BeeOasis.com

Southern trees bear strange fruit Blood on the leaves and blood at the root Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees These sad words open the song “Strange Fruit.” The song was written by Abel Meeropol, and it was sung and made famous by Billie Holiday. The words [...]

Bill was walking slowly to class. He always walked slowly. He wore thick glasses, and it was hard for him to see far ahead. He didn’t want to trip and fall. It’s better to be safe than sorry, he thought. Safe was good, but Bill was late again. He needed to go to the other [...]

An old man is walking along a rocky river bed. He is a traveller, but he is carrying only a few things. He can hear the songs of birds and the breath of the wind. The sound of the River Fuji is clear in his ears. It’s the voice of fresh water running over rocks. [...]

  “Then I saw the beauty of primitive music.” W.C. Handy, Father of the Blues W.C. Handy grew up in a small town in Alabama in the southern part of the US. His father was the pastor of a church, and Handy was raised in the faith of his father. When he was young, he [...]

So this guy, this guy is a guy named Bob McKim. And he was a creativity researcher in the ’60s and ’70s, and also led the Stanford design program. And in fact, my friend and IDEO founder, David Kelley, who’s out there somewhere, studied under him at Stanford. And he liked to do an exercise [...]

A while ago, a friend of mine bought a new camera. He soon discovered the joy of taking pictures. In a matter of months, he was taking hundreds of pictures every day. At first, many of his shots were not very good. But he continued to shoot. As he practiced, his pictures became better and [...]

On June 2, 2010, President Barack Obama stood on a small stage in the White House. In the audience sat a mix of elite leaders and famous musicians. The President was about to give America’s highest award for popular music to Paul McCartney of the Beatles. The prestigious award was the Gershwin Prize. The Gershwin Prize [...]

Julie is visiting the Spanish city of Madrid with her friends. One night, they decide to go to a beautiful restaurant in the Main Plaza of the city. Julie studied Spanish in high school, and she can communicate fairly well. But tonight she is having trouble understanding the menu. She wants to eat fish, but [...]

Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) was a Japanese artist, painter, and maker of prints, called UKIYO-E. During his life, he was the leading expert on Chinese painting in Japan. His most famous work is The Great Wave off Kanagawa, created in the 1820s.

El Greco wanted to be a great artist. (His name means “the Greek.”) Like many Greek artists of his time, El Greco moved to Venice, Italy. Venice was alive with cultural change, achievement, and art during a period of time called the Renaissance. As an artist, El Greco wanted to make a name for himself [...]

“Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.” This is the crooked disposition of one Ebenzer Scrooge from Charles Dickens [...]

I am an alcoholic and an addict and I didn’t want to see my children do the same thing. Ozzy Osbourne, heavy metal singer Heavy metal is a style of rock music developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It has roots in the blues and psychedelic rock. But metal music is often much [...]