The Roman Colosseum Deconstructed: 3D Animation Reveals the Hidden Technology That Powered Rome’s Great Arena

in Architecture, History | April 23rd, 2025

Most tourists in Rome put the Colos­se­um at the top of their to-see list. (My own sis­ter-in-law, soon to head out on her Ital­ian hon­ey­moon, plans to head to that sto­ried ruin more or less straight from the air­port.) Even those with no par­tic­u­lar inter­est in ancient Roman civ­i­liza­tion, step­ping into the space that was once the are­na — from the Latin hare­na, refer­ring to the sand laid down to absorb blood shed in com­bat — fills the imag­i­na­tion with images of glad­i­a­tors, lions, sen­a­tors glow­er­ing from their court­side seats, and the bay­ing mass­es behind them. But their visions may not include oth­er such true-to-his­to­ry details as trap doors, staged naval bat­tles, and a sub­ter­ranean sys­tem of tun­nels and ele­va­tors, all of which are explained in the new Decon­struct­ed video above.

Even casu­al Rome enthu­si­asts all know that com­peti­tors and oth­er per­form­ers, both human and ani­mal, made their offi­cial Colos­se­um entrances through the floor. (Announce­ments were made some years ago to the effect that the mech­a­nized floor that made such the­atrics pos­si­ble would be rebuilt by 2023 — a project that seems not to have made much progress as yet, though whether it will end up being put off as long as the Strait of Messi­na Bridge remains to be seen.)

But only the most obses­sive already have a clear under­stand­ing of exact­ly how it worked, which this video clear­ly explains in both words and 3D ren­der­ings, restor­ing ele­ments of not just the build­ing itself but also its imme­di­ate urban con­text that have long since been lost to time.

Take the velar­i­um, a retractable awning con­sist­ing of “long strips of fab­ric wound around drums, which were mount­ed on a wood­en frame and sup­port­ed by 240 masts fixed into sock­ets along the amphithe­ater’s upper cor­nice.” With each of its 240 strips oper­at­ed by a sep­a­rate winch, it required at least as many human oper­a­tors to deploy or retract at speed — a greater speed, per­haps, than the oper­a­tion of some of the retractable roofs incor­po­rat­ed into sports facil­i­ties today. Not “just a feat of engi­neer­ing, but also a pre­cur­sor for mod­ern sta­di­um design,” the velar­i­um addressed a prob­lem that will hard­ly escape the notice of mod­ern tourists today — espe­cial­ly those who vis­it the Colos­se­um in the mid­dle of a sum­mer day.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Build­ing the Colos­se­um: The Icon of Rome

What Hap­pened to the Miss­ing Half of the Roman Colos­se­um?

How Much Would It Cost to Build the Colos­se­um Today?

When the Colos­se­um in Rome Became the Home of Hun­dreds of Exot­ic Plant Species

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

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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The 1924 Soviet Chess Match Where The Chess Pieces Were Real Soldiers and Horses

in Games | April 23rd, 2025

Let’s time trav­el back to Leningrad (aka St. Peters­burg) in 1924. That’s when an uncon­ven­tion­al chess match was played by Peter Romanovsky and Ilya Rabi­novich, two chess mas­ters of the day.

Appar­ent­ly, they called in their moves over the tele­phone. And then real-life chess pieces—in the form of human beings and horses—were moved across a huge chess­board cov­er­ing Palace Square. Mem­bers of the Sovi­et Union’s Red Army served as the black pieces; mem­bers of the Sovi­et navy were the white pieces. 8,000 onlook­ers watched the action unfold.

Accord­ing to this online forum for chess enthu­si­asts, the 5‑hour match “was an annu­al event, designed to pro­mote chess in the USSR.” The first such match was held in Smolen­sk in 1921, fol­lowed by match­es in Kerch in 1922, Omsk in 1923 and then St. Peters­burg in 1924. You can catch a glimpse of the match in the footage below.

