How to Waste Time for a Year
After being laid off in June 2020. I found myself with a lot of free time. I couldn’t work, I had nowhere to go, just a weekly Zoom call with the family to keep me slightly sane. So naturally, I went down the rabbit-hole of YouTube. But instead of political conspiracies, I ended up watching history, science and book videos. I want to pay tribute to some of my favorite channels in various topics
Science
Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell. I had no idea what the word “Kurzgesagt” means (I went to their website and learned that it is German for “in a nutshell”), but the videos deal with science topics with a clear narrative voice and a jaunty, slightly psychedelic animation style. I’ve watched all of their cosmology videos with great pleasure. I recommend their mind-blowing video on nuetron stars.
Dr. Becky. Dr Becky Smethurst is an astrophysicist at Oxford, and does a lot of videos on astrophysical topics, like black holes. But she also discusses the other end of the scale: quantum physics. She is filmed talking, so no snazzy animation like Kurzgesagt. I liked her videos about the Higgs Boson, where she visited CERN and chatted with some of the phyicists there.
Crash Course: This is not a science channel, but instead a general education channel. It includes playlists on many general science subjects: Geology, Physics, Astronomy, Chemistry, Organic Chemistry, Biology, Statistics, etc. Most are pretty good, but I found the Statisics course to be pretty bad. But Astronomy with Dr. Phil Plait was excellent. He is a lively lecturer who radiates enthusiasm for his subject.
The whole Crash Course group of playlists is amazing in its breadth and entertainment value. It seems to be a business for the two founders, Hank and John Green. The Green brothers also do a more personal series called The Vlogbrothers where they each make a video for the other in a conversation of sorts. Sometimes these are pretty amusing, and other viewers clearly agree since the channel has 3.4 million subscribers. They spun their obvious video skill into an education empire, Crash Course. You may know John Green as the author of the YA tearjerker, The Fault in Our Stars. Both of the brothers are novelists, but probably at this point, we could better characterize them as educational entrepreneurs.
History
I’m going to loop back to Crash Course because their history playlists are absolutely great. World history, European history, U.S. history as well as specialized histories of science, theater, and film.
Epimetheus: This is a history channel that specializes in ancient and medieval history. It uses maps and illustrations for its visuals. You can see from the drawing above, Epimetheus makes ancient people look very tough and rugged. So his (assuming Epimetheus is a he) Hittites, Elamites, Assyrians, etc., all look like they are about to ride up in their chariots and sack your city within the next five minutes. But this visial quirk shouldn’t dissauade you from watching these incredibly informative videos about some very old civilizations.
Extra Credits: I like these video historians because they go into deep detail about every subject they cover, so a video on the Bronze Age Collapse will last for four 10 minute videos, then be followed by a video where they discuss any mistakes they made or any cases where there is disagreement amongst hitorians and/or archeologists, as there usually is.
History Matters: This channel uses crude but humorous animation on its history videos. While it does do a little bit of Roman history, thisis not a place for ancient history videos. But it is very good on European history and modern histoy. The narrator is English and very sarcastic. When a historical figure dies, the animated figure (which looks a little like a Lego person) just falls over with a thump.
Books
For obvious reasons, I like book videos. Most book video channels I’ve found aren’t great because the hosts like books I don’t like. Grrrr! How dare they? The two I’m going to mention now have impeccable taste and have both read more books that I ever will.
Leaf by Leaf. This book video series is hosted by Chris Via. It’s him sitting in two enormous floor-to-ceiling bookshelves (as you can see in the photo above) talking about a book he has read. He likes to read large books and jokes about it as he does his reviews. In fact, if he discusses a short book, its brevity will merit a special mention. His favorite book seems to be The Recognitions by William Gaddis. I’ll read it someday.
Better Than Food. The host of this book channel is Clifford Lee Sargent, who also usually stands in front of a bookshelf to tell you why a book he just read is worth reading. Both Via and Sargent have about the simplest set-up possible. But both are good talkers—a quality I am still working on—and they are interesting. One could imagine having a great conversation with either of them over coffee or a bottle of wine.
Odds and Ends
Not every video channel I follow is based on an interest of mine—as are all of the above. Sometimes I will just stumble onto one that I end up loving.
The Clark Family Collective: Colt Clark is a professional musician. But when Covid his, he was left without gigs. So he dragooned his wife Aubree (who operates the camera) and his three kids into performing pop songs with him. Their tastes (or I should porbably say, his tastes) run towards rock classics. It’s been amusing watching how good the kids have gotten over the past year. The young guitarist is amazing. I don’t know their names, but I always think of them as “Drummer,” “Guitarist” and “Girl” (who sometimes sings backup and plays various percussion instruments). They’re young enough that you can see that they’ve grown between the earliest videos and now. I don’t know what childhood is like now, but I would not want to be stuck with the haircuts that Colt and Aubree have burdened the boys with. But the music is so good and it’s life-affirming to see this little family band play.
Not Just Bikes: This one is a urban planning channel. I put a link to his video about Houston a few days ago. He is a Canadian who now live in the Netherlands and is willing to unabashedly say that European cities, particularly Dutch cities, are better than North American cities. Even the best North American cities are sprawled out, car-centirc monsters. He and his family made a conscious decision not to live like that, which I admire. He is good at diagnosing little things that make North American urban culture so inhuman. And note that he does not pretend Canada’s cities are any better than the U.S.A.’s. The anti-pedestrian, anti-biker, anti-transit mindset that afflicts most American cities is just as strong in Canada.
Noah Van Sciver. You know I had to have at least one comics-oriented video channel here, and Noah Van Sciver’s channel is my favorite. He has these long Zoom calls (at least, I assume it’s Zoom) with cartoonists and they are very casual, but go so deep into the subjects’ work. And Van Sciver’s enthusiasm come off in waves. Van Sciver himself is a gifted cartoonist, which puts him on a level playing field with his subjects. They all know the art and the business and the little practical details of being a cartoonist. And like all of the video channels I like, I like this one a lot becuase Van Sciver has great taste. (And by “great taste”, I mean taste similar to mine.) Some of his interview subjects are young cartoonists who I don’t necessarily know that much about (and in doing this, he performs a great service), but many are cartoonists I have long admired, and some are cartoonists I know but haven’t seen in years, like Ivan Brunetti, Bob Fingerman, Megan Kelso, and more. Hearing their interviews is like renewing a friendship in a way. I recommend his conversation with Simon Hanselman, author of the utterly insane Crisis Zone, possibly my favorite book read in 2021 so far (maybe tied with 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed).
If you want to waste a year watching YouTube videos, these would be good places to start. A word of warning—the way YouTube’s algorthm works, watching any of them might lead you down a dark path from which you never return.
That said, what is wrong with me watching so damn much YouTube? It seems insane when I think about it. But I’ve enjoyed and admired the videos described above.
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