Why Humans Are Obsessed with Cats

in Biology, History, K-12, Life, Nature, Science | December 4th, 2020

A house cat is not really a fur baby, but it is something rather more remarkable: a tiny conquistador with the whole planet at its feet —Abigail Tucker

As part of its Annals of Obsession video series, The New Yorker invited science journalist Abigail Tucker, author of The Lion in the Living Room, to reflect on “how felines took over the Internet, our homes, and our lives.”

It goes without saying that cats and humans have co-existed for a very long time.

Most of us are acquainted with the high regard in which Ancient Egyptians held Felis catus.

And we may know something of their seafaring history, beginning with the Vikings and continuing on through Unsinkable Sam and other celebrated ship’s cats.

An overwhelming majority of us have spent the last decade or so glued to online examples of their antics—riding robot vacuums, reacting with terror to cucumbers, and pouncing on humans, some of whom have had the temerity to write and record voiceovers that suggest they have insight as to what goes on inside a cat’s hat. (As if!)

It’s gratifying to hear Tucker echo what cat lovers have long suspected (and emblazoned on t‑shirts, coffee mugs, and decorative pillows)—the cats, not the owners, are the ones running the show.

Forgive us. Dogs have owners. Cats have staff.

Cats took a commensal path to domestication, motivated, then as now, by the food they knew to be stored in our settlements.

Tucker describes it as a series of cat controlled takeovers—a process of artificial selection, undertaken on the cats’ own initiative:

House cats are supremely adaptable. They can live anywhere and, while they must have plenty of protein, they eat practically anything that moves, from pelicans to crickets, and many things that don’t, like hot dogs. (Some of their imperiled feline relatives, by contrast, are adapted to hunt only a rare species of chinchilla.) House cats can tweak their sleeping schedules and social lives. They can breed like crazy.

In certain ways the house cat’s rise is tragic, for the same forces that favor them have destroyed many other creatures. House cats are carpetbaggers, arrivistes, and they’re among the most transformative invaders the world has ever seen—except for Homo sapiens, of course. It’s no coincidence that when they show up in ecosystems, lions and other megafauna are usually on their way out.

Aloof as many of their number may be, cats have engineered things in such a way as to be physically irresistible to most humans:

Their big heads and big eyes are so cute!

Their fur is so soft!

We can carry them around!

Dress them in doll clothes (sometimes)!

Their cries mimic the cries of hungry human babies, and elicit a similar response from their human caregivers.

We may not love litter box duty, but with 1 in 3 humans infected by Toxoplasma gondii, we’ll likely be tethered to them for all eternity.

For better or worse, we love them. And so do dog lovers. They just don’t know it yet.

But do not ever imagine that the feeling is reciprocal.

They’re archcarnivores who cannot open their own cans. As Tucker wryly observes:

I think it’s fair to say that we are obsessed and they are not.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. She loves cats, but most recently appeared as a French Canadian bear who travels to New York City in search of food and meaning in Greg Kotis’ short film, L’Ourse. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

A 1913 Children’s Book Lampoons Duchamp, Picasso & Other Avant-Garde Artists: Read The Cubies’ ABC Online

in Art, Books, History | December 3rd, 2020

Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring premiered in 1913, and its violent break from musical and choreographic tradition, so the story goes, pushed the genteel Parisian audience to violent rebellion. That tale may have grown taller over the past century, but public distaste for then-novel trends in all forms of “modern art” has left a paper trail. Here we have a particularly amusing exhibit, and long an obscure one: The Cubies’ ABC, a picture book by a couple named Mary Mills and Earl Harvey Lyall. They were inspired by another major cultural event of 1913, the International Exhibition of Modern Art, or “Armory Show,” which offered the United States of America its first look at groundbreaking work by Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, and Wassily Kandinsky, among a host of other foreign artists.

The Lyalls, evidently, were not impressed. In order to ridicule what they seem to have considered the pretensions of the avant-garde, they came up with the Cubies, a trio of angular, wild-haired troublemakers bent on discarding all established conventions in the name of Ego, the Future, and Intuition.

Those three concepts get their own pages in this alphabetically organized book, as do artists — not that the authors would unironically grant them the title — like Duchamp, “the Deep-Dyed Deceiver, who, drawing accordions, labels them stairs”; Kandinsky, painter of “Kute ‘improvisations’ ”; and even Gertrude Stein, “eloquent scribe of the Futurist soul.” X stands, of course, for “the Xit,” a direction “Xtremely alluring when Cubies invite us to study their Art.”

“We tend to forget, now that the Cubists and Futurists have become as integral to the history of art as the painters of the Dutch Golden Age and the Italian Renaissance, how hostile most people — even most artists — felt toward the non-representational innovations of the artists on display at the Armory,” says the Public Domain Review, where you can read The Cubies’ ABC in full.

