A Beginner’s Guide to Philosophy: From Logic to Epistemology to Metaphysics

in Photography | November 2nd, 2026

These are, per­haps, not the very best times for human­i­ties majors. Sel­dom do we even hear the once-stan­dard defense that, by pur­su­ing a course of study in sub­jects of that kind, stu­dents “learn how to think.” Such a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion still points to real val­ue, at least in the most demand­ing set­tings. Take Har­vard’s course Human­i­ties 10, whose dig­i­tal device-free envi­ron­ment and syl­labus cov­er­ing every­thing from The Odyssey and Ulysses to Pla­to and James Bald­win — at a pace of one sub­stan­tial book per week — recent­ly drew the atten­tion of the Wall Street Jour­nal. Yet it’s always been true that you don’t have to major in any­thing to learn how to think, or in any case, to make a start of doing so.

Take the phi­los­o­phy-and-lit­er­a­ture YouTu­ber Jared Hen­der­son, who in the video at the top of the post tells us how he began his self-direct­ed study in high school. “I did what a lot of peo­ple would think is nat­ur­al,” he says. “I went to a book­store, and then I just found some books that I want­ed to read.” The pieces of light read­ing he took home: Friedrich Niet­zsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger’s Intro­duc­tion to Meta­physics.

“If you know any­thing about phi­los­o­phy, I think you know that that was prob­a­bly not the ide­al way to start.” But all the years of learn­ing and teach­ing since have final­ly put him in a posi­tion of know­ing how to begin, and in the span of half an hour, he lays out an intel­lec­tu­al roadmap for any­one in the same posi­tion as his teenage self, with stops in log­ic, meta­physics, epis­te­mol­o­gy, ethics, and polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy.

That sequence reflects the rea­son­able assump­tion that, before we can eval­u­ate argu­ments about how soci­ety ought to be arranged, we must learn to eval­u­ate state­ments about how things are. We must, in oth­er words, learn how to think — but also learn about the nature of real­i­ty itself, and how or whether we can know any­thing about it in the first place, ques­tions rel­e­vant to both meta­physics and epis­te­mol­o­gy. That may seem like a daunt­ing task, but Hen­der­son frames all its stages in rela­tion to one anoth­er, nam­ing some of the most famous philoso­phers who have writ­ten in the rel­e­vant fields along the way. No sin­gle read­ing could give you mas­tery of their work, or even a full under­stand­ing of it, how­ev­er clear the big­ger pic­ture might seem. But the attempt teach­es the true first les­son of phi­los­o­phy: in one area of knowl­edge or anoth­er, you’ll always be a begin­ner.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Sev­en Phi­los­o­phy Books for Begin­ners: Where to Start

135 Free Phi­los­o­phy eBooks

The Rad­i­cal Ideas of Plato’s Repub­lic: An In-Depth Intro­duc­tion

A His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy in 81 Video Lec­tures: A Free Course That Explores Phi­los­o­phy from Ancient Greece to Mod­ern Times

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch David Bowie Take MTV to Task for Failing to Play Music Videos by Black Artists (1983)

in Music, Television | November 2nd, 2026

The old vaude­ville phrase “Will it play in Peo­ria?” has its roots in the late 19th cen­tu­ry, specif­i­cal­ly in Hor­a­tio Alger’s nov­el Five Hun­dred Dol­lars; Or Jacob Marlowe’s Secret. Like all of the books Alger wrote extolling the virtues of thrift, study, groom­ing, indus­try, etc., this one artic­u­lates a mid­dle Amer­i­can boot­straps phi­los­o­phy and rags-to-rich­es mythol­o­gy, while giv­ing the enter­tain­ment indus­try a col­or­ful way to sum up the small-town audi­ences who embraced Alger’s strait-laced eth­ic, and who need­ed to be pan­dered to or they wouldn’t get all those big-city jokes and ref­er­ences.

Peo­ria has been many places in the U.S.—from Tul­sa to Boise—but what­ev­er the test mar­ket, the assump­tions have always been the same: the Amer­i­can main­stream is insu­lar, mid­dle class or aspir­ing to it, cul­tur­al­ly con­ser­v­a­tive, unfail­ing­ly white, and fear­ful of every­one who isn’t. Such demo­graph­ic dog­ma has per­sist­ed for over a hun­dred years. Even when it is shown to be out­mod­ed or plain wrong, broad­cast­ers and jour­nal­ists con­tin­ue to play to Peo­ria, gen­u­flect­ing to a sta­t­ic, pop­ulist ver­sion of the U.S. that ignores large, rapid­ly chang­ing seg­ments of the pop­u­la­tion.

In the ear­ly eight­ies it took an Eng­lish­man with a very high pro­file to inter­ro­gate this state of affairs on the air. You may have come across the inter­view after David Bowie died, when social media filled with trib­utes and remem­brances. One thread that got a lot of atten­tion involved the tran­script of a 1983 inter­view Bowie gave the fledg­ling MTV, in which he “turns the tables on reporter Mark Good­man,” writes Takepart’s Jen­nifer Swann, “to grill him about the youth-ori­ent­ed network’s lack of eth­nic diver­si­ty.”

“It’s a sol­id enter­prise, and it’s got a lot going for it,” says Bowie. “I’m just floored by the fact there’s so few black artists fea­tured in it. Why is that?” On the spot, Good­man reach­es for a mar­ket­ing term, “nar­row­cast­ing,” to sug­gest that the net­work is delib­er­ate­ly tar­get­ing a niche. But when Bowie keeps push­ing, Good­man admits that the “nar­row” demo­graph­ic is the very same sup­posed mass mar­ket that exist­ed in Alger’s day, when the only rep­re­sen­ta­tions of black enter­tain­ers most white audi­ences in Peo­ria (or wher­ev­er) saw were in black­face.

