Hear Jeremy Irons Read the Poetry of T.S. Eliot (Available for a Limited Time)

in Poetry, Radio | January 25th, 2017

We may have come nearly to the end of January already, but we can still call 2017 a new year — at least until we’ve listened to the poetry of T.S. Eliot to properly ring it in. “There’s surely no better poet than Eliot to help us confront the problem of finding meaning in a world where old certainties are being troubled,” says Martha Kearney, host of BBC Radio 4’s New Year’s series celebrating his work.

“Our lives are so busy now that we need some help from the season to just take stock, both of where we’ve been and where we might like to go to,” says the first episode’s guest, novelist Jeanette Winterson. We need to inhabit “that inward moment that poetry’s so good at,” and that Eliot made entirely his own. The bulk of that broadcast comprises a reading of Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by Jeremy Irons, surely one of the poet’s ideal living interpreters. (Note: you can stream all of the episodes in the series here.)

Irons reads more in the second, which includes a discussion with Winterson and Anthony Julius, Chair of Law and the Arts and University College London, about the opening of “Gerontion” and the “ugly references” made in Eliot’s other poems. The discussion in the third, in which Irons takes on Eliot’s immortal “The Waste Land,” looks for the source of the power of its “poetry of fragments” with former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and Scots Makar (something like a Poet Laureate of Scotland) Jackie Kay.

“The Waste Land” continues as a subject in part four, as its guest, the actress Fiona Shaw, has drawn acclaim for her own reading of the poem, but the Irons section of the broadcast offers various other selections, including “The Hollow Men,” “Ash Wednesday,” and “Journey of the Magi.” Finally, in part five, Kearney and Rory Stewart, Member of Parliament and man of letters, talk about and hear Irons deliver Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” whose language Stewart memorized on a walk through Nepal and which he later used during his political campaign.

This poetic, conversational, and performative radio feast comes to nearly four hours (listen to all of the episodes here), but you’ve got only the next six days to stream it. Otherwise you’ll have to wait until Radio 4’s next, as yet announced calendar-appropriate celebration of Eliot. They’ve used his work to refresh audiences after a troubling year; perhaps they’ll use it again to get us through the cruelest month of this one.

Listen to T.S. Eliot Recite His Late Masterpiece, the Four Quartets

Bob Dylan Reads From T.S. Eliot’s Great Modernist Poem The Waste Land

Hear Alec Guinness (The Legend Behind Obi-Wan Kenobi) Read T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets & The Waste Land

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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George Orwell’s 1984 Is Now the #1 Bestselling Book on Amazon

in Film | January 24th, 2017

George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel, 1984, has suddenly surged to the very top of the Amazon’s bestseller list. Though first published in 1949, it’s back with a vengeance. And George only has the new administration to thank.

We’ll have more on Orwell’s 1984 tomorrow. In the meantime, enjoy some great 1984 picks from our archive below:

Hear the Very First Adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 in a Radio Play Starring David Niven (1949)

George Orwell Explains in a Revealing 1944 Letter Why He’d Write 1984

A Complete Reading of George Orwell’s 1984: Aired on Pacifica Radio, 1975

Huxley to Orwell: My Hellish Vision of the Future is Better Than Yours (1949)

George Orwell’s Harrowing Race to Finish 1984 Before His Death

Note: You can download Orwell’s 1984 as a free audiobook (or two other books of your choice) if you sign up for Audible.com’s free trial program. Learn more about Audible’s free trial program here.

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

in History, Politics | January 24th, 2017

Image by Bernd Schwabe, via Wikimedia Commons

At least when I was in grade school, we learned the very basics of how the Third Reich came to power in the early 1930s. Paramilitary gangs terrorizing the opposition, the incompetence and opportunism of German conservatives, the Reichstag Fire. And we learned about the critical importance of propaganda, the deliberate misinforming of the public in order to sway opinions en masse and achieve popular support (or at least the appearance of it). While Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels purged Jewish and leftist artists and writers, he built a massive media infrastructure that played, writes PBS, “probably the most important role in creating an atmosphere in Germany that made it possible for the Nazis to commit terrible atrocities against Jews, homosexuals, and other minorities.”

