Before she became a composer of electronic music, Else Marie Pade was a sick child listening to the radio. Frequent kidney inflammations consigned her to bed for long periods of time, which would constitute neither her last nor her harshest experience of confinement. She was still young when the Nazis occupied her homeland of Denmark during World War II, and perhaps her youth explains her decision to spit on a column of marching German soldiers. She escaped capture that day, running right into the Danish Resistance, for which she distributed underground newspapers and trained in the use of explosives to cut off the enemy’s telephone lines in the event of an Allied invasion. Arrested by the Gestapo in 1944, she never did get to execute that plan, but her real ambitions turned out to be much larger.

“I screamed out loud in fear and helplessness in my solitary cell — but no one came,” Pade wrote in an essay published in The Wire. “It was then I promised myself that if I survived this I would work with music for the rest of my life. And then I felt a strange calm: light, warmth and love were all around me. I was no longer alone. This was the turning point in my life.” The very next day, “I started scratching staves on the prison wall with my garter belt fastener, and wrote out the theme that had come to me, inspired by the vision of the night.” Though infuriated at first, the Commandant in charge told her he would “make sure that the Red Cross brought me music paper and writing utensils so I would refrain from violence and would not dirty the wall any more.”

Pade did all she could to compose during her time as a prisoner of war. After her transfer to the Frøslevlejren internment camp, she was reunited with her piano teacher Karen Brieg, who’d brought her into the Resistance in the first place. “Karen wrote out Danish songs for a three-part women’s choir, and I wrote schlagers — with which I wanted to earn money for music studies when we were released.” Her compatriots in the women’s barracks promised to give her the opportunity to study at the Royal Danish Academy of Music after the war’s end, which is exactly what she did. Though she entered the school with thoughts of becoming a pianist, a 1952 Danmarks Radio broadcast on Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrète permanently changed the course of her artistic life.

Those sound collages turned musical experiences sent Pade back to her bouts of childhood sickness, during which her chief pleasures came from listening to the world around her. The result of this inspiration was the first work of electronic musique concrète composed in Denmark, A Day at Dyrehavsbakken. Learning from Schaeffer, and later from other electronic-music pioneers like Karlheinz Stockhausen, György Ligeti and Pierre Boulez, Pade developed the ability to realize the musical worlds she’s been exploring in her head all along. Their austere soundscapes could hardly be farther from the sentimental schlager ballads she’d written to keep spirits up in the barracks, but as you can hear in the selection from 1985 to 1995 presented in the compilation above, the sonic imagination that heard an ambient symphony in dripping sponges, whistling kettles, singing birds, and trotting horses remains exhilarating today.

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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.

We have any number of reasons for difficulty getting to sleep, not least worries about the future. This is hardly a recent phenomenon, and indeed practices meant to clarify the nature of events to come may be older than civilization itself. In fact, many of us moderns trust the old ways of fortune-telling more than the new. Take the cards of the Tarot, often featured here on Open Culture, whose recognizable European form dates back to at least the fourteenth century. But as explained in the new video above from YouTube channel Bedtime & Historian, their pre-history begins longer ago and farther away, with the invention of the playing card itself in Tang-Dynasty China. For Tarot decks weren’t originally a means of glimpsing the future, but of passing time in the present.

In the 400 years or so between the civilizational journey playing cards made along the Silk Road and their first employment as a divination tool by French occultists, many a game of Tarot — or tarocchi, Tarock, and so on — took place in Europe. Monetary stakes, and sometimes considerable ones, were not unknown, which drew the ire of both state and Church authorities.

Yet not only did the cards survive these attempts at repression, they evolved along numerous long and winding cultural paths, taking artistically elaborate and evocative forms that still capture the imagination today. At the same time, the structure of the Tarot deck used by esotericists has remained remarkably stable, with its 78 cards consisting of 22 Major Arcana and 56 Minor Arcana, the latter divided into four suits (like the standard deck used for poker or blackjack).

If you aren’t sure what some of those terms mean, know that all is clarified over the course of the video’s nearly three-hour runtime, the final third of which is dedicated to explaining the identities, characteristics, and meanings of the cards themselves. It’s worth a listen as a kind of advance preparation if you’ve considered going in to get a Tarot reading done by one of the professionals who still ply their trade all around the world. (In Korea, where I live, they even work out of booths set up on the sidewalk, a true convenience for commuters in need of spiritual guidance on the way home.) True to Bedtime & Historian’s concept, the narrator speaks as slowly and calmly as possible, with a fire crackling in the background. You’ll learn a lot about Tarot, certainly, but you may also find that your sleep troubles have been solved before you’ve drawn your first card.

