How to Silence the Negative Chatter in Our Heads: Psychology Professor Ethan Kross Explains

in Psychology | February 18th, 2023

A cou­ple of weeks ago, the New York Times pub­lished an arti­cle head­lined “How to Stop Rumi­nat­ing.” If your social media feeds are any­thing like mine, you’ve seen it pop up with some fre­quen­cy since then. “Per­haps you spend hours replay­ing a tense con­ver­sa­tion you had with your boss over and over in your head,” writes its author Han­nah Seo. “Maybe you can’t stop think­ing about where things went wrong with an ex dur­ing the weeks and months after a breakup.” The piece’s pop­u­lar­i­ty speaks to the com­mon­ness of these ten­den­cies.

But if “your thoughts are so exces­sive and over­whelm­ing that you can’t seem to stop them,” lead­ing to dis­trac­tion and dis­or­ga­ni­za­tion at work and at home, “you’re prob­a­bly expe­ri­enc­ing rumi­na­tion.” For this broad­er phe­nom­e­non Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan psy­chol­o­gy pro­fes­sor Ethan Kross has a more evoca­tive name: chat­ter.

“Your inner voice is your abil­i­ty to silent­ly use lan­guage to reflect on your life,” he explains in the Big Think video above. “Chat­ter refers to the dark side of the inner voice. When we turn our atten­tion inward to make sense of our prob­lems, we don’t end up find­ing solu­tions. We end up rumi­nat­ing, wor­ry­ing, cat­a­stro­phiz­ing.”

Despite being an invalu­able tool for plan­ning, mem­o­ry, and self-con­trol, our inner voice also has a way of turn­ing against us. “It makes it incred­i­bly hard for us to focus,” Kross says, and it can also have “severe neg­a­tive phys­i­cal health effects” when it keeps us per­pet­u­al­ly stress­ing out over long-passed events. “We expe­ri­ence a stres­sor in our life. It then ends, but in our minds, our chat­ter per­pet­u­ates it. We keep think­ing about that event over and over again.” When you’re inside them, such men­tal loops can feel infi­nite, and they could result in per­pet­u­al­ly dire con­se­quences in our per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al lives. To those in need of a way to break free, Kross empha­sizes the pow­er of rit­u­als.

“When you expe­ri­ence chat­ter, you often feel like your thoughts are in con­trol of you,” he says. But “we can com­pen­sate for this feel­ing out of con­trol by cre­at­ing order around us. Rit­u­als are one way to do that.” Per­form­ing cer­tain actions exact­ly the same way every sin­gle time gives you “a sense of order and con­trol that can feel real­ly good when you’re mired in chat­ter.” Kross goes into greater depth on the range of chat­ter-con­trol­ling tools avail­able to us (“dis­tanced-self talk,” for exam­ple, which involves per­ceiv­ing and address­ing the self as if it were some­one) in his book Chat­ter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Mat­ters, and How to Har­ness It. His inter­view with Chase Jarvis above offers a pre­view of its con­tent — and a reminder that, as means of silenc­ing chat­ter go, some­times a pod­cast works as well as any­thing.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Secret to High Per­for­mance and Ful­fil­ment: Psy­chol­o­gist Daniel Gole­man Explains the Pow­er of Focus

How Lit­er­a­ture Can Improve Men­tal Health: Take a Free Course Fea­tur­ing Stephen Fry, Ian McK­ellen, Melvyn Bragg & More

Why You Do Your Best Think­ing In The Show­er: Cre­ativ­i­ty & the “Incu­ba­tion Peri­od”

The Ther­a­peu­tic Ben­e­fits of Ambi­ent Music: Sci­ence Shows How It Eas­es Chron­ic Anx­i­ety, Phys­i­cal Pain, and ICU-Relat­ed Trau­ma

Erich Fromm’s Six Rules of Lis­ten­ing: Learn the Keys to Under­stand­ing Oth­er Peo­ple from the Famed Psy­chol­o­gist

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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 Life & Art of Gustav Klimt: A Short Art History Lesson on the Austrian Symbolist Painter and His Work

in Art, Technology, Video - Arts & Culture | February 17th, 2023

The Aus­tri­an sym­bol­ist painter, Gus­tav Klimt, a dri­ving force of the Vien­na Seces­sion, has joined the ranks of famous, dead artists being served up as pricey, super-sized, Insta­gram-friend­ly immer­sive expe­ri­ences.

Jane Kallir, author of Gus­tav Klimt: 25 Mas­ter­works and co-founder of the Kallir Research Insti­tute, a foun­da­tion ded­i­cat­ed to fur­ther­ing the study of Aus­tri­an and Ger­man Mod­ernists, is not buy­ing into this approach.

