Soon after the first election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four became a bestseller again. Shooting to the top of the American charts, the novel that inspired the term “Orwellian” passed Danielle Steel’s latest opus, the poetry of Rupi Kaur, the eleventh Diary of a Wimpy Kid book, and the memoir of an ambitious young man named J. D. Vance. But how much of its renewed popularity owed to the relevance of a nearly 70-year-old vision of shabby, totalitarian future England to twenty-first century America, and how much to the fact that, as far as influence on popular culture’s image of political dystopia, no other work of literature comes close?
For all the myriad ways one can criticize his two administrations, Trump’s America bears little superficial resemblance to Oceania’s Airstrip One as ruled by The Party. But it can hardly be a coincidence that this period of history has also seen the concept “post-truth” become a fixture in the zeitgeist.
There are many reasons not to want to live in the world Orwell imagines in Nineteen Eighty-Four: the thorough bureaucratization, the lack of pleasure, the unceasing surveillance and propaganda. But none of this is quite so intolerable as what makes it all possible: the rulers’ claim to absolute control over the truth, a form of psychological manipulation hardly limited to regimes we regard as evil.
As James Payne says in his Great Books Explained video on Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell worked for the BBC’s overseas service during the war, and there received a troubling education in the use of information as a political weapon. The experience inspired the Ministry of Truth, where the novel’s protagonist Winston Smith spends his days re-writing history, and the dialect of Newspeak, a severely reduced English designed to narrow its speakers’ range of thought. Orwell may have overestimated the degree to which language can be modified from the top down, but as Payne reminds us, we now all hear culture warriors describe reality in highly slanted, politically-charged, and often thought-terminating ways all day long. Everywhere we look, someone is ready to tell us that two plus two make five; if only they were as obvious about it as Big Brother.
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.
On social media, the Talking Heads teased a major announcement on June 5th, leading fans to wonder if a reunion—41 years after their last tour—might finally be in the offing. As one fan put it, “If this is a tour announcement, I am going to freak out!” Alas, we didn’t quite get that. (Maybe next time!) Instead, we got the first official music video for “Psycho Killer.” Directed by Mike Mills and starring Saoirse Ronan, the video helps commemorate the band’s first show at CBGB 50 years ago. You can watch the video above, and footage from CBGB in 1975 here.
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It’s been said that the United States won the Cold War without firing a shot — a statement, as P. J. O’Rourke once wrote, that doubtless surprised veterans of Korea and Vietnam. But it wouldn’t be entirely incorrect to call the long stare-down between the U.S. and the Soviet Union a battle of ideas. Dwight Eisenhower certainly saw it that way, a worldview that inspired the 1956 creation of the President’s Special International Program for Participation in International Affairs, which aimed to use American culture to improve the country’s image around the world. (That same year, Eisenhower also signed off on the construction of the Interstate Highway System, such was the country’s ambition at the time.)
For an unambiguously American art form, one could hardly do better than jazz, which also had the advantage of counterbalancing U.S.S.R. propaganda focusing on the U.S.’ troubled race relations. And so the State Department picked a series of “jazz ambassadors” to send on carefully planned world tours, beginning with Dizzy Gillespie and his eighteen-piece interracial band (with the late Quincy Jones in the role of music director).
Starting in March of 1956, Gillespie’s ten-week tour featured dates all over Europe, Asia, and South America. These wouldn’t be his last State Department-sponsored tours abroad: in the videos above, you can see a clip from his performance in Germany in 1960. This touring even resulted in live albums like Dizzy in Greece and World Statesman.
Other jazz ambassadors would follow: Louis Armstrong (who quit over the high-school integration crisis in Little Rock), Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, and Dave Brubeck (whose dim view of the program inspired the musical The Real Ambassadors). But none went quite so far in pursuing their cultural-political interests as Gillespie, who announced himself as a write-in candidate in the 1964 U.S. presidential election. He promised not only to rename the White House the Blues house, but also to appoint a cabinet including Miles Davis as Director of the CIA, Charles Mingus as Secretary of Peace, Armstrong as Secretary of Agriculture, and Ellington as Secretary of State. This jazzed-up administration was, alas, never to take power, but the music itself has left more of a legacy than any government could. Surely the fact that I write these words in a café in Korea soundtracked entirely by jazz speaks for itself.
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.
Working a dull civil service job ill-suited to your talents does not make you a writer, but plenty of famous writers have worked such jobs. Nathaniel Hawthorne worked at a Boston customhouse for a year. His friend Herman Melville put in considerably more time—19 years—as a customs inspector in New York, following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather. Both Walt Disney and Charles Bukowski worked at the post office, though not together (can you imagine?), and so, for two years, did William Faulkner.