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If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Man Ray Designs a Supreme­ly Ele­gant, Geo­met­ric Chess Set in 1920 (and It’s Now Re-Issued for the Rest of Us)

A Free 700-Page Chess Man­u­al Explains 1,000 Chess Tac­tics in Straight­for­ward Eng­lish

A Famous Chess Match from 1910 Reen­act­ed with Clay­ma­tion

A Brief His­to­ry of Chess: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the 1,500-Year-Old Game

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How Zaha Hadid Revolutionized Architecture & Drew Inspiration from Russian Avant-Garde Art

in Architecture, Art | April 22nd, 2025

Zaha Hadid died in 2016, at the age of 65. She cer­tain­ly was­n’t old, by the stan­dards of our time, though in most pro­fes­sions, her best work­ing years would already have been behind her. She was, how­ev­er, an archi­tect, and by age 65, most archi­tects are still very much in their prime. Take Rem Kool­haas, who today remains a leader of the Office of Met­ro­pol­i­tan Archi­tec­ture in his eight­ies — and who, back in the sev­en­ties, was one of Hadid’s teach­ers at the Archi­tec­tur­al Asso­ci­a­tion School of Archi­tec­ture in Lon­don. It was there that Kool­haas gave his promis­ing, uncon­ven­tion­al stu­dent the assign­ment of bas­ing a project on the art of Kaz­imir Male­vich.

Specif­i­cal­ly, as archi­tect Michael Wyet­zn­er explains in the new Archi­tec­tur­al Digest video above, Hadid had to adapt one of Male­vich’s “arkhitek­tons,” which were “objects that took his ideas of shapes that he used in his paint­ings” — the most wide­ly known among them being Black Square, from 1915, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture — “and turned them into a 3D piece.”

To under­stand Hadid’s for­ma­tion, then, we must go back to the ear­ly-twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry Rus­sia in which Male­vich oper­at­ed as an avant-garde artist, and in which he launched the move­ment he called Supre­ma­tism, whose name reflects “the idea that his art was con­cerned with the suprema­cy of pure feel­ing, as opposed to the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the real world.”

As a pio­neer of “non-objec­tive” art, Male­vich did his part to inspire Hadid on her path to design­ing build­ings that come as close to abstrac­tion as tech­no­log­i­cal­ly pos­si­ble. In fact, dur­ing the ini­tial phas­es of Hadid’s career, what we think of as her sig­na­ture curve-inten­sive archi­tec­tur­al style — exem­pli­fied by build­ings like the Lon­don Aquat­ics Cen­tre and the Dong­dae­mun Design Plaza in Seoul — was­n’t tech­no­log­i­cal­ly pos­si­ble. Exam­in­ing her ear­ly paint­ings, such as the one of the arkhitek­ton-based bridge hotel she turned in to Kool­haas, or her first built projects like the Vit­ra Fire Sta­tion in Weil am Rhein, shows us how her ideas were already evolv­ing in direc­tions then prac­ti­cal­ly unthink­able in archi­tec­ture. Zaha Hadid has now been gone near­ly a decade, but her field is in many ways still catch­ing up with her.

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Intro­duc­tion to the World-Renowned Archi­tect Zaha Hadid, “the Queen of the Curve”

The ABC of Archi­tects: An Ani­mat­ed Flip­book of Famous Archi­tects and Their Best-Known Build­ings

What Makes Kaz­imir Malevich’s Black Square (1915) Not Just Art, But Impor­tant Art

Every­thing You Need to Know About Mod­ern Russ­ian Art in 25 Min­utes: A Visu­al Intro­duc­tion to Futur­ism, Social­ist Real­ism & More

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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Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi–Walt Disney’s 1943 Film Shows How Fascists Are Made

in Film, History | April 22nd, 2025

Dur­ing World War II, Walt Dis­ney entered into a con­tract with the US gov­ern­ment to devel­op 32 ani­mat­ed shorts. Near­ly bank­rupt­ed by Fan­ta­sia (1940), Dis­ney need­ed to refill its cof­fers, and mak­ing Amer­i­can pro­pa­gan­da films did­n’t seem like a bad way to do it. On numer­ous occa­sions, Don­ald Duck was called upon to deliv­er moral mes­sages to domes­tic audi­ences (see The Spir­it of ’43 and Der Fuehrer’s Face). But that was­n’t the case with Edu­ca­tion for Death: The Mak­ing of the Nazi, a film shown in U.S. movie the­aters in 1943.

Based on a book writ­ten by Gre­gor Ziemer, this ani­mat­ed short used a dif­fer­ent line­up of char­ac­ters to show how the Nazi par­ty turned inno­cent youth into Hitler’s cor­rupt­ed chil­dren. Unlike oth­er top­ics addressed in Dis­ney war films (e.g. tax­es and the draft), this theme—the cul­ti­va­tion of young minds—hit awful­ly close to home. And it’s per­haps why it’s one of Dis­ney’s bet­ter wartime films.