How did the minority party of Hitler and Goebbels take over and break the will of the German people so thoroughly that they would allow and participate in mass murder? Post-war scholars of totalitarianism like Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt asked that question over and over, for several decades afterward. Their earliest studies on the subject looked at two sides of the equation. Adorno contributed to a massive volume of social psychology called The Authoritarian Personality, which studied individuals predisposed to the appeals of totalitarianism. He invented what he called the F‑Scale (“F” for “fascism”), one of several measures he used to theorize the Authoritarian Personality Type.

Arendt, on the other hand, looked closely at the regimes of Hitler and Stalin and their functionaries, at the ideology of scientific racism, and at the mechanism of propaganda in fostering “a curiously varying mixture of gullibility and cynicism with which each member… is expected to react to the changing lying statements of the leaders.” So she wrote in her 1951 Origins of Totalitarianism, going on to elaborate that this “mixture of gullibility and cynicism… is prevalent in all ranks of totalitarian movements”:

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true… The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

Why the constant, often blatant lying? For one thing, it functioned as a means of fully dominating subordinates, who would have to cast aside all their integrity to repeat outrageous falsehoods and would then be bound to the leader by shame and complicity. “The great analysts of truth and language in politics”—writes McGill University political philosophy professor Jacob T. Levy—including “George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Vaclav Havel—can help us recognize this kind of lie for what it is.… Saying something obviously untrue, and making your subordinates repeat it with a straight face in their own voice, is a particularly startling display of power over them. It’s something that was endemic to totalitarianism.”

Arendt and others recognized, writes Levy, that “being made to repeat an obvious lie makes it clear that you’re powerless.” She also recognized the function of an avalanche of lies to render a populace powerless to resist, the phenomenon we now refer to as “gaslighting”:

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.

The epistemological ground thus pulled out from under them, most would depend on whatever the leader said, no matter its relation to truth. “The essential conviction shared by all ranks,” Arendt concluded, “from fellow traveler to leader, is that politics is a game of cheating and that the ‘first commandment’ of the movement: ‘The Fuehrer is always right,’ is as necessary for the purposes of world politics, i.e., world-wide cheating, as the rules of military discipline are for the purposes of war.”

“We too,” writes Jeffrey Isaacs at The Washington Post, “live in dark times”—an allusion to another of Arendt’s sobering analyses—“even if they are different and perhaps less dark.” Arendt wrote Origins of Totalitarianism from research and observations gathered during the 1940s, a very specific historical period. Nonetheless the book, Isaacs remarks, “raises a set of fundamental questions about how tyranny can arise and the dangerous forms of inhumanity to which it can lead.” Arendt’s analysis of propaganda and the function of lies seems particularly relevant at this moment. The kinds of blatant lies she wrote of might become so commonplace as to become banal. We might begin to think they are an irrelevant sideshow. This, she suggests, would be a mistake.

via Michiko Kakutani

Enter the Hannah Arendt Archives & Discover Rare Audio Lectures, Manuscripts, Marginalia, Letters, Postcards & More

Hannah Arendt Discusses Philosophy, Politics & Eichmann in Rare 1964 TV Interview

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

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Watch Eero Saarinen: The Architect Who Saw the Future: Free for a Limited Time

in Architecture | January 24th, 2017

A quick heads up. For the next few days (until January 27) you can watch Eero Saarinen: The Architect Who Saw the Future, the latest installment from the PBS American Masters series. Here’s the PBS blurb for the episode.

Best known for designing National Historic Landmarks such as St. Louis’ iconic Gateway Arch and the General Motors Technical Center, Saarinen also designed New York’s TWA Flight Center at John F. Kennedy International Airport, Yale University’s Ingalls Rink and Morse and Ezra Stiles Colleges, Virginia’s Dulles Airport, and modernist pedestal furniture like the Tulip chair.

