The Story of Elizebeth Friedman, the Pioneering Cryptologist Who Thwarted the Nazis & Got Burned by J. Edgar Hoover

Elize­beth S. Fried­man: Sub­ur­ban Mom or Nin­ja Nazi Hunter?

Both, though in her life­time, the press was far more inclined to fix­ate on her lady­like aspect and home­mak­ing duties than her career as a self-taught cryp­to­an­a­lyst, with head­lines such as “Pret­ty Woman Who Pro­tects Unit­ed States” and “Solved By Woman.”

The nov­el­ty of her gen­der led to a brief stint as America’s most rec­og­niz­able code­break­er, more famous even than her fel­low cryp­tol­o­gist, hus­band William Fried­man, who was instru­men­tal in the found­ing of the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency dur­ing the Cold War.

Renowned though she was, the high­ly clas­si­fied nature of her work exposed her to a secu­ri­ty threat in the per­son of FBI direc­tor J. Edgar Hoover.

Hoover cred­it­ed the FBI, and by exten­sion, him­self, for deci­pher­ing some 50 Nazi radio cir­cuits’ codes, at least two of them pro­tect­ed with Enig­ma machines.

He also rushed to raid South Amer­i­can sources in his zeal to make an impres­sion and advance his career, scup­per­ing Fried­man’s mis­sion by caus­ing Berlin to put a stop to all trans­mis­sions to that area.

Too bad no one asked him to demon­strate the meth­ods he’d used to crack these impos­si­ble nuts.

The Ger­man agents used the same codes and radio tech­niques as the Con­sol­i­dat­ed Exporters Cor­po­ra­tion, a mob-backed rum-run­ning oper­a­tion whose codes and ciphers Elize­beth had trans­lat­ed as chief cryp­tol­o­gist for the U.S. Trea­sury Depart­ment dur­ing Pro­hi­bi­tion.

As an expert wit­ness in the crim­i­nal tri­al of inter­na­tion­al rum­run­ner Bert Mor­ri­son and his asso­ciates, she mod­est­ly assert­ed that it was “real­ly quite sim­ple to decode their mes­sages if you know what to look for,” but the sam­ple decryp­tion she pro­vid­ed the jury made it plain that her work required tremen­dous skill. The Mob Museum’s Jeff Bur­bank sets the scene:

She read a sam­ple mes­sage, refer­ring to a brand of whiskey: “Out of Old Colonel in Pints.” She showed how the three “o” and “l” let­ters in “Colonel” had iden­ti­cal cipher code let­ters. From the cipher’s let­ters for “Colonel” she could fig­ure out the let­ter the rack­e­teers chose for “e,” the most fre­quent­ly occur­ring let­ter in Eng­lish, based on oth­er brand names of liquor they men­tioned in oth­er mes­sages. The “o” and “l” let­ters in “alco­hol,” she said, had the same cipher let­ters as “Colonel.” 

Cinchy, right?

Elizebeth’s biog­ra­ph­er, Jason Fagone, notes that in dis­cov­er­ing the iden­ti­ty, code­name and ciphers used by Ger­man spy net­work Oper­a­tion Bolí­var’s leader, Johannes Siegfried Beck­er, she suc­ceed­ed where “every oth­er law enforce­ment agency and intel­li­gence agency failed. She did what the FBI could not do.”

Sex­ism and Hoover were not the only ene­mies.

William Friedman’s crit­i­cism of the NSA for clas­si­fy­ing doc­u­ments he thought should be a mat­ter of pub­lic record led to a rift result­ing in the con­fis­ca­tion of dozens of papers from the cou­ple’s home that doc­u­ment­ed their work.

This, togeth­er with the 50-year “TOP SECRET ULTRA” clas­si­fi­ca­tion of her WWII records, ensured that Elize­beth’s life would end beneath “a vast dome of silence.”

Recog­ni­tion is mount­ing, how­ev­er.

Near­ly 20 years after her 1980 death, she was induct­ed into the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency’s Cryp­to­log­ic Hall of Hon­or as “a pio­neer in code break­ing.”

A Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency build­ing now bears both Fried­mans’ names.

The U.S. Coast Guard will soon be adding a Leg­end Class Cut­ter named the USCGC Fried­man to their fleet.

In addi­tion to Fagone’s biog­ra­phy, a pic­ture book, Code Break­er, Spy Hunter: How Elize­beth Fried­man Changed the Course of Two World Wars, was pub­lished ear­li­er this year.

As far as we know, there are no pic­ture books ded­i­cat­ed to the pio­neer­ing work of J. Edgar Hoover….

Elize­beth Fried­man, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Watch The Code­break­er, PBS’s Amer­i­can Expe­ri­ence biog­ra­phy of Elize­beth Fried­man here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Enig­ma Machine: How Alan Tur­ing Helped Break the Unbreak­able Nazi Code

How British Code­break­ers Built the First Elec­tron­ic Com­put­er

Three Ama­teur Cryp­tog­ra­phers Final­ly Decrypt­ed the Zodi­ac Killer’s Let­ters: A Look Inside How They Solved a Half Cen­tu­ry-Old Mys­tery

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her June 7 for a Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain: The Peri­od­i­cal Cica­da, a free vir­tu­al vari­ety hon­or­ing the 17-Year Cicadas of Brood X. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

167 Pieces of Life & Work Advice from Kevin Kelly, Founding Editor of Wired Magazine & The Whole Earth Review

Image by Christo­pher Michel, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

I am a big admir­er of Kevin Kel­ly for the same rea­son I am of Bri­an Eno—he is con­stant­ly think­ing. That thirst for knowl­edge and end­less curios­i­ty has always been the back­bone to their par­tic­u­lar art forms. For Eno it’s music, but for Kel­ly it’s in his edi­tor­ship of the Whole Earth Review and then Wired mag­a­zine, pro­vid­ing a space for big ideas to reach the widest audi­ence. (He’s also the rea­son one of my buck­et lists is the Nakasendo, after see­ing his pho­to essay on it.)

On his 68th birth­day in 2020, Kel­ly post­ed on his blog a list of 68 “Unso­licit­ed Bits of Advice.” One bit of advice that frames his thought process and his work is this one:

“I’m pos­i­tive that in 100 years much of what I take to be true today will be proved to be wrong, maybe even embar­rass­ing­ly wrong, and I try real­ly hard to iden­ti­fy what it is that I am wrong about today.”

How­ev­er, the list is more about wis­dom from a life well-spent. Many fall into the art of being a curi­ous human among oth­er humans:

  • Every­one is shy. Oth­er peo­ple are wait­ing for you to intro­duce your­self to them, they are wait­ing for you to send them an email, they are wait­ing for you to ask them on a date. Go ahead.
  • The more you are inter­est­ed in oth­ers, the more inter­est­ing they find you. To be inter­est­ing, be inter­est­ed.
  • Being able to lis­ten well is a super­pow­er. While lis­ten­ing to some­one you love keep ask­ing them “Is there more?”, until there is no more.

And this is prob­a­bly the hard­est piece of advice these days:

  • Learn how to learn from those you dis­agree with, or even offend you. See if you can find the truth in what they believe.

Oth­er bits of advice have to do with cre­ativ­i­ty and being an artist:

  • Always demand a dead­line. A dead­line weeds out the extra­ne­ous and the ordi­nary. It pre­vents you from try­ing to make it per­fect, so you have to make it dif­fer­ent. Dif­fer­ent is bet­ter.
  • Don’t be the smartest per­son in the room. Hang­out with, and learn from, peo­ple smarter than your­self. Even bet­ter, find smart peo­ple who will dis­agree with you.
  • To make some­thing good, just do it. To make some­thing great, just re-do it, re-do it, re-do it. The secret to mak­ing fine things is in remak­ing them.
  • Art is in what you leave out.

