By the time he filmed this video archived on Iowa Public Television’s YouTube channel, Jim Henson was just about to strike gold with a new children’s show called Sesame Street. The year was 1969, and he already had 15 years of puppetry experience under his belt, from children’s shows to commercials and experimental films.
On the cusp of success, Henson, along with fellow puppeteer Don Sahlin (the creator and voice of Rowlf), ventures to teach kids how to make a puppet out of pretty much anything you’ll find around the house. Such a vision appears easy, but it really shows the genius of Henson, as he and Sahlin make characters from a tennis ball, a mop, a wooden spoon, a cup, socks, an envelope, even potatoes and pears. (There is a lot to be said for the inherent comedy of googly eyes, and the importance of fake fur.)
An unknown assistant takes some of these puppets and brings them to life while Henson and his partner create more–funny voices, personalities, even a bit of anarchy are in play. Surprisingly, Kermit does not make an appearance, although his sock ancestor does.
The man who saw potential puppets in everything is in his element and relaxed. Check it out, smile, and then raid your kitchen for supplies for your own puppet show. And although Henson promises a further episode, it has yet to be found on YouTube, or elsewhere.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Homework has lately become unfashionable, at least according to what I’ve heard from teachers in certain parts of the United States. That may complicate various fairly long-standing educational practices, but it doesn’t necessarily reflect an absolute drop in standards and expectations. Those of us who went to school around the turn of the millennium may remember feeling entombed in homework, an intensified version of what the generation that came of age amid the early Cold War’s pressure for “more science,” would have dealt with. But late baby boomers and early Gen-Xers in the sixties and seventies had a much lighter load, as did the generation educated under John Dewey’s reforms of the early twentieth century.
We can follow this line all the way back to the times of the Babylonians, 4,000 years ago. In the video above from her channel Tibees, science YouTuber Toby Hendy shows us a few artifacts of homework from antiquity and explains how to interpret them.
Inscribed in a clay tablet, their simple but numerous marks reveal them to be examples of math homework, that most loathed category today, and perhaps then as well. (Even when interpreted in modern language, the calculations may seem unfamiliar, performed as they are not in our base ten, but base 60 — shades of the “new math” to come much later.) That the Babylonians had fairly advanced mathematics, which Hendy demonstrates using some clay of her own, may be as much of a surprise as the fact that they did homework.
Not that they all did it. Universal schooling itself dates only from the industrial age, and for the Babylonians, industry was still a long way off. They did, however, take the considerable step of creating civilization, which they couldn’t have done without writing. The ancient assignment Hendy shows would’ve been done by a student at an eduba, which she describes as a “scribe school.” Scribe, as we know, means one who writes — which, in Babylon, meant one who writes in Sumerian. That skill was transmitted through the network of eduba, or “house where tablets are passed out,” which were usually located in private residences, and which turned out graduates literate and numerate enough to keep the empire running, at least until the sixth century BC or so. From certain destructive forces, it seems, no amount of homework can protect a civilization forever.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
Three Yale professors—Timothy Snyder, Jason Stanley and Marci Shore–have spent their careers studying fascism and authoritarianism. They know the signs of emerging authoritarianism when they see it. Now, they’re seeing those signs here in the United States, and they’re not sitting by idly. They’ve moved to the University of Toronto where they can speak freely, without fearing personal or institutional retribution. Above, they share their views in the NYTimes Op-Doc. It comes prefaced with the text below:
Legal residents of the United States sent to foreign prisons without due process. Students detained after voicing their opinions. Federal judges threatened with impeachment for ruling against the administration’s priorities.
In this Opinion video, Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley, all professors at Yale and experts in authoritarianism, explain why America is especially vulnerable to a democratic backsliding — and why they are leaving the United States to take up positions at the University of Toronto.
Professor Stanley is leaving the United States as an act of protest against the Trump administration’s attacks on civil liberties. “I want Americans to realize that this is a democratic emergency,” he said.
Professor Shore, who has spent two decades writing about the history of authoritarianism in Central and Eastern Europe, is leaving because of what she sees as the sharp regression of American democracy. “We’re like people on the Titanic saying our ship can’t sink,” she said. “And what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.”
She borrows from political and apolitical Slavic motifs and expressions, arguing that the English language does not fully capture the democratic regression in this American moment.