Spiegel Online has more on Dis­ney’s WW II pro­pa­gan­da films here, and you can find some of these films in the Relat­eds below. Also find links to oth­er WWII pro­pa­gan­da films by Dr. Seuss, Mel Blanc, Alfred Hitch­cock, Frank Capra and more.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Dr. Seuss’ World War II Pro­pa­gan­da Films: Your Job in Ger­many (1945) and Our Job in Japan (1946)

When Sal­vador Dalí Cre­at­ed a Chill­ing Anti-Vene­re­al Dis­ease Poster Dur­ing World War II

Don­ald Duck Wants You to Pay Your Tax­es (1943)

Neu­ro­science and Pro­pa­gan­da Come Togeth­er in Disney’s World War II Film, Rea­son and Emo­tion

“Evil Mick­ey Mouse” Invades Japan in a 1934 Japan­ese Ani­me Pro­pa­gan­da Film

Mem­o­ry of the Camps (1985): The Holo­caust Doc­u­men­tary that Trau­ma­tized Alfred Hitch­cock, and Remained Unseen for 40 Years

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The Extreme Life and Philosophy of Hunter S. Thompson: Gonzo Journalism and the American Condition

in Books, Writing | April 21st, 2025

Hunter S. Thomp­son has been gone for two decades now. When he went out, as the new Pur­suit of Won­der video on his life and work reminds us, he did so in a high­ly Amer­i­can man­ner: with a gun, and at the moment of his own choos­ing. Even his long­time fans who respect­ed some­thing about the agency evi­dent in that choice nat­u­ral­ly regret­ted that he’d made it; many of us have wished aloud that we could read his judg­ments of the past twen­ty years’ devel­op­ments in U.S. pol­i­tics, cul­ture, and soci­ety, which would cer­tain­ly fit in well enough with the nar­ra­tive of decline he’d pur­sued since the late six­ties.

At the same time, we rec­og­nize that Thomp­son’s man­ner of liv­ing would hard­ly have allowed him to live into his late eight­ies (the man him­self expressed sur­prise to have reached his six­ties), and that it was inex­tri­ca­ble from his man­ner of writ­ing. Which is not to call it the main ingre­di­ent: as gen­er­a­tions of imi­ta­tors have proven, inges­tion of con­trolled sub­stances and a dis­re­spect for tra­di­tion­al nar­ra­tive struc­ture do not, by them­selves, con­sti­tute a recipe for the “gonzo jour­nal­ism” Thomp­son pio­neered. In fact, he had a healthy respect for struc­ture, cul­ti­vat­ed through his ear­ly career in worka­day reportage and a self-imposed train­ing regime that involved re-typ­ing the whole of A Farewell to Arms and The Great Gats­by.

Gonzo jour­nal­ism, accord­ing to the nar­ra­tor of the video, actu­al­ly has a seri­ous ques­tion to ask: “Are not the par­tic­u­lar sub­jec­tive fil­ters by which facts and events are processed and imag­ined in a moment in his­to­ry as rel­e­vant as the facts them­selves in under­stand­ing the truth of that moment, or at least a slice of the truth?” Thomp­son’s most wide­ly read books Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Cam­paign Trail ’72 stand as two attempts at an answer. But from the late sev­en­ties onward, as his “life­long com­pan­ions of drugs and chaot­ic behav­ior nes­tled clos­er, the lines between his larg­er-than-life char­ac­ter in his work, his pub­lic per­sona, and his true self began to blur.”

It could be said that Thomp­son nev­er recov­ered the decep­tive clar­i­ty of his Fear and Loathing-era work, though he remained pro­lif­ic to the end. Indeed, there’s much of val­ue in his last three decades of writ­ing for read­ers attuned to who he real­ly was. “He was not mere­ly the char­ac­ter he por­trayed in his work and pub­lic life, but the man who cared enough, and was tal­ent­ed enough, to cre­ate this char­ac­ter in order to explore, under­stand, and rep­re­sent a very nuanced con­di­tion of the world dur­ing his time.” It would, per­haps, have been bet­ter if he’d been able, at some point, to retire the drugs, the firearms, the sun­glass­es, and the para­noia and come up with a new per­sona. What kept him from doing so? Maybe the notion, as artic­u­lat­ed by his great inspi­ra­tion Fitzger­ald, that there are no sec­ond acts in Amer­i­can lives.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Read 9 Free Arti­cles by Hunter S. Thomp­son That Span His Gonzo Jour­nal­ist Career (1965–2005)

Hunter S. Thomp­son, Exis­ten­tial­ist Life Coach, Gives Tips for Find­ing Mean­ing in Life

