The Genius of Brian Wilson (RIP) and How He Turned “Good Vibrations” Into the Beach Boys’ Pocket Symphony

in Music | June 13th, 2025

This week, Brian Wilson became the last of the Wilson brothers to shuffle off this mortal coil. Dennis, the first of the Wilsons to go, died young in 1983 — but not before offering this memorable assessment of the family musical project: “Brian Wilson is the Beach Boys. He is the band. We’re his messengers. He is all of it. Period. We’re nothing.” That was a bit harsh: Dennis may not have been a virtuoso drummer, but Beach Boys enthusiasts all credit his faintly despairing songs with enriching the band’s signature emotional landscape. Brian may have written “God Only Knows,” but he did so with his brother Carl’s voice in mind. And could even Brian’s other masterpiece “Good Vibrations” have made the same impact without the participation of his much-resented cousin Mike Love?

Still, without Brian’s orchestration, the other Beach Boys’ voices would never have come together in the powerful way they did, to say nothing of the contributions of the countless studio musicians who played on their recordings. Before “Good Vibrations,” never had a pop song owed so much to so many musicians — and, at the same time, even more to the fertile and unconventional sonic imagination of just one man.

Laboriously crafted over seven months in four different studios, it came out in October of 1966 as the most expensive single ever produced. Its then-epic length of 3:35 filled Capitol Records with doubts about its radio viability, but that turned out to be an astonishingly brief running time to contain the sheer compositional intensity that soon got the song labeled a “pocket symphony.”

“Good Vibrations” and its myriad intricacies are scrutinized to this day, most recently in video essays like the ones you see here. On his Youtube channel Polyphonic, Noah Lefevre calls it “dense enough that you could teach an entire music course on it.” David Hartley grants it the status of “probably the most complex song ever recorded,” and even “the first song ever created using copy and paste.” Long before the era of digital audio workstations, Brian Wilson used wholly analog studio technology to string together “feels,” his name for the disparate fragments of music in his mind. His method contributed to the symphonic construction of “Good Vibrations,” and his willingness to follow the mood wherever it led resulted in the song’s distinctive use of an Electro-Theremin. Despite all this, some listeners still question his centrality to the Beach Boys’ music; for them, there will always be “Kokomo.”

How the Beach Boys Created Their Pop Masterpieces: “Good Vibrations,” Pet Sounds, and More

The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson & Beatles Producer George Martin Break Down “God Only Knows,” the “Greatest Song Ever Written”

Hear the Beach Boys’ Angelic Vocal Harmonies in Four Isolated Tracks from Pet Sounds: “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “God Only Knows,” “Sloop John B” & “Good Vibrations”

Enter Brian Wilson’s Creative Process While Making The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds 50 Years Ago: A Fly-on-the Wall View

Paul McCartney vs. Brian Wilson: A Rivalry That Inspired Pet Sounds, Sgt. Pepper, and Other Classic Albums

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books 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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An Architectural Tour of Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Iconic Desert Home and Studio

in Architecture | June 12th, 2025

By some estimations, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West home-studio complex took shape in 1941. But even then, the Arizona Republic presciently noted that “it may be years before it is considered finished.” The Taliesin West you can see in the new Architectural Digest video above is unlikely to change dramatically over the next few generations, but it’s also quite different from what Wright and his apprentices initially designed and built over their first six years of life and work in the Arizona desert. Much of that change has come since Wright himself last saw Taliesin West in 1959, the final year of his life, as the Taliesin Institute’s Jennifer Gray explains while showing the place off.

Wright enthusiasts can argue about the degree to which the expansions, modifications, and renovations made by the master’s disciples and others are in keeping with his vision. But in a sense, ongoing growth and metamorphosis (as well as damage and regrowth, resulting from the occasional fire) suits a work of architecture made to look and feel as if it had emerged organically from the natural landscape. Arguably, Taliesin West even exhibits a kind of purity not found in other, more famous Wright buildings, created as it was without a client, and thus without a client’s demands and deadlines — not to mention with the benefit of apprentice labor.