We have to try and do what we think not only New York and Los Ange­les will appre­ci­ate, but also Pough­keep­sie or the Mid­west. Pick some town in the Mid­west that would be scared to death by Prince, which we’re play­ing, or a string of oth­er black faces, or black music. We have to play music we think an entire coun­try is going to like, and cer­tain­ly we’re a rock and roll sta­tion.

What do the Isley Broth­ers, asks Good­man, mean to a sev­en­teen-year-old? To which Bowie replies, “I’ll tell you what the Isley Broth­ers mean to a black sev­en­teen-year-old, and sure­ly he’s part of Amer­i­ca as well.” To the defense that it’s just the way things are, espe­cial­ly in radio, he gives a reply that might be derid­ed by many in the ready-made terms that rou­tine­ly pop up in such dis­cus­sions these days. Bowie, who suc­cess­ful­ly crossed over into play­ing for black audi­ences on Soul Train in the mid-sev­en­ties, would have sneered at phras­es like “SJW.” As he says in response to one young fan who rant­ed in a let­ter about “what he did­n’t want to see” on MTV: “Well that’s his prob­lem.”

The Peo­ria effect, says Bowie, “does seem to be ram­pant through Amer­i­can media. Should it not be a chal­lenge to make the media far more inte­grat­ed, espe­cial­ly, if any­thing, in musi­cal terms?” The “lines are begin­ning to blur,” Good­man admits. At the end of that year, Michael Jackson’s John Lan­dis-direct­ed “Thriller” video debuted and “changed music videos for­ev­er,” break­ing the prime­time bar­ri­ers for black artists on MTV, trans­form­ing the net­work “into a cul­tur­al behe­moth,” as Swann writes, and giv­ing the lie to the Peo­ria myth, one Bowie knew had lit­tle to do in actu­al­i­ty with the country’s cul­ture or its tastes but with a nar­row, archa­ic view of who the media should serve.

See Good­man’s full inter­view with Bowie just above.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2018.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” Video Changed Pop Cul­ture For­ev­er: Revis­it the 13-Minute Short Film Direct­ed by John Lan­dis

David Bowie Sings “Fame” & “Gold­en Years” on Soul Train (1975)

David Bowie and Cher Sing Duet of “Young Amer­i­cans” and Oth­er Songs on 1975 Vari­ety Show

David Bowie Becomes a DJ on BBC Radio in 1979; Intro­duces Lis­ten­ers to The Vel­vet Under­ground, Talk­ing Heads, Blondie & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. 

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch 150 Classic Horror and Suspense Films Free Online: Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Carnival of Souls, Night of the Living Dead & More

in Film | October 30th, 2026

From rough­ly the mid-nine­teen-fifties through the mid-nine­teen-sev­en­ties, the avail­abil­i­ty of air­time on Amer­i­can tele­vi­sion sta­tions exceed­ed their capac­i­ty to fill it with high-qual­i­ty orig­i­nal pro­gram­ming. This was espe­cial­ly true in the hours when rel­a­tive­ly few view­ers were awake to tune in, a con­di­tion that gave rise to the late-night movie show. Spe­cial­iz­ing in less­er Hol­ly­wood pro­duc­tions and the releas­es of by-then for­got­ten stu­dios, these pro­grams came to con­sti­tute home revival hous­es, and often eccen­tric ones. By its very nature, the reper­toire of yes­ter­year’s “B movies” con­sist­ed most­ly of genre pic­tures, and no genre proved as pop­u­lar among this par­tic­u­lar view­er­ship as hor­ror. Hence the even­tu­al pop­u­lar­i­ty of hosts like Vam­pi­ra, Ghoular­di, and, lat­er, the icon­ic Elvi­ra, Mis­tress of the Dark.

Wide­ly rec­og­nized as hav­ing inspired gen­er­a­tions of film­mak­ers, writ­ers, and artists, the late-night movie show also pro­vid­ed ordi­nary view­ers with glimpses of film his­to­ry and cul­ture they’d nev­er get oth­er­wise. And though its time may be long since over, you can still expe­ri­ence a ver­sion of it this Hal­loween, or on any oth­er night, through sources like the Youtube playlist above.

It col­lects about 150 hor­ror and sus­pense films that, whether fright­en­ing, kitschy, fun­ny, or some com­bi­na­tion of those qual­i­ties, could well have been local­ly broad­cast to the will­ing insom­ni­acs of 50, 60, 70 years ago. Revenge of the Zom­bies, The Mon­ster Mak­er, Fangs of the Liv­ing Dead, The Brain That Would­n’t Die, Were­wolf in a Girl’s Dor­mi­to­ry: with movies like these, the enter­tain­ment — and the entice­ment to stay tuned, no mat­ter the hour — began right there in the title.

