The Most Iconic Electronic Music Sample of Every Year (1990–2024)

in Music | March 21st, 2025

Hear a sec­ond or two of Ver­non Burch’s “Get Up,” and you’re back in 1990; of “Bal­ance and Rehearsal” from the JBL sound-test album Ses­sion, and you’re back in 1999; of Eddie Johns’ “More Spell on You,” and you’re back in 2001. What, you don’t know any of those songs? Per­haps you’re more famil­iar with them in a dif­fer­ent form: chopped up, pitched up or down, and looped over and over again in the songs  “Groove Is in the Heart” by Deee-Lite, “Praise You” by Fat­boy Slim, and “One More Time” by Daft Punk. None of those hits would be con­ceiv­able with­out the clips they incor­po­rate from old­er record­ings, those named here and a vari­ety of oth­ers besides.

Three and a half decades ago, few ordi­nary lis­ten­ers would have under­stood how a song could be con­struct­ed out of oth­er songs; today, most of us know it as the tech­nol­o­gy and art of sam­pling. We tend to asso­ciate it with hip-hop, and indeed, last year we fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture Track­lib’s video on the most icon­ic hip-hop sam­ples of the past half-cen­tu­ry.

But the same chan­nel has also put out the video above, which sim­i­lar­ly breaks down the con­stituent son­ic ingre­di­ents of elec­tron­ic dance hits from “Groove Is in the Heart” onward. If you’ve ever want­ed to know what, exact­ly, went into Snap!‘s “Rhythm Is a Dancer,” Moby’s “Porce­lain,” Skrillex’s “First of the Year,” or James Hype and Miggy Dela Rosa’s “Fer­rari,” this is your chance.

Those over a cer­tain age may rec­og­nize all the titles of the songs includ­ed on the first twen­ty or so years of the video’s time­line, and almost none there­after. But they may well know the bod­ies of work from which they sam­ple, includ­ing those of Aaron Neville, Freeez, Bri­an Wil­son, Gladys Knight & the Pips, and Mel­ba Moore. For the last cou­ple of gen­er­a­tions of lis­ten­ers, seek­ing out the sources of a sam­ple in a favorite song has become a reli­able method of dis­cov­er­ing the music of past eras. By the same token, lis­ten­ers already well-versed in the music of those eras can hear it anew in the tracks to which kids are cur­rent­ly danc­ing, work­ing out, or sim­ply “vib­ing.” What­ev­er your gen­er­a­tion, once you hear how “Get Ready for This” was con­struct­ed, you’ll nev­er expe­ri­ence a bas­ket­ball game quite the same way again.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Brief His­to­ry of Sam­pling: From the Bea­t­les to the Beast­ie Boys

The Most Icon­ic Hip-Hop Sam­ple of Every Year (1973–2023)

Hear the Evo­lu­tion of Elec­tron­ic Music: A Son­ic Jour­ney from 1929 to 2019

How Gior­gio Moroder & Don­na Summer’s “I Feel Love” Cre­at­ed the “Blue­print for All Elec­tron­ic Dance Music Today” (1977)

How the Fairlight CMI Syn­the­siz­er Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Music

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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Why There Isn’t a Bridge from Italy to Sicily – And Why the 2,000-Year-Old Dream of Building the Bridge May Soon Be Realized

in Architecture | March 20th, 2025

We’ve all heard of the great Amer­i­can road trip. If you’ve ever dreamt of tak­ing a great Ital­ian road trip, you’ve sure­ly come across this inevitable hitch in the plan: you can’t dri­ve to Sici­ly. You can, of course, put your car on a fer­ry; you can even take a train that gets put on a fer­ry, the last of its kind in Europe. But a stretch of road span­ning the volatile Strait of Messi­na, which sep­a­rates Sici­ly from the main­land, has been a dream deferred since antiq­ui­ty, when Pliny the Elder wrote of Roman notions of build­ing a float­ing bridge — which, with its poten­tial to dis­rupt the water­way’s con­sid­er­able north-south trade, was even­tu­al­ly scrapped.

It seems that Ital­ians have been jok­ing about the impos­si­bil­i­ty of a bridge to Sici­ly ever since. These two videos from Get to the Point and The B1M explain the his­to­ry of this con­tin­u­al­ly frus­trat­ed infra­struc­tur­al project, and the polit­i­cal maneu­vers that have recent­ly begun to make it seem very near­ly semi-pos­si­ble.