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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.

Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I mentally revisit the various homes of my childhood, wandering from room to room, turning on lights and peering in closets until I conk out.

Turns out these imaginary tours are also handy mnemonic tools, as Vox’s Dean Peterson explains above.

Hey, that’s good news… isn’t the subconscious rumored to do some heavy lifting in terms of processing information?

Peterson conquered a self-described bad memory, at least temporarily, by traipsing around his apartment, depositing vivid sentence-by-sentence clues that would eventually help him recite by heart one of his favorite chapters in Moby Dick.

In truth, he was planting these clues in his hippocampus, the relatively small structure in the brain that’s a critical player when it comes to memory, including the spatial memories that allow us to navigate familiar locations without seeming to give the matter any thought.

What made it stick was pairing his everyday coordinates to extraordinary visuals.

Chapter 37, for those keeping track at home, is a monologue for Captain Ahab in which he describes himself as not just mad but “madness maddened.” Here’s the first sentence:

I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where’er I sail.

Not the easiest text for 21st-century heads to wrap around, though with a little effort, most of us get the gist.

Let’s not get hung up on literary interpretation here, though, folks. Having settled on his front stoop as the first stop of his memory palace Peterson refrained from picturing frothy spume lapping at the lowermost step. Instead he plunked down a funeral wreath and director John Waters, pale of suit and cheek, weeping. Get it? White? Wake? Pale cheeks?

After which Peterson moved on to the next sentence.

There are 38 in all, and after several days of practice in which he mentally walked the image-strewn course of his apartment-cum-Memory Palace, Peterson was able to regale his coworkers with an off-book recitation.

The time factor will definitely be a letdown for those hoping for a low-commitment party trick.

Peterson spent three-to-four hours a day pacing his spatial memory, admiring the oddities he himself had placed there.

The incredulous comments from those questioning the efficiency of giving up half a day to memorize a page and a half are balanced by testimonials from those who’ve met with success, using the Memory Palace method to retain vast amounts of data prior to an exam.

That may, ultimately, be a better use of the Memory Palace. Peterson gets an A for spitting out the lines as written, but his expression is that of an actor auditioning with material he has not yet mastered. (No shade on Peterson’s acting talent or lack thereof—even great actors get this face when their lines are shaky. One friend doesn’t consider herself off book until she can get all the way through her monologue whilst hopping on one foot.)

For more information on building a Memory Palace, refer, as Peterson did, to author Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, or to his appearance on Adam Grant’s TED Work Life podcast. Stream it here:

If you would like to go whale to whale with Peterson, below is the text that he installed in his Memory Palace, compliments of Herman Melville:

I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where’er I sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass.

Yonder, by ever-brimming goblet’s rim, the warm waves blush like wine. The gold brow plumbs the blue. The diver sun- slow dived from noon- goes down; my soul mounts up! she wearies with her endless hill. Is, then, the crown too heavy that I wear? this Iron Crown of Lombardy. Yet is it bright with many a gem; I the wearer, see not its far flashings; but darkly feel that I wear that, that dazzlingly confounds. ‘Tis iron- that I know- not gold. ‘Tis split, too- that I feel; the jagged edge galls me so, my brain seems to beat against the solid metal; aye, steel skull, mine; the sort that needs no helmet in the most brain-battering fight!

Dry heat upon my brow? Oh! time was, when as the sunrise nobly spurred me, so the sunset soothed. No more. This lovely light, it lights not me; all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne’er enjoy. Gifted with the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power; damned, most subtly and most malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise! Good night-good night! (waving his hand, he moves from the window.)

‘Twas not so hard a task. I thought to find one stubborn, at the least; but my one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels, and they revolve. Or, if you will, like so many ant-hills of powder, they all stand before me; and I their match. Oh, hard! that to fire others, the match itself must needs be wasting! What I’ve dared, I’ve willed; and what I’ve willed, I’ll do! They think me mad- Starbuck does; but I’m demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness that’s only calm to comprehend itself! The prophecy was that I should be dismembered; and- Aye! I lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer. Now, then, be the prophet and the fulfiller one. That’s more than ye, ye great gods, ever were. I laugh and hoot at ye, ye cricket-players, ye pugilists, ye deaf Burkes and blinded Bendigoes! I will not say as schoolboys do to bullies- Take some one of your own size; don’t pommel me! No, ye’ve knocked me down, and I am up again; but ye have run and hidden. Come forth from behind your cotton bags! I have no long gun to reach ye. Come, Ahab’s compliments to ye; come and see if ye can swerve me. Swerve me? ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves! man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2019.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine.  

