When Mahatma Gandhi Met Charlie Chaplin (1931)

in Film, History | August 4th, 2021

Mahatma Gandhi and Charlie Chaplin were both forged in the 19th century, and both went on to become icons of the 20th. History has remembered one as a tireless liberator and the other as a tireless entertainer; decades after their deaths, both continue to command the respect of many in the 21st century. It’s understandable then, that a meeting between Gandhi and Chaplin at the peak of their fame would cause something of a fuss. “East-Enders, in the thousands, turn out to greet the two famous little men,” announces the title card of the British Pathé newsreel clip above. Cries of “Good old Charlie!” and “Good old Gandhi!” were heard.

The occasion for this encounter was the Round Table Conferences, a series of meetings between the British government and political representatives of India held with an eye toward constitutional reform. “The buzz was that Mahatma Gandhi would be coming to Britain for the first time since he joined the Freedom movement,” writes blogger Vijayamadhav. The buzz proved correct, but more historic than the results of that particular conference session was what transpired thereafter. “Gandhi was preparing for his departure when a telegram reached him. A certain Charles Chaplin, who was in Britain at that time, had requested permission to be granted an audience with him.”

Gandhi, said to have seen only two films in his life (one of them in Hindi), “did not know who this gentleman was,” and so “replied that it would be hard for him to find time and asked his aides to send a reply declining the request.” But it seems that Gandhi’s circle contained Chaplin fans, or at least advisors aware of the political value of a photo opportunity with the most beloved Englishman alive, who prevailed upon him to take the meeting. And so, on September 22, 1931, “hundreds of people crowded around the house” — the characteristically humble lodgings off East India Dock Road — “to catch a glimpse of the famous visitors.” Some “even clambered over garden fences to look through the windows.”

Chaplin opened with a question to Gandhi about his “abhorrence of machinery.” Gandhi’s reply, as recorded in The Print: “Machinery in the past has made us dependent on England, and the only way we can rid ourselves of that dependency is to boycott all goods made by machinery,” especially those machines he saw as robbing Indians of their livelihoods. Chaplin later wrote of having received in this conversation “a lucid object lesson in tactical maneuvering in India’s fight for freedom, inspired, paradoxically, by a realistic, virile-minded visionary with a will of iron to carry it out.” He might also have got the idea for 1935’s Modern Times, a comedic critique of industrialized modernity that now ranks among Chaplin’s most acclaimed works. The abstemious Gandhi never saw it, of course, and whether it would have made him laugh is an open question. But apart, perhaps, from its glorification of drug use, he could hardly have disagreed with it.

Watch Gandhi Talk in His First Filmed Interview (1947)

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Mahatma Gandhi’s List of the 7 Social Sins; or Tips on How to Avoid Living the Bad Life

Charlie Chaplin Does Cocaine and Saves the Day in Modern Times (1936)

Watch 85,000 Historic Newsreel Films from British Pathé Free Online (1910–2008)

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.

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

How West Magazine Created a Southern-California Pop-Culture Aesthetic with the Help of Milton Glaser, Gahan Wilson, and Others (1967–1972)

in Design, History, Magazines | August 3rd, 2021

In the late 1960s, a counterculture-minded media professional could surely have imagined more appealing places to work than the Los Angeles Times. Widely derided as the official organ of the Southern California Babbitt, the paper also put out a bland Sunday supplement called West magazine. But West had the potential to evolve into something more vital — or so seemed to think its editor, Jim Bellows. The creator of “the original New York magazine in the early 1960s,” writes Design Observer’s Steven Heller, Bellows convinced a young adman named Mike Salisbury, “who worked for Carson Roberts Advertising in L.A. (where Ed Ruscha and Terry Gilliam worked), to accept the job as art director.”

Salisbury injected West “with such an abundance of pop culture visual richness that it was more like a miniature museum than weekly gazette.” Its weekly issues “covered a wide range of themes — mostly reflecting Salisbury’s insatiable curiosities — from a feature on basketball that illustrated the tremendous size of center forwards by showing a life-size photograph of Wilt Chamberlin’s Converse sneaker, to a pictorial history of movie star pinups with a bevy of gorgeous silhouettes fanning on the page, to an array of souped-up VW Beetles in all shapes and sizes.”