Hav­ing vis­it­ed the Gold in Motion immer­sive Klimt exhib­it at New York City’s recent­ly inau­gu­rat­ed Hall des Lumières with Art­net’s Ben Davis, she def­i­nite­ly has some notes:

They take lib­er­ties with the orig­i­nals. If you know the orig­i­nals well, which I do, it’s some­times hard to fig­ure out what they were work­ing from. The col­or is some­times way off. And some of the images are not by Klimt at all. They seem like pas­tich­es of Klimt or pieces of Klimts that they’ve past­ed togeth­er in dif­fer­ent ways…these images are blown up to a height of, what, 20 feet? It real­ly doesn’t work, aes­thet­i­cal­ly. Klimt’s draw­ings are espe­cial­ly dif­fi­cult because they’re so del­i­cate, at times almost invis­i­ble.

But mustn’t some young vis­i­tors, after post­ing the pletho­ra of self­ies that moti­vate many a pil­grim­age to this “mul­ti-sen­so­ry cel­e­bra­tion,” be moved to learn more about the artist it’s cash­ing in on?

That’d be a good thing, right?

Of course it would, and Paul Priest­ley pro­vides a great intro­duc­tion to Klimt’s life and work in the above episode of his Art His­to­ry School web series.

We grant that spend­ing 13 min­utes with a mid­dle-aged arts edu­ca­tor in a fes­tive vest is a less sexy-see­ing prospect than “step(ping) into a won­der­land of mov­ing paint­ings” to be “amazed by the gold­en era of mod­ernism.”

But Priest­ley offers some­thing you can’t real­ly focus on while gawk­ing at enor­mous 360º pro­jec­tions of The Kiss dur­ing a $35 timed entry  — his­tor­i­cal con­text and a gen­er­ous por­tion of art world dish on a “life­long bach­e­lor who had count­less liaisons dur­ing his life­time, usu­al­ly with his mod­els, and is rumored to have fathered more than a dozen chil­dren.”

Priest­ley makes clear how the young Klimt’s career took a fate­ful turn with Phi­los­o­phy (below), part of a mas­sive com­mis­sion for the ceil­ing of Vien­na University’s Great Hall, that was ulti­mate­ly destroyed by the Nazis, but has since been res­ur­rect­ed after a fash­ion using AI, black and white pho­tos, and eye­wit­ness descrip­tions.


When Klimt’s first go at it was dis­played, it was sav­aged by crit­ics as “chaot­ic, non­sen­si­cal and out of keep­ing with the intend­ed set­ting.”

Philosophy’s drub­bing put an end to Klimt’s offi­cial com­mis­sions, but pri­vate ones flour­ished due to the bohemi­an painter’s “beau­ti­ful women in ele­gant­ly lan­guid and flat­ter­ing pos­es.”

Imag­ine how those sta­tus con­scious soci­ety matrons would have react­ed to see­ing their like­ness­es tapped as immer­sive art, which Vice’s Alex Flem­ing-Brown pegs as “the lat­est lazy lovechild of Tik­Tok and enter­pris­ing ware­house land­lords.”

Sure­ly they would have rel­ished the atten­tion!

Well, every­one, that is, except Mar­garet Ston­bor­ough-Wittgen­stein, sis­ter of Lud­wig, who chafed at her appear­ance in Klimt’s 1905 bridal por­trait as  “too inno­cent, timid and girl­ish…” and stuck the pic­ture in the attic.

C’mon, they can’t all be The Kiss.

It’s an aston­ish­ing paint­ing, but there’s so much more to dis­cov­er about Klimt and his four decades worth of work.

But first, with apolo­gies to any read­ers who gen­uine­ly enjoy immer­sive art exhibits — many do — here are Jane Kallir’s not entire­ly con­cil­ia­to­ry thoughts on Beethoven Frieze, Klimt’s volup­tuous vision of lust, love and dis­ease, which was delib­er­ate­ly enhanced by accom­pa­ny­ing sculp­ture and live music when it made its pub­lic debut in 1902, and is cur­rent­ly being parceled out and writ large in dig­i­tal form in the build­ing for­mer­ly known as New York’s Emi­grant Indus­tri­al Sav­ings Bank:

I asked myself whether Klimt would have approved of the Beethoven Frieze pro­jec­tions. I believe most artists embrace cut­ting-edge tech­nol­o­gy, what­ev­er it may be in their day and age. The Beethoven Frieze seg­ment is a Gesamtkunst­werk on a scale that Klimt might have dreamed of—might have. This is the one part of the pre­sen­ta­tion that could be faith­ful to his inten­tions.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