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

Many a foreigner has visited England and found it an unexpectedly surreal place. Some of that effect has to do with encountering familiar icons — Big Ben, double-decker Routemaster buses, Marmite — in cold, damp reality. More of it may be induced by the country’s simultaneously thoroughgoing cultures of normality and eccentricity, an endless source of inspiration for Monty Python’s Flying Circus and much other British comedy since. Yet England came relatively late to Surrealism, or rather, Surrealism came late to England. When the International Surrealist Exhibition opened at the New Burlington Galleries behind London’s Royal Academy in the summer of 1936, the Manchester Evening News decried it as “a travesty of everything that’s decent.” Naturally, the show was a smash hit.

On display was work by artists including Pablo Picasso, René Magritte, Max Ernst, Alexander Calder, Giorgio de Chirico, Marcel Duchamp, Alberto Giacometti, Paul Klee, Man Ray, and Salvador Dalí, who turned up in person to deliver a lecture on “Authentic Paranoiac Phantoms.” In order to “descend to the subconscious” with a properly Surrealist literalism, he rented a diving suit and helmet from a local outfitter for his appearance. (You can see an actual image from 1936 here.) “The diving suit had extremely heavy lead shoes which I could barely lift,” he writes in his autobiography, as translated by Haakon Chevalier. “I therefore had to walk very slowly, leaning on friends who helped to move me, as though I were completely paralyzed, and thus I appeared before the audience holding two luxurious white Russian wolfhounds on a leash.”

Only after he’d been talking for a few minutes did Dalí realize that “it would be impossible for me to deliver my speech through the glass window of my helmet. Moreover, I had been shut up in this thing for ten minutes and became heated from the exertions I had made in walking across the stage to reach my chair, so that I was dripping with perspiration, and felt faint and on the point of suffocating.” With the technician who’d screwed the helmet on in the first place nowhere to be found, his wife Gala and friend Edward James worked desperately to free him, eventually taking a hammer to the bolts. “At each blow I thought I would faint.” When Dalí finally emerged, the audience, having assumed it had all been an act, “was impressed by my really deathly pallor, which constituted the accurate gauge of that Dalinian dramatic element which never fails to attend my most trivial acts and undertakings.”

As uncompromisingly as they made their declarations to change the world through sheer force of nonsense, the Surrealists also understood that the show must go on. Dalí moved on to the visual portion of his lecture, presenting slides out of order and, for the most part, upside down. This was just one of the attractions with which the International Surrealist Exhibition drew 30,000 visitors during its three-week run, and “had it not been for the gathering storm clouds of war in Europe,” writes the Guardian’s Joanna Moorhead, “it might have gone on to achieve far more.” The old English intolerance for Gallic self-seriousness would also have made things difficult for Surrealism as the likes of Dalí, Duchamp, and André Breton conceived it. Or perhaps the domestic variety was simply enough: as critic and poet Herbert Read puts it in the exhibition’s catalog, a nation that has produced both William Blake and Lewis Carroll is to the manner born.

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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 1924, Zenon Komissarenko, Youry Merkulov and Nikolai Khodataev produced Interplanetary Revolution, which might just be one of the strangest Soviet propaganda films ever produced.

First, the film is animated using not only traditional cel animation but also collage and stop motion, giving the work a queasy, disorienting feel. A bit like looking at a painting by Henry Darger.

Then there is the film’s story. As an intertitle proclaims, this is “a tale about Comrade Coninternov, the Red Army Warrior who flew to Mars, and vanquished all the capitalists on the planet!!” This already sounds better than John Carter.

The movie, however, is rather hard to follow without either the appropriate amount of revolutionary fervor or, perhaps, hallucinogens. Interplanetary Revolution opens with a wild-eyed, ax-wielding bulldog with a top hat – a capitalist, obviously. Other capitalists, with swastikas on their foreheads, suck the blood from a hapless member of the proletariat. (By the early 1920s, Germany’s nationalist right had adopted the swastika, and Soviet propagandists quickly used it to brand capitalists as fascists.) Then the revolution comes and a pantless capitalist demon loses his mind after devouring a copy of Pravda. Next, the capitalists board a giant flying shoe and fly off into space. From there, the film gets kind of weird.