On any given Sunday, subscribers might find themselves treated to “the history of Mickey Mouse, Coca-Cola art (the first time it was published as ‘art’), the visual history of Levis, Hollywood garden apartments, Raymond Chandler locations, and Kustom Kars.”

“I was the writer on the Coca-Cola ‘art’ piece as well as the first ‘programmatic’ architecture article to see print,” says a commenter under the Design Observer retrospective named Larry Dietz. He also claims to have written the feature on Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles; much later, he adds, Chinatown screenwriter “Robert Towne said that he was inspired to learn about L.A. history from that piece, but that the writing was crappy.” But then, the main impact of Salisbury’s West was never meant to be textual. Heller quotes Salisbury as saying that “design was not my sole objective: cinema-graphic information is a better definition.” Of all the covers he designed, he remembers the one just above, promoting an exposé on heroin, as having been the most controversial: “Don’t give me too much reality over Sunday breakfast,” he heard readers grumbling.

Other memorable West covers include the magazine’s tribute to the just-canceled Ed Sullivan show in 1971, as well as contributions by artists and designers like Victor Moscoso, Gahan Wilson, John Van Hamersveld, and Milton Glaser, all figures who did a great deal to craft the American zeitgeist of the 1960s and 70s. The magazine as a whole consolidated the Southern Californian pop-cultural aesthetic of its period, as distinct from what Salisbury calls the “quasi-Victorian” look and feel of San Francisco to the north and the “Rococo or Baroque” New York to the east. Los Angeles, to his mind, was “streamline,” emblematized by the culture and industry of motorcycle customization and its “belief in Futurism.”

West was a product of the Los Angeles Times under Otis Chandler, publisher from 1960 to 1980, who dedicated his career to expanding the scope and ambition of the newspaper his great-grandfather had once run. His labors paid off in retrospect, especially from readers as astute as Joan Didion, who praised Chandler’s Times to the skies. But by 1972, West seemed to have become too much of an extravagance even for him. After the magazine’s cancellation, Salisbury moved on to Rolling Stone, then in the process of converting from a newspaper to a magazine format. No small part of that magazine’s pop-cultural power in the 70s must have owed to his art direction.

Later in the decade, both Salisbury and Glaser would bring their talents to the just-launched New West magazine. It had no direct connection with West or the Los Angeles Times, but was conceived as the sister publication of New York Magazine, which itself had been re-invented by Glaser and publisher Clay Felker in the mid-1960s. Its debut cover, just above, featured Glaser’s artwork; three years later, in 1979, Salisbury designed a cover on California’s water crisis that the American Institute of Graphic Arts’ Steven Brower calls “prescient.” At that same time, he notes, Salisbury “worked with Francis Ford Coppola on the set design for Apocalypse Now; he designed Michael Jackson’s breakthrough album, Off the Wall,” and he even collaborated with George Harrison on his eponymous album.” But when “veteran magazine art directors” get together and “reminisce about the glory years,” writes Heller, it’s West they inevitably talk about.

Milton Glaser’s Stylish Album Covers for The Band, Nina Simone, John Cage & Many More

Download the Complete Archive of Oz, “the Most Controversial Magazine of the 60s,” Featuring R. Crumb, Germaine Greer & More

A Complete Digitization of the 1960s Magazine Avant Garde: From John Lennon’s Erotic Lithographs to Marilyn Monroe’s Last Photos

Download 50+ Issues of Legendary West Coast Punk Music Zines from the 1970–80s: Damage, Slash & No Mag

Flair Magazine: The Short-Lived, Highly-Influential Magazine That Still Inspires Designers Today (1950)

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.