Not that this is a playlist of guilty plea­sures alone. Silent pic­tures like The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari, The Golem, Nos­fer­atu, and Häx­an con­tin­ue to be scru­ti­nized by film-stud­ies schol­ars as foun­da­tion­al to not just mod­ern hor­ror cin­e­ma but the visu­al lan­guage of cin­e­ma itself. How­ev­er strait­ened their bud­gets, nine­teen-six­ties fea­tures like Car­ni­val of Souls, Night of the Liv­ing Dead, The Inno­cents (a favorite of Mar­tin Scors­ese), and the Edgar Allan Poe adap­ta­tion The Masque of the Red Death are now cred­it­ed with mer­its tran­scend­ing their genre. But even the less ret­ro­spec­tive­ly ele­vat­ed likes of The Mur­der in the Muse­um, The Earth Dies Scream­ing, The Lit­tle Shop of Hor­rors, and The Psy­chopath lurid­ly demon­strate that hor­ror could be mixed with mys­tery, sci­ence fic­tion, com­e­dy, and psy­cho­log­i­cal dra­ma. The pow­er of that hybrid­i­ty was what late-night movie shows impressed on their most dis­cern­ing view­ers — which is to say, their least dis­cern­ing ones.

Vis­it our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Mar­tin Scors­ese Cre­ates a List of the 11 Scari­est Hor­ror Films

Time Out Lon­don Presents The 100 Best Hor­ror Films: Start by Watch­ing Four Hor­ror Clas­sics Free Online

Jer­ry Gar­cia Explains How Abbott and Costel­lo Meet Franken­stein Changed His Life (1995)

Stephen King’s 22 Favorite Movies, Packed with Hor­ror & Sus­pense

Watch Free Cult Films by Stan­ley Kubrick, Fritz Lang, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi & More on the New Kino Cult Stream­ing Ser­vice

Hear Vin­cent Price, Hor­ror Film Leg­end, Read 8+ Hours of Scary Sto­ries

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Early Years of Electronic Pop: The Moog Craze, Psychedelic Experiments, and More

in History, Music, Technology | October 29th, 2026

There’s a decent chance you’ve heard at least a cou­ple of tracks from Wendy Car­los’ Switched-On Bach. But when was the last time you put on Switched-On Rock, Switched-On Coun­try, Switched-On San­ta, or Switched-On Bacharach? More like­ly than not, you’ve nev­er even heard of those oth­er albums, which have noth­ing to do with Car­los and every­thing to do with the music-indus­try fad that her then-high-tech ren­di­tions of Bach set off in the late nine­teen-six­ties and ear­ly sev­en­ties. That’s the sub­ject of the new Band­splain­ing video above, which cov­ers the “awk­ward and glo­ri­ous” releas­es that con­sti­tut­ed the ini­tial waves of elec­tron­ic pop music.

Like so many cul­tur­al shifts, the rise of elec­tron­ic pop took place thanks to a tech­no­log­i­cal change. To be more spe­cif­ic, it was made pos­si­ble by the inven­tion of the volt­age-con­trolled, mod­u­lar syn­the­siz­er, itself depen­dent on two par­tic­u­lar inno­va­tions. Volt­age con­trol per­mit­ted the pitch of the sounds being gen­er­at­ed to be select­ed with a piano-style key­board, a slide rib­bon, a sequencer, or any oth­er inter­face the cre­ator’s elec­tron­ics know-how would allow. In the con­text of syn­the­siz­ers, a mod­ule is “a lit­tle box with an input and an out­put that did one thing and one thing only, either mak­ing a wave­form or mod­i­fy­ing it some­how,” as Robert Moog once described it, adding that mul­ti­ple mod­ules could be con­nect­ed togeth­er with cables.

If the name Moog sounds famil­iar, that’s because the lines of syn­the­siz­ers that bear it changed music for­ev­er. In fact, Car­los used an ear­ly Moog mod­el to record Switched-On Bach, hav­ing cus­tom-built it in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the inven­tor him­self. Though the machine set up behind the Bach imper­son­ator on that album’s cov­er may look unwieldy today, it rep­re­sent­ed a major improve­ment in con­ve­nience over the room-fill­ing, musi­cal­ly unin­tu­itive behe­moths pre­vi­ous­ly acces­si­ble only at cer­tain uni­ver­si­ties and cor­po­rate R&D depart­ments. So did the syn­the­siz­er invent­ed by Don Buch­la on the west coast, at about the same time Moog was build­ing his on the east coast, though each man’s design expressed a dif­fer­ent vision of how elec­tron­ic instru­ments would adapt to music, or vice ver­sa.

Indeed, up through at least the first few years of the sev­en­ties, it would’ve been impos­si­ble to say how or whether elec­tron­ic sounds would find their place in main­stream records. The emer­gence of home hi-fi cul­ture cre­at­ed a mar­ket for swing­ing “space age pop” by the likes of Les Bax­ter, Dick Hyman, and Juan Gar­cia Esquiv­el, the sub­ject of Band­splain­ing’s pre­vi­ous video. This one high­lights such releas­es as Richard Hay­man’s Gen­uine Elec­tric Latin Love Machine and Ger­shon Kings­ley’s Music to Moog By, whose track “Pop­corn” would become a world­wide hit when re-record­ed by Hot But­ter in 1972, but not before the space-age com­pos­er Hyman got in on the action. “The Mino­taur,” his piece of hyp­not­ic psy­che­delia with an Indi­an drone and Greek melody, reached #38 on the Hot 100 57 years ago — and today, remains a thrilling eight-and-a-half-minute ride down one of the many roads elec­tron­ic pop music did­n’t take.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music in 476 Tracks (1937–2001)

Hear Glenn Gould Cel­e­brate the Moog Syn­the­siz­er & Wendy Car­los’ Pio­neer­ing Album Switched-On Bach (1968)

What is Elec­tron­ic Music?: Pio­neer­ing Elec­tron­ic Musi­cian Daphne Oram Explains (1969)

