From Red Bull’s YouTube Channel: “Ski mountaineer Andrzej Bargiel becomes the first person to climb Mount Everest and ski back to Everest Base Camp without supplementary oxygen. After nearly 16 hours climbing in the high altitude “death zone” (above 8,000m where oxygen levels are dangerously low), Bargiel clipped into his skis on the summit of the tallest mountain on earth and started his descent via the South Col Route. He reached Camp II that night and rested — the summit ridge and Hillary Step had taken longer than planned, meaning darkness made it dangerous and difficult to navigate further that day. The next morning, he skied through the treacherous Khumbu Icefall — guided by a drone flown by his brother, Bartek — before safely arriving at Base Camp to become the first person to ascend and descend Mount Everest on skis with no supplementary oxygen.”
Everywhere you look, you can find traces of the ancient Roman civilization from which the modern West descends. That’s especially true if you happen to be looking in Europe, though echoes of Latin make themselves heard in major languages used all over the world. Take, for example, the common English word itinerary, meaning a planned route for travel, which descends from iter, the Latin word for a journey, route, or path. The Romans eventually spoke of itineraria, which meant more or less the same thing as we do when we speak of our travel itineraries. Now, bridging these distant eras, we have Itiner‑e, a new online map of ancient Rome’s road network, the most comprehensive yet.
Originally envisioned as a kind of “Google Maps for Roman roads,” Itiner‑e is a project of Tom Brughmans of Aarhus University, and Pau de Soto Cañamares and Adam Pažout of the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Its users can digitally explore nearly 300,000 kilometers of roads laid across the vast Roman Empire at its height in the mid-second century — or at least as much of that network as educated guesses can reconstruct.
Researchers can only be sure about less than three percent of the network, with another seven percent of ancient Roman roads documented in existence if not in precise location. Regardless, Itiner‑e is based on an unprecedentedly wide (and open) dataset, which incorporates topographic mapping, satellite imagery and centuries of historical records.
Among Itiner-e’s many features is a confidence rating, which shows just how confident we can be that any given road actually looked like it does on the map. You can also view the whole thing in 3D to get a sense of the elevations involved in construction and travel of the network; use a routing tool to determine suggested routes around the empire “by foot, ox cart or donkey”; and even check satellite imagery to find still-extant parts of Roman roads and draw comparisons with the same parts of the world today. Though a fair few major Roman roads have evolved into current routes for trains and automobiles, we can’t exactly travel on them in the same way the Romans did. Still, when next you plan a European itinerary of your own, consider punching it in to Itiner‑e and seeing how the journey most likely would’ve been made 1,875 years ago.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
To imagine ourselves into the time of Leonardo da Vinci, we must first imagine a world without such things as helicopters, parachutes, tanks, diving suits, robots. Yet those all existed for Leonardo himself — or rather, they existed in his imagination. What he didn’t build in real life, he documented in his notebooks, leaving behind material for appreciations of his genius that would continue half a millennium later. One such appreciation appears above in a new video from Lost in Time, which renders his inventions using the kind of 3D animation technology even the paradigmatic Renaissance man couldn’t have begun to foresee.
This helps us see Leonardo’s work from the perspective of his contemporaries, and to feel how surprised they would’ve been to encounter a seated knight who stands up, opens his visor, and reveals that there’s no one inside the armor. That sort of thing might even amuse us here in the twenty-first century, but accustomed as we are to seeing machines that move around under their own power — and now, seeing them take more credible humanoid form every day — we wouldn’t be inclined to credit it with any kind of life force.
In the fourteen-nineties, however, manpower was what people knew, so they instinctively looked for the man. Leonardo, too, conceived most of his inventions to employ human muscle, the study of whose inner workings enabled him to make the gears and pulleys of his “robotic” knight move its limbs realistically.
