Wired magazine has entered the video explainer game with a novel series that takes concepts from kindergarten to graduate school and beyond in under twenty minutes. Their “5 Levels of Difficulty” videos have it all: hip 21st century ideas like blockchain, cute kids saying smart things, a celebration of expertise and the communication skills today’s experts need to present their work to a diverse, international public of all ages and education levels. This is no gimmick—it’s entertaining and accessible, while still informative for even the best informed.
Take the video above, in which 23-year-old composer and musician Jacob Collier explains the concept of musical harmony. His students include a child, a teen, a college student, a professional, and… Herbie Hancock. “I’m positive,” he says, “that everyone can leave this video with some understanding, at some level.” At level 1, we understand harmony as an expression of mood or feeling, produced by adding “more notes” to a melody. A simple but effective definition.
Level 2 introduces basic theory—using chords, or triads, to explain how harmony can produce different emotions, modulating from major to minor, and creating “narratives” within a song. In Level 3, harmony becomes a language, and the vocabulary of the circle of fifths comes in. Collier’s college student companion also plays guitar, and the two jam through a few chord voicings to give his example song, “Amazing Grace,” a smooth and jazzy feel. At Level 4, a professional pianist learns a few things about overtones and undertones, compositional arranging, and “negative harmony.”
Then, at 8:30, we get to the main attraction, and, as tends to happen in these videos at the final stage, student and teacher roles reverse. Collier essentially interviews Hancock on harmony, both perched behind keyboards and speaking the language of music fluently. Non-professionals won’t have had nearly enough preparation in 8 minutes to grasp what’s going on. It’s high level stuff, but even if you’re mystified by the theory, stick around for the stories—and learn what Miles Davis meant when he told Hancock, “don’t play the butter notes,” advice on playing harmony that changed everything for him.
When you watch an animated film, you visit a world. That holds true, to an extent, for live-action movies as well, but much more so for those cinematic experiences whose audiovisual details all come, of necessity, crafted from scratch. Walt Disney understood that better than anyone else in the motion-picture industry, and none could argue that he didn’t capitalize on it. When they founded Studio Ghibli, Hayao Miyazaki and the late Isao Takahata — in the fine 20th-century Japanese tradition of borrowing Western ideas and then refining them nearly beyond recognition — took Disney’s deliberate world-building a step further, painstakingly crafting a look and feel for their productions that amounts to a separate reality: rich, coherent, and, for the millions of die-hard Ghibli fans all around the world, immensely appealing.
In a few years, those fans will get the chance to enter Ghibli’s world in a much more concrete sense. Disney’s insight that his audience would beat a path to an amusement park based on his studio’s movies led to Disneyland, Disney World, and their global successors, two of which, Tokyo Disneyland and Tokyo Disney Sea, now rank among the five most visited theme parks in the world.
The area of the Japanese capital already offers an acclaimed Ghibli experience in the form of the Ghibli Museum, but in just a few years the city of Nagakute, a suburb of Nagoya, will see the opening of Ghibli’s own version of Disneyland, a theme park filled with attractions based on the studios beloved films.
Scheduled to open in 2022 on the same plot of land used for the 2005 World’s Fair (where the house from My Neighbor Totoro was then built and still stands today), Ghibli’s theme park will greet visitors with a main gate reminiscent, writes Kotaku’s Brian Ashcraft, of “19th-century structures out of Howl’s Moving Castle as well as a recreation of Whisper of the Heart’s antique shop.”
It also includes “the Big Ghibli Warehouse, which is filled with all sorts of Ghibli themed play areas as well as exhibition areas and small cinemas,” a Princess Mononoke village, a combined area for Howl’s Moving Castle and Kiki’s Delivery Service called Witch Valley, and the Totoro-themed Dondoko Forest. Will Studio Ghibli’s theme park rise into the ranks of the world’s most visited? Nobody who has yet visited their world, in any of its manifestations thus far, would put it past them.
Studio Ghibli has released some basic concept for the new theme park. You can get a few glimpses of what they have in mind on this page.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Back in 2012, a redditor by the name of “Kepleronlyknows” wondered what’s the longest distance you could travel by sea without hitting land. And then s/he hazarded an educated guess: “you can sail almost 20,000 miles in a straight line from Pakistan to the Kamchatka Peninsula, Russia.”