136 Paint­ings by Gus­tav Klimt Now Online (Includ­ing 63 Paint­ings in an Immer­sive Aug­ment­ed Real­i­ty Gallery)

Vienna’s Alberti­na Muse­um Puts 150,000 Dig­i­tized Art­works Into the Pub­lic Domain: Klimt, Munch, Dür­er, and More

Gus­tav Klimt’s Mas­ter­pieces Destroyed Dur­ing World War II Get Recre­at­ed with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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How to Solve the Prisoner’s Dilemma: A Gloriously Animated Explanation of the Classic Game-Theory Problem

in Animation, Economics, Photography | February 17th, 2023

Imag­ine two pris­on­ers, each one placed in soli­tary con­fine­ment. The police offer a deal: if each betrays the oth­er, they’ll both get five years in prison. If one betrays the oth­er but the oth­er keeps qui­et, the betray­er will walk free and the betrayed will serve ten years. If nei­ther say any­thing, they’ll both be locked up, but only for two years. Unable coor­di­nate, both pris­on­ers will like­ly betray each oth­er in order to secure the best indi­vid­ual out­come, despite the fact that it would be bet­ter on the whole for both to keep their mouths shut. This is the “pris­on­er’s dilem­ma,” a thought exper­i­ment much-cit­ed in game the­o­ry and eco­nom­ics since the mid­dle of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry.

Though the sit­u­a­tion the pris­on­er’s dilem­ma describes may sound quite spe­cif­ic, its gen­er­al form actu­al­ly con­forms to that of a vari­ety of prob­lems that arise through­out the mod­ern world, in pol­i­tics, trade, inter­per­son­al rela­tions, and a great many oth­ers besides.

Blog­ger Scott Alexan­der describes the pris­on­er’s dilem­mas as one man­i­fes­ta­tion of what Allen Gins­berg called Moloch, the relent­less unseen force that dri­ves soci­eties toward mis­ery. Moloch “always and every­where offers the same deal: throw what you love most into the flames, and I can grant you pow­er.” Or, as he’d put it to Chewy the gin­ger­bread man, “Betray your friend Crispy, and I’ll make a fox eat only three of your limbs.”

Such is the sit­u­a­tion ani­mat­ed in glo­ri­ous­ly wool­ly stop-motion by Ivana Bošn­jak and Thomas John­son in the TED-Ed video at the top of the post, which replaces the pris­on­ers with “sen­tient baked goods,” the jail­er with a hun­gry wood­land preda­tor, and years of impris­on­ment with bit­ten-off arms and legs. After explain­ing the pris­on­er’s dilem­ma in a whim­si­cal man­ner, it presents one pro­posed solu­tion: the “infi­nite pris­on­er’s dilem­ma,” in which the par­tic­i­pants decide not just once but over and over again. Such a set­up would allow them to “use their future deci­sions as bar­gain­ing chips for the present one,” and even­tu­al­ly (depend­ing upon how heav­i­ly they val­ue future out­comes in the present) to set­tle upon repeat­ing the out­come that would let both of them walk free — as free as they can walk on one gin­ger­bread leg, at any rate.

via Aeon

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Intro­duc­tion to Game The­o­ry & Strate­gic Think­ing: A Free Course from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Famous Thought Exper­i­ment, the “Trol­ley Prob­lem,” Nar­rat­ed by Har­ry Shear­er

The Famous Schrödinger’s Cat Thought Exper­i­ment Comes Back to Life in an Off-Kil­ter Ani­ma­tion

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 Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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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Gnome Chomsky: The Indispensable Ornament for the Thinking Person’s Garden

in Random | February 16th, 2023

Images via Just­SayG­nome

The Noam Chom­sky Gar­den Gnome. That’s right, I said it, the Noam Chom­sky Gar­den Gnome.

Over at justsaygnome.net, you can buy “Gnome Chom­sky the Gar­den Noam.” Here’s is how it’s gen­er­al­ly described:

Just over one foot in height, the ful­ly paint­ed Gnome Chom­sky the Gar­den Noam (Ver­sion II) stands relaxed and con­fi­dent in his classy gnome clothes, hat and glass­es. Equipped with a cou­ple books on an author­i­ta­tive pil­lar, he’s ready to give your gar­den or home a big infu­sion of insight­ful gnome polit­i­cal per­spec­tive. A sol­id foun­da­tion base com­plete with a carved title assures that Gar­den Noam will be well-bal­anced and helps inform any­one who may not imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­nize him of the iden­ti­ty of this hand­some and schol­ar­ly gnome.