Read 18 Lost Sto­ries From Hunter S. Thompson’s For­got­ten Stint As a For­eign Cor­re­spon­dent

Hunter S. Thompson’s Har­row­ing, Chem­i­cal-Filled Dai­ly Rou­tine

Hunter S. Thomp­son Typed Out The Great Gats­by & A Farewell to Arms Word for Word: A Method for Learn­ing How to Write Like the Mas­ters

Hunter Thomp­son Died 15 Years Ago: Hear Him Remem­bered by Tom Wolfe, John­ny Depp, Ralph Stead­man, and Oth­ers

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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James Joyce, With His Eyesight Failing, Draws a Sketch of Leopold Bloom (1926)

in Art, Literature | April 21st, 2025

James Joyce had a ter­ri­ble time with his eyes. When he was six years old he received his first set of eye­glass­es, and, when he was 25, he came down with his first case of iri­tis, a very painful and poten­tial­ly blind­ing inflam­ma­tion of the col­ored part of the eye, the iris. A short time lat­er, he named his new­born daugh­ter “Lucia,” after the patron saint of those with eye trou­bles.

For the rest of his life, Joyce had to endure a hor­rif­ic series of oper­a­tions and treat­ments for one or the oth­er of his eyes, includ­ing the removal of parts of the iris, a reshap­ing of the pupil, the appli­ca­tion of leech­es direct­ly on the eye to remove fluid–even the removal of all of Joyce’s teeth, on the the­o­ry that his recur­ring iri­tis was con­nect­ed with the bac­te­r­i­al infec­tion in his teeth, brought on by years of pover­ty and den­tal neglect.

After his sev­enth eye oper­a­tion on Decem­ber 5, 1925, accord­ing to Gor­don Bowk­er in James Joyce: A New Biog­ra­phy, Joyce was “unable to see lights, suf­fer­ing con­tin­u­al pain from the oper­a­tion, weep­ing oceans of tears, high­ly ner­vous, and unable to think straight. He was now depen­dent on kind peo­ple to see him across the road and hail taxis for him. All day, he lay on a couch in a state of com­plete depres­sion, want­i­ng to work but quite unable to do so.”

In ear­ly 1926, Joyce’s sight was improv­ing a lit­tle in one eye. It was about this time (Jan­u­ary 1926, accord­ing to one source) that Joyce paid a vis­it to his friend Myron C. Nut­ting, an Amer­i­can painter who had a stu­dio in the Mont­par­nasse sec­tion of Paris. To demon­strate his improv­ing vision, Joyce picked up a thick black pen­cil and made a few squig­gles on a sheet of paper, along with a car­i­ca­ture of a mis­chie­vous man in a bowler hat and a wide mus­tache–Leopold Bloom, the pro­tag­o­nist of Ulysses. Next to Bloom, Joyce wrote in Greek (“with a minor error in spelling and char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly skewed accents,” accord­ing to R. J. Schork in Greek and Hel­lenic Cul­ture in Joyce) the open­ing pas­sage  of Home­r’s Odyssey: “Tell me, muse, of that man of many turns, who wan­dered far and wide.”

NOTE: Joyce’s draw­ing of Bloom is now in the Charles Deer­ing McCormick Library of Spe­cial Col­lec­tions at North­west­ern Uni­ver­si­ty. Nut­ting was a sig­nif­i­cant source for the biog­ra­phy of Joyce that was writ­ten by Richard Ell­mann, a pro­fes­sor at North­west­ern. Accord­ing to Scott Krafft, a cura­tor at the library, Ell­mann bro­kered a deal in 1960 for the library to pur­chase Nut­ting’s oil paint­ings of James and Nora Joyce, his pas­tel draw­ings of the Joyce chil­dren Gior­gio and Lucia, along with Joyce’s sketch of Bloom, for a total of $500. The source for the Jan­u­ary 1926 date of the Bloom sketch is an arti­cle, “James Joyce…a quick sketch” from the July 1976 edi­tion of Foot­notes, pub­lished by the North­west­ern Uni­ver­si­ty Library Coun­cil. Our thanks to Scott Krafft.

