What’s the Best Audio Book You’ve Ever “Read”?

Image by Knop­per

We were look­ing for a good audio­book. So we asked our friends on Twit­ter for their audio­book rec­om­men­da­tions, and recom­men­da­tions we got. Good ones, and more than a few.  So we thought we would share the twit­ter thread/recommendations with you.

I, Claudius nar­rat­ed by Nel­son Runger; Loli­ta read by Jere­my Irons; Last Chance Tex­a­co by Rick­ie Lee Jones; The Ili­ad as read by Alfred Moli­na; The Odyssey read by Ian McK­ellen; Anna Karen­i­na nar­rat­ed by Mag­gie Gyl­len­haal, and the list goes on.

If you find any titles you like, you can always sign up for a free tri­al with Audible.com.

Please feel free to add any of your own favorites to the com­ments sec­tion below. Enjoy…

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 

1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free

Hear Neil Gaiman Read Aloud 15 of His Own Works, and Works by 6 Oth­er Great Writ­ers: From The Grave­yard Book & Cora­line, to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven & Dick­ens’ A Christ­mas Car­ol

Hear Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch Read­ing Let­ters by Kurt Von­negut, Alan Tur­ing, Sol LeWitt, and Oth­ers https://www.openculture.com/2022/01/hear-benedict-cumberbatch-reading-letters-by-kurt-vonnegut-alan-turing-sol-lewitt-and-others.html

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Download The Harvard Classics as Free eBooks: A “Portable University” Created in 1909

Every rev­o­lu­tion­ary age pro­duces its own kind of nos­tal­gia. Faced with the enor­mous social and eco­nom­ic upheavals at the nine­teenth century’s end, learned Vic­to­ri­ans like Wal­ter Pater, John Ruskin, and Matthew Arnold looked to High Church mod­els and played the bish­ops of West­ern cul­ture, with a monk­ish devo­tion to pre­serv­ing and trans­mit­ting old texts and tra­di­tions and turn­ing back to sim­pler ways of life. It was in 1909, the nadir of this milieu, before the advent of mod­ernism and world war, that The Har­vard Clas­sics took shape. Com­piled by Harvard’s pres­i­dent Charles W. Eliot and called at first Dr. Eliot’s Five Foot Shelf, the com­pendi­um of lit­er­a­ture, phi­los­o­phy, and the sci­ences, writes Adam Kirsch in Har­vard Mag­a­zine, served as a “mon­u­ment from a more humane and con­fi­dent time” (or so its upper class­es believed), and a “time cap­sule…. In 50 vol­umes.”

What does the mas­sive col­lec­tion pre­serve? For one thing, writes Kirsch, it’s “a record of what Pres­i­dent Eliot’s Amer­i­ca, and his Har­vard, thought best in their own her­itage.” Eliot’s inten­tions for his work dif­fered some­what from those of his Eng­lish peers. Rather than sim­ply curat­ing for pos­ter­i­ty “the best that has been thought and said” (in the words of Matthew Arnold), Eliot meant his anthol­o­gy as a “portable university”—a prag­mat­ic set of tools, to be sure, and also, of course, a prod­uct. He sug­gest­ed that the full set of texts might be divid­ed into a set of six cours­es on such con­ser­v­a­tive themes as “The His­to­ry of Civ­i­liza­tion” and “Reli­gion and Phi­los­o­phy,” and yet, writes Kirsch, “in a more pro­found sense, the les­son taught by the Har­vard Clas­sics is ‘Progress.’” “Eliot’s [1910] intro­duc­tion express­es com­plete faith in the ‘inter­mit­tent and irreg­u­lar progress from bar­barism to civ­i­liza­tion.’”

In its expert syn­er­gy of moral uplift and mar­ket­ing, The Har­vard Clas­sics (find links to down­load them as free ebooks below) belong as much to Mark Twain’s bour­geois gild­ed age as to the pseu­do-aris­to­crat­ic age of Victoria—two sides of the same ocean, one might say.