Though the sea mon­sters Scyl­la and Charyb­dis of which Homer sung may not be a threat, the chal­lenges are still many and var­ied, from the depth of the strait and the region­al seis­mic activ­i­ty that would neces­si­tate build­ing the largest sin­gle-span bridge in the world to the inter­fer­ence of local mafia groups who make their liv­ing by dri­ving up the costs of con­struc­tion works while also mak­ing sure that they’re nev­er com­plet­ed.

Two years ago, the gov­ern­ment of Prime Min­is­ter Gior­gia Mel­oni approved a decree to pro­ceed with con­struc­tion, but whether it will real­ize its pro­ject­ed com­ple­tion by 2032 is any­body’s guess. The very idea of such a struc­ture has such cul­tur­al res­o­nance that its exis­tence — as well as its col­lapse — was envi­sioned to great effect in the recent Ital­ian crime dra­ma The Bad Guy. Though crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed, that series was also con­demned in some polit­i­cal quar­ters for per­pet­u­at­ing neg­a­tive stereo­types of the coun­try: stereo­types that could poten­tial­ly be refut­ed by get­ting some ambi­tious new infra­struc­ture fin­ished. If Italy can get the Strait of Messi­na Bridge built, after all, what could­n’t it do?

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Bril­liant Engi­neer­ing That Made Venice: How a City Was Built on Water

Watch Venice’s New $7 Bil­lion Flood Defense Sys­tem in Action

High-Res­o­lu­tion Walk­ing Tours of Italy’s Most His­toric Places: The Colos­se­um, Pom­peii, St. Peter’s Basil­i­ca & More

Built to Last: How Ancient Roman Bridges Can Still With­stand the Weight of Mod­ern Cars & Trucks

Why Europe Has So Few Sky­scrap­ers

Rome’s Colos­se­um Will Get a New Retractable Floor by 2023 — Just as It Had in Ancient Times

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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Watch Dziga Vertov’s A Man with a Movie Camera: The 8th Best Film Ever Made

in Film | March 19th, 2025

Of all the cin­e­mat­ic trail­blaz­ers to emerge dur­ing the ear­ly years of the Sovi­et Union – Sergei Eisen­stein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Lev Kuleshov – Dzi­ga Ver­tov (né Denis Arkadievitch Kauf­man, 1896–1954) was the most rad­i­cal.

Where­as Eisen­stein – as seen in that film school stan­dard Bat­tle­ship Potemkin – used mon­tage edit­ing to cre­ate new ways of telling a sto­ry, Ver­tov dis­pensed with sto­ry alto­geth­er. He loathed fic­tion films. “The film dra­ma is the Opi­um of the peo­ple,” he wrote. “Down with Bour­geois fairy-tale scenarios…long live life as it is!”  He called for the cre­ation of a new kind of cin­e­ma free of the counter-rev­o­lu­tion­ary bag­gage of West­ern movies. A cin­e­ma that cap­tured real life.

At the begin­ning of his mas­ter­piece, A Man with a Movie Cam­era (1929) – which was named in 2012 by Sight and Sound mag­a­zine as the 8th best movie ever made – Ver­tov announced exact­ly what that kind of cin­e­ma would look like:

This film is an exper­i­ment in cin­e­mat­ic com­mu­ni­ca­tion of real events with­out the help of inter­ti­tles, with­out the help of a sto­ry, with­out the help of the­atre. This exper­i­men­tal work aims at cre­at­ing a tru­ly inter­na­tion­al lan­guage of cin­e­ma based on its absolute sep­a­ra­tion from the lan­guage of the­atre and lit­er­a­ture.

Glee­ful­ly using jump cuts, super­im­po­si­tions, split screens and every oth­er trick in a filmmaker’s arse­nal, Ver­tov, along with his edi­tor (and wife) Eliza­ve­ta Svilo­va, crafts a dizzy­ing, impres­sion­is­tic, propul­sive por­trait of the new­ly indus­tri­al­iz­ing Sovi­et Union. The lengths to which Ver­tov goes to cap­ture this “cin­e­mat­ic com­mu­ni­ca­tion of real events” are star­tling: His cam­era soars over cities and gazes up at street­cars; it films machines chug­ging away and even records a woman giv­ing birth. “I am eye. I am a mechan­i­cal eye,” Ver­tov once famous­ly wrote. “I, a machine, am show­ing you a world, the likes of which only I can see.”