Like Wright’s original Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin, Taliesin West was a home, a studio, and most importantly, an educational institution. Wright and his students spent the winters there every year from 1935 on, though it was a completely undeveloped site at first. Just getting there necessitated a vehicular pilgrimage, a great American road trip avant la lettre — and indeed, avant l’autoroute. While the Wrights stayed at an inn, the apprentices camped out on-site, living a hardscrabble but highly educational existence, devoted as it was to building straight from plans that their teacher could have drawn up the day before. Even after Taliesin West was basically built, then hooked up to such luxuries as plumbing and electricity, communal rigors of life there weren’t for every student. Yet it did have its pleasures: it’s not every architecture school, after all, that has its own cabaret.

12 Famous Frank Lloyd Wright Houses Offer Virtual Tours: Hollyhock House, Taliesin West, Fallingwater & More

A Virtual Tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Lost Japanese Masterpiece, the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo

Inside the Beautiful Home Frank Lloyd Wright Designed for His Son (1952)

What Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unusual Windows Tell Us About His Architectural Genius

How Frank Lloyd Wright’s Architecture Evolved Over 70 Years and Changed America

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books 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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Read the Original 32-Page Program for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927)

in Uncategorized | June 12th, 2025

One of the very first feature-length sci-fi films ever made, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis took a daring visual approach for its time, incorporating Bauhaus and Futurist influences in thrillingly designed sets and costumes. Lang’s visual language resonated strongly in later decades. The film’s rather stunning alchemical-electric transference of a woman’s physical traits onto the body of a destructive android—the so-called Maschinenmensch— began a very long trend of female robots in film and television, most of them as dangerous and inscrutable as Lang’s. And yet, for all its many imitators, Metropolis continues to deliver surprises. Here, we bring you a new find: a 32-page program distributed at the film’s 1927 premiere in London and recently re-discovered.

In addition to underwriting almost one hundred years of science fiction film and television tropes, Metropolis has had a very long life in other ways: Inspiring an all-star soundtrack produced by Giorgio Moroder in 1984, with Freddie Mercury, Loverboy, and Adam Ant, and a Kraftwerk album.

In 2001, a reconstructed version of Metropolis received a screening at the Berlin Film Festival, and UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register added it to their roster. 2002 saw the release of an exceptional Metropolis-inspired anime with the same title. And in 2010 an almost fully restored print of the long-incomplete film—recut from footage found in Argentina in 2008—appeared, adding a little more sophistication and coherence to the simplistic storyline.

Even at the film’s initial reception, without any missing footage, critics did not warm to its story. For all its intense visual futurism, it has always seemed like a very quaint, naïve tale, struck through with earnest religiosity and inexplicable archaisms. Contemporary reviewers found its narrative of generational and class conflict unconvincing. H.G. Wells—“something of an authority on science fiction”—pronounced it “the silliest film” full of “every possible foolishness, cliché, platitude, and muddlement about mechanical progress and progress in general served up with a sauce of sentimentality that is all its own.” Few were kinder when it came to the story, and despite its overt religious themes, many saw it as Communist propaganda.

Viewed after subsequent events in 20th century Germany, many of the film’s scenes appear “disturbingly prescient,” writes the Unaffiliated Critic, such as the vision of a huge industrial machine as Moloch, in which “bald, underfed humans are led in chains to a furnace.” Lang and his wife Thea von Harbou—who wrote the novel, then screenplay—were of course commenting on industrialization, labor conditions, and poverty in Weimar Germany. Metropolis’s “clear message of classism,” as io9 writes, comes through most clearly in its arresting imagery, like that horrifying, monstrous furnace and the “looming symbol of wealth in the Tower of Babel.”