According to the plans in one of Leonardo’s notebooks, his “aerial screw,” involving a linen sail wrapped around a wooden mast, would need four men running in circles around a revolving platform, which would theoretically cause the mast to rotate and the whole contraption to lift into the air. As designed, it wouldn’t have been able to take off, but in 2019, University of Maryland scientists modified it to work successfully in miniature, as a kind of drone. As shown in the video, that’s not the only one of Leonardo’s unrealized inventions his intellectual descendants have tried out for themselves. It seems that none have yet attempted to construct his nearly 80-foot-wide crossbow, whose use on the battlefield required the efforts of a dozen soldiers, but then, that’s probably all to the good.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Rings with a discreet dual purpose have been in use since before the common era, when Hannibal, facing extradition, allegedly ingested the poison he kept secreted behind a gemstone on his finger. (More recently, poison rings gave rise to a popular Game of Thrones fan theory…)
Victorians prevented their most closely kept secrets—illicit love letters, perhaps? Last wills and testaments?—from falling into the wrong hands by wearing the keys to the boxes containing these items concealed in signet rings and other statement-type pieces.
A tiny concealed blade could be lethal on the finger of a skilled (and no doubt, beautiful) assassin. These days, they might be used to collect a bit of one’s attacker’s DNA.
Enter the fictional world of James Bond, and you’ll find a number of handy dandy spy rings including one that doubles as a camera, and another capable of shattering bulletproof glass with a single twist.
Armillary sphere rings like the ones in the British Museum’s collection and the Swedish Historical Museum (top) serve a more benign purpose. Folded together, the two-part outer hoop and three interior hoops give the illusion of a simple gold band. Slipped off the wearer’s finger, they can fan out into a physical model of celestial longitude and latitude.
Art historian Jessica Stewart writes that in the 17th century, rings such as the above specimen were “used by astronomers to study and make calculations. These pieces of jewelry were considered tokens of knowledge. Inscriptions or zodiac symbols were often used as decorative elements on the bands.”
The armillary sphere rings in the British Museum’s collection are made of a soft high-alloy gold.
Jewelry-loving modern astronomers seeking an old school finger-based calculation tool that really works can order armillary sphere rings from Brooklyn-based designer Black Adept.
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From the mighty Maya civilization, which dominated Mesoamerica for more than three and a half millennia, we have exactly four books. Only one of them predates the arrival of Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth century: the Códice Maya de México, or Maya Codex of Mexico, which was created between 1021 and 1152. Though incomplete, and hardly in good shape otherwise, its artwork — colored in places with precious materials — vividly evokes an ancient worldview now all but lost. In the video above from the Getty Museum and Smarthistory, art historians Andrew Turner and Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank tell us what we’re looking at when we behold the remains of this sacred Mayan book, the oldest ever found in the Americas.
“This book has a controversial history,” says Turner. “It was long considered to be a fake due to the strange circumstances in which it surfaced.” After its discovery in a private collection in Mexico City in the nineteen-sixties, it was rumored to have been looted from a cave in Chiapas.
At first pronounced a fake by experts, due to its lack of resemblance to the other extant Mayan texts, it was only verified as the genuine article in 2018. For a non-specialist, the question remains: what is the Códice about? Its purpose, as Kilroy-Ewbank puts it, is astronomical, relaying as it does “information about the cycle of the planet Venus” — which, as Turner adds, “was considered a dangerous planet” by the Mayans.
The Códice contains records of Venus’ 584-day cycle over the course of 140 years, testifying to the scrutiny Mayan astronomers gave to its complicated pattern of rising and falling. They thus managed to determine — as many ancient civilizations did not — that it was both the Morning Star and the Evening Star, although they seem to have been more interested in what its movements revealed about the intentions of the deities they saw as controlling it, and thus the likelihood of events like war or famine. Those gods weren’t benevolent: one page shows “a frightful skeletal deity that has a blunt knife sticking out of his nasal cavity,” holding “a giant jagged blade up” with one hand and “the hair of a captive whose head he’s freshly severed” with the other. That’s hardly the sort of image that comes to our modern minds when we gaze up at the night sky, but then, we don’t see things like the Mayans did.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
In the whole of Alien, the titular entity only appears on screen for about three minutes. That’s one reason the movie holds up so well against the other creature features of its era: in glimpses, you never get a chance to register signs of the alien’s being an artificial construction. That’s not to say it was a shoddy piece of work; quite the contrary, as explained in the new video above from CinemaTyler. Its creation demanded the dedicated efforts of an international group of professionals including special effects artist Carlo Rambaldi, who’d engineered the giant ape head in the 1976 King Kong remake and the aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (and would later work on an even more iconic extraterrestrial for E.T.).