You can also buy a copy of the reprint organized by gallerist Francis Naumann in commemoration of the Armory show’s centenary. “People in those days thought that they could stop modern art in its tracks,” says Naumann in a New Yorker piece on the book. Did the Lyalls think the Cubies’ antics would land a decisive blow against abstraction and subjectivity? Then again, could they have imagined us enjoying them more than a hundred years later, in a time unknowable to even the most far-sighted Futurist?

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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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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

What Ancient Egyptian Sounded Like & How We Know It

in History | December 2nd, 2020

If you’ve seen any Hollywood movie set in ancient Egypt, you already know how its language sounded: just like English, but spoken with a more formal diction and a range of broadly Middle-Eastern accents. But then there are many competing theories about life that long ago, and perhaps you’d prefer to believe the linguistic-historical take provided in the video above. A production of Joshua Rudder’s NativLang, a Youtube channel previously featured here on Open Culture for its videos on ancient Latin and Chinese, it tells the story of “the many forms of the long-lived Egyptian languages,” as well as its “ancestors and relatives,” and how they’ve helped linguists determine just how the ancient Egyptians really spoke.

Rudder begins with a certain artifact called — perhaps you’ve heard of it — the Rosetta Stone. Discovered in 1799 during Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt, it “bore two Egyptian scripts and, auspiciously, a rough translation in perfectly readable Greek.” Using this information, the scholar Jean-François Champollion became the first to decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. But as to the question of what they sounded like when pronounced, the stone had no answers. Champollion eventually became convinced that the still-living Coptic language was “the Egyptian language, the very same one that stretches back continuously for thousands of years.”

Though Coptic sounds and grammar could provide clues about spoken ancient Egyptian, it couldn’t get Champollion all the way to accurate pronunciation. One pressing goal was to fill in the language’s missing vowels, an essential type of sound that nevertheless went unrecorded by hieroglyphs. To the archives, then, which in Egypt were especially vast and contained documents dating far back into history. These enabled a process of “internal reconstruction,” which involved comparing different versions of the Egyptian language to each other, and which ultimately “resulted in an explosion of hieroglyphic knowledge.”

But the journey to reconstruct the speaking of this “longest written language on Earth” doesn’t stop there: it thereafter makes such side quests as one to a “pocket of Ethiopia” where people speak “a cluster of languages grouped together under the label Omotic.” Along with the Semitic, the Amazigh, the Chadic, and others, traceable with Egyptian to a common ancestor, these languages provided information essential to the state of ancient Egyptian linguistic knowledge today. Given the enormous amount of scholarship required to let us know what to call them, it’s enough to make you want ankhs to come back into fashion.

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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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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

A Flying Car Took to the Skies Back in 1949: See the Taylor Aerocar in Action

in History, Technology | November 26th, 2020

“A secret question hovers over us, a sense of disappointment, a broken promise we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like,” the late anthropologist David Graeber once wrote in the Baffler. This refers to “a particular generational promise — given to those who were children in the fifties, sixties, seventies, or eighties — one that was never quite articulated as a promise but rather as a set of assumptions about what our adult world would be like.” In the confusingly disappointing future we now inhabit, one question hovers above them all: “Where, in short, are the flying cars?”

Even those of us not yet born in the mid-20th century can sense the cultural import of the flying car to that era, and not just from its science fiction. Chuck Berry was singing about flying cars back in 1956: His song “You Can’t Catch Me” tells of racing down the New Jersey Turnpike in a custom-made “airmobile,” a “Flight DeVille with a powerful motor and some hideaway wings.”

This wasn’t wholly fantastical, given that an actual flying car had been built seven years earlier. Demonstrated in the newsreel from that year at the top of the post, the Aerocar came designed and built by a solo inventor, former World War II pilot Moulton Taylor of Longview, Washington, who in 1959 would appear on the popular game show I’ve Got a Secret.

The program’s panelists attempt to guess the nature of Taylor’s invention as he puts it together onstage, for the Aerocar required some assembly. Though considerably more complicated than the push-button mechanism imagined by Berry, the process took only five minutes to convert from automobile to airplane, or so the inventor promised. Despite securing the Civil Aviation Authority’s approval for mass production, Taylor couldn’t find a sufficient number of buyers, and in the end only built six Aerocars. But one of them still flies, as seen on the first episode of the 2008 series James May’s Big Ideas. “I wouldn’t have flown it if I’d seen the wings were attached with elaborate paperclips,” writes the former Top Gear co-host, “but by the time I realized this, we were already at 2,000 feet.”

