Actor Margaret Colin (VEEP, Independence Day) Joins Pretty Much Pop #28 to Take On the Trope of the Alpha Female

in Film, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Television, Theatre | January 23rd, 2020

What’s the deal with images of pow­er­ful women in media? The trope of the tough-as-nails boss-lady who may or may not have a heart of gold has evolved a lot over the years, but it’s dif­fi­cult to por­tray such a char­ac­ter unob­jec­tion­ably, prob­a­bly due to those all-too-famil­iar dou­ble stan­dards about want­i­ng women in author­i­ty (or, say, run­ning for office) to be assertive but not astrin­gent.

Mar­garet was the female lead in major films includ­ing Inde­pen­dence Day and The Dev­il’s Own, is a main­stay on Broad­way, and has appeared on TV in many roles includ­ing the moth­er of the Gos­sip Girl and as an unscrupu­lous news­cast­er on the final sea­sons of VEEP. Her height and voice have made her a good fit for dom­i­nant-lady roles, and she leads Mark, Eri­ca, and Bri­an through a quick, instruc­tive tour through her work with male direc­tors (e.g. in a pre-Mur­phy-Brown Dianne Eng­lish sit-com), play­ing the lead in three Life­time Net­work movies, on Broad­way as Jack­ie, and oppo­site Har­ri­son Ford, Al Paci­no, Melanie Grif­fith, Michael Shan­non, Wal­lace Shawn, and oth­ers.

Giv­en the lim­i­ta­tions of short-form sto­ry­telling in film, maybe some use of stereo­types is just nec­es­sary to get the gist of a char­ac­ter out quick­ly, but actors can load their per­for­mances with unseen back­sto­ry. We hear about the actor’s role in estab­lish­ing a char­ac­ter vs. the vision of the film­mak­ers or show-run­ners. Also, the rel­a­tive con­ser­vatism of film vs. stage vs. TV in grant­i­ng women cre­ative con­trol, the “fem­i­nine voice,” why women always appar­ent­ly have to trip in movies when chased, and more.

A few resources to get you think­ing about this top­ic:

Some­one’s post­ed a tape of Carousel fea­tur­ing Eri­ca and Mar­garet.

This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can only hear by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts or start with the first episode.

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How the Female Scientist Who Discovered the Greenhouse Gas Effect Was Forgotten by History

in Gender, Science | January 22nd, 2020


In the ear­ly 19th cen­tu­ry, Aristotle’s Mete­o­ro­log­i­ca still guid­ed sci­en­tif­ic ideas about the cli­mate. The mod­el “sprang from the ancient Greek con­cept of kli­ma,” as Ian Bea­cock writes at The Atlantic, a sta­t­ic scheme that “divid­ed the hemi­spheres into three fixed cli­mat­ic bands: polar cold, equa­to­r­i­al heat, and a zone of mod­er­a­tion in the mid­dle.” It wasn’t until the 1850s that the study of cli­mate devel­oped into what his­to­ri­an Deb­o­rah Cohen describes as “dynam­ic cli­ma­tol­ogy.”

Indeed, 120 years before Exxon Mobile learned about—and then seem­ing­ly cov­ered up—glob­al warm­ing, pio­neer­ing researchers dis­cov­ered the green­house gas effect, the ten­den­cy for a closed envi­ron­ment like our atmos­phere to heat up when car­bon diox­ide lev­els rise. The first per­son on record to link CO2 and glob­al warm­ing, ama­teur sci­en­tist Eunice New­ton Foote, pre­sent­ed her research to the Eight Annu­al Meet­ing of the Amer­i­can Asso­ci­a­tion for the Advance­ment of Sci­ence in 1856.

Foote’s paper, “Cir­cum­stances affect­ing the heat of the sun’s rays,” was reviewed the fol­low­ing month in the pages of Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can, in a col­umn that approved of her “prac­ti­cal exper­i­ments” and not­ed, “this we are hap­py to say has been done by a lady.” She used an air pump, glass cylin­ders, and ther­mome­ters to com­pare the effects of sun­light on “car­bon­ic acid gas” (or car­bon diox­ide) and “com­mon air.” From her rudi­men­ta­ry but effec­tive demon­stra­tions, she con­clud­ed:

An atmos­phere of that gas [CO2] would give to our earth a high tem­per­a­ture; and if as some sup­pose, at one peri­od of its his­to­ry the air had mixed with it a larg­er pro­por­tion than at present, an increased temperature…must have nec­es­sar­i­ly result­ed.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, her achieve­ment would dis­ap­pear three years lat­er when Irish physi­cist John Tyn­dall, who like­ly knew noth­ing of Foote, made the same dis­cov­ery. With his supe­ri­or resources and priv­i­leges, Tyn­dall was able to take his research fur­ther. “In ret­ro­spect,” one cli­mate sci­ence data­base writes, Tyn­dall has emerged as the founder of cli­mate sci­ence, though the view “hides a com­plex, and in many ways more inter­est­ing sto­ry.”

Nei­ther Tyn­dall nor Foote wrote about the effect of human activ­i­ty on the con­tem­po­rary cli­mate. It would take until the 1890s for Swedish sci­en­tist Svante Arrhe­nius to pre­dict human-caused warm­ing from indus­tri­al CO2 emis­sions. But sub­se­quent devel­op­ments depend­ed upon their insights. Foote, whose was born 200 years ago this past July, was mar­gin­al­ized almost from the start. “Entire­ly because she was a woman,” the Pub­lic Domain Review points out, “Foote was barred from read­ing the paper describ­ing her find­ings.”

Fur­ther­more, Foote “was passed over for pub­li­ca­tion in the Association’s annu­al Pro­ceed­ings.” Her paper was pub­lished in The Amer­i­can Jour­nal of Sci­ence, but was most­ly remarked upon, as in the Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can review, for the mar­vel of such home­spun inge­nu­ity from “a lady.” The review, titled “Sci­en­tif­ic Ladies—Experiments with Con­densed Gas,” opened with the sen­tence “Some have not only enter­tained, but expressed the mean idea, that women do not pos­sess the strength of mind nec­es­sary for sci­en­tif­ic inves­ti­ga­tion.”

