According to a new report published by PEN America, the “2022–23 school year has been marked to date by an escalation of book bans and censorship in classrooms and school libraries across the United States.” PEN America has tracked “1,477 instances of individual books banned, affecting 874 unique titles,” during the first half of this academic year. That marks an increase of 28 percent compared to the prior six months, January – June 2022.” The book bannings are taking place in conservative-leaning states (mainly, Texas, Florida, Missouri, Utah, and South Carolina), and overwhelmingly, they’re targeting “stories by and about people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals.”
Fortunately, American public libraries are pushing back. As mentioned last summer, the Brooklyn Public Library launched Books Unbanned. This initiative provides American students, no matter where they live in the U.S., free access to 500,000 digital books, including books banned by students’ local libraries. And now the Seattle Public Library has joined the effort, rolling out its own version of Books Unbanned. “We believe in your right to read what you want, discover yourself and form your own opinions,” writes the library. “Teens and young adults ages 13 to 26 living anywhere in the U.S. can access our entire collection of e‑books and audiobooks.” To get started, students can fill out the form at the bottom of this page (click here), and then explore these curated lists of banned non-fiction books and banned fiction books.
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!
“If you see a pie chart projected twelve feet high in front of you, you know you’re in the hands of an idiot.” These words have stuck with me since I heard them spoken by Edward Tufte, one of the most respected living authorities on data visualization. The latter-day sins of pie-chart-makers (especially those who make them in PowerPoint) are many and varied, but the original sin of the pie chart itself is that of fundamentally misrepresenting one-dimensional information — a company budget, a city’s population demographics — in two-dimensional form.
Yet the pie chart was created by a master, indeed the first master, of information design, the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Scottish economist William Playfair. Tufte includes Playfair’s first pie chart, an illustration of the land holdings of various nations and empires circa 1800, in his book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.
“The circle represents the area of each country,” Tufte explains. “The line on the left, the population in millions read on the vertical scales; the line on the right, the revenue (taxes) collected in millions of pounds sterling read also on the vertical scale.” The dotted lines between them show, in Playfair’s words, whether “the country is burdened with heavy taxes or otherwise” in proportion to its population.
Playfair was experimenting with data visualization long before his invention of the pie chart. He also came up with the more truthful bar chart, history’s first example of which appeared in his Commercial and Political Atlas of 1786. That same book also contains the striking graph above, of England’s “exports and imports to and from Denmark and Norway from 1700 to 1780,” whose lines create fields that make the balance of trade legible at a glance. A much later example of the line graph, another form Playfair is credited with inventing, appears just below, “exhibiting the revenues, expenditure, debt, price of stocks and bread from 1770 to 1824,” a period spanning the American and French Revolutions as well as the Napoleonic Wars.
It’s safe to say that Playfair lived in interesting times, and even within that context lived an unusually interesting life. During Great Britain’s wars with France, he served his country as a secret agent, even coming up with a plan to counterfeit assignats, a French currency at the time, in order to destabilize the enemy’s economy. “Their assignats are their money,” he wrote in 1793, “and it is better to destroy this paper founded upon an iniquitous extortion and a villainous deception than to shed the blood of men.” Two years after the plan went into effect, the assignat was worthless and France’s ship of state had more or less run aground. Playfair’s measures may seem extreme, but then, you don’t win a war with pie charts.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
Above, you can watch the Galactic Menagerie, “a whimsical and visually stunning fan-made fake trailer that reimagines the classic Star Wars universe through the eccentric lens of Wes Anderson. This enchanting mashup brings together iconic Star Wars characters with Anderson’s trademark symmetrical compositions, pastel color palettes, and quirky humor.” There are also, of course, “peculiar locations reminiscent of Anderson’s beloved films such as Moonrise Kingdom and The Grand Budapest Hotel.” Enjoy!
Before the internet, it would have been hard to imagine that people around the world would one day be unable to get enough of traditional Japanese carpentry, and specifically traditional Japanese joinery. And before Youtube, who could have predicted that videos showing each and every step of a woodworking project — without narration, or indeed explanation of any kind — would find an enthusiastic viewership? At the intersection of these two surprising phenomena stands that channel H Carpenter, whose unadorned, methodical, and detailed portrayals of wooden joint-making have racked up millions upon millions of views.