How the Moog Syn­the­siz­er Changed the Sound of Music

Watch Com­pos­er Wendy Car­los Demo an Orig­i­nal Moog Syn­the­siz­er (1989)

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music, 1800–2015: Free Web Project Cat­a­logues the Theremin, Fairlight & Oth­er Instru­ments That Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Music

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Surreal Pinscreen Animations Bring Kafka, Gogol & Mussorgsky to Life (1933–1972)

in Animation, Film, Literature | October 29th, 2026

What do Franz Kaf­ka, Niko­lai Gogol, and Mod­est Mus­sorgsky have in com­mon? They stand alone among their peers for their dark­ly humor­ous sen­si­bil­i­ties, fas­ci­na­tion with the grotesque, imag­i­na­tive takes on cul­tur­al tra­di­tions, and a pre­dis­po­si­tion for the pro­to-sur­re­al. Like the odd fig­ure lurch­ing through the first move­ment of Mussorgsky’s Pic­tures at an Exhi­bi­tion, they are gnom­ic artists: enig­mat­ic and ambigu­ous, giv­en to the apho­ris­tic in sto­ries and tone poems of mon­strous and mar­velous beings. It’s easy to imag­ine the three of them, or their works at least, in cryp­tic con­ver­sa­tion with each oth­er.

We might imag­ine that con­ver­sa­tion as we watch three works by these major Euro­pean artists—all of which we’ve fea­tured on the site before—animated via the painstak­ing pin­screen method pio­neered by hus­band-and-wife, Russ­ian-and-French duo Alexan­der Alex­eieff and Claire Park­er.

The two invent­ed the tech­nique in the 1930s. Ded­i­cat­ed to this extreme­ly labor-inten­sive process, they made 6 short films over a peri­od of 50 years, includ­ing adap­ta­tions of Kafka’s “Before the Law,” nar­rat­ed by Orson Welles, Gogol’s “The Nose,” and Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Moun­tain.

We know the Mus­sorgsky piece as a ter­ri­fy­ing vignette from Walt Disney’s Fan­ta­sia. Sev­en years before that mar­riage of clas­si­cal music and ani­ma­tion came out in 1940, Alex­eieff and Park­er released their ver­sion, at the top. Steve Stanch­field at Car­toon Research calls it “one of the most unusu­al and unique look­ing ani­mat­ed films ever cre­at­ed.” Its “delight­ful and at times hor­ri­fy­ing imagery… chal­lenge the view­er to com­pre­hend both their mean­ing and the mys­tery of how they were cre­at­ed.” The same could be said of “The Nose” (1963), whose impro­vised sound­track by Hai-Minh adds dra­mat­ic ten­sion to the eerie ani­ma­tion.

Each of these films uses the same method, a hand­made pin­screen device in which thou­sands of pins are pushed by hand out­ward and inward for each frame to cre­ate areas of light or dark. The pair intend­ed to move beyond the flat­ness of con­ven­tion­al cel ani­ma­tion tech­niques and cap­ture the depth and con­trast of chiaroscuro. They achieved this through the most aching­ly slow process imag­in­able, yet “the illu­sion of dimen­sion­al draw­ing in ani­ma­tion has rarely been cre­at­ed bet­ter,” Stanch­field writes, not even in the most sophis­ti­cat­ed com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed imagery.

Alex­eieff and Parker’s “Before the Law,” from a para­ble in Kafka’s The Tri­al, takes a pic­ture-book approach to the ani­ma­tion that would reward younger view­ers. Welles’ nar­ra­tion anchors the pro­duc­tion with even more than his usu­al grav­i­tas. In 1972, they returned to Mus­sorgsky, in the short Pic­tures at an Exhi­bi­tion, above. Here, after a pro­logue in French and the styl­iza­tions of the open­ing Pre­lude, the fig­ure of “The Gnome” appears, a translu­cent homuncu­lus hatch­ing from an egg and danc­ing across the piano keys. I like to think Mus­sorgsky, Kaf­ka, and Gogol would find this imagery irre­sistible.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2020.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Kafka’s Para­ble “Before the Law” Nar­rat­ed by Orson Welles & Illus­trat­ed with Pin­screen Art

Night on Bald Moun­tain: An Eery, Avant-Garde Pin­screen Ani­ma­tion Based on Mussorgsky’s Mas­ter­piece

Niko­lai Gogol’s Clas­sic Sto­ry, “The Nose,” Ani­mat­ed With the Aston­ish­ing Pin­screen Tech­nique (1963)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Inside the Making of the Sagrada Família, Barcelona’s 144-Year Megaproject

in Architecture, History, Religion | October 28th, 2026

To get a sense of Sagra­da Famíli­a’s pop­u­lar­i­ty with YouTu­bers, you have only to take a look at the relat­ed Open Cul­ture posts linked below. As will hard­ly escape your atten­tion, most sub­jects that con­sis­tent­ly draw the atten­tion of the GoPro class are not nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry Catholic church­es. But Antoni Gaudí’s mas­ter­piece, whose con­struc­tion alone has sur­vived him by a cen­tu­ry now, tran­scends many bound­aries of intel­lec­tu­al and cul­tur­al inter­est: his­to­ry chan­nels fea­ture it, trav­el chan­nels fea­ture it, reli­gious chan­nels fea­ture it, and, of course, archi­tec­ture chan­nels fea­ture it. Most recent­ly, Sagra­da Família has appeared on The B1M, which is all about con­struc­tion — the more ambi­tious, the bet­ter.

