The Genius Urban Design of Amsterdam: Canals, Dams & Leaning Houses

in Architecture, History | July 7th, 2025

It’s common to hear it said that some particular city — usually one of the American metropolises that sprang into existence over the past couple of centuries — “shouldn’t exist.” And indeed, as urban planner M. Nolan Gray writes in a recent blog post, “no city should exist.” On the scale of human history, we’ve only just started building the things, and we don’t do so on pure instinct. “There isn’t supposed to be a city anywhere. They exist because we will them into existence.” And we often do so in unlikely contexts: “Half of Boston was dredged up from the ocean. St. Louis only exists because we tamed the greatest river on our continent. Supplying Philadelphia with drinking water is an engineering feat on the scale of the Los Angeles Aqueduct.”

Outside the United States, we see the same conditions surrounding “the greatest cities ever built: Tokyo and St. Petersburg required engineering feats on the scale of anything seen in the US. Amsterdam and Mexico City were literally built on top of water.” How that was managed in the particular case of the Dutch capital is explained in the new video from The Present Past at the top of the post, as well as in the OBF video below.

Amsterdam’s most striking feature, its canals, were created not to look picturesque; in fact, as The Present Past host Jochem Boodt puts it, their construction was “a matter of life and death.” Too soft for farming or home-building, the swampy ground beneath the city on the river Amstel had to be drained; when drained, it became subject to floods, which necessitated building dikes and a dam.

httv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo3llzKdAD0

That thirteenth-century engineering project of damming the Amstel protected the city, and also gave it its name. The Amstel itself is, in fact, a huge canal, and the rapid expansion of the settlement around it necessitated digging more and more auxiliary canals to assist with drainage, which defined the space for islands on which to build new districts (Venice-style, atop hundreds of thousands of poles driven into the sea floor). As shown in the OBF video, this distinctive urban structure dictated the shapes of the city’s houses, with their universally narrow façades and their depths reflecting the wealth of the families within. Now, four centuries after it took its current shape — and having survived numerous crises inherent to its unusual situation and form — the center of Amsterdam is looked to as a paragon of urban planning, sometimes imitated, but without similarly “impossible” original conditions, never replicated.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books 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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How Four Masters—Michelangelo, Donatello, Verrocchio & Bernini—Sculpted David

in Art, History | July 4th, 2025

More than a few visitors to Florence make a beeline to the Galleria dell’Accademia, and once inside, to Michelangelo’s David, the most famous sculpture in the world. But how many of them, one wonders, then take the time to view the three other Davids in that city alone? At the Bargello, just ten minutes’ walk away, reside two more sculptures of the young man who would be king of Israel and Judah, both of them by Michelangelo’s fellow Renaissance master Donatello. The less renowned, he made of marble in the late fourteen-hundreds; the more renowned, of bronze in the fourteen-forties, is the subject of the Smarthistory video at the top of the post.

“For a thousand years, the Christian West had looked to the soul as the place to focus. The body was seen as the path to corruption, and so it was not to be celebrated,” says the video’s host Steven Zucker. “What we’re seeing here is a return to ancient Greece and Rome’s love of the body, its respect for the body.”

And to the Florentines of the mid-fifteenth century, as co-host Beth Harris explains, this particular body wasn’t just that of “King David from the Bible,” but that of their own republic as well. Seeing themselves as the David-like underdog victorious over the Goliath that was the Duke of Milan, “they felt blessed and chosen by God” as the “heirs of the ancient Roman Republic.”

Whether or not most everyday citizens of the Florentine Republic felt that way, the banking Medici family, who effectively ran the place for centuries, surely must have. Also at the Bargello is another of the Davids they commissioned, sculpted in bronze by Andrea del Verrocchio in the fourteen-seventies. “Verrocchio gives us a very self-assured young man,” says Harris, with the beauty to be expected of a work of this genre, but also with a certain degree of anti-classicist adolescent awkwardness. In that, the work contrasts with Bernini’s, though both artists created a victorious David, standing over the head of Goliath. Michelangelo, of course, did things quite differently thirty years later, sculpting a David out of marble eternally steeling himself for the battle, at just the moment when his colossal foe comes into view.