Professor Snyder’s reasons are more complicated. Primarily, he’s leaving to support his wife, Professor Shore, and their children, and to teach at a large public university in Toronto, a place he says can host conversations about freedom. At the same time, he shares the concerns expressed by his colleagues and worries that those kinds of conversations will become ever harder to have in the United States.
“I did not leave Yale because of Donald Trump or because of Columbia or because of threats to Yale — but that would be a reasonable thing to do, and that is a decision that people will make,” he wrote in a Yale Daily News article explaining his decision to leave.
Their motives differ but their analysis is the same: ignoring or downplaying attacks on the rule of law, the courts and universities spells trouble for our democracy.
On his 84th birthday this past Saturday, Bob Dylan played a show. That was in keeping with not only his still-serious touring schedule, but also his apparently irrepressible instinct to work: on music, on writing, on painting, on sculpture. Even his occasional tweeting draws an appreciative audience every time. The Bob Dylan of 2025 is not, of course, the Bob Dylan of 1965, but then, the Bob Dylan of 1965 wasn’t the Bob Dylan of 1964. This constant artistic change is just what his fans appreciate, not that they don’t still put on his early stuff with regularity.
In the earliest of that early stuff, as music YouTuber David Hartley explains in the new video above, Dylan “wrote songs by reinventing tradition.” Using nothing but his voice, guitar, and harmonica, the young Dylan “imitated some of the most well-known folk melodies,” placing himself in that long American tradition of borrowing and reinterpretation. But as dramatized in the recent film A Complete Unknown, he soon “went electric,” and with the change in instrumentation came a change in songwriting method: “He would just come up with endless pages of lyrics, something he once called ‘the long piece of vomit.’ ”
The advice to “puke it out now and clean it up later” has long been given, in various forms, to aspiring artists everywhere. One aspect worth highlighting about the way Dylan did it was that, despite writing popular songs, he drew a great deal of inspiration from more traditional literature, to the point that his notes hardly appear to contain anything resembling verses or choruses at all. Only in the studio, with a band behind him, could Dylan give these ideas their final musical shape — or rather, their final shape on that particular album, often to be modified endlessly, and sometimes radically, over decades of live performances to come.
Hartley tells of more dramatic changes to Dylan’s music and his process of creating. The motorcycle crash, the Basement Tapes, the open E tuning, Blood on the Tracks: all of these now lie half a century or more in the past. To go over all the ways Dylan has approached music since then would require more hours than all but the most rabid enthusiasts (though there are many) would watch. The video does include a 60 Minutes clip from 2004 in which Dylan says that “those early songs were almost magically written,” and that he wouldn’t be able to create them anymore. But then, nor could the Dylan of Highway 61 Revisited have recorded Time Out of Mind, and nor, for that matter, could the Dylan of Time Out of Mind have recorded any of Dylan’s albums from this decade — or those that could, quite possibly, be still to come.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
Images or Orwell and Dali via Wikimedia Commons
Should we hold artists to the same standards of human decency that we expect of everyone else? Should talented people be exempt from ordinary morality? Should artists of questionable character have their work consigned to the trash along with their personal reputations? These questions, for all their timeliness in the present, seemed no less thorny and compelling 81 years ago when George Orwell confronted the strange case of Salvador Dali, an undeniably extraordinary talent, and—Orwell writes in his 1944 essay “Benefit of Clergy”—a “disgusting human being.”
The judgment may seem overly harsh except that any honest person would say the same given the episodes Dali describes in his autobiography, which Orwell finds utterly revolting. “If it were possible for a book to give a physical stink off its pages,” he writes, “this one would.” The episodes he refers to include, at six years old, Dali kicking his three-year-old sister in the head, “as though it had been a ball,” the artist writes, then running away “with a ‘delirious joy’ induced by this savage act.” They include throwing a boy from a suspension bridge, and, at 29 years old, trampling a young girl “until they had to tear her, bleeding, out of my reach.” And many more such violent and disturbing descriptions.
Dali’s litany of cruelty to humans and animals constitutes what we expect in the early life of serial killers rather than famous artists. Surely he is putting his readers on, wildly exaggerating for the sake of shock value, like the Marquis de Sade’s autobiographical fantasies. Orwell allows as much. Yet which of the stories are true, he writes, “and which are imaginary hardly matters: the point is that this is the kind of thing that Dali would have liked to do.” Moreover, Orwell is as repulsed by Dali’s work as he is by the artist’s character, informed as it is by misogyny, a confessed necrophilia and an obsession with excrement and rotting corpses.