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

James Joyce: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to His Life and Lit­er­ary Works

What Makes James Joyce’s Ulysses a Mas­ter­piece: Great Books Explained

James Joyce’s Cray­on Cov­ered Man­u­script Pages for Ulysses and Finnegans Wake

Read the Orig­i­nal Seri­al­ized Edi­tion of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1918)

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Carl Sagan Issues a Chilling Warning About the Decline of Scientific Thinking in America: Watch His Final Interview (1996)

in Current Affairs, Science | April 18th, 2025

Until the end of his life, Carl Sagan (1934–1996) con­tin­ued doing what he did all along — pop­u­lar­iz­ing sci­ence and “enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly con­vey­ing the won­ders of the uni­verse to mil­lions of peo­ple on tele­vi­sion and in books.” When­ev­er Sagan appeared on The Tonight Show with John­ny Car­son dur­ing the 70s and 80s, his goal was to con­nect with every­day Amer­i­cans — peo­ple who did­n’t sub­scribe to Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can — and increase the pub­lic’s under­stand­ing and appre­ci­a­tion of sci­ence.

At the end of his life, Sagan still cared deeply about where sci­ence stood in the pub­lic imag­i­na­tion. But while los­ing a bat­tle with myelodys­pla­sia, Sagan also sensed that sci­en­tif­ic think­ing was los­ing ground in Amer­i­ca, and even more omi­nous­ly with­in the cham­bers of the Newt Gin­grich-led Con­gress.

Dur­ing his final inter­view, aired on May 27, 1996, Sagan issued a strong warn­ing, telling Char­lie Rose:

We’ve arranged a soci­ety on sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy in which nobody under­stands any­thing about sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy, and this com­bustible mix­ture of igno­rance and pow­er soon­er or lat­er is going to blow up in our faces. I mean, who is run­ning the sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy in a democ­ra­cy if the peo­ple don’t know any­thing about it.

And he also went on to add:

And the sec­ond rea­son that I’m wor­ried about this is that sci­ence is more than a body of knowl­edge. It’s a way of think­ing. A way of skep­ti­cal­ly inter­ro­gat­ing the uni­verse with a fine under­stand­ing of human fal­li­bil­i­ty. If we are not able to ask skep­ti­cal ques­tions, to inter­ro­gate those who tell us that some­thing is true, to be skep­ti­cal of those in author­i­ty, then we’re up for grabs for the next char­la­tan polit­i­cal or reli­gious who comes ambling along.

Near­ly 30 years lat­er, we have reached that point. Under the sec­ond Trump admin­is­tra­tion, DOGE has rushed to dis­man­tle the sci­en­tif­ic infra­struc­ture of our gov­ern­ment, hap­haz­ard­ly cut­ting the Nation­al Sci­ence Foun­da­tion, the Nation­al Insti­tutes of Health, and NASA. Next, they’re going after our lead­ing research uni­ver­si­ties, inten­tion­al­ly weak­en­ing the research engine that has fueled the growth of Amer­i­can corporations—and the over­all Amer­i­can economy—since World War II. And they’re replac­ing sci­en­tif­ic lead­ers with char­la­tans like RFK Jr. who dab­ble in the very pseu­do­science that Sagan warned us about. Need­less to say, our com­peti­tors aren’t mak­ing the same mis­takes. Few seri­ous gov­ern­ments are stu­pid enough to cut off their nose to spite their face.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Steps a Pres­i­dent Would Take to Destroy His Nation, Accord­ing to Elon Musk’s AI Chat­bot, Grok

Carl Sagan Presents His “Baloney Detec­tion Kit”: 8 Tools for Skep­ti­cal Think­ing

Richard Feyn­man Cre­ates a Sim­ple Method for Telling Sci­ence From Pseu­do­science (1966)

Daniel Den­nett Presents Sev­en Tools For Crit­i­cal Think­ing

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The Real Story of Easter: How We Got from the First Easter in the Bible to Bunnies, Eggs & Chocolate

in Religion | April 18th, 2025

Pop­u­lar cul­ture has long since claimed East­er as an occa­sion for trick­ster rab­bits, dyed-egg hunts, and marsh­mal­low chicks of unnat­ur­al hues — none of which are actu­al­ly in the Bible. Though that prob­a­bly does­n’t sur­prise you, you may not be aware of just how far the mod­ern hol­i­day has drift­ed from its tex­tu­al ori­gins. In the new Hochela­ga video above, that Youtube chan­nel’s Tom­mie Trelawny recounts first the Bib­li­cal sto­ry at the basis of all this, that of the death and res­ur­rec­tion of Jesus. Then he exam­ines how the lat­ter event has since been com­mem­o­rat­ed, an evo­lu­tion that has led to the East­er we know today.

“Jesus’ res­ur­rec­tion would have been cel­e­brat­ed in the very ear­li­est days of Chris­tian­i­ty,” Trelawny explains. “Ini­tial­ly, it was held on the feast of Passover, but even­tu­al­ly, it branched off into its own dis­tinct hol­i­day.” That ini­tial over­lap is reflect­ed in the resem­blance between Pesach, the Hebrew word for Passover, and the Span­ish and French names for East­er, Pas­cua and Pâques.