After dropping out of the University of Mississippi in 1920, Faulkner became its postmaster two years later, a job he found “tedious, boring, and uninspiring,” writes Mental Floss: “Most of his time as a postmaster was spent playing cards, writing poems, or drinking.” Eudora Welty characterized Faulkner’s tenure as postmaster with the following vignette:
Let us imagine that here and now, we’re all in the old university post office and living in the ’20’s. We’ve come up to the stamp window to buy a 2‑cent stamp, but we see nobody there. We knock and then we pound, and then we pound again and there’s not a sound back there. So we holler his name, and at last here he is. William Faulkner. We interrupted him.… When he should have been putting up the mail and selling stamps at the window up front, he was out of sight in the back writing lyric poems.
By all accounts, she hardly overstates the case. As author and editor Bill Peschel puts it, Faulkner “opened the post office on days when it suited him, and closed it when it didn’t, usually when he wanted to go hunting or over to the golf course.
He would throw away the advertising circulars, university bulletins and other mail he deemed junk.” A student publication from the time proposed a motto for his service: “Never put the mail up on time.”
Unsurprisingly, the powers that be eventually decided they’d had enough. In 1924, Faulkner sensed the end coming. But rather than bow out quietly, as perhaps most people would, the future Nobel laureate composed a dramatic and uncharacteristically succinct resignation letter to his superiors:
As long as I live under the capitalistic system, I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp.
This, sir, is my resignation.
The defiant self-aggrandizement, wounded pride, blame-shifting… maybe it’s these qualities, as well as a notorious tendency to exaggerate and outright lie (about his military service for example) that so qualified him for his late-life career as—in the words of Ole Miss—“Statesman to the World.” Faulkner’s gift for self-fashioning might have suited him well for a career in politics, had he been so inclined. He did, after all, receive a commemorative stamp in 1987 (above) from the very institution he served so poorly.
But like Hawthorne, Bukowski, or any number of other writers who’ve held down tedious day jobs, he was compelled to give his life to fiction. In a later retelling of the resignation, Peschel claims, Faulkner would revise his letter “into a more pungent quotation,” unable to resist the urge to invent: “I reckon I’ll be at the beck and call of folks with money all my life, but thank God I won’t ever again have to be at the beck and call of every son of a bitch who’s got two cents to buy a stamp.”
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in
It would be a worthwhile exercise for any of us to sit down and attempt to draw up a list of our 100 favorite paintings of all time. Naturally, those not professionally involved with art history may have some trouble quite hitting that number. Still, however many titles we can write down, each of us will no doubt come up with a mixture of the near-universally known and the relatively obscure, with paintings we’ve been seeing reproduced in popular culture since birth alongside works that made a strong and unexpected impression on us the one time we came across them in a book or gallery. The 100-favorite-paintings list in video form above by Luiza Liz Bond is no exception.
You may recognize Bond’s name from her work on the YouTube channel The Cinema Cartography, many of whose videos — on David Lynch, on Quentin Tarantino, on animation, on cinematography, on the greatest films ever made — we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture. Recently rebranded as The House of Tabula, that channel now makes its aesthetic and intellectual explorations into not just film but art broadly considered.
And though painting may not be the art form with which we spend most of our time these days, it’s still one of the first art forms that comes to our minds, perhaps thanks to its twenty or so millennia of history. It’s from a relatively narrow but enormously rich slice of that history, spanning the fourteenth century to the twentieth, that Bond makes her 100 selections.
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.
We’ve previously written about one of Leonard Bernstein’s major works, The Unanswered Question, the staggering six-part lecture that the multi-disciplinary artist gave as part of his duties as Harvard’s Charles Eliot Norton Professor. Over 11 hours, Bernstein attempts to explain the whither and the whence of music history, notably at a time when Classical music had come to a sort of crisis point of atonality and anti-music, but was still pre-Merzbow.
But, as Bernstein said “…the best way to ‘know’ a thing is in the context of another discipline,” and these six lectures bring in all sorts of contexts, especially Chomsky’s linguistic theory, phonology, semantics, and more. And he does it all with frequent trips to the piano to make a point, or bringing in a whole orchestra—which Bernstein kept in his back pocket for times just like this.
Joking aside, this is still a major scholarly work that has plenty inside to debate. That’s pertinent a half a century after the fact, especially when so much music feels like it has stopped advancing, just recycling.