The visual effects and spectacular set pieces have worked their magic on almost everyone (Wells excluded) who has seen Metropolis. And they remain, for all its silliness, the primary reason for the movie’s cultural prevalence. Wired calls it “probably the most influential sci-fi movie in history,” remarking that “a single movie poster from the original release sold for $690,000 seven years ago, and is expected to fetch even more at an auction later this year.”

We now have another artifact from the movie’s premiere, this 32-page program, appropriately called “Metropolis” Magazine, that offers a rich feast for audiences, and text at times more interesting than the film’s script. (You can view the program in full here.) One imagines had they possessed backlit smart phones, those early moviegoers might have found themselves struggling not to browse their programs while the film screened. But, of course, Metropolis’s visual excesses would hold their attention as they still do ours. Its scenes of a futuristic city have always enthralled viewers, filmmakers, and (most) critics, such that Roger Ebert could write of “vast futuristic cities” as a staple of some of the best science fiction in his review of the 21st-century animated Metropolis—“visions… goofy and yet at the same time exhilarating.”

The program really is an astonishing document, a treasure for fans of the film and for scholars. It’s full of production stills, behind-the-scenes articles and photos, technical minutiae, short columns by the actors, a bio of Thea von Harbou, the “authoress,” excerpts from her novel and screenplay placed side-by-side, and a short article by her. There’s a page called “Figures that Speak” that tallies the production costs and cast and crew numbers (including very crude drawings and numbers of “Negroes” and “Chinese”). Lang himself weighs in, laconically, with a breezy introduction followed by a classic silent-era line: “if I cannot succeed in finding expression on the picture, I certainly cannot find it in speech.” Film history agrees, Lang found his expression “on the picture.”

“Only three surviving copies of this program are known to exist,” writes Wired, and one of them, from which these pages come, has gone on sale at the Peter Harrington rare book shop for 2,750 pounds ($4,244)—which seems rather low, given what an original Metropolis poster went for. But markets are fickle, and whatever its current or future price, ”Metropolis” Magazine is invaluable to cineastes. See all 32 pages of the program at Peter Harrington’s website.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.

Fritz Lang First Depicted Artificial Intelligence on Film in Metropolis (1927), and It Frightened People Even Then

If Fritz Lang’s Iconic Film Metropolis Had a Kraftwerk Soundtrack

Behold Beautiful Original Movie Posters for Metropolis from France, Sweden, Germany, Japan & Beyond

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

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Every Wes Anderson Movie, Explained by Wes Anderson

in Film | June 11th, 2025

That Wes Anderson is perhaps the most assiduous maker of short films today becomes clear when you look closely at his recent work. The four adaptations of “The Wonderful World of Henry Sugar” and three other Roald Dahl stories he made for Netflix were presented as a single anthology film; his slightly earlier feature The French Dispatch didn’t hide the essential separateness of its stories, each one based on an article for a fictionalized version of the New Yorker. Though both Anderson’s fans and critics readily note the increasingly elaborate constructions of his pictures, it’s worth remembering that his career began with a simple short: the thirteen-minute black-and-white version of Bottle Rocket that would evolve into his first full-length work.

Anderson tells the story of not just that first feature but also the twelve that would follow in the new video from Vanity Fair above, mentioning details even dedicated Andersonians may not know. The original, “very, very, very long” Bottle Rocket script got a severe cutting under the guidance of Hollywood producer James L. Brooks. Locations for Rushmore were scouted based on whether movements through them could properly be choreographed to certain British Invasion songs.

Anderson promised the late Gene Hackman that he’d have a “good time” on The Royal Tenenbaums, a promise that went not-quite-fulfilled. When he hired Seu Jorge to sing David Bowie songs for The Life Aquatic, he didn’t know he was already a pop singer in Brazil. When talking to him about The Darjeeling Limited, people tend to call it “The Darjeeling Express.”