Donatello, Verrocchio, and Michelangelo’s Davids all date from the Renaissance. The other unignorable sculpture in this tradition was created much later, in the sixteen-twenties, and also far from Florence. The David by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who would become synonymous with the dramatic extravagance of seventeenth-century Rome, is “like a spring that’s about to unwind,” as Zucker puts it. Unlike when we behold Michelangelo’s contemplative rendition, Harris adds, “here, we’re emotionally, bodily involved,” not just because of the action pose, but also of the physical effort evident in the face. This was the Baroque era, when “the Catholic church is using art as a way to affirm and strengthen the faith of believers.” Ideas about the purpose of art may have changed in the four centuries since, but that hasn’t stopped even the lesser-known Davids from receiving a steady stream of impressed visitors.

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How Michelangelo’s David Still Draws Admiration and Controversy Today

New Video Shows What May Be Michelangelo’s Lost & Now Found Bronze Sculptures

School Principal, Forced to Resign After Students Learn About Michelangelo’s “David,” Visits the Renaissance Statue in Florence

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

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Discover the Only Painting Van Gogh Ever Sold During His Lifetime

in Art, History | July 2nd, 2025

It may have crossed your mind, while beholding paintings of Vincent van Gogh, that you’d like to own one yourself someday. If so, you’ll have to get in line with more than a few billionaires, and even they may never see one go up on the auction block. This would probably come as a surprise to van Gogh himself, who died destitute — and practically unknown — after an artistic career of just ten years. In that time, he managed to sell exactly one painting, at least according to certain definitions of “sell.” Van Gogh did barter paintings for food and art supplies, and he did accept commissions, beginning with one from his art-dealer uncle Cor. But as for sales made to non-relatives through an official show, we only know of one: La vigne rouge.

Known in English as The Red Vineyards near Arles, or simply The Red Vineyard, the painting depicts a landscape van Gogh came across “on a late afternoon walk with Paul Gauguin on 28 October 1888, five days after his friend’s arrival in Arles.” So writes Martin Bailey at The Art Newspaper, who adds that “picking the grapes normally takes place in September in Provence, but the harvest seems to have been late that year.”

To his brother Theo, Vincent described the scene thus: “A red vineyard, completely red like red wine. In the distance it became yellow, and then a green sky with a sun, fields violet and sparkling yellow here and there after the rain in which the setting sun was reflected.” The artist was not, however, moved to set up his canvas then and there; rather, he painted the vineyard the next month, from memory.

Vincent let Theo hang the resulting canvas in his Paris apartment until he asked for it back in order to exhibit it in the annual Brussels show put on by a group called Les Vingt in early 1890. The Red Vineyards’ buyer was one of their number, a certain Anna Boch, the sister of van Gogh’s colleague in impressionism (and onetime portrait subject) Eugène Boch. Though she was no relation, Anna did pay full sticker price for the painting, and van Gogh later expressed some regret about not giving her a “friend’s price.” But whatever it cost her, it was surely a steal compared to its value today, after its purchase by a Russian collector, its revolutionary expropriation, and its long Soviet suppression followed by proud exhibition at Moscow’s Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts — which, owing to the painting’s fragility, won’t even lend it out.

via Messy Nessy

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

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

How 16th-Century Artist Joris Hoefnagel Made Insects Beautiful—and Changed Science Forever

in Art, History, Nature | July 2nd, 2025

In English, most of the words we’d use to refer to insects sound off-putting at best and fearsome at worst, at least to those without an entomological bent. Dutch, close a linguistic relation though it may be, offers a more endearing alternative in beestjes, which refers to all these “little beasts” in which the artists and scientists of Europe started to take a major interest in the late sixteenth century. As was the style of that era, the magisteria of art and science tended to overlap, a phenomenon nowhere more clearly reflected — at least with regard to the insect kingdom — than in the work of Joris Hoefnagel, a Flemish artist whose illustrations of beestjes combined beauty and accuracy in a manner never seen before.

