Nietzsche’s 10 Rules for Writing with Style

in Writing | February 11th, 2022

The life of Russ­ian-born poet, nov­el­ist, crit­ic, and first female psy­chol­o­gist Lou Andreas-Salomé has pro­vid­ed fod­der for both sala­cious spec­u­la­tion and intel­lec­tu­al dra­ma in film and on the page for the amount of roman­tic atten­tion she attract­ed from Euro­pean intel­lec­tu­als like philoso­pher Paul Rée, poet Ranier Maria Rilke, and Friedrich Niet­zsche. Emo­tion­al­ly intense Niet­zsche became infat­u­at­ed with Salomé, pro­posed mar­riage, and, when she declined, broke off their rela­tion­ship in abrupt Niet­zschean fash­ion.

For her part, Salomé so val­ued these friend­ships she made a pro­pos­al of her own: that she, Niet­zsche and Rée, writes D.A. Bar­ry at 3:AM Mag­a­zine, “live togeth­er in a celi­bate house­hold where they might dis­cuss phi­los­o­phy, lit­er­a­ture and art.” The idea scan­dal­ized Nietzsche’s sis­ter and his social cir­cle and may have con­tributed to the “pas­sion­ate crit­i­cism” Salomé’s 1894 bio­graph­i­cal study, Friedrich Niet­zsche: The Man and His Works, received. The “much maligned” work deserves a reap­praisal, Bar­ry argues, as “a psy­cho­log­i­cal por­trait.”

In Niet­zsche, Salomé wrote, we see “sor­row­ful ail­ing and tri­umphal recov­ery, incan­des­cent intox­i­ca­tion and cool con­scious­ness. One sens­es here the close entwin­ing of mutu­al con­tra­dic­tions; one sens­es the over­flow­ing and vol­un­tary plunge of over-stim­u­lat­ed and tensed ener­gies into chaos, dark­ness and ter­ror, and then an ascend­ing urge toward the light and most ten­der moments.” We might see this pas­sage as charged by the remem­brance of a friend, with whom she once “climbed Monte Sacro,” she claimed, in 1882, “where he told her of the con­cept of the Eter­nal Recur­rence ‘in a qui­et voice with all the signs of deep­est hor­ror.’”

We should also, per­haps pri­mar­i­ly, see Salomé’s impres­sions as an effect of Nietzsche’s tur­bu­lent prose, reach­ing its apoth­e­o­sis in his exper­i­men­tal­ly philo­soph­i­cal nov­el, Thus Spake Zarathus­tra. As a the­o­rist of the embod­i­ment of ideas, of their inex­tri­ca­ble rela­tion to the phys­i­cal and the social, Niet­zsche had some very spe­cif­ic ideas about lit­er­ary style, which he com­mu­ni­cat­ed to Salomé in an 1882 note titled “Toward the Teach­ing of Style.” Well before writ­ers began issu­ing “sim­i­lar sets of com­mand­ments,” writes Maria Popo­va at Brain Pick­ings, Niet­zsche “set down ten styl­is­tic rules of writ­ing,” which you can find, in their orig­i­nal list form, below.

1. Of prime neces­si­ty is life: a style should live.

2. Style should be suit­ed to the spe­cif­ic per­son with whom you wish to com­mu­ni­cate. (The law of mutu­al rela­tion.)

3. First, one must deter­mine pre­cise­ly “what-and-what do I wish to say and present,” before you may write. Writ­ing must be mim­ic­ry.

4. Since the writer lacks many of the speaker’s means, he must in gen­er­al have for his mod­el a very expres­sive kind of pre­sen­ta­tion of neces­si­ty, the writ­ten copy will appear much paler.

5. The rich­ness of life reveals itself through a rich­ness of ges­tures. One must learn to feel every­thing — the length and retard­ing of sen­tences, inter­punc­tu­a­tions, the choice of words, the paus­ing, the sequence of argu­ments — like ges­tures.

6. Be care­ful with peri­ods! Only those peo­ple who also have long dura­tion of breath while speak­ing are enti­tled to peri­ods. With most peo­ple, the peri­od is a mat­ter of affec­ta­tion.

7. Style ought to prove that one believes in an idea; not only that one thinks it but also feels it.

8. The more abstract a truth which one wish­es to teach, the more one must first entice the sens­es.

9. Strat­e­gy on the part of the good writer of prose con­sists of choos­ing his means for step­ping close to poet­ry but nev­er step­ping into it.