Many of these recollections have to do with his inspirations, which for The Darjeeling Limited were specific subcontinental films like Jean Renoir’s The River, Louis Malle’s Phantom India, and Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy. Moonrise Kingdom was made possible when Anderson, long resident in France, came to “see America like some foreign country.” Writing The French Dispatch, he looked to the New Yorker as it was under its contrasting first editors, Harold Ross and William Shawn. Asteroid City originated as a kind of tribute to the Actors Studio in the nineteen-fifties. He describes his latest picture The Phoenician Scheme as having been inspired by the work of Luis Buñuel and written for Benicio del Toro, who plays a tycoon out of a “nineteen-fifties Italian movie” subject to “Biblical visions” during his frequent brushes with death. “I haven’t had the moment where I don’t know what I want to do next,” Anderson says at the end of the video. As sure as filmgoers may feel that they know just what to expect from him, he surely has many more surprises in store for us.

A Complete Collection of Wes Anderson Video Essays

Why Do Wes Anderson Movies Look Like That?

Wes Anderson Explains How He Built Asteroid City, the Fictional American Desert Town in His New Film

Wes Anderson’s Breakthrough Film Rushmore Revisited in Five Video Essays: It Came Out 20 Years Ago Today

Wes Anderson’s First Short Film: The Black-and-White, Jazz-Scored Bottle Rocket (1992)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books 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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The History of the World in One Beautiful, 5‑Foot-Long Chart (1931)

in History, Maps | June 11th, 2025

In the image above, we see an impressive pre-internet macro-infographic called a “Histomap.” Its creator John B. Sparks (who later created “histomaps” of religion and evolution) published the graphic in 1931 with Rand McNally. The five-foot-long chart—purportedly covering 4,000 years of “world” history—is, in fact, an example of an early illustration trend called the “outline,” of which Rebecca Onion at Slate writes: “large subjects (the history of the world! every school of philosophy! all of modern physics!) were distilled into a form comprehensible to the most uneducated layman.” Here we have the full description of most every political chart, graph, or animation in U.S.A. Today, most Internet news sites, and, of course, The Onion.

The similarity here isn’t simply one of form. The “outline” functioned in much the same way that simplified animations do—condensing heavy, contentious theoretical freight trains and ideological baggage. Rebecca Onion describes the chart as an artifact very much of its time, presenting a version of history prominent in the U.S. between the wars. Onion writes:

The chart emphasizes domination, using color to show how the power of various “peoples” (a quasi-racial understanding of the nature of human groups, quite popular at the time) evolved throughout history.

Sparks’ map, however, remains an interesting document because of its seeming disinterestedness. While the focus on racialism and imperial conquest may seem to place Sparks in company with populist “scientific” racists of the period like Lothrop Stoddard (whom Tom Buchanan quotes in Fitzgerald’s Gatsby), it would also seem that his design has much in common with early Enlightenment figures whose conception of time was not necessarily linear. Following classical models, thinkers like Thomas Hobbes tended to divide historical epochs into rising and falling actions of various people groups, rather than the gradual ascent of one race over all others towards an end of history. For example, poet Abraham Cowley writes a compressed “universal history” in his 1656 poem “To Mr. Hobs,” moving from Aristotle (the “Stagirite”) to the poem’s subject Thomas Hobbes. The movement is progressive, yet the historical representatives of each civilization receive some equal weight and similar emphasis.

Long did the mighty Stagirite retain
The universal Intellectual reign,
Saw his own Countreys short-liv’ed Leopard slain;
The stronger Roman-Eagle did out-fly,
Oftner renewed his Age, and saw that Dy.
Mecha it self, in spight of Mahumet possest,
And chas’ed by a wild Deluge from the East,
His Monarchy new planted in the West.
But as in time each great imperial race
Degenerates, and gives some new one place:

The period of Cowley recognized theories of racial, cultural, and natural supremacy, but such qualities, as in Sparks’ map, were the product of a long line of succession from equally powerful and noteworthy empires and groups to others, not a social evolution in which a superior race naturally arose. Rand McNally advertised the chart as presenting “the march of civilization, from the mud huts of the ancients thru the monarchistic glamour of the middle ages to the living panorama of life in present day America.” While the blurb is filled with pseudoscientific colonialist talking points, the chart itself has the dated, yet strikingly egalitarian arrangement of information that—like much of the illustration in National Geographic—sought to accommodate the best consensus models of the times, displaying, but not proselytizing, its biases.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2013.