And some of the more inter­est­ing ones are his dis­agree­ments with per­ceived wis­dom:

  • Fol­low­ing your bliss is a recipe for paral­y­sis if you don’t know what you are pas­sion­ate about. A bet­ter mot­to for most youth is “mas­ter some­thing, any­thing”. Through mas­tery of one thing, you can drift towards exten­sions of that mas­tery that bring you more joy, and even­tu­al­ly dis­cov­er where your bliss is.

One year lat­er, Kel­ly has returned with 99 more bits of advice. I guess he couldn’t wait til his 99th birth­day for it. Some favorites include:

  • If some­thing fails where you thought it would fail, that is not a fail­ure.
  • Being wise means hav­ing more ques­tions than answers.
  • I have nev­er met a per­son I admired who did not read more books than I did.
  • Every per­son you meet knows an amaz­ing lot about some­thing you know vir­tu­al­ly noth­ing about. Your job is to dis­cov­er what it is, and it won’t be obvi­ous.

and final­ly:

  • Don’t let your email inbox become your to-do list.

There is a small shift in Kelly’s 2021 list from his 2020 list, like a lit­tle more frus­tra­tion with the world, a need for more order in the chaos. I won­der what his advice will be in a few more years?

via Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wired Co-Founder Kevin Kel­ly Gives 36 Lec­tures on Our Future World: Edu­ca­tion, Movies, Robots, Autonomous Cars & More

The Best Mag­a­zine Arti­cles Ever, Curat­ed by Kevin Kel­ly

What Books Could Be Used to Rebuild Civ­i­liza­tion?: Lists by Bri­an Eno, Stew­art Brand, Kevin Kel­ly & Oth­er For­ward-Think­ing Minds

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

A Young Janis Joplin Plays a Passionate Set at One of Her First Gigs in San Francisco (1963)

From her ear­ly, unhap­py teen years in Port Arthur, Texas, Janis Joplin seemed to know she want­ed to be a blues singer. She once said she decid­ed to become a singer when a friend “loaned her his Bessie Smith and Lead­bel­ly records,” writes biog­ra­ph­er Ellis Amburn. “Ten years lat­er, Janis was hailed as the pre­mier blues singer of her time. She paid trib­ute to Bessie by buy­ing her a head­stone for her unmarked grave.” She was devot­ed to the blues, from her ear­li­est encoun­ters with the music in her youth to her last record­ed song, the lone­ly, a capel­la blues, “Mer­cedes Benz.”

But when Joplin first appeared on the San Fran­cis­co scene in 1963, she did so as a Dylan-influ­enced folkie fresh from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas, Austin. The year before, she had been described by a pro­file in The Dai­ly Tex­an as an artist who “goes bare­foot­ed when she feels like it, wears Levis to class because they’re more com­fort­able, and car­ries her auto­harp with her every­where she goes so that in case she gets the urge to break into song, it will be handy.” The arti­cle was titled “She Dares to Be Dif­fer­ent.”

Joplin’s folk per­sona was hard­ly unique in either San Fran­cis­co or Austin in the ear­ly 60s. “In fact, her love of Dylan and folk sim­ply marked her out as a rid­er of the zeit­geist,” writes music jour­nal­ist Chris Salewicz. “When, for exam­ple, a for­mer Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas alum­nus called Chet Helms passed through [Austin] he was aston­ished at the wealth of folk music.” Helms, who had already moved west, promised Joplin gigs in San Fran­cis­co. The pair hitch­hiked to the city “mid­way through Jan­u­ary 1963, with con­sid­er­able trep­i­da­tion… a trek in which they spent 50 hours on the road.”

Once in North Beach, a neigh­bor­hood defined by City Lights book­store and the Beats, Helms found Joplin gigs at Cof­fee and Con­fu­sion, then the Cof­fee Gallery, where she “was just one of many future rock­ers to play the Cof­fee Gallery as a folkie,” writes Alice Echols. In South Bay cof­fee­hous­es, she met Jer­ry Gar­cia and future Jef­fer­son Air­plane gui­tarist Jor­ma Kauko­nen. Every­one made the cof­fee­house rounds, acoustic gui­tar in hand. It was the way to make a name in the scene, which Janis did quick­ly, appear­ing the same year she arrived in San Fran­cis­co on the side stage at the Mon­terey Folk Fes­ti­val.