The praise of Foote cred­its her as a paragon of her gen­der, while fail­ing to con­vey the uni­ver­sal impor­tance of her dis­cov­ery. At the AAAS con­fer­ence, the Smithsonian’s Joseph Hen­ry praised Foote by declar­ing that sci­ence was “of no coun­try and of no sex,” a state­ment that has proven time and again to be untrue in prac­tice. The con­de­scen­sion and dis­crim­i­na­tion Foote endured points to the mul­ti­ple ways in which she was exclud­ed as a woman—not only from the sci­en­tif­ic estab­lish­ment but from the edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tions and fund­ing sources that sup­port­ed it.

Her dis­ap­pear­ance, until recent­ly, from the his­to­ry of sci­ence “plays into the Matil­da Effect,” Leila McNeill argues at Smith­son­ian, “the trend of men get­ting cred­it for female scientist’s achieve­ments.” In this case, there’s no rea­son not to cred­it both sci­en­tists, who made orig­i­nal dis­cov­er­ies inde­pen­dent­ly. But Foote got there first. Had she been giv­en the cred­it she was due at the time—and the insti­tu­tion­al sup­port to match—there’s no telling how far her work would have tak­en her.

Just as Foote’s dis­cov­ery places her firm­ly with­in cli­mate sci­ence his­to­ry, ret­ro­spec­tive­ly, her “place in the sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty, or lack therof,” writes Ama­ra Hud­dle­ston at Climate.gov, “weaves into the broad­er sto­ry of women’s rights.” Foote attend­ed the first Women’s Rights Con­ven­tion in Seneca Falls, NY in 1848, and her name is fifth down on the list of sig­na­to­ries to the “Dec­la­ra­tion of Sen­ti­ments,” a doc­u­ment demand­ing full equal­i­ty in social sta­tus, legal rights, and edu­ca­tion­al, eco­nom­ic, and, Foote would have added, sci­en­tif­ic oppor­tu­ni­ties.

Learn much more about Foote and her fas­ci­nat­ing fam­i­ly from her descen­dent, marine biol­o­gist Liz Foote.

via Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Women Sci­en­tists Launch a Data­base Fea­tur­ing the Work of 9,000 Women Work­ing in the Sci­ences

“The Matil­da Effect”: How Pio­neer­ing Women Sci­en­tists Have Been Denied Recog­ni­tion and Writ­ten Out of Sci­ence His­to­ry

Marie Curie Became the First Woman to Win a Nobel Prize, the First Per­son to Win Twice, and the Only Per­son in His­to­ry to Win in Two Dif­fer­ent Sci­ences

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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When Salvador Dali Met Sigmund Freud, and Changed Freud’s Mind About Surrealism (1938)

in Art, Psychology | January 22nd, 2020

The close asso­ci­a­tions between Sur­re­al­ism and Freudi­an psy­cho­analy­sis were lib­er­al­ly encour­aged by the most famous pro­po­nent of the move­ment, Sal­vador Dalí, who con­sid­ered him­self a devot­ed fol­low­er of Freud. We don’t have to won­der what the founder of psy­cho­analy­sis would have thought of his self-appoint­ed pro­tégé.

We have them record­ing, in their own words, their impres­sions of their one and only meeting—which took place in July of 1938, at Freud’s home in Lon­don. Freud was 81, Dali 34. We also have sketch­es Dali made of Freud while the two sat togeth­er. Their mem­o­ries of events, shall we say, dif­fer con­sid­er­ably, or at least they seemed total­ly bewil­dered by each oth­er. (Freud pro­nounced Dali a “fanat­ic.”)

In any case, There’s absolute­ly no way the encounter could have lived up to Dali’s expec­ta­tions, as the Freud Muse­um Lon­don notes:

[Dalí] had already trav­elled to Vien­na sev­er­al times but failed to make an intro­duc­tion. Instead, he wrote in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, he spent his time hav­ing “long and exhaus­tive imag­i­nary con­ver­sa­tions” with his hero, at one point fan­ta­siz­ing that he “came home with me and stayed all night cling­ing to the cur­tains of my room in the Hotel Sach­er.”

Freud was cer­tain­ly not going to indulge Dalí’s pecu­liar fan­tasies, but what the artist real­ly want­ed was val­i­da­tion of his work—and maybe his very being. “Dali had spent his teens and ear­ly twen­ties read­ing Freud’s works on the uncon­scious,” writes Paul Gal­lagher at Dan­ger­ous Minds, “on sex­u­al­i­ty and The Inter­pre­ta­tion of Dreams.” He was obsessed. Final­ly meet­ing Freud in ’38, he must have felt “like a believ­er might feel when com­ing face-to-face with God.”

He brought with him his lat­est paint­ing The Meta­mor­pho­sis of Nar­cis­sus, and an arti­cle he had pub­lished on para­noia. This, espe­cial­ly, Dali hoped would gain the respect of the elder­ly Freud.

Try­ing to inter­est him, I explained that it was not a sur­re­al­ist diver­sion, but was real­ly an ambi­tious­ly sci­en­tif­ic arti­cle, and I repeat­ed the title, point­ing to it at the same time with my fin­ger. Before his imper­turbable indif­fer­ence, my voice became invol­un­tar­i­ly sharp­er and more insis­tent.

On being shown the paint­ing, Freud sup­pos­ed­ly said, “in clas­sic paint­ings I look for the uncon­scious, but in your paint­ings I look for the con­scious.” The com­ment stung, though Dali wasn’t entire­ly sure what it meant. But he took it as fur­ther evi­dence that the meet­ing was a bust. Sketch­ing Freud in the draw­ing below, he wrote, “Freud’s cra­ni­um is a snail! His brain is in the form of a spiral—to be extract­ed with a nee­dle!”