In the film, Saarinen’s son, Eric Saarinen, “visits the sites of his father’s work on a cathartic journey, shot in 6K with the latest in drone technology that showcases the architect’s body of timeless work for the first time. The documentary also features rare archival interviews with Eero and his second wife, The New York Times art critic Aline Saarinen, as well as letters and quotations from Aline’s memoirs voiced respectively by Peter Franzén and Blythe Danner.”

You can get more background on the film here. Copies of the film can be purchased online here.

A is for Architecture: 1960 Documentary on Why We Build, from the Ancient Greeks to Modern Times

32,000+ Bauhaus Art Objects Made Available Online by Harvard Museum Website

Roman Architecture: A Free Online Course from Yale University

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Disco Demolition Night: Scenes from the Night Disco Died (or Did It?) at Chicago’s Comiskey Park, 1979

in Music | January 24th, 2017

Surely you’ve heard of Disco Demolition Night, when Chicago DJ Steve Dahl invited listeners to the 1979 White Sox double header against the Tigers at Comiskey Park, offering tickets for .98 cents if they brought a disco record he could blow up between games. The event drew thousands more than Dahl expected, turned into a riot on the field, and has since passed into history for its rallying cry of “Disco sucks!” and its heralding of the end of disco’s reign.

Disco died at the end of the 70s, the story goes. But many music fans know differently. Disco didn’t die. It mutated, became House music, New Wave, and other hybrid genres. It made its way into the music of the Clash, Blondie, Michael Jackson, Madonna, and others. Nonetheless, Disco Demolition Night represented a widespread backlash that drove disco off the pop charts and back where it came from—the mostly black, Latino, and gay clubs in New York, Chicago, Detroit, and other cities.

Many people who have written histories of Disco Demolition have come to see it “as a not-so-subtle attack” against those groups of people, writes NPR, against “disco’s early adopters.” Dahl, who has co-authored his own book about the night, disagrees, but he admits that images of the event look “like a book burning.” Disco “obviously threatened a lot of rockers,” he concedes. Another witness to the event, an African-American usher named Vince Lawrence, saw evidence firsthand.

Lawrence—a disco fan and aspiring musician—tells the podcast Undone that he was actually looking forward to the event. He liked Dahl and “had strict intention of keeping records that were good that I didn’t have.” However, as he collected the records at the gate, he noticed among them Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder albums, “records that were black records,” he says, but not disco. He tells NPR, he saw “Curtis Mayfield records and Otis Clay records.… Records that were clearly not disco.” He balked, but was told he had to take them and issue tickets.

After Dahl rolled onto the field in a Jeep and blew up the dumpster full of records, chaos ensued, and the stunt turned into “this zany, real life slapstick routine,” says Undone’s host Pat Walters, “until all the sudden, it’s just not.” Rioters set a bonfire, stole the bases (literally), and became a raging mob. On his way out of the park, Lawrence was attacked by fans yelling “Disco Sucks!” and breaking records in his face.

Columnist Renee Graham, a gay woman of color who was a teenager at the time, recalls seeing photos of the event and being reminded of White Citizens Councils smashing rock and roll records because they brought white and black kids together. “This wasn’t just ‘We don’t like this music,’” she says, “this was ‘We don’t like these people who listen to this music.’” By 1979, however, “those people” included many of the same kids’ classmates, siblings, parents.… Disco had gone mainstream after Saturday Night Fever and the Bee Gees’ breakout. “It was almost like musical gentrification,” says Graham.

The Rolling Stones, Rod Stewart, Led Zeppelin, KISS—all of them appropriated disco. And the rock kids were furious. After the riot at Comiskey, “disco became a four-letter word.” Careers collapsed, radio stations changed format, record stores reordered, almost overnight. Had none of this happened, it’s possible disco would have fizzled out. Driven underground, back to its roots, it instead found new expression in the hands of pioneers like Chicago DJ Frankie Knuckles, the “Godfather of House,” and New York’s “Little” Louie Vega and Kenny “Dope” Ramirez.