The idea for the col­lec­tion didn’t ini­tial­ly come from Eliot, but from two edi­tors at the pub­lish­er P.F. Col­lier, who intend­ed “a com­mer­cial enter­prise from the begin­ning” after read­ing a speech Eliot gave to a group of work­ers in which he “declared that a five-foot shelf of books could pro­vide”

a good sub­sti­tute for a lib­er­al edu­ca­tion in youth to any­one who would read them with devo­tion, even if he could spare but fif­teen min­utes a day for read­ing.

Col­lier asked Eliot to “pick the titles” and they would pub­lish them as a series. The books appealed to the upward­ly mobile and those hun­gry for knowl­edge and an edu­ca­tion denied them, but the cost would still have been pro­hib­i­tive to many. Over a hun­dred years, and sev­er­al cul­tur­al-evo­lu­tion­ary steps lat­er, and any­one with an inter­net con­nec­tion can read all of the 51-vol­ume set online. In a pre­vi­ous post, we sum­ma­rized the num­ber of ways to get your hands on Charles W. Eliot’s anthol­o­gy:

You can still buy an old set off of Ama­zon for $750. But, just as eas­i­ly, you can head to the Inter­net Archive and Project Guten­berg, which have cen­tral­ized links to every text includ­ed in The Har­vard Clas­sics (Wealth of Nations, Ori­gin of Species, Plutarch’s Lives, the list goes on below). Please note that the pre­vi­ous two links won’t give you access to the actu­al anno­tat­ed Har­vard Clas­sics texts edit­ed by Eliot him­self. But if you want just that, you can always click here and get dig­i­tal scans of the true Har­vard Clas­sics.

In addi­tion to these options, Bartle­by has dig­i­tal texts of the entire col­lec­tion of what they call “the most com­pre­hen­sive and well-researched anthol­o­gy of all time.” But wait, there’s more! Much more, in fact, since Eliot and his assis­tant William A. Neil­son com­piled an addi­tion­al twen­ty vol­umes called the “Shelf of Fic­tion.” Read those twen­ty vol­umes—at fif­teen min­utes a day—starting with Hen­ry Field­ing and end­ing with Nor­we­gian nov­el­ist Alexan­der Kiel­land at Bartle­by.

What may strike mod­ern read­ers of Eliot’s col­lec­tion are pre­cise­ly the “blind spots in Vic­to­ri­an notions of cul­ture and progress” that it rep­re­sents. For exam­ple, those three har­bin­gers of doom for Vic­to­ri­an certitude—Marx, Niet­zsche, and Freud—are nowhere to be seen. Omis­sions like this are quite telling, but, as Kirsch writes, we might not look at Eliot’s achieve­ment as a rel­ic of a naive­ly opti­mistic age, but rather as “an inspir­ing tes­ti­mo­ny to his faith in the pos­si­bil­i­ty of demo­c­ra­t­ic edu­ca­tion with­out the loss of high stan­dards.” This was, and still remains, a noble ide­al, if one that—like the utopi­an dreams of the Victorians—can some­times seem frus­trat­ing­ly unat­tain­able (or cul­tur­al­ly impe­ri­al­ist). But the wide­spread avail­abil­i­ty of free online human­i­ties cer­tain­ly brings us clos­er than Eliot’s time could ever come.

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:

Harold Bloom Cre­ates a Mas­sive List of Works in The “West­ern Canon”: Read Many of the Books Free Online

W.H. Auden’s 1941 Lit­er­a­ture Syl­labus Asks Stu­dents to Read 32 Great Works, Cov­er­ing 6000 Pages

The Har­vard Clas­sics: A Free, Dig­i­tal Col­lec­tion

975 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

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

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The Entire Archives of Radical Philosophy Go Online: Read Essays by Michel Foucault, Alain Badiou, Judith Butler & More (1972–2022)

On a seem­ing­ly dai­ly basis, we see attacks against the intel­lec­tu­al cul­ture of the aca­d­e­m­ic human­i­ties, which, since the 1960s, have opened up spaces for left­ists to devel­op crit­i­cal the­o­ries of all kinds. Attacks from sup­pos­ed­ly lib­er­al pro­fes­sors and cen­trist op-ed colum­nists, from well-fund­ed con­ser­v­a­tive think tanks and white suprema­cists on col­lege cam­pus tours. All rail against the evils of fem­i­nism, post-mod­ernism, and some­thing called “neo-Marx­ism” with out­sized agi­ta­tion.