One might see why Freud was sus­pi­cious of Sur­re­al­ists, “who have appar­ent­ly cho­sen me as their patron saint,” he wrote to Ste­fan Zweig, the mutu­al friend who intro­duced him to Dali. In 1921, poet and Sur­re­al­ist man­i­festo writer André Bre­ton “had shown up unin­vit­ed on [Freud’s] doorstep.” Unhap­py with his recep­tion, Bre­ton pub­lished a “bit­ter attack,” call­ing Freud an “old man with­out ele­gance” and lat­er accused Freud of pla­gia­riz­ing him.

Despite the mem­o­ry of this nas­ti­ness, and Freud’s gen­er­al dis­taste for mod­ern art, he could­n’t help but be impressed with Dali. “Until then,” he wrote to Zweig, “I was inclined to look upon the sur­re­al­ists… as absolute (let us say 95 per­cent, like alco­hol), cranks. That young Spaniard, how­ev­er, with his can­did and fanat­i­cal eyes, and his unde­ni­able tech­ni­cal mas­tery, has made me recon­sid­er my opin­ion.”

via Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sal­vador Dalí’s Tarot Cards Get Re-Issued: The Occult Meets Sur­re­al­ism in a Clas­sic Tarot Card Deck

George Orwell Reviews Sal­vador Dali’s Auto­bi­og­ra­phy: “Dali is a Good Draughts­man and a Dis­gust­ing Human Being” (1944)

The Famous Break Up of Sig­mund Freud & Carl Jung Explained in a New Ani­mat­ed Video

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The First Real Museum of Philosophy Prepares to Launch: See the Museo della Filosofia in Milan

in Museums, Philosophy | January 22nd, 2020

You’ve almost cer­tain­ly been to more art muse­ums than you can remem­ber, and more than like­ly to a few muse­ums of nat­ur­al his­to­ry, sci­ence, and tech­nol­o­gy as well. But think hard: have you ever set foot inside a muse­um of phi­los­o­phy? Not just an exhi­bi­tion deal­ing with philoso­phers or philo­soph­i­cal con­cepts, but a sin­gle insti­tu­tion ded­i­cat­ed whol­ly to putting the prac­tice of phi­los­o­phy itself on dis­play. Your answer can approach a yes only if you spent time in Milan last Novem­ber, and more specif­i­cal­ly at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Milan, in whose halls the Museo del­la Filosofia set up shop and proved its sur­pris­ing­ly untest­ed — and sur­pris­ing­ly suc­cess­ful — con­cept.

“What we had in mind was not an his­tor­i­cal­ly-mind­ed muse­um col­lect­ing relics about the lives and works of impor­tant philoso­phers, but some­thing more dynam­ic and inter­ac­tive,” writes Uni­ver­si­ty of Milan post­doc­tor­al research fel­low Anna Ichi­no at Dai­ly Nous, “where philo­soph­i­cal prob­lems and the­o­ries become intu­itive­ly acces­si­ble through a vari­ety of games, activ­i­ties, exper­i­ments, aes­thet­ic expe­ri­ences, and oth­er such things.”

In the first hall, “we used images like Mary Midgely’s ‘con­cep­tu­al plumb­ing’ or Wittgenstein’s ‘fly bot­tle’ to con­vey the idea accord­ing to which philo­soph­i­cal prob­lems are in impor­tant respects con­cep­tu­al prob­lems, which amount to ana­lyz­ing con­cepts that we com­mon­ly use in unre­flec­tive ways.”

In the sec­ond hall, vis­i­tors to the Museo del­la Filosofia “could lit­er­al­ly play with para­dox­es and thought exper­i­ments in order to appre­ci­ate their heuris­tic role in philo­soph­i­cal inquiry.” The expe­ri­ences avail­able there ranged from using an over­sized deck of cards to “solve” para­dox­es, the per­haps inevitable demon­stra­tion of the well-known “trol­ley prob­lem” using a mod­el rail­road set, and — most har­row­ing of all — the chance to “eat choco­lates shaped as cat excre­ment” straight from the lit­ter box. Then came the “School of Athens” game, “in which vis­i­tors had to decide whether to back Pla­to or Aris­to­tle; then they could also take a sou­venir pic­ture por­tray­ing them­selves in the shoes (and face!) of one or the oth­er.”

In the third, “pro­gram­mat­ic” hall, the muse­um’s orga­niz­ers “pre­sent­ed the plan for what still needs to be done,” a to-do list that includes find­ing a per­ma­nent home. Before it does so, you can have a look at the pro­jec­t’s web site as well as its pages on Face­book and Insta­gram. At the top of the post appears a short video intro­duc­ing the Museo del­la Filosofia which, like the rest of the mate­ri­als, is for the moment in Ital­ian only, but it nev­er­the­less gets across even to non-Ital­ian-speak­ers a cer­tain idea of the expe­ri­ence a philo­soph­i­cal muse­um can deliv­er. Philo­soph­i­cal think­ing, after all, occurs pri­or to lan­guage. Or maybe it’s inex­tri­ca­bly tied up with lan­guage; dif­fer­ent philoso­phers have approached the prob­lem dif­fer­ent­ly. And when the Museo del­la Filosofia opens for good, you’ll be able to vis­it and approach a few philo­soph­i­cal prob­lems your­self. Read more about the muse­um at Dai­ly Nous.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Philo­graph­ics Presents a Visu­al Dic­tio­nary of Phi­los­o­phy: 95 Philo­soph­i­cal Con­cepts as Graph­ic Designs

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy Visu­al­ized

A Data Visu­al­iza­tion of Mod­ern Phi­los­o­phy, 1950–2018

Phi­los­o­phy Explained With Donuts

Watch a 2‑Year-Old Solve Philosophy’s Famous Eth­i­cal “Trol­ley Prob­lem” (It Doesn’t End Well)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

 

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Introducing The Radiohead Public Library: Radiohead Makes Their Full Catalogue Available via a Free Online Web Site

in Music | January 21st, 2020

Radio­head remained rel­e­vant longer than any of their peers not only because they adapt­ed to tech­no­log­i­cal change but because they’ve just as often been a force behind it, whether musi­cal­ly or oth­er­wise. Yet when it comes to their release strate­gies, we might call them increas­ing­ly conservative–they have embraced one of the old­est tra­di­tion­al fea­tures of the inter­net: the abil­i­ty to give away free con­tent to huge num­bers of peo­ple all at once, and to archive that con­tent in freely acces­si­ble repos­i­to­ries.