“As an airplane, it was actually pretty good,” May admits, “but then, it would be, because an airplane is what it was.” As a car, “it was diabolical. Worse than the Beetle, to be honest, and not helped by the requirement to drag all the unwanted airplaney bits behind you on a trailer.” Still, the experience of flying in the Aerocar clearly thrilled him, as it would any car or plane enthusiast. Even in a non-airworthy state the Aerocar certainly thrills Matthew Burchette, curator at Seattle’s Museum of Flight. In the video above he introduces the museum’s Aerocar III, the last one Taylor built. “If you’re about my age, you really wanted your jetpack,” says the gray-haired Burchette, though a flying car would also have done the trick. Alas, more than half a century after Taylor’s ambitious project, humanity seems to have made no apparent progress in that department; jetpacks, however, seem to be coming along nicely.

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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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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

The Polygraph: The Proto-Photocopy Machine Machine Invented in 1803 That Changed Thomas Jefferson’s Life

in History, Technology, Writing | November 24th, 2020

Today we associate the word polygraph mainly with the devices we call “lie detectors.” The unhidden Greek terms from which it originates simply mean “multiple writing,” which seems apt enough in light of all those movie interrogation scenes with their juddering parallel needles. But the first “polygraph machine” meriting the name long predates such cinematic clichés, and indeed cinema itself. Patented in 1803 by an Englishman named John Isaac Hawkins, it consisted essentially of twin pens, mounted side-by-side and connected by means of levers and springs so as always to move in unison. The result, in theory, was that it would make an identical copy of a letter even as the writer wrote it.

“The polygraph was pushing technology to the absolute limit,” but for years “it was nearly impossible to make it work correctly.” So says Charles Morrill, a guide at Thomas Jefferson’s estate Monticello, in the video above.

Despite the prolonged technical difficulties, the third president of the United States of America fell in love with the polygraph, “a device to duplicate letters, just the thing if you’re carrying on multiple conversations with different people all over the world. You want to keep a copy of the letter to catch yourself up, to see what you had written to cause a response” — and, of special concern to a national politician, to check on the exact degree to which the press was misquoting you.

Image by the Smithsonian, via Wikimedia Commons

Jefferson wrote nearly 20,000 letters, one of them a complaint to John Adams about suffering “under the persecution of Letters,” a condition ensuring that “from sun-rise to one or two o’clock, I am drudging at the writing table.” That the polygraph reduced this drudgery somewhat made it, in Jefferson’s words, “the finest invention of the present age.” Like technological early adopters today, Jefferson acquired each new model as it came out, the device having been continually retooled by American rights-holder Charles Willson Peale. By 1809 Peale had improved the polygraph to the point that Jefferson could write that it “has spoiled me for the old copying press the copies of which are hardly ever legible … I could not, now therefore, live without the Polygraph.” Imagine how he would’ve felt had Monticello been wired for e‑mail.

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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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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

A Curious Herbal: 500 Beautiful Illustrations of Medicinal Plants Drawn by Elizabeth Blackwell in 1737 (to Save Her Family from Financial Ruin)

in Art, Books, History, Science | November 23rd, 2020

Sometimes beautiful things come out of terrible circumstances. This does not justify more terrible circumstances. But as evidence of the resilience, resourcefulness, and creativity of human beings—and more specifically of mothers in dire straits—we offer the following: A Curious Herbal, Elizabeth Blackwell’s finely illustrated, engraved, and colored “herbal,” the term for a “book of plants, describing their appearance, their properties and how they may be used for preparing ointments,” the British Library writes.

Born sometime around 1700 to a successful merchant family in Scotland, Elizabeth married Alexander Blackwell, a “shady character” who proceeded to drag her through a series of misadventures involving him posing as a doctor and a printer, despite the fact that he’d had no training in either profession.

Blackwell incurred several hefty fines from the authorities, which he could not pay, and he was finally remanded to debtor’s prison, an institution that often left women with young children to fend for themselves.

“With Alexander in prison, Elizabeth was forced to rely on her own resources to keep herself and her child.” Fortunately, she had been prepared with life skills during her prosperous upbringing, having learned a thing or two about business and “received tuition in drawing and painting, as many well-to-do young women then did.” Blackwell realized a publishing opportunity: finding no high-quality herbals available, she decided to make her own in “a rare triumph of turning desperation into inspiration,” Maria Popova writes.

After befriending the head curator Chelsea Physic Garden — a teaching facility for apprentice apothecaries established several decades earlier — she realized that there was a need for a handbook depicting and describing the garden’s new collection of mysterious plants from the New World. A keen observer, a gifted artist, and an entrepreneur by nature, she set about bridging the world’s need and her own.

The gorgeous book, A Curious Herbal (1737–39), was not all Blackwell’s work, though she completed all of the illustrations from start to finish. She also enlisted her husband’s help, visiting his cell to have him “supply each plant’s name in Latin, Greek, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, and German.” Blackwell produced 500 illustrations in total. She advertised “by word of mouth,” notes the British Library, “and in several journals” and “showed herself an adept businesswoman, striking mutually advantageous deals with booksellers that ensured the financial success of the herbal.”