For stu­dents and pro­fes­sors, the onslaughts are exhaust­ing, and not only because they have very real, often dan­ger­ous, con­se­quences, but because they all attack the same straw men (or “straw peo­ple”) and refuse to engage with aca­d­e­m­ic thought on its own terms. Rarely, in the exas­per­at­ing pro­lif­er­a­tion of cranky, cher­ry-picked anti-acad­e­mia op-eds do we encounter peo­ple actu­al­ly read­ing and grap­pling with the ideas of their sup­posed ide­o­log­i­cal neme­ses.

Were non-aca­d­e­m­ic crit­ics to take aca­d­e­m­ic work seri­ous­ly, they might notice that debates over “polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness,” “thought polic­ing,” “iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics,” etc. have been going on for thir­ty years now, and among left intel­lec­tu­als them­selves. Con­trary to what many seem to think, crit­i­cism of lib­er­al ide­ol­o­gy has not been banned in the acad­e­my. It is absolute­ly the case that the human­i­ties have become increas­ing­ly hos­tile to irre­spon­si­ble opin­ions that dehu­man­ize peo­ple, like emer­gency room doc­tors become hos­tile to drunk dri­ving. But it does not fol­low there­fore that one can­not dis­agree with the estab­lish­ment, as though the Uni­ver­si­ty sys­tem were still behold­en to the Vat­i­can.

Under­stand­ing this requires work many peo­ple are unwill­ing to do, either because they’re busy and dis­tract­ed or, per­haps more often, because they have oth­er, bad faith agen­das. Should one decide to sur­vey the philo­soph­i­cal debates on the left, how­ev­er, an excel­lent place to start would be Rad­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy, which describes itself as a “UK-based jour­nal of social­ist and fem­i­nist phi­los­o­phy.” Found­ed in 1972, in response to “the wide­ly-felt dis­con­tent with the steril­i­ty of aca­d­e­m­ic phi­los­o­phy at the time,” the jour­nal was itself an act of protest against the cul­ture of acad­e­mia.

Rad­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy has pub­lished essays and inter­views with near­ly all of the big names in aca­d­e­m­ic phi­los­o­phy on the left—from Marx­ists, to post-struc­tural­ists, to post-colo­nial­ists, to phe­nom­e­nol­o­gists, to crit­i­cal the­o­rists, to Laca­ni­ans, to queer the­o­rists, to rad­i­cal the­olo­gians, to the prag­ma­tist Richard Rorty, who made argu­ments for nation­al pride and made sev­er­al cri­tiques of crit­i­cal the­o­ry as an illib­er­al enter­prise. The full range of rad­i­cal crit­i­cal the­o­ry over the past 45 years appears here, as well as con­trar­i­an respons­es from philoso­phers on the left.

Rorty was hard­ly the only one in the journal’s pages to cri­tique cer­tain promi­nent trends. Soci­ol­o­gists Pierre Bour­dieu and Loic Wac­quant launched a 2001 protest against what they called “a strange Newspeak,” or “NewLib­er­al­S­peak” that includ­ed words like “glob­al­iza­tion,” “gov­er­nance,” “employ­a­bil­i­ty,” “under­class,” “com­mu­ni­tar­i­an­ism,” “mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism” and “their so-called post­mod­ern cousins.” Bour­dieu and Wac­quant argued that this dis­course obscures “the terms ‘cap­i­tal­ism,’ ‘class,’ ‘exploita­tion,’ ‘dom­i­na­tion,’ and ‘inequal­i­ty,’” as part of a “neolib­er­al rev­o­lu­tion,” that intends to “remake the world by sweep­ing away the social and eco­nom­ic con­quests of a cen­tu­ry of social strug­gles.”

