinds of tasks we need to perform, and whether we need to wake up quickly and get on to other things.

Mednick expands substantially on her evidence-based advocacy for naps in her book Take a Nap! Change Your Life. (See her discuss her research on sleep and memory in the short video just above.) In the book’s introduction, she tells the story of her “journey from skeptic to nap advocate.” Here, she uses uses a different metaphor. Naps, she says, are a “secret weapon” — one she reached for just minutes before she stood up at the Salk Institute to present research on naps. “I never imagined,” she writes of her journey into napping, “that a healthy solution to facing life’s multiple challenges could be as simple and attainable as a short nap.” Given how much sleep we’re all losing lately, maybe it’s not so surprising after all.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

A Young Janis Joplin Plays a Passionate Set at One of Her First Gigs in San Francisco (1963)

The First Cellphone: Discover Motorola’s DynaTAC 8000X, a 2-Pound Brick Priced at $3,995 (1984)

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Flash Sale: Get 75% Off Udacity’s Online Courses

How to Shop Online & Check Your E-Mail on the Go: A 1980s British TV Show Demonstrates

How to Take the Perfect Nap, According to Cognitive Scientist Sara Mednick

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