The joke-tellers range from mere mortals — doctors, lawyers, wine salesmen, garment workers — to icons like Milton Glaser, for a vibe that’s part Larry David without the painful awkwardness, part Seinfeld without the painful laughtrack, part something completely authentic altogether.
Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner:
You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount:
Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Five ways to celebrate The First Lady of Song, from illustration to rare concert footage.
On April 25, 1917, the world welcomed the great Ella Fitzgerald, nicknamed The First Lady of Song. Her remarkable recording career spanned 59 years, garnered 13 Grammys and forever changed the face of jazz with her signature improvisational scat singing. Today, we celebrate Lady Ella five ways.
ONE NOTE SAMBA
Ella’s legendary scat singing springs to life in this rare recording from June 22, 1969. Here, she performs One Note Samba with Ed Thigpen on drums, Frank de la Rosa on bass, and Tommy Flanagan on piano.
ELLA + LOUIS
As far as artistic collaborations go, hardly does it get more iconic and powerful than Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. While sifting through YouTube’s annoying array of static-photo-with-low-quality-audio-recording non-videos for a decent example, we stumbled upon this lovely animation from BBC4, a charming take on one of their most beloved duets, Dream A Little Dream Of Me:
SKIT-SCAT RAGGEDY CAT
It’s no secret we have asoftspot for children’s books. So we love Skit-Scat Raggedy Cat: Ella Fitzgerald from author Roxanne Orgill and mixed-media artist Sean Qualls — the wonderfully illustrated rags-to-riches story of how Lady Ella sang her way from the streets of Yonkers to jazz history.
Bonus points: Interwoven throughout the eloquent biographical narrative are snippets of Fitzgerald’s most iconic songs.
But what makes Skit-Scat Raggedy Cat most noteworthy is the very concept of engaging kids with jazz — another facet of the kind of cross-disciplinary curiosity that’s fundamental to true “education” and creativity.
SUMMERTIME
It hardly gets more classic than Lady Ella belting George Gershwin’s Summertime, as she does in this rare and powerful footage from a 1968 concert in Berlin:
ELLA BY HERMAN LEONARD
This rare photograph of Ella on stage in New York in 1948 comes from Jazz — the humbly titled yet absolutely amazing retrospective of the work of legendary photographer Herman Leonard, which we reviewed last year. Leonard had been photographing jazz musicians since the 1950s and developed close friendships with greats like Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis, which gave him unique access to these innovators and their larger worlds beyond the stage. The book reveals a rare glimpse of the underbelly of a cultural revolution through stunning, luminous never-before-seen images of icons like Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, and more.
Leonard captures, with his signature visual eloquence, the grace and elegance with which Lady Ella was able to command a room’s attention, transfixing the audience like the vocal hypnotist that she was.
Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, NYC, New York, 1948
Image courtesy of Herman Leonard
Donating = Loving
Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner:
You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount:
Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
The color of Friday, or what the absence on silence has to do with the presence of light.
I have a long-standing fascinating with synesthesia, the rare neurological condition that leads stimulation in one sensory pathway to trigger an experience in another — a neural short-circuiting that enables such strange phenomena as hearing colors, seeing sounds, and tasting smells.
All sounds have color. The alphabet has color. Days of the week have color. Each day has a color and a certain shape.
What makes strange phenomena like synesthesia all the more fascinating is that they raise unsettling questions about some of the most fundamental givens of the “normal” brain: Does color even exist, or is it merely a product of our fancy? (Goethe had some thoughts on the subject.) Do things have inherent, static smells, tastes, sounds and colors, or do we arbitrarily confer those qualities by manufacturing them in our own minds? Are life’s sensory qualities static and permanent — is the sky always blue, lemons always sour — or are they fluid and dynamic attributes on a spectrum of which we just happen to experience arbitrary slices?
Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner.
You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount.
Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
The highly contested nonfiction category of the Pulitzer Prize is as much a measure of good writing as it is a reflection of the era’s cultural concerns. The 2011 nonfiction winner was The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (public library) by Columbia professor of medicine Siddhartha Mukherjee — an intelligent and illuminating medical and sociocultural history of the ubiquitous disease, from its origin to the first recorded cases to modern medicine’s ongoing struggle to find effective treatment.
Mukherjee writes:
When I started writing this book, I thought of cancer as a disease. But as I wrote more and more about it, it seemed as though it was not just a disease but something that envelops our lives so fully that it was writing about someone. It was like writing about an alter personality, an illness that had a psyche, a behavior, a pattern of existing.
The book begins with the stories of pathologist Sidney Farber and philanthropist Mary Lasker, who is credited with launching the war on cancer by urging scientists and the government to race for a cure of the little-understood killer.
The second half of the narrative shifts from the cultural to the scientific context of humanity’s battle with the disease, focusing on the incremental yet game-changing discoveries of a various brilliant scientists over the past half-century as the scientific community raced to understand how cell become cancerous in order to better address prevention and treatment.
So fascinating is the book that one dedicated fan used its narrative to extract a visual timeline of cancer from 1950 to the present:
With its blend of cultural anthropology, rigorous research, and genuine empathy, The Emperor of All Maladies is, as the Pulitzer unequivocally implies, a pinnacle of nonfiction that oscillates between the profoundly distressing cultural tyranny of a presently incurable disease and the relentless scientific exhilaration embedded in the very possibility of unraveling this great and all-consuming mystery.
Donating = Loving
Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner.
You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount.
Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Brain Pickings has a free weekly interestingness digest. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week's best articles. Here's an example. Like? Sign up.
donating = loving
Brain Pickings remains free (and ad-free) and takes me hundreds of hours a month to research and write, and thousands of dollars to sustain. If you find any joy and value in what I do, please consider becoming a Member and supporting with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner:
You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount:
We’ve previously had our fun with some painfully hilarious politically incorrect books, most of which began as blog projects. But we’d be remiss not to add the apologetically titled, apologetically funny Old Jews Telling Jokes. Available as both a book (Old Jews Telling Jokes: 5,000 Years of Funny Bits and Not-So-Kosher Laughs) and a DVD, it’s an absolute string of comedic gems that don’t fail to tickle the funny bone of people of all faiths.
Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
ONE NOTE SAMBA
ELLA + LOUIS
SKIT-SCAT RAGGEDY CAT
SUMMERTIME
ELLA BY HERMAN LEONARD
I have a long-standing fascinating with 
The highly contested 