One can also find in the pages of Rad­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy philoso­pher Alain Badiou’s 2005 cri­tique of “demo­c­ra­t­ic mate­ri­al­ism,” which he iden­ti­fies as a “post­mod­ernism” that “rec­og­nizes the objec­tive exis­tence of bod­ies alone. Who would ever speak today, oth­er than to con­form to a cer­tain rhetoric? Of the sep­a­ra­bil­i­ty of our immor­tal soul?” Badiou iden­ti­fies the ide­al of max­i­mum tol­er­ance as one that also, para­dox­i­cal­ly, “guides us, irre­sistibly” to war. But he refus­es to counter demo­c­ra­t­ic materialism’s max­im that “there are only bod­ies and lan­guages” with what he calls “its for­mal oppo­site… ‘aris­to­crat­ic ide­al­ism.’” Instead, he adds the sup­ple­men­tary phrase, “except that there are truths.”

Badiou’s polemic includes an oblique swipe at Stal­in­ism, a cri­tique Michel Fou­cault makes in more depth in a 1975 inter­view, in which he approv­ing­ly cites phe­nom­e­nol­o­gist Merleau-Ponty’s “argu­ment against the Com­mu­nism of the time… that it has destroyed the dialec­tic of indi­vid­ual and history—and hence the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a human­is­tic soci­ety and indi­vid­ual free­dom.” Fou­cault made a case for this “dialec­ti­cal rela­tion­ship” as that “in which the free and open human project con­sists.” In an inter­view two years lat­er, he talks of pris­ons as insti­tu­tions “no less per­fect than school or bar­racks or hos­pi­tal” for repress­ing and trans­form­ing indi­vid­u­als.

Foucault’s polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy inspired fem­i­nist and queer the­o­rist Judith But­ler, whose argu­ments inspired many of today’s gen­der the­o­rists, and who is deeply con­cerned with ques­tions of ethics, moral­i­ty, and social respon­si­bil­i­ty. Her Adorno Prize Lec­ture, pub­lished in a 2012 issue, took up Theodor Adorno’s chal­lenge of how it is pos­si­ble to live a good life in bad cir­cum­stances (under fas­cism, for example)—a clas­si­cal polit­i­cal ques­tion that she engages through the work of Orlan­do Pat­ter­son, Han­nah Arendt, Lud­wig Wittgen­stein, and Hegel. Her lec­ture ends with a dis­cus­sion of the eth­i­cal duty to active­ly resist and protest an intol­er­a­ble sta­tus quo.

You can now read for free all of these essays and hun­dreds more at the Rad­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy archive, either on the site itself or in down­load­able PDFs. The jour­nal, run by an ‘Edi­to­r­i­al Col­lec­tive,” still appears three times a year. The most recent issue fea­tures an essay by Lars T. Lih on the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion through the lens of Thomas Hobbes, a detailed his­tor­i­cal account by Nathan Brown of the term “post­mod­ern,” and its inap­plic­a­bil­i­ty to the present moment, and an essay by Jami­la M.H. Mas­cat on the prob­lem of Hegelian abstrac­tion.

If noth­ing else, these essays and many oth­ers should upend facile notions of left­ist aca­d­e­m­ic phi­los­o­phy as dom­i­nat­ed by “post­mod­ern” denials of truth, moral­i­ty, free­dom, and Enlight­en­ment thought, as doc­tri­naire Stal­in­ism, or lit­tle more than thought polic­ing through dog­mat­ic polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness. For every argu­ment in the pages of Rad­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy that might con­firm cer­tain read­ers’ bias­es, there are dozens more that will chal­lenge their assump­tions, bear­ing out Foucault’s obser­va­tion that “phi­los­o­phy can­not be an end­less scruti­ny of its own propo­si­tions.”

Enter the Rad­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy archive here.