We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly post­ed B1M videos on the Flat­iron Build­ing, the Guggen­heim Muse­um Bil­bao, the extrater­res­tri­al­ly curv­ing work of Zaha Hadid, and every gen­er­a­tion of New York sky­scraper. That selec­tion only hints at the range of struc­tures to which the chan­nel’s cre­ator Fred Mills has paid close atten­tion, and yet it’s Sagra­da Família that puts him at a loss. “There’s parts of this build­ing where you can’t help but describe what you’re see­ing,” he says as he stands in its stained glass-illu­mi­nat­ed cen­tral nave. “There’s oth­er moments where you don’t have the words; it’s just emo­tion.” Enter­ing it feels, as he describes it, “less like you’re stand­ing inside a build­ing, and more like you’ve been trans­port­ed to the thresh­old of heav­en itself.”

How does Sagra­da Família cre­ate this expe­ri­ence for its vis­i­tors, even in its incom­plete state? Some will cred­it divine inspi­ra­tion; oth­ers, Gaudí’s sheer archi­tec­tur­al genius. Mills seeks out more con­crete forms of expla­na­tion, right down to the very blocks of stone used to build its tow­ers. Grant­ed much more access than ordi­nary tourists, who now come at a rate of about 1,500 per hour, he goes all the way up to see the mas­sive cross assem­bled on the church’s pin­na­cle, and all the way down to the base­ment work­shop where intri­cate mod­els test the myr­i­ad pos­si­ble ways to real­ize Gaudí’s vision. For when he died in 1926, hav­ing been hit by a tram, the plans he left behind did­n’t exact­ly explain all the details about how to fin­ish what resem­bled no oth­er build­ing ever erect­ed, reli­gious or oth­er­wise.

As Mills points out, sub­se­quent­ly devel­oped tech­nolo­gies have helped keep Sagra­da Famíli­a’s now 144-year-long con­struc­tion pro­ceed­ing apace. And though great cel­e­bra­tion attend­ed the top­ping-out of its cen­tral tow­er high above the streets of Barcelona this past Feb­ru­ary, more work remains to be done. Com­plet­ing its inte­ri­or, roofs, and side chapels, as well as the grand façade with its main entrance, should take anoth­er decade, depend­ing on how the rel­e­vant dis­putes involv­ing local res­i­dents and the city coun­cil play out. Still, it seems like­ly indeed that Sagra­da Família will final­ly be fin­ished with­in our life­times, which makes for the kind of dra­ma that will keep attract­ing both large- and small-time doc­u­men­tar­i­ans. “I’m not sure we’re ever going to see any­thing else quite like it,” Mills says, which hints at anoth­er rea­son for all the con­tent-cre­ator fas­ci­na­tion: though it may well be com­plet­ed in our age, Sagra­da Família could hard­ly be less of our age.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Archi­tec­tur­al Tour of Sagra­da Família, Antoni Gaudí’s Auda­cious Church That’s Been Under Con­struc­tion for 142 Years

The Incred­i­ble Engi­neer­ing of Anto­nio Gaudí’s Sagra­da Famil­ia, the 137 Year Con­struc­tion Project

The Japan­ese Sculp­tor Who Ded­i­cat­ed His Life to Fin­ish­ing Gaudí’s Mag­num Opus, the Sagra­da Família

The Longest Con­struc­tion Projects in His­to­ry: Why Sagra­da Família, the Milan Duo­mo, Greek Tem­ples & Oth­er Famous Struc­tures Took Gen­er­a­tions to Com­plete

How Design­ing Build­ings Upside-Down Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Archi­tec­ture, Mak­ing Pos­si­ble St. Paul’s Cathe­dral, Sagra­da Família & More

LEGO Lets You Build Gaudí’s Sagra­da Família in Its Largest Set Ever

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Vibrant Color Wheels Designed by Goethe, Newton & Other Theorists of Color (1665–1810)

in Art, Science | October 28th, 2026

Maybe it’s the clois­tered headi­ness of Rene Descartes, or the rig­or­ous aus­ter­i­ty of Isaac New­ton; maybe it’s all the leath­ern breech­es, gray waist­coats, sal­low faces, and pow­dered wigs… but we tend not to asso­ciate Enlight­en­ment Europe with an explo­sion of col­or the­o­ry. Yet philoso­phers of the late 17th and 18th cen­turies were obsessed with light and sight. Descartes wrote a trea­tise on optics, as did New­ton.

New­ton first described in his 1672 paper the “rev­o­lu­tion­ary new the­o­ry of light and colour,” the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge Whip­ple Library writes, “in which he claimed that exper­i­ments with prisms proved that white light was com­prised of light of sev­en dis­tinct colours.” Sci­en­tists debat­ed Newton’s the­o­ry “well into the 19th cen­tu­ry.”

One ear­ly oppo­nent famous­ly illus­trat­ed his rebut­tal. Poet, writer, and sci­en­tist Johann Wolf­gang von Goethe pub­lished The­o­ry of Col­ors (see here), with its care­ful­ly hand-drawn and col­ored dia­grams and wheels, in 1810. From New­ton’s time onward, col­or the­o­rists elab­o­rat­ed pre­vail­ing con­cepts with col­or wheels, the first attrib­uted to New­ton in 1704 (and drawn in black and white, above).