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

1960s Schoolchildren Imagine Life in the Year 2000: Overpopulation, Mass Unemployment, Robot Courts, Rising Seas & Beyond

in History, Television | August 2nd, 2021

Westerners today entertain nothing but grim, dystopian visions of the future. This in stark contrast to the postwar decades when, as everyone knows, all was optimism. “In the year 2000, I think I’ll probably be in a spaceship to the moon, dictating to robots,” says an English schoolboy in the 1966 footage above. “Or else I may be in charge of a robot court, judging some robots, or I may be at the funeral of a computer. Or if something’s gone wrong with the nuclear bombs, I may be back from hunting, in a cave.” Granted, this was the middle of the Cold War, when humanity felt itself perpetually at the brink of self-destruction. How did other children imagine the turn of the millennium? “I don’t like the idea of getting up and finding you’ve got a cabbage pill to eat for breakfast.”

Interviewed for the BBC television series Tomorrow’s World, these adolescents paint a series of bleak pictures of the year 2000, some more vivid than others. “All these atomic bombs will be dropping around the place,” predicts another boy. One will get near the center, because it will make a huge, great big crater, and the whole world will just melt.”

One girl sounds more resigned: “There’s nothing you can do to stop it. The more people get bombs — somebody’s going to use it one day.” But not all these kids envision a nuclear holocaust: “I don’t think there is going to be atomic warfare,” says one boy, “but I think there is going to be all this automation. People are going to be out of work, and a great population, and I think something has to be done about it.”

The idea that “computers are taking over” now has great currency among pundits, but it seems schoolgirls were making the same point more than half a century ago. “In the year 2000, there just won’t be enough jobs to go around,” says one of them. “The only jobs there will be, will be for people with high IQ who can work computers and such things.” Another contributing factor, as other kids see it, is an overpopulation so extreme that “either everyone will be living in big domes in the Sahara, or they’ll be undersea.” And there’ll be plenty of sea to live under, as one boy figures it, when it rises to cover everything but “the highlands in Scotland, and some of the big hills in England and Wales.” Less dramatically but more chillingly, some of these young students fear a terminal boredom at the end of history: “Everything will be the same. People will be the same; things will be the same.”

Not all of them foresee a wholly dehumanized future. “Black people won’t be separate, they’ll be all mixed in with the white people,” says one girl. “There will be poor and rich, but they won’t look down on each other.” Her prediction may not quite have come to pass even in 2021, but nor have most of her cohort’s more harrowing fantasies. If anything has collapsed since then, it’s standards of adolescent articulacy. As Roger Ebert wrote of Michael Apted’s Up series, which documents the same generation of English children, these clips make one ponder “the inarticulate murkiness, self-help clichés, sports metaphors, and management truisms that clutter American speech,” a condition that now afflicts even the English. But then, not even the most imaginative child could have known that the dystopia to come would be linguistic.

Jean Cocteau Delivers a Speech to the Year 2000 in 1962: “I Hope You Have Not Become Robots”

Foreign Exchange Students Debate Whether American Teenagers Have Too Much Freedom (1954)

The Summerhill School, the Radical Educational Experiment That Let Students Learn What, When, and How They Want (1966)

Hunter S. Thompson Chillingly Predicts the Future, Telling Studs Terkel About the Coming Revenge of the Economically & Technologically “Obsolete” (1967)

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.

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

An Animated History of Writing: From Ancient Egypt to Modern Writing Systems

in History, Writing | July 29th, 2021

He would be a very simple person, and quite a stranger to the oracles of Thamus or Ammon, who should leave in writing or receive in writing any art under the idea that the written word would be intelligible or certain. — Socrates

The transmission of truth was at one time a face-to-face business that took place directly between teacher and student. We find ancient sages around the world who discouraged writing and privileged spoken dialogue as the best way to communicate. Why is that? Socrates himself explained it in Plato’s Phaedrus, with a myth about the origin of writing. In his story, the Egyptian god Thoth devises the various means of communication by signs and presents them to the Egyptian god-king Thamus, also known as Ammon. Thamus examines them, praising or disparaging each in turn. When he gets to writing, he is especially put out.