You can watch the whole thing above. It’s also added to our list of Free Animated Films, a subset of our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

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

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Jonathan Crow is a writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. 

There was a time when you could just go out and buy an Enigma machine. In the early nineteen-twenties, any organization with a need to keep its communications secret could order a few of those brand-new devices from Germany and rest assured that any messages encoded using them would be safe from prying eyes. It didn’t take long for the military to catch on to the Enigma’s usefulness. Just a few years after the machine came on the market, it had been adopted by the German Navy, Army, and Air Force, and made possible the rapid, secret coordination central to the technique we now call blitzkrieg. When World War II began, Axis forces were confident, as anyone in possession of an unbreakable code might well be.

As history played out, of course, that code turned out to be breakable. That this came as a surprise to the Nazis makes sense if you watch the new video above from Veritasium, which opens up an actual Enigma machine and explains its inner workings. Each letter typed into its keyboard passes through a series of interchangeable rotors wired together, then comes back through in the opposite direction, resulting in a particular substitute letter.

Each character entered advances at least one of the rotors, each of which turns at a different speed, meaning that the already complex substitution cipher constantly changes. To make it even trickier, the Nazis made modifications to their Enigma machines, including a telephone-operator-style plugboard that expanded the possible encryption keys to 7 x 10¹⁸: an infinite-seeming number that fairly cried out for the mathematical services of Alan Turing.

Already famous for having come up with the “Turing machine,” which could theoretically manipulate strings of symbols in what we’d now call an algorithmic fashion, he was recruited by Britain’s wartime codebreaking headquarters at Bletchley Park, where experts were already hard at work reverse-engineering the Enigma machine. There he considered flaws in the design of the device, such as its inability to encrypt any given letter as itself, and the ways in which its human operators used it, such as making predictable weather reports. Exploiting these weaknesses required building a non-theoretical computation engine, the Bombe, to grind through all possibilities at what would then have seemed an unfathomable speed. The intelligence the Bombe produced contributed to the success of the surprise D‑Day invasion and may have taken years off the potential ravages of World War II. It wouldn’t have happened without Turing’s formidable intelligence — or his understanding that you need a machine to outsmart a machine.

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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.

Critical theorists like Theodor Adorno may have overreached in claiming that all mass culture is mediocre, mechanized propaganda made to justify the status quo. But that doesn’t mean they were entirely wrong. Over and over we see even the most subversive art, literature, film, and music has a way of being tamed and Bowdlerized. Global mega-corporate industries don’t need to censor what they don’t like; they only need to buy it, rebrand it, or price it out of reach.

So what? Why do we need challenging, independent art when we have endless entertainment? Is the concept a nostalgic, elitist, Eurocentric idea? Artists have justified the need for art since antiquity, with poetic and logical arguments of every kind. But Dada artists of the early 20th century broke ranks, building their movement on the insight that no defense could possibly mean anything when it came to art’s purpose, especially in the face of the technocratic slaughter of World War I.

When the hyperrationalism of modernity led to mass death and destruction, the only humane response was to declare war on rationalization—to “destroy the hoaxes of reason,” as French artist Jean Arp put it. “For the disillusioned artists of the Dada movement,” the Museum of Modern Art explains, “the war merely confirmed the degradation of social structures that led to such violence: corrupt and nationalist politics, repressive social values, and unquestioning conformity of culture and thought.”

Dada took a combative stance against, for one thing, the insistence that art justify its existence to win establishment approval. “All activity is vain,” declared poet Tristan Tzara in his 1918 “Dada Manifesto,” including the “monetary system, pharmaceutical product, or a bare leg advertising the ardent sterile spring…. The beginnings of Dada were not the beginnings of art, but of disgust” with the ossified culture of the “nice, nice bourgeois,” who would preserve at any cost “the possibility of wallowing in cushions and good things to eat.”

“And so Dada,” wrote Tzara, “was born of a need for independence, of a distrust toward unity.” Such declarations aside, the movement was decidedly unified in its aims. “For us, art is not an end in itself,” poet Hugo Ball wrote. “It is an opportunity for the true perception and criticism of the times we live in.” This critique required new experimental techniques that deformed and repurposed the technologies of mass culture.