Charged with designing the alien, and eventually with overseeing its fabrication and assembly, was the artist H. R. Giger, whose artistic sensibility occupied the intersection of organism and machine, Eros and Thanatos. Though it’s most thoroughly expressed in the deadly creature that stows away aboard the space tug Nostromo, it also, to one degree or another, pervades the whole movie’s look and feel.
Whether from the late seventies or any other period, the usual sleek, antiseptic sci-fi futures date rather quickly, a condition hardly suffered by the unrelievedly dark, dank, and dysfunctional setting of Alien. This surprisingly grimy realism makes the threat of the alien feel that much more real; hidden in its many shadows, Giger’s vision preys that much more effectively on our imagination.
Not that it was guaranteed to succeed in doing so. As CinemaTyler explains, the process of creating the alien came up against countless setbacks, all under increasingly severe constraints of both time and budget. At times the production got lucky, as when it happened upon the nearly seven-foot-tall Bolaji Badejo, who ended up wearing the alien costume (despite Scott’s insistence, early in the production, that he didn’t want to make a movie about “a man in a suit”). But it was attempting to create a being of a kind never seen on screen before, one that had to be developed through trial and error, more often the latter than the former. And it was hardly the only difficult aspect of the making of Alien, as evidenced by the eleven-and-counting episodes of CinemaTyler’s series on the subject. Maybe in space, no one can hear you scream, but one can easily imagine the cries of frustration let out by Scott, Giger, and all their pressured collaborators down here on Earth.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Marlon Brando has now been gone for more than two decades, and so thoroughgoing was his impact on the art of film acting that younger generations of movie-lovers may have trouble pinning down what, exactly, he did so differently on screen. In the new video above, Evan “Nerdwriter” Puschak shows them — and reminds us — using a single scene from Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront. No, it’s not the scene you’re thinking of even if you’ve never seen the movie: Puschak selects an earlier one, a conversation between Brando’s prizefighter-turned-longshoreman Terry Malloy and Eva Marie Saint’s young Edie Doyle, the sister of the colleague Terry unknowingly lured to his death.
When Edie asks Terry how he got into boxing, Terry glances at the floor while launching into his answer. “It’s hard to overstate how revolutionary a choice like this was in 1954,” says Puschak. “Actors just didn’t get distracted in this way. Trained in theatrical techniques, they hit their spots, articulated their lines, and performed instantly legible emotions for the audience. They didn’t pause a conversation to look under the table, turning their head away from the microphone in the process, and they certainly didn’t speak while chewing food.” Just a few years earlier, “the famous Brando mumble” would have been unthinkable in a feature film; after On the Waterfront, it became an enduring part of popular culture.
Much of the evolution of the motion picture is the story of its liberation from the tropes of theater. The earliest narrative films amounted to little more than documentations of stage performances, statically framed from the familiar perspective of a spectator’s seat. Just as the development of the technology and techniques for camera movement and editing allowed cinema to come into its own on the visual level, the nature of the actors’ performances also had to change. In the mid-nineteen-forties, the electrified microphone allowed Frank Sinatra to sing with the cadence and subtlety of speech; not long thereafter, Brando took similar advantage of the technological capability of film to capture a range of what would come to be known as his own signature idiosyncrasies.