Yet Vertov’s stroke of genius was to expose the entire arti­fice of film­mak­ing with­in the movie itself. In A Man with a Movie Cam­era, Ver­tov shoots footage of his cam­era­men shoot­ing footage. There’s a recur­ring shot of an eye star­ing through a lens. We see images from ear­li­er in the movie get­ting edit­ed into the film. This sort of cin­e­mat­ic self-reflex­iv­i­ty was decades ahead of its time, influ­enc­ing such future exper­i­men­tal film­mak­ers as Chris Mark­er, Stan Brakhage and espe­cial­ly Jean-Luc Godard who in 1968 formed a rad­i­cal film­mak­ing col­lec­tive called The Dzi­ga Ver­tov Group.

A Man with a Movie Cam­era is noth­ing short of exhil­a­rat­ing. Check it out above.

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

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Eight Free Films by Dzi­ga Ver­tov, Cre­ator of Sovi­et Avant-Garde Doc­u­men­taries

Hear Dzi­ga Vertov’s Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Exper­i­ments in Sound: From His Radio Broad­casts to His First Sound Film

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow.

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An Introduction to The Garden of Earthly Delights & Hieronymus Bosch’s Wildly Creative Vision

in Art, History | March 19th, 2025

Hierony­mus Bosch’s mas­ter­piece of grotes­querie, The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights, con­tains a young God, Adam and Eve, over­sized fruits and musi­cal instru­ments, owls, tor­tured sin­ners, some­thing called a “tree man” whose body con­tains an entire tav­ern, a defe­cat­ing avian dev­il eat­ing a human being, and “frol­ick­ing, obliv­i­ous fig­ures engaged in all sorts of car­nal plea­sures,” as art his­to­ri­an Beth Har­ris puts it in the new Smarthis­to­ry video above. Through­out its fif­teen min­utes, she and her col­league Steven Zuck­er explain as much as pos­si­ble of this jam-packed trip­tych — not that even a life­time would be long enough to under­stand it ful­ly.

“Bosch con­founds our abil­i­ty to even talk about what we see,” says Har­ris. “His imag­i­na­tion has run wild. He’s just invent­ed so many things here that we could nev­er even have thought about in our wildest imag­i­na­tions.” Zuck­er cites one art-his­to­ry the­o­ry that this trip­tych rep­re­sents Bosch’s attempt to “ele­vate the visu­al arts to the lev­el of cre­ativ­i­ty that was per­mit­ted in lit­er­a­ture.”

Even in Bosch’s late fif­teenth and ear­ly six­teenth cen­turies, writ­ers had an envi­ably free hand in choos­ing and pre­sent­ing their sub­ject mat­ter; because the direct­ly rep­re­sen­ta­tive form of paint­ing, by con­trast, “had always been at the ser­vice of reli­gion, it was inher­ent­ly more con­ser­v­a­tive.”

It’s entire­ly pos­si­ble — and oth­er analy­ses pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here at Open Cul­ture have argued it – that Bosch, too, was work­ing at the ser­vice of reli­gion. But it could also be that The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights, in its vast mid­dle pan­el, tells “an alter­nate sto­ry,” as Zuck­er puts it. “What if the temp­ta­tion had not tak­en place? What if Adam and Eve had remained inno­cent, and had pop­u­lat­ed the world? And so, is it pos­si­ble that what we’re see­ing is that real­i­ty, played out in Bosch’s imag­i­na­tion?” Not that such a vision would have read­i­ly been accept­ed in the artist’s own time and place — nor that his inten­tions alone could lead us to a com­plete inter­pre­ta­tion of his work. As any nov­el­ist knows, some­times your char­ac­ters sim­ply take over, and it could hard­ly have been with­in even Bosch’s pow­ers to deny the desires of a cast so teem­ing and bizarre.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Mean­ing of Hierony­mus Bosch’s The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights Explained

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Hierony­mus Bosch’s Bewil­der­ing Mas­ter­piece The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights

Hierony­mus Bosch’s Medieval Paint­ing, “The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights,” Comes to Life in a Gigan­tic, Mod­ern Ani­ma­tion

The Mean­ing of Hierony­mus Bosch’s Spell­bind­ing Trip­tych The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights

The Musi­cal Instru­ments in Hierony­mus Bosch’s The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights Get Brought to Life, and It Turns Out That They Sound “Painful” and “Hor­ri­ble”

