In which John Green teaches you about Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This week, we'll talk a little bit about Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who wrote under the name Mark Twain, and how he mined his early life for decades to produce his pretty well-loved body of work. By far the best of Twain's novels, Huckleberry Finn has a lot to say about life in America around the Civil War, and it resonates today with its messages on race, class, and what exactly freedom is.

Today we are talking about art and aesthetic appreciation. What makes something an artwork? Can art really be defined? Is aesthetic value objective or subjective? Can taste be developed? How?
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How do art and morality intersect? Today we look at an ethically questionable work of art and discuss R. G. Collingwood’s view that art is best when it helps us live better lives. We’ll go over Aristotle’s concept of catharsis and how it can resolve the problem of tragedy. We are also exploring the paradox of fiction and the debate between autonomism and moralism.

So we've been talking about civil rights for the last few episodes now, and we're finally going to wrap this discussion up with the rather controversial topic of affirmative action. We'll explain what exactly affirmative action is, who it is for, and why it still exists. Now, affirmative action is a pretty problematic concept. So we'll get into the court's rationalization for it in the 70s as well as its fall from favor in more recent years. Now, people tend to have pretty strong, and varying opinions, about this stuff - so we'll start talking about how these opinions are informed next week when we start our discussion on politics.

So, today we’re talking about African Pantheons. Now, you might say, that’s ridiculous. Africa isn’t a single place with a single pantheon, and we’d be fools to try and cover all that in an eleven minute video. You’d be right. Instead we’re going to focus on Yoruba religion from west Africa, and the Orishas that populate Yoruba stories. The many, many Orishas cover all aspects of life, and can be pretty specialized. We’re going to focus on a dozen or so.

So, you did it! You're done and now you need to look beyond college. What's next? How do you know what's next? Do you want to go to grad school? To work? In this episode, Erica talks about how to think about what comes after college.

Chapters:
- Introduction
- Planning Your Transition
- Managing Priorities
- Conclusion

Review

People are getting older – not just in the individual sense, but the human population itself. Today we’re going to explore those shifting patterns and their implications. We’ll go over the biological, psychological, and cultural aspects of aging, including some of the particular challenges that older individuals face.

The thing about European History is that it tends to leak out of Europe. Europeans haven't been great at staying put in Europe. As human beings do, the people of Europe were very busy traveling around to trade, to spread religion, and in a lot of cases to try and conquer other people. In the 15th and 16th centuries, Europeans developed a bunch of tools and techniques that would allow them to travel around the world, in numbers and force heretofore unseen on the planet. And a lot of the results weren't great for the people who already lived in the places Europeans were "visiting."

In which John Green teaches you about the presidency of Andrew Jackson So how did a president with astoundingly bad fiscal policies end up on the $20 bill? That's a question we can't answer, but we can tell you how Jackson got to be president, and how he changed the country when he got the job. Jackson's election was more democratic than any previous presidential election. More people were able to vote, and they picked a doozie. Jackson was a well-known war hero, and he was elected over his longtime political enemy, John Quincy Adams. Once Jackson was in office, he did more to expand executive power than any of the previous occupants of the White House. He used armed troops to collect taxes, refused to enforce legislation and supreme court legislation, and hired and fired his staff based on support in elections. He was also the first president to regularly wield the presidential veto as a political tool. Was he a good president? Watch this video and draw your own conclusions.

Chapters:
Introduction: the Age of Jackson
Democracy in the United States
Economics during the Era of Good Feelings
The Monroe Doctrine
John Quincy Adams
The Missouri Compromise
Martin Van Buren, "The Little Magician", and other Presidential Nicknames
Andrew Jackson's Presidential Campaign
The Democratic Party
The Whig Party
Jackson's Tariffs
The Indian Removal Act & The Trail of Tears
American Banking Under Jackson
Mystery Document
Jackson Ends the Second U.S. Bank
Inflation and the Panic of 1837
Legacy of the Age of Jackson
Credits

In our final episode of Crash Course Psychology, Hank discusses the ideas of Aggression and Altruism. These two things are difficult to understand and explain so sit tight and get ready to run the gauntlet of human emotions.