“O most ingenious Theuth,” says Thamus (in Benjamin Jowett’s translation), “you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth.”

Other technologies of communication like Incan khipu have the quality of “embeddedness,” says YouTuber NativeLang above, in an animated history of writing that begins with the myth of “Thoth’s Pill.” That is to say, such forms are inseparable from the material context of their origins. Writing is unique, fungible, alienable, and alienating. Its greatest strength — the ability to communicate across distances of time and space — is also its weakness since it separates us from each other, requiring us to memorize complex systems of signs and interpret an author’s meaning in their absence. Socrates criticizes writing because “it will de-embed you.”

The irony of Socrates’ critique (via Plato) is that “it comes to us via text,” notes Bear Skin Digital. “We enjoy it and think about it purely because it is recorded in writing.” What’s more, as Phaedrus says in response, Socrates’ story is only a story. “You can easily invent tales of Egypt, or of any other country.” To which Socrates replies that a truth is a truth, no matter who says it, or how we happen to hear it. Is it so with writing? Does its ambiguity render it useless? Are written works like orphans, as Socrates characterizes them? “If they are maltreated or abused, they have no parents to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves….”

It’s a little too late to decide if we’re better off without the written word, so many millennia after writing grew out of pictographs, or “proto-writing” and into ideographs, logographs, rebuses, phonetic alphabets, and more. Watch the full animated history of writing above and, then, by all means, close your browser and go have a long conversation with someone face-to-face.

40,000-Year-Old Symbols Found in Caves Worldwide May Be the Earliest Written Language

A 4,000-Year-Old Student ‘Writing Board’ from Ancient Egypt (with Teacher’s Corrections in Red)

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Frida Kahlo: The Complete Paintings Collects the Painter’s Entire Body of Work in a 600-Page, Large-Format Book

in Art, Books, History | July 27th, 2021

Most of us who know Frida Kahlo’s work know her self-portraits. But, in her brief 47 years, she created a more various body of work: portraits of others, still lifes, and difficult-to-categorize visions that still, 67 years after her death, feel drawn straight from the wild currents of her imagination. (Not to mention her elaborately illustrated diary, previously featured here on Open Culture.) Somehow, Kahlo’s work has never all been gathered in one place. That, along with her enduring appeal as both an artist and a historical figure, surely made her an appealing proposition for art-book publisher Taschen, an operation as invested in visual richness as it is in completeness.

There’s also the matter of size. Though not conceived at the same scale as the murals of Diego Rivera, with whom Kahlo lived in not one but two less-than-conventional marriages, Kahlo’s paintings look best when seen at their biggest. Hence Taschen’s “large-format XXL” production of Frida Kahlo: The Complete Paintings, which “allows readers to admire Frida Kahlo’s paintings like never before, including unprecedented detail shots and famous photographs.” Presented along with a biographical essay, those photos capture, among other subjects, “Frida, Diego, and the Casa Azul, Frida’s home and the center of her universe.”

In creating his volume, editor-author Luis-Martín Lozano and contributors Andrea Kettenmann and Marina Vázquez Ramos focused not on the artist’s life, but her work. “Most people at exhibitions, they’re interested in her personality — who she is, how she dressed, who does she go to bed with, her lovers, her story,” says Lozano in an interview with BBC Culture. Putting together a run-of-the-mill Kahlo book, “you repeat the same things, and it will sell – because everything about Kahlo sells. It’s unfortunate to say, but she’s become a merchandise.” Frida Kahlo: The Complete Paintings is also, of course, a product, and one painstakingly designed to compel the Frida Kahlo enthusiast. Its ideal reader, however, desires to live in not Kahlo’s world, but the world she created.

via Colossal

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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, 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.

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

What Makes Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks a Great Painting?: A Video Essay

in Art, History | July 26th, 2021

“Even though you may live in one of the most crowded and busy cities on Earth, it is still possible to feel entirely alone.” Though hardly a novel sentiment, this nevertheless makes for a highly suitable entrée into a video essay on Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. Its creator is gallerist and Youtuber James Payne, whose channel Great Art Explained has already taken on the likes of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, Michelangelo’s David, Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych, and Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. Nighthawks, safe to say, makes a more immediate impression on us 21st-century urbanites than any of those works, whatever our individual degrees of alienation. But why?