10. It is not good man­ners or clever to deprive one’s read­er of the most obvi­ous objec­tions. It is very good man­ners and very clever to leave it to one’s read­er alone to pro­nounce the ulti­mate quin­tes­sence of our wis­dom.

As with all such pre­scrip­tions, we are free to take or leave these rules as we see fit. But we should not ignore them. While Nietzsche’s per­spec­tivism has been (mis)interpreted as wan­ton sub­jec­tiv­i­ty, his ven­er­a­tion for antiq­ui­ty places a high val­ue on for­mal con­straints. His prose, we might say, resides in that ten­sion between Dionysian aban­don and Apol­lon­ian cool, and his rules address what lib­er­al arts pro­fes­sors once called the Triv­i­um: gram­mar, rhetoric, and log­ic: the three sup­ports of mov­ing, expres­sive, per­sua­sive writ­ing.

Salomé was so impressed with these apho­ris­tic rules that she includ­ed them in her biog­ra­phy, remark­ing, “to exam­ine Nietzsche’s style for caus­es and con­di­tions means far more than exam­in­ing the mere form in which his ideas are expressed; rather, it means that we can lis­ten to his inner sound­ings.” Isn’t this what great writ­ing should feel like?

Salomé wrote in her study that “Niet­zsche not only mas­tered lan­guage but also tran­scend­ed its inad­e­qua­cies.” (As Niet­zsche him­self com­ment­ed in 1886, notes Hugo Dro­chon, he need­ed to invent “a lan­guage of my very own.”) Nietzsche’s bold-yet-dis­ci­plined writ­ing found a com­ple­ment in Salomé’s bold­ly keen analy­sis. From her we can also per­haps glean anoth­er prin­ci­ple: “No mat­ter how calum­nious the pub­lic attacks on her,” writes Bar­ry, “par­tic­u­lar­ly from [his sis­ter] Elis­a­beth Förster-Niet­zsche dur­ing the Nazi peri­od in Ger­many, Salomé did not respond to them.”

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in Decem­ber 2016.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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 Dai­ly Habits of High­ly Pro­duc­tive Philoso­phers: Niet­zsche, Marx & Immanuel Kant

Wal­ter Kaufmann’s Clas­sic Lec­tures on Niet­zsche, Kierkegaard and Sartre (1960)

Writ­ing Tips by Hen­ry Miller, Elmore Leonard, Mar­garet Atwood, Neil Gaiman & George Orwell

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

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How Insulated Glass Changed Architecture: An Introduction to the Technological Breakthrough That Changed How We Live and How Our Buildings Work

in Architecture, History, Technology | February 11th, 2022

When we think of a “mid­cen­tu­ry mod­ern” home, we think of glass walls. In part, this has to do with the post-World War II decades’ pro­mo­tion of the south­ern Cal­i­for­nia-style indoor-out­door sub­ur­ban lifestyle. But busi­ness and cul­ture are down­stream of tech­nol­o­gy, and, in this spe­cif­ic case, the tech­nol­o­gy known as insu­lat­ed glass. Its devel­op­ment solved the prob­lem of glass win­dows that had dogged archi­tec­ture since at least the sec­ond cen­tu­ry: they let in light, but even more so cold and heat. Only in the 1930s did a refrig­er­a­tion engi­neer fig­ure out how to make win­dows with not one but two panes of glass and an insu­lat­ing lay­er of air between them. Its trade name: Ther­mopane.

First man­u­fac­tured by the Libbey-Owens-Ford glass com­pa­ny, “Ther­mopane changed the pos­si­bil­i­ties for archi­tects,” says Vox’s Phil Edwards in the video above, “How Insu­lat­ed Glass Changed Archi­tec­ture.” In it he speaks with archi­tec­tur­al his­to­ri­an Thomas Leslie, who says that “by the 1960s, if you’re putting a big win­dow into any res­i­den­tial or office build­ing” in all but the most tem­per­ate cli­mates, you were using insu­lat­ed glass “almost by default.”

Com­pet­ing glass man­u­fac­tur­ers intro­duced a host of vari­a­tions on and inno­va­tions in not just the tech­nol­o­gy but the mar­ket­ing as well: “No home is tru­ly mod­ern with­out TWINDOW,” declared one brand’s mag­a­zine adver­tise­ment.