Six years later, two computer scientists–Rohan Chabukswar (United Technologies Research Center in Ireland) and Kushal Mukherjee (IBM Research in India)–have developed an algorithm that offers a more definitive answer. According to their computations, “Kepleronlyknows was entirely correct,” notes the MIT Technology Review.
The longest path over water “begins in Sonmiani, Balochistan, Pakistan, passes between Africa and Madagascar and then between Antarctica and Tierra del Fuego in South America, and ends in the Karaginsky District, Kamchatka Krai, in Russia. It is 32,089.7 kilometers long.” Or 19,939 miles.
While they were at it, Chabukswar and Mukherjee also determined the longest land journey you could take without hitting the sea. That path, again notes the MIT Technology Review, “runs from near Jinjiang, Fujian, in China, weaves through Mongolia Kazakhstan and Russia, and finally reaches Europe to finish near Sagres in Portugal. In total the route passes through 15 countries over 11,241.1 kilometers.” Or 6,984 miles. You can read Chabukswar and Mukherjee’s research report here.
Disasters both natural and man-made—or in the case of climate change, some measure of both—can reduce built environments to ash and rubble with little warning. In cases like the Lisbon earthquake, the Great Fire of London, or the bombing of Dresden, cities have been completely rebuilt. In others, like the utterly destroyed Pompeii, they lay in ruins forever, or like Chernobyl, become irradiated ghost towns. Such events stand as singular moments in history, like ruptures in time, shaking faith in religion, science, and government.
In the case of the Great 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, which destroyed 80% of the city with its estimated magnitude of 7.9, the disaster also serves as a dire historical warning for what might happen again if seismologists’ current grim prognostications prove correct. In the film above, “A Trip Down Market Street” by the Miles brothers, we see the bustling city just four days before the quake. Film historian David Kiehn has dated this footage to April 14th, 1906. The very convincing sound design has been added by Mike Upchurch.
The film shows Market Street in full swing, Model T’s jostling with horsedrawn carriages over streetcar tracks, while pedestrians weave in and out of the traffic. The four Miles brothers, Harry, Herbert, Earle, and Joe, left for New York shortly after shooting in San Francisco and just missed the quake. They had sent the negatives ahead, barely saving this valuable footage. They returned to find their studios, and their city, destroyed by the quake and the nearly four days of fires that followed it. They did what any filmmaker would—started filming.
Their footage of the devastation was long thought lost until it was re-discovered at a flea market. Kiehn digitized the film and it was recently screened at the Bay Area Edison Theater while on its way to the Library of Congress, just before the 112th anniversary of the quake. The Miles brothers, says Kiehn, “shot almost two hours of film after the earthquake and very little of it survives. I think this is one of the longest surviving pieces.” It begins with a harrowing trip down Market Street, reduced from bustling city center to wasteland.
The quake, writes Bill Van Niekerken at the San Francisco Chronicle, caused “unfathomable devastation… At least 700 are thought to have perished, with some estimates at more than 3,000…. 490 city blocks were leveled, with 28,188 buildings destroyed. More than 200,000 people were left homeless.” From this horror, Niekerkan draws inspiration. “San Francisco, however, rose from the ashes, rebuilt and became a greater city, a shining symbol of the West.”
Above, we find an earlier example of the filmmaker’s attention to detail … and his appetite for risk. In the 1928 film, The Circus, Chaplin took more than 200 takes to complete the Lion’s Cage sceneshown above. Many of those takes, the official Charlie Chaplin website reminds us, took place inside the lion’s cage itself. As the scene unfolds, the tension builds and Chaplin puts in a performance that helped him secure his first Academy Award.
Enjoy.
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The old joke about supergroups being less than the sum of their parts often holds true in rock and pop. Too many cooks, and all that. But what happens when you bring together superstars from different genres? This was basically the idea of jazz fusion, and especially of Miles Davis, one of fusion’s principle pioneers in the late sixties and early seventies. It’s a genre of music people seem to either love or hate. Those who fall into the latter camp often cite the tendency of jazz-rock ensembles to overplay, to the detriment of both jazz and rock.
