Thinking back to the many childhood grocery-store trips made with their parents, Americans of a certain age will remember nothing so vividly as the Weekly World News. It always stood out on the checkout stand’s impulse-buy rack, in part because of its adherence to stark yet jumbled black-and-white cover designs even as all the other magazines grew slicker and simpler. But what really caught our young and impressionable eyes had even more to do with the contrast between the surrounding publications’ mundane coverage of home, family, and celebrity and the WWN’s unfailingly, screamingly outlandish headlines: “I WAS BIGFOOT’S LOVE SLAVE!” “WILD WEST TOWN ON VENUS!” “BAT BOY LEADS COPS ON 3 STATE CHASE!”

For many of us, the temptation to buy (or at least flip through) an issue of the WWN lay in keeping up with the exploits of Bat Boy, the most prominent of many fictional characters to which its extravagantly lurid yet oddly sober stories returned again and again. Though introduced only in 1992, he has notable ancestors in his industry: take the “Vespertilio-homo,” or “man-bat,” a race found to have made its home on the moon in 1835.

Or at least that’s what the readers of New York newspaper the Sun were told in a series of illustrated articles, later collected in book form, that credited the discovery to the astronomer Sir John Herschel. Herschel was real, but as the Sun admitted the following month, the Vespertilio-homo wasn’t — nor were the unicorn-goats, miniature zebras, and beavers walking on their hind legs reportedly also seen through his telescope.

The “Great Moon Hoax,” as it’s now known, and about which you can learn more from the BBC video at the top of the post, wasn’t Herschel’s doing. A reporter called Richard Adams Locke admitted to the fabrication, seemingly motivated by a desire to boost the circulation of the Sun, one of the many “penny paper” tabloids of the day that lived and died by sensation and scandal, and also to make light of the extravagant astronomical claims then in the air. Much like the writers of the Weekly World News — or later, the Onion — Locke wanted less to fool readers than to entertain them by satirizing an over-credulous popular culture. Yet what he pioneered was, quite literally, “fake news,” though that label by now refers to media created with clear intent to deceive. The world has changed since the eighteen-thirties, and indeed, even since Bat Boy’s late twentieth-century heyday, when the WWN predicted his election as President of the United States in 2028. Stranger things have certainly happened.

via Boing Boing

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

Image by Carl Van Vechten, via Library of Congress and Wikimedia Commons

We may be conditioned to offering an opinion at the push of a button, but before venturing on the question of whether we can, or should, separate the art from the artist, it seems ever prudent to ask, “Which art and which artist?” There are the usual case studies, in addition to the crop of disgraced celebrities: Ezra Pound, P.G. Wodehouse, and, in philosophy, Martin Heidegger. One case of a very troubling artist, Salvador Dalí, gets less attention, but offers us much material for consideration, especially alongside an essay by George Orwell, who ruminated on the question and called Dalí both “a disgusting human being” and an artist of undeniably “exceptional gifts.”

Like these other figures, Dalí has long been alleged to have had fascist sympathies, a charge that goes back to the 1930s and perhaps originated with his fellow Surrealists, especially André Breton, who put Dalí on “trial” in 1934 for “the glorification of Hitlerian fascism” and expelled him from the movement. The Surrealists, most of whom were communists, were provoked by Dalí’s disdain for their politics, expressed in the likeness of Lenin in The Enigma of William Tell. It’s also true that Dalí seemed to publicly profess an admiration for Hitler. But as with everything he did, it’s impossible to tell how seriously we can take any of his pronouncements.

Another painting, 1939’s The Enigma of Hitler is even more ambiguous than The Enigma of William Tell, a collection of dream images, with the recurring melting objects, crutches, mollusk shells, and food images, set around a tiny portrait of the German dictator. Kamila Kocialkowska suggests that psychoanalytic motifs in the painting, some rather obvious, reflect Hitler’s “fear of impotence, and certain commentators have noted that Hitler’s enthusiastic promotion of nationalistic breeding can further explain the innuendo present in this image.”

The Hitler obsession began years earlier. “I often dreamed of Hitler as a woman,” Dalí supposedly said,

His flesh, which I imagined as whiter than white, ravished me. I painted a Hitlerian wet nurse sitting kneeling in a puddle of water….

There was no reason for me to stop telling one and all that to me Hitler embodied the perfect image of the great masochist who would unleash a world war solely for the pleasure of losing and burying himself beneath the rubble.