But Janis brought some­thing dif­fer­ent than oth­er stu­dents of Dylan — big­ger and bold­er and loud­er and deeply root­ed in a South­ern blues tra­di­tion Joplin spread to aston­ished beat­niks like a “Blues His­to­ri­an,” one com­menter notes, “turn­ing a small audi­ence on to some obscure and for­got­ten per­form­ers, whose music would serve as the foun­da­tion for an entire genre yet to come.” You can hear her do just that in the gig above at the Cof­fee Gallery in 1963: “no drums, no crowds. Just Janis and a small group of peo­ple gath­ered to hear some sam­ples of rur­al blues, done by an enthu­si­ast from Texas.”

See the full setlist below. Oth­er per­form­ers on the record­ing, accord­ing to the YouTube uploader, are Lar­ry Han­ks on acoustic gui­tar and vocals, and Bil­ly Roberts (or pos­si­bly Roger Perkins) on acoustic gui­tar, as well as ban­jo, vocals, and har­mon­i­ca.

Leav­ing’ This Morn­ing (K.C. Blues)
Dad­dy, Dad­dy, Dad­dy
Care­less Love
Bour­geois Blues
Black Moun­tain Blues
Gospel Ship
Stealin’

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Janis Joplin’s Last TV Per­for­mance & Inter­view: The Dick Cavett Show (1970)

Hear a Rare First Record­ing of Janis Joplin’s Hit “Me and Bob­by McGee,” Writ­ten by Kris Kristof­fer­son

Janis Joplin & Tom Jones Bring the House Down in an Unlike­ly Duet of “Raise Your Hand” (1969)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him @jdmagness

The First Cellphone: Discover Motorola’s DynaTAC 8000X, a 2‑Pound Brick Priced at $3,995 (1984)

We get the cul­ture our tech­nol­o­gy per­mits, and in the 21st cen­tu­ry no tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment has changed cul­ture like that of the smart­phone. As with every piece of per­son­al tech­nol­o­gy that we strug­gle to remem­ber how we lived with­out, it evolved into being from a series of sim­pler pre­de­ces­sors that, no mat­ter how clunky they seem now, were received as tech­no­log­i­cal mar­vels in their day. Take it from Mar­tin Coop­er, the Motoro­la Engi­neer who invent­ed the first hand­held cel­lu­lar mobile phone. “We did­n’t know it was going to be his­toric in any way at all,” he says of the first pub­licly demon­strat­ed cell­phone call in 1973 in the Bloomberg video above. “We were only wor­ried about one thing: is the phone going to work when we turn it on?”

The device Coop­er had in hand was the pro­to­type that would even­tu­al­ly become the Motoro­la DynaT­AC 8000X, the first com­mer­cial portable cel­lu­lar phone. (This as dis­tinct from the exist­ing car-phone sys­tems that Coop­er cred­its with inspir­ing him to devel­op an entire­ly hand­held ver­sion.) Brought to mar­ket in 1983, it weighed about two pounds, took ten hours to charge a bat­tery that last­ed only 30 min­utes, could store no more than 30 phone num­bers, and cost near­ly $10,000 in today’s dol­lars.

Yet “con­sumers were so impressed by the con­cept of being always acces­si­ble with a portable phone that wait­ing lists for the DynaT­AC 8000X were in the thou­sands,” says Motoro­la design mas­ter Rudy Krolopp as quot­ed by the Project Man­age­ment Insti­tute. “In 1983, the notion of sim­ply mak­ing wire­less phone calls was rev­o­lu­tion­ary.”