The gnome costs $228.00 paint­ed and $124 unpaint­ed (plus ship­ping). And if you’re inter­est­ed, you can also get Howard the Zinn Monk and BerGnome Sanders.

In putting this post togeth­er, I spot­ted an old com­ic bit that took the idea of a Noam Gar­den Gnome as its premise. You can watch it below.

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Noam Chom­sky on Chat­G­PT: It’s “Basi­cal­ly High-Tech Pla­gia­rism” and “a Way of Avoid­ing Learn­ing”

Clash of the Titans: Noam Chom­sky & Michel Fou­cault Debate Human Nature & Pow­er on Dutch TV, 1971

Noam Chom­sky Explains the Best Way for Ordi­nary Peo­ple to Make Change in the World, Even When It Seems Daunt­ing

Noam Chom­sky Defines What It Means to Be a Tru­ly Edu­cat­ed Per­son

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A 3D Computer Animation of the Panopticon, Jeremy Bentham’s 18th Century Design for an All-Controlling Prison

in Architecture, Philosophy | February 16th, 2023

Near­ly two cen­turies after his death, the eigh­teenth-cen­tu­ry util­i­tar­i­an philoso­pher and social reformer Jere­my Ben­tham — or most of him, any­way — still sits in state in the main build­ing of Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don. For a time in the mid-twen­ty-tens, he was equipped with the Panop­ti­Cam, “an online cam­era that streams what Ben­tham sees while sit­ting in his cab­i­net at UCL.” That most every­one gets the joke behind its name speaks to the endur­ing rel­e­vance of one of Ben­tham’s ideas in par­tic­u­lar: the Panop­ti­con, “a prison designed so that a prison guard could look into all cells at any time, and ensure that pris­on­ers mod­i­fied their behav­ior for the bet­ter.”

In Ben­tham’s Panop­ti­con, many pris­on­ers could be mon­i­tored effec­tive­ly by just a few unseen guards. This accords, as Michel Fou­cault writes in 1975’s Dis­ci­pline and Pun­ish, with the prin­ci­ple that “pow­er should be vis­i­ble and unver­i­fi­able. Vis­i­ble: the inmate will con­stant­ly have before his eyes the tall out­line of the cen­tral tow­er from which he is spied upon. Unver­i­fi­able: the inmate must nev­er know whether he is being looked at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so.” Fou­cault drew con­nec­tions between the Panop­ti­con and the com­plex, large-scale soci­eties that had devel­oped since Ben­tham’s day. Imag­ine if he’d lived to see the rise of social media.

In a series of posts by Phi­los­o­phy for Change, Tim Rayn­er takes up just such an exer­cise. “By mak­ing our actions and shares vis­i­ble to a crowd, social media expos­es us to a kind of vir­tu­al Panop­ti­con,” he writes. “This is not just because our activ­i­ties are mon­i­tored and record­ed by the social media ser­vice for the pur­pos­es of pro­duc­ing mar­ket analy­sis or gen­er­at­ing tar­get­ed adver­tis­ing.” But “the sur­veil­lance that direct­ly affects us and impacts on our behav­ior comes from the peo­ple with whom we share.” In the online Panop­ti­con, “we are both guards and pris­on­ers, watch­ing and implic­it­ly judg­ing one anoth­er as we share con­tent.” Rayn­er wrote these words more than a decade ago, but any­one who has expe­ri­enced life on social media then can hard­ly deny the par­al­lels with Ben­tham’s vision.

Far from improv­ing our behav­ior, how­ev­er, this con­stant online sur­veil­lance has in a fair few cas­es made it con­sid­er­ably less appeal­ing. What­ev­er the nature of its actu­al effects on those who inhab­it it, the Panop­ti­con is an unde­ni­ably pow­er­ful struc­ture, at least metaphor­i­cal­ly speak­ing. But we should remem­ber that Ben­tham intend­ed it to be a real, phys­i­cal struc­ture, one that could con­tain not just pris­ons but oth­er types of insti­tu­tions as well. Whether a Panop­ti­con has ever been whol­ly built to his spec­i­fi­ca­tions seems to be a mat­ter of debate, but we can see what one would look like in the 3D ren­der­ing by Myles Zhang at the top of the post: an appro­pri­ate medi­um, after all, in which to per­ceive an idea most ful­ly real­ized in the dig­i­tal realm.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Jere­my Bentham’s Mum­mi­fied Body Is Still on Dis­play – Much Like Oth­er Aging British Rock Stars

What Would Michel Fou­cault Think of Social Media, Fake News & Our Post Truth World?