The above clip is just one of the gems to be found among the lectures, something that one viewer found so stunning they recorded it off the television screen and posted to YouTube.
In the clip, Bernstein uses the melody of “Fair Harvard,” also known as “Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms” by Thomas Moore—recognizable to the young’uns as the fiddle intro to “Come On, Eileen”—as a starting point. He assumes a prehistoric hominid humming the tune, then the younger and/or female members of the tribe singing along an octave apart.
From this moment of musical and human evolution, Bernstein brings in the fifth interval—only a few million years later—and then the fourth. Then polyphony is born out of that and…well, we don’t want to spoil everything. Soon Bernstein brings us up to the circle of fifths, compressing them into the 12 tones of the scale, and then 12 keys.
Bernstein can hear the potential for chaos, however, in the possibilities of “chromatic goulash,” and so ends with Bach, the master of “tonal control” who balanced the chromatic (which uses notes outside a key’s scale) with the diatonic (which doesn’t). (It all comes back to Bach, doesn’t it?)
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
If you’re under 60, you probably heard the line “I read the news today, oh boy” before encountering the song it opens. Even after you discovered the work of the Beatles, it may have taken you some time to understand what, exactly, it was that John Lennon read in the news. The “lucky man who made the grade” and “blew his mind out in a car” turn out to have been inspired by the young Guinness heir Tara Browne, who’d fatally wiped out in his Lotus Elan. The figure of 4,000 holes in the roads of Blackburn came from another page of the same edition of the Daily Mail. These are just two of the memorable images in “A Day in the Life,” which sonically reconstructs the fabric of the nineteen-sixties as the Beatles knew it.
And if any single factor shaped its development, that factor was LSD. “A song about perception — a subject central both to late-period Beatles and the counterculture at large — ‘A Day in the Life’ concerned ‘reality’ only to the extent that this had been revealed by LSD to be largely in the eye of the beholder,” he writes. Lennon may have proven to be the group’s most dedicated enthusiast of that shortcut to enlightenment. It’s worth noting, as Puschak does, that it was Browne who first “turned on” Paul McCartney.
Though primarily John’s work, “A Day in the Life” wouldn’t be what it is without Paul’s double-time bridge, whose jauntily narrative ordinariness makes the verses all the more transcendent. The need for some kind of transition between these disparate John and Paul parts led to George Martin’s commissioning a 40-piece orchestra instructed to play from the lowest notes up to the highest, a collective glissando quadruple-recorded and mixed to sound like the end of the world. In theory, perhaps, all this — to say nothing of Lennon’s references to the Albert Hall, the House of Lords, and his own role in Richard Lester’s How I Won the War — shouldn’t work together. But the result, as MacDonald puts it, remains one of “the most penetrating and innovative artistic reflections of its era,” as experienced by the young men standing at its very center.
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.
At the age of twelve, he followed his own line of reasoning to find a proof of the Pythagorean Theorem. At thirteen he read Kant, just for the fun of it. And before he was fifteen he had taught himself differential and integral calculus.
But while the young Einstein was engrossed in intellectual pursuits, he didn’t much care for school. He hated rote learning and despised authoritarian schoolmasters. His sense of intellectual superiority was resented by his teachers.
At the Gymnasium a teacher once said to him that he, the teacher, would be much happier if the boy were not in his class. Einstein replied that he had done nothing wrong. The teacher answered, “Yes, that is true. But you sit there in the back row and smile, and that violates the feeling of respect that a teacher needs from his class.”
The same teacher famously said that Einstein “would never get anywhere in life.”
What bothered Einstein most about the Luitpold was its oppressive atmosphere. His sister Maja would later write:
“The military tone of the school, the systematic training in the worship of authority that was supposed to accustom pupils at an early age to military discipline, was also particularly unpleasant for the boy. He contemplated with dread that not-too-distant moment when he will have to don a soldier’s uniform in order to fulfill his military obligations.”
When he was sixteen, Einstein’s parents moved to Italy to pursue a business venture. They told him to stay behind and finish school. But Einstein was desperate to join them in Italy before his seventeenth birthday. “According to the German citizenship laws,” Maja explained, “a male citizen must not emigrate after his completed sixteenth year; otherwise, if he fails to report for military service, he is declared a deserter.”
So Einstein found a way to get a doctor’s permission to withdraw from the school on the pretext of “mental exhaustion,” and fled to Italy without a diploma. Years later, in 1944, during the final days of World War II, the Luitpold Gymnasium was obliterated by Allied bombing. So we don’t have a record of Einstein’s grades there. But there is a record of a principal at the school looking up Einstein’s grades in 1929 to fact check a press report that Einstein had been a very bad student. Walter Sullivan writes about it in a 1984 piece in The New York Times:
With 1 as the highest grade and 6 the lowest, the principal reported, Einstein’s marks in Greek, Latin and mathematics oscillated between 1 and 2 until, toward the end, he invariably scored 1 in math.