The asso­ci­at­ed imagery, says Leslie, was “always a slid­ing glass door look­ing out onto a very ver­dant land­scape,” which promised “a way of con­nect­ing your inside world and your out­side world” (as well as “being able to see all of your stuff”). But the new pos­si­bil­i­ty of “walls of glass” made for an even more vis­i­ble change in com­mer­cial archi­tec­ture, being the sine qua non of the smooth­ly reflec­tive sky­scrap­ers that rise from every Amer­i­can down­town. Today, of course, we can see 80, 900, 100 floors of sheer glass stacked up in cities all over the world, shim­mer­ing dec­la­ra­tions of mem­ber­ship among the devel­oped nations. Those slid­ing glass doors, by the same token, once announced an Amer­i­can fam­i­ly’s arrival into the pros­per­ous mid­dle class — and now, more than half a cen­tu­ry lat­er, still look like the height of moder­ni­ty.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Why Do Peo­ple Hate Mod­ern Archi­tec­ture?: A Video Essay

How the Rad­i­cal Build­ings of the Bauhaus Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Archi­tec­ture: A Short Intro­duc­tion

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

Tony Hawk & Archi­tec­tur­al His­to­ri­an Iain Bor­den Tell the Sto­ry of How Skate­board­ing Found a New Use for Cities & Archi­tec­ture

Why Europe Has So Few Sky­scrap­ers

A Glass Floor in a Dublin Gro­cery Store Lets Shop­pers Look Down & Explore Medieval Ruins

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.

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That Time When the Mediterranean Sea Dried Up & Disappeared: Animations Show How It Happened

in History, Science | February 10th, 2022

We hear a great deal today about the poten­tial caus­es of ris­ing sea lev­els. At a cer­tain point, nat­ur­al curios­i­ty brings out the oppo­site ques­tion: what caus­es sea lev­els to fall? And for that mat­ter, can a body of water so large sim­ply van­ish entire­ly? Such a thing did hap­pen once, accord­ing to the PBS Eons video above. The sto­ry begins, from our per­spec­tive, with the dis­cov­ery about a decade ago of a giant rab­bit — or rather of the bones of a giant rab­bit, one “up to six times heav­ier than your aver­age cot­ton­tail” that “almost cer­tain­ly could­n’t hop.” This odd, long-gone spec­i­men was dubbed Nurala­gus rex: “the rab­bit king of Minor­ca,” the mod­ern-day island it ruled from about five mil­lion to three mil­lion years ago.

After liv­ing for long peri­ods of time on islands with­out nat­ur­al preda­tors, cer­tain species take on unusu­al pro­por­tions. “But how did the nor­mal-size ances­tor of Nurala­gus make it onto a Mediter­ranean island in the first place?” The answer is that Minor­ca was­n’t always an island. In fact, “mega-deposits” of salt under the floor of the Mediter­ranean sug­gest that, “at one point in his­to­ry, the Mediter­ranean Sea must have evap­o­rat­ed.” As often in our inves­ti­ga­tion of the nat­ur­al world, one strange big ques­tion leads to anoth­er even stranger and big­ger one. Geol­o­gists’ long and com­plex project of address­ing it has led them to posit a for­bid­ding-sound­ing event called the Messin­ian Salin­i­ty Cri­sis, or MSC.

MSC-explain­ing the­o­ries include a “glob­al cool­ing event” six mil­lion years ago whose cre­ation of glac­i­ers would have reduced the flow of water into the Mediter­ranean, and “tec­ton­ic events” that could have blocked off what we now know as the Strait of Gibral­tar. But the cause now best sup­port­ed by evi­dence involves a com­bi­na­tion of shifts in the Earth­’s crust and changes in its cli­mate — six­teen full cycles of them. “Dur­ing peri­ods of decreas­ing sea lev­el, the posi­tion and angle of the Earth changed with respect to the Sun, so there were peri­ods of low­er solar ener­gy, and oth­ers of high­er solar ener­gy, which increased evap­o­ra­tion rates in the Mediter­ranean. At the same time, an active­ly fold­ing and uplift­ing tec­ton­ic belt caused water input to decrease.”

The MSC seems to have last­ed for over 600,000 years. At its dri­est point, 5.6 mil­lion years ago, “exter­nal water sources were com­plete­ly cut off, and most of the water left behind in the Mediter­ranean basin was evap­o­rat­ing.” For sea crea­tures, the Mediter­ranean became unin­hab­it­able, but those that lived on dry land had a bit of a field day. These rel­a­tive­ly dry con­di­tions “allowed hip­pos, ele­phants, and oth­er megafau­na from Africa to walk and swim across the Mediter­ranean,” con­sti­tut­ing a great migra­tion that would have includ­ed the ances­tor of Nurala­gus rex. But when the sea lat­er filled back up — pos­si­bly due to a flood, as ani­mat­ed above — the rab­bit king of Minor­ca learned that, even on a geo­log­i­cal timescale, you can’t go home again.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Glob­al Warm­ing: A Free Course from UChica­go Explains Cli­mate Change