But against this has to be set the fact that Dali is a draughtsman of very exceptional gifts. He is also, to judge by the minuteness and the sureness of his drawings, a very hard worker. He is an exhibitionist and a careerist, but he is not a fraud. He has fifty times more talent than most of the people who would denounce his morals and jeer at his paintings. And these two sets of facts, taken together, raise a question which for lack of any basis of agreement seldom gets a real discussion.
Orwell is unwilling to dismiss the value of Dali’s art, and distances himself from those who would do so on moralistic grounds. “Such people,” he writes, are “unable to admit that what is morally degraded can be aesthetically right,” a “dangerous” position adopted not only by conservatives and religious zealots but by fascists and authoritarians who burn books and lead campaigns against “degenerate” art. “Their impulse is not only to crush every new talent as it appears, but to castrate the past as well.” (“Witness,” he notes, the outcry in America “against Joyce, Proust and Lawrence.”) “In an age like our own,” writes Orwell, in a particularly jarring sentence, “when the artist is an exceptional person, he must be allowed a certain amount of irresponsibility, just as a pregnant woman is.”
At the very same time, Orwell argues, to ignore or excuse Dali’s amorality is itself grossly irresponsible and totally inexcusable. Orwell’s is an “understandable” response, writes Jonathan Jones at The Guardian, given that he had fought fascism in Spain and had seen the horror of war, and that Dali, in 1944, “was already flirting with pro-Franco views.” But to fully illustrate his point, Orwell imagines a scenario with a much less controversial figure than Dali: “If Shakespeare returned to the earth to-morrow, and if it were found that his favourite recreation was raping little girls in railway carriages, we should not tell him to go ahead with it on the ground that he might write another King Lear.”
Draw your own parallels to more contemporary figures whose criminal, predatory, or violently abusive acts have been ignored for decades for the sake of their art, or whose work has been tossed out with the toxic bathwater of their behavior. Orwell seeks what he calls a “middle position” between moral condemnation and aesthetic license—a “fascinating and laudable” critical threading of the needle, Jones writes, that avoids the extremes of “conservative philistines who condemn the avant garde, and its promoters who indulge everything that someone like Dali does and refuse to see it in a moral or political context.”
This ethical critique, writes Charlie Finch at Artnet, attacks the assumption in the art world that an appreciation of artists with Dali’s peculiar tastes “is automatically enlightened, progressive.” Such an attitude extends from the artists themselves to the society that nurtures them, and that “allows us to welcome diamond-mine owners who fund biennales, Gazprom billionaires who purchase diamond skulls, and real-estate moguls who dominate temples of modernism.” Again, you may draw your own comparisons.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2018.
Standing atop the Acropolis in Athens as it has for nearly 2,500 years now, the Parthenon remains an impressive sight indeed. Not that those two and a half millennia have been kind to the place: one of the most famous ruins of the ancient world is still, after all, a ruin. But it does fire up visitors’ imaginations, filling their heads with visions of how it must have looked back in the fifth century BC, when it was a functioning temple and treasury. One enthusiast in particular, an Oxford archaeology professor named Juan de Lara, has spent four years using 3D modeling tools to create a 3D digital reconstruction of the Parthenon at the height of its glory, of which you can get glimpses in the video above and at the project’s official site.
Image by Juan de Lara/The Parthenon 3D
The materials promoting Parthenon 3D, as it’s called, emphasize one element above all: its almost 40-foot-tall statue of the goddess Athena Parthenos, better known mononymically as Athena. The work of the renowned sculptor Phidias, who also handled the rest of the structure’s sculptural decoration, it ended up costing twice as much as the building itself.
Though now long lost, the Athena statue was well documented enough for de Lara to model its every detail, down to the folds in her golden robes and the cracks in her ivory skin. During the Panathenaic Festival, which came around every four years, sunlight would enter the Parthenon at just the right angle to cause a supernatural-looking illumination of the goddess against the surrounding darkness.