The painting Dalí alludes to, The Weaning of Furniture-Nutrition, is the work that first raised Breton’s ire, since “Dalí had originally painted a swastika on the nurse’s armband,” notes art historian Robin Adèle Greeley, “which the Surrealists later forced him to paint out.” Dalí later claimed that his Hitler paintings “subvert fascist ideologies,” Greeley writes: “Breton and company appear not to have appreciated a fellow Surrealist suggesting that there were connections to be made between bourgeois childhoods such as their own and the family life of the Nazi dictator.” Likewise, his creepy dream-language above is hardly more straightforward than the paintings, though he did write in The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí, “Hitler turned me on in the highest.”

Other pieces of evidence for Dalí’s politics are also compelling but still circumstantial, such as his friendship with the proudly professed Nazi-sympathizer, Wallis Simpson, the American Duchess of Windsor, and his admiration for Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, whom he called, as Lauren Oyler points out at Vice, “the greatest hero of Spain.” (Dalí painted a portrait of Franco’s daughter). Oyler points out that Dalí’s “wickedness,” as Orwell put it in his scathing review of the artist’s “autobiography” (a spurious category in the case of serial fabricator Dalí), matters even if it were pure provocation rather than genuine commitment.

The claim carries more weight when applied to the artist’s attested sadism in general. Dalí spends a good part of his Confessions delighting in stories of brutal physical and sexual assault and cruelty to animals. (The famous Dalí Atomicus photo, his collaboration with Philippe Halsman, required 28 attempts, Oyler notes, and “each of those attempts involved throwing three cats in the air and flinging buckets of water at them.”) Whether or not Dalí was a genuine Nazi sympathizer or an amoral right-wing troll, Orwell is completely unwilling to give him a pass for generally cruel, abusive behavior.

“In his outlook,” writes Orwell, “his character, the bedrock decency of a human being does not exist. He is as anti-social as a flea. Clearly, such people are undesirable, and a society in which they can flourish has something wrong with it.” But perhaps Dalí means to say exactly that. Allowing for the possibility, Orwell is also unwilling to toss aside Dalí’s work. The artist, he writes “has fifty times more talent than most of the people who would denounce his morals and jeer at his paintings.”

When it comes to the question of Dalí as fascist, some less-than-nuanced views of his work (“Marxist criticism has a short way with such phenomena as Surrealism,” writes Orwell) might miss the mark. The Weaning of Furniture-Nutrition, writes Greeley, seems to reveal “a secret about his own middle-class background” as a nursery for fascism, especially given the “disturbing” fact that “the nurse is a portrait of Dalí’s own, and that she droops hollowly on the shore near the painter’s Catalan childhood home, suggesting that Dalí himself might have had a ‘hitlerian’ upbringing.”

Greeley’s further elaboration on Dalí’s conflict with Breton further weakens the charges against him. “Ten days before the February meeting, he had defended himself to Breton,” she writes, “claiming, ‘I am hitlerian neither in fact nor in intention.’ ” He pointed out that the Nazis would likely burn his work, and chastised leftists for “their lack of insight into fascism.”

The question of Dalí’s fascist sympathies is incoherent without the biography, and the biographical evidence against Dalí seems fairly thin. Nonetheless, he has emerged from history as a violent, vicious, opportunistic person. How much this should matter to our appreciation of his art is a matter you’ll have to decide for yourself.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2018.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.

Leonardo da Vinci was a painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect, to provide only his most widely agreed-upon list of occupations. It is he, more than any other single figure, who comes to mind when we think of the ideal of the “Renaissance man.” Though considered rather less practical today than it was in fifteenth-century Italy, the relentless questing for both scientific knowledge and artistic perfection implied by that title has never entirely ceased to appeal. For aspiring modern Renaissance men, one of the most enduring sources of inspiration remains Leonardo’s own notebooks, full of backwards-written explorations of ideas both realized and unrealized that move unpredictably from one intellectual domain to another.

That last quality seems to have displeased the sculptor Pompeo Leoni, who eventually came into possession of Leonardo’s notebooks after they were inherited by his last student Francesco Melzi. Leoni “dismounted and cut the folios, separating the materials into two albums according
to his own judgement,” notes the Italian Embassy in London, “the larger portion for technical and scientific topics,” and the smaller for “Leonardo’s artistic and figurative workings.”

In the early seventeenth century, Leoni’s son-in-law sold the former album, now known as the Codex Atlanticus, to a count who in turn donated it to the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana; the latter ended up in England’s Royal Collection by 1670 or so. Only now have they been reunited, thanks to a project called Leonardotheka.