On the Waterfront opened fairly close on the heels of the Brando-starring A Streetcar Named Desire and The Wild One; still to come were the likes of One-Eyed Jacks, The Godfather, Last Tango in Paris, and Apocalypse Now. While Brando didn’t appear exclusively in acclaimed pictures — especially in the later decades of his career — never did he give a wholly uninteresting performance. Incorporating the tics, hitches, and self-stifling impulses that afflict all our real-life communication, he understood the potential of both realism and oddity to bring a character’s interiority out into the open, usually against that character’s will. But he never could’ve done it without his fellow performers to act and react against, not least the formidable Eva Marie Saint: at 101 years old, one of our few living connections to the vital, deceptively harrowing realm of postwar Hollywood cinema.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Look up the word architecture in the dictionary, and though you won’t actually find a picture of Frank Lloyd Wright, it may feel as if you should. Or at least it will feel that way if you’re looking in an American dictionary, given that Wright has been regarded as the personification of American architecture longer than any of us have been alive. Exactly when he gained that status isn’t easy to pin down. Like all architects, he began his career unknown; only later did even his early solo works from around the turn of the twentieth century, like his private home and studio and the Unity Temple, both in Oak Park, Illinois, become sites of pilgrimage. By 1935, however, Wright’s name had long since been internationally made — and unmade.
It could hardly have been otherwise; nearly as unignorable are his Arizona home and studio Taliesin West and his much-filmed Maya revival Ennis House in Los Angeles. Through these videos, you can also get tours of his lesser-known works like Toy Hill House in Pleasantville, New York; Tirranna in New Canaan, Connecticut; and the Circular Sun House in Phoenix, Arizona, his final realized home design.
For all the varied interests he pursued and influences he absorbed, Wright did stick to certain philosophical principles, some of which Architectural Digest has traced in its videos. Using three different houses, the one just above illuminates perhaps Wright’s single most important guiding idea: “A home, he believed, should not be placed upon the land, but grow from it, natural, intentional, and inseparable from the environment around it.” As his architecture evolved, he increasingly “treated the landscape not as a backdrop, but as a collaborator,” creating “spaces that invite the outside in and express the essential principles of organic architecture.” Wright’s houses can thus be stunning in a way we might’ve only thought possible in a natural landscape — and, as generations of buyers have found out by now, just as unruly and demanding as any purely organic cultivation.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
In 1957, the BBC program Panorama aired one of the first televised April Fools’ Day hoaxes. Above, you can watch a faux news report from Switzerland narrated by respected BBC journalist Richard Dimbleby. Here’s the basic premise: After a mild winter and the “virtual disappearance of the spaghetti weevil,” the residents of Ticoni (a Swiss canton on the Italian border) reap a record-breaking spaghetti harvest. Swiss farmers pluck strands of spaghetti from trees and lay them out to dry in the sun. Then we cut to Swiss residents enjoying a fresh pasta meal for dinner—going from farm to table, as it were.
The spoof documentary originated with the BBC cameraman Charles de Jaeger. He remembered one of his childhood schoolteachers in Austria joking, “Boys, you are so stupid, you’d believe me if I told you that spaghetti grew on trees.” Apparently he was right. Years later, David Wheeler, the producer of the BBC segment, recalled: “The following day [the broadcast] there was quite a to-do because there were lots of people who went to work and said to their colleagues ‘did you see that extraordinary thing on Panorama? I never knew that about spaghetti.’ ” An estimated eight million people watched the original program, and, decades later, CNN called the broadcast “the biggest hoax that any reputable news establishment ever pulled.”
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Certain cult historical figures have served as prescient avatars for the techno-visionaries of the digital age. Where the altruistic utopian designs of Buckminster Fuller provided an ideal for the first wave of Silicon Valley pioneers (a group including computer scientist and philosopher Jaron Lanier and Wired editor Kevin Kelly), later entrepreneurs have hewn closer to the principles of brilliant scientist and inventor Nikola Tesla, who believed, as he told Liberty magazine in 1935, that “we suffer the derangement of our civilization because we have not yet completely adjusted ourselves to the machine age.”
Such an adjustment would come, Tesla believed, only in “mastering the machine”—and he seemed to have supreme confidence in human mastery—over food production, climate, and genetics. We would be freed from onerous labor by automation and the creation of “a thinking machine,” he said, over a decade before the invention of the computer. Tesla did not anticipate the ways such machines would come to master us, even though he cannily foresaw the future of wireless technology, computing, and telephony, technologies that would radically reshape every aspect of human life.
In an earlier, 1926, interview in Collier’s magazine, Tesla predicted, as the editors wrote, communicating “instantly by simple vest-pocket equipment.” His actual words conveyed a much grander, and more accurate, picture of the future.