A Map Shows What Hap­pens When Our World Gets Four Degrees Warmer: The Col­orado Riv­er Dries Up, Antarc­ti­ca Urban­izes, Poly­ne­sia Van­ish­es

Why Civ­i­liza­tion Col­lapsed in 1177 BC: Watch Clas­si­cist Eric Cline’s Lec­ture That Has Already Gar­nered 5.5 Mil­lion Views

How Humans Domes­ti­cat­ed Cats (Twice)

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.

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Zoo Hires Marvin Gaye Impersonator to Help Endangered Monkeys “Get It On”

in Life, Music | February 10th, 2022

This past week­end, mon­keys resid­ing at a British zoo got a spe­cial treat. A Mar­vin Gaye imper­son­ator per­formed “Let’s Get It On” and “Sex­u­al Heal­ing,” all in an effort to help the mon­keys, well, “get it on.”

Locat­ed in Stafford, Eng­land, the Tren­tham Mon­key For­est saw the per­for­mance as a nov­el way to get their endan­gered Bar­bary macaques to pro­duce off­spring: Park Direc­tor Matt Lovatt said on the zoo’s web­site: “We thought it could be a cre­ative way to encour­age our females to show a lit­tle affec­tion to males that might not have been so lucky in love.” “Females in sea­son mate with sev­er­al males so pater­ni­ty among our fur­ry res­i­dents is nev­er known. Each birth is vital to the species with Bar­bary macaques being classed as endan­gered. Birthing sea­son occurs in late spring/early sum­mer each year, so hope­ful­ly Marvin’s done his mag­ic and we can wel­come some new babies!”

For any­one keep­ing score, Dave Largie is the singer chan­nel­ing Mar­vin.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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!

via UPI

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Pianist Plays Beethoven, Bach, Chopin, Rav­el & Debussy for Blind Ele­phants in Thai­land

Footage of the Last Known Tas­man­ian Tiger Restored in Col­or (1933)

Two Mil­lion Won­drous Nature Illus­tra­tions Put Online by The Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library

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The Code of Charles Dickens’ Shorthand Has Been Cracked by Computer Programmers, Solving a 160-Year-Old Mystery

in History, Literature, Writing | February 9th, 2022


We can describe the writ­ing of Charles Dick­ens in many ways, but nev­er as impen­e­tra­ble. The most pop­u­lar nov­el­ist of his day, he wrote for the broad­est pos­si­ble audi­ence, seri­al­iz­ing his sto­ries in news­pa­pers before putting them between cov­ers. This hard­ly pre­vent­ed him from demon­strat­ing a mas­tery of the Eng­lish lan­guage whose mark remains detectable in our own rhetoric and lit­er­ary prose more than 150 years after his death. But Dick­ens wrote both pub­licly and pri­vate­ly, and in the case of the lat­ter he could write quite pri­vate­ly indeed: in doc­u­ments for his own eyes only, he made use of a short­hand that he called it “the devil’s hand­writ­ing,” and which has long been dev­il­ish­ly impen­e­tra­ble to schol­ars.

Dick­ens “learned a dif­fi­cult short­hand sys­tem called Brachyg­ra­phy and wrote about the expe­ri­ence in his semi-auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal nov­el, David Cop­per­field, call­ing it a ‘sav­age steno­graph­ic mys­tery,’ ” says The Dick­ens Code, a web site ded­i­cat­ed to solv­ing that mys­tery.

A for­mer court reporter, “Dick­ens used short­hand through­out his life but while he was using the sys­tem, he was also chang­ing it. So the hooks, lines, cir­cles and squig­gles on the page are very hard to deci­pher.” The Dick­ens Code project thus offered up t0 any­one who could tran­scribe his short­hand a sum of 300 British pounds — which might not sound like much, but imag­ine how grand a sum it would have been in Dick­ens’ day.

Besides, the inter­net’s cryp­tog­ra­phy enthu­si­asts hard­ly require much of an incen­tive to get to work on such a long-uncracked code as this. “The win­ner of the com­pe­ti­tion, Shane Bag­gs, a com­put­er tech­ni­cal sup­port spe­cial­ist from San Jose, Calif., had nev­er read a Dick­ens nov­el before,” writes the New York Times’ Jen­ny Gross. “Mr. Bag­gs, who spent about six months work­ing on the text, most­ly after work, said that he first heard about the com­pe­ti­tion through a group on Red­dit ded­i­cat­ed to crack­ing codes and find­ing hid­den mes­sages.”