At least since In Rain­bows, Radio­head has seen the inter­net as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to give away their work or sell it at a low-cost slid­ing scale, often with prof­its ben­e­fit­ting char­i­ties. Last year, when hack­ers stole demos from 1997’s OK Com­put­er, Radio­head coun­tered by releas­ing 18 hours of the mate­r­i­al free to stream or buy for a lim­it­ed time, with all pro­ceeds going to cli­mate action. Then they released every sin­gle stu­dio album, includ­ing dozens of rar­i­ties, live ses­sions, and more, on YouTube, mak­ing every­thing free to stream for any­one with the band­width.

Now, con­cerned with the integri­ty of Radio­head col­lec­tions online, they’ve gone full Inter­net Archive and start­ed a “pub­lic library” (com­plete with a print­able library card). And for any fan of the band—from the most casu­al to the most ter­mi­nal­ly dedicated—it’s an expe­ri­ence. “The band has brought near­ly the entire­ty of their cat­a­log to one place,” writes Rob Arcand at Spin, “which doesn’t con­tain ads and doesn’t use algo­rithms or obtru­sive design ges­tures that could encour­age myopic lis­ten­ing.” Dive in and you nev­er know what you’ll find.

I stum­bled upon OK Com­put­er’s “Para­noid Android” and was remind­ed of how inex­plic­a­bly weird the video is; crossed paths with 1992’s Drill, the band’s sur­pris­ing pow­er-pop-punk first EP (hear “Think­ing About You” at the top); found a recent live per­for­mance of Thom Yorke, Jon­ny Green­wood, and a drum machine—the two demon­strat­ing with elec­tric gui­tars and voice why even the band’s most abstract and fore­bod­ing songs still have at their heart the del­i­cate melodies that made up the entire­ty of their aching­ly earnest sec­ond album, The Bends.

Oth­er rar­i­ties include the King of Limbs remix EP TKOL RMX 8 (“not to be con­fused with their King of Limbs remix album TKOL RMX 1234567”) and a 2005 track titled “I Want None of This” made for war relief com­pi­la­tion Help!: A Day in the Life. The “stress” here in this archive “is on ‘Pub­lic,’” notes Daniel Kreps at Rolling Stone. “The library is free to enter and audio and video files are acces­si­ble even to those with­out pre­mi­um stream­ing ser­vices.” Each mem­ber of the band served as a “librar­i­an” for the first week of the archive’s exis­tence, curat­ing their favorite selec­tions of mate­r­i­al for post­ing on social media from Jan­u­ary 20th to the 24th.

Check out the Radio­head Pub­lic Library here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Radio­head Puts Every Offi­cial Album on YouTube, Mak­ing Them All Free to Stream

The 10 Most Depress­ing Radio­head Songs Accord­ing to Data Sci­ence: Hear the Songs That Ranked High­est in a Researcher’s “Gloom Index”

Clas­sic Radio­head Songs Re-Imag­ined as a Sci-Fi Book, Pulp Fic­tion Mag­a­zine & Oth­er Nos­tal­gic Arti­facts

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Can You Spot Liars Through Their Body Language? A Former FBI Agent Breaks Down the Clues in Non-Verbal Communication

in Psychology | January 21st, 2020

Can you spot a liar? We all know peo­ple who think they can, and very often they claim to be able to do so by read­ing “body lan­guage.” Clear­ing one’s throat, touch­ing one’s mouth, cross­ing one’s arms, look­ing away: these and oth­er such ges­tures, they say, indi­cate on the part of the speak­er a cer­tain dis­tance from the truth. In the WIRED “Trade­craft” video above, how­ev­er for­mer FBI spe­cial agent Joe Navar­ro more than once pro­nounces ideas about such phys­i­cal lie indi­ca­tors “non­sense.” And hav­ing spent 25 years work­ing to iden­ti­fy peo­ple pre­sent­ing them­selves false­ly to the world — “my job was to catch spies,” he says — he should know, at the very least, what isn’t a tell.

Not that all the throat-clear­ing and arm-cross­ing does­n’t indi­cate some­thing. Navar­ro calls such behav­iors “self-soothers,” phys­i­cal actions we use to paci­fy our­selves in stress­ful moments. Of course, even if self-soothers pro­vide no use­ful infor­ma­tion about whether a per­son is telling the truth, that does­n’t mean they pro­vide no use­ful infor­ma­tion at all.

But Navar­ro’s career has taught him that actions deci­sive­ly indi­cat­ing decep­tion are much more spe­cif­ic, and with­out rel­e­vant knowl­edge com­plete­ly illeg­i­ble: take the sus­pect­ed spy he had under sur­veil­lance who gave the game away just by leav­ing a flower shop hold­ing a bou­quet fac­ing not upward but down­ward, “how they car­ry flow­ers in east­ern Europe.”

For the most part, detect­ing a liar requires a great deal of what Navar­ro calls “face time,” a neces­si­ty when it comes to observ­ing the full range of and pat­terns in an indi­vid­u­al’s forms of non-ver­bal com­mu­ni­ca­tion. In the video he ana­lyzes footage of a pok­er game, the kind of set­ting that height­ens our aware­ness of such non-ver­bal com­mu­ni­ca­tion. At the table we all know to put on a “pok­er face” and shut our mouths, but even when we say noth­ing, Navar­ro empha­sizes, we’re con­stant­ly trans­mit­ting a high quan­ti­ty of infor­ma­tion about our­selves. What­ev­er the set­ting, it comes through in how we dress, how we walk, how we car­ry our­selves — espe­cial­ly if we think it does­n’t. In the eyes of those who know how to inter­pret this infor­ma­tion, all the world becomes a pok­er game.