After he dropped out, Einstein’s family enlisted a well-connected friend to persuade the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, or ETH, to let him take the entrance exam, even though he was only sixteen years old and had not graduated from high school. He scored brilliantly in physics and math, but poorly in other areas. The director of the ETH suggested he finish preparatory school in the town of Aarau, in the Swiss canton of Aargau. A diploma from the cantonal school would guarantee Einstein admission to the ETH.
At Aarau, Einstein was pleasantly surprised to find a liberal atmosphere in which independent thought was encouraged. “When compared to six years’ schooling at a German authoritarian gymnasium,” he later said, “it made me clearly realize how much superior an education based on free action and personal responsibility is to one relying on outward authority.”
In Einstein’s first semester at Aarau, the school still used the old method of scoring from 1 to 6, with 1 as the highest grade. In the second semester the system was reversed, with 6 becoming the highest grade. Barry R. Parker talks about Einstein’s first-semester grades in his book, Einstein: The Passions of a Scientist:
His grades over the first few months were: German, 2–3; French, 3–4; history, 1–2; mathematics, 1; physics, 1–2; natural history, 2–3; chemistry, 2–3; drawing, 2–3; and violin, 1. (The range is 1 to 6, with 1 being the highest.) Although none of the grades, with the exception of French, were considered poor, some of them were only average.
The school headmaster, Jost Winteler, who had welcomed Einstein into his home as a boarder and had become something of a surrogate father to him during his time at Aarau, was concerned that a young man as obviously brilliant as Albert was receiving average grades in so many courses. At Christmas in 1895, he mailed a report card to Einstein’s parents. Hermann Einstein replied with warm thanks, but said he was not too worried. As Parker writes, Einstein’s father said he was used to seeing a few “not-so-good grades along with very good ones.”
In the next semester Einstein’s grades improved, but were still mixed. As Toby Hendy of the YouTube channel Tibees shows in the video above, Einstein’s final grades were excellent in math and physics, but closer to average in other areas.
Einstein’s uneven academic performance continued at the ETH, as Hendy shows. By the third year his relationship with the head of the physics department, Heinrich Weber, began to deteriorate. Weber was offended by the young man’s arrogance. “You’re a clever boy, Einstein,” said Weber. “An extremely clever boy. But you have one great fault. You’ll never allow yourself to be told anything.” Einstein was particularly frustrated that Weber refused to teach the groundbreaking electromagnetic theory of James Clerk Maxwell. He began spending less time in the classroom and more time reading up on current physics at home and in the cafes of Zurich.
Einstein increasingly focused his attention on physics, and neglected mathematics. He came to regret this. “It was not clear to me as a student,” he later said, “that a more profound knowledge of the basic principles of physics was tied up with the most intricate mathematical methods.”
Einstein’s classmate Marcel Grossmann helped him by sharing his notes from the math lectures Einstein had skipped. When Einstein graduated, his conflict with Weber cost him the teaching job he had expected to receive. Grossmann eventually came to Einstein’s rescue again, urging his father to help him secure a well-paid job as a clerk in the Swiss patent office. Many years later, when Grossmann died, Einstein wrote a letter to his widow that conveyed not only his sadness at an old friend’s death, but also his bittersweet memories of life as a college student:
“Our days together come back to me. He a model student; I untidy and a daydreamer. He on excellent terms with the teachers and grasping everything easily; I aloof and discontented, not very popular. But we were good friends and our conversations over iced coffee at the Metropol every few weeks belong among my nicest memories.”
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2020.
World War II officially ended on September 2, 1945. It followed, by less than three weeks, an equally momentous event, at least in the eyes of cinephiles: the birth of Wim Wenders. Though soon to turn 80 years old, Wenders has remained both productive and capable of drawing great critical acclaim. Witness, for example, his Tokyo-set 2023 film Perfect Days, which made it to the running for both the Palme d’Or and a Best International Feature Film Academy Award. Back on V‑J Day, it surely would’ve been difficult to imagine a Japanese-German co-production seriously competing for the most prestigious prizes in cinema — even one directed by a known Americaphile.
Wenders has long worked at revealing intersections of history and culture. Seen today, Wings of Desireseems for all the world to express the spirit about to be liberated by the fall of the Soviet Union, but by Wenders’ own admission, nobody working on the movie would have credited the idea of the Berlin Wall coming down any time in the foreseeable future.