The culmination of a decade’s work involving the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana as well as the Biblioteca Leonardiana and the Royal Collection Trust, Leonardotheka digitally reunites those albums after four centuries apart. Such a task also entailed the reconstruction of 50 long-sundered individual pages and their replacement into their original context. The notebooks combined “decades of anatomical studies, flying machines, landscapes, and grocery-list-adjacent musings, all tangled together the way Leonardo’s mind may have worked,” writes Anastasia Scott at Discover. Yet he’d “likely never intended to separate art from science in the first place. A single page might hold a machine, a horse, and a poem, and Leoni severed connections the artist had made on purpose.” With those connections restored, we here in the twenty-twenties — a time plagued by its own doubts about the relationship between what we now call “humanities” and “STEM” — can see once again how a real Renaissance mind worked. Enter the Leonardotheka here.

via Kottke

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

It’s a myth that starving artists don’t eat.

They do, just not often or well. Their meals rarely rate recipes, let alone cookbooks.

Those cookbooks do exist though.…

The mostly conceptual Starving Artist Cookbook put together by EIDIA (aka artists Paul Lamarre and Melissa Wolf) comes close to the spirit of sustaining life through meager ingredients… like spaghetti or 4 pages of shredded Pravda.

Not so this other title, which approaches cute overload with an abundance of Instagram-worthy illustrated fare—mojitos, an unstructured berry tart, a “manly” burger.…

Do “starving” artists no longer fear being outed as posers?

Successful artists may not worry about that, as they eat whatever and however they want.

Andy Warhol had the taste of an eccentric child.

Marina Abramović takes the ascetic route.

Many have gladly traded the candle in the Chianti bottle for the most rarefied restaurants in town.

Georgia O’Keeffe and Frida Kahlo, PBS Digital Studios’ series the Art Assignment informed us, took cooking—and eating—seriously.

So seriously, their culinary efforts led to cookbooks, which the Art Assignment’s host, curator Sarah Urist Green, tried out on camera.

O’Keeffe, who grew up in Wisconsin on homemade yogurt, homemade cheese, and plentiful homegrown produce, ground her own flour in order to bake daily loaves of whole wheat bread.

Green treats viewers to a brief overview of O’Keeffe’s life and work as she struggles with the grinder. (You might get the same, or better, results if you take a $5 bill to a good bakery right at opening.)

She also tackles the wheat germ Tiger’s Milk smoothie advocated by Adelle Davis, a nutritionist whom O’Keeffe admired, and Green Chiles with Garlic and Oil and Fried Eggs, using recipes from the cookbooks A Painter’s Kitchen and Dinner with Georgia O’Keeffe.

Before attempting the same, you might want to watch the Kahlo-centric episode, above, in which Green discovers a much better method for roasting the poblano peppers she haplessly substituted for New Mexico chiles in O’Keeffe’s egg dish.

Here, they’re used for Chiles Rellenos, a dish whose pronunciation the self-effacing Green butchers, along with a multitude of other Spanish phrases, a fact not lost on the video’s Youtube commenters. They also take issue with the presence of plantains, her preparation of the Nopales Salad, and her cooking skills in general. No wonder Green—a self-proclaimed wussy where serranos are concerned—seems so eager to reach for a shot of tequila as dinner is finally served.

Green chose the dishes for this episode from Frida’s Fiestas: Recipes and Reminiscences of Life with Frida Kahlo by Marie-Pierre Colle and Kahlo’s stepdaughter, Guadalupe Rivera.

Kahlo herself learned to cook from her mother’s copy of El Nuevo Cocinero Mejicano, and from husband Diego Rivera’s first wife, Guadalupe (leading one to wonder if some of that cookbook’s recipes aren’t misattributed to the more famous cook).

As with the O’Keeffe video and the cookbooks cited herein, there’s a wealth of vintage photos and reproduced artwork on display.

Even though Green alludes to Kahlo’s dark side, sensitive stomachs might have trouble with the inclusion of the graphically violent Unos Quantos Piquetitos. Another painting, My Nurse and I is at least related to eating, if not cooking and recipes.

Those with stomachs of steel on the other hand can continue on to another Art Assignment—the supremely gross Meat Sculpture from the Futurist Cookbook.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker in NYC.

At one time or another, we all feel twinges of anxiety about what will constitute the legacy we leave behind. Jerry Gretzinger may well be subject to just the same discomfort, but at least he can point to the Map: an enormous representation, made of thousands and thousands of individually created and continually modified panels, of an entirely fictional land called Ukrania. You can see Jerry’s Map painstakingly laid out in its most up-to-date state in the new People Make Games video above. As interesting as the product is so far, the work that goes into it is just as compelling, which Gretzinger performs every day according to a complex and strictly defined set of procedures dictated by a deck of heavily modified playing cards.

It would take an astute listener to grasp the rules of the project the first time through, but they’re also available for supplementary study at the official site of Gretzinger’s map. They may bring to mind Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies, the deck of cards printed with suggestions meant to dislodge creative jams in the music studio or elsewhere.