Navar­ro is the author of two books on this sub­ject: The Dic­tio­nary of Body Lan­guage: A Field Guide to Human Behav­ior and What Every Body Is Say­ing: An Ex-FBI Agen­t’s Guide to Speed-Read­ing Peo­ple. For a con­trar­i­an point of view that chal­lenges the idea that we can ever read peo­ple accu­rate­ly, see Mal­colm Glad­well’s new book, Talk­ing to Strangers: What We Should Know about the Peo­ple We Don’t Know.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Han­nah Arendt Explains How Pro­pa­gan­da Uses Lies to Erode All Truth & Moral­i­ty: Insights from The Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism

How to Spot Bull­shit: A Primer by Prince­ton Philoso­pher Har­ry Frank­furt

FBI’s “Vault” Web Site Reveals Declas­si­fied Files on Hem­ing­way, Ein­stein, Mar­i­lyn & Oth­er Icons

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Neuroscience of Drumming: Researchers Discover the Secrets of Drumming & The Human Brain

in Music | January 21st, 2020

An old musician’s joke goes “there are three kinds of drum­mers in the world—those who can count and those who can’t.” But per­haps there is an even more glob­al divide. Per­haps there are three kinds of peo­ple in the world—those who can drum and those who can’t. Per­haps, as the pro­mo­tion­al video above from GE sug­gests, drum­mers have fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent brains than the rest of us. Today we high­light the sci­en­tif­ic research into drum­mers’ brains, an expand­ing area of neu­ro­science and psy­chol­o­gy that dis­proves a host of dumb drum­mer jokes.

“Drum­mers,” writes Jor­dan Tay­lor Sloan at Mic, “can actu­al­ly be smarter than their less rhyth­mi­cal­ly-focused band­mates.” This accord­ing to the find­ings of a Swedish study (Karolin­s­ka Insti­tutet in Stock­holm) which shows “a link between intel­li­gence, good tim­ing and the part of the brain used for prob­lem-solv­ing.” As Gary Cle­land puts it in The Tele­graph, drum­mers “might actu­al­ly be nat­ur­al intel­lec­tu­als.”

Neu­ro­sci­en­tist David Eagle­man, a renais­sance researcher The New York­er calls “a man obsessed with time,” found this out in an exper­i­ment he con­duct­ed with var­i­ous pro­fes­sion­al drum­mers at Bri­an Eno’s stu­dio. It was Eno who the­o­rized that drum­mers have a unique men­tal make­up, and it turns out “Eno was right: drum­mers do have dif­fer­ent brains from the rest.” Eagle­man’s test showed “a huge sta­tis­ti­cal dif­fer­ence between the drum­mers’ tim­ing and that of test sub­jects.” Says Eagle­man, “Now we know that there is some­thing anatom­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent about them.” Their abil­i­ty to keep time gives them an intu­itive under­stand­ing of the rhyth­mic pat­terns they per­ceive all around them.

That dif­fer­ence can be annoying—like the pain of hav­ing per­fect pitch in a per­pet­u­al­ly off-key world. But drum­ming ulti­mate­ly has ther­a­peu­tic val­ue, pro­vid­ing the emo­tion­al and phys­i­cal ben­e­fits col­lec­tive­ly known as “drum­mer’s high,” an endor­phin rush that can only be stim­u­lat­ed by play­ing music, not sim­ply lis­ten­ing to it. In addi­tion to increas­ing peo­ple’s pain thresh­olds, Oxford psy­chol­o­gists found, the endor­phin-filled act of drum­ming increas­es pos­i­tive emo­tions and leads peo­ple to work togeth­er in a more coop­er­a­tive fash­ion.

Clash drum­mer Top­per Head­on dis­cuss­es the ther­a­peu­tic aspect of drum­ming in a short BBC inter­view above. He also calls drum­ming a “primeval” and dis­tinct­ly, uni­ver­sal­ly human activ­i­ty. For­mer Grate­ful Dead drum­mer Mick­ey Hart and neu­ro­sci­en­tist Adam Gaz­za­ley have high hopes for the sci­ence of rhythm. Hart, who has pow­ered a light show with his brain­waves in con­certs with his own band, dis­cuss­es the “pow­er” of rhythm to move crowds and bring Alzheimer’s patients back into the present moment.

Whether we can train our­selves to think and feel like drum­mers may be debat­able. But as for whether drum­mers real­ly do think in ways non-drum­mers can’t, con­sid­er the neu­ro­science of Stew­art Copeland’s polyrhyth­mic beats, and the work of Ter­ry Bozzio (below) play­ing the largest drumk­it you’ve ever seen.

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Play­ing an Instru­ment Is a Great Work­out For Your Brain: New Ani­ma­tion Explains Why

Iso­lat­ed Drum Tracks From Six of Rock’s Great­est: Bon­ham, Moon, Peart, Copeland, Grohl & Starr

The Neu­ro­science of Bass: New Study Explains Why Bass Instru­ments Are Fun­da­men­tal to Music

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

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Drunk History Takes on the Father of Prohibition: The Ban on Alcohol in the U.S. Started 100 Years Ago This Month

in Comedy, History | January 21st, 2020

There may be plen­ty of good rea­sons to restrict sales and lim­it pro­mo­tion of alco­hol. You can search the stats on traf­fic fatal­i­ties, liv­er dis­ease, alco­hol-relat­ed vio­lence, etc. and you’ll find the term “epi­dem­ic” come up more than once. Yet even with all the dan­gers alco­hol pos­es to pub­lic health and safe­ty, its total pro­hi­bi­tion has seemed “so hos­tile to Amer­i­cans’ con­tem­po­rary sen­si­bil­i­ties of per­son­al free­dom,” writes Mark Lawrence Schrad at The New York Times, “that we strug­gle to com­pre­hend how our ances­tors could have pos­si­bly sup­port­ed it.” Pro­hi­bi­tion in the Unit­ed States began 1oo years ago–on Jan­u­ary 17, 1920–and last­ed through 1933.