38 years after “the brick,” as the 8000X was known, we’ve grown so used to that notion that many of us hard­ly ever make wire­less phone calls any­more, pre­fer­ring to com­mu­ni­cate on our phones through text mes­sages or an ever-expand­ing uni­verse of inter­net-based apps — to say noth­ing of the oth­er aspects of our lives increas­ing­ly han­dled through palm-sized touch­screens. “The mod­ern smart­phone is a tech­no­log­i­cal mar­vel,” says Coop­er. “It real­ly is incred­i­ble, all the stuff that is squeezed into that cell­phone.” Yet despite the aston­ish­ing evo­lu­tion of his inven­tion it rep­re­sents, he’s not sat­is­fied. “We think that we can make a smart­phone that does all things for all peo­ple, and yet we know that it does­n’t do any of those things per­fect­ly. We’ve still got a ways to go.” If you’re read­ing this on a smart­phone, know that you hold in your hand the “brick” of 2059.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lyn­da Bar­ry on How the Smart­phone Is Endan­ger­ing Three Ingre­di­ents of Cre­ativ­i­ty: Lone­li­ness, Uncer­tain­ty & Bore­dom

Film­mak­er Wim Wen­ders Explains How Mobile Phones Have Killed Pho­tog­ra­phy

A 1947 French Film Accu­rate­ly Pre­dict­ed Our 21st-Cen­tu­ry Addic­tion to Smart­phones

When We All Have Pock­et Tele­phones (1923)

The World’s First Mobile Phone Shown in 1922 Vin­tage Film

Sci­en­tist Cre­ates a Work­ing Rotary Cell­phone

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

The Great Wave Off Kanagawa by Hokusai: An Introduction to the Iconic Japanese Woodblock Print in 17 Minutes

When wood­cut artist Kat­sushi­ka Hoku­sai made his famous print The Great Wave off Kana­gawa in 1830 — part of the series Thir­ty-six Views of Mount Fuji — he was 70 years old and had lived his entire life in a Japan closed off from the rest of the world. In the 19th cen­tu­ry, how­ev­er, “the rest of the world was becom­ing indus­tri­al­ized,” James Payne explains above in his Great Art Explained video, “and the Japan­ese were con­cerned about for­eign inva­sions.” The Great Wave shows “an image of Japan fear­ful that the sea — which has pro­tect­ed its peace­ful iso­la­tion for so long — would become its down­fall.”

It’s also true, how­ev­er, that The Great Wave would not have exist­ed with­out a for­eign inva­sion. Pruss­ian blue, the first sta­ble blue pig­ment, acci­den­tal­ly invent­ed around 1705 in Berlin, arrived in the ports of Nagasa­ki on Dutch and Chi­nese ships in the 1820s. Pruss­ian Blue would start a new artis­tic move­ment in Japan, aizuri‑e, wood­cuts print­ed in bright, vivid blues.

“Hoku­sai was one of the first Japan­ese print­mak­ers to bold­ly embrace the colour,” Hugh Davies writes at The Con­ver­sa­tion, “a deci­sion that would have major impli­ca­tions in the world of art.” When the country’s iso­la­tion­ist poli­cies end­ed in the 1850s, “a show­case at the inau­gur­al Japan­ese Pavil­ion ele­vat­ed the artis­tic sta­tus of wood­block prints and a craze for their col­lec­tion quick­ly fol­lowed.”

Chief among the works col­lect­ed in the Euro­pean and Amer­i­can fer­vor for Japan­ese prints were those from Hoku­sai, his con­tem­po­rary Hiroshige, and oth­er aizuri‑e artists. So famous was The Great Wave in the West by 1891 that French graph­ic artist Pierre Bon­nard would sat­i­rize its styl­ish spray in an adver­tise­ment for cham­pagne. A print of The Great Wave hung on Claude Debussy’s wall, and the first edi­tion of his La Mer bore an adap­ta­tion of a detail from the print. As Michael Cirigliano writes for the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art:

Cul­tur­al cir­cles through­out Europe great­ly admired Hoku­sai’s work…. Major artists of the Impres­sion­ist move­ment such as Mon­et owned copies of Hoku­sai prints, and lead­ing art crit­ic Philippe Bur­ty, in his 1866 Chefs-d’oeu­vre des Arts indus­triels, even stat­ed that Hoku­sai’s work main­tained the ele­gance of Wat­teau, the fan­ta­sy of Goya, and the move­ment of Delacroix. Going one step fur­ther in his laud­ed com­par­isons, Bur­ty wrote that Hoku­sai’s dex­ter­i­ty in brush strokes was com­pa­ra­ble only to that of Rubens.