The map itself may look more reminiscent of the work of Henry Darger, another “outsider artist” who produced riots of color and haphazard-looking materials with an obsessive underlying order of their own. But unlike Darger, who died in obscurity only for his askew epics to be discovered among his belongings, Gretzinger has become famous for his creation in his lifetime, so much so that there exists an active subreddit of amateurs following his example.

Still, the Map did first have to be rediscovered. What Gretzinger began as the expansion of idle doodles in urban form made during breaks at the ball bearing factory in 1963 had to be shelved in the eighties, when a clothing business he’d started with his wife took off. A couple of decades thereafter, his son’s discovery of the Map in the attic inspired Gretzinger to resume work on it, which has continued apace ever since. When interviewed, he sounds less like a creator than an observer, helplessly watching as the city of Ukrania becomes more abstract as it grows — and as great swathes are inexorably consumed by a white space, made of scraps of his own correspondence and other life artifacts, that he portentously calls “the Void.” Now that he’s in his mid-eighties, Gretzinger appears to find it all more freighted with meaning than ever. Sooner or later, alas the Void comes for us all; what’s left to us is how we prepare for it.

via Metafilter

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

The history of moral philosophy in the West hinges principally on a handful of questions: Is there a God of some sort? An afterlife? Free will? And, perhaps most pressingly for humanists, what exactly is the nature of our obligations to others? The latter question has long occupied philosophers like Immanuel Kant, whose extreme formulation—the “categorical imperative”—flatly rules out making ethical decisions dependent upon particular situations. Kant’s famous example, one that generally gets repeated with a nod to Godwin, involves an axe murderer showing up at your door and asking for the whereabouts of a visiting friend. In Kant’s estimation, telling a lie in this case justifies telling a lie at any time, for any reason. Therefore, it is unethical.

In the video at the top of the post, Harry Shearer narrates a script about Kant’s maxim written by philosopher Nigel Warburton, with whimsical illustrations provided by Cognitive. Part of the BBC and Open University’s “A History of Ideas” series, the video—one of four dealing with moral philosophy—also explains how Kant’s approach to ethics differs from those of utilitarianism.

In the video above, Shearer describes the most utilitarian of thought experiments, the “Trolley Problem.” As described by philosopher Philippa Foot, this scenario imagines having to sacrifice the life of one for those of many. But there is a twist—the second version involves the added crime of physically murdering one person, up close and personal, to save several. An analogous but converse theory is that of philosopher Peter Singer (below) who proposes that our obligations to people in peril right in front of us equal our obligations to those on the other side of the world.

Finally, the last video surveys one of the thorniest issues in moral philosophical history—the “is/ought” divide, as problematic as the ancient Euthyphro dilemma. How, asked David Hume, are we to deduce moral principles from facts about the world that have no moral dimension? Particularly when those facts are never conclusive, are subject to revision, and when new ones get uncovered all the time? The question introduces a seemingly unbridgeable chasm between facts and values. Moral judgments founded on what is or isn’t “natural” flounder before our terror of much of what nature does, and the very partial and fallible nature of our knowledge of it.

The problem is as startling as Hume’s critique of causality, and in part caused Kant to remark that Hume had awakened him from a “dogmatic slumber.” What may strike viewers of the series is just how abstract these questions and examples are—how divorced from the messiness of real world politics, with the exception, perhaps, of Peter Singer. It may be instructive that political philosophy forms a separate branch in the West. While these problems are certainly difficult enough to trouble the sleep of just about any thoughtful person, in our day-to-day lives, our decision making process seems to be much messier, and much more situational, than we’re probably ever aware of.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.

Every four years, humanity undergoes a great increase in its number of soccer fans — or rather, football fans, depending on what part of the world we’re talking about. That’s not to imply that the world otherwise suffers from a dearth of enthusiasts of that particular sport. Nor is football an obscure secondary term: the language of most every country obsessed with the thing itself has localized that name for it, resulting in a variety of words from fútbol to futbol to futebol to Fußball. There remains the matter of calcio, but then, Italians have always done things their own way. So do Americans, as this year’s World Cup has emphasized, but you’ll find that soccer actually turns out not to have originated as yet another awkward custom exclusive to the United States.

In fact, it derives from a few letters of the full British name of the game, “association football.” Commonly heard in the U.K. up until the nineteen-seventies, soccer eventually came in handy on the other side of the pond to differentiate it from what most of the world calls “American football.”

As explained in about 20 minutes in the Geo History video at the top of the post, the history of soccer, football, fútbol, or whatever you may call it is full of facts that will surely surprise those of who only pay it any attention when the World Cup comes around — and may occasionally surprise the die-hards who live and breathe the game even during the off years. For a much deeper (and more humorous) dive into a narrower slice of the past, we also have this two-hour history of the World Cup from football YouTuber Vizeh.