As for the Eng­lish word East­er itself, it res­onates with the name of “the Ancient Sax­on god­dess Ēostre, deity of spring and fer­til­i­ty.” Much as the Roman mid-win­ter fes­ti­val Sat­ur­na­lia may have inspired Christ­mas, could the pre-Chris­t­ian hol­i­day for Ēostre have inspired East­er?

To an extent, per­haps, though as Trelawny under­scores, East­er was very much derived from Passover. Yet its asso­ci­a­tions with spring­time go well beyond the time of year in which it occurs, not least in the form of all those eggs. In fact, “dec­o­rat­ed eggs are an ancient cus­tom that pre­dates Chris­tian­i­ty by many cen­turies.” Hav­ing stood as “a uni­ver­sal sym­bol for new life,” they also offered Chris­tians an eas­i­ly leg­i­ble “metaphor for Jesus’ sealed tomb, and crack­ing it open as a sym­bol of his res­ur­rec­tion.” As for the East­er Bun­ny, he has a prece­dent in the Ger­man­ic East­er Hare, who “judged chil­dren on whether they’ve been good or bad” — now soft­ened up, pre­dictably, after so many years in Amer­i­ca.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Down­load Beau­ti­ful Free Vin­tage East­er Cards from the New York Pub­lic Library

Stream Andrea Bocelli’s East­er Con­cert from Milan

A Map of All the Coun­tries Men­tioned in the Bible: What The Coun­tries Were Called Then, and Now

A Sur­vival Guide to the Bib­li­cal Apoc­a­lypse

Did the Tow­er of Babel Actu­al­ly Exist?: A Look at the Archae­o­log­i­cal Evi­dence

The Ark Before Noah: Dis­cov­er the Ancient Flood Myths That Came Before the Bible

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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How to Evade Taxes in Ancient Rome: A 1,900-Year-Old Papyrus Reveals an Ancient Tax Evasion Scheme

in History, Law | April 17th, 2025

It was sure­ly not a coin­ci­dence that the New York Times pub­lished its sto­ry on the tri­al of a cer­tain Gadalias and Sau­los this past Mon­day, April 14th. The defen­dants, as their names sug­gest, did not live in moder­ni­ty: the papyrus doc­u­ment­ing their legal trou­bles dates to the reign of Hadri­an, around 130 AD.  These men were charged, writes the Times’ Franz Lidz, with “the fal­si­fi­ca­tion of doc­u­ments and the illic­it sale and man­u­mis­sion, or free­ing, of slaves — all to avoid pay­ing duties in the far-flung Roman provinces of Judea and Ara­bia, a region rough­ly cor­re­spond­ing to present-day Israel and Jor­dan.”

In oth­er words, Gadalias and Sau­los were accused of tax eva­sion, a sub­ject always on the mind of Amer­i­cans under the shad­ow of their tax-return due date, April 15th. While the prospect of an IRS audit keeps more than a few of them awake at night, ancient Roman law went, pre­dictably, quite a bit harsh­er.

“Penal­ties ranged from heavy fines and per­ma­nent exile to hard labor in the salt mines and, in the worst case, damna­tio ad bes­tias, a pub­lic exe­cu­tion in which the con­demned were devoured by wild ani­mals,” writes Lidz. Such a fate pre­sum­ably would­n’t have been out of the ques­tion for those con­vict­ed of a crime of these pro­por­tions.

The long-mis­clas­si­fied doc­u­ment of this case was only prop­er­ly deci­phered, and even under­stood to have been writ­ten in ancient Greek, after its redis­cov­ery in 2014. “A team of schol­ars was assem­bled to con­duct a detailed phys­i­cal exam­i­na­tion and cross-ref­er­ence names and loca­tions with oth­er his­tor­i­cal sources,” which result­ed in this paper pub­lished this past Jan­u­ary. For any schol­ar of Roman law, such an oppor­tu­ni­ty to get into the minds of both that civ­i­liza­tion’s judges and its crim­i­nals could hard­ly be passed up. Even out on the edge of the empire, pros­e­cu­tors turn out to have employed “deft rhetor­i­cal strate­gies wor­thy of Cicero and Quin­til­ian and dis­played an excel­lent com­mand of Roman legal terms and con­cepts in Greek.” This will no doubt get today’s law stu­dents spec­u­lat­ing: specif­i­cal­ly, about the exis­tence of an ancient Chat­G­PT.