Knuckles DJ’ed at Chicago club the Warehouse, which lent its name to the music—predominantly disco or disco inspired—he played. As house music evolved, “you could hear it fill in the space that disco had occupied,” says Walters. Vince Lawrence, too young to get into the Warehouse, began staging his own house parties, and these spread to cities all over the country, and eventually to Europe, where the music influenced bands like the Eurythmics and New Order, who discovered house on the Spanish island of Ibiza. Undone makes the case that Disco Demolition Night saved disco, in a way, so that it could emerge and influence many more appreciative crossover fans in the decades to come.

Rita Hayworth, 1940s Hollywood Icon, Dances Disco to the Tune of The Bee Gees Stayin’ Alive: A Mashup

Saturday Night Fever: The (Fake) Magazine Story That Started it All

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

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Hear Kurt Vonnegut Visit the Afterlife & Interview Dead Historical Figures: Isaac Newton, Adolf Hitler, Eugene Debs & More (Audio, 1998)

in History, Radio | January 24th, 2017

Image by Daniele Prati, via Flickr Commons

Kurt Vonnegut wrote novels, of course, but also short stories, essays, and — briefly, suitably late in his career — correspondence from the afterlife. He did that last gig in 1998, composing for broadcast on the formidable WNYC, by undergoing a series of what he called “controlled near-death experiences” orchestrated, so he claimed, by “Dr. Jack Kevorkian and the facilities of a Huntsville, Texas execution chamber.” These made possible “more than one hundred visits to Heaven and my returning to life to tell the tale,” or rather, to tell the tales of the more permanently deceased with whom he’d sat down for a chat.

Vonnegut’s roster of afterlife interviewees included personages he personally admired such as Eugene Debs (listen), Isaac Newton (listen), and Clarence Darrow (listen), as well as historical villains like James Earl Ray (listen) and Adolf Hitler (listen). Other of the dead with whom he spoke, while they may not qualify as household names, nevertheless went to the grave with some sort of achievement under their belts: Olestra inventor Fred H. Mattson, for instance, or John Wesley Joyce, owner of the famed Greenwich Village literary watering hole The Lion’s Head. Only the Slaughterhouse-Five author’s courageous and impossible reportage has saved the names of a few, like that of retired construction worker Salvatore Biagini, from total obscurity.

Famous or not, people interested Vonnegut, who claimed to get his ideas from “disgust with civilization” but also served as honorary president of the National Humanist Association. This aspect of his personality comes up in the Brian Lehrer Show segment just above, a listen back to Vonnegut’s “Reports on the Afterlife” segments for WNYC’s 90th anniversary. (You can listen to all the segments individually here.)

Producer Marty Goldensohn talks about recording them at Vonnegut’s apartment, where the famous writer would answer the phone every few minutes for a brief talk with one curious fan after another, none of whom he’d taken any pains whatsoever to keep from finding his phone number. “It was a wonderful thing,” says Goldensohn. “He had a way of talking, hearing what he wanted to hear, thanking, and hanging up very nicely. Sixty seconds.” He’d also mastered, adds Lehrer, the art of the one-minute trip to the afterlife, and the stories this unusual radio format allowed him to tell surely drew from the vast range of experiences and emotions to which Vonnegut had exposed his mind not just through reading, but also with such frequent and brief yet very real human connections he’d make on a seemingly near-constant basis.

A little bit less than a decade after these recordings and the subsequent publication of their print collection God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, the unceasingly smoking and drinking Vonnegut would, at the age of 84, make his own final trip to the afterlife. There he now presumably awaits (possibly beside Kevorkian himself) the next correspondent intrepid enough to come up and interview him. Given the events of the past decade, listeners could certainly use whatever dose of his characteristically clear-eyed and sardonic perspective he might have to offer.