If you want to avoid a name specific to any one national language, you can always refer to “the beautiful game,” but even if that adjective applies to the action on the field, at least on a good day, it sits less easily with the politicking, backbiting, and not-always-above-board dealmaking characteristic of its business and administration at a global scale. The whole enterprise has come to represent all the glories and ugliness of modernity, reduced to a rigidly standardized battlefield on which increasingly many nations of the world aspire to achieve first presence, then domination. For example, South Korea, where I live, has made its seriousness on the pitch sufficiently known over four straight decades of World Cup participation that you might want to learn the Korean word chukgu — at least if the coming match with South Africa goes its way.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

In a conversation with Julian Baggini on why there are so few women in academic philosophy, Mary Warnock once noted that “of all the humanities departments in British universities, only philosophy departments have a mere 25% women members.” That number is even lower in the US. “Why should this be?” Warnock asked. She asserted that the problem may lie with the discipline itself. “I think that academic philosophy has become an extraordinarily inward-looking subject,” she said, “If you pick up a professional journal now, you find little nitpicking responses to previous articles. Women tend to get more easily bored with this than men. Philosophy seems to stop being interesting just when it starts to be professional.”

It’s a provocative claim, one I’m sure many women in philosophy would contest, though the more general idea that academic philosophy has become an arid practice divorced from real life concerns might have wider support. The data on women in academic philosophy presents a very complex picture. “No single intervention is likely to change the climate,” as Tania Lombrozo writes at NPR. Explicit and implicit biases do play a role, as do instances of sexual harassment and coercion by those in positions of power. But another significant issue Warnock seemed to ignore is the way that philosophy is generally taught at the undergraduate level.

In the research on which Lombrozo reports, studies found that “the biggest drop in the proportion of women in the philosophy pipeline seems to be from enrollment in an introductory philosophy class to becoming a philosophy major. At Georgia State, for example, women make up about 55 percent of Introduction to Philosophy students but only around 33 percent of philosophy majors.” This may have to do with the fact that “readings on the syllabus were overwhelmingly by men (over 89 percent).” As Georgia State graduate student Morgan Thompson explained at a conference in 2013:

This problem is compounded by the fact that introductory philosophy textbooks have an even worse gender balance; women account for only 6 percent of authors in a number of introductory philosophy textbooks.

Does this disparity reflect an unalterable truth about the history of philosophy? No, and it can very well be remedied. The Center for the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists is working to do that with a new site, the Encyclopedia of Concise Concepts by Women Philosophers. The joint project of Paderborn University’s Ruth Hagengruber and Cleveland State’s Mary Ellen Waithe, this resource aims to introduce “women philosophers who mostly have been omitted from the philosophical canon despite their historical and philosophical influence.” So far, reports Daily Nous, “there are around 100 entries… with more to be added every few months.”

Each entry is written by a recognized scholar. The easy-to-navigate site has four main sections: Concepts, Keywords, Philosophers, and Contributors. There are a few names most people will recognize, like Mary Wollstonecraft, Ayn Rand, and Simone de Beauvoir. But most of these thinkers will seem obscure, despite their meaningful contributions to various fields of thought. Integrating these philosophers into syllabi and textbooks could go a long way toward retaining women in philosophy departments. As importantly, it will broaden the tradition, giving all students a wider range of perspectives.

For example, much of the academic work on social ethics in democracy might reference Adam Smith’s “Theory of Moral Sentiments” or the prolific 20th century work of John Dewey. But it might overlook the work of Dewey’s contemporary Jane Addams (top), who also wrote critical studies on democracy and education and who “sees a connection,” writes Maurice Hamington in a short entry about her, “between sympathetic understanding and a robust democracy.… For Addams, it is crucial that citizens in a democracy engage with one another to reach across difference to care and find common cause.”

Addams brought her philosophical concerns into real world practice. She made important interventions in the treatment of immigrants and African-Americans in Chicago, supported working mothers, and helped pass child protection laws and end child labor. But while she has long been renowned as a social reformer and Nobel Peace Prize winner, “the dynamics of canon formation,” notes the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “resulted in her philosophical work being largely ignored until the 1990s.” Now, many philosophers recognize that works like Democracy and Social Ethics anticipated key contemporary issues in political philosophy a century ago.

Other thinkers in the Encyclopedia of Concise Concepts by Women Philosophers like Diotima of Mantinea (whom Socrates revered) and early American thinker Mercy Otis Warren made important contributions to the theories of beauty and government, respectively. Yet they may receive no more than a footnote in most undergraduate philosophy courses. This may have less to do with explicit bias than with the way professors themselves have been educated. But the history, and current practice, of philosophy needs the inclusion of these views. Learn more about many historically overlooked women in philosophy at the Encyclopedia here.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2018.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. 

