Over the decades, Tom Jones has performed with the best of them. In 1969, we can find him singing “Long Time Gone” with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and taking them delightfully by surprise. The same goes for his duetwith Janis Joplin in that same year. Now fast forward to the 1990s. In this decade, Jones teamed up with the Swedish rock band The Cardigans and performed a rollicking version of the Talking Heads “Burning Down the House.” And, rather unexpectedly, he would get paired with Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour and croon Prince’s “Purple Rain.”
The recording above comes from Jones’ show The Right Time, a six-episode television series that aired in 1992. Tracing the evolution of pop music, the show featured appearances by Bob Geldof, Cyndi Lauper, The Chieftains and Stevie Wonder. When it comes to his version of “Purple Rain,” don’t miss the Gilmour solo midway through. Enjoy!
We didn’t have civilization until we had cities, and we didn’t have cities until we had agriculture. So, at least, goes a widely accepted narrative in “big history” — a narrative somewhat troubled by the discovery of ruins on Göbekli Tepe, or “Potbelly Hill,” in southeastern Turkey. Apparently inhabited from around 9500 to 8000 BC, the ancient settlement predates the Pyramids of Giza by nearly 8,000 years, and Stonehenge by about 6,000 years. Though it was once believed to be a site used for ritual purposes only, later research unearthed evidence that suggests it was host to a variety of activities we associate with urban civilization, rather than what we usually think of hunter-gatherer sites. Does it amount to reason enough to revise our very understanding of the history of humanity?
“Like Stonehenge, Göbekli Tepe’s structure includes circles of T‑shaped limestone pillars, many of them featuring etchings of animals,” says YouTuber Joe Scott in the video above. These pillars are arranged into enclosures, which together constitute a site that “features archaeological complexity that probably would have been too advanced for hunter-gatherers.”
Klaus Schmidt, the archaeologist who led the excavations at Göbekli Tepe between 1996 and 2014, believed that it was “a sanctuary and maybe a regional pilgrimage center where people gathered to perform religious rites.” But since his death, evidence of houses, a cistern, and grain-processing tools has turned up, indicating “a fully fledged settlement with permanent occupation” well before the advent of farming. This finding indicates that social and technological innovations associated with ‘civilization’ may have emerged long before the advent of agriculture, cities, or domesticated animals — under conditions very different from what historians had previously assumed. But as to the reason it was all built in the first place, this new information has led to more questions than answers.
One less than generally accepted theory holds that Göbekli Tepe was an astronomical observatory, and perhaps also a memorial to a devastating comet strike that occurred 13,000 years ago. Maybe it was “a last-ditch effort by a hunter-gatherer society to hang on to their vanishing lifestyle as the world was transitioning to farming.” That could have been the first large-scale technological revolution in human history, but it certainly wouldn’t be the last, and as we here in the twenty-first century consider the ruins of Göbekli Tepe — most of which still have yet to be excavated — we naturally find ourselves thinking about the long-term survival prospects of our own civilization. But the more recent discovery elsewhere in Turkey of other, even older ruins with a distinctly urban structure may also make us feel that our way of life isn’t quite as modern as we’d imagined.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
You may have seen every single one of Studio Ghibli’s animated films, going well beyond the Hayao Miyazaki-directed My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, and Kiki’s Delivery Service to the less widely known but also charmingly crafted likes of Ocean Waves, My Neighbors the Yamadas, and The Cat Returns. Even so, the question remains: have you really seen them all? Experiencing them in the theater or on home video is only the first stage of the process. Ideally, each element of a Ghibli movie should subsequently be appreciated in isolation and at length: by listening to the music, for example, hundreds of hours of which, available to stream, we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture.
Still, no matter how captivating Joe Hisaishi’s scores may sound on their own, Ghibli’s work is ultimately made to be seen. Given that 24 frames of their movies go by each second, it can be difficult to pick up all the details their animators include in each and every one of them.
Hence the value of the free archive of stills that the studio first made available online a few years ago, and that has steadily expanded ever since. Though only available in Japanese, it doesn’t present a great challenge even to fans with no knowledge of the language to click on the poster of their Ghibli film of choice, then to browse the variety of downloadable images associated with it.