Hopper painted what he knew, and especially so in the case of his single best-known work. Though the diner Nighthawks takes as its setting exists nowhere in New York, the artist had spent his entire adult life in the city, an immersion that allowed him to create a street-corner scene that feels realer than real.

But the emotion exuded by that diner’s patrons must run deeper than the standard urban malaise. Eighteen years into a bitter and dysfunctional marriage, the inspiration for all the “disconnected and unhappy couples he portrays time and again in his paintings,” Hopper knew intimately more than one kind of human loneliness. He himself acted as model for all three of Nighthawks’ male figures, in fact, and his wife Josephine posed for the female one.

“It was down to Jo that Edward became a success,” says Payne, “a fact he never thanked her for.” An artist in her own right, she got Hopper his first solo show in 1924, when he was 42. Up to then he’d worked as a magazine illustrator, but even by the time of Nighthawks in 1942, he clearly hadn’t forgotten the misery of his day job. Nor had he discarded what it gave him: “along with the preparation skills he picked up, it also helped to hone his storytelling abilities.” An avid moviegoer, he “planned Nighthawks like a filmmaker, storyboarding the painting ahead of its creation.” Filmmakers have responded to Hopper’s cinematic painting with tributes of their own: Herbert Ross re-created the diner in Pennies from Heaven, as did Wim Wenders in The End of Violence, evoking Hopper’s “world of loneliness, anguish, and quiet isolation.” Ironic, then, that so many in Nighthawks’ generations of appreciators have felt less alone while regarding it.

How Edward Hopper “Storyboarded” His Iconic Painting Nighthawks

Edward Hopper’s Iconic Painting Nighthawks Explained in a 7‑Minute Video Introduction

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Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks: The 2020 Edition

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.

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

Epidemics in Western Society Since 1600: A Free Online Course from Yale University

in History, Yale | July 25th, 2021

From Yale University comes an unfortunately timely course, Epidemics in Western Society Since 1600. Recorded before the outbreak of COVID-19, the 25 lecture course, presented by historian Frank Snowden, covers the following ground:

This course consists of an international analysis of the impact of epidemic diseases on western society and culture from the bubonic plague to HIV/AIDS and the recent experience of SARS and swine flu. Leading themes include: infectious disease and its impact on society; the development of public health measures; the role of medical ethics; the genre of plague literature; the social reactions of mass hysteria and violence; the rise of the germ theory of disease; the development of tropical medicine; a comparison of the social, cultural, and historical impact of major infectious diseases; and the issue of emerging and re-emerging diseases.

You can watch the lectures on YouTube above, or on iTunes (Video — Audio). You can also read Snowden’s related book: Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present.

If you want to hear what Snowden has to say about COVID-19, we have two interviews below.

Coronavirus (COVID-19) Update: Epidemics in History

How Will COVID-19 Change the World? Historian Frank Snowden on Epidemics From the Black Death to Now

Epidemics in Western Society Since 1600 will be added to our list of Free Online History courses, a subset of our metacollection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.

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The History of the 1918 Flu Pandemic, “The Deadliest Epidemic of All Time”: Three Free Lectures from The Great Courses

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Oldest-Known Work of Literature in World History

in History, Literature | July 22nd, 2021

You’re probably familiar with The Epic of Gilgamesh, the story of an overbearing Sumerian king and demi-god who meets his match in wild man Enkidu. Gilgamesh is humbled, the two become best friends, kill the forest guardian Humbaba, and face down spurned goddess Ishtar’s Bull of Heaven. When Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh goes looking for the only man to live forever, a survivor of a legendary pre-Biblical flood. The great king then tries, and fails, to gain eternal life himself. The story is packed with episodes of sex and violence, like the modern-day comics that are modeled on ancient mythology. It is also, as you may know, the oldest-known work of literature on Earth, written in cuneiform, the oldest-known form of writing.