Michel Fou­cault: Free Lec­tures on Truth, Dis­course & The Self (UC Berke­ley, 1980–1983)

On the Pow­er of Teach­ing Phi­los­o­phy in Pris­ons

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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 Futurist Architectural Designs Created by Étienne-Louis Boullée in the 18th Century

in Architecture, Art, History | February 15th, 2023

If a painter is ahead of his time, his work won’t sell par­tic­u­lar­ly well while he’s alive. If an archi­tect is ahead of his time, his work prob­a­bly won’t exist at all — not in built form, at least. Such was the case with Éti­enne-Louis Boul­lée, who con­struct­ed few projects in the eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry in which he lived, almost none of which remain stand­ing today. The best Boul­lée devo­tees can do for a site of pil­grim­age is the Hôtel Alexan­dre in Paris’ eighth arrondisse­ment, which, though hand­some enough, does­n’t quite offer a sense of why he would have devo­tees in the first place. To under­stand that, one must look to Boul­lée’s unbuilt works, the most notable of which are intro­duced in the video from Kings and Things above.

“Paper archi­tect” iden­ti­fies a mem­ber of the pro­fes­sion who may design struc­tures pro­lif­i­cal­ly but sel­dom, if ever, builds them. It is not a desir­able label, espe­cial­ly in its impli­ca­tion of will­ful imprac­ti­cal­i­ty (even by archi­tec­tur­al stan­dards). But as prac­ticed by Boul­lée, paper archi­tec­ture became an art form unto itself: he left behind not just an exten­sive essay on his art, but volu­mi­nous draw­ings that envi­sion a host of neo­clas­si­cal build­ings as ambi­tious in his time as they were unfash­ion­able — and often, due to their sheer size, unbuild­able.

These includ­ed an updat­ed colos­se­um, a spher­i­cal ceno­taph for Isaac New­ton taller than the Great Pyra­mids of Giza, a basil­i­ca meant to give its behold­ers an impres­sion of the uni­verse itself, a roy­al library of near-Bor­ge­sian pro­por­tions, and even an actu­al Tow­er of Babel.

 

For Boul­lée, big­ger was bet­ter, an idea that would sweep glob­al archi­tec­ture a cen­tu­ry and a half after his death. By the mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, the world had also come to accept a Boul­lée-like pref­er­ence for min­i­mal orna­men­ta­tion as well as his con­cep­tion of what his con­tem­po­raries jok­ing­ly termed archi­tec­ture par­lante: that is, build­ings that “speak” about their pur­pose visu­al­ly, and in no uncer­tain terms. (You can hear more about it in the video below, a seg­ment by pro­fes­sor Eri­ka Nagin­s­ki from Har­vard’s online course “The Archi­tec­tu­al Imag­i­na­tion.”) When Boul­lée designed a Palace of Jus­tice, he placed a cour­t­house direct­ly over a jail­house, artic­u­lat­ing “one enor­mous metaphor for crime over­whelmed by the weight of jus­tice.” This may have been a bit much even for the new French Repub­lic, but for those who appre­ci­at­ed Boul­lée’s work, it point­ed the way to the archi­tec­ture of the future — a future we would lat­er call mod­ern.

via Aeon

Relat­ed con­tent:

The World Accord­ing to Le Cor­busier: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Most Mod­ern of All Archi­tects

The Unre­al­ized Projects of Frank Lloyd Wright Get Brought to Life with 3D Dig­i­tal Recon­struc­tions

What Makes Paris Look Like Paris? A Cre­ative Use of Google Street View

The Cre­ation & Restora­tion of Notre-Dame Cathe­dral, Ani­mat­ed

Why Do Peo­ple Hate Mod­ern Archi­tec­ture?: A Video Essay

How to Draw Like an Archi­tect: An Intro­duc­tion in Six Videos

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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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An Exhilarating ASL Performance of Rihanna’s Super Bowl Halftime Show

in Music, Sports | February 15th, 2023

Before Super Bowl LVII fades too far into the back­ground (being an Eagles fan, it can’t fade fast enough for me), it’s worth flag­ging this great ASL per­for­mance of Rihanna’s Super Bowl Half­time Show. Above, you can watch Justi­na Miles, a nurs­ing stu­dent at HBCU Bowie State Uni­ver­si­ty, become “the first female deaf per­former for the Super Bowl’s half­time show,” notes CNBC. Before this, Miles went viral when her ASL per­for­mance of Lil’ Kim’s “Crush on You” explod­ed on Tik­Tok. As one com­menter not­ed on YouTube, this may be the best Super Bowl per­for­mance since Prince.