Note: This post was orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished on our site in March, 2018.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Intro­duc­ing Ergo, the New Open Phi­los­o­phy Jour­nal

His­to­ry of Mod­ern Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Online Course 

On the Pow­er of Teach­ing Phi­los­o­phy in Pris­ons

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

How to Predict What the World Will Look Like in 2122: Insights from Futurist Peter Schwartz

“It’s very easy to imag­ine how things go wrong,” says futur­ist Peter Schwartz in the video above. “It’s much hard­er to imag­ine how things go right.” So he demon­strat­ed a quar­ter-cen­tu­ry ago with the Wired mag­a­zine cov­er sto­ry he co-wrote with Peter Ley­den, “The Long Boom.” Made in the now tech­no-utopi­an-seem­ing year of 1997, its pre­dic­tions of “25 years of  pros­per­i­ty, free­dom, and a bet­ter envi­ron­ment for a whole world” have since become objects of ridicule. But in the piece Schwartz and Ley­den also pro­vide a set of less-desir­able alter­na­tive sce­nar­ios whose details — a new Cold War between the U.S. and Chi­na, cli­mate change-relat­ed dis­rup­tions in the food sup­ply, an “uncon­trol­lable plague” — look rather more pre­scient in ret­ro­spect.

The intel­li­gent futur­ist, in Schwartz’s view, aims not to get every­thing right. “It’s almost impos­si­ble. But you test your deci­sions against mul­ti­ple sce­nar­ios, so you make sure you don’t get it wrong in the sce­nar­ios that actu­al­ly occur.” The art of “sce­nario plan­ning,” as Schwartz calls it, requires a fair­ly deep root­ed­ness in the past.

His own life is a case in point: born in a Ger­man refugee camp in 1946, he even­tu­al­ly made his way to a place then called Stan­ford Research Insti­tute. “It was the ear­ly days that became Sil­i­con Val­ley. It’s where tech­nol­o­gy was accel­er­at­ing. It was one of the first thou­sand peo­ple online. It was the era when LSD was still being used as an explorato­ry tool. So every­thing around me was the future being born,” and he could hard­ly have avoid­ed get­ting hooked on the future.

That addic­tion remains with Schwartz today: most recent­ly, he’s been fore­cast­ing the shape of work to come for Sales­force. The key ques­tion, he real­ized, “was not what did I think about the future, but what did every­body else think about the future?” And among “every­body else,” he places spe­cial val­ue on the abil­i­ties of those pos­sessed of imag­i­na­tion, col­lab­o­ra­tive abil­i­ty, and “ruth­less curios­i­ty.” As for the great­est threat to sce­nario plan­ning, he names “fear of the future,” call­ing it “one of the worst prob­lems we have today.” There will be more set­backs, more “wars and pan­ics and pan­demics and so on.” But “the great arc of human progress, and the gain of pros­per­i­ty, and a bet­ter life for all, that will con­tin­ue.” Despite all he’s seen – and indeed, because of all he’s seen — Peter Schwartz still believes in the long boom.

Relat­ed con­tent:

In 1997, Wired Mag­a­zine Pre­dicts 10 Things That Could Go Wrong in the 21st Cen­tu­ry: “An Uncon­trol­lable Plague,” Cli­mate Cri­sis, Rus­sia Becomes a Klep­toc­ra­cy & More

Pio­neer­ing Sci-Fi Author William Gib­son Pre­dicts in 1997 How the Inter­net Will Change Our World

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

In 1926, Niko­la Tes­la Pre­dicts the World of 2026

M.I.T. Com­put­er Pro­gram Pre­dicts in 1973 That Civ­i­liza­tion Will End by 2040

Why Map­mak­ers Once Thought Cal­i­for­nia Was an Island

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.

John Oliver’s Show on World-Class Art Museums & Their Looted Art: Watch It Free Online

From John Oliv­er comes a com­ic take on a seri­ous subject–how West­ern muse­ums have often built their col­lec­tions, espe­cial­ly in antiq­ui­ties, through loot­ing art from col­o­nized nations. In this 34 minute episode, Oliv­er dis­cuss­es “some of the world’s most pres­ti­gious muse­ums, why they con­tain so many stolen goods, [and] the mar­ket that con­tin­ues to ille­gal­ly trade antiq­ui­ties.” It’s one of the lat­est episodes from HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliv­er.