via NYTimes

Relat­ed con­tent:

To Save Civ­i­liza­tion, the Rich Need to Pay Their Tax­es: His­to­ri­an Rut­ger Breg­man Speaks Truth to Pow­er at Davos and to Fox’s Tuck­er Carl­son

Read David Fos­ter Wallace’s Notes From a Tax Account­ing Class, Tak­en to Help Him Write The Pale King

Don­ald Duck Wants You to Pay Your Tax­es (1943)

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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How to Enter a ‘Flow State’ on Command: Peak Performance Mind Hack Explained in 7 Minutes

in Creativity, Productivity, Psychology | April 17th, 2025

You can be for­giv­en for think­ing the con­cept of “flow” was cooked up and pop­u­lar­ized by yoga teach­ers. That word gets a lot of play when one is mov­ing from Down­ward-Fac­ing Dog on through War­rior One and Two.

Actu­al­ly, flow — the state of  “effort­less effort” — was coined by Goethe, from the Ger­man “rausch”, a dizzy­ing sort of ecsta­sy.

Friedrich Niet­zsche and psy­chol­o­gist William James both con­sid­ered the flow state in depth, but social the­o­rist Mihaly Csik­szent­mi­ha­lyi, author of Cre­ativ­i­ty: Flow and the Psy­chol­o­gy of Dis­cov­ery and Inven­tion, is the true giant in the field. Here’s one of his def­i­n­i­tions of flow:

Being com­plete­ly involved in an activ­i­ty for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, move­ment, and thought fol­lows inevitably from the pre­vi­ous one, like play­ing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.

Author Steven Kotler, Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of the Flow Research Col­lec­tive, not only seems to spend a lot of time think­ing about flow, as a lead­ing expert on human per­for­mance, he inhab­its the state on a fair­ly reg­u­lar basis, too.

Chalk it up to good luck?

Good genes? (Some researchers, includ­ing retired NIH geneti­cist Dean Hamer and psy­chol­o­gist C. Robert Cloninger, think genet­ics play a part…)

As Kotler points out above, any­one can hedge their bets by clear­ing away dis­trac­tions — all the usu­al bad­dies that inter­fere with sleep, per­for­mance, or pro­duc­tiv­i­ty.

It’s also impor­tant to know thy­self. Kotler’s an ear­ly bird, who gets crackin’ well before sun­rise:

I don’t just open my eyes at 4:00 AM, I try to go from bed to desk before my brain even kicks out of its Alpha wave state. I don’t check any emails. I turn every­thing off at the end of the day includ­ing unplug­ging my phones and all that stuff so that the next morn­ing there’s nobody jump­ing into my inbox or assault­ing me emo­tion­al­ly with some­thing, you know what I mean?… I real­ly pro­tect that ear­ly morn­ing time.

By con­trast, his night owl wife doesn’t start clear­ing the cob­webs ’til ear­ly evening.

In the above video for Big Think, Kotler notes that 22 flow trig­gers have been dis­cov­ered, pre-con­di­tions that keep atten­tion focused in the present moment.

His web­site lists many of those trig­gers:

  • Com­plete Con­cen­tra­tion in the Present Moment
  • Imme­di­ate Feed­back
  • Clear Goals
  • The Chal­lenge-Skills Ratio (ie: the chal­lenge should seem slight­ly out of reach
  • High con­se­quences 
  • Deep Embod­i­ment 
  • Rich Envi­ron­ment 
  • Cre­ativ­i­ty (specif­i­cal­ly, pat­tern recog­ni­tion, or the link­ing togeth­er of new ideas)

Kotler also shares Uni­ver­si­ty of North Car­oli­na psy­chol­o­gist Kei­th Sawyer’s trig­ger list for groups hop­ing to flow like a well-oiled machine:

  • Shared Goals
  • Close Lis­ten­ing 
  • “Yes And” (addi­tive, rather than com­bat­ive con­ver­sa­tions)
  • Com­plete Con­cen­tra­tion (total focus in the right here, right now)
  • A sense of con­trol (each mem­ber of the group feels in con­trol, but still)
  • Blend­ing Egos (each per­son can sub­merge their ego needs into the group’s)
  • Equal Par­tic­i­pa­tion (skills lev­els are rough­ly and equal every­one is involved)
  • Famil­iar­i­ty (peo­ple know one anoth­er and under­stand their tics and ten­den­cies)
  • Con­stant Com­mu­ni­ca­tion (a group ver­sion of imme­di­ate feed­back)
  • Shared, Group Risk

One might think peo­ple in the flow state would be float­ing around with an expres­sion of ecsta­t­ic bliss on their faces. Not so, accord­ing to Kotler. Rather, they tend to frown slight­ly. Good news for any­one with rest­ing bitch face!