In traditional Japanese joinery, which we’ve featuredmanytimesbefore here on Open Culture, the carpenter uses no nails, screws, or adhesives. Rather, he carves the ends of the pieces of wood to be joined into interlocking three-dimensional shapes that can hold solid for decades, or even centuries.
The biggest advantage of this technique, writes a commenter on one video, “is that it minimizes the use of rust-prone nails and other materials, reduces damage to the wood, and dampens seismic shaking with unfastened joints” — always a consideration in earthquake-prone Japan. “Furthermore, the entire building can be disassembled like Lego blocks, and only the damaged parts can be replaced and rebuilt as before.”
Like many other Japanese traditions, this form of carpentry has been around for a long time indeed, and through the centuries has built up a formidable library of joints, many of them complex enough not to be comprehensible at first glance. With 193 videos on the relevant playlist so far, H carpenter seems to have made a mission of constructing all of them on Youtube not just to aid our understanding of their workings, but also to provide us with the sensory pleasures of the process itself. (A few million of his views are surely accounted for by ASMR enthusiasts alone.) Just like his forebears in the craft, he does it without using a single nail — as well, perhaps as a counterbalance to the chatter of the twenty-first century, without speaking a single word.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
In March, a Florida school principal lost her job when 6th graders encountered Michelangelo’s “David” during an art history lesson–even though the school ostensibly specializes in offering students “a content-rich classical education in the liberal arts and sciences.” Parents apparently found the Renaissance sculpture, um, “pornographic.”
Fast forward two months, and the former principal Hope Carrasquilla has now traveled to Florence and visited Michelangelo’s “David” in person. This came at the invitation of the mayor of Florence, Dario Nardella, and the director of the Galleria dell’Accademia, Cecilie Hollberg. Above you can see Hollberg on the left, and Carrasquilla on the right.
I’m very impressed. The thing that strikes me the most, and that I didn’t know, is that this whole gallery was built for him [Michelangelo’s “David”]. I think it’s beautiful, it looks like a church. And to me, that just represents really the purity of this figure and you see his humanity. There is nothing wrong with the human body. Michelangelo did nothing wrong. He could only sculpt it like this. It couldn’t be otherwise. He’s wonderful and I’m really happy to be here.
In her own statement, Hollberg said:
I am delighted to welcome her and show her the magnificence of our museum, as well as personally introduce her to David, a sculpture that I reiterate has nothing to do with pornography. It is a masterpiece representing a religious symbol of purity and innocence, the triumph of good over evil. His nudity is an outward manifestation of Renaissance thought, which considered man the centre of the universe. People from all over the world, including many Americans, make the pilgrimage to admire him every year. Currently, more than 50% of visitors are from the United States. I am certain that Ms. Carrasquilla will receive the welcome and solidarity she deserves here in Florence.
Florida may be canceling classical art and thought. Florence is decidedly not.
Today we think of the Renaissance as one of those periods when everything changed, and if the best-known artifacts of the time are anything to go by, nothing changed quite so much as art. This is reflected in obvious aesthetic differences between the works of the Renaissance and those created before, as well as in less obvious technical ones. Egg yolk-based tempera paints, for example, had been in use since the time of the ancient Egyptians, but in the fifteenth century they were replaced by oil paints. When chemical analysis of the work of certain Renaissance masters revealed traces of egg, they were assumed to be the result of chance contamination.
Now, thanks to a recent study led by chemical engineer Ophélie Ranquet of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, we have reason to believe that painters like Botticelli and Leonardo kept eggs in the mix deliberately. Oil replaced tempera because “it creates more vivid colors and smoother color transitions,” writes Smithsonian.com’s Teresa Nowakowski.
“It also dries slowly, so it can be used for longer after the initial preparation.” But “the colors darken more easily over time, and the paint is more susceptible to damage from light exposure. It also has a tendency to wrinkle as it dries,” visible in Leonardo’s Madonna of the Carnation below.