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 British Muse­um is Full of Loot­ed Arti­facts

Take a Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Tour of the World’s Stolen Art

Lis­ten to Last Seen, a True-Crime Pod­cast That Takes You Inside an Unsolved, $500 Mil­lion Art Heist

When Ger­man Per­for­mance Artist Ulay Stole Hitler’s Favorite Paint­ing & Hung it in the Liv­ing Room of a Turk­ish Immi­grant Fam­i­ly (1976)

When Pablo Picas­so and Guil­laume Apol­li­naire Were Accused of Steal­ing the Mona Lisa (1911)

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How Plants Move in a 24-Hour Period

Neat to watch. Learn more about how plants move over on this Penn State web site.

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!

Behold a 21st-Century Medieval Castle Being Built with Only Tools & Materials from the Middle Ages

Con­struc­tion sites are hives of spe­cial­ized activ­i­ty, but there’s no par­tic­u­lar train­ing need­ed to fer­ry 500 lbs of stone sev­er­al sto­ries to the masons wait­ing above. All you need is the sta­mi­na for a few steep flights and a medieval tread­wheel crane or “squir­rel cage.”

The tech­nol­o­gy, which uses sim­ple geom­e­try and human exer­tion to hoist heavy loads, dates to ancient Roman times.

Retired in the Vic­to­ri­an era, it has been res­ur­rect­ed and is being put to good use on the site of a for­mer sand­stone quar­ry two hours south of Paris, where the cas­tle of an imag­i­nary, low rank­ing 13th-cen­tu­ry noble­man began tak­ing shape in 1997.

There’s no typo in that time­line.

Château de Guéde­lon is an immer­sive edu­ca­tion­al project, an open air exper­i­men­tal arche­ol­o­gy lab, and a high­ly unusu­al work­ing con­struc­tion site.

With a project time­line of 35 years, some 40 quar­rypeo­ple, stone­ma­sons, wood­cut­ters, car­pen­ters, tilers, black­smiths, rope mak­ers and carters can expect anoth­er ten years on the job.

That’s longer than a medieval con­struc­tion crew would have tak­en, but unlike their 21st-cen­tu­ry coun­ter­parts, they did­n’t have to take fre­quent breaks to explain their labors to the vis­it­ing pub­lic.

A team of arche­ol­o­gists, art his­to­ri­ans and castel­lol­o­gists strive for authen­tic­i­ty, eschew­ing elec­tric­i­ty and any vehi­cle that does­n’t have hooves.

Research mate­ri­als include illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­scripts, stained glass win­dows, finan­cial records, and exist­ing cas­tles.

The 1425-year-old Can­ter­bury Cathe­dral has a non-repro­duc­tion tread­mill crane stored in its rafters, as well as a levers and pul­leys activ­i­ty sheet for young vis­i­tors that notes that oper­at­ing a “human tread­mill” was both gru­el­ing and dan­ger­ous:

Philoso­pher John Stu­art Mill wrote that they were “unequalled in the mod­ern annals of legal­ized tor­ture.”

Good call, then, on the part of Guédelon’s lead­er­ship to allow a few anachro­nisms in the name of safe­ty.

Guédelon’s tread­mill cranes, includ­ing a dou­ble drum mod­el that piv­ots 360º to deposit loads of up to 1000 lbs wher­ev­er the stone­ma­sons have need of them, have been out­fit­ted with brakes. The walk­ers inside the wood­en wheels wear hard hats, as are the over­seer and those mon­i­tor­ing the brakes and the cra­dle hold­ing the stones.

The onsite work­er-edu­ca­tors may be garbed in peri­od-appro­pri­ate loose-fit­ting nat­ur­al fibers, but rest assured that their toes are steel-rein­forced.

Château de Guéde­lon guide Sarah Pre­ston explains the rea­son­ing:

Obvi­ous­ly, we’re not try­ing to dis­cov­er how many peo­ple were killed or injured in the 13th-cen­tu­ry.

Learn more about Château de Guéde­lon, includ­ing how you can arrange a vis­it, here.

Explore the his­to­ry of tread­mill cranes here.