(We’ll thank you to refer to it as rest­ing flow state face from here on out.)

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2022.

Relat­ed Con­tent

Cre­ativ­i­ty, Not Mon­ey, is the Key to Hap­pi­ness: Dis­cov­er Psy­chol­o­gist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly’s The­o­ry of “Flow”

How to Enter Flow State, Increase Your Abil­i­ty to Con­cen­trate, and Let Your Ego Fall Away : An Ani­mat­ed Primer

How to Get into a Cre­ative “Flow State”: A Short Mas­ter­class

David Lynch Explains How Sim­ple Dai­ly Habits Enhance His Cre­ativ­i­ty

“The Phi­los­o­phy of “Flow”: A Brief Intro­duc­tion to Tao­ism

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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A Forgotten 16th-Century Manuscript Reveals the First Designs for Modern Rockets

in History, Science, Technology | April 16th, 2025

The Aus­tri­an mil­i­tary engi­neer Con­rad Haas was a man ahead of his time — indeed, about 400 years ahead, con­sid­er­ing that he was work­ing on rock­ets aimed for out­er space back in the mid-six­teenth cen­tu­ry. Need­less to say, he nev­er actu­al­ly man­aged to launch any­thing into the upper atmos­phere. But you have to give him cred­it for get­ting as far as he did with the idea, a con­sid­er­able progress doc­u­ment­ed in his trea­tise “How You Must Make Quite a Nice Rock­et That Can Trav­el Itself into the Heights,” which no doubt sounds bet­ter in the orig­i­nal Ger­man. As Kaushik Pato­wary notes at Amus­ing Plan­et, its 450 pages are “filled with draw­ings and tech­ni­cal data on artillery, bal­lis­tics and detailed descrip­tions of mul­ti­stage rock­ets.”

“Born in 1509 in Dorn­bach, now part of Vien­na, to a Ger­man fam­i­ly from Bavaria,” Haas moved to Tran­syl­va­nia, then part of the Aus­tri­an Empire, ear­ly in his adult­hood. “In 1551, Haas was invit­ed by Stephen Bátho­ry, the grand prince of Tran­syl­va­nia, to Her­mannstadt (now Sibiu, Roma­nia), where he became the com­man­der of the artillery bar­racks and a weapons engi­neer.”

It was in this pro­fes­sion­al capac­i­ty that he began his research into rock­etry, which led him to dis­cov­er the con­cept of “a cylin­dri­cal thrust cham­ber filled with a pow­der pro­pel­lant, with a con­i­cal hole to pro­gres­sive­ly increase the com­bus­tion area and con­se­quent­ly the thrust,” a clear intel­lec­tu­al ances­tor of the mul­ti-stage design “still used in mod­ern rock­ets.”

Haas’ is the ear­li­est sci­en­tif­ic work on rock­ets known to have been under­tak­en in Europe. And until fair­ly recent­ly, it had been for­got­ten: only in 1961 was his man­u­script found in Sibi­u’s pub­lic archives, which moti­vat­ed Roma­nia to claim Haas as the first rock­et sci­en­tist. Though anachro­nis­tic, that des­ig­na­tion does under­score the far-sight­ed­ness of Haas’ world­view. So do the per­son­al words he includ­ed in his chap­ter about the mil­i­tary use of rock­ets. “My advice is for more peace and no war, leav­ing the rifles calm­ly in stor­age, so the bul­let is not fired, the gun­pow­der is not burned or wet, so the prince keeps his mon­ey, the arse­nal mas­ter his life,” he wrote. But giv­en what he must have learned while liv­ing in polit­i­cal­ly unsta­ble Euro­pean bor­der­lands, he sure­ly under­stood, on some lev­el, that it would be eas­i­er to get to the moon.

via Messy­Nessy

Relat­ed con­tent:

A 16th-Cen­tu­ry Astron­o­my Book Fea­tured “Ana­log Com­put­ers” to Cal­cu­late the Shape of the Moon, the Posi­tion of the Sun, and More

Leonar­do da Vin­ci Draws Designs of Future War Machines: Tanks, Machine Guns & More

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

Meet the Mys­te­ri­ous Genius Who Patent­ed the UFO

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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