You can now see Hoefnagel’s art up close at the exhibition Little Beasts: Art, Wonder, and the Natural World, which will be up at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC until early November. If you won’t be able to make it out to the museum, have a look at the exhibition’s web site, which shows off the splendor of Hoefnagel’s work as published in The Four Elements, a collection of about 300 watercolors grouped into four volumes in the fifteen-seventies and eighties, each one named for an element: Aqua contains water animals; Terra land animals; Aier birds and plants; and Ignis, or “fire,” insects.

“We don’t really know why Hoefnagel put insects in the fire volume,” says Evan “Nerdwriter” Puschak in the new video above. “Maybe because both fire and insects symbolize transformation.”

“What we do know,” Puschak adds, “is that these insect miniatures are magnificently rendered.” Hoefnagel even made improvements on the nature illustrations of his artistic predecessor Albrecht Dürer, whose own abilities to render our world with fidelity had been regarded as nearly superhuman. One particular work that surpasses Dürer is Hoefnagel’s depiction of a stag beetle, which he accompanied with the Latin inscription “SCARABEI UMBRA,” or “the shadow of the stag beetle”: possibly a reference to the unprecedented realism of the insect’s shadow as Hoefnagel rendered it, but in any case a common saying at the time about hollow threats. For however frightening the stag beetle looked, as Hoefnagel well knew, the actual creature was gentle — just another wee beastie after all.

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

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

A Visualization of the History of Technology: 1,889 Innovations Across Three Million Years

in History, Technology | June 30th, 2025

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” So holds the third and most famous of the “three laws” originally articulated by science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. Even when it was first published in the late nineteen-sixties, Clarke’s third law would have felt true to any resident of the developed world, surrounded by and wholly dependent on advanced technologies whose workings they could scarcely hope to explain. Naturally, it feels even truer now, a quarter of the way into our digital twenty-first century. Indeed, for all we know about how they really work, our credit cards, our smartphones, our computers, and indeed the internet itself might as well be magic.

To best understand the technology that increasingly makes up our world, we should attempt to understand the evolution of that technology. Those smartphones, for example, couldn’t have been invented in the form we know them without the previous developments of chemically strengthened glass, the multi-touch screen interface, and the camera phone. Each of those individual technologies also has its predecessors: follow the chain back far enough, and eventually you get to the likes of the mobile radio telephone, invented in 1946; the phased array antenna, invented in 1905; and glass, invented around 1500 BC. These and countless other paths can be traced at the Historical Tech Tree, an ambitious project of writer and programmer Étienne Fortier-Dubois.

Fortier-Dubois credits among his inspirations Sid Meier’s Civilization games, with their all-important “tech trees,” and James Burke’s television series Connections, which highlighted the unpredictable processes by which one innovation could lead to others across the centuries or millennia. Even in the seventies, Fortier-Dubois writes, “Burke was already concerned that our lives depend on technological systems that very few people deeply understand. It is, of course, possible to live without comprehending how computers, money, or airplanes work. But when everything around us feels vaguely magical, reliant on experts whose actions we have no way of verifying, it’s easy to lose trust in technological solutions to our current problems.” He offers the Historical Tech Tree as a potential corrective to that loss of understanding and the enervating attitudes it produces.

Fortier-Dubois himself admits that the project “made me realize how little I knew about the objects around me. I didn’t really know that ‘electronics’ meant controlling the flow of electrons with vacuum tubes or semiconductors, or that refining petroleum into kerosene uses fractional distillation, or that WiFi and bluetooth are just the use of certain radio frequencies that can be detected by a specific kind of chip.” Anyone who explores even this early version of the Historical Tech Tree (which, as of this writing, contains 1886 technologies and 2180 connections between them) will find it an educational experience in the same way, providing as it does not just knowledge about technologybut a sense of how much of that knowledge we lack. Our civilization has made its way from stone tools to robotaxis, mRNA vaccines, and LLM chatbots; we’d all be better able to inhabit it with even a slightly clearer idea of how it did so. Visit the Historical Tech Tree here.