These com­par­isons are not mis­placed, John-Paul Stonard explains in The Guardian: “That the Great Wave became the best known print in the west was in large part due to Hokusai’s for­ma­tive expe­ri­ence of Euro­pean art.” Not only did he absorb Pruss­ian blue into his reper­toire, but “prints from ear­ly in his career show him attempt­ing, rather awk­ward­ly, to apply the les­son of math­e­mat­i­cal per­spec­tive, learnt from Euro­pean prints brought into Japan by Dutch Traders.” By the time of The Great Wave, he had per­fect­ed his own syn­the­sis of West­ern and Japan­ese art, over two decades before Euro­pean painters would attempt the same in the explo­sion of Japanophil­ia of the late 19th and ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Great Art Explained: Watch 15 Minute Intro­duc­tions to Great Works by Warhol, Rothko, Kahlo, Picas­so & More

Watch the Mak­ing of Japan­ese Wood­block Prints, from Start to Fin­ish, by a Long­time Tokyo Print­mak­er

The Evo­lu­tion of The Great Wave off Kanaza­wa: See Four Ver­sions That Hoku­sai Paint­ed Over Near­ly 40 Years

Down­load Vin­cent van Gogh’s Col­lec­tion of 500 Japan­ese Prints, Which Inspired Him to Cre­ate “the Art of the Future”

Watch the Mak­ing of Japan­ese Wood­block Prints, from Start to Fin­ish, by a Long­time Tokyo Print­mak­er

19th-Cen­tu­ry Japan­ese Wood­blocks Illus­trate the Lives of West­ern Inven­tors, Artists, and Schol­ars (1873)

The Met Puts 650+ Japan­ese Illus­trat­ed Books Online: Mar­vel at Hokusai’s One Hun­dred Views of Mount Fuji and More 

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

Why Collect? A Conversation about Collectibles from Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast (#92)

What dri­ves some­one to col­lect Star Wars fig­ures or Trans­form­ers or LEGOs or what­ev­er else? Your Pret­ty Much Pop hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt are joined by guest Matt Young of the Hel­lo from the Mag­ic Tav­ern and Impro­vised Star Trek pod­casts to talk about this poten­tial­ly expen­sive and life-eat­ing habit. No kidult­ing required.

For a lit­tle extra infor­ma­tion on this top­ic, you may want to look at Wikipedia on the Psy­chol­o­gy of Col­lect­ing, this incom­plete list of nos­tal­gic col­lectible IPs (that’s “intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty”), or this weird list of col­lec­tions that includes erasers, con­fet­ti, traf­fic cones and sug­ar pack­ets.

Most of the lit­er­a­ture we found in research­ing this episode was either about what col­lec­tions might present a future invest­ment oppor­tu­ni­ty or oth­er tips for doing this as a finan­cial activ­i­ty (please don’t try to do this) and sur­prise that adults buy toys.

After the episode, Matt remained on the line for our Aftertalk, which is typ­i­cal­ly only avail­able for sup­port­ers via patreon.com/prettymuchpop, but this this case we’ve unleashed it to the pub­lic:

Hear more of this pod­cast at prettymuchpop.com. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

An Interactive Visualization of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

2020 was “a year for the (record) books in pub­lish­ing,” wrote Jim Mil­liot in Publisher’s Week­ly this past Jan­u­ary, a surge con­tin­u­ing into 2021. Yet some kinds of print books have so declined in sales there may be no rea­son to keep pub­lish­ing them, or buy­ing them, since their equiv­a­lents online are supe­ri­or in almost every respect to any ver­sion on paper. As I final­ly con­ced­ed dur­ing a recent, aggres­sive spring clean­ing, I per­son­al­ly have no rea­son to store heavy, bulky, dusty ref­er­ence books, except in cas­es of extreme sen­ti­ment.