Newton’s wheel “arranged red, orange, yel­low, green, blue, indi­go, and vio­let into a nat­ur­al pro­gres­sion on a rotat­ing disk.” A few years lat­er, two col­or circles—one with 7 col­ors and anoth­er with 12—appeared in a paint­ing man­u­al attrib­uted to Claude Boutet (top), based on Newton’s the­o­ries. Artists, chemists, map­mak­ers, poets, even ento­mol­o­gists… every­one seemed to have a pet the­o­ry of col­or, gen­er­al­ly accom­pa­nied by elab­o­rate col­ored charts and dia­grams.

The col­or wheel was one among many forms—which often pre­sent­ed con­trast­ing the­o­ries, like that of Jacques-Fabi­en Gau­ti­er, who argued that black and white were pri­ma­ry col­ors. But the wheel, and Newton’s basic ideas about it, have endured almost unchanged. The wheel fur­ther up (third one from top) by British ento­mol­o­gist Moses Har­ris from 1766 shows Newton’s 7‑color scheme sim­pli­fied to the 6 pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary col­ors we usu­al­ly see, arranged in the com­ple­men­tary and anal­o­gous scheme, with ter­tiary gra­da­tions between them. Anoth­er ento­mol­o­gist, Ignaz Schif­fer­müller, drew the 12-col­or wheel right above.

Col­or is always rep­re­sen­ta­tive. Newton’s orig­i­nal wheel includ­ed “musi­cal notes cor­re­lat­ed with col­or.” By the end of the 18th cen­tu­ry, col­or the­o­ry had become increas­ing­ly tied to psy­cho­log­i­cal the­o­ries and typolo­gies, as in the wheel above, the “rose of tem­pera­ments,” made by Goethe and Friedrich Schiller in 1799 to illus­trate “human occu­pa­tions and char­ac­ter traits,” the Pub­lic Domain Review notes, includ­ing “tyrants, heroes, adven­tur­ers, hedo­nists, lovers, poets, pub­lic speak­ers, his­to­ri­ans, teach­ers, philoso­phers, pedants, rulers,” grouped into the four tem­pera­ments of humoral the­o­ry.

It’s a fair­ly short leap from these psy­cholo­gies of col­or to those used by adver­tis­ers and com­mer­cial design­ers in the 20th century—or from the artists and sci­en­tists’ col­or the­o­ries to abstract expres­sion­ism, the Bauhaus school, and the chemists and pho­tog­ra­phers who recre­at­ed the col­ors of the world on film. (Goethe’s col­or wheel, below, from The­o­ry of Col­ors, illus­trates his chap­ter on “Alle­gor­i­cal, sym­bol­ic, and mys­ti­cal use of colour.”) See more ear­ly col­or wheels, like Philipp Otto Runge’s 1810 Far­benkugel, as well as oth­er con­cep­tu­al col­or schemes, at the Pub­lic Domain Review.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Woman Who The­o­rized Col­or: An Intro­duc­tion to Mary Gartside’s New The­o­ry of Colours (1808)

A 900-Page Pre-Pan­tone Guide to Col­or from 1692: A Com­plete High-Res­o­lu­tion Dig­i­tal Scan

Goethe’s The­o­ry of Col­ors: The 1810 Trea­tise That Inspired Kandin­sky & Ear­ly Abstract Paint­ing

How Tech­ni­col­or Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Cin­e­ma with Sur­re­al, Elec­tric Col­ors & Changed How We See Our World

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. 

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How Balzac’s Extreme Coffee Habit Fueled His Productive Writing Routine

in History, Literature | October 27th, 2026

Even now, in this age when the very read­ing of lit­er­a­ture is endan­gered — or so the arti­cles tell us — Hon­oré de Balzac (1799–1850) retains a notable abil­i­ty to pick up new admir­ers. But even though he may have a decent read­er­ship by the stan­dards of French nov­el­ists who died in the mid­dle of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, one does won­der whether he still inspires the kind of devo­tion embod­ied by William Hobart Royce. A Brook­lyn book­seller’s assis­tant first intro­duced to Les Cent Con­tes dro­la­tiques as an impres­sion­able (and duly scan­dal­ized) teenag­er on a trip to Eng­land, Royce became not just the ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry’s fore­most Amer­i­can expert on Balzac, but also a kind of clone of the man him­self, right down to his appear­ance.

“In their long asso­ci­a­tion, Royce has con­tract­ed sev­er­al habits from Balzac,” writes the New York­er’s Alva John­ston in a 1933 pro­file. “When work­ing late at night or ear­ly in the morn­ing, he com­bats fatigue, as Balzac did, by tak­ing snuff, smok­ing Latakia tobac­co, and drink­ing enor­mous quan­ti­ties of cof­fee. These are not mere whims or idol-wor­ship­ping cer­e­monies on the part of Royce; they are prac­tices which he adopt­ed from Balzac after test­ing them and con­vinc­ing him­self that they were sound.”

Balzac him­self explains the impor­tance of these sub­stances to the writ­ing life — noth­ing less, to his mind, than life itself — in “Traité des exci­tants mod­ernes,” or “Trea­tise on Mod­ern Stim­u­lants,” an essay he append­ed to Phys­i­olo­gie du goût, the cel­e­brat­ed text by the lawyer-politi­cian-gour­mand Jean Anthelme Bril­lat-Savarin.