Many of these stills are drawn from highly memorable moments across the Ghibli filmography: the children’s party on the hero of Porco Rosso’s beloved airplane; the emergence of the kodama in Princess Mononoke; the defeat of the colossal Giant Warrior in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (which predates the studio’s foundation, but in any case now seems to count honorarily among its productions); the sentient flame cooking a skillet of bacon and eggs in Howl’s Moving Castle. Some of them have even been turned into wallpaper for video calls, downloadable from a page of their own. There we have another way to add a touch of Studio Ghibli’s distinctive vision to our everyday lives — and another source of inspiration to watch through the movies themselves one more time.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
The site Fast Companypublished an article that describes the “Complaint Restraint project,” an initiative that aims to create a “positive life by eliminating negative statements.” It’s an admirable goal. Though most of us have a perverse love of wallowing in our misery—a human trait amplified a thousandfold by the internet—complaining rarely makes things any better. As in the Buddha’s parable of the “second arrow,” our griping can make our sufferings doubly painful; as in the parable of the “poisoned arrow,” it can postpone or substitute for the constructive actions we need to take in order to heal or improve our condition.
But it would be a mistake to think that complaining is somehow a recent phenomenon, though we may hear more of it every day, all the time, from every quarter of the globe. The Buddhist arrow stories are, after all, at least a couple thousand years old; lamentation more or less constitutes its own genre in Biblical literature.
Even older still than these religious sources is the first documented customer service complaint, a specific variety of complaining that we might be forgiven for associating mainly with a modern, consumerist age—and one of the few kinds of complaints that can generate positive results.
Absent a Yelp app, the ancient Babylonian consumer in this case inscribed his complaint on a clay tablet—which now resides at the British Museum—sometime around 1750 B.C. The irate purchaser here, Nanni, writing to someone named Ea-nasir, received a shipment of copper ore of an inferior grade, after some annoying delay and in a damaged condition. In the translation below from Assyriologist A. Leo Oppenheim, Nanni vents his spleen.
Tell Ea-nasir: Nanni sends the following message:
When you came, you said to me as follows : “I will give Gimil-Sin (when he comes) fine quality copper ingots.” You left then but you did not do what you promised me. You put ingots which were not good before my messenger (Sit-Sin) and said: “If you want to take them, take them; if you do not want to take them, go away!”
What do you take me for, that you treat somebody like me with such contempt? I have sent as messengers gentlemen like ourselves to collect the bag with my money (deposited with you) but you have treated me with contempt by sending them back to me empty-handed several times, and that through enemy territory. Is there anyone among the merchants who trade with Telmun who has treated me in this way? You alone treat my messenger with contempt! On account of that one (trifling) mina of silver which I owe(?) you, you feel free to speak in such a way, while I have given to the palace on your behalf 1,080 pounds of copper, and umi-abum has likewise given 1,080 pounds of copper, apart from what we both have had written on a sealed tablet to be kept in the temple of Samas.
How have you treated me for that copper? You have withheld my money bag from me in enemy territory; it is now up to you to restore (my money) to me in full.
Take cognizance that (from now on) I will not accept here any copper from you that is not of fine quality. I shall (from now on) select and take the ingots individually in my own yard, and I shall exercise against you my right of rejection because you have treated me with contempt.
It does seem that Nanni maybe took this poor service a little too personally. In any case, let’s hope he received some satisfaction for the trouble it must have taken to inscribe this angry message.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.
The average Open Culture reader may well be aware that there is such a thing as Archaeology YouTube. What could come as more of a surprise is how much back-and-forth there is within that world. Below, we have a video from the channel Artifactually Speaking in which Brad Hafford, a University of Pennsylvania archaeologist, gives his take on the so-called Baghdad Battery, an ancient artifact discovered in modern-day Iraq. He does so in the form of a response to an earlier video on the Baghdad Battery from another channel hosted by a young archaeology educator called Milo Rossi. At some points Hafford agrees, and at others he has corrections to make, but surely both YouTubers can agree on the fascination of the object in question. After all: an ancient battery?
Even those of us without any particular investment in archaeology may find our curiosity piqued by the notion that some long-vanished civilization had managed to harness electricity. The name Baghdad Battery was granted in the first place by Wilhelm König, who was the director of the laboratory of the National Museum of Iraq in the nineteen-thirties, when the object was originally discovered.
Given that it consisted of not just a ceramic pot but also a copper tube and an iron rod, all attached to one another with bitumen (a substance present in crude oil used today in asphalt), the idea of its being used for power storage was logical, in its way, if also fantastically anachronistic. Not that König suggested the Baghdad Battery was used to power, say, a grid of streetlights; rather, he supposed that it could have been involved in some kind of electroplating system.