The undertaking would not have been possible without a Dada publishing wing that turned out scores of journals, magazines, books, leaflets, essays, manifestos, etc., written, designed, edited, illustrated, photographed, and controlled by the artists themselves. They might find no small amount of irony in the fact that their productions have received the ultimate institutional sanction: housed in “nice, nice bourgeois” museums, libraries, and universities around the world.

The University of Iowa’s International Dada Archive has amassed a considerable number of Dada publications and offers a wealth of high-quality scanned images of the originals on their site. “The first section” of their Digital Library “includes some of the major periodicals of the Dada movement from Zurich, Berlin, Paris, and elsewhere.”

The second section of the site “includes books by some of the participants in the Dada movement, as well as some of the more ephemeral Dada-era publications, such as exhibition catalogs and broadsides.” You’ll find writings by all of the artists mentioned above, as well as other well-known names like Max Ernst, Paul Eluard, George Grosz, Man Ray, Francis Picabia, and more.

All of these publications are, of course, in their original European languages, though you can find translations of many documents online. The most influential Dada magazine in English, Alfred Stieglitz’s 291, will give monolingual readers a flavor of the larger scene. Published in New York between 1915 and 1916, the short-lived journal included many of the major European names. Its first issue covered experiments like “simultanism,” “sincerism,” and “idiotism,” and introduced visual poetry to American readers. Issue 5–6 featured on its cover one of the weird, nonsensical machines of Francis Picabia.

Dada splintered into other movements before its artists were forced out of Europe or hounded into obscurity by the Nazis. Their unified attempt to fragment and disrupt the dominance of mass culture was itself fragmented and disrupted by a horrific new war machine. But while their ideas may have been co-opted, their spirit may yet live on. Inspired by their work, perhaps a new generation will take up the Sisyphean task of making radical, critical, experimental art to subvert the homogenizing juggernaut of the culture industry.

Enter the University of Iowa’s Digital Dada Library here.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2019.

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

We venerate Galileo Galilei for daring to speak the scientific truth in the face of severe institutional opposition. He publicly acknowledged that the Earth revolves around the Sun in a time when the Church would rather he didn’t, displaying a bloody-mindedness that he seems to have acquired with age. Decades earlier, in the first stage of his career, he found himself (circa 1588) tasked by the Florentine Academy with calculating the precise dimensions of hell as described in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Dutifully applying himself to this now-absurd-sounding work, he determined that the underworld’s roof had to be centered in Jerusalem, as wide as the radius of the entire Earth, and no less than 600 kilometers thick.

Not that any of this was based on frivolous reasoning. As a model for the dimensions of hell’s roof, for instance, Galileo looked over to Filippo Brunelleschi’s dome, which had topped the Florence Cathedral for a century and a half at that point. Galileo’s calculations of hell’s dimensions contradicted an earlier model proposed by the scholar Alessandro Vellutello. Instead, they supported a model developed by architect Antonio Manetti, whose drawings appear here.

That Manetti was a fellow Florentine, and Vellutello was from Florence’s longtime rival Lucca could well have counted among the motivating factors. But we must bear in mind that, in the sixteenth century, people really did want to get these facts straight — if “facts” be the proper term.

The attempt to reconcile scripture with objectivity absorbed the lives of many highly intelligent people throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. However hopeless that goal could be, the thought Galileo devoted to the problem may have resulted in a genuine breakthrough. Mathematician and science historian Mark Peterson, previously featured here on Open Culture, has argued that his calculations of Dante’s non-Euclidean, topology-curved universe — as we might plausibly describe it today — laid out the basis for what would become mathematical physics. In any case, the young Galileo’s lectures at the Florentine Academy landed him a job as a mathematics lecturer at the University of Pisa, as good a reason as any for him to keep his private doubts to himself. When it comes to science and religion, as he must have known, you’ve got to pick your battles.

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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.

Before he became a novelist, Haruki Murakami ran a jazz bar in Tokyo, and music has filled his novels ever since. For your listening pleasure, NTS Radio has created two playlists of the jazz and classical music referenced in his fiction. Together, they run nearly five hours and feature everyone from John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and Thelonious Monk to Schubert, Liszt, and Mozart. Our suggestion: Pick up a Murakami novel, press play, and let the music become the soundtrack to your reading. Enjoy!

via Kottke

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One often-repeated anecdote about Milton Friedman has the famous economist visiting a canal under construction in nineteen-sixties China. Noticing the sheer number of human laborers digging away with shovels, he asked the official in charge why they weren’t getting the work done faster with excavators and other modern machines. The bureaucrat explained to him that doing it by hand created more jobs. Friedman’s reply: “If it’s jobs you want, you should give those men spoons instead.” Whether or not this exchange ever actually happened, it illustrates a conflict that’s arisen more than once in the history of civilization, possibly since the dawn of industrialization — and at least since the heyday of the Luddites.