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The History of Modern Art Visualized in a Massive 130-Foot Timeline

The Map of Computer Science: New Animation Presents a Survey of Computer Science, from Alan Turing to “Augmented Reality”

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

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Hear the World’s Oldest Instrument, the “Neanderthal Flute,” Dating Back Over 43,000 Years

in History, Music | June 27th, 2025

Several years ago, we brought you a transcription and a couple of audio interpretations of the oldest known song in the world, discovered in the ancient Syrian city of Ugarit and dating back to the 14th century B.C.E.. Likely performed on an instrument resembling an ancient lyre, the so-called “Hurrian Cult Song” or “Hurrian Hymn No. 6” sounds otherworldly to our ears, although modern-day musicologists can only guess at the song’s tempo and rhythm.

When we reach even further back in time, long before the advent of systems of writing, we are completely at a loss as to the forms of music prehistoric humans might have preferred. But we do know that music was likely a part of their everyday lives, as it is ours, and we have some sound evidence for the kinds of instruments they played. In 2008, archeologists discovered fragments of flutes carved from vulture and mammoth bones at a Stone Age cave site in southern Germany called Hohle Fels. These instruments date back 42,000 to 43,000 years and may supplant earlier findings of flutes at a nearby site dating back 35,000 years.

Image via the The Archaeology News Network

The flutes are meticulously crafted, reports National Geographic, particularly the mammoth bone flute, which would have been “especially challenging to make.” At the time of their discovery, researchers speculated that the flutes “may have been one of the cultural accomplishments that gave the first European modern-human (Homo sapiens) settlers an advantage over their now extinct Neanderthal-human (Homo neanderthalensis) cousins.” But as with so much of our knowledge about Neanderthals, including new evidence of interbreeding with Homo sapiens, these conclusions may have to be revised.

It is perhaps possible that the much-underestimated Neanderthals made their own flutes. Or so a 1995 discovery of a flute made from a cave bear femur might suggest. Found by archeologist Ivan Turk in a Neanderthal campsite at Divje Babe in northwestern Slovenia, this instrument (above) is estimated to be over 43,000 years old and perhaps as much as 80,000 years old. According to musicologist Bob Fink, the flute’s four finger holes match four notes of a diatonic (Do, Re, Mi…) scale. “Unless we deny it is a flute at all,” Fink argues, the notes of the flute “are inescapably diatonic and will sound like a near-perfect fit within ANY kind of standard diatonic scale, modern or antique.” To demonstrate the point, the curator of the Slovenian National Museum had a clay replica of the flute made. You can hear it played at the top of the post by Slovenian musician Ljuben Dimkaroski.

The prehistoric instrument does indeed produce the whole and half tones of the diatonic scale, so completely, in fact, that Dimkaroski is able to play fragments of several compositions by Beethoven, Verdi, Ravel, Dvořák, and others, as well as some free improvisations “mocking animal voices.” The video’s YouTube page explains his choice of music as “a potpourri of fragments from compositions of various authors,” selected “to show the capabilities of the instrument, tonal range, staccato, legato, glissando….” (Dimkaroski claims to have figured out how to play the instrument in a dream.) Although archeologists have hotly disputed whether or not the flute is actually the work of Neanderthals, as Turk suggested, should it be so, the finding would contradict claims that the close human relatives “left no firm evidence of having been musical.” But whatever its origin, it seems certainly to be a hominid artifact—not the work of predators—and a key to unlocking the prehistory of musical expression.

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

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

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Why Bob Dylan’s Unreleased “Blind Willie McTell” Is Now Considered a Masterpiece

in History, Music | June 25th, 2025

Most Dylanologists disagree about which is the single greatest song in Bob Dylan’s catalog, but few would deny “Blind Willie McTell” a place high in the running. It may come as a surprise — or, to those with a certain idea of Dylan and his fan base, the exact opposite of a surprise — to learn that that song is an outtake, recorded but never quite completed in the studio and available for years only in bootleg form. “Blind Willie McTell” was a product of the sessions for what would become Infidels. Released in 1983, that album was received as something of a return to form after the Christian-themed trilogy of Slow Train Coming, Saved, and Shot of Love that Dylan put out after being born again.