A Dig­i­tal Archive of Hierony­mus Bosch’s Com­plete Works: Zoom In & Explore His Sur­re­al Art

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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NYU Professor Answers Your Burning Questions About Authoritarianism

in Current Affairs, History | March 19th, 2025

From WIRED comes this: NYU pro­fes­sor and “author­i­tar­i­an­ism schol­ar Ruth Ben-Ghi­at joins WIRED to answer the inter­net’s burn­ing ques­tions about dic­ta­tors and fas­cism. Why do peo­ple sup­port dic­ta­tors? How do dic­ta­tors come to pow­er? What’s the dif­fer­ence between a dic­ta­tor­ship, an autoc­ra­cy, and author­i­tar­i­an­ism? What are the most com­mon per­son­al­i­ty traits found in tyrants and dic­ta­tors? Is Xi Jin­ping a dic­ta­tor? How do dic­ta­tors amass wealth? Pro­fes­sor Ben-Ghi­at answers these ques­tions and many more on Tech Sup­port: Dic­ta­tor Sup­port.” Watch the video above and pick up a copy of Ben-Ghi­at’s time­ly, best­selling book: Strong­men: Mus­soli­ni to the Present.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Are You a Fas­cist?: Take Theodor Adorno’s Author­i­tar­i­an Per­son­al­i­ty Test Cre­at­ed to Com­bat Fas­cism (1947)

Han­nah Arendt Explains Why Democ­ra­cies Need to Safe­guard the Free Press & Truth … to Defend Them­selves Against Dic­ta­tors and Their Lies

Umber­to Eco’s List of the 14 Com­mon Fea­tures of Fas­cism

20 Lessons from the 20th Cen­tu­ry About How to Defend Democ­ra­cy from Author­i­tar­i­an­ism, Accord­ing to Yale His­to­ri­an Tim­o­thy Sny­der

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Watch Alfred Hitchcock’s Groundbreaking, Six-Minute Trailer for Psycho (1960)

in Film | March 18th, 2025

The ear­ly trail­er for Alfred Hitch­cock­’s Psy­cho above describes the film as “the pic­ture you MUST see from the begin­ning… or not at all!” That’s good advice, giv­en how ear­ly in the film its first big twist arrives. But it was also a pol­i­cy: “Every the­atre man­ag­er, every­where, has been instruct­ed to admit no one after the start of each per­for­mance of Psy­cho,” declares Hitch­cock him­self in its print adver­tise­ments. “We said no one — not even the man­ager’s broth­er, the Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States or the Queen of Eng­land (God bless her).” Even in 1960, ordi­nary movie­go­ers still had the habit of enter­ing and leav­ing the the­ater when­ev­er they pleased. With Psy­cho’s mar­ket­ing cam­paign, Hitch­cock meant to alter their rela­tion­ship to cin­e­ma itself.

As for the trail­er’s form and con­tent, audi­ences would nev­er have seen any­thing like it before. Con­tain­ing no actu­al footage from the film — and indeed, con­sti­tut­ing some­thing of a short film itself — it instead offers a tour of its main loca­tions per­son­al­ly guid­ed by Hitch­cock. Those are, of course, the Bates Motel and its pro­pri­etor’s house, “which is, if I may say so, a lit­tle more sin­is­ter look­ing, less inno­cent-look­ing than the motel itself. And in this house, the most dire, hor­ri­ble events took place.”

In his telling, these build­ings are not film sets, but the gen­uine sites of heinous crimes, about which he proves only too hap­py to pro­vide sug­ges­tive details. We com­plain that today’s trail­ers “give the movie away,” and that seems to be Hitch­cock­’s enter­prise here.

But after these six min­utes, what, in a world that had yet to see Psy­cho, would you real­ly know about the movie? It would seem to involve some sort of gris­ly mur­ders, and you’d sure­ly be dying, as it were, to know of what sort and how gris­ly. Who, more­over, could fail to be star­tled and intrigued by Hitch­cock­’s sud­den reveal of a scream­ing blonde woman behind the motel-room show­er cur­tain? Hitch fans might have rec­og­nized her as Vera Miles, who’d been in The Wrong Man in 1956 and the first episode of Alfred Hitch­cock Presents the next year. They might also have noticed the name of no less a movie star than Janet Leigh, and won­dered what she was doing in such a sen­sa­tion­al­is­tic-look­ing genre pic­ture. One thing is cer­tain: when they final­ly did take their seat for Psy­cho — before show­time, of course — they had no idea what they were in for.