According to the University of Cambridge, that heyday came in 1812, the year of “an assault by some 150 armed laborers on a Huddersfield mill, in which soldiers opened fire on the mob to stop them breaking into the premises, fatally wounding two attackers.” This was the culmination of a series of protests across England, all of them inspired by anger at “new technologies, like automated looms, which were being used in the textile industry in place of the skilled work of artisans, threatening their livelihoods as a result.” These desperately infuriated protesters, whose documented actions include the murder of a Yorkshire mill owner, loudly expressed allegiance to one Ned Ludd, a weaver said to have taken the bold step of smashing a couple of newfangled stocking frames some 25 years before.

The story of Ludd’s early stand against mechanization may be even more questionable than the one about Milton Friedman and the spoons, but his name survives today nevertheless. In fact, it’s undergone somewhat of a revival thanks to the artificial-intelligence boom of recent years, during which even the modern “knowledge workers” have come to fear the trampling of their livelihoods under technology’s inexorable march. Their calls for restrictions on the development and deployment of AI are, in one side’s framing of the argument, merely the latest public spasm of Luddism, a movement explained in the video above from The History Guy. How many here in the twenty-first century, after all, would argue that the mass production of socks ultimately constituted a real loss for humanity?

Luddism never did count a large proportion of the English labor force as its own. Rather, the movement appealed to “a relatively ‘elite’ group” of legally protected workers only allowed into their professions after years of apprenticeship, at which point “they tended to feel that they were owed a living.” Nor did the conditions, hours, and compensation at the factories then springing up seem favorable compared to the way of life enjoyed by their predecessors. Similar sentiments may underlie the “Luddite clubs” forming on college campuses, on which NPR has reported, or this year’s social media-free “Summer of Ludd” at the New School, to say nothing of ongoing protests against data-center construction. It would be fascinating to hear what genuine nineteenth-century Luddites would make of our situation. Perhaps, one day, we can use AI to resurrect them.

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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.

Reading is unnatural. This will hardly come as a surprise to any child trying to put off his homework for just one more hour of watching other kids play Minecraft. Yet there really are implications worth considering if we accept that our cognitive systems didn’t evolve to process text in the same way as they evolved to handle vision and speech. Speaking on an evolutionary historical scale, “we haven’t had enough time to develop a dedicated reading brain,” says UCLA neuroscientist Rebecca Gotlieb in the BBC World Service video above. For the time being, in a kind of cognitive jerry-rigging, “we co-opt parts of the brain involved in vision and auditory processing and language and attention and affect.”

That was true for readers and writers of Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics five millennia ago. It still is for readers and writers of the many scripts in use today, from the Latin alphabet to Chinese characters to the Arabic abjad, each of which has its own influence on its users’ neurological architecture. One of the biggest differences between then and now is the scale of reading: ancient Sumeria and Egypt seem to have had literacy rates around one percent, a number comprising mostly scribes, priests, and nobles, while the global average today comes in around 88 percent and rising. Another is the medium of reading: the shift from papyrus to paper may have seemed remarkable at the time, but the more recent one from paper to electronic screens has already changed the way we think about our world.

“When we read on screens, we tend to skim, and when we skim, we’re more susceptible to misinformation,” says Gotlieb. So we’ve been told, many times and many ways, amid the past decade’s ever-more-troubled political reportage. In 2018, Maryanne Wolf, author of Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, argued in the Guardian that the “subtle atrophy of critical analysis and empathy” apparently caused by technology-encouraged skimming “affects our ability to navigate a constant bombardment of information. It incentivizes a retreat to the most familiar silos of unchecked information, which require and receive no analysis, leaving us susceptible to false information and demagoguery.”

So much for us adults. What about the children? In the BBC World Service video, Wolf bluntly sums up the results of studies so far on the effects of early reading experience on later intellectual performance: “the more digital, the worse academic.” If a young brain is “constantly being distracted and hyperstimulated, you’re going to have them not able to really move from one stimulus to the next without a desire for ever-quicker intervals between stimuli.” For our part, as parents, teachers, or other visible examples of grown-uphood, we can do nothing to counteract that more effectively than to model and enjoy a rich “reading life” for the next generation. We must, in other words, pick up books and not put them down, which may strike an Open Culture reader as an easy task. But ask yourself this: how many times did you click over to something else before getting to the end of this post?