The Big Map of Who Lived When Shows Which Cultural Figures Walked the Earth at the Same Time: From 1200 to Present

Joseph Priestley Visualizes History & Great Historical Figures with Two of the Most Influential Infographics Ever (1769)

10 Million Years of Evolution Visualized in an Elegant, 5‑Foot Long Infographic from 1931

The History of the World in One Video: Every Year from 200,000 BCE to Today

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

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How the BIC Cristal Ballpoint Pen Became the Most Successful Product in History

in History, Technology, Writing | June 10th, 2025

If you want to see a tour de force of modern technology and design, there’s no need to visit a Silicon Valley showroom. Just feel around your desk for a few moments, and sooner or later you’ll lay a hand on it: the BIC Cristal ballpoint pen, which is described in the Primal Space video above as “possibly the most successful product ever made.” Not long after its introduction in 1950, the Cristal became ubiquitous around the world, so ideally did it suit human needs at a price that would have seemed impossibly cheap not so very long ago — to say nothing of the seventeenth century, when the art of writing demanded mastery of the quill and inkpot.

Of course, writing itself was of little use in those days to humanity’s illiterate majority. That began to change with the invention of the fountain pen, which was certainly more convenient than the quill, but still prohibitively expensive even to most of those who could read. It was only at the end of the nineteenth century, a heady age of American ingenuity, that an inventor called John Loud came up with the first ballpoint pen.

Though crude and impractical, Loud’s design planted the technological seed that would be cultivated thereafter by others, like Laszlo Biro, who understood the advantage of using oil-based rather than traditional water-based ink, and French manufacturer Marcel Bich, who had access to the technology that could bring the ballpoint pen to its final form.

Bich (the foreign pronunciation of whose surname inspired the brand name BIC) figured out how to use Swiss watchmaking machines to mass-produce tiny stainless steel balls to precise specifications. He chose to manufacture the rest of the pen out of molded plastic, a then-new technology. The Cristal’s clear body allowed the ink level to be seen at all times, and its hexagonal shape stopped it from rolling off desks. Its polypropylene lid wouldn’t break when dropped, and it doubled as a clip to boot. What did this “game changer” avant la lettre cost when it came to market? The equivalent of two dollars. As an industrial product, the BIC Cristal has in many respects never been surpassed (over 100 billion have been sold to date), even by the ultra-high-tech cellphones or tablets on which you may be reading this post. Bear that in mind the next time you’re struggling with one, patchily zigzagging back and forth on a page in an attempt to get the ink out that you’re sure must be in there somewhere.

Montblanc Unveils a New Line of Miles Davis Pens … and (Kind of) Blue Ink

Vermeer with a BiC

Neil Gaiman Talks Dreamily About Fountain Pens, Notebooks & His Writing Process in His Long Interview with Tim Ferriss

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

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Marie Curie Invented Mobile X‑Ray Units to Help Save Wounded Soldiers in World War I

in History, Life, Science | June 10th, 2025

A hundred years ago, Mobile X‑Ray Units were a brand new innovation, and a godsend for soldiers wounded on the front in WW1. Prior to the advent of this technology, field surgeons racing to save lives operated blindly, often causing even more injury as they groped for bullets and shrapnel whose precise locations remained a mystery.