Relat­ed con­tent:

16 Free Hitch­cock Movies Online

Watch 25 Alfred Hitch­cock Trail­ers, Excit­ing Films in Their Own Right

Alfred Hitchcock’s Strict Rules for Watch­ing Psy­cho in The­aters (1960)

Who Cre­at­ed the Famous Show­er Scene in Psy­cho? Alfred Hitch­cock or the Leg­endary Design­er Saul Bass?

Hitch­cock (Antho­ny Hop­kins) Pitch­es Janet Leigh (Scar­lett Johans­son) on the Famous Show­er Scene

Alfred Hitchcock’s 7‑Minute Mas­ter Class on Film Edit­ing

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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A 6‑Hour Time-Stretched Version of Brian Eno’s Music For Airports: Meditate, Relax, Study

in Music | March 17th, 2025

Writ­ing in his 1995 diary about his sem­i­nal ambi­ent album Music for Air­ports, Eno remem­bered his ini­tial thoughts going into it: “I want to make a kind of music that pre­pares you for dying–that doesn’t get all bright and cheer­ful and pre­tend you’re not a lit­tle appre­hen­sive, but which makes you say to your­self, ‘Actu­al­ly, it’s not that big a deal if I die.’”

Cre­at­ed in 1978 from sec­onds-long tape loops from a much longer improv ses­sion with musi­cians includ­ing Robert Wyatt, Music for Air­ports start­ed the idea of slow, med­i­ta­tive music that aban­doned typ­i­cal major and minor scales, brought in melod­ic ambi­gu­i­ty, and began the explo­ration of sounds that were designed to exist some­where in the back­ground, beyond the scope of full atten­tion.

For those who think 50 min­utes is too short and those piano notes too rec­og­niz­able, may we sug­gest this 6‑hour, time-stretched ver­sion of the album, cre­at­ed by YouTube user “Slow Motion TV.” The tonal field is the same, but now the notes are no attack, all decay. It’s gran­u­lar as hell, but you could imag­ine the whole piece unspool­ing unno­ticed in a ter­mi­nal while a flight is delayed for the third time. (Maybe that’s when the accep­tance of death hap­pens, when you’ve giv­en up on ever get­ting home?)

Unlike Music for Films, which fea­tured sev­er­al tracks Eno had giv­en to film­mak­ers like Derek Jar­man, it took some time for Music for Air­ports to be real­ized in its intend­ed loca­tion: being piped in at a ter­mi­nal at La Guardia, New York, some­time in the 1980s. And that was just a one-time thing.

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The album seemed des­tined for per­son­al use only, but then in 1997 the mod­ern ensem­ble Bang on a Can played it live, trans­lat­ing the ran­dom­ness of out-of-sync tape loops into music nota­tion. Over the years they’ve per­formed it at air­ports in Brus­sels, the Nether­lands and Liv­er­pool, and in 2015 the group brought it to Ter­mi­nal 2 of San Diego Inter­na­tion­al. Writ­ing for KCET, Alex Zaragoza report­ed that “cry­ing babies, echoes of rolling suit­cas­es and board­ing pass­es serv­ing as tick­ets to the con­cert failed to remind any­one that they were, indeed, at one of the busiest air­ports in the coun­try. Even the tell­tale announce­ments were there: Air­port secu­ri­ty is every­one’s respon­si­bil­i­ty. Do not leave bags unat­tend­ed.”

And then in 2018, Lon­don City Air­port played the orig­i­nal album in a day-long loop for the album’s 40th anniver­sary.

As site-spe­cif­ic mul­ti-media art builds pop­u­lar­i­ty in the 21st cen­tu­ry with increas­ing­ly cheap­er and small­er tech­nol­o­gy, we might hope to hear ambi­ent drones, and not clas­sic rock or pop, in more and more land­scapes.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2019.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bri­an Eno’s Ambi­ent Album Music for Air­ports Per­formed by Musi­cians in an Air­port

Decon­struct­ing Bri­an Eno’s Music for Air­ports: Explore the Tape Loops That Make Up His Ground­break­ing Ambi­ent Music

Bri­an Eno’s Advice for Those Who Want to Do Their Best Cre­ative Work: Don’t Get a Job

Behold the Orig­i­nal Deck of Oblique Strate­gies Cards, Hand­writ­ten by Bri­an Eno Him­self