Putting in a bit of egg yolk may have been a way of using oil’s advantages while minimizing its disadvantages. Ranquet and her collaborators tested this idea by doing it themselves, re-creating two pigments used during the Renaissance, both with egg and without. “In the mayolike blend” produced by the former method, writes ScienceNews’ Jude Coleman, “the yolk created sturdy links between pigment particles, resulting in stiffer paint. Such consistency would have been ideal for techniques like impasto, a raised, thick style that adds texture to art. Egg additions also could have reduced wrinkling by creating a firmer paint consistency,” though the paint itself would take longer to dry.
In practice, Renaissance painters seem to have experimented with different proportions of oil and egg, and so discovered that each had its own strengths for rendering different elements of an image. Hyperallergic’s Taylor Michael writes that in The Lamentation Over the Dead Christ, seen up top, “Botticelli painted Christ, Mary Magdalene, and the Virgin, among others, with tempera, and the background stone and foregrounding grass with oil.” Thanks to the oxidization-slowing effects of phospholipids and antioxidants in the yolk — as scientific research has since proven — they’ve all come through the past five centuries looking hardly worse for wear.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
To find a visual definition of the nineteen-eighties, you need look no further than the windows of the nearest run-down hair or nail salon. There, “faded by time and years of sun damage,” remain on makeshift display the most widely recognized works of — or imitations of the works of — artist and illustrator Patrick Nagel, who specialized in images of women with “sleek black hair, paper-white skin, bold red lipstick and a look of mystery, power, and cool detachment.” So says Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter, in his new video essay above on the sudden rise and lasting cultural legacy of the “Nagel women.”
As Puschak tells the story, the figure responsible for launching Nagel and his women into the zeitgeist was publisher Karl Bornstein, who “had been in Europe admiring the work of Toulouse-Lautrec and Pierre Bonnard, Parisian poster artists of the late nineteenth century, and came back to America looking for an artist of his own time when Nagel walked into his life.”
Around this same time, “the manager of the English new-wave band Duran Duran saw Nagel’s work in Playboy, and commissioned a picture for the cover of their 1982 album Rio” — which, apart from all those salon windows, gave most of us our first look at a Nagel woman.
These and other pop-cultural associations “helped to cement the Nagel woman as an emblem of the decade.” For years after Nagel’s death in 1984, his “chic, fashionable, independent” women continued to serve as “aspirational images,” but eventually, amid market saturation and changing sensibilities, their bold look of glamor and professionalism began to seem tacky. Nevertheless, rediscovery always follows desuetude, and sufficient distance from the actual eighties has allowed us to appreciate Nagel’s technique. “Day by day, little by little, Nagel removed details until he arrived at the fewest number of lines that would still capture the spirit of his models,” using rigorous minimalism to evoke — and forever crystallize — a time of brazen excess.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
Perhaps we would have felt differently in the early 19th-century, when silhouettes offered a quick and affordable alternative to oil portraits, and photography had yet to be invented.
Self-taught silhouette artist William Bache traveled the eastern seaboard, and later to New Orleans and Cuba, plying his trade with a physiognotrace, a device that helped him outline subjects’ profiles on folded sheets of light paper.
Once a profile had been captured, Bache carefully cut inside the tracing and affixed the “hollow-cut” surrounding sheet to black paper, creating the appearance of a hand-cut black silhouette on a white background.
Customers could purchase four copies of these shadow likenesses for 25¢, which, adjusted for inflation, is about the same amount as a photo strip in one of New York City’s vintage photobooths these days — $5.
Bache was an energetic promoter of his services, advertising that if customers found it inconvenient to visit one of his pop-up studios, he would “at the shortest notice, wait upon them at their own Dwellings without any additional expense.”
Naturally, people were eager to lay hands on silhouettes of their children and sweethearts, too.
One of Bache’s competitors, Raphaelle Peale assumed the perspective of a satisfied male customer to tout his own business:
‘Tis almost herself, Eliza’s shade,
Thus by the faithful facietrace pourtray’d!
Her placid brow and pouting lips, whose swell
My fond impatient ardor would repell.
Let me then take that vacant seat, and there
Inhale her breath, scarce mingled with the air:
And thou blest instrument! which o’er her face
Did’st at her lips one moment pause, retrace
My glowing form and leave, unequall’d bliss!
Borrow’d from her, a sweet etherial Kiss.
