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How many Americans have never heard the name of Martin Luther King Jr.? And indeed, gone more than half a century though he may be, how many Americans have never heard his voice, or can’t quote his words? Long though King will doubtless stand as an example of the English language’s greatest 20th-century orators, he […] How Martin Luther King Jr. Got C’s in...

FYI: Between now and January 10, Coursera is offering a $100 discount on its annual subscription plan called “Coursera Plus.” Normally priced at $399, Coursera Plus (now available for $299) gives you access to 90% of Coursera’s courses, Guided Projects, Specializations, and Professional Certificates, all of which are taught by top instructors from leading universities and […] Coursera Offers $100 Off of Coursera Plus, a...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlU-zDU6aQ0 If you’ve left formal education, you no doubt retain a few good memories from your years as a student. None of them, safe to say, involve studying — assuming you managed to get any studying done in the first place. The unfortunate fact is that few of us ever really come to grips with […] Study Less, Study Smart: A Longtime Psych Professor...

In 1919, Sigmund Freud published “The ‘Uncanny,’” his rare attempt as a psychoanalyst “to investigate the subject of aesthetics.” The essay arrived in the midst of a modernist revolution Freud himself unwittingly inspired in the work of Surrealists like Salvador Dali, Andre Breton, and many others. He also had an influence on another artist of […] The Uncanny Children’s Book Illustrations of Sigmund’s Freud’s...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hdT8PgT19w Who can resist miniatures? Wee food, painstakingly rendered in felted wool… Matchbook-sized books you can actually read… Classic record albums shrunk down for mice… The late Frances Glessner Lee (1878-1962) definitely loved miniatures, and excelled at their creation, knitting socks on pins, hand rolling real tobacco into tiny cigarettes, and making sure the victims in her […] The Gruesome Dollhouse Death Scenes That Reinvented Murder...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unzc731iCUY In his legendary MIT lecture “How to Speak,” professor Patrick Winston opens with a story about seeing Olympic gymnast Mary Lou Retton at a Celebrity Ski Weekend. It was immediately clear to him that he was the better skier, but not because he had more innate athletic ability than an Olympic gold medalist, but […] How to Speak: Watch the Lecture on Effective...

The teenager was invented in the 1950s. Of course, the stages of physical development that characterize those years taking us from childhood to adulthood haven't fundamentally changed as long as Homo sapiens has existed. But even though there were "teenagers" in, say, ancient Rome, they weren't teenagers as we've known them over the past three […] Foreign Exchange Students Debate Whether American Teenagers Have...

As all of us have noticed in recent months, living in a viral pandemic really messes with your sense of time. A few months feels like a decade. Time slows to a crawl. If you’re a parent, however, you have before you walking, talking, growing, complaining reminders that no matter what’s happening in the world, […] The 1937 Experiment in Distance Learning: When Chicago...

To bring back memories of your schooldays, there's nothing quite like the sight of your old exercise books. This holds true whether you went to school in Ghana in the 2010s, Italy in the 90s, France in the 80s, China in the 70s, Japan in the 60s, or India in the 50s. All of these examples and many […] Explore a Digital Archive of Student Notebooks from...

Pop quiz, hot shot. World War III has devastated civilization. As a prisoner of survivors living beneath the ruins of Paris, you're made to go travel back in time, to the era of your own childhood, in order to secure aid for the present from the past. What do you do? You probably never faced […] Understanding Chris Marker’s Radical Sci-Fi Film <i>La Jetée</i>:...

Open access publishing has, indeed, made academic research more accessible, but in “the move from physical academic journals to digitally-accessible papers,” Samantha Cole writes at Vice, it has also become “more precarious to preserve…. If an institution stops paying for web hosting or changes servers, the research within could disappear.” At least a couple hundred […] The Internet Archive Will Digitize & Preserve Millions...

I used to make a point of asking every college-applying teenager I encountered why they wanted to go to college in the first place. Few had a ready answer; most, after a deer-in-the-headlights moment, said they wanted to be able to get a job — and in a tone implying it was too obvious to […] Google Introduces 6-Month Career Certificates, Threatening to Disrupt...

If Richard Feynman had only ever published his work in theoretical physics, his name would still be known far and wide. As it is, Feynman remains famous more than thirty years after his death in large part for the way he engaged with the public. From his popular textbook The Feynman Lectures on Physics (which […] What Made Richard Feynman One of the Most...

What if I said the problem with STEM education is that it doesn’t include nearly enough art? For one thing, I would only echo what STEAM proponents have said for years. This doesn't only mean that students should study the arts with the same seriousness as they do the sciences. But that science should be […] Explore an Interactive, Online Version of the Beautifully...

Earlier this month, Stanford's Online High School offered (in partnership with Stanford Continuing Studies) a free, five-day course "Teach Your Class Online: The Essentials." With many schools starting the next academic year online, this course found a large audience. 7,000 teachers signed up. Aimed at middle and high school teachers, the course covered "general guidelines […] A Free Stanford Course on How to Teach...

We all know Marshall McLuhan’s pithy, endlessly quotable line “the medium is the message,” but rarely do we stop to ask which one comes first. The development of communication technologies may genuinely present us with a chicken or egg scenario. After all, only a culture that already prized constant visual stimuli but grossly undervalued physical […] Emma Willard, the First Woman Mapmaker in America,...

This fall, many teachers (across the country and the world) will be asked to teach online--something most teachers have never done before. To assist with that transition, the Stanford Online High School and Stanford Continuing Studies have teamed up to offer a free online course called Teaching Your Class Online: The Essentials. Taught by veteran […] A Free Stanford Course on How to Teach...

In one cascade of events after another, people are finding out the normal they once knew doesn’t exist anymore. Instead it feels as if we’re living through several past crises at once, trying to cram as much historical knowledge as we can to make sense of the moment. 2020 especially feels like an echo of […] The History of the 1918 Flu Pandemic, “The...