The doc­u­ment being decod­ed is a copy of a let­ter from 1859, the year Dick­ens was seri­al­iz­ing A Tale of Two Cities. Writ­ing to Times of Lon­don edi­tor John Thad­deus Delane, “Dick­ens says that a clerk at the news­pa­per was wrong to reject an adver­tise­ment he want­ed in the paper, pro­mot­ing a new lit­er­ary pub­li­ca­tion, and asks again for it to run,” report Gross. This seem­ing­ly triv­ial inci­dent inspires the kind of “strong, direct lan­guage in the 19th cen­tu­ry that showed the writer was angry.” Though 70 per­cent of this deco­rous­ly bad-tem­pered let­ter has now been deci­phered, The Dick­ens Code still has work to do and con­tin­ues to enlist help from vol­un­teers to do it, albeit with­out the prize mon­ey that is now pre­sum­ably in Bag­gs’ pos­ses­sion. Let’s hope he uses it on the hand­somest pos­si­ble set of Dick­ens’ col­lect­ed works.

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Charles Dick­ens’ Life & Lit­er­ary Works

The Writ­ing Sys­tem of the Cryp­tic Voyn­ich Man­u­script Explained: British Researcher May Have Final­ly Cracked the Code

Stream a 24 Hour Playlist of Charles Dick­ens Sto­ries, Fea­tur­ing Clas­sic Record­ings by Lau­rence Olivi­er, Orson Welles & More

Why Did Leonar­do da Vin­ci Write Back­wards? A Look Into the Ulti­mate Renais­sance Man’s “Mir­ror Writ­ing”

Alice in Won­der­land, Ham­let, and A Christ­mas Car­ol Writ­ten in Short­hand (Cir­ca 1919)

Charles Dick­ens (Chan­nel­ing Jorge Luis Borges) Cre­at­ed a Fake Library, with 37 Wit­ty Invent­ed Book Titles

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.

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Nikola Tesla’s Predictions for the 21st Century: The Rise of Smart Phones & Wireless, The Demise of Coffee & More (1926/35)

in Life, Magazines, Science | February 9th, 2022

The fate of the vision­ary is to be for­ev­er out­side of his or her time. Such was the life of Niko­la Tes­la, who dreamed the future while his oppor­tunis­tic rival Thomas Edi­son seized the moment. Even now the name Tes­la con­jures seem­ing­ly wild­ly imprac­ti­cal ven­tures, too advanced, too expen­sive, or far too ele­gant in design for mass pro­duc­tion and con­sump­tion. No one bet­ter than David Bowie, the pop artist of pos­si­bil­i­ty, could embody Tes­la’s air of mag­is­te­r­i­al high seri­ous­ness on the screen. And few were bet­ter suit­ed than Tes­la him­self, per­haps, to extrap­o­late from his time to ours and see the tech­no­log­i­cal future clear­ly.

Of course, this image of Tes­la as a lone, hero­ic, and even some­what trag­ic fig­ure who fell vic­tim to Edis­on’s designs is a bit of a roman­tic exag­ger­a­tion. As even the edi­tor of a 1935 fea­ture inter­view piece in the now-defunct Lib­er­ty mag­a­zine wrote, Tes­la and Edi­son may have been rivals in the “bat­tle between alter­nat­ing and direct cur­rent…. Oth­er­wise the two men were mere­ly oppo­sites. Edi­son had a genius for prac­ti­cal inven­tions imme­di­ate­ly applic­a­ble. Tes­la, whose inven­tions were far ahead of the time, aroused antag­o­nisms which delayed the fruition of his ideas for years.” One can in some respects see why Tes­la “aroused antag­o­nisms.” He may have been a genius, but he was not a peo­ple per­son, and some of his views, though maybe char­ac­ter­is­tic of the times, are down­right unset­tling.

libertymagazine9february1935page5

In the lengthy Lib­er­ty essay, “as told to George Sylvester Viereck” (a poet and Nazi sym­pa­thiz­er who also inter­viewed Hitler), Tes­la him­self makes the pro­nounce­ment, “It seems that I have always been ahead of my time.” He then goes on to enu­mer­ate some of the ways he has been proven right, and con­fi­dent­ly lists the char­ac­ter­is­tics of the future as he sees it. No one likes a know-it-all, but Tes­la refused to com­pro­mise or ingra­ti­ate him­self, though he suf­fered for it pro­fes­sion­al­ly. And he was, in many cas­es, right. Many of his 1935 pre­dic­tions in Lib­er­ty are still too far off to mea­sure, and some of them will seem out­landish, or crim­i­nal, to us today. But some still seem plau­si­ble, and a few advis­able if we are to make it anoth­er 100 years as a species. Tes­la’s pre­dic­tions include the fol­low­ing, which he intro­duces with the dis­claimer that “fore­cast­ing is per­ilous. No man can look very far into the future.”