Bri­an Eno Explains the Loss of Human­i­ty in Mod­ern Music

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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A Tour of Ancient Rome’s Best Graffiti: “We Have Urinated in Our Beds … There Was No Chamber Pot” & More

in History, Writing | March 17th, 2025

Apart from the likes of bra­vo and piz­za, graf­fi­ti must be one of the first Ital­ian words that Eng­lish-speak­ers learn in every­day life. As for why the Eng­lish word comes direct­ly from the Ital­ian, per­haps it has some­thing to do with the his­to­ry of writ­ing on the walls — a his­to­ry that, in West­ern civ­i­liza­tion, stretch­es at least as far back as the time of the Roman Empire. The Fire of Learn­ing video above offers a selec­tion of trans­lat­ed pieces of the more than 11,000 pieces of ancient Roman graf­fi­ti found etched into the pre­served walls of Pom­peii: “Mar­cus loves Spe­dusa”; “Phileros is a eunuch”; “Secun­dus took a crap here” (writ­ten three times); “Atime­tus got me preg­nant”; and “On April 19th, I made bread.”

Crude though some of these may sound, the nar­ra­tor empha­sizes that “many, many of the promi­nent pieces of graf­fi­ti, espe­cial­ly in Pom­peii, are too sex­u­al or vio­lent to show here,” com­par­ing their sen­si­bil­i­ty to that of “a high-school bath­room stall.” You can read more of them at The Ancient Graf­fi­ti Project, whose archive is brows­able through cat­e­gories like “love,” “poet­ry,” “food,” and “glad­i­a­tors” (as decent a sum­ma­ry as any of life in ancient Rome).

Romans did­n’t just write on the walls — a prac­tice that seems to have been encour­aged, at least in some places — they also drew on them, as evi­denced by what you can see in the fig­ur­al graf­fi­ti sec­tion, as well as the exam­ples in the video.

Anoth­er rich archive of ancient graf­fi­ti comes from a sur­pris­ing loca­tion: the Egypt­ian pyra­mids, then as now a major tourist attrac­tion. Rather than post­ing their reviews of the attrac­tion on the inter­net, in our twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry man­ner, ancient Roman tourists wrote direct­ly on its sur­face. “I vis­it­ed and did not like any­thing except the sar­coph­a­gus,” says one inscrip­tion; “I can not read the hiero­glyph­ics,” com­plains anoth­er, in a man­ner that may sound awful­ly famil­iar these mil­len­nia lat­er. “We have uri­nat­ed in our beds,” declares anoth­er piece of writ­ing, dis­cov­ered on the door of a Pom­peii inn. “Host, I admit we should not have done this. If you ask why? There was no cham­ber pot.” Con­sid­er it con­firmed: the ancient world, too, had Airbnb guests.

Relat­ed con­tent:

High-Tech Analy­sis of Ancient Scroll Reveals Plato’s Bur­ial Site and Final Hours

Demys­ti­fy­ing the Activist Graf­fi­ti Art of Kei­th Har­ing: A Video Essay

Archae­ol­o­gists Dis­cov­er an Ancient Roman Snack Bar in the Ruins of Pom­peii

Tour the World’s Street Art with Google Street Art

Big Bang Big Boom: Graf­fi­ti Stop-Motion Ani­ma­tion Cre­ative­ly Depicts the Evo­lu­tion of Life

The Only Writ­ten Eye-Wit­ness Account of Pompeii’s Destruc­tion: Hear Pliny the Younger’s Let­ters on the Mount Vesu­vius Erup­tion

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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A Boy and His Atom: Watch The World’s Smallest Stop-Motion Film

in Science, Technology | March 17th, 2025

What you’re watch­ing above isn’t your ordi­nary film. No, this film — A Boy and His Atom – holds the Guin­ness World Record for being the World’s Small­est Stop-Motion Film. It’s lit­er­al­ly a movie made with atoms, cre­at­ed by IBM nanophysi­cists who have “used a scan­ning tun­nel­ing micro­scope to move thou­sands of car­bon monox­ide mol­e­cules, all in the pur­suit of mak­ing a movie so small it can be seen only when you mag­ni­fy it 100 mil­lion times.” If you’re won­der­ing what that means exact­ly, then I’d encour­age you to watch the behind-the-scenes doc­u­men­tary below. It takes you right onto the set — or, rather into the lab­o­ra­to­ries — where IBM sci­en­tists reveal how they move 5,000 mol­e­cules around, cre­at­ing a sto­ry frame by frame. As you watch the doc­u­men­tary, you’ll real­ize how far nan­otech­nol­o­gy has come since Richard Feyn­man laid the con­cep­tu­al foun­da­tions for the field in 1959.