Following Davis’ innovations, virtuoso collaborators like John McLaughlin went on to form their own supergroups, while the star trumpeter checked out for a while. But “after five years of silence,” as People magazine wrote in 1981, his trumpet was “once again heard in the land.”
Davis assembled a few bands and charged ahead in an even more fusion‑y direction, despite some severe criticism from music writers, fans, and fellow performers. He covered Cyndi Lauper and Michael Jackson and collaborated with new wave bands and pop stars like Toto. He seemed determined to mix it up with as many major players as he could.
The results were sometimes less than the sum of their parts, though his experimentation crystalized in an excellent record in 1986, the Marcus Miller-produced jazz/funk/pop/R&B album Tutu. That same year, Davis and a loosely-assembled band took the stage at Giants Stadium for a short set at an Amnesty International benefit concert, where they were joined by jazz and rock guitarist Robben Ford and, on the last song, by special guest star Carlos Santana. Tutu, notes The Last Miles—website for George Cole’s book of the same name—“was still a few months away from its official release.”
The band jammed through two of the new album’s tunes, the title track and “Splatch.” Then, for the final song, “Burn”—“a rock-funk number that Miles first heard in 1980”—Santana took the stage. You can see video of them playing that song at the top of the post and hear the full audio of the short performance, less than 30 minutes, further up. The eight-piece band plays a typically busy fusion set, with solo after amazing solo over a full-on wall of electrified sound. I confess, I find this side of Miles a little assaultive next to the restraint of much earlier work, but that’s a matter of personal taste. It’s impossible to say a bad word about the quality of these performances.
How did these superstars end up working together, not only at this benefit but in other concerts and recordings? Find out in the interviews above from Santana and Ford, both of whom describe their experiences as major career highlights. The respect in both cases, a rarity with Miles Davis, was mutual.
You’ve heard the word “blockchain” many times now, but probably not quite as many as you’ve heard the word “bitcoin.” Yet you surely have a sense that the referents of those two words have a connection, and even if you haven’t yet been interested in either, you may well know that blockchain, a technology, makes Bitcoin, a currency, possible in the first place. Their sheer novelty has already given rise to a mini-industry of explainer videos, more of them dealing directly with bitcoin than blockchain, but in time the latter could potentially overtake the former in importance, to the degree that it becomes as vital to society as the protocols that undergird the internet itself.
Or at least you could come away convinced of that after watching the blockchain explainer videos featured here. The shortest of the three, the one by the Institute for the Future at the top of the post, attempts to break down, in just two minutes, the principles behind this technology, still in its infancy, in which so many see such revolutionary potential.
“Blockchains store information across a network of personal computers, making them not just decentralized but distributed,” says the video’s narrator. “This means no central company or person owns the system, yet everyone can use it and help run it.” And according to blockchain’s boosters, that very decentralization and distribution makes it that much more trustable and less hackable.
In the Wired video just above, blockchain researcher Bettina Warburg explains her subject in five different ways to people at five different stages of life, from a five-year-old girl to a fully grown academic. Actually, that last interlocutor, an NYU historian named Finn Brunton, does much of the explaining himself, and right at the beginning of his segment (at 9:48) rolls out one of the clearer and more intriguing rundown of the nature of blockchain currently floating around on the internet:
A technical definition of blockchain is that it is a persistent, transparent, public, append-only ledger. So it is a system that you can add data to, and not change previous data within. It does this through a mechanism for creating consensus between scattered, or distributed, parties that do not need to trust each other. They just need to trust the mechanism by which their consensus is arrived at. In the case of blockchain, it relies on some form of challenge such that no one actor on the network is able to solve this challenge more consistently than anyone else on the network. It randomizes the process, and in theory ensures that no one can force the blockchain to accept a particular entry onto the ledger that others disagree with.
Brunton also emphasizes that “almost every aspect of it that is connected with the concept of money” — including but not limited to Bitcoin — “is wildly over-hyped.” Those who can look past the Gold Rush-style ballyhooing of those early applications of blockchain can better grasp what role the technology, which essentially enables the building of systems to securely exchange information over the internet that no one person or company owns, might one day play in many parts of our lives, from finance to energy to health care. “Credit scores that aren’t controlled by a handful of high-risk, data-breach-prone companies,” promises Carissa Carter of Stanford’s d.school, “credible news systems that resist censorship; efficient power grids that could lower your power bills.”