  • “Bud­dhism and Chris­tian­i­ty… will be the reli­gion of the human race in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry.”
  • “The year 2100 will see eugen­ics uni­ver­sal­ly estab­lished.” Tes­la went on to com­ment, “no one who is not a desir­able par­ent should be per­mit­ted to pro­duce prog­e­ny. A cen­tu­ry from now it will no more occur to a nor­mal per­son to mate with a per­son eugeni­cal­ly unfit than to mar­ry a habit­u­al crim­i­nal.”
  • “Hygiene, phys­i­cal cul­ture will be rec­og­nized branch­es of edu­ca­tion and gov­ern­ment. The Sec­re­tary of Hygiene or Phys­i­cal Cul­ture will be far more impor­tant in the cab­i­net of the Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States who holds office in the year 2025 than the Sec­re­tary of War.” Along with per­son­al hygiene, Tes­la includ­ed “pol­lu­tion” as a social ill in need of reg­u­la­tion.
  • “I am con­vinced that with­in a cen­tu­ry cof­fee, tea, and tobac­co will be no longer in vogue. Alco­hol, how­ev­er, will still be used. It is not a stim­u­lant but a ver­i­ta­ble elixir of life.”
  • “There will be enough wheat and wheat prod­ucts to feed the entire world, includ­ing the teem­ing mil­lions of Chi­na and India.” (Tes­la did not fore­see the anti-gluten mania of the 21st cen­tu­ry.)
  • “Long before the next cen­tu­ry dawns, sys­tem­at­ic refor­esta­tion and the sci­en­tif­ic man­age­ment of nat­ur­al resources will have made an end of all dev­as­tat­ing droughts, for­est fires, and floods. The uni­ver­sal uti­liza­tion of water pow­er and its long-dis­tance trans­mis­sion will sup­ply every house­hold with cheap pow­er.” Along with this opti­mistic pre­dic­tion, Tes­la fore­saw that “the strug­gle for exis­tence being less­ened, there should be devel­op­ment along ide­al rather than mate­r­i­al lines.”

Tes­la goes on to pre­dict the elim­i­na­tion of war, “by mak­ing every nation, weak or strong, able to defend itself,” after which war chests would be divert­ed to fund­ing edu­ca­tion and research. He then describes—in rather fan­tas­ti­cal-sound­ing terms—an appa­ra­tus that “projects par­ti­cles” and trans­mits ener­gy, enabling not only a rev­o­lu­tion in defense tech­nol­o­gy, but “undreamed of results in tele­vi­sion.” Tes­la diag­noses his time as one in which “we suf­fer from the derange­ment of our civ­i­liza­tion because we have not yet com­plete­ly adjust­ed our­selves to the machine age.” The solu­tion, he asserts—along with most futur­ists, then and now—“does not lie in destroy­ing but in mas­ter­ing the machine.” As an exam­ple of such mas­tery, Tes­la describes the future of “automa­tons” tak­ing over human labor and the cre­ation of “a think­ing machine.”

Matt Novak at the Smith­son­ian has ana­lyzed many of Tes­la’s claims, inter­pret­ing his pre­dic­tions about “hygiene and phys­i­cal cul­ture” as a fore­shad­ow­ing of the EPA and dis­cussing Tes­la’s work in robot­ics (“Today,” Tes­la pro­claimed, “the robot is an accept­ed fact”). The Lib­er­ty arti­cle was not the first time Tes­la had made large-scale, pub­lic pre­dic­tions about the cen­tu­ry to come and beyond. In 1926, Tes­la gave an inter­view to Col­lier’s mag­a­zine in which he more or less accu­rate­ly fore­saw smart­phones and wire­less tele­pho­ny and com­put­ing:

When wire­less is per­fect­ly applied the whole earth will be con­vert­ed into a huge brain, which in fact it is…. We shall be able to com­mu­ni­cate with one anoth­er instant­ly, irre­spec­tive of dis­tance. Not only this, but through tele­vi­sion and tele­pho­ny we shall see and hear one anoth­er as per­fect­ly as though were face to face, despite inter­ven­ing dis­tances of thou­sands of miles; and the instru­ments through which we shall be able to do this will be amaz­ing­ly sim­ple com­pared with our present tele­phone. A man will be able to car­ry one in his vest pock­et. 