“We are approaching a darkness in the land. Boys and girls are emerging from every level of school with certificates and degrees, but they can’t read, write or calculate. We don’t have academic honesty or intellectual rigor.” That quote may sound like a familiar lament today, but it’s actually drawn from an interview conducted about half a century ago with the physicist and television host Julius Sumner Miller. If that name sounds familiar to you, there’s a fair chance you’re an Australian who grew up between the sixties and the eighties — and it’s hardly impossible that, thanks to his program Why Is It So?, you went on to pursue a career in science or engineering.

Generations of young viewers down under and elsewhere learned from Why Is It So? that physics and its principles could be fun. Even if you weren’t among them at the time, you can now watch full episodes of the show uploaded to YouTube by ABC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

As you may notice after just a few seconds of listening to him, Miller himself was American. The Massachusetts-born son of immigrants from Latvia and Lithuania, he studied physics at Boston University and thereafter taught and performed research at various institutions (befriending Albert Einstein along the way) before taking a long-term position at El Camino College in Torrance, California in 1952.

Miller’s popularity at El Camino, the school’s proximity to Hollywood, and television’s rapid expansion into a mass medium led to his launching Why Is It So? on KNXT in Los Angeles in 1959. By the mid-sixties, he was also explaining scientific phenomena on Disney’s Mickey Mouse Club, Great Moments in Science, and Science and Its Magic, as well as on Steve Allen’s late-night talk show. He made his debut on Australian television when the University of Sydney brought him out as a visiting lecturer. The appearance went wrong when he couldn’t perform his standard trick of driving a drinking straw through a potato, but what it nevertheless got him — apart from an office filled with the domestic straws he’d jokingly criticized on-air — was a new home for Why Is It So? on ABC.

ABC has so far made available seven full broadcasts originally aired between the early sixties and the early seventies. Despite their black-and-white production and lack of visual effects, they hold up well today in both educational and entertainment value. However engaging his personality as what we would now call a science communicator, it seems that “Miller could be a terror in the classroom,” according to his Los Angeles Times obituary from 1987, “intolerant of misspelled words or misplaced punctuation” and insistent that “most faculty were not rigid enough and that students were not learning enough.” He’d hardly be pleased with what’s happened to intellectual standards in the nearly four decades since his death, but he’d surely appreciate that his teaching continues to reach “everybody ages four to 94,” as he liked to describe his audience. Age, nationality, and even credentials didn’t matter; what counted was genuine curiosity and the willingness to pursue it, whether in the classroom or the living room.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

The ill-fated romance of Abelard and Héloïse may be a permanent cultural fixture, but it’s worth asking what any of us understand about Abelard or Héloïse themselves. Before the two ever crossed paths, Peter Abelard was already a celebrated philosopher in France whose classes drew large and enthusiastic crowds. This was, bear in mind, a time and place where arguing realism versus conceptualism amounted to a spectator sport. A modern framing might analogize him to a cross between an intellectual athlete and a public intellectual. That he would attract admiring pupils is a given, but none seems to have exuded the sheer allure of Héloïse d’Argenteuil.

That allure, moreover, was of the mind at least as much as of the body. “A prodigy from a young age, Héloïse was fluent in several languages and renowned for her poetry, musical prowess, and fiery wit,” explains the narrator of the new video from Aeon above. ”

As women couldn’t attend university, her uncle and guardian arranged for her to continue her education with a renowned young scholar.” That, of course, was Abelard, who didn’t need too much one-on-one time with his new pupil before deciding to cast off his famously ascetic ways and roll the dice on love. Alas, we all know at least the more dramatic points of how it turned out: castration for Abelard, self-imposed cloistering for the both of them. Yet even that didn’t mark the end of their association.

In her nunhood, Héloïse “came to possess a letter Abelard intended to send to a friend, eulogizing their time together. In response, she initiated a years-long correspondence.” The letters “are steeped in longing, yet they transcend the sighs of star-crossed lovers, weaving heart-wrenching personal sentiment with trailblazing theology and philosophy.” At one point, Héloïse brings her philosophical mind to bear on the problem of their own relationship, arriving at her simultaneous guilt and innocence on the premise that “it is not the deed, but the intention of the doer, which makes the crime.” Here we have an early example of what philosophers today call “intentionalist,” as opposed to “consequentialist,” ethics. How much comfort her argument that “there can be no sin in an action done out of love” provided Abelard is unclear. But surely he appreciated its intellectual merits, given that his mind, at least, was left wholly intact.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

From Newton’s mechanical calculations to Einstein’s general and special relativity to the baffling indeterminacy of quantum mechanics, the discipline of physics has become increasingly arcane and complex, and less and less governed by orderly laws. This presents a problem for the layperson, who struggles to understand how Newtonian physics, with its predictable observations of physical forces, relates to the parallax and paradox of later discoveries. “If you don’t already know physics,” says physicist Dominic Walliman in the video above, it’s difficult sometimes to see how all of these different subjects are related to each other.” So Walliman has provided a helpful visual aid: an animated video map showing the connections between classical physics, quantum physics, and relativity.

Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation and his invention of calculus best represent the first domain. Here we see the inseparable relationship between physics and math, “the bedrock that the world of physics is built from.” When we come to one of Newton’s less well-known pursuits, optics, we see how his interest in light waves anticipated James Clerk Maxwell’s work on electromagnetic fields. After this initial connection, the proliferation of subdisciplines intensifies: fluid mechanics, chaos theory, thermodynamics… the guiding force of them all is the study of energy in various states. The heuristics of classical physics prevailed, and worked perfectly well, until about 1900, when the clockwork universe of Newtonian mechanics exploded with new problems, both at very large and very small levels of description.

It is here that physics branches into relativity and quantum mechanics, which Walliman explains in brief. While we are likely familiar with the very basics of Einstein’s relativity, quantum physics tends to get a little less coverage in the typical course of a general education, due to its complexity, perhaps, as well as the fact that at their edges, quantum explanations fail. While quantum field theory, says Walliman, is “the best description of the universe we have,” once we come to quantum gravitation, we reach “the giant Chasm of Ignorance” that speculative and controversial ideas like string theory and loop quantum gravity attempt to bridge.

At the “Chasm of Ignorance,” our journey through the domains of physics ends, and we end up back in the airy realm where it all began, philosophy. Those of us with a typical general education in the sciences may find that we have a much better understanding of the field’s intellectual geography. As a handy reminder, you might even wish to purchase a poster copy of Walliman’s Map of Physics, which you can see en miniature above. (It’s also available as a digital download here.) Just below, the charming, laid-back physicist takes the stage in a TEDx talk to demonstrate effective science communication, explaining “quantum physics for 7 year olds,” or, as it were, 37, 57, or 77-year olds.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. 

If you had to pick a single figure to represent the concept of the film auteur, you could do much worse than Stanley Kubrick. That’s not to call him the greatest director who ever lived, nor even to call his body of work the greatest in cinema. But no filmography more clearly bears the stamp of a single presiding intelligence across various eras, genres, and styles. On one level, Kubrick never made the same movie twice. On another, each is but a facet of the larger project of rendering on film his ever more aesthetically immaculate, ever less comforting worldview, one that encompasses both Dr. Strangelove and The Shining, both Lolita and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

For that and other reasons, Kubrick’s filmography has long occupied a peculiar position in cinema culture. Despite having provided generations of moviegoers their introduction to the “art house,” it also repays the most serious degrees of engagement and scrutiny. Somehow, as Lewis Bond puts it in the recorded Twitch stream above, Kubrick has remained both cinema’s gateway drug and its “final boss.”

You may know Bond’s name — or more likely, recognize his voice — from the many film-related video essays of his (under the banners of Channel Criswell, The Cinema Cartography, and now The House of Tabula) we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture, including an exegesis of Kubrick he made nearly a decade ago. It says something that even someone as auteur-obsessed for as long as he’s been can’t resist another trip to the well.

Over the two-hour course of his stream, Bond discusses each and every one of Kubrick’s films while ranking them against each other. It will hardly provoke much controversy that he starts at the bottom with the ramshackle thriller Fear and Desire, the debut feature that even Kubrick himself attempted to strike from the record. What really gets cinephiles talking are the relative merits of the pictures higher up the list: Does The Shining transcend horror, or Dr. Strangelove transcend comedy? Is the sensationalism of A Clockwork Orange or the stateliness of Barry Lyndon to be counted for or against those films? Is Eyes Wide Shut a late masterpiece or, as some thought in 1999, a late mess? Bond jokes that his is the objectively correct ranking of Kubrick’s filmography, and perhaps it does align with critical consensus on many points. But few film-lovers will be entirely free of the temptation to watch through it and judge again for themselves.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to travel back in time and look over the shoulder of one of the early 20th century’s greatest artists to watch him work? In this brief film from 1926, we get to see the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky as he turns a blank canvas into one of his distinctive abstract compositions.

The film was made at the Galerie Neumann-Nierendorf in Berlin by Hans Cürlis, a pioneer in the making of art documentaries. At the time, Kandinsky was teaching at the Bauhaus. It was the same year he published his second major treatise, On Point and Line to Plane. The contrasting straight lines and curves that Kandinsky paints in the movie are typical of this period, when his approach was becoming less intuitive and more consciously geometric.