Chapters:
Introduction: Robber's Cave Experiment
Conflict vs. Cooperation
Aggression
Genetic, Neurological, & Biochemical Reasons for Aggression
Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis
Altruism
Bystander Effect
Why do we help others?
Social Exchange Theory & the Norm of Reciprocity
Social Responsibility Norm
Conflict & Self-Interest
Review & Credits
Credits

On November 26, 2020, trade unions in India reported that over 250 MILLION people took part in a strike. What could prompt such massive protest? Farming. Today, we’re going to take a closer look at GMOs, which are organisms whose DNA has been modified in a laboratory, and examine the impact of one GMO in particular, Bt Cotton, in the agrarian crisis in India.

Like the Industrial or the Einsteinian Revolution, the Space Race is a trope, or way of organizing historical events into a story that makes sense. In this story, the two great powers that emerged after World War Two—the United States and Soviet Union—competed to send communications satellites, dogs, and people into outer space…

Today we’re going to take a step back from programming and discuss the person who formulated many of the theoretical concepts that underlie modern computation - the father of computer science himself: Alan Turing. Now normally we try to avoid “Great Man" history in Crash Course because truthfully all milestones in humanity are much more complex than just an individual or through a single lens - but for Turing we are going to make an exception. From his theoretical Turing Machine and work on the Bombe to break Nazi Enigma codes during World War II, to his contributions in the field of Artificial Intelligence (before it was even called that), Alan Turing helped inspire the first generation of computer scientists - despite a life tragically cut short.

In fantasy stories, charlatans in fancy robes promise to turn lead into gold. But real alchemists weren’t just mystical misers. They were skilled experimentalists, backed by theories of matter.
And they played a huge role in the development of knowledge about one of our fundamental questions: “what is stuff?”

What comes to mind when you think of alcohol? Probably alcoholic drinks like beer or wine. But in organic chemistry alcohols are an important and versatile family of compounds. In this episode of Crash Course Organic Chemistry, we’ll use alcohols as a starting point to get other types of compounds like ethers, epoxides, and more!

We’ve already learned the basics of carbonyl chemistry and talked about how we can synthesize aldehydes and ketones, but there’s still so much more to learn, like the role carbonyl groups play in reactions involving sedatives! In this episode of Crash Course Organic Chemistry we’re diving deeper into aldehydes and ketones by focusing on addition reactions of oxygen and nitrogen based nucleophiles. We’ll cover hydrates, acetals and hemiacetals, imines and enamines, and more!

Organic chemistry is a great workout for your brain, and to keep its energy up, your brain needs glucose. To maintain blood glucose levels, our bodies go through a process called gluconeogenesis, which involves the important type of organic reaction we’re getting into today: aldol reactions! In this episode of Crash Course Organic Chemistry, we’ll learn what an aldol is, as well as how aldol reactions work and what they do. Plus we’ll learn about a similar reaction, Claisen condensation.

In which you are introduced to the life and accomplishments of Alexander the Great, his empire, his horse Bucephalus, the empires that came after him, and the idea of Greatness. Is greatness a question of accomplishment, of impact, or are people great because the rest of us decide they're great?

Also discussed are Kim Kardashian and the Situation, gender bias in history, Catherine the Great's death (not via horse love), the ardent love other generals--from Pompey the Great to Napoleon--had for Alexander, and a bit of Persian history.

Chapters:
Introduction
What Makes Historical Figures So 'Great?'
The Life of Alexander the Great
Death & Legacy of Alexander the Great
The Legend of Alexander the Great
An Open Letter to the Ladies
What Makes Alexander So Great?
Credits

Today, we're going to talk about five common types of algorithmic bias we should pay attention to: data that reflects existing biases, unbalanced classes in training data, data that doesn't capture the right value, data that is amplified by feedback loops, and malicious data. Now bias itself isn't necessarily a terrible thing, our brains often use it to take shortcuts by finding patterns, but bias can become a problem if we don't acknowledge exceptions to patterns or if we allow it to discriminate.

In which John Green teaches you about Kurt Vonnegut's most famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut wrote the book in the Vietnam era, and it closely mirrors his personal experiences in World War II, as long as you throw out the time travel and aliens and porn stars and stuff. Slaughterhouse-Five tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, a World War II veteran who was a prisoner of war, survived the Battle of the Bulge and the fire-bombing of Dresden, goes home after the war, and has trouble adapting to civilian life (this is the part that's like Vonnegut's own experience). Billy Pilgrim has flashbacks to the war that he interprets as being "unstuck in time." He believes he's been abducted by aliens, and pretty much loses it. You'll learn a little about Vonnegut's life, quite a bit about Dresden, and probably more than you'd like about barbershop quartets as a metaphor for post-traumatic stress.