Hear Kurt Vonnegut’s Very First Public Reading from Breakfast of Champions (1970)

Hear Kurt Vonnegut’s Novel Cat’s Cradle Get Turned into Avant-Garde Music (Featuring Kurt Himself)

An Animated Kurt Vonnegut Visits NYU, Riffs, Rambles, and Blows the Kids’ Minds (1970)

Kurt Vonnegut’s Term Paper Assignment from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop Teaches You to Read Fiction Like a Writer

Kurt Vonnegut Diagrams the Shape of All Stories in a Master’s Thesis Rejected by U. Chicago

In 1988, Kurt Vonnegut Writes a Letter to People Living in 2088, Giving 7 Pieces of Advice

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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An Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy of History: The Road to Progress Runs First Through Dark Times

in Philosophy | January 23rd, 2017

The question of whether or not genuine human progress is possible, or desirable, lies at the heart of many a radical post-Enlightenment philosophical project. More pessimistic philosophers have, unsurprisingly, doubted it. Arthur Schopenhauer, cast baleful suspicion on the idea. Danish Existentialist Soren Kierkegaard thought of collective progress toward a more enlightened state an unlikely prospect. One modern critic of progress, pessimistic English philosopher John Gray, writes in his book Straw Dogs that “the pursuit of progress” is an idealist illusion ending in “mass murder.” (Gray has been unimpressed by Steven Pinker’s optimistic arguments in The Better Angels of Our Nature.)

These skeptics of progress all in some way write in response to the towering 19th century figure G.W.F. Hegel, the German logician and philosopher of history, politics, and phenomenology whose systematic thinking provided Karl Marx with the basis of his dialectical materialism. Hegel saw the mass murder brought about by massive political and economic change in his revolutionary and imperial age, but in his estimation, such man-made disasters were necessary occurrences, the “slaughter bench of history,” as he famously wrote in the Philosophy of History.

This suggests a very brutal view, and yet Hegel believed overall that “Reason is the Sovereign of the World; that the history of the world therefore, presents us with a rational process.” For Hegel, the individual personality was not important, only collective entities: peoples, states, empires. These moved against each other according to a metaphysical reasoning process working through history which Hegel called the dialectic. In his animated School of Life video above, Alain de Botton describes the dialectic in the terms we usually use—thesis, antithesis, synthesis—though Hegel himself did not exactly formulate the principle this way.

This is the common shorthand way of understanding how Hegel’s nonlinear explanation of history works: “the world makes progress,” summarizes de Botton, “by lurching from one extreme to the other, as it seeks to overcompensate for a previous mistake, and generally requires three moves before the right balance on any issue can be found.” One particularly bloody example is the terror of the French Revolution as an extreme corrective for the monarchy’s oppression. This gave way to the antithesis, the brutal autocratic empire of Napoleon in another extreme swing. Only decades later could these be reconciled in modern French civil society.

In our own time, we have encountered the progressive ideas of Hegel not only through Marx, but through the work of Martin Luther King, Jr., who studied Hegel as a graduate student at Harvard and Boston University and found much inspiration in the Philosophy of History. Though critical of Hegel’s idealism, which, “tended to swallow up the many in the one,” King discovered important first principles there as well: “His analysis of the dialectical process, in spite of its shortcomings, helped me to see that growth comes through struggle.”

We endlessly quote King’s statement, “the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice,” but we forget his corresponding emphasis on the necessity of struggle to achieve the goal. As Hegel theorized, says de Botton above, “the dark moments aren’t the end, they are a challenging but in some ways necessary part… imminently compatible with events broadly moving forward in the right direction.” King found his own historical synthesis in the principle of nonviolent resistance, which “seeks to reconcile the truths of two opposites,” he wrote in 1954’s Stride Toward Freedom, “acquiescence and violence.” Nonviolent resistance is not passive compliance, but neither is it intentional aggression.

Hegel and his socially influential students like Martin Luther King and John Dewey have generally operated on the basis of some faith—in reason, divine justice, or secular humanism. There are much harsher, more pessimistic ways of viewing history than as a swinging pendulum moving toward some greater end. Pessimistic thinkers may be more rigorously honest about the staggering moral challenge posed by increasingly efficient means of mass killing and the perpetuation of ideologies that commit it. Yet it is partly through the influence of Hegel that modern social movements have embraced the necessity of struggle and believed progress was possible, even inevitable, when it seemed least likely to occur.