Marie Curie was just setting up shop at Paris’ Radium Institute, a world center for the study of radioactivity, when war broke out. Many of her researchers left to fight, while Curie personally delivered France’s sole sample of radium by train to the temporarily relocated seat of government in Bordeaux.

“I am resolved to put all my strength at the service of my adopted country, since I cannot do anything for my unfortunate native country just now…,” Curie, a Pole by birth, wrote to her lover, physicist Paul Langevin on New Year’s Day, 1915.

To that end, she envisioned a fleet of vehicles that could bring X‑ray equipment much closer to the battlefield, shifting their coordinates as necessary.

Rather than leaving the execution of this brilliant plan to others, Curie sprang into action.

She studied anatomy and learned how to operate the equipment so she would be able to read X‑ray films like a medical professional.

She learned how to drive and fix cars.

She used her connections to solicit donations of vehicles, portable electric generators, and the necessary equipment, kicking in generously herself. (When she got the French National Bank to accept her gold Nobel Prize medals on behalf of the war effort, she spent the bulk of her prize purse on war bonds.)

She was hampered only by backwards-thinking bureaucrats whose feathers ruffled at the prospect of female technicians and drivers, no doubt forgetting that most of France’s able-bodied men were otherwise engaged.

Curie, no stranger to sexism, refused to bend to their will, delivering equipment to the front line and X‑raying wounded soldiers, assisted by her 17-year-old daughter, Irène, who like her mother, took care to keep her emotions in check while working with maimed and distressed patients.

“In less than two years,” writes Amanda Davis at The Institute, “the number of units had grown substantially, and the Curies had set up a training program at the Radium Institute to teach other women to operate the equipment.” Eventually, they recruited about 150 women, training them to man the Little Curies, as the mobile radiography units came to be known.

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

via Brain Pickings

Marie Curie Became the First Woman to Win a Nobel Prize, the First Person to Win Twice, and the Only Person in History to Win in Two Different Sciences

An Animated Introduction to the Life & Work of Marie Curie, the First Female Nobel Laureate

Marie Curie Attended a Secret, Underground “Flying University” When Women Were Banned from Polish Universities

Marie Curie’s Ph.D. Thesis on Radioactivity–Which Made Her the First Woman in France to Receive a Doctoral Degree in Physics

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine.

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The Dylatov Pass Incident: Has One of the Biggest Soviet Mysteries Been Solved?

in History | June 9th, 2025

Most of us would go out of our way not to set foot anywhere near a place the local natives refer to as “Dead Mountain.” That didn’t stop the Dyatlov Hiking Group, who set out on a sixteen-day skiing expedition across the northern Urals in late January of 1959. Experienced and intrepid, those ten young Soviet ski hikers had what it took to make the journey, at least if nothing went terribly wrong. A bout of sciatica forced one member of the group to turn back early, which turned out to be lucky for him. About a month later, the irradiated bodies of his nine comrades were discovered scattered in different areas of Dead Mountain some distance from their campsite, with various traumatic injuries and in various states of undress.

Something had indeed gone terribly wrong, but nobody could figure out what. For decades, the fate of the Dyatlov Hiking Group inspired countless explanations ranging widely in plausibility. Some theorized a freak weather phenomenon; others some kind of toxic airborne event; others still, the actions of American spies or even a yeti.

“In a place where information has been as tightly controlled as in the former Soviet Union, mistrust of official narratives is natural, and nothing in the record can explain why people would leave a tent undressed, in near-suicidal fashion,” writes the New Yorker’s Douglas Preston. Only in the late twenty-tens, when the Dyatlov Group Memorial Foundation got the case reopened, did investigators assess the contradictory evidence while making new measurements and conducting new experiments.