The online Stan­ford Ency­clo­pe­dia of Phi­los­o­phy, or the SEP, dis­pensed with the need for phi­los­o­phy ency­clo­pe­dias in print years ago. It’s “the most inter­est­ing web­site on the inter­net,” wrote Nikhail Son­nad at Quartz in 2015. “Not because of the con­tent — which includes fas­ci­nat­ing entries on every­thing from ambi­gu­i­ty to zom­bies—but because of the site itself. Its cre­ators have solved one of the internet’s fun­da­men­tal prob­lems: How to pro­vide author­i­ta­tive, rig­or­ous­ly accu­rate knowl­edge, at no cost to read­ers. It’s some­thing the ency­clo­pe­dia, or SEP, has man­aged to do for two decades.”

Start­ed in 1995 by Stan­ford philoso­pher Edward Zal­ta with only two entries, the SEP is “pos­i­tive­ly ancient in inter­net years,” but it is hard­ly “ossi­fied,” remain­ing an online source “‘com­pa­ra­ble in scope, depth and author­i­ty,’” the Amer­i­can Library Association’s Book­list review wrote, “to the biggest phi­los­o­phy ency­clo­pe­dias in print.”

I per­son­al­ly think the SEP is just as inter­est­ing for its con­tent as its achieve­ment, if not more so — and now, thanks to engi­neer and devel­op­er Joseph DiCas­tro, that con­tent is more acces­si­ble than ever, though an inter­ac­tive visu­al­iza­tion project and search engine called Visu­al­iz­ing SEP.

Visu­al­iz­ing SEP “pro­vides clear visu­al­iza­tions based on a philo­soph­i­cal tax­on­o­my that DiCas­tro adapt­ed from the one devel­oped by the Indi­ana Uni­ver­si­ty Phi­los­o­phy Ontol­ogy Project (InPhO),” Justin Wein­berg writes at Dai­ly Nous. “Type a term into the search box and sug­gest­ed SEP entries will be list­ed. Click on one of the entry titles, and a sim­ple visu­al­iza­tion will appear with your select­ed entry at the cen­ter and relat­ed entries sur­round­ing it.” At the top of the page, you can select from a series of “domains.” Each selec­tion pro­duces a sim­i­lar visu­al­iza­tion of var­i­ous-sized dots.

I found enough entries to keep me busy for hours in the very first domain graph, “Aes­thet­ics and Phi­los­o­phy of Art.” The last of these, sim­ply titled “Thinker,” links togeth­er all of the philoso­phers men­tioned in the Stan­ford Ency­clo­pe­dia of Phi­los­o­phy, from the most famous house­hold names to the most obscure and scholas­tic. Just skim­ming through these names and read­ing the brief biogra­phies at the left will leave read­ers with a broad­er con­tex­tu­al under­stand­ing than they could gain from a print ency­clo­pe­dia. (Click on the “Arti­cle Details” but­ton to expand the full arti­cle).

The visu­al­iz­er project car­ries forth into the data-obsessed 21st cen­tu­ry one of the best things about the Inter­net in its ear­li­est years: access to free, high qual­i­ty (and high­ly portable) infor­ma­tion with few bar­ri­ers for entry. Learn more about how to best nav­i­gate Visu­al­iz­ing SEP at Dai­ly Nous.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

A Data Visu­al­iza­tion of Mod­ern Phi­los­o­phy, 1950–2018

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy Visu­al­ized in an Inter­ac­tive Time­line

“The Philosopher’s Web,” an Inter­ac­tive Data Visu­al­iza­tion Shows the Web of Influ­ences Con­nect­ing Ancient & Mod­ern Philoso­phers

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

The Surprising Reason Why Chinatowns Worldwide Share the Same Aesthetic, and How It All Started with the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake

Anti-Chi­nese racism runs deep in Amer­i­can cul­ture and law, begin­ning in the 19th cen­tu­ry as com­pe­ti­tion inten­si­fied in Cal­i­for­nia gold and land rush­es. Chi­nese immi­grants were pushed into teem­ing cities, then den­i­grat­ed for sur­viv­ing in over­crowd­ed slums. To get a sense of the scope of the prej­u­dice, we need only con­sid­er the 1882 law known as the Chi­nese Exclu­sion Act — the only leg­is­la­tion passed to explic­it­ly restrict immi­gra­tion by one eth­nic or nation­al group. The law actu­al­ly goes back to 1875, when the Page Act banned Chi­nese women from immi­grat­ing. It was only repealed in 1943.