Known for drink­ing his own cus­tom blend of beans from Mar­tinique, cof­fee from Bour­bon (now known as Réu­nion Island), and Mokha from the pot pic­tured above, Balzac also rec­om­mends to his fel­low “men of exces­sive vig­or” a “hor­ri­ble, rather bru­tal method” involv­ing “fine­ly pul­ver­ized, dense cof­fee” pre­pared with as lit­tle water as pos­si­ble and con­sumed on an emp­ty stom­ach. In response, he promis­es in this par­tial Eng­lish trans­la­tion of the essay, “ideas quick march into motion like bat­tal­ions of a grand army to its leg­endary fight­ing ground, and the bat­tle rages. Mem­o­ries charge in, bright flags on high; the cav­al­ry of metaphor deploys with a mag­nif­i­cent gal­lop; the artillery of log­ic rush­es up with clat­ter­ing wag­ons and car­tridges; on imagination’s orders, sharp­shoot­ers sight and fire; forms and shapes and char­ac­ters rear up.”

In the case of Balzac, who cre­at­ed thou­sands of char­ac­ters and deployed them across his body of work, that charge could have been a fear­some sight indeed. Yet he proved equal to it night after writ­ing night, sit­ting down to his desk some time between mid­night and 2:00 a.m., then pro­duc­ing man­u­script pages with his quill at a type­writer’s pace until morn­ing. After a nap, more work fol­lowed until 4:00 or so in the after­noon; soon there­after would come an ear­ly-evening din­ner, and thus the cycle would repeat. A com­mon­ly cit­ed fig­ure holds that Balzac drank as many as 50 cups of cof­fee per day, which even the most proud­ly caf­feine-hooked lap­top jock­ey today would strug­gle to touch. Nor would it be advis­able to try, giv­en that Balza­c’s for­mi­da­ble cof­fee habit may have con­tributed to his death at age 51 — but then, it cer­tain­ly played a part in the pro­duc­tiv­i­ty that ensured his immor­tal­ité.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Hon­oré de Balzac Writes About “The Plea­sures and Pains of Cof­fee,” and His Epic Cof­fee Addic­tion

Paul Gia­mat­ti Plays Hon­oré de Balzac, Hopped Up on 50 Cof­fees Per Day

Is Cof­fee Good for You?: A Cof­fee Con­nois­seur Reviews the Sci­en­tif­ic Research

Philoso­phers Drink­ing Cof­fee: The Exces­sive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard

The Case for Writ­ing in Cof­fee Shops: Why Mal­colm Glad­well Does It, and You Should Too

How Cof­fee Affects Your Brain: A Very Quick Primer

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

A Soviet Animation of Stephen King’s Short Story “Battleground” (1986)

in Animation, Literature | October 27th, 2026

Stephen King has that rare, and spec­tac­u­lar­ly prof­itable, skill to suck you into his world and com­pel you to flip to the next page. And when you’re hooked, his words have the uncan­ny abil­i­ty to sim­ply unfold like a movie in your head. So it isn’t sur­pris­ing that his books have been wide­ly adapt­ed to the sil­ver screen. Some are flat out mas­ter­pieces. Oth­ers are most decid­ed­ly not. This appre­ci­a­tion by film­mak­ers of King’s sto­ry­telling chops isn’t just con­tained to this side of the Iron Cur­tain. In 1986, Sovi­et ani­ma­tor Mikhail Titov — whose pre­vi­ous work includes How the Cos­sacks Played Foot­ball (1970) — turned King’s short sto­ry “Bat­tle­ground” (1972) into an ani­mat­ed movie, titled sim­ply Сражение or Bat­tle.

The short is about a noirish hired gun who dress­es in a trench coat and a fedo­ra. He is con­tract­ed to kill a toy mak­er. When he returns home, he dis­cov­ers that there’s a box on his doorstep and makes the com­plete­ly unwise deci­sion of tak­ing it inside. Soon, toy sol­diers start to tum­ble out of the box. They have live ammo, rock­et launch­ers, tiny lit­tle heli­copters at their dis­pos­al and they are on a sin­gle-mind­ed mis­sion to kill him. The killer soon finds him­self pinned down in the bath­room, wait­ing for the next attack.

The film is a lot of fun. Titov relies heav­i­ly on roto­scop­ing – an ani­ma­tion tech­nique you prob­a­bly remem­ber from A‑ha’s music video Take On Me. The killer’s form and move­ments feel real­is­tic as the rest of the movie’s height­ened, brood­ing world bends and bulges as if ren­dered through a fish­eye lens. And like A‑ha, the film’s synth and sax­o­phone sound­track might sound painful­ly 80s to some. You can watch Bat­tle with sub­ti­tles above or with­out sub­ti­tles below. The dia­logue is min­i­mal through­out.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behold Sovi­et Ani­ma­tions of Ray Brad­bury Sto­ries

Watch Dzi­ga Vertov’s Sovi­et Toys: The First Sovi­et Ani­mat­ed Movie Ever (1924)

Niko­lai Gogol’s Clas­sic Sto­ry, “The Nose,” Ani­mat­ed With the Aston­ish­ing Pin­screen Tech­nique (1963)

Watch the Sur­re­al­ist Glass Har­mon­i­ca, the Only Ani­mat­ed Film Ever Banned by Sovi­et Cen­sors (1968)

Jonathan Crow is a writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. 

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Harry Houdini Died 100 Years Ago This Halloween: Was He Really Killed by a Punch to the Stomach?

in History | October 26th, 2026

This Hal­loween marks the 100th anniver­sary of the death of famed escape artist Har­ry Hou­di­ni. Today, most of us know more about the man­ner of that death than we do about any of the feats of escape artistry that made him famous in the first place. As the sto­ry goes, he’d mas­tered his own body to the extent that he could tight­en his abdom­i­nal mus­cles so as to with­stand even the hard­est punch to the gut. Or at least that’s the image he let cir­cu­late: tak­ing it as a chal­lenge, a stu­dent and ama­teur box­er turned up and offered his fist to Hou­di­ni as an unex­pect­ed test. A week and a half lat­er, the great escapol­o­gist was dead of peri­toni­tis.