The probable causes were narrowed down to those explained by experts in the Vox video above: a severe blizzard and a slab of ice that must have shifted and crushed the tent. Densely packed by the wind, that massive, heavy slab would have “prevented them from retrieving their boots or warm clothing and forced them to cut their way out of the downslope side of the tent,” proceeding to the closest natural shelter from the avalanche they believed was coming. But no avalanche came, and they couldn’t find their way back to their camp in the darkness. “Had they been less experienced, they might have remained near the tent, dug it out, and survived,” writes Preston. “The skiers’ expertise doomed them.” Not everyone accepts this theory, but then, the idea that knowledge can kill might be more frightening than even the most abominable snowman.

The Denali Experiment: A Test of Human Limits

The Curious Death of Vincent van Gogh

The Gruesome Dollhouse Death Scenes That Reinvented Murder Investigations

Archaeologists Discover 1300-Year-Old Pair of Skis, the Best-Preserved Ancient Skis in Existence

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

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Hear What Shakespeare Sounded Like in the Original Pronunciation

in Language | June 9th, 2025

What did Shakespeare’s English sound like to Shakespeare? To his audience? And how can we know such a thing as the phonetic character of the language spoken 400 years ago? These questions and more are addressed in the video above, which profiles a very popular experiment at London’s Globe Theatre, the 1994 reconstruction of Shakespeare’s theatrical home. As linguist David Crystal explains, the theater’s purpose has always been to recapture as much as possible the original look and feel of a Shakespearean production—costuming, music, movement, etc. But until recently, the Globe felt that attempting a play in the original pronunciation would alienate audiences. The opposite proved to be true, and people clamored for more. Above, Crystal and his son, actor Ben Crystal, demonstrate to us what certain Shakespearean passages would have sounded like to their first audiences, and in so doing draw out some subtle wordplay that gets lost on modern tongues.

Shakespeare’s English is called by scholars Early Modern English (not, as many students say, “Old English,” an entirely different, and much older language). Crystal dates his Shakespearean early modern to around 1600. (In his excellent textbook on the subject, linguist Charles Barber bookends the period roughly between 1500 and 1700.) David Crystal cites three important kinds of evidence that guide us toward recovering early modern’s original pronunciation (or “OP”).

1. Observations made by people writing on the language at the time, commenting on how words sounded, which words rhyme, etc. Shakespeare contemporary Ben Jonson tells us, for example, that speakers of English in his time and place pronounced the “R” (a feature known as “rhoticity”). Since, as Crystal points out, the language was evolving rapidly, and there wasn’t only one kind of OP, there is a great deal of contemporary commentary on this evolution, which early modern writers like Jonson had the chance to observe firsthand.

2. Spellings. Unlike today’s very frustrating tension between spelling and pronunciation, Early Modern English tended to be much more phonetic and words were pronounced much more like they were spelled, or vice versa (though spelling was very irregular, a clue to the wide variety of regional accents).

3. Rhymes and puns which only work in OP. The Crystals demonstrate the important pun between “loins” and “lines” (as in genealogical lines) in Romeo and Juliet, which is completely lost in so-called “Received Pronunciation” (or “proper” British English). Two-thirds of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the father and son team claim, have rhymes that only work in OP.

Not everyone agrees on what Shakespeare’s OP might have sounded like. Eminent Shakespeare director Trevor Nunn claims that it might have sounded more like American English does today, suggesting that the language that migrated across the pond retained more Elizabethan characteristics than the one that stayed home.

You can hear an example of this kind of OP in the recording from Romeo and Juliet above. Shakespeare scholar John Barton suggests that OP would have sounded more like modern Irish, Yorkshire, and West Country pronunciations, an accent that the Crystals seem to favor in their interpretations of OP and is much more evident in the reading from Macbeth below (both audio examples are from a CD curated by Ben Crystal).

Whatever the conjecture, scholars tend to use the same set of criteria David Crystal outlines. I recall my own experience with Early Modern English pronunciation in an intensive graduate course on the history of the English language. Hearing a class of amateur linguists read familiar Shakespeare passages in what we perceived as OP—using our phonological knowledge and David Crystal’s criteria—had exactly the effect Ben Crystal described in an NPR interview:

If there’s something about this accent, rather than it being difficult or more difficult for people to understand … it has flecks of nearly every regional U.K. English accent, and indeed American and in fact Australian, too. It’s a sound that makes people — it reminds people of the accent of their home — and so they tend to listen more with their heart than their head.