Before it can bring those wonders, Bitcoin must first overcome formidable technical limitations: as Computerworld’s Lucas Mearian writes, for instance,” the Bitcoin blockchain harnesses anywhere between 10 and 100 times as much computing power compared to all of Google’s serving farms put together.” But then, few of the first developers of the technologies that drive the internet could have imagined all we do with them across the world today, and those who did must have had a solid understanding of its most basic elements. How do you know when you’ve attained that understanding? “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough,” as Albert Einstein once said, and as Citi Innovation Lab CTO Shai Rubin quotes him as saying at the beginning of his own blockchain explainer, performed in less than fifteen minutes using no pieces of technology more revolutionary than a whiteboard and marker.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
In the spring of 1934, a young man who wanted to be a writer hitchhiked to Florida to meet his idol, Ernest Hemingway.
Arnold Samuelson was an adventurous 22-year-old. He had been born in a sod house in North Dakota to Norwegian immigrant parents. He completed his coursework in journalism at the University of Minnesota, but refused to pay the $5 fee for a diploma. After college he wanted to see the country, so he packed his violin in a knapsack and thumbed rides out to California. He sold a few stories about his travels to the Sunday MinneapolisTribune.
In April of ’34 Samuelson was back in Minnesota when he read a story by Hemingway in Cosmopolitan, called “One Trip Across.” The short story would later become part of Hemingway’s fourth novel, To Have and Have Not. Samuelson was so impressed with the story that he decided to travel 2,000 miles to meet Hemingway and ask him for advice. “It seemed a damn fool thing to do,” Samuelson would later write, “but a twenty-two-year-old tramp during the Great Depression didn’t have to have much reason for what he did.”
And so, at the time of year when most hobos were traveling north, Samuelson headed south. He hitched his way to Florida and then hopped a freight train from the mainland to Key West. Riding on top of a boxcar, Samuelson could not see the railroad tracks underneath him–only miles and miles of water as the train left the mainland. “It was headed south over the long bridges between the keys and finally right out over the ocean,” writes Samuelson. “It couldn’t happen now–the tracks have been torn out–but it happened then, almost as in a dream.”
When Samuelson arrived in Key West he discovered that times were especially hard there. Most of the cigar factories had shut down and the fishing was poor. That night he went to sleep on the turtling dock, using his knapsack as a pillow. The ocean breeze kept the mosquitos away. A few hours later a cop woke him up and invited him to sleep in the bull pen of the city jail. “I was under arrest every night and released every morning to see if I could find my way out of town,” writes Samuelson. After his first night in the mosquito-infested jail, he went looking for the town’s most famous resident.
When I knocked on the front door of Ernest Hemingway’s house in Key West, he came out and stood squarely in front of me, squinty with annoyance, waiting for me to speak. I had nothing to say. I couldn’t recall a word of my prepared speech. He was a big man, tall, narrow-hipped, wide-shouldered, and he stood with his feet spread apart, his arms hanging at his sides. He was crouched forward slightly with his weight on his toes, in the instinctive poise of a fighter ready to hit.
“What do you want?” said Hemingway. After an awkward moment, Samuelson explained that he had bummed his way from Minneapolis just to see him. “I read your story ‘One Trip Across’ in Cosmopolitan. I liked it so much I came down to have a talk with you.” Hemingway seemed to relax. “Why the hell didn’t you say you just wanted to chew the fat? I thought you wanted to visit.” Hemingway told Samuelson he was busy, but invited him to come back at one-thirty the next afternoon.
After another night in jail, Samuelson returned to the house and found Hemingway sitting in the shade on the north porch, wearing khaki pants and bedroom slippers. He had a glass of whiskey and a copy of the New York Times. The two men began talking. Sitting there on the porch, Samuelson could sense that Hemingway was keeping him at a safe distance: “You were at his home but not in it. Almost like talking to a man out on a street.” They began by talking about the Cosmopolitan story, and Samuelson mentioned his failed attempts at writing fiction. Hemingway offered some advice.