When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is…. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.
The complexity of smartphones far outstrips that of the telephone, but in every other respect, Tesla’s picture maps onto the reality of almost 100 years later. Other aspects of Tesla’s future scenario for wireless also seem to anticipate current technologies, like 3D printing, though the kind he describes still remains in the realm of science fiction: “Wireless will achieve the closer contact through transmission of intelligence, transport of our bodies and materials and conveyance of energy.”
But Tesla’s vision had its limitations, and they lay precisely in his techno-optimism. He never met a problem that wouldn’t eventually have a technological solution (and like many other techno-visionaries of the time, he heartily endorsed state-sponsored eugenics). “The majority of the ills from which humanity suffers,” he said, “are due to the immense extent of the terrestrial globe and the inability of individuals and nations to come into close contact.”
Wireless technology, thought Tesla, would help eradicate war, poverty, disease, pollution, and general discontent, when we are “able to witness and hear events—the inauguration of a President, the playing of a world series game, the havoc of an earthquake or the terror of a battle—just as though we were present.” When international boundaries are “largely obliterated” by instant communication, he believed, “a great step will be made toward the unification and harmonious existence of the various races inhabiting the globe.”
Tesla did not, and perhaps could not, foresee the ways in which technologies that bring us closer together than ever also, and at the same time, pull us ever further apart. Read Tesla’s full interview here, in which he also predicts that women will become the “superior sex,” not by virtue of “the shallow physical imitation of men” but through “the awakening of the intellect.”
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2019.
Michael Jackson’s Thriller is the best-selling album of all time, and not by a particularly slim margin. The most recent figures have it registered at 51.3 million copies, as against the 31.2 million notched by the runner up, AC/DC’s Back in Black. But it would surely be a closer call without the title song’s celebrated music video, thirteen John Landis-directed minutes full of not just singing and dancing, but also classic-style Hollywood monsters, some of them doing that singing and dancing themselves. Halloween night is, of course, the best time to revisit Michael Jackson’s Thriller, as it’s officially titled. This year, why not chase it with the behind-the-scenes documentary below, Making Michael Jackson’s Thriller?
Younger fans may not know that “Thriller” wasn’t even released as a single until November of 1983: about a year after the album itself, which had already spun off six songs, including enormous hits like “Billie Jean” and “Beat It.” In fact, Jackson’s unprecedented vision for the album had been that every song could be a hit, with no filler in between.
The higher-ups at Epic Records felt that its popularity, however sensational to that point, had just about run its course. That made them unwilling, at first, to put out “Thriller” on its own, as did the song’s campy scary-movie lyrics, sound effects, and “rap” by none other than Vincent Price, the embodiment of old-Hollywood horror. (This sort of thing wasn’t without precedent: with his siblings, Jackson had created a similar spooky atmosphere in “This Place Hotel,” from 1980.)
Still, at that point in his rise to the kind of fame no cultural figure may ever know again, Jackson understood much that the old guard didn’t. He knew that “Thriller” could succeed, not just as a song on the radio, but a multimedia cultural phenomenon. It would, of course, need a music video, but not one that merely met the (still fairly lax) standards of MTV. Impressed by the horror, comedy, and visual effects of John Landis’ An American Werewolf in London, Jackson called up Landis and asked him to direct what he’d been envisioning for “Thriller” at feature-film production values. The $500,000 budget came from television networks like MTV and Showtime, officially for broadcasting rights to Making Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
The documentary captures various aspects of the video’s creation, from casting to choreography to shooting to makeup, that last being an especially painstaking process overseen by industry master Rick Baker. Whatever the rigors of the production, Jackson displays undisguised enjoyment of it all in this footage, perhaps foreseeing that it would culminate in the kind of expression that could come from no other artist. Though an intensely collaborative effort, Michael Jackson’s Thriller is true to its name in ultimately being the product of a single, guiding performative sensibility, somehow both universally appealing and highly idiosyncratic at the same time. Jackson’s insistence on calling his music videos “short films” may have been regarded as a typical eccentricity, but never was the label more appropriate than when he brought back the old-school monster movie one last, funky time.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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