Unfortunately for König’s hypothesis, none of the other gilded artifacts recovered from ancient Iraq, no matter how fine their craft, were actually electroplated. More practically speaking, the Baghdad Battery has no means of connection to a circuit, a necessity to charge it up in the first place. As of now, the professional consensus holds that it must have been ceremonial: a default, as Rossi frames it, whenever archaeologists throw up their hands at a lack of dispositive evidence about an artifact’s original purpose. Though Hafford acknowledges that tendency, he also lays out the reasons he believes the mysteries don’t go quite as deep as popularizers tend to assume. Like any good YouTuber, archaeological or otherwise, Rossi responded with another video of his own, in which he addresses Hafford’s criticisms, and also keeps the Baghdad Battery — as well as its newly created namesake cocktail — firing up our imaginations a little longer.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
In 1980, Newsweek published a cantankerous and sadly on-the-nose diagnosis of the United States’ “cult of ignorance” — written by one Isaac Asimov, “professor of biochemistry at Boston University School of Medicine” and “author of 212 books, most of them on various scientific subjects for the general public.” Given this intimidating biography, and the fact that Asimov believed that “hardly anyone can read” in the U.S., we might expect the science fiction legend wanted nothing to do with television. We would be wrong.
Asimov seemed to love TV. In 1987, for example, the four-time Hugo winner wrote a humorously critical takedown of ALF for TV Guide. And he was a consummate TV entertainer, making his first major TV appearance on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show in 1968, appearing four times on The Mike Douglas Show in the next few years, and giving his final television interviews to Dick Cavett in a two-part series in 1989. The same year he wrote about America’s cult of ignorance, he appeared on The David Letterman show to crack wise with the biggest wiseass on TV. Asimov held his own and then some.
“Asimov, sixty in this video, proves himself a natural comedian,” writes the Melville House blog; “Letterman, thirty-three, can barely keep up.” Surely Asimov’s banter had nothing to do with The David Letterman Show’s cancellation three days later. (Letterman was back on the air for eleven seasons two years later.) Their interview ranges widely from pop culture (Asimov confesses his appreciation for both Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back) to “the future of medicine, space exploration, hope for mankind, and much more,” Vic Sage writes at Pop Culture Retrorama.
Asimov’s dry delivery — honed during his English-and-Yiddish-speaking Brooklyn childhood — is delightful. But the writer, teacher, and scientist hasn’t only come on TV to crack jokes, promote a book, and flaunt his muttonchops. He wants to educate his fellow Americans about the state of the future. (His Newsweek bio was outdated. As Letterman says, his appearance marked the publication of his 221st book.) Like Hari Seldon, the hero of his 1951 novel Foundation, Asimov felt confident in his ability to predict the course of human progress (or regress, as the case may be).
He also felt confident answering questions about what to do with outer space, and where to “put more men,” as Letterman says. His recommendation to build “factories” may strike us as a banal forerunner of Jeff Bezos’ even more banal plans for office parks in space. Asimov boasts of the vision he had of “pocket computers” in 1950 — hardly a reality in 1980. Dave complains about how complicated computers are, and Asimov accurately predicts that as technology catches up, they will get simpler to use. “But these are little things,” he says. “I never tried to predict. I just tried to write stories to pay my way through college.” He must have paid it several times over, and he seemed to get more right than he got wrong. See more of Asimov’s predictions in the links below.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2021.
If you want to see the Mona Lisa in real life, your first thought may not be to head to the Prado. But according to a school of thought that has emerged in recent years, the Mona Lisa in Madrid has a greater claim to artistic faithfulness than the one in Paris. That’s because researchers have discovered compelling evidence suggesting that what was long considered just another copy of the most famous painting in the world wasn’t made after Leonardo had completed the original, but concurrently with the original, probably by one of his students. Over half a millennium, in this view, the Prado’s Mona Lisa has retained the colors and details the Louvre’s has lost, resulting in its preservation of Leonardo’s intentions today.
Infrared photography has even revealed, says the narrator of the new Inspiraggio video above, that both paintings “share the same changes in the original sketch. For years, it has been known that Leonardo made small corrections to the shape of the Mona Lisa’s hands, adjustments to the line of the eyes, and subtle modifications to the curve of the face,” the very same corrections that were found in the newly examined copy.
Unlike other copies, the Prado’s version uses “incredibly expensive pigments” such as lapis lazuli—imported from Afghanistan—for the sky. This only became evident during the 2012 restoration, when the background, long hidden under a thick layer of black, was finally uncovered.