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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.

With the Bayeux Tapestry now on display at the British Museum, Deep Down History presents a deep dive into the embroidery’s full story:

“The Bayeux Tapestry is one of the most remarkable survivals of the Middle Ages — a 70 metre embroidered account of the events leading to the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, culminating in the Battle of Hastings. This video tells the Tapestry’s story in full, using Charles Stothard’s early colour reproduction, presented here as a seamless scroll for the first time. We follow Harold Godwinson’s fateful journey from Edward the Confessor’s court to Normandy, his later seizure of the Crown, and William the Conqueror’s invasion. Beyond its political messaging, the Tapestry is also bursting with medieval history, including jokes, fascinating technical details, and a warning for those who break their promises…”

Enjoy!

via Kottke

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Most of us can rattle off the first few words-that-stand-for-letters of the NATO phonetic alphabet. Alfa, Bravo, and Charlie no doubt come right to mind, and depending on how many war movies you’ve seen, so may Delta, Echo, and Foxtrot. But how many of us would recognize Kilo, Mike, and Sierra? For that matter, how much do any of us know about how these particular words came to be used to spell out other words when communicating over walkie-talkies or other low-fidelity communication systems? In the video above for his YouTube channel RobWords, YouTuber Rob Watts explains the development of and logic behind the NATO phonetic alphabet, wasting no time in clarifying that it isn’t a phonetic alphabet, nor was it created by NATO.

What we actually have here, Watts says, is a “spelling alphabet,” and its story goes back to the invention of the telephone in the eighteen-seventies. “Early telephonists found that if ever they needed to spell something out, like someone’s name, one letter would get misheard as another.” The idea of expressing each letter with a common word starting with that letter arose naturally, though figuring out exactly which words to use took a lot more trial and error.

In the early nineteen-tens, Western Union published a spelling alphabet consisting mostly of the names of people and places: Adams, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Edward, and so on. By World War I, the British army had also implemented a rather more eccentric version, using words like Beer, Monkey, Nuts, Orange, Pip, and Yorker; by World War II, “every armed service in Britain and the U.S. had developed its own spelling alphabet.”

In light of the rapidly globalizing nature of human affairs, and not just the military kind, the need for a single universal spelling alphabet became pressing. It wasn’t until the establishment of the International Civil Aviation Organization, meant to oversee the skies in peacetime, that earnest work began on a revision of the U.S.-U.K. combined forces’ existing spelling alphabet, incorporating English words easily pronounceable by non-English speakers, while also being minimally confusable for one another. By 1956, ICAO finalized its list, which has remained the NATO phonetic alphabet (or, officially, the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet) we all know today — or we at least partially know. It may well be worth your time to memorize the rest, since you never know when you’ll have to keep your Papas and Quebecs straight.

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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.

For decades following World War II,  the world was left wondering how the atrocities of the Holocaust could have been perpetrated in the midst of—and, most horrifically, by—a modern and civilized society. How did people come to engage in a willing and systematic extermination of their neighbors? Psychologists, whose field had grown into a grudgingly respected science by the midpoint of the 20^th century, were eager to tackle the question.

In 1961, Yale University’s Stanley Milgram began a series of infamous obedience experiments. While Adolf Eichmann’s trial was underway in Jerusalem (resulting in Hannah Arendt’s five-piece reportage, which became one of The New Yorker magazine’s most dramatic and controversial article series), Milgram began to suspect that human nature was more straightforward than earlier theorists had imagined; he wondered, as he later wrote, “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?”

In the most famous of his experiments, Milgram ostensibly recruited participants to take part in a study assessing the effects of pain on learning. In reality, he wanted to see how far he could push the average American to administer painful electric shocks to a fellow human being.

When participants arrived at his lab, Milgram’s assistant would ask them, as well as a second man, to draw slips of paper to receive their roles for the experiment. In fact, the second man was a confederate; the participant would always draw the role of “teacher,” and the second man would invariably be made the “learner.”

The participants received instructions to teach pairs of words to the confederate. After they had read the list of words once, the teachers were to test the learner’s recall by reading one word, and asking the learner to name one of the four words associated with it. The experimenter told the participants to punish any learner mistakes by pushing a button and administering an electric shock; while they could not see the learner, participants could hear his screams. The confederate, of course, remained unharmed, and merely acted out in pain, with each mistake costing him an additional 15 volts of punishment. In case participants faltered in their scientific resolve, the experimenter was nearby to urge them, using four authoritative statements:

Please continue.