This is one version of the story. But Gilgamesh beaks out of the tidy frame usually put around it. It is a “poem that exists in a pile of broken pieces,” Joan Acocella writes at The New Yorker, “in an extremely dead language.”

If Gilgamesh were based on a real king of Ur, he would have lived around 2700 BC. The first stories written about him come from some 800 years after that time, during the Old Babylonian period, after the last of the Sumerian dynasties had already ended. The version we tend to read in world literature and mythology courses comes from several hundred years later, notes the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Ira Spar:

Some time in the twelfth century B.C., Sin-leqi-unninni, a Babylonian scholar, recorded what was to become a classic version of the Gilgamesh tale. Not content to merely copy an old version of the tale, this scholar most likely assembled various versions of the story from both oral and written sources and updated them in light of the literary concerns of his day, which included questions about human mortality and the nature of wisdom…. Sin-leqi-unninni recast Enkidu as Gilgamesh’s companion and brought to the fore concerns about unbridled heroism, the responsibilities of good governance, and the purpose of life.

This so-called “Standard Babylonian Version,” as you’ll learn in the TED-Ed video at the top by Soraya Field Fiorio, was itself only discovered in 1849 — very recent by comparison with other ancient texts we regularly read and study. The first archaeologists to discover it were searching not for Sumerian literature but for evidence that proved the Biblical stories. They thought they’d found it in Nineveh, in the excavated library of King Ashurbanipal, the oldest library in the world. Instead, they discovered the broken, incomplete tablets containing the story of Gilgamesh and Utnapishtim, who, like Noah from the Hebrew Bible, built an enormous boat in advance of a divinely ordered flood. The first person to translate the passages was so excited, he stripped off his clothes.

The flood story wasn’t the knock-down proof Christian scholars hoped for, but the discovery of the Gilgamesh epic was even more important for our understanding of the ancient world. What we know of the story, however, was already edited and redacted to suit a millennia-old agenda. The Epic of Gilgamesh “explains that Gilgamesh, although he is king of Uruk, acts as an arrogant, impulsive, and irresponsible ruler,” Spar writes. “Only after a frustrating and vain attempt to find eternal life does he emerge from immaturity to realize that one’s achievements, rather than immortality, serve as an enduring legacy.”

Other, much older versions of his story show the mythical king and his exploits in a different light. So how should we read Gilgamesh in the 21st century, a few thousand years after his first stories were composed? You can begin here with the TED-Ed summary and Crash Course in World Mythology video further up. Dig much deeper with the lecture above from Andrew George, Professor of Babylonian at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).

George has produced one of the most highly respected translations of Gilgamesh, Acocella writes, one that “gives what remains of Sin-leqi-unninni’s text” and appends other fragmentary tablets discovered in Baghdad, showing how the meaning of the cuneiform symbols changed over the course of the millennia between the Old Babylonian stories and the “New Babylonian Version” of the Epic of Gilgamesh we think we know. Hear a full reading of Gilgamesh above, as translated by N.K. Sanders.

20 New Lines from The Epic of Gilgamesh Discovered in Iraq, Adding New Details to the Story

World Literature in 13 Parts: From Gilgamesh to García Márquez

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

When Mahatma Gandhi Met Charlie Chaplin (1931)

How West Magazine Created a Southern-California Pop-Culture Aesthetic with the Help of Milton Glaser, Gahan Wilson, and Others (1967–1972)

1960s Schoolchildren Imagine Life in the Year 2000: Overpopulation, Mass Unemployment, Robot Courts, Rising Seas & Beyond

An Animated History of Writing: From Ancient Egypt to Modern Writing Systems

Frida Kahlo: The Complete Paintings Collects the Painter’s Entire Body of Work in a 600-Page, Large-Format Book

What Makes Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks a Great Painting?: A Video Essay

Epidemics in Western Society Since 1600: A Free Online Course from Yale University

The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Oldest-Known Work of Literature in World History

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