Image by Juan de Lara/The Parthenon 3D
Of course, that effect wasn’t accidental. Even if we consider the creation of the Parthenon to have been divinely inspired, we can best understand it as a work of man — and a meticulously thought-out work at that. For ancient Greek visitors, the illumination of Athena would have been enhanced by the placement of roof apertures, reflecting water pools, and reflective materials, whose original incorporation into the space would come as a surprise to most modern visitors. At present, Parthenon 3D offers the closest experience we have to a time machine set to the Parthenon as Phidias and architects Iktinos and Callicrates originally intended. But as de Lara’s research notes, the building also contained numerous incense burners, so perfect realism won’t be achieved until smells can go through the internet. Visit the Parthenon 3D site here.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
In 1874, Stepan Andreevich Bers published The Cookbook and gave it as a gift to his sister, countess Sophia Andreevna Tolstaya, the wife of the great Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy. The book contained a collection of Tolstoy family recipes, the dishes they served to their family and friends, those fortunate souls who belonged to the aristocratic ruling class of late czarist Russia. 150 years later, this cookbook has been translated and republished by Sergei Beltyukov.
Leo Tolstoy’s Family Recipe Book features dozens of recipes, everything from Tartar Sauce and Spiced Mushrooms (what’s a Russian kitchen without mushrooms?), to Stuffed Dumplings and Green Beans à la Maître d’Hôtel, to Coffee Cake and Viennese Pie. The text comes with a translation, too, of Russian weights and measures used during the period. One recipe Mr. Beltyukov provided to us (which I didn’t see in the book) is for the Tolstoys’ good ole Mac ‘N’ Cheese dish. It goes something like this:
Bring water to a boil, add salt, then add macaroni and leave boiling on light fire until half tender; drain water through a colander, add butter and start putting macaroni back into the pot in layers – layer of macaroni, some grated Parmesan and some vegetable sauce, macaroni again and so on until you run out of macaroni. Put the pot on the edge of the stove, cover with a lid and let it rest in light fire until the macaroni are soft and tender. Shake the pot occasionally to prevent them from burning.
We’ll leave you with bon appétit! — an expression almost certainly heard in the homes of those French-speaking Russian aristocrats.
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Christianity often manifests in popular culture through celebrations like Christmas and Easter, or icons like lambs and fish. Less often do you see it associated with vials of blood and disembodied heads. Yet as the new Hochelaga video above reveals, the most famed Christian artifacts do tend toward the gruesome. Take one particularly renowned example, the Shroud of Turin: hear the name, and you imagine a cloth bearing the image of Jesus Christ. But think about it a moment, and you remember that it’s the bloodstained wrapping of a crucified body — that is, if the tales told about it are true in the first place.
As with any religious relics, you have to decide for yourself what to believe about all of these. If you pay a visit to the Basilica of St. Anthony in Padua, you’ll see on display the preserved jaw of that holy figure — which does, at least, look like a real human jaw. In southeastern France, at the basilica of Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume, you’ll find a skull purported to be that of Mary Magdalene.
And we certainly can’t rule out that it really is, speculative though the evidence may be. The situation grows somewhat more complicated with the head of John the Baptist — or rather, the heads of John the Baptist, four of which have been claimed in different places so far.
“During the Middle Ages, relics were in high demand, and there were always people willing to supply them,” explains Hochelaga creator Tommie Trelawny. “It’s often joked that, if you gathered all the alleged fragments of the true cross, you’d have enough wood to build a small forest.” Even the Shroud of Turin has come under unforgiving scrutiny. Radiocarbon dating has placed it in the mid-fourteenth century, implying a forgery, but more recent X‑ray tests suggest that its linen was made in the first century, between the years 55 and 74: close enough to what we understand as the time of Jesus’ burial. Debates over the authenticity of all these artifacts will continue for centuries — and quite possibly millennia — to come, but their powerful embodiment of both “the deeply disturbing and the hauntingly beautiful” won’t fade away any time soon.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail isn’t a big-budget spectacle, and nobody knew that better than the Pythons themselves. Necessity being the mother of invention, they turned the project’s financial constraints into one of its many sources of humor, fashioning memorable gags out of everything from coconut shells substituting for horses to the sudden shutdown of filming that ends the “story.” But, as explained in the Canned History video above, putting together even the modest sum with which they had to work was hardly a straightforward endeavor. Turned down by studios, the Pythons sought out the only financiers likely to possess both sufficient wealth and sufficient belief in an absurdist TV comedy troupe making their first proper film: rock stars.
This was the mid-nineteen-seventies, recall, when a group with a few hit albums could find themselves making, quite literally, more money than they knew what to do with. Such was the case with Pink Floyd, for example, after releasing The Dark Side of the Moon in 1973.