Hot stuff, though hopefully besotted young lovers refrained from pressing their lips to the silhouettes they loved best. Conservators in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, which houses Bache’s sample book, a ledger filled with likenesses of some 1,800 sitters, discovered it to be suffused with arsenic, presumably meant to repel invading rodents and insects.
Most of the heads in Bache’s album arrived unidentified, but by combing through digitized newspapers, history books, baptismal records, wills, marriage certificates and Ancestry.com, lead curator Robyn Asleson and Getty-funded research assistant Elizabeth Isaacson have managed to identify over 1000.
There are some whose names — and profiles — remain well known more than 200 years later. Can you identify George Washington, Martha Washington, and Thomas Jefferson on the album page below?
Some pages contain entire families. Pedro Bidetrenoulleau coughed up $1.25 for his own likeness, as well as those of his wife, and children Félix, Adele, and Zacharine, numbers 638 through 642, below.
Bache’s travels to New Orleans and Cuba make for a racially diverse collection, though little is known about most of the Black sitters. Dr. Asleson suspects some of these might be the only existing portraits of these individuals, particularly in the case of New Orleanians in mixed-race relationships, whose descendants destroyed strategic evidence in the effort to “pass” as white:
As I was learning more and more about this history, I really began to hope that some of the people who are trying to find their heritage today, who realize it might have been deliberately eradicated to protect their ancestors from oppression, might have the chance to discover an image of a great-great-grandfather or grandmother.
Readers, if you are the caretaker of passed down family silhouettes, perhaps you can help the curators get closer to putting a name to someone who currently exists as little more than a shadow in interesting headgear.
Even if you’re not in possession of a silhouette, you may well be one of the tens of thousands living in the United States today connected to the album by blood.
It’s telling that the avian participants in a recent study wherein pet parrots, assisted by their owners, learned to make video calls to others of their kind were recruited from the online educational forum Parrot Kindergarten.
In the above footage, the humans’ hopeful, high-pitched cajoling, as they encourage their birds to interact with a new “friend”, carries a strong whiff of those Mommy and Me classes where a dozen or so adults sit crosslegged in a circle, shaking tambourines and brightly warbling “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” while an equal number of toddlers wander around, markedly less invested in the proceedings.
Though, really, who am I to judge? I don’t have a parrot, and it’s been over two decades since my youngest child required parental interference to foment social interaction…
Eighteen pet parrots enrolled in the study, hanging out with one another during self-initiated video chats, to see how and if such interactions might improve their quality of life.
No one was forced to make a call if they weren’t feeling it, or to remain on the line after their interest flagged.
I’m hunching the average parrot’s preoccupation with modern technology clocks in far south of the average American toddler’s, which may explain why they completed a mere 147 calls over the course of two months (and 1000 hours of combined footage.)
That said, I can easily imagine a scenario in which the average human toddler, having successfully gotten their beak, excuse me, hands on a touchscreen tablet, loses all interest in FaceTiming with a peer, preferring the solitary pleasures of Balloon Pop or Peek-a-Zoo.
Typically, human toddlers have more opportunities for “interspecies ethical enrichment” than creatures whose lives are primarily spent in a cage. As the authors of the study note, “over 20 million parrots are kept as pets in the US, often lacking appropriate stimuli to meet their high social, cognitive, and emotional needs.”
The parrot participants may not have thrown themselves into the proceedings with the vigor of Bye Bye Birdie’s teenaged telephone chorus, but all placed calls, the majority exhibited “high motivation and intentionality”, and their humans indicated that they would gladly continue to facilitate this social experiment.
The human contribution is not inconsiderable here. It took vast amounts of time and patience to orient the birds to the system, and careful monitoring to make sure calls didn’t run off the rails. Nothing like having your iPad screen smashed by a parrot who’s got beef in an online forum…
Several legit friendships formed over the course of the experiment — a Goffin’s cockatoo and an African grey who made each other’s virtual acquaintance during the pilot study were still chatting, a year after they met.
Data collected in the field shows that the number and duration of outgoing calls were closely tied to the number and duration of incoming calls. The most popular birdies did not take their connections for granted.
It’s a finding humans would do well to absorb if we are to combat feelings of isolation from within our own species.