How did this hap­pen? Demand, of course, per­sist­ed, but pub­lic sup­port seemed wide­spread. Despite sto­ries of thou­sands rush­ing bars and liquor stores on the evening of Jan­u­ary 16, 1920 before the 18th Amend­ment ban­ning alco­hol nation­wide went into effect, “the final tri­umph of pro­hi­bi­tion was met with shrugs…. The Unit­ed States had already been ‘dry’ for the pre­vi­ous half-year thanks to the Wartime Pro­hi­bi­tion Act. And even before that, 32 of the 48 states had already enact­ed their own statewide pro­hi­bi­tions.”

We tend to think of pro­hi­bi­tion now as a wild over­re­ac­tion and a polit­i­cal mis­cal­cu­la­tion, and frankly, it’s no won­der, giv­en how bonkers some of its most promi­nent advo­cates were. Who bet­ter to pro­file one of the most fanat­i­cal than the irre­spon­si­bly drunk come­di­ans of Com­e­dy Central’s Drunk His­to­ry? See John Lev­en­stein and friends take on the leader of the Anti-Saloon League, Wayne Wheel­er, above,

Wheel­er indi­rect­ly killed tens of thou­sands of peo­ple when his ASL pushed to have poi­son added to indus­tri­al alco­hol to deter boot­leg­ging in the 20s. His pre-pro­hi­bi­tion tac­tics (he coined the term “pres­sure group”) recall those of the Moral Major­i­ty cam­paigns that took over local and state leg­is­la­tures nation­wide in the U.S. in recent decades, and it is large­ly due to the ASL that pro­hi­bi­tion gained such sig­nif­i­cant polit­i­cal ground.

They allied with pro­gres­sives in the North and racists in the South; with suf­frag­ists and with the Klan, whom Wheel­er secret­ly employed to smash up bars. As Daniel Okrent writes at Smith­son­ian:

Wheeler’s devo­tion to the dream of a dry Amer­i­ca accom­mo­dat­ed any num­ber of unlike­ly allies. Bil­ly Sun­day, meet pio­neer­ing social work­er Jane Addams: you’re work­ing togeth­er now. The evan­gel­i­cal cler­gy of the age were moti­vat­ed to sup­port Pro­hi­bi­tion because of their faith; reform­ers like Addams signed on because of the dev­as­tat­ing effect that drunk­en­ness had on the urban poor. Ku Klux Klan, shake hands with the Indus­tri­al Work­ers of the World (IWW): you’re on the same team. The Klan’s anti-liquor sen­ti­ment was root­ed in its hatred of the immi­grant mass­es in liquor-soaked cities; the IWW believed that liquor was a cap­i­tal­ist weapon used to keep the work­ing class­es in a stu­por.

Dogged, uncom­pro­mis­ing, shrewd, and seem­ing­ly amoral, Wheel­er was once described by the Cincin­nati Enquir­er as a cru­sad­er who “made great men his pup­pets.” Pro­hi­bi­tion may be impos­si­ble to imag­ine one hun­dred years lat­er, but we sure­ly rec­og­nize Wayne Wheel­er as a peren­ni­al fig­ure in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics. Don’t trust a drunk come­di­an to give you the straight sto­ry? Get a sober his­to­ry above in the excerpt from the Ken Burns’ doc­u­men­tary Pro­hi­bi­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

A Whiskey-Fueled Lin-Manuel Miran­da Reimag­ines Hamil­ton as a Girl on Drunk His­to­ry

Drunk His­to­ry: An Intox­i­cat­ed Look at the Famous Alexan­der Hamil­ton – Aaron Burr Duel

Ben Franklin’s List of 200 Syn­onyms for “Drunk”: “Moon-Ey’d,” “Ham­mer­ish,” “Stew’d” & More (1737)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

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Fellini’s Fantastic TV Commercials for Barilla, Campari & More: The Italian Filmmaker Was Born 100 Years Ago Today

in Film, Television | January 20th, 2020

To help cel­e­brate the 100th anniver­sary of the birth of the great Ital­ian film­mak­er Fed­eri­co Felli­ni, we present a series of lyri­cal tele­vi­sion adver­tise­ments made dur­ing the final decade of his life.

In 1984, when he was 64 years old, Felli­ni agreed to make a minia­ture film fea­tur­ing Cam­pari, the famous Ital­ian apéri­tif. The result, Oh, che bel pae­sag­gio! (“Oh, what a beau­ti­ful land­scape!”), shown above, fea­tures a man and a woman seat­ed across from one anoth­er on a long-dis­tance train.

The man (played by Vic­tor Polet­ti) smiles, but the woman (Sil­via Dion­i­sio) averts her eyes, star­ing sul­len­ly out the win­dow and pick­ing up a remote con­trol to switch the scenery. She grows increas­ing­ly exas­per­at­ed as a sequence of desert and medieval land­scapes pass by. Still smil­ing, the man takes the remote con­trol, clicks it, and the beau­ti­ful Cam­po di Mira­coli (“Field of Mir­a­cles”) of Pisa appears in the win­dow, embell­ished by a tow­er­ing bot­tle of Cam­pari.

“In just one minute,” writes Tul­lio Kezich in Fed­eri­co Felli­ni: His Life and Work, “Felli­ni gives us a chap­ter of the sto­ry of the bat­tle between men and women, and makes ref­er­ence to the neu­ro­sis of TV, insin­u­ates that we’re dis­parag­ing the mirac­u­lous gifts of nature and his­to­ry, and offers the hope that there might be a screen that will bring the joy back. The lit­tle tale is as quick as a train and has a remark­ably light touch.”

Also in 1984, Felli­ni made a com­mer­cial titled Alta Soci­eta (“High Soci­ety”) for Bar­il­la riga­toni pas­ta (above). As with the Cam­pari com­mer­cial, Felli­ni wrote the script him­self and col­lab­o­rat­ed with cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Ennio Guarnieri and musi­cal direc­tor Nico­la Pio­vani. The cou­ple in the restau­rant were played by Gre­ta Vaian and Mau­r­izio Mau­ri. The Bar­il­la spot is per­haps the least inspired of Fellini’s com­mer­cials. Bet­ter things were yet to come.