Monty Python, for their part, had put out not only three seasons of their BBC series Monty Python’s Flying Circus, but also a variety of purchasable goods like books and LPs. The latter made them the music-industry connections that they could use to enlist the likes of not just the Floyd, but also Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, as well as record labels like Island, Charisma, and Chrysalis. As Eric Idle tweeted much later, Zeppelin contributed £31,500, Pink Floyd’s company £21,000, and Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson £6,300: £627,000 in more recent value, or nearly $850,000 in U.S. dollars.
Altogether, Monty Python and the HolyGrail’s budget came to £282,035 in 1974 pounds: by no means a king’s ransom, but just enough to put together a comic take on Arthurian legend. No more conventional investors than the Pythons were conventional filmmakers, the rock stars and other music-industry figures involved made no visits to the set, nor offered any “notes” on the work in progress. One suspects that they were happy just to support a Monty Python project, and even more so to receive the tax break offered for films produced in the U.K. In the event, of course, they all made their money back many times over, with a cut of the Broadway musical adaptation Spamalot to boot. The film’s immediate and outsized success can’t have been far from the mind of George Harrison — that great enemy of the taxman — when Idle called him up a few years later, asking for the money to make Life of Brian.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
During the 1940s and 50s, Hollywood entered a “noir” period, producing riveting films based on hard-boiled fiction. These films were set in dark locations and shot in a black & white aesthetic that fit like a glove. Hardened men wore fedoras and forever smoked cigarettes. Women played the femme fatale role brilliantly. Love was the surest way to death. All of these elements figured into what Roger Ebert calls “the most American film genre” in his short Guide to Film Noir.
If you head over to this list of Noir Films, you can find 60 films from the noir genre, including some classics by John Huston, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang and Ida Lupino. The list also features some cinematic legends like Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson, and even Frank Sinatra. Hope the collection helps you put some noir entertainment into 2025!
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“America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.” That observation tends to be attributed to Tennessee Williams, though it’s become somewhat detached from its source, so deeply does it resonate with a certain experience of life in the United States. But consider this: can every American city claim to be where rock and roll began — or at least the site of the very first rock and roll concert? Cleveland can, thanks to Alan Freed, a famous radio announcer of the nineteen-forties and fifties. The Moondog Coronation Ball he organized in 1952 may have ended in disaster, but it began a pop-cultural era that arguably continues to this day.
Having attained popularity announcing in a variety of radio formats, including jazz and classical music, Freed was awakened to the possibility of what was then known as rhythm and blues by a local record-store owner, Leo Mintz. It was with Mintz’s sponsorship that Freed launched a program on Cleveland’s WJW-AM, for which he cultivated a hepcat persona called “Moondog.” (Some credit the name to an album by Robby Vee and The Vees, and others to the avant-garde street musician Moondog and his eponymous “symphony.”) Starting at midnight, the show broadcast hours of so-called “race music” to not just its already-enthusiastic fan base, but also the young white listeners increasingly intrigued by its captivating, propulsive sounds.
Freed soon commanded enough of an audience to describe himself as “King of the Moondoggers.” When he announced the upcoming Moondog Coronation Ball, a show at Cleveland’s hockey arena featuring sets from such popular acts as Paul Williams and the Hucklebuckers, Tiny Grimes and the Rocking Highlanders (an all-black group whose signature kilts would surely stir up “cultural appropriation” discourse today), Varetta Dillard, and Danny Cobb, the Moondoggers turned out. About 20,000 of them turned out, in fact, twice what the venue could handle. A ticket misprint was to blame, but the damage had been done — or rather, it would be done, when the well-dressed but over-excited crowd stormed the arena and the authorities were called in to shut the show down by force.
In the event, only the first two acts ever took the stage. The planned coronation of the two most popular teenagers in attendance (a holdover from another cultural dimension entirely) never happened. But the spirit of rebelliousness witnessed at this first-ever rock concert was like a genie that couldn’t be put back in its bottle. However square his image, Freed, who popularized the term “rock and roll” as applied to music, was never much of a rule-follower in his professional life. His later implication in the payola bribe scandals of the late fifties sent his career into a tailspin, and his early death followed a few years later. But to judge by re-tellings like the one in the Drunk History video just above, he remains the hero of the story of the Moondog Coronation Ball — and thus a hero of rock and roll history.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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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