Although rou­tine­ly evad­ed, the severe restric­tions and out­right bans on Chi­nese immi­gra­tion under the Exclu­sion Act drove and were dri­ven by racist ideas still vis­i­ble today in tropes of dan­ger­ous, exoti­cized “drag­on ladies” or sex­u­al­ly sub­mis­sive con­cu­bines: roles giv­en in ear­ly Hol­ly­wood films to the first Chi­nese-Amer­i­can movie star, Anna May Wong, who, after 1909 — despite being the most rec­og­niz­able Chi­nese-Amer­i­can in the world — had to car­ry iden­ti­fi­ca­tion at all times to prove her legal sta­tus.

Wong was born in Los Ange­les, a city that — like every oth­er major metrop­o­lis — became home to its own Chi­na­town, and a famous one at that. But the most famous of the seg­re­gat­ed urban areas orig­i­nat­ed in San Fran­cis­co, after the 1906 earth­quake that near­ly lev­eled the city and “came on the heels of decades of vio­lence and racist laws tar­get­ing Chi­nese com­mu­ni­ties in the US,” notes Vox. “The earth­quake dev­as­tat­ed Chi­na­town. But in the destruc­tion, San Francisco’s Chi­nese busi­ness­men had an idea for a fresh start” that would define the look of Chi­na­towns world­wide.

The new Chi­na­town was more than a new start; it was sur­vival. As often hap­pens after dis­as­ters, pro­pos­als for relo­cat­ing the unpop­u­lar immi­grant neigh­bor­hood appeared “before the dust had set­tled and smoke cleared,” notes 99 Per­cent Invis­i­ble. “The city’s may­or com­mis­sioned archi­tect and urban design­er Daniel Burn­ham to draw up plans aligned with the City Beau­ti­ful move­ment.” Feel­ing they had to cater to white Amer­i­can stereo­types to gain accep­tance, Chi­nese-Amer­i­can busi­ness lead­ers “hired archi­tect T. Pater­son Ross and engi­neer A.W. Bur­gren to rebuild—even though nei­ther man had been to Chi­na.”

The archi­tects “relied on cen­turies-old images, pri­mar­i­ly of reli­gious ver­nac­u­lar, to devel­op the look of the new Chi­na­town,” and the result was to cre­ate a gen­uine tourist attrac­tion — an “icon­ic look,” the Vox Miss­ing Chap­ter video explains, that bears lit­tle resem­blance to actu­al Chi­nese cities. The Chi­nese immi­grant com­mu­ni­ty in San Fran­cis­co “kept their cul­ture alive by invent­ing a new one,” a delib­er­ate co-opta­tion of Ori­en­tal­ist stereo­types for a city, its mer­chants decid­ed, that would be built of “ver­i­ta­ble fairy palaces.”

The New Chi­na­town was “not quite Chi­nese, not quite Amer­i­can”; safe for mid­dle-class tourism and con­sump­tion and safer for Chi­nese busi­ness­es to flour­ish. The mod­el spread rapid­ly. Now, in what­ev­er major city we might might vis­it — out­side of Chi­na, that is — the Chi­na­town we encounter is both a unique cul­tur­al hybrid and a mar­ket­ing tri­umph that offered a mea­sure of pro­tec­tion to belea­guered Chi­nese immi­grant com­mu­ni­ties around the world.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Learn the Untold His­to­ry of the Chi­nese Com­mu­ni­ty in the Mis­sis­sip­pi Delta

The Utopi­an, Social­ist Designs of Sovi­et Cities

The His­to­ry of West­ern Archi­tec­ture: A Free Online Course Mov­ing from Ancient Greece to Roco­co

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

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.