In his new short film “The Keys to Freedom,” he commemorates the 80th anniversary of the Second World War’s conclusion by paying a visit to a school in Reims. Commandeered for the secret all-night meeting in which German generals signed the documents confirming their country’s total surrender to the Allies, it hosted the end of what Wenders called “the darkest period in the history of Europe.”
Closing up the temporary headquarters, Allied commander-in-chief Dwight D. Eisenhower returned its keys to the mayor of Reims, saying, “These are the keys to the freedom of the world.” As much as these words move Wenders, he also fears that, even as the Russia-Ukraine war roils on, younger generations of Europeans no longer grasp their meaning. Born into societies protected by the United States, they naturally take peace for granted. “We have to be aware of the fact that Uncle Sam isn’t doing our job for very much longer, and we might have to defend this freedom ourselves,” Wenders explains in a New York Times interview. The end of World War II marked the beginning of the so-called “American century.” If that century is well and truly drawing to its close, who better to observe it than Wenders?
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.
It’s hard to imagine from this historical distance how upsetting Pablo Picasso’s 1907 modernist painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignonwas to Parisian society at its debut. On its 100th anniversary, Guardian critic Jonathan Jones described it as “the rift, the break that divides past and future.” The painting caused an uproar, even among the artist’s peers. It was a moment of culture shock, notes PBS. Its five nude figures, broken into proto-cubist planes and angles with faces painted like African masks, met “with almost unanimous shock, distaste, and outrage.”
Henri Matisse, himself often credited with ushering in modernist painting with his flattened fields of color, “is angered by the work, which he considers a hoax, an attempt to paint the fourth dimension.” Much of the outrage was purported to come from middle-class moral qualms about the painting’s subject, “the sexual freedom depicted in a brothel.”
This is a little hard to believe. Nude women in brothels, “odalisques,” had long been a favorite subject of some of the most revered European painters. But where the women in these paintings always appear passive, if not submissive, Picasso’s nudes pose suggestively and meet the viewer’s gaze, actively unashamed.
What likely most disturbed those first viewers was the perceived violence done to tradition. While we cannot recover the tender sensibilities of early 20th-century Parisian critics, we can, I think, experience a similar kind of shock by looking at work Picasso had done ten years earlier, such as the 1896 First Communion, further up, and 1897 study Science and Charity at the top, conservative genre paintings in an academic style, beautifully rendered with exquisite skill by a then 15-year-old artist. See an earlier drawing, Study for a Torso, above, completed in 1892 when Picasso was only 11.
Given his incredible precocity, it may seem hardly any wonder that Picasso innovated scandalously new means of using line, color, and composition. He was a prodigious master of technique at an age when many artists are still years away from formal study. Where else could his restless talent go? He painted a favorite subject in 1900, in the loose, impressionist Bullfight, above, a return of sorts to his first oil painting, Picador, below, made when he was 8. Further down, see a drawing from the following year in his early development, “Bullfight and Pigeons.”
This piece, with its realistic-looking birds carefully drawn upside-down atop a loose sketch of a bullfight, appeared in a 2006 show at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC featuring childhood artworks from Picasso and Paul Klee. Contrary, perhaps, to our expectations, curator Jonathan Fineberg remarks of this drawing that “9‑year-old Picasso’s confident, playful scribble” gives us more indication of his talent than the finely-drawn birds.
“It’s not just that Picasso could render well, because you could teach anybody to do that,” Fineberg says. Maybe not anybody, but the point stands—technique can be taught, creative vision cannot. “It’s not about skill. It’s about unique qualities of seeing. That’s what makes Picasso a better artist than Andrew Wyeth. Art is about a novel way of looking at the world.” You may prefer Wyeth, or think the downward comparison unfair, but there’s no denying Picasso had a very “novel way of seeing,” from his earliest sketches to his most revolutionary modernist masterpieces. See several more highly accomplished early works from Picasso here.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2018.
In South Korea, where I live, there may be no brand as respected as Habodeu. Children dream of it; adults seemingly do anything to play up their own connections to it, however tenuous those connections may be. But what is Habodeu? An electronics company? A line of clothing? Some kind of luxury car? Not at all: it is, in fact, the Korean pronunciation of Harvard, the American university. Practically everyone around the world is aware of Harvard’s prestige, but relatively few know that you can take many of its courses online without paying tuition, or even applying. In fact, you can find a list of more than 130 such courses right here, all available to take right now.
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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.
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