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Nano Gui­tar: Dis­cov­er the World’s Small­est, Playable Micro­scop­ic Gui­tar

Richard Feyn­man Intro­duces the World to Nan­otech­nol­o­gy with Two Sem­i­nal Lec­tures (1959 & 1984)

Stephen Fry Intro­duces the Strange New World of Nanoscience

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The Ancient Greeks Who Converted to Buddhism

in History, Religion | March 14th, 2025

It would hard­ly be notable to make the acquain­tance of a Greek Bud­dhist today. Despite hav­ing orig­i­nat­ed in Asia, that reli­gion — or phi­los­o­phy, or way of life, or what­ev­er you pre­fer to call it — now has adher­ents all over the world. Mod­ern-day Bud­dhists need not make an ardu­ous jour­ney in order to under­take an even more ardu­ous course of study under a rec­og­nized mas­ter; nor are the forms of Bud­dhism they prac­tice always rec­og­niz­able to the lay­man. What’s more sur­pris­ing is that the trans­plan­ta­tion into and hybridiza­tion with oth­er cul­tures that has brought about so many nov­el strains of Bud­dhism was going on even in the ancient world.

Take, for exam­ple, the “Gre­co-Bud­dhism” described in the Reli­gion for Break­fast video above, the sto­ry of which involves a vari­ety of fas­ci­nat­ing fig­ures both uni­ver­sal­ly known and rel­a­tive­ly obscure. The most famous of all of them would be Alexan­der the Great, who, as host Andrew Hen­ry puts it, “con­quered a mas­sive empire stretch­ing from Greece across cen­tral Asia all the way to the Indus Riv­er, Hel­l­eniz­ing the pop­u­la­tions along the way.”

But “the cul­tur­al exchange did­n’t just go one way,” as evi­denced by the still-new Bud­dhist reli­gion also spread­ing in the oth­er direc­tion, illus­trat­ed by pieces of text and works of art clear­ly shaped by both civ­i­liza­tion­al cur­rents.

Oth­er major play­ers in Gre­co-Bud­dhism include the philoso­pher Pyrrho of Elis, who trav­eled with Alexan­der and took ideas of the sus­pen­sion of judg­ment from Indi­a’s “gym­nosophists”; Ashoka, emper­or of the Indi­an sub­con­ti­nent in the third cen­tu­ry BC, an avowed Bud­dhist who renounced vio­lence for com­pas­sion (and pros­e­ly­ti­za­tion); and King Menan­der, “the most famous Greek who con­vert­ed to Bud­dhism,” who appears as a char­ac­ter in an ear­ly Bud­dhist text. It can still be dif­fi­cult to say for sure exact­ly who believed what in that peri­od, but it’s not hard to iden­ti­fy res­o­nances between Bud­dhist prin­ci­ples, broad­ly speak­ing, and those of such wide­ly known ancient Greek schools of thought as Sto­icism. Both of those belief sys­tems now hap­pen to have a good deal of cur­ren­cy in Sil­i­con Val­ley, though what lega­cy they’ll leave to be dis­cov­ered in its ruins a cou­ple mil­len­nia from now remains to be seen.


Relat­ed con­tent:

Take Harvard’s Intro­duc­to­ry Course on Bud­dhism, One of Five World Reli­gions Class­es Offered Free Online

Learn the His­to­ry of Indi­an Phi­los­o­phy in a 62 Episode Series from The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps: The Bud­dha, Bha­gavad-Gita, Non Vio­lence & More

One of the Old­est Bud­dhist Man­u­scripts Has Been Dig­i­tized & Put Online: Explore the Gand­hara Scroll

Breath­tak­ing­ly Detailed Tibetan Book Print­ed 40 Years Before the Guten­berg Bible

Dis­cov­er the World’s Old­est Uni­ver­si­ty, Which Opened in 427 CE, Housed 9 Mil­lion Man­u­scripts, and Then Edu­cat­ed Stu­dents for 800 Years

Con­cepts of the Hero in Greek Civ­i­liza­tion (A Free Har­vard Course)