Kandinsky believed that an artist could reach deeper truths by dispensing with the depiction of external objects and by looking within, and despite his analytic turn at the Bauhaus he continued to speak of art in deeply mystical terms. In On Point and Line to Plane, Kandinsky writes:

The work of Art mirrors itself upon the surface of our consciousness. However, its image extends beyond, to vanish from the surface without a trace when the sensation has subsided. A certain transparent, but defininite glass-like partition, abolishing direct contact from within, seems to exist here as well. Here, too, exists the possibility of entering art’s message, to participate actively, and to experience its pulsating life with all one’s senses.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2012.

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The term apocryphal may sound antiquated, but any reasonably serious reader encounters it fairly often, even in recently published texts. In the modern usage, it usually describes words or events that, despite probably never having been spoken or taken place, tend to be cited as if they had. Hochelaga creator Tommie Trelawny says that the word comes from a Greek term meaning “hidden,” and was used to refer to disputed texts not included in the mainstream Bible. Some churches acknowledge these apocrypha, and others reject them. As for what the unpredictable and often bizarre material, even by biblical standards, in these “hidden books,” that’s what Trelawny explains in his new video above.

In the book of Tobit, a highly unfortunate man and woman receive salvation from the angel Raphael, who uses fish guts to cure their physical and demonic afflictions. In the book of Judith, the titular Israelite widow deceives and slays the Assyrian general Holofernes, a scene immortalized by Caravaggio (and rendered even more viscerally, as previously featured here on Open Culture, by Artemisia Gentileschi).

In one chapter of the book of Daniel, the titular prophet plays the lawyer in a kind of courtroom drama that has a couple of men getting their comeuppance for falsely accusing a woman of adultery; in another, he turns detective, investigating the matters of a statue said to come alive at night and a dragon being worshipped as a god.

There’s quite a bit more, all of it eventful, none of it universally accepted among the holy texts of Christianity. The peculiar status of the apocrypha dates back to the fourth century, when the scholar Jerome embarked upon a translation of the Bible into Latin. This first required gathering up all extant versions of the book, which didn’t necessarily agree with each other: one, written in Greek, included quite a few more books than the Bible in Hebrew. It was Jerome who, unable to confirm these extra books’ authenticity, labeled them “apocrypha,” placing them in a section that eventually got them regarded as a kind of second canon: “deleted scenes,” as Trelawny puts it, accompanying the feature that is the Bible. As for the extent to which they reflect the auteur’s true vision, that can only be — and remain — a matter of debate.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

When Clare Torry went into the studio to record her now-legendary vocals for Pink Floyd’s “Great Gig in the Sky,” the centerpiece of 1973’s Dark Side of the Moon, neither the singer nor the band was particularly impressed with each other. David Gilmour remembered the moment in an interview on the album’s 30th anniversary:

Clare Torry didn’t really look the part. She was Alan Parsons’ idea. We wanted to put a girl on there, screaming orgasmically. Alan had worked with her previously, so we gave her a try. And she was fantastic. We had to encourage her a little bit. We gave her some dynamic hints: “Maybe you’d like to do this piece quietly, and this piece louder.” She did maybe half a dozen takes, and then afterwards we compiled the final performance out of all the bits. It wasn’t done in one single take.

Asked the follow-up question “what did she look like?,” Gilmour replied, “like a nice English housewife.”

Torry, for her part, was hardly starstruck. “If it had been the Kinks,” she later said, “I’d have been over the moon.” She also remembers the session very differently. “They had no idea what they wanted,” she says. Told only “we don’t want any words,” she decided to “pretend to be an instrument.” She remembers “having a little go” and knocking out the session in a couple takes.

This Rashomon scenario involves not only faulty memory but also the legal question as to who composed the song’s melody and vocal concept—a question eventually decided, in 2004, in Torry’s favor, entitling her to royalties.

She clearly wasn’t about to become a touring member of the band, even after the album’s massive success and two subsequent tours. Still, while Torry may not have suited Gilmour’s physical preferences for female singers, and while she may not have thought much of Pink Floyd, she has appeared live with their different iterations over the years, including a show at the Rainbow Theatre in London just months after the album’s release (further up). Later, in 1987, Torry appeared again, this time with Roger Waters at Wembley Stadium on his K.A.O.S. on the Road Tour.

Torry would then join the David Gilmour-led Pink Floyd in 1990 for “Great Gig in the Sky” at Knebworth. I do not think she resembles an English housewife in the concert film at the top—or at least no more than the rest of the band look like middle-aged English husbands. But she still pulls off the soaring vocal, more or less, seventeen years after she first stepped into the studio, having little idea who Pink Floyd was or what would become of that fateful session.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2020.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.