Of the material officially included on Infidels, the greatest impact was probably made by the album’s opener “Jokerman,” at least in the punk rendition Dylan performed on Late Night with David Letterman. Not that every Dylanologist is a fan of that song: in the Daily Maverick, Drew Forrest calls it “random and incoherent,” drawing an unfavorable comparison with “Blind Willie McTell,” which is “sure to be remembered as one of Dylan’s most perfect creations.”

The sources of that perfection are many, as explained by Noah Lefevre in the new, nearly 50-minute long Polyphonic video above on this “unreleased masterpiece,” whose origin and afterlife underscore how thoroughly Dylan inhabits the musical traditions from which he draws.

Like most major Dylan songs, “Blind Willie McTell” exists in several versions, but the one most listeners know (officially released in 1991, eight years after its recording) features Mark Knopfler on twelve-string guitar and Dylan himself on piano. Melodically based on the jazz standard “St. James Infirmary Blues” and named after a real, prolific musician from Georgia, its sparse music and lyrics manage to evoke a panoramic view encompassing the blues, the Bible, the ways of the old South, and indeed, the very history of American music and slavery. Though Dylan himself considered the song unfinished, he came around to see its value after hearing The Band work it into their show, and has by now performed it live himself more than 200 times — none, in adherence to the protean character of blues, folk, and jazz, quite the same as the last.

“Tangled Up in Blue”: Deciphering a Bob Dylan Masterpiece

Hear the Uncensored Original Version of “Hurricane,” Bob Dylan’s Protest Song About Jailed Boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter (1976)

The Religions of Bob Dylan: From Delivering Evangelical Sermons to Singing Hava Nagila With Harry Dean Stanton

How Bob Dylan Kept Reinventing His Songwriting Process, Breathing New Life Into His Music

How Bob Dylan Created a Musical & Literary World All His Own: Four Video Essays

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

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

The Very First Coloring Book, The Little Folks’ Painting Book (Circa 1879)

in Coloring Books, History | June 25th, 2025

Funny how not that long ago coloring books were considered the exclusive domain of children. How times have changed. If you are the sort of adult who unwinds with a big box of Crayolas and pages of mandalas or outlines of Ryan Gosling, you owe a debt of gratitude to the McLoughlin Brothers and illustrator Kate Greenaway.

Their Little Folks’ Painting Book burst onto the scene in around 1879 with such fun-to-color outline engravings as “The Owl’s Advice,” “A Flower Fairy,” and “Little Miss Pride,” each accompanied by nursery rhymes and stories. The abundance of mob caps, pinafores, and breeches is of a piece with Greenaway’s enduring takes on nursery rhymes, though grown-up manual dexterity seems almost mandatory given the tiny patterns and other details.

Seeing as how there was no precedent, the publishers of the world’s first coloring book went ahead and filled in the frontispiece so that those tackling the other hundred drawings would know what to do. (Hint: Stay inside the lines and don’t get too creative with skin or hair color.)

Also note: the copy represented here has been carefully hand-colored by the previous owners, with one contributing some exuberant scribbles in pencil. See the full book, and download it in various formats, at Archive.org.

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

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Genius Urban Design of Amsterdam: Canals, Dams & Leaning Houses

How Four Masters—Michelangelo, Donatello, Verrocchio & Bernini—Sculpted David

Discover the Only Painting Van Gogh Ever Sold During His Lifetime

How 16th-Century Artist Joris Hoefnagel Made Insects Beautiful—and Changed Science Forever

A Visualization of the History of Technology: 1,889 Innovations Across Three Million Years

Hear the World’s Oldest Instrument, the “Neanderthal Flute,” Dating Back Over 43,000 Years

Why Bob Dylan’s Unreleased “Blind Willie McTell” Is Now Considered a Masterpiece

The Very First Coloring Book, The Little Folks’ Painting Book (Circa 1879)

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