Tel­sa also made some odd pre­dic­tions about fuel-less pas­sen­ger fly­ing machines “free from any lim­i­ta­tions of the present air­planes and diri­gi­bles” and spout­ed more of the scary stuff about eugen­ics that had come to obsess him late in life. Addi­tion­al­ly, Tes­la saw chang­ing gen­der rela­tions as the pre­cur­sor of a com­ing matri­archy. This was not a devel­op­ment he char­ac­ter­ized in pos­i­tive terms. For Tes­la, fem­i­nism would “end in a new sex order, with the female as supe­ri­or.” (As Novak notes, Tes­la’s mis­giv­ings about fem­i­nism have made him a hero to the so-called “men’s rights” move­ment.) While he ful­ly grant­ed that women could and would match and sur­pass men in every field, he warned that “the acqui­si­tion of new fields of endeav­or by women, their grad­ual usurpa­tion of lead­er­ship, will dull and final­ly dis­si­pate fem­i­nine sen­si­bil­i­ties, will choke the mater­nal instinct, so that mar­riage and moth­er­hood may become abhor­rent and human civ­i­liza­tion draw clos­er and clos­er to the per­fect civ­i­liza­tion of the bee.”

It seems to me that a “bee civ­i­liza­tion” would appeal to a eugeni­cist, except, I sup­pose, Tes­la feared becom­ing a drone. Although he saw the devel­op­ment as inevitable, he still sounds to me like any num­ber of cur­rent politi­cians who argue that soci­ety should con­tin­ue to sup­press and dis­crim­i­nate against women for their own good and the good of “civ­i­liza­tion.” Tes­la may be an out­sider hero for geek cul­ture every­where, but his social atti­tudes give me the creeps. While I’ve per­son­al­ly always liked the vision of a world in which robots do most the work and we spend most of our mon­ey on edu­ca­tion, when it comes to the elim­i­na­tion of war, I’m less san­guine about par­ti­cle rays and more sym­pa­thet­ic to the words of Ivor Cut­ler.

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

via Smith­son­ian/Pale­o­fu­ture

Relat­ed Con­tent:

In 1953, a Tele­phone-Com­pa­ny Exec­u­tive Pre­dicts the Rise of Mod­ern Smart­phones and Video Calls

Jules Verne Accu­rate­ly Pre­dicts What the 20th Cen­tu­ry Will Look Like in His Lost Nov­el, Paris in the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry (1863)

In 1922, a Nov­el­ist Pre­dicts What the World Will Look Like in 2022: Wire­less Tele­phones, 8‑Hour Flights to Europe & More

In 1900, Ladies’ Home Jour­nal Pub­lish­es 28 Pre­dic­tions for the Year 2000

Philip K. Dick Makes Off-the-Wall Pre­dic­tions for the Future: Mars Colonies, Alien Virus­es & More (1981)

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

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The Fiendishly Complicated Board Game That Takes 1,500 Hours to Play: Discover The Campaign for North Africa

in Games | February 8th, 2022

Monop­oly is noto­ri­ous­ly time-con­sum­ing. On the child­hood Christ­mas I received my first copy of that Park­er Broth­ers clas­sic, my dad and I start­ed a game that end­ed up spread­ing over two or three days. That may have had to do with my appre­ci­a­tion for Monopoly’s aes­thet­ic far exceed­ing my grasp of its aim, and I’ve since real­ized that it can be played in about an hour. That’s still a good deal longer than, say, a game of check­ers, but it falls some­what short of the league occu­pied by The Cam­paign for North Africa — which is, in fact, a league of its own. Since its pub­li­ca­tion in 1979, it’s been known as the longest board game in exis­tence, requir­ing 1,500 hours (or 62 days) to com­plete.

We are, of course, talk­ing about a war game, and that genre has its own stan­dards of com­plex­i­ty — stan­dards The Cam­paign for North Africa leaves in the dust. “The game itself cov­ers the famous WWII oper­a­tions in Libya and Egypt between 1940 and 1943,” writes Kotaku’s Luke Win­kle. “You’ll need to recruit 10 total play­ers, (five Allied, five Axis,) who will each lord over a spe­cial­ized divi­sion. The Front-line and Air Com­man­ders will issue orders to the troops in bat­tle, the Rear and Logis­tics Com­man­ders will fer­ry sup­plies to the com­bat areas, and last­ly, a Com­man­der-in-Chief will be respon­si­ble for all macro strate­gic deci­sions over the course of the con­flict. If you and your group meets for three hours at a time, twice a month, you’d wrap up the cam­paign in about 20 years.”