And see how the Château de Guéde­lon has housed Ukrain­ian refugees here.

via The Kids Should See This

Relat­ed Con­tent 

The Medieval City Plan Gen­er­a­tor: A Fun Way to Cre­ate Your Own Imag­i­nary Medieval Cities

A Medieval Book That Opens Six Dif­fer­ent Ways, Reveal­ing Six Dif­fer­ent Books in One

Behold the Medieval Wound Man: The Poor Soul Who Illus­trat­ed the Injuries a Per­son Might Receive Through War, Acci­dent or Dis­ease

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

1950s Pulp Comic Adaptations of Ray Bradbury Stories Getting Republished

Grow­ing up, there was always a spe­cial trans­gres­sive thrill in read­ing EC Comics, espe­cial­ly titles like Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Hor­ror, and The Haunt of Fear. That must have been even truer when they were first pub­lished in the nine­teen-fifties than it was when they were reprint­ed in the nine­teen-nineties, the peri­od in which I myself thrilled to their dis­tinc­tive mix­ture of grotes­querie, sug­ges­tive­ness, moral­ism, and dark humor. By no means above indulging in either shock or schlock val­ue, the pub­lish­ers EC Comics also knew lit­er­ary val­ue when they saw it: in the work of Ray Brad­bury, for exam­ple, to which they paid the ulti­mate trib­ute by swip­ing.

“EC Comics writer-edi­tor Al Feld­stein com­bined two sci­ence-fic­tion sto­ries he’d read into a sin­gle tale, adapt­ed it into the comics form, and assigned it to artist Wal­ly Wood,” writes J. L. Bell at Oz and Ends, appar­ent­ly “work­ing on the belief that steal­ing from two sto­ries at once wasn’t pla­gia­rism but research.”

Brad­bury’s response came swift­ly: “You have not as of yet sent on the check for $50.00 to cov­er the use of sec­ondary rights on my two sto­ries THE ROCKET MAN and KALEIDOSCOPE which appeared in your WEIRD-FANTASY May-June ’52, #13, with the cov­er-all title of HOME TO STAY,” he wrote to EC. “I feel this was prob­a­bly over­looked in the gen­er­al con­fu­sion of office-work, and look for­ward to your pay­ment in the near future.”

Brad­bury’s “reminder” result­ed in not just pay­ment but a series of legit­i­mate adap­ta­tions there­after. His oth­er sto­ries to get the EC treat­ment include “A Sound of Thun­der,” “Mars Is Heav­en,” and the clas­sic “There Will Come Soft Rains…” All of these sto­ries are includ­ed in Fan­ta­graph­ics’ new sin­gle-vol­ume Home to Stay!: The Com­plete Ray Brad­bury EC Sto­ries, which you can see reviewed in this video. The book includes not just the 35 orig­i­nal com­ic-book sto­ries (one of which you can read free here), but also “essays by lead­ing schol­ars, EC experts, some big-name fans,” says the review­er, whose chan­nel EC Fan-Addict reveals him to be no casu­al enthu­si­ast him­self. Gen­er­a­tions of kids have found in EC comics a gate­way to “high­er” read­ing mate­r­i­al, Brad­bury and much else besides, but those who get the taste for EC’s light­heart­ed grim­ness and earnest irony nev­er real­ly lose it.

You can pick up a copy of Home to Stay!: The Com­plete Ray Brad­bury EC Sto­ries here. It will be offi­cial­ly released on Octo­ber 18.

via Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Essen­tial Brad­bury: The 25 Finest Sto­ries by the Beloved Writer

Sovi­et Ani­ma­tions of Ray Brad­bury Sto­ries: ‘Here There Be Tygers’ & ‘There Will Come Soft Rain’

Hear Ray Bradbury’s Beloved Sci-Fi Sto­ries as Clas­sic Radio Dra­mas

Down­load Issues of Weird Tales (1923–1954): The Pio­neer­ing Pulp Hor­ror Mag­a­zine Fea­tures Orig­i­nal Sto­ries by Love­craft, Brad­bury & Many More

Dis­cov­er the First Hor­ror & Fan­ta­sy Mag­a­zine, Der Orchideen­garten, and Its Bizarre Art­work (1919–1921)

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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