“The most important thing I’ve learned about writing is never write too much at a time,” Hemingway said, tapping my arm with his finger. “Never pump yourself dry. Leave a little for the next day. The main thing is to know when to stop. Don’t wait till you’ve written yourself out. When you’re still going good and you come to an interesting place and you know what’s going to happen next, that’s the time to stop. Then leave it alone and don’t think about it; let your subconscious mind do the work. The next morning, when you’ve had a good sleep and you’re feeling fresh, rewrite what you wrote the day before. When you come to the interesting place and you know what is going to happen next, go on from there and stop at another high point of interest. That way, when you get through, your stuff is full of interesting places and when you write a novel you never get stuck and you make it interesting as you go along.”
Hemingway advised Samuelson to avoid contemporary writers and compete only with the dead ones whose works have stood the test of time. “When you pass them up you know you’re going good.” He asked Samuelson what writers he liked. Samuelson said he enjoyed Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. “Ever read War and Peace?” Hemingway asked. Samuelson said he had not. “That’s a damned good book. You ought to read it. We’ll go up to my workshop and I’ll make out a list you ought to read.”
His workshop was over the garage in back of the house. I followed him up an outside stairway into his workshop, a square room with a tile floor and shuttered windows on three sides and long shelves of books below the windows to the floor. In one corner was a big antique flat-topped desk and an antique chair with a high back. E.H. took the chair in the corner and we sat facing each other across the desk. He found a pen and began writing on a piece of paper and during the silence I was very ill at ease. I realized I was taking up his time, and I wished I could entertain him with my hobo experiences but thought they would be too dull and kept my mouth shut. I was there to take everything he would give and had nothing to return.
Hemingway wrote down a list of two short stories and 14 books and handed it to Samuelson. Most of the texts you can find in our collection, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices. If the texts don’t appear in our eBook collection itself, you’ll find a link to the text directly below.
Hemingway reached over to his shelf and picked up a collection of stories by Stephen Crane and gave it to Samuelson. He also handed him a copy of his own novel, A Farewell to Arms. “I wish you’d send it back when you get through with it,” Hemingway said of his own book. “It’s the only one I have of that edition.” Samuelson gratefully accepted the books and took them back to the jail that evening to read. “I did not feel like staying there another night,” he writes, “and the next afternoon I finished reading A Farewell to Arms, intending to catch the first freight out to Miami. At one o’clock, I brought the books back to Hemingway’s house.” When he got there he was astonished by what Hemingway said.
“There is something I want to talk to you about. Let’s sit down,” he said thoughtfully. “After you left yesterday, I was thinking I’ll need somebody to sleep on board my boat. What are you planning on now?”
“I haven’t any plans.”
“I’ve got a boat being shipped from New York. I’ll have to go up to Miami Tuesday and run her down and then I’ll have to have someone on board. There wouldn’t be much work. If you want the job, you could keep her cleaned up in the mornings and still have time for your writing.”
“That would be swell,” replied Samuelson. And so began a year-long adventure as Hemingway’s assistant. For a dollar a day, Samuelson slept aboard the 38-foot cabin cruiser Pilar and kept it in good condition. Whenever Hemingway went fishing or took the boat to Cuba, Samuelson went along. He wrote about his experiences–including those quoted and paraphrased here–in a remarkable memoir, With Hemingway: A Year in Key West and Cuba. During the course of that year, Samuelson and Hemingway talked at length about writing. Hemingway published an account of their discussions in a 1934 Esquire article called “Monologue to the Maestro: A High Seas Letter.” (Click here to open it as a PDF.) Hemingway’s article with his advice to Samuelson was one source for our February 19 post, “Seven Tips From Ernest Hemingway on How to Write Fiction.”
When the work arrangement had been settled, Hemingway drove the young man back to the jail to pick up his knapsack and violin. Samuelson remembered his feeling of triumph at returning with the famous author to get his things. “The cops at the jail seemed to think nothing of it that I should move from their mosquito chamber to the home of Ernest Hemingway. They saw his Model A roadster outside waiting for me. They saw me come out of it. They saw Ernest at the wheel waiting and they never said a word.”
Note: An earlier version of this post originally appeared on our site in May, 2013.
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