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!

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Watch Prince Per­form “Pur­ple Rain” in the Rain in His Tran­scen­dent Super Bowl Half-Time Show (2007)

“Alexan­der Hamil­ton” Per­formed with Amer­i­can Sign Lan­guage

Hip Hop Hits Sung Won­der­ful­ly in Sign Lan­guage: Eminem’s “Lose Your­self,” Wiz Khalifa’s “Black and Yel­low” & More

How Inge­nious Sign Lan­guage Inter­preters Are Bring­ing Music to Life for the Deaf: Visu­al­iz­ing the Sound of Rhythm, Har­mo­ny & Melody

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Archaeologists May Have Discovered a Secret Language in Lascaux & Chauvet Cave Paintings, Perhaps Revealing a 20,000-Year-Old “Proto-Writing” System

in Art, Biology, History, Language, Nature | February 14th, 2023

Care to take a guess what your smart phone has in com­mon with Pale­olith­ic cave paint­ings of Las­caux, Chau­vet and Altami­ra?

Both can be used to track fer­til­i­ty.

Admit­ted­ly, you’re prob­a­bly not using your phone to stay atop the repro­duc­tive cycles of rein­deer, salmon, and birds, but such infor­ma­tion was of crit­i­cal inter­est to our hunter-gath­er­er ances­tors.

Know­ing how cru­cial an under­stand­ing of ani­mal behav­ior would have been to ear­ly humans led Lon­don-based fur­ni­ture con­ser­va­tor Ben Bacon to recon­sid­er what pur­pose might have been served by non-fig­u­ra­tive mark­ings — slash­es, dots, and Y‑shapes — on the cave walls’ 20,000-year-old images.

Their mean­ing had long elud­ed esteemed pro­fes­sion­als. The marks seemed like­ly to be numer­ic, but to what end?

Bacon put for­ward that they doc­u­ment­ed ani­mal lives, using a lunar cal­en­dar.

The ama­teur researcher assem­bled a team that includ­ed experts from the fields of math­e­mat­ics, arche­ol­o­gy, and psy­chol­o­gy, who ana­lyzed the data, com­pared it to the sea­son­al behav­iors of mod­ern ani­mals, and agreed that the num­bers rep­re­sent­ed by the dots and slash­es are not car­di­nal, but rather an ordi­nal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of months. 

As Bacon told All Things Con­sid­ered his fel­low self-taught anthro­po­log­i­cal researcher, sci­ence jour­nal­ist Alexan­der Mar­shack, came close to crack­ing the code in the 1970s:

… but he was­n’t actu­al­ly able to demon­strate the sys­tem because he thought that these indi­vid­ual lines were days. What we did is we said, actu­al­ly, they’re months because a hunter-gath­er­er does­n’t need to know what day a rein­deer migrates. They need to know what month the rein­deer migrates. And once you use these months units, this whole sys­tem responds very, very well to that.

As to the fre­quent­ly occur­ring sym­bol that resem­bles a Y, it indi­cates the months in which var­i­ous female ani­mal birthed their young. Bacon and his team the­o­rize in the Cam­bridge Arche­o­log­i­cal Jour­nal that this mark may even con­sti­tute “the first known exam­ple of an ‘action‘ word, i.e. a verb (‘to give birth’).

Tak­en togeth­er, the cave paint­ings and non-fig­u­ra­tive mark­ings tell an age-old cir­cu­lar tale of the migra­tion, birthing and mat­ing of aurochs, birds, bison, caprids, cervids, fish, hors­es, mam­moths, and rhi­nos … and like snakes and wolver­ines, too, though they were exclud­ed from the study on basis of “excep­tion­al­ly low num­bers.”

Ear­ly humans were able to log months by observ­ing the moon, but how could they tell when a new year had begun, essen­tial infor­ma­tion for any­one seek­ing to arrange their lives around their prey’s pre­vi­ous­ly doc­u­ment­ed activ­i­ties?

Bacon and his peers, like so many poets and farm­ers, look to the rites of spring:

The obvi­ous event is the so-called ‘bonne sai­son’, a French zooar­chae­o­log­i­cal term for the time at the end of win­ter when rivers unfreeze, the snow melts, and the land­scape begins to green.


Read the con­clu­sions of their study here.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Alger­ian Cave Paint­ings Sug­gest Humans Did Mag­ic Mush­rooms 9,000 Years Ago

Was a 32,000-Year-Old Cave Paint­ing the Ear­li­est Form of Cin­e­ma?

