The Best Masterclasses on Masterclass

I don’t know anybody with a Masterclass account. I’ve had one. They give you discounts pretty often.

This confuses me because I really love Masterclass. It is one of my favorite subscription services, and one of my favorite thing that has been done with the internet.

It has some really incredible gems on there. The Armin van Buuren music production masterclass is really amazing for example. He goes through making a song, just shows you all his process and his tools in a pretty detailed way. It feels like kind of just hanging out with him in a room. There is a parasocial element to it, but also you are learning real things from a real master, and so the parasocial element doesn’t feel odd. It feels like having a teacher teach a class online, but the teacher happens to be a quite famous person, and you get to see “behind the lens” of what they are doing.

And then the Marc Jacobs fashion design class is really excellent. He teaches you how to make clothes, both with general principles and with details, and gives really fun assignments.

The different celebrities put in different amounts of effort into the classes. Some are a bit more sparse. Some are mostly interviews about the person’s lfie. But some are incredibly detailed.

The David Lynch masterclass is really good. I am really glad that they got that one recorded before he died. That one is really inspiring. He goes through his process of creativity and filmmaking. He used to be a visual artist before filmmaking, then did a creative project in school once, and then he kept doing films. He didn’t think he would do films because they are so expensive, but the opportunities were coming and he kept doing them. In some ways he had a very straightforward manner of having a career.

Masterclass is really nice to think about when you are really depressed. There are so many of them on such nice topics, recorded so nicely. It is hard not to be charmed by it and become interested in something on there.

I checked out the Serena Williams one, once. I didn’t know I was holding my racket incorrectly for my forehand this entire time. I changed it and my game instantly got a lot better.

I guess it is an antidote to loneliness. Marina Keegan once wrote an essay titled The Opposite of Loneliness. It is how Masterclass makes me feel. It helps that I was around for when it first launched, and it was like the most wonderful thing ever. My first account got set up as a birthday present, and then I didn’t have the heart to cancel it since then. It was a very streamlined, basic, but at that time not too corporate format. It seemed like somebody’s passion project, and if you watch old interviews this did seem to be true. To record these great ideas from these masterful practitioners and make it widely available. It seemed like a lot of work, to convince people to be on the platform and to film everything beautifully.

It feels like if you don’t really know what to do, or don’t really want to do anything, like a really nice place to be to get inspired somehow again. Being near people who give a shit can be really helpful.