How Martin Luther King, Jr. Used Hegel, Kant & Nietzsche to Overturn Segregation in America

135 Free Philosophy eBooks

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Musician Lugs a Cello Up a Mountain, Then Plays Bach at 10,000 Feet, at the “Top of the World”

in Music | January 23rd, 2017

After this inspiring weekend, I didn’t need anything particularly energizing to start my week. But, then again, it’s hard to refuse a shot inspiration when it falls right into your lap. Above, watch “Andante,” which the website Aeon describes as follows:

Andante (a musical term meaning ‘at walking pace’) follows the cellist Ruth Boden as she climbs 10,000 feet to a peak in Oregon’s Wallowa Mountains for a deeply personal, yet breathtakingly public solo performance. With her prized cello strapped to her back, Boden reflects on how she wants to do something with music that transcends the commonplace, and on the particular joy of playing from Bach’s cello suite at ‘the top of the world’.

Hope this helps you get to Wednesday. And, to reach Friday, we’ve added some other fine Bach material in the Relateds below.

via Aeon

Download the Complete Organ Works of J.S. Bach for Free

Watch a 27-Year-Old Glenn Gould Play Bach & Put His Musical Genius on Display (1959)

The Genius of J.S. Bach’s “Crab Canon” Visualized on a Möbius Strip

Stream the Complete Works of Bach & Beethoven: 250 Free Hours of Music

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Before Siri & Alexa: Hear the First Attempt to Use a Synthesizer to Recreate the Human Voice (1939)

in Technology | January 23rd, 2017

Whether from Stephen Hawking, Siri, or anyone in between, we’ve all heard quite a lot of electronically synthesized speech by now. But less than eighty years ago, the very idea of a human-sounding voice produced in a mechanical manner inspired wonder and disturbance in equal measure. The everyman and everywoman got their first chance to hear such a technology at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, during its hourly demonstrations of the very first speech synthesizer, the “Voder.” Who, they must have imagined as they stood before its booming square-jawed-Art-Deco-hero logo, could have invented such a thing?

Homer Dudley, an electronic and acoustic engineer at Bell Labs, had in the 1920s invented the “Vocoder” (or “Voice Operated reCorDER”), a device that could convert human speech into an electronic signal and then, somewhere else down the like, turn that signal back into speech again.

For the Voder (or “Voice Operation DEmonstratoR”) he took the initial voice out of the signal, creating a kind of synthesizer dedicated to the sounds of speech that one could operate manually, through an interface somewhat resembling that of an organ. Its controls (which you can see diagrammed at 120 Years of Electonic Music) presented a steep enough learning curve that fewer than thirty people, mostly the “girls” employed for the Voder’s demonstrations, ever learned to play it.

Though impressive for the time (the other feat of artificial humanity at that World’s Fair being Electro the Smoking Robot), “the Voder’s speech came out a little hard to understand, and even a bit unsettling,” according to Atlas Obscura. “The Voder was shown again during San Francisco’s Golden Gate International Exposition in late 1939, but after that, the machine disappeared almost instantly.” Speech synthesis itself, by contrast, had come to stay, though progress would remain relatively slow for the next four or five decades. Now, in the 21st century, it exists all around us, and despite considerable improvements in realism, its voices still retain a bit of the unearthly awkwardness of the Voder — and we probably wouldn’t have it any other way.

Monty Python’s “Argument Clinic” Sketch Reenacted by Two Vintage Voice Synthesizers (One Is Stephen Hawking’s Voice)

Soviet Inventor Léon Theremin Shows Off the Theremin, the Early Electronic Instrument That Could Be Played Without Being Touched (1954)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

An Animated History of Planned Parenthood, Brought to You by Lena Dunham, JJ Abrams & More

in Current Affairs, Health, History, Life, Politics | January 23rd, 2017

Lena Dunham drafted a host of well known friends for The History Of 100 Years Of Women’s Health Care At Planned Parenthood, the short film (above) she co-directed with animator Kirsten Lepore. Others taking part in the production include comedians Mindy Kaling and Amy Schumer, actors Meryl Streep, America Ferrera, Hari Nef, Jennifer Lawrence, and Constance Wu, and producer J.J. Abrams.

