The world always needs new songs. They put a spring in our step as we hear them on the radio, help us reflect on painful experience and offer new angles on love, sex and death. As an important part of what makes us human, songs are always going to be valid cultural currency. And there will always be a need for people who write good ones.
Writing is lonely and bad for your back, but it’s also a thrilling adventure of self-discovery and a potential money spinner. Those who feel driven to write will write regardless of what anyone says – but many a desk drawer is full of manuscripts that never see the light of day. Furthermore, writing can be a very slow process if most of the time is spent staring out of the window waiting for inspiration to strike.
Masterclass is an educational company offering online classes delivered by astonishingly big names in their fields. We are talking bona fide A-list people. Looking at their course list, one can’t help wondering “How on Earth did they get Helen Mirren and Samuel L. Jackson to teach acting? Gordon Ramsay to teach cooking? Annie Liebovitz to teach photography? Steve Martin to teach comedy?”
Sometimes you meet people who can recite the entire family tree of rock: which bands spawned which other bands, which members left and formed their own bands, where they came from, who produced them, the names of all their albums in chronological order, what was on the B side of all of their hits, and what their pets were called.
If you are visiting a foreign country, you might take along a pocket guide to the language to help you order things in restaurants or explain to the local police what the person who snatched your cell phone looks like. It beats pointing and grunting or shouting in English, and the natives will admire you for making the effort, even if they bring you squid instead of chicken.
Arts funding cuts in the UK have bitten deep. The Arts Council has lost a third of its funds, forcing it to axe some of its projects and scale down others. In this atmosphere of austerity, arts fundraising needs to go into overdrive to save some of Britain’s best cultural assets from extinction.
Before science really got going, curious minds tried to convert substances into other substances by trial and error and a whole lot of wishful thinking. Attempts were made to create an elixir of immortality (science is still working on that), a panacea that would cure any disease, and the well-known turning-lead-into gold conundrum. An associated philosophy grew up around these practices: alchemy. An alchemist’s lab looked similar to a chemistry lab, and he would boil and burn and crush and mix things as chemists do, but nobody knew about atoms yet so it was all a bit hit-and-miss.
Yes, that’s a thing and there’s a course for it. There are three grades of Pokémon Professor: Basic Rank Professor, Stage 1 Rank Professor, and Stage 2 Rank Professor. The courses are delivered via Pokemon.com.
In 1984 an American Biologist and ‘father of sociobiology’ Edward O. Wilson published a work Called Biophilia in which he laid out his reasoning for why animals can make humans feel good. His theory goes that our fondness for and attachment to animals stems from the possibility that early human survival was dependent on signals and warnings they gave out. The biophilia hypothesis suggests that when we see animals in a restful or peaceful state, this elicits feelings of safety and wellbeing in us because they aren’t warning us about anything.
A college course about ice cream? Is this yet another frivolous course that exists only in order to acquire college credits? A professor who has lost their grip on reality a little? No, this is a 119-year-old course whose alumni read like a who’s who of the ice cream industry: Ben and Jerry’s, Baskin-Robbins, Haagen-Dazs, Hershey, Nestlé, Dairy Queen and most other well-known ice cream manufacturers. Apart from the big boys, mom and pop operations can also attend the course to learn the secrets of ice cream making.
We are all happy to consume innovative technology – but how many of us are interested in doing all the hard thinking and sums required to create it?