40,000-Year-Old Sym­bols Found in Caves World­wide May Be the Ear­li­est Writ­ten Lan­guage

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

 

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Do Movie Androids Want to Love Us or Kill Us? Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #144

in Film, Pretty Much Pop, Sci Fi | February 14th, 2023

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Your Pret­ty Much Pop hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Lawrence Ware, Sarahlyn Bruck, and Al Bak­er talk through var­i­ous eth­i­cal and nar­ra­tive prob­lems hav­ing to do with the cre­ation of arti­fi­cial life.

We all watched M3GAN and Steve Spielberg’s A.I., and also touch on After Yang, Ex Machi­na, Bicen­ten­ni­al Man, the BBC show Humans, and of course this is an ele­ment in clas­sic sci-fi prop­er­ties like Alien, Blade Run­ner, Star Trek, etc.

We also go on a tan­gent about A.I. writ­ing aca­d­e­m­ic papers.

We men­tion the short sto­ries E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” and Roger Zelazny’s “For a Breath I Tar­ry.”

Fol­low us @law_writes, @sarahlynbruck, @ixisnox, @MarkLinsenmayer.

Hear more Pret­ty Much Pop. Sup­port the show and hear bonus talk­ing for this and near­ly every oth­er episode at patreon.com/prettymuchpop or by choos­ing a paid sub­scrip­tion through Apple Pod­casts. 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.

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Older Women Come Together & Play Punk Rock: Discover The Unglamorous Music Project

in Gender, Life, Music | February 13th, 2023

Punk is not only not dead, it’s get­ting a fresh burst of ener­gy, thanks to The Unglam­orous Music Pro­ject, a female col­lec­tive in Leices­ter.

In accor­dance with punk tra­di­tion, musi­cal abil­i­ty is not a pri­ma­ry con­cern.

Shock­ing­ly, life expe­ri­ence is.

With five, six, and sev­en decades worth, Unglam­orous Music Project par­tic­i­pants have no illu­sions about how women their age — with the pos­si­ble excep­tion of Pat­ti Smith — are per­ceived.

Rather than con­tent them­selves with crumbs and con­form to soci­etal expec­ta­tions, they are going hard in new­ly formed bands like The Wonky Por­traits, Dada Women, BOILERS, Vel­vet Cri­sis and The Veri­nos, above.

“This is def­i­nite­ly not ‘cutesy grannies have a go at punk’ band,” BOILERS’ Alli­son “Fish” Dunne empha­sized to The Guardian:

I’ve got no fucks to give any more about what any­one thinks of me…We write our own music and we’ve got a lot to say about every­thing we’re angry about. I’ve been enraged for years.

The Veri­nos’ 61-year-old Ruth Miller, founder of The Unglam­orous Music Project, told RNZ  how she tapped into an unex­pect­ed­ly rich reser­voir of pre­vi­ous­ly unact­ed upon mature female musi­cal impulse, when she men­tioned her plan to form a band to the friend with whom she drank cof­fee and talked pol­i­tics.

The friend con­fessed that she’d long want­ed to take up the drums, and on the strength of that com­ment was draft­ed as drum­mer for the Veri­nos, after watch­ing one instruc­tion­al YouTube video.

A “real­ly cool look­ing old­er woman” with “stick­ing up hair” whom Miller approached in a restau­rant, ask­ing, “Excuse me, are you in a band?” earned her place by answer­ing “No, but I’ve always want­ed to learn bass.”

I think as a woman, you hit a par­tic­u­lar age and you think, “Well, I don’t care what any­one thinks. It’s my life, and I real­ly want to do music again, and it doesn’t mat­ter whether peo­ple like it or not. They don’t have to lis­ten…”

But they do like it! It’s incred­i­bly appeal­ing, that idea of see­ing a group of old­er women who are just them­selves.

Miller believes that rather than pay­ing for pri­vate lessons and con­cen­trat­ing on the “prop­er” way to play music, begin­ners should let go of their inhi­bi­tions and have a go at play­ing com­mu­nal­ly.

The prin­ci­ples of the Unglam­orous Music Project spell it out even more explic­it­ly:

  • Choose an instru­ment that appeals and fits in with oth­ers
  • Find help­ful peo­ple to lend you stuff and sup­port uncon­di­tion­al­ly
  • Form a duo or band with oth­er begin­ners straight­away
  • Explore very sim­ple rhythms and sounds
  • Write your own words about your life
  • Sing great tunes and back­ing vocals
  • Play your song in a con­fi­dent, cool, chal­leng­ing way
  • Get encour­age­ment and applause from friends
  • Start per­form­ing to audi­ences as soon as pos­si­ble

Per­haps an unspo­ken prin­ci­ple, giv­en the Pro­jec­t’s empha­sis on fun, is assum­ing Ramones-style stage names, a la Vim, Vi, Vol­cano, Vix­en and VeeDee Veri­no.