At the moment, I happen to be planning some time in France, with a side trip to Belgium included. Modern intra-European train travel makes arranging the latter quite convenient: Thalys, the high-speed rail service connecting those two countries, can get you from Paris to Brussels in about an hour and half. This stands in contrast to the time of the Roman Empire, which despite its political power lacked high-speed rail, and indeed lacked rail of any kind. But it did have an expansive network of roads, some of which you can still walk today, imagining what it would have been like to travel Europe two millennia ago. And now, using the website OmnesViae, you can get historically accurate directions as well.
Though not quite geographically accurate, it does offer a detailed view of which cities in the empire were connected and how. “Geolocating thousands of points from Peutinger, OmnesViae reformats the roads and destinations on the scroll onto a more familiarly landscaped map. The shortest route between two (ancient) points is calculated using the distances traveled over Roman rather than modern roads, also taking into account the rivers and mountains the network must cross.”
You can use OmnesViae just like any other way-finding application, except you enter your origin and destination into fields labeled “ab” and “ad” rather than “from” and “to.” And though “for some cities current day names are understood,” as the instructions note, it works better — and feels so much more authentic — if you type in cities like “Roma” and “Londinio.” The resulting journey between those two great capitals looks arduous indeed, passing at least three mountainous areas, thirteen rivers, and countless smaller settlements. And according to OmnesViae, no roads led to Brussels: the closest an ancient traveler could get to the location of the modern-day seat of the European Union was the Walloon village of Liberchies — which, as the birthplace of Django Reinhardt, remains an important stop for the jazz-loving traveler of Europe today.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
So you think you know your way around a potato, eh?
No doubt you excel at boiling, mashing, roasting, baking and twice baking …
You may make a mean potato chip or pomme frite…
Perhaps you’ve perfected some tricks with a microwave or air fryer.
But before you’re puffed too full of bragging rights, have you ever thought to subject this humble root vegetable to a blow torch, an iron, a dishwasher, a juicer or a gasoline powered generator plugged into a giant dimmer switch?
No?
Congratulations on having avoided some truly dreadful methods for preparing a potato, judging by the results of some of Bon Appétit Contributing Editor Amiel Stanek’s more outré, tongue-in-cheek experiments, above.
Wait, maybe there aren’t really 63 ways to cook potatoes?
The preparation we’re legitimately eager to try is pickling, for spuds Stanek declares “very sweet, salty, acidic”, a welcome addition to a cheese board or a crudité plate.
And there’s an argument to be made for turning a waffle iron into a dual purpose device by making hash browns in it.
Stanek fares less well, piping pre-mashed potatoes into a Rollie ® Eggmaster, “a weird, made-for-TV device that is made expressly for cooking eggs:”
Ewww, no, why is it like that? This is disgusting!!!
If you’re wondering how that Rollie ® does with its intended ingredient, Stanek’s got an answer for you:
Oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, oh my god, it looks like it’s in a condom. This is the most disgusting egg thing we have made all day…it tastes like bad seafood. I don’t know why, it tastes plastic‑y. This is horrible!
Meanwhile, those in long term relationships with partners holding different views on the best way to scramble, fry or poach an egg may find themselves feeling vindicated by this episode.
Either that or horribly betrayed.
Other than potatoes and eggs, the only episode of the 10 in the Almost Everyseries not exclusively geared toward cooking flesh is the one devoted to pizza, which at 32 methods, ties with chicken breast. (Only whole chicken, at 24 methods, has fewer options.)
Perhaps a visit to Moonburger, a meatless Hudson Valley chain where Stanek is Culinary Consultant and the shakes are dairy free is in order?
Those craving ever more offbeat attacks, however, will find themselves entertained by Stanek’s efforts involving an Easy-Bake Oven (yeah, nope, not good at all), a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Pizza Machine (the whole cheese sitch looks a little bit demented…bummer, dude), and a crust that’s baked around a silicone cone, then filled with a “molten, dangerous slurry” of sauce and cheese (this thing looks demonic to me, like an animal horn meant for a Satanic ritual…)
If that’s not our cue to seek out a restaurant with a wood burning oven, perhaps it’s a signal we should order out.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
#/media/File:DuranRio.jpg){kind=link}