The experiment requires that you continue.

It is absolutely essential that you continue.

You have no other choice, you must go on.

In a jarring set of findings, Milgram found that 26 of the 40 participants obeyed instructions, administering shocks all the way from “Slight Shock,” to “Danger: Severe Shock.” The final two ominous switches were simply marked “XXX.” Even when the learner would pound on the walls in agony after seemingly receiving 300 volts, participants persisted. Eventually, the learner simply stopped responding.

Although they followed instructions, participants repeatedly expressed their desire to stop the experiment, and showed clear signs of extreme discomfort:

“I observed a mature and initially poised businessman enter the laboratory smiling and confident. Within 20 minutes he was reduced to a twitching, stuttering wreck, who was rapidly approaching a point of nervous collapse… At one point he pushed his fist into his forehead and muttered: “Oh God, let’s stop it.” And yet he continued to respond to every word of the experimenter, and obeyed to the end.” 

Milgram’s study set off a powder keg whose impact remains felt to this day. Ethically, many objected to the deception and the lack of adequate participant debriefing. Others claimed that Milgram overemphasized human nature’s propensity for blind obedience, with the experimenter often urging participants to continue many more times than the four stock phrases allowed.

In the clip above, you can watch original footage from Milgram’s  experiment, frightening in its insidious simplicity. (See a full documentary on the study on YouTube.) The man administering the shock grows increasingly uncomfortable with his part in the proceedings, and almost walks out, asking “Who’s going to take the responsibility for anything that happens to that gentleman?” When the experimenter replies, “I’m responsible,” the man, absolving himself, continues. As the person receiving the shocks grows increasingly panicked, complaining about his heart and asking to be let out, the participant makes his objections known but appears paralyzed, sheepishly turning to the experimenter, unable to leave.

Although Milgram’s work has drawn critics, his results endure. While changing the experiment’s procedure may alter compliance (e.g., having the experimenter speak to participants over the phone rather than remain in the same room throughout the experiment decreased obedience rates), replications have tended to confirm Milgram’s initial findings. Whether one is urged once or a dozen times, people tend to take on the yoke of authority as absolute, relinquishing their personal agency in the pain they impart. Human nature, it seems, has no Manichean leanings—merely a pliant bent.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in November 2013.

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Written by Ilia Blinderman.

We no longer live in a time when college freshmen get shocked by much of the reading material assigned to them. Counterintuitively, the texts that do retain their power to disturb young minds (presuming they can read texts in the first place) tend to skew old — and in one prominent case, about 2,400 years old. Even the most superficial interpretations of Plato’s Republic challenge the political assumptions held by almost every student today, at least in the developed West. Many of them hold those assumptions so deeply that they’ve never articulated them. Encountering the arguments made by Plato’s Socrates in favor of a society ruled by an enlightened upper class, tightly controlled from above in everything from the division of its labor to the content of its art, prompts them to do so.

Or rather, it prompts them to do so in an ideal educational setting, but then, Plato was dedicated to nothing so much as the ideal. When he casts Socrates as making the case for the best possible relationships between ruler, state, and individual, he creates less a how-to manual (as Machiavelli did nineteen centuries later, in a brutally quasi-satirical spirit) than a means of better understanding extant societies by bringing their characteristics into relief through comparison.

We may reflexively quote Churchill’s remark about modern democracy, vulnerable as it is to manipulation by all manner of unsavory actors, being “the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time,” but we nevertheless flinch from holding it up too closely against any kind of ideal system.

It’s tempting to declare that we wouldn’t want to live in the republic of the Republic. (Some of us may have succumbed to that temptation in the political-philosophy lecture hall.) But a more reflective reading reveals a good deal about Plato’s time as well as our own. In the 78-minute video above, Jared Henderson takes us through the Socratic dialogues that propose and refine this Utopia, with its philosopher-kings, noble lies, spiritual aristocrats, breeding festivals, and guardians trained from the cradle. He arrives at certain unfashionable ideas, such as the ultimate task of refining one’s own soul and the necessity of persuading those impervious to philosophy with myth. Even those of us who regard ourselves as sophisticated thinkers, impervious to the crude rhetoric of ideologies and demagogues, would do well to ask ourselves: how much of that thinking has been shaped by the stories we’ve heard all our lives?

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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.