You can get an idea of what you’d be deal­ing with over those two decades in the video below from Youtu­ber Phas­ing Play­er, an overview that itself takes about an hour and a half. “Hon­est­ly, if I’m being straight-up here, this game does sound, broad­ly speak­ing, like a fun time,” he says, half an hour deep into the expla­na­tion. “Imag­ine set­ting up a giant map of Africa,” get­ting your friends togeth­er, “Sarah’s in charge of the air force and Jim is in charge of logis­tics. You have all these peo­ple in charge of dif­fer­ent things, and you’re com­mu­ni­cat­ing strate­gies, and the com­man­der-in-chief is for­mu­lat­ing plans and doing all this stuff. That sounds like a real hoot, right?” Alas, “the big aster­isk comes in when that good time has to last lit­er­al­ly a thou­sand hours,” involv­ing what anoth­er play­er quot­ed by Win­kle calls “doing tedious cal­cu­la­tions all the time.”

Those cal­cu­la­tions neces­si­tate pay­ing close atten­tion, on every sin­gle turn, to not just quan­ti­ties like fuel reserves but the his­tor­i­cal­ly accu­rate size of the bar­rels con­tain­ing those reserves. Note also that, as Win­kle adds, “the Ital­ian troops in World War II were out­fit­ted with noo­dle rations, and in the name of his­tor­i­cal dog­ma, the play­er respon­si­ble for the Ital­ians is required to dis­trib­ute an extra water ration to their forces, so that their pas­ta may be boiled.” The Cam­paign for North Africa’s design­er, the late Richard Berg, claimed that the so-called “pas­ta rule” was a joke, and that the game’s fiendish over­all com­plex­i­ty was in keep­ing with the style of the times, a “gold­en age” of war gam­ing with high sales and ever-esca­lat­ing ambi­tions. As with so many oth­er seem­ing­ly inex­plic­a­ble arti­facts of cul­tur­al his­to­ry, one falls back on a famil­iar expla­na­tion: hey, it was the 70s.

via Kotaku

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch a Playthrough of the Old­est Board Game in the World, the Sumer­ian Roy­al Game of Ur, Cir­ca 2500 BC

Learn to Play Senet, the 5,000-Year Old Ancient Egypt­ian Game Beloved by Queens & Pharaohs

The Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Board Game, Inspired by Hunter S. Thompson’s Rol­lick­ing Nov­el

Monop­oly: How the Orig­i­nal Game Was Made to Con­demn Monop­o­lies & the Abus­es of Cap­i­tal­ism

Down­load & Play the Shin­ing Board Game

Board Game Ide­ol­o­gy — Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast #108

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.

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Pink Floyd’s Debut on American TV, Restored in Color (1967)

in Music, Television | February 8th, 2022

Sev­er­al years ago, Josh Jones took you inside Pink Floy­d’s first appear­ance on Amer­i­can tele­vi­sion. In 1967, after releas­ing their first album Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the band came to the States and made their unlike­ly TV debut on Dick Clark’s Amer­i­can Band­stand, per­form­ing “Apples and Oranges.” That’s the “third sin­gle and the final song Bar­rett wrote for the band before he suf­fered a psy­chot­ic break onstage and was replaced by David Gilmour.”

Our orig­i­nal post fea­tured grainy black and white footage of the appear­ance. Above, you can watch a restored, col­orized ver­sion that took near­ly a year to cre­ate. Accord­ing to the YouTube chan­nel “Artist on the Bor­der,” each “frame of the 3350 required frames had to be uploaded indi­vid­u­al­ly, down­loaded again and indi­vid­u­al­ly named.” Enjoy the fruits of their labor above.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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 

Pink Floyd Per­forms on US Tele­vi­sion for the First Time: Amer­i­can Band­stand, 1967

Dick Clark Intro­duces Jef­fer­son Air­plane & the Sounds of Psy­che­del­ic San Fran­cis­co to Amer­i­ca: Yes Par­ents, You Should Be Afraid (1967)

Talk­ing Heads’ First TV Appear­ance Was on Amer­i­can Band­stand, and It Was a Lit­tle Awk­ward (1979)

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