Blackwell not only benefited her family and her readers, but she also gave her book to posterity—though she couldn’t have known it at the time. Her herbal has been digitized in full by the Biodiversity Heritage Library. The herbal will also give back to the natural world she lovingly rendered (including plants that have since gone extinct). Popova has made a selection of the illustrations available as prints to benefit The Nature Conservancy. See Blackwell’s digitized book in full here and order prints at Brain Pickings.

via BrainPickings

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

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

How Errol Morris Became Obsessed with — and Figured Out — the Truth of a Famous War Photograph

in History, Photography | November 19th, 2020

Errol Morris didn’t go all the way to the Crimean Peninsula just because of a sentence written by Susan Sontag. “No,” he once explained to a friend, “it was actually two sentences.” Found in Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag’s late book-length essay on war photography, these lines deal with the fact that “many of the canonical images of early war photography turn out to have been staged, or to have had their subjects tampered with.” Take Valley of the Shadow of Death, pioneering war photographer Roger Fenton’s famously desolate 1855 image from the Crimean War. Fenton actually shot this landscape twice: in one picture, “cannonballs are thick on the ground to the left of the road, but before taking the second picture — the one that is always reproduced — he oversaw the scattering of the cannonballs on the road itself.”

Or did he? Morris had his doubts — and, as the maker of such acclaimed documentaries on the nature of truth and its representation as The Thin Blue Line and Standard Operating Procedure and the author of the book Believing is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography — he clearly has an intellectual investment in the subject.

“I spent a considerable amount of time looking at the two photographs and thinking about the two sentences,” Morris writes in a 2007 New York Times blog post. “How did Sontag know that Fenton altered the landscape or, for that matter, ‘oversaw the scattering of the cannonballs on the road itself?’ ” How, for that matter, “did Sontag know the sequence of the photographs? How did she know which photograph came first?”

Unable to turn up any persuasive evidence, Morris launched an investigation of his own, interviewing experts, digging into Fenton’s letters, and eventually making his way to the Valley of the Shadow of Death itself (not to be confused with the other, better-known valley across which Tennyson’s Light Brigade charged). All of this Morris did in the name of finding out which came first, the photo with the cannonballs beside the road, or the one with the cannonballs on the road. You can hear him discuss this increasingly obsessive quest for the truth in the video above from Vox’s Darkroom, the series that previously gave us a breakdown of the very first faked photograph. But then, as this and other investigations by Morris into the relationship between images, language, and reality have underscored, there is no such thing as a true photograph.

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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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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

Experience Blade Runner Like You Never Have Before Through a Feature-Length Remastered Soundtrack

in Film, History, Music | November 18th, 2020

There is no one Blade Runner. Ridley Scott’s influential “neo-noir” has appeared in several different versions over the past 38 years, both official — the “director’s cut,” the “final cut,” and lest we forget, the now-derided first theatrical cut — and unofficial. So has Blade Runner’s soundtrack, the first official release of which lagged the film by about a dozen years, and even then didn’t include all the music so integral to the unprecedented aesthetic richness of the futuristic setting. Then, about a dozen more years later, followed an expanded soundtrack album, which for many fans still proved unsatisfying. In the name of completeness and sonic fidelity, at least five widely distributed bootlegs have attempted to fill the gap.

Now, in our 21st-century age of streaming, we have fan-made “remasters” of the Blade Runner soundtrack like the above, the 5.7‑million-times-viewed work of a user called Greendragon861. Running just over one hour and 52 minutes — nearly the length of the various cuts of Blade Runner itself — this sonic experience includes, of course, the well-known electronic pieces by composer Vangelis, those that come right to mind when you envision the flame-belching industrial landscape of 21st-century Los Angeles or a police “spinner” taking to the skies. But it also incorporates background music, sound effects, and even snatches of dialogue from the movie. The result feels a great deal like watching Blade Runner without actually watching Blade Runner.

Despite initially flopping, at least in the West, Blade Runner has exerted an enormous influence on other art and media — indeed, on the way humanity envisions the future — and one still spreading nearly four decades later. The film seems unsurpassable in that regard, an achievement creditable to a range of creators: director Ridley Scott, of course; but also Philip K. Dick, author of its source material; the late Syd Mead, who as a “visual futurist” gave focus to the world’s look and feel; model master Douglas Trumbull, thanks in part to whom its built and mechanical environment has aged so well. The list goes on, and it shouldn’t fail to include Vangelis as well as everyone else responsible for this intricate soundscape, without which Blade Runner wouldn’t be Blade Runner, no matter the