In other words, despite the strangeness of the accent, the language can sometimes feel more immediate, more universal, and more of the moment, even, than the sometimes stilted, pretentious ways of reading Shakespeare in the accent of a modern London stage actor or BBC news anchor.

For more on this subject, don’t miss this related post: Hear What Hamlet, Richard III & King Lear Sounded Like in Shakespeare’s Original Pronunciation.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2013.

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3,000 Illustrations of Shakespeare’s Complete Works from Victorian England, Presented in a Digital Archive

Take a Virtual Tour of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London

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

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An Introduction to George Orwell’s 1984 and How Power Manufactures Truth

in Books, History, Literature, Politics | June 6th, 2025

Soon after the first election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four became a bestseller again. Shooting to the top of the American charts, the novel that inspired the term “Orwellian” passed Danielle Steel’s latest opus, the poetry of Rupi Kaur, the eleventh Diary of a Wimpy Kid book, and the memoir of an ambitious young man named J. D. Vance. But how much of its renewed popularity owed to the relevance of a nearly 70-year-old vision of shabby, totalitarian future England to twenty-first century America, and how much to the fact that, as far as influence on popular culture’s image of political dystopia, no other work of literature comes close?

For all the myriad ways one can criticize his two administrations, Trump’s America bears little superficial resemblance to Oceania’s Airstrip One as ruled by The Party. But it can hardly be a coincidence that this period of history has also seen the concept “post-truth” become a fixture in the zeitgeist.

There are many reasons not to want to live in the world Orwell imagines in Nineteen Eighty-Four: the thorough bureaucratization, the lack of pleasure, the unceasing surveillance and propaganda. But none of this is quite so intolerable as what makes it all possible: the rulers’ claim to absolute control over the truth, a form of psychological manipulation hardly limited to regimes we regard as evil.

As James Payne says in his Great Books Explained video on Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell worked for the BBC’s overseas service during the war, and there received a troubling education in the use of information as a political weapon. The experience inspired the Ministry of Truth, where the novel’s protagonist Winston Smith spends his days re-writing history, and the dialect of Newspeak, a severely reduced English designed to narrow its speakers’ range of thought. Orwell may have overestimated the degree to which language can be modified from the top down, but as Payne reminds us, we now all hear culture warriors describe reality in highly slanted, politically-charged, and often thought-terminating ways all day long. Everywhere we look, someone is ready to tell us that two plus two make five; if only they were as obvious about it as Big Brother.

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

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

George Orwell’s Final Warning: Don’t Let This Nightmare Situation Happen. It Depends on You!

What “Orwellian” Really Means: An Animated Lesson About the Use & Abuse of the Term

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

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books 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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Talking Heads Release the First Official Video for “Psycho Killer”: Watch It Online

in Music | June 6th, 2025

On social media, the Talking Heads teased a major announcement on June 5th, leading fans to wonder if a reunion—41 years after their last tour—might finally be in the offing. As one fan put it, “If this is a tour announcement, I am going to freak out!” Alas, we didn’t quite get that. (Maybe next time!) Instead, we got the first official music video for “Psycho Killer.” Directed by Mike Mills and starring Saoirse Ronan, the video helps commemorate the band’s first show at CBGB 50 years ago. You can watch the video above, and footage from CBGB in 1975 her e.

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A Brief History of Talking Heads: How the Band Went from Scrappy CBGB’s Punks to New Wave Superstars

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

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An Introduction to George Orwell’s 1984 and How Power Manufactures Truth

Talking Heads Release the First Official Video for “Psycho Killer”: Watch It Online

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