In 1991 Felli­ni made a series of three com­mer­cials for the Bank of Rome called Che Brutte Not­ti or “The Bad Nights.” “These com­mer­cials, aired the fol­low­ing year,” writes Peter Bon­danel­la in The Films of Fed­eri­co Felli­ni, “are par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing, since they find their inspi­ra­tion in var­i­ous dreams Felli­ni had sketched out in his dream note­books dur­ing his career.”

In the episode above, titled “The Pic­nic Lunch Dream,” the clas­sic damsel-in-dis­tress sce­nario is turned upside down when a man (played by Pao­lo Vil­lag­gio) finds him­self trapped on the rail­road tracks with a train bear­ing down on him while the beau­ti­ful woman he was din­ing with (Anna Falchi) climbs out of reach and taunts him. But it’s all a dream, which the man tells to his psy­cho­an­a­lyst (Fer­nan­do Rey). The ana­lyst inter­prets the dream and assures the man that his nights will be rest­ful if he puts his mon­ey in the Ban­co di Roma.

The oth­er com­mer­cials (watch here) are called “The Tun­nel Dream” and “The Dream of the Lion in the Cel­lar.” (You can watch Rober­to Di Vito’s short, untrans­lat­ed film of Felli­ni and his crew work­ing on the project here.)

The bank com­mer­cials were the last films Felli­ni ever made. He died a year after they aired, at age 73. In Kezich’s view, the deeply per­son­al and imag­i­na­tive ads amount to Fellini’s last tes­ta­ment, a brief but won­drous return to form. “In Fed­eri­co’s life,” he writes, “these three com­mer­cial spots are a kind of Indi­an sum­mer, the gold­en autumn of a patri­arch of cin­e­ma who, for a moment, holds again the reins of cre­ation.”

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Fellini’s Three Bank of Rome Com­mer­cials, the Last Thing He Did Behind a Cam­era (1992)

Watch All of the Com­mer­cials That David Lynch Has Direct­ed: A Big 30-Minute Com­pi­la­tion

Wim Wen­ders Cre­ates Ads to Sell Beer (Stel­la Artois), Pas­ta (Bar­il­la), and More Beer (Car­ling)

Ing­mar Bergman’s 1950s Soap Com­mer­cials Wash Away the Exis­ten­tial Despair

All of Wes Anderson’s Cin­e­mat­ic Com­mer­cials: Watch His Spots for Pra­da, Amer­i­can Express, H&M & More

 

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A Medical Student Creates Intricate Anatomical Embroideries of the Brain, Heart, Lungs & More

in Art, Biology, Creativity, Science | January 20th, 2020

My first thought upon see­ing the del­i­cate, anato­my-based work of the 23-year-old embroi­dery artist and med­ical stu­dent Emmi Khan was that the Girl Scouts must have expand­ed the cat­e­gories of skills eli­gi­ble for mer­it badges.

(If mem­o­ry serves, there was one for embroi­dery, but it cer­tain­ly didn’t look like a cross-sec­tioned brain, or a sinus cav­i­ty.)

Clos­er inspec­tion revealed that the cir­cu­lar views of Khan’s embroi­deries are not quite as tiny as the round badges stitched to high achiev­ing Girl Scouts’ sash­es, but rather still framed in the wood­en hoops that are an essen­tial tool of this artist’s trade.

Meth­ods both sci­en­tif­ic and artis­tic are a source of fas­ci­na­tion for Khan, who began tak­ing needle­work inspi­ra­tion from anato­my as an under­grad study­ing bio­med­ical sci­ences. As she writes on her Mol­e­c­u­lart web­site:

Sci­ence has par­tic­u­lar meth­ods: it is fun­da­men­tal­ly objec­tive, con­trolled, empir­i­cal. Sim­i­lar­ly, art has par­tic­u­lar meth­ods: there is an empha­sis on sub­jec­tiv­i­ty and explo­ration, but there is also an ele­ment of reg­u­la­tion regard­ing how art is cre­at­ed… e.g. what type of nee­dle to use to embroi­der or how to prime a can­vas.

The pro­ce­dures and tech­niques adopt­ed by sci­en­tists and artists may be very dif­fer­ent. Ulti­mate­ly, how­ev­er, they both have a com­mon aim. Artists and sci­en­tists both want to 1) make sense of the vast­ness around them in new ways, and 2) present and com­mu­ni­cate it to oth­ers through their own vision. 

A glimpse at the flow­ers, intri­cate stitch­es, and oth­er dain­ties that pop­u­late her Pin­ter­est boards offers a fur­ther peek into Khan’s meth­ods, and might prompt some read­ers to pick up a nee­dle them­selves, even those with no imme­di­ate plans to embroi­der a kary­otype or The Cir­cle of Willis, the cir­cu­lar anas­to­mo­sis of arter­ies at the base of the brain.

The Cardiff-based med­ical stu­dent delights in embell­ish­ing her thread­ed obser­va­tions of inter­nal organs with the occa­sion­al dec­o­ra­tive element—sunflowers, posies, and the like…

She makes her­self avail­able on social media to answer ques­tions on sub­jects rang­ing from embroi­dery tips to her rela­tion­ship to sci­ence as a devout Mus­lim, and to share works in progress, like a set of lungs that embody the Four Sea­sons, com­mis­sioned by a cus­tomer in the States.

To see more of Emmi Khan’s work, includ­ing a down­load­able anatom­i­cal flo­ral heart embroi­dery pat­tern, vis­it Mol­e­c­u­lart, her Insta­gram page, or her Etsy shop.