Thereafter, the Prado Mona Lisa was exhibited alongside the Mona Lisa at the Louvre in a temporary exhibition. This gave the public the chance to see both how similar they look, and how different. Though undeniably La Gioconda, the copy doesn’t seem quite “right,” in large part because it hasn’t deteriorated in the manner or to the degree of the original. Leonardo painted it on a poplar wood panel that has given way to countless small cracks, and the layers of yellow varnish added over the centuries have darkened to give the whole image a sepia tone. The result, of course, is the texture and coloring we’ve come to associate with the Mona Lisa by ceaseless exposure to her in popular culture, even if we’ve never seen any version hanging in any museum. If the Prado’s copy really does reflect Leonardo’s original artistic choices, we can put at least one hotly debated matter to rest: the lady really did have eyebrows.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Marie Curie’s 1911 Nobel Prize win, her second, for the discovery of radium and polonium, would have been cause for public celebration in her adopted France, but for the nearly simultaneous revelation of her affair with fellow physicist Paul Langevin, the fellow standing to the right of a 32-year-old Albert Einstein in the above group photo from the 1911 Solvay Conference in Physics.
Both stories broke while Curie—unsurprisingly, the sole woman in the photo—was attending the conference in Brussels.
Equally unsurprisingly, the press preferred le scandale to la réalisation scientifique. Sex sells, then and now.
The fires of radium which beam so mysteriously…have just lit a fire in the heart of one of the scientists who studies their action so devotedly; and the wife and the children of this scientist are in tears.…
—Le Journal, November 4, 1911
There’s no denying that the affair was painful for Langevin’s family, particularly his wife, Jeanne, who supplied the media with incriminating letters from Curie to her husband. She must have been aware that Curie would be the one to bear the brunt of the public’s disapproval. Double standards with regard to gender are nothing new.
A furious throng gathered outside of Curie’s house and anti-Semitic papers, dissatisfied with labeling the pioneering scientist a mere home wrecker, declared—erroneously—that she was Jewish. The timeline was tweaked to suggest that Curie had taken up with Langevin prior to her husband’s death. Fellow radiochemist Bertram Boltwood seized the opportunity to declare that “she is exactly what I always thought she was, a detestable idiot.”
In the midst of this, Einstein, who had made Curie’s acquaintance at the conference, proved himself a true friend with a “don’t let the bastards get you down” letter, written on November 23. Other than a delicate allusion to Langevin as a person with whom he felt privileged to be in contact, he refrained from mentioning the cause of her misfortune.
A friendly word can go a long way in times of disgrace, and Einstein supplied his new friend with some stoutly unequivocal ones, denouncing the scandalmongers as “reptiles” feasting on sensationalistic “hogwash”:
Highly esteemed Mrs. Curie,
Do not laugh at me for writing you without having anything sensible to say. But I am so enraged by the base manner in which the public is presently daring to concern itself with you that I absolutely must give vent to this feeling. However, I am convinced that you consistently despise this rabble, whether it obsequiously lavishes respect on you or whether it attempts to satiate its lust for sensationalism! I am impelled to tell you how much I have come to admire your intellect, your drive, and your honesty, and that I consider myself lucky to have made your personal acquaintance in Brussels. Anyone who does not number among these reptiles is certainly happy, now as before, that we have such personages among us as you, and Langevin too, real people with whom one feels privileged to be in contact. If the rabble continues to occupy itself with you, then simply don’t read that hogwash, but rather leave it to the reptile for whom it has been fabricated.
With most amicable regards to you, Langevin, and Perrin, yours very truly,
A. Einstein
PS I have determined the statistical law of motion of the diatomic molecule in Planck’s radiation field by means of a comical witticism, naturally under the constraint that the structure’s motion follows the laws of standard mechanics. My hope that this law is valid in reality is very small, though.
That deliberately geeky postscript amounts to another sweet show of support. Perhaps it fortified Curie when a week later, she received a letter from Nobel Committee member Svante Arrhenius, urging her to skip the Prize ceremony in Stockholm. Curie rejected Arrhenius’ suggestion thusly:
The prize has been awarded for the discovery of radium and polonium. I believe that there is no connection between my scientific work and the facts of private life. I cannot accept … that the appreciation of the value of scientific work should be influenced by libel and slander concerning private life.
For a more in-depth look at Marie Curie’s nightmarish November, refer to “Honor and Dishonor” the sixteenth chapter in Barbara Goldsmith’s Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2018.
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