It seemed that the blow he sus­tained had rup­tured Hou­dini’s already-inflamed appen­dix, and that remained the wide­ly accept­ed, if not med­ical­ly air­tight, expla­na­tion for near­ly a cen­tu­ry. Yet there was always some­thing too dra­mat­i­cal­ly neat in the tale of a man famed for defy­ing death being done in by noth­ing more than a thought­less young man’s suck­er punch. Gen­er­a­tions of enthu­si­asts have offered expla­na­tions of their own, some more plau­si­ble than oth­ers, but few inves­ti­ga­tions into this qua­si-leg­endary demise have been con­duct­ed as seri­ous­ly as the one under­tak­en in our time by retired urol­o­gist Lar­ri­an Gille­spie, author of Hou­di­ni: The Man Who Died Twice.

When she had the chance to exam­ine his death cer­tifi­cate, Gille­spie noticed appar­ent irreg­u­lar­i­ties that led her down the rab­bit hole to “a paper trail of mis­state­ments and actions by more than a dozen peo­ple close to Hou­di­ni, includ­ing rel­a­tives and employ­ees,” writes the New York Times’ Robin Pogre­bin, “includ­ing a con­spir­a­cy to change his offi­cial death date to Octo­ber 31st, fix­ing his mem­o­ry to Hal­loween.” Accord­ing to her recon­struc­tion of events, Hou­di­ni actu­al­ly died the day before: not of appen­dici­tis, and not as a result of the young man’s punch. “Rather, she argues, the cul­prit was a bow­el obstruc­tion, brought on by a fibrous mass of chop suey that Hou­di­ni ate on Oct. 28.”

Emer­gency surgery took place the next day, but it was too late. “Sep­tic shock set in, Houdini’s fever spiked to 105 and his rapid breath­ing led to mus­cle spasms and uncon­scious­ness.” He was oper­at­ed on again the day after, and “Gillespie’s research into the death cer­tifi­cates indi­cates that the magi­cian died that after­noon at 1:26 p.m.” Gille­spie argues that the lack of a prop­er autop­sy helped con­ceal pos­si­ble med­ical mal­prac­tice and allowed Hou­dini’s wid­ow to col­lect a dou­ble-indem­ni­ty pay­ment for what was treat­ed as an acci­den­tal death. Even if accept­ed, her the­o­ry prob­a­bly won’t erase the cul­tur­al link between Hou­di­ni and Hal­loween. But the the­o­ry does add a new dimen­sion of irony to his life sto­ry: the man who could sur­vive a Chi­nese water tor­ture cell proved to be no match for Amer­i­can Chi­nese food.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch Hou­di­ni Escape From a Strait Jack­et, Then See How He Did It (Cir­ca 1917)

Har­ry Houdini’s Great Rope Escape (Cir­ca 1920)

Browse the Mag­i­cal Worlds of Har­ry Houdini’s Scrap­books

The Mys­tery of Edgar Allan Poe’s Death: 19 The­o­ries on What Caused the Poet’s Demise

How Anti-Chi­nese Immi­gra­tion Laws Unex­pect­ed­ly Led to a Chi­nese Restau­rant Boom in Amer­i­ca

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Hear an Hour of the Jazzy Background Music from the Original 1967 Spider-Man Cartoon

in Comics/Cartoons, Music | October 26th, 2026

Ray Ellis had a six-decade career as a pro­duc­er, arranger, and jazz com­pos­er. And while he’s best known for arrang­ing music for Bil­lie Hol­i­day’s Lady in Satin (1958), he also enjoyed a long career orches­trat­ing music for tele­vi­sion. Work­ing under a pseu­do­nym “Yvette Blais” (his wife’s name), Ellis com­posed back­ground music for the car­toon stu­dio Fil­ma­tion between 1968 and 1982. And, dur­ing the late 60s, he notably cre­at­ed the back­ground and inci­den­tal music for the orig­i­nal Spi­der-Man car­toons.

Above, hear Ray Ellis’ Spi­der-Man sound­track. The show’s talk­ing parts and sound effects have been removed as much as pos­si­ble, then “pieced back togeth­er into com­plete form,” by a YouTu­ber who uses the moniker “11db11.” All of the music from Sea­son 1 is includ­ed, plus many record­ings from Sea­sons 2 and 3. It’s worth not­ing that the 52 episodes from the orig­i­nal 1967 Spi­der-Man TV series have been com­plete­ly restored. You can pur­chase them on DVD online.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read 20,000+ Gold­en Age Com­ic Books Free Online: Super­heroes, West­erns, Romance, Hor­ror, and More

The Math­e­mat­ics of Spi­der­man and the Physics of Super­heroes

Crime Jazz: How Miles Davis, Count Basie & Duke Elling­ton Cre­at­ed Sound­tracks for Noir Films & TV

Watch Miles Davis Impro­vise Music for Ele­va­tor to the Gal­lows, Louis Malle’s New Wave Thriller (1958)

Every Spi­der-Man Movie and TV Show Explained By Kevin Smith

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |


| Older Entries »

  • Great Lectures

  • About Us

    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.


    Advertise With Us

  • Great Recordings

  • Book Lists By

  • Syllabi

  • Favorite Movies

  • Archives

  • Search

    • Quantcast