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behold an Anatom­i­cal­ly Cor­rect Repli­ca of the Human Brain, Knit­ted by a Psy­chi­a­trist

An Artist Cro­chets a Life-Size, Anatom­i­cal­ly-Cor­rect Skele­ton, Com­plete with Organs

Watch Nina Paley’s “Embroi­der­ma­tion,” a New, Stun­ning­ly Labor-Inten­sive Form of Ani­ma­tion

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Feb­ru­ary 3 when her month­ly book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain cel­e­brates New York: The Nation’s Metrop­o­lis (1921). Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Watch Hunter S. Thompson & Ralph Steadman Head to Hollywood in a Revealing 1978 Documentary

in Film | January 20th, 2020

In 1978, Hol­ly­wood was look­ing to make a film about Hunter S. Thomp­son. No, it was not an adap­ta­tion of Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas–that would come lat­er. Instead, this was the now-almost-for­got­ten Bill Mur­ray vehi­cle Where the Buf­fa­lo Roam, which was based on Thompson’s obit­u­ary for his friend and “attor­ney” from Fear & Loathing, Oscar “Zeta” Acos­ta.

Know­ing that both Thomp­son and illus­tra­tor Ralph Stead­man would be involved and reunit­ing and dri­ving from Aspen, through Las Vegas, and into Hol­ly­wood, the BBC dis­patched a film crew for the arts pro­gram Omnibus. Direc­tor Nigel Finch returned with a ram­shackle road trip of a film, one that always seems in dan­ger of falling apart due to Thompson’s para­noid and antag­o­nis­tic state.

For a lot of British view­ers, this would have been their primer on the Amer­i­can writer, and quick­ly brings them up to date on Thompson’s rise to infamy, the cre­ation of Gonzo jour­nal­ism, and his alter-ego Raoul Duke.

Per­haps Finch thought that get­ting Thomp­son and Stead­man togeth­er in a car would con­jure up the Fear & Loathing vibe on screen, but the two make an awk­ward cou­ple. At one point the reserved Stead­man com­pares him­self to Thompson’s pet bird Edward. Thomp­son antag­o­nizes this bird into some sort of trau­ma, then holds it close and talks to it. “I feel absolute­ly tak­en apart,” being friends with the writer, Stead­man says. “…he’s hold­ing me like that bird and I’m try­ing to bite my way out.”

In Vegas, the crew and Stead­man try to rouse Thomp­son, then find him, con­fused, and with his face cov­ered in white make-up. In Hol­ly­wood, Thomp­son hates the atten­tion from the cam­era crew so much–not to men­tion the tourists who assume he is a celebri­ty of some kind–that they find him hid­ing behind a parked car.

This era was indeed the end of that phase of Thompson’s career. At one point he asks Finch if he’s there to film Thomp­son or to film Raoul Duke. Finch doesn’t know. Thomp­son doesn’t know either, but he does real­ize that “The myth has tak­en over…I feel like an appendage.” He can no longer cov­er events like he did with the Hell’s Angels, or the Ken­tucky Der­by, because of his fame. He can’t cov­er the sto­ry, because he’s become part of the sto­ry, and to a real jour­nal­ist that’s death.

So per­haps that’s the appeal of Hol­ly­wood? We see Thomp­son and Stead­man meet with a screen­writer (prob­a­bly John Kaye, who wrote Where the Buf­fa­lo Roam) to dis­cuss the script.

Thomp­son had agreed to option the script because, like Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, he nev­er believed it would get made. So when it went into pro­duc­tion he had pret­ty much giv­en away cre­ative con­trol. The script, he said, “It sucks – a bad, dumb, low-lev­el, low-rent script.”

How­ev­er, Bill Mur­ray and Thomp­son hung out in Aspen togeth­er dur­ing the shoot and engaged in a sort of mind-meld, Mur­ray becom­ing a ver­sion of Duke. When Mur­ray returned to Sat­ur­day Night Live that sea­son, he came back as a cig­a­rette-hold­er-smok­ing faux-Thomp­son. Years lat­er, John­ny Depp would also find him­self being trans­formed dur­ing Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas. (I noticed right after watch­ing this Omnibus spe­cial that I answered my phone in a sort of Thomp­son drawl until my friend called me out. The pow­er of the Gonzo is such.)

But the man who had an equal pow­er over Thomp­son was Richard Nixon. Since see­ing the wily politi­cian reap­pear on the nation­al stage dur­ing the Bar­ry Gold­wa­ter cam­paign in 1964, Thomp­son cor­rect­ly rec­og­nized an ene­my of every­thing he held dear, a dark side of Amer­i­ca ris­ing from the corpse of John F. Kennedy. And Nixon caused the fear and the loathing in Amer­i­ca to bear fruit. As Thomp­son says in the doc­u­men­tary:

Richard Nixon for me stands for every­thing that I would not want to have hap­pen to myself, or be, or be around. He is every­thing that I have con­tempt for and dis­like and I think should be stomped out: Greed, treach­ery, stu­pid­i­ty, cupid­i­ty, pos­i­tive pow­er of lying, total con­tempt for any sort of human, con­struc­tive, polit­i­cal instinct. Every­thing that’s wrong with Amer­i­ca, every­thing that this coun­try has demon­strat­ed as a nation­al trait, that the world finds repug­nant: the bul­ly instinct, the pow­er grab, the dumb­ness, the insen­si­tiv­i­ty. Nixon rep­re­sents every­thing that’s wrong with this coun­try, down the line.

Maybe the ques­tion is not, what would Thomp­son think of Trump, who doesn’t even feign Nixon’s hum­ble rou­tine. The ques­tion is, where is our Hunter S. Thomp­son?

Relat­ed con­tent:

Read 11 Free Arti­cles by Hunter S. Thomp­son That Span His Gonzo Jour­nal­ist Career (1965–2005)

Hunter S. Thomp­son Gets Con­front­ed by The Hell’s Angels: Where’s Our Two Kegs of Beer? (1967)

How Hunter S. Thomp­son Gave Birth to Gonzo Jour­nal­ism: Short Film Revis­its Thompson’s Sem­i­nal 1970 Piece on the Ken­tucky Der­by

Hunter S. Thompson’s Deca­dent Dai­ly Break­fast: The “Psy­chic Anchor” of His Fre­net­ic Cre­ative Life

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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