But the real stars of this show are the female trailblazers who fought (and continue to fight) for access to safe and affordable reproductive care for all women, regardless of age, race, or ability to pay.

In the words of founder Margaret Sanger, a controversial figure who seems to share quite a few traits with Dunham, from her deft leverage of her celebrity on behalf of her chosen cause to her capacity for alienating fans with some of her less savory views and statements:

No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.

Women like Rosie Jimenez, a single mother who died from complications of a back alley abortion following the passage of the Hyde Amendment, were victimized by laws regarding reproductive choice.

Others, like Estelle Griswold, executive director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, flouted the laws to bring about change.

More recently Faye Wattleton, Planned Parenthood’s first African American president and its current president, Cecile Richards, have worked to promote awareness of both the public’s rights and any impending dangers to those rights.

(Vice President Mike Pence’s inadvertent fundraising efforts go unheralded, appropriately enough. The millions of women—and men—who made small donations to Planned Parenthood in his name are the true heroes here.)

For more of Dunham’s highly visible support of Planned Parenthood, read her 2015 interview with President Cecile Richards or check out the t‑shirt she designed to benefit the California Planned Parenthood Education Fund.

via Kottke

Download Images From Rad American Women A‑Z: A New Picture Book on the History of Feminism

An Animated Introduction to the Feminist Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir (on Her 109th Birthday)

Download All 239 Issues of Landmark UK Feminist Magazine Spare Rib Free Online

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play Zamboni Godot is opening in New York City in March 2017. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

20 Lessons from the 20th Century About How to Defend Democracy from Authoritarianism, According to Yale Historian Timothy Snyder

in History | January 20th, 2017

Image by Rob Kall, via Flickr Commons

Timothy Snyder, Housum Professor of History at Yale University, is one of the foremost scholars in the U.S. and Europe on the rise and fall of totalitarianism during the 1930s and 40s. Among his long list of appointments and publications, he has won multiple awards for his recent international bestsellers Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin and last year’s Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning. That book in part makes the argument that Nazism wasn’t only a German nationalist movement but had global colonialist origins—in Russia, Africa, and in the U.S., the nation that pioneered so many methods of human extermination, racist dehumanization, and ideologically-justified land grabs.

The hyper-capitalism portrayed in the U.S.—even during the Depression—Snyder writes, fueled Hitler’s imagination, such that he promised Germans “a life comparable to that of the American people,” whose “racially pure and uncorrupted” German population he described as “world class.” Snyder describes Hitler’s ideology as a myth of racialist struggle in which “there are really no values in the world except for the stark reality that we are born in order to take things from other people.” Or as we often hear these days, that acting in accordance with this principle is the “smart” thing to do. Like many far right figures before and after, Hitler aimed to restore a state of nature that for him was a perpetual state of race war for imperial dominance.

After the November election, Snyder wrote a profile of Hitler, a short piece that made no direct comparisons to any contemporary figure. But reading the facts of the historical case alarmed most readers. A few days later, the historian appeared on a Slate podcast to discuss the article, saying that after he submitted it, “I realized there was more.… there are an awful lot of echoes.” Snyder admits that history doesn’t actually repeat itself. But we’re far too quick, he says, to dismiss that idea as a cliché “and not think about history at all. History shows a range of possibilities.” Similar events occur across time under similar kinds of conditions. And it is, of course, possible to learn from the past.

If you’ve heard other informed analysis but haven’t read Snyder’s New York Review of Books columns on fascism in Putin’s Russia or the former Yanukovich’s Ukraine, or his long article “Hitler’s World May Not Be So Far Away,” you may have seen his widely-shared Facebook post making the rounds. As he argued in The Guardian last September, today we may be “too certain we are ethically superior to the Europeans of the 1940s.” On November, 15, Snyder wrote on Facebook that “Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism.” Snyder has been criticized for conflating these regimes, and rising “into the top rungs of punditdom,” but when it comes to body counts and levels of suppressive malignancy, it’s hard to argue that Stalinist Russia, any more than Tsarist Russia, was anyone’s idea of a democracy.