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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Puppets of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Charles Dickens & Edgar Allan Poe Star in 1957 Frank Capra Educational Film

in Education, Science, Television | March 13th, 2025

Pro­duced between 1956 and 1964 by AT&T, the Bell Tele­phone Sci­ence Hour TV spe­cials antic­i­pate the lit­er­ary zani­ness of The Mup­pet Show and the sci­en­tif­ic enthu­si­asm of Cos­mos. The “ship of the imag­i­na­tion” in Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Cos­mos reboot may in fact owe some­thing to the episode above, one of nine, direct­ed by none oth­er than It’s A Won­der­ful Life’s Frank Capra. “Strap on your wits and hop on your mag­ic car­pet,” begins the spe­cial, “You’ve got one, you know: Your imag­i­na­tion.” As a guide for our imag­i­na­tion, The Strange Case of the Cos­mic Rays enlists the humanities—specifically three pup­pets rep­re­sent­ing Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dick­ens, and, some­what incon­gru­ous­ly for its detec­tive theme, Fyo­dor Dos­toyevsky, who plays the foil as an incu­ri­ous spoil­sport. The show’s host, Frank Bax­ter (“Dr. Research”) was actu­al­ly a pro­fes­sor of Eng­lish at UCLA and appears here with Richard Carl­son, explain­ing sci­en­tif­ic con­cepts with con­fi­dence.

The one-hour films became very pop­u­lar as tools of sci­ence edu­ca­tion, but there are good reasons—other than their dat­ed­ness or Dr. Baxter’s expertise—to approach them crit­i­cal­ly. At times, the degree of spec­u­la­tion indulged by Bax­ter and the writ­ers strains creduli­ty. For exam­ple, writes Geoff Alexan­der in Aca­d­e­m­ic Films for the Class­room: A His­to­ry, 1958’s The Unchained God­dess (above) “intro­duces the view­er to bizarre con­cepts such as the pos­si­bil­i­ty of ‘steer­ing’ hur­ri­canes away from land by cre­at­ing bio-haz­ards such as ocean borne oil-slicks and intro­duc­ing oil-based ocean fires.” These grim, fos­sil fuel indus­try-friend­ly sce­nar­ios nonethe­less open­ly acknowl­edged the pos­si­bil­i­ty of man-made cli­mate change and looked for­ward to solar ener­gy.

Along with some dystopi­an weird­ness, the series also con­tains a good deal of explic­it Chris­t­ian pros­e­ly­tiz­ing, thanks to Capra. As a con­di­tion for tak­ing the job, “the renowned direc­tor would be allowed to embed reli­gious mes­sages in the films.” As Capra him­self said to AT&T pres­i­dent Cleo F. Craig:

If I make a sci­ence film, I will have to say that sci­en­tif­ic research is just anoth­er expres­sion of the Holy Spir­it… I will say that sci­ence, in essence, is just anoth­er facet of man’s quest for God.

At times, writes Alexan­der, “the reli­gious per­spec­tive is tak­en to extremes,” as in the first episode, Our Mr. Sun, which begins with a quo­ta­tion from Psalms and admon­ish­es “view­ers who would dare to ques­tion the causal rela­tion­ship between solar ener­gy and the divin­i­ty.” The Unchained God­dess, above, is the fourth in the series, and Capra’s last.

After­ward, a direc­tor named Owen Crump took over duties on the next four episodes. His films, writes Alexan­der, “did not overt­ly pros­e­ly­tize” and “relied less on ani­mat­ed char­ac­ters inter­act­ing with Dr. Bax­ter.” (Watch the Crump-direct­ed Gate­ways to the Mind above, a more sober-mind­ed, yet still strange­ly off-kil­ter, inquiry into the five sens­es.) The last film, The Rest­less Sea was pro­duced by Walt Dis­ney and direct­ed by Les Clark, and starred Dis­ney him­self and Bax­ter’s replace­ment, Ster­ling Hol­loway.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Oscar-Win­ning Direc­tor Frank Capra Made an Edu­ca­tion­al Sci­ence Film Warn­ing of Cli­mate Change in 1958

The Great­est Shot in Tele­vi­sion: Sci­ence His­to­ri­an James Burke Had One Chance to Nail This Scene … and Nailed It

Pri­vate Sna­fu: The World War II Pro­pa­gan­da Car­toons Cre­at­ed by Dr. Seuss, Frank Capra & Mel Blanc

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

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