If you’re inspired to join the move­ment, mark your cal­en­dar for March, 8, Inter­na­tion­al Women’s Day and join Miller’s Face­book group, 66 Days to your Debut.

via Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Four Female Punk Bands That Changed Women’s Role in Rock

33 Songs That Doc­u­ment the His­to­ry of Fem­i­nist Punk (1975–2015): A Playlist Curat­ed by Pitch­fork

How the Riot Grrrl Move­ment Cre­at­ed a Rev­o­lu­tion in Rock & Punk

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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An Introduction to the World-Renowned Architect Zaha Hadid, “the Queen of the Curve”

in Architecture | February 13th, 2023

Zaha Hadid won the Pritzk­er Prize, archi­tec­ture’s most pres­ti­gious award, in 2004. She was then in her ear­ly fifties — prac­ti­cal­ly a school­girl by the stan­dards of her pro­fes­sion — and had only com­plet­ed four build­ings. Yet the Pritzk­er com­mit­tee already sus­pect­ed that she saw pos­si­bil­i­ties in the built envi­ron­ment, and per­haps entire dimen­sions, that oth­ers did not. Indeed, she would spend her remain­ing dozen years prov­ing them right, as evi­denced by the lega­cy of impres­sive struc­tures she left all across the world, from the Con­tem­po­rary Arts Cen­ter in Cincin­nati and the BMW Cen­tral Build­ing in Leipzig to the Lon­don Aquat­ics Cen­ter and the Guangzhou Opera House.

Liv­ing in Seoul, I myself have occa­sion every so often to pass through a Hadid build­ing: the Dong­dae­mun Design Plaza, which opened in 2013. Essen­tial­ly a col­lec­tion of shops and exhi­bi­tion spaces, it has become best known as a qua­si-pub­lic gath­er­ing place full of back­drops suit­able for Insta­gram pho­tog­ra­phy.

In its size, shape, and aes­thet­ic, the DDP stands well apart from its urban con­text, look­ing like a space­ship sent by an advanced alien civ­i­liza­tion to col­o­nize an old down­town gar­ment dis­trict. In that respect it’s rep­re­sen­ta­tive of Hadid’s work, which real­izes the kind of irreg­u­lar, unre­lent­ing­ly curvi­lin­ear forms prac­ti­cal­ly unknown in archi­tec­ture before her rise to its high­est lev­el of star­dom.

“In her build­ings, walls are nev­er quite ver­ti­cal, floors sel­dom remain flat for long, and the twain meet not in nine­ty-degree angles but, rather, in the kinds of curves one finds in skate­board parks,” writes the New York­er’s John Seabrook, pro­fil­ing Hadid in 2009. “There is no sin­gle Hadid style, although one can detect a water­mark in her build­ings’ futur­is­tic smooth­ness. Cer­tain themes car­ry through her use of mate­ri­als (glass, steel, con­crete), her lines (cor­ri­dors often trace flow­ing arabesque shapes, while roof struts make sharp Z‑shaped angles), her struc­tures (she favors col­umn-free spaces), and her sculp­tur­al inte­ri­ors and asym­met­ric façades.”

Such dis­tinc­tive designs — of build­ings as well as of fur­ni­ture, jew­el­ry, and oth­er con­sumer objects — earned Hadid the infor­mal title of “queen of the curve.” You can learn more about her reign and its last­ing influ­ence in these two video essays, one from Curi­ous Muse and the oth­er from The B1M. Like all the most inno­v­a­tive archi­tects, Hadid had visions real­iz­able only with, and simul­ta­ne­ous­ly influ­enced by, the tech­nol­o­gy of her time. “The idea is not to have any 90-degree angles,” she once said, and the devel­op­ment of advanced com­put­er-aid­ed design tools in the nine­teen-nineties made that idea a real­i­ty. In pur­su­ing that idea to its very lim­its, she took the most con­crete of all art forms and, improb­a­bly, made it abstract.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch 50+ Doc­u­men­taries on Famous Archi­tects & Build­ings: Bauhaus, Le Cor­busier, Hadid & Many More

The ABC of Archi­tects: An Ani­mat­ed Flip­book of Famous Archi­tects and Their Best-Known Build­ings

The World Accord­ing to Le Cor­busier: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Most Mod­ern of All Archi­tects

Why Do Peo­ple Hate Mod­ern Archi­tec­ture?: A Video Essay

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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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