Rather than making a historical case for viewing the U.S. as exactly like one of the totalitarian regimes of WWII Europe, Snyder presents 20 lessons we might learn from those times and use creatively in our own where they apply. In my view, following his suggestions would make us wiser, more self-aware, proactive, responsible citizens, whatever lies ahead. Read Snyder’s lessons from his Facebook post below and consider ordering his latest book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century:

1. Do not obey in advance. Much of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then start to do it without being asked. You’ve already done this, haven’t you? Stop. Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom.

2. Defend an institution. Follow the courts or the media, or a court or a newspaper. Do not speak of “our institutions” unless you are making them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions don’t protect themselves. They go down like dominoes unless each is defended from the beginning.

3. Recall professional ethics. When the leaders of state set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become much more important. It is hard to break a rule-of-law state without lawyers, and it is hard to have show trials without judges.

4. When listening to politicians, distinguish certain words. Look out for the expansive use of “terrorism” and “extremism.” Be alive to the fatal notions of “exception” and “emergency.” Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary.

5. Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that all authoritarians at all times either await or plan such events in order to consolidate power. Think of the Reichstag fire. The sudden disaster that requires the end of the balance of power, the end of opposition parties, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Don’t fall for it.

6. Be kind to our language. Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone is saying. (Don’t use the internet before bed. Charge your gadgets away from your bedroom, and read.) What to read? Perhaps “The Power of the Powerless” by Václav Havel, 1984 by George Orwell, The Captive Mind by Czesław Milosz, The Rebel by Albert Camus, The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt, or Nothing is True and Everything is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev.

7. Stand out. Someone has to. It is easy, in words and deeds, to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. And the moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.

8. Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

9. Investigate. Figure things out for yourself. Spend more time with long articles. Subsidize investigative journalism by subscribing to print media. Realize that some of what is on your screen is there to harm you. Learn about sites that investigate foreign propaganda pushes.

10. Practice corporeal politics. Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people. Make new friends and march with them.

11. Make eye contact and small talk. This is not just polite. It is a way to stay in touch with your surroundings, break down unnecessary social barriers, and come to understand whom you should and should not trust. If we enter a culture of denunciation, you will want to know the psychological landscape of your daily life.

12. Take responsibility for the face of the world. Notice the swastikas and the other signs of hate. Do not look away and do not get used to them. Remove them yourself and set an example for others to do so.

13. Hinder the one-party state. The parties that took over states were once something else. They exploited a historical moment to make political life impossible for their rivals. Vote in local and state elections while you can.

14. Give regularly to good causes, if you can. Pick a charity and set up autopay. Then you will know that you have made a free choice that is supporting civil society helping others doing something good.

15. Establish a private life. Nastier rulers will use what they know about you to push you around. Scrub your computer of malware. Remember that email is skywriting. Consider using alternative forms of the internet, or simply using it less. Have personal exchanges in person. For the same reason, resolve any legal trouble. Authoritarianism works as a blackmail state, looking for the hook on which to hang you. Try not to have too many hooks.

16. Learn from others in other countries. Keep up your friendships abroad, or make new friends abroad. The present difficulties here are an element of a general trend. And no country is going to find a solution by itself. Make sure you and your family have passports.

17. Watch out for the paramilitaries. When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching around with torches and pictures of a Leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-Leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the game is over.

18. Be reflective if you must be armed. If you carry a weapon in public service, God bless you and keep you. But know that evils of the past involved policemen and soldiers finding themselves, one day, doing irregular things. Be ready to say no. (If you do not know what this means, contact the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and ask about training in professional ethics.)

19. Be as courageous as you can. If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die in unfreedom.

20. Be a patriot. The incoming president is not. Set a good example of what America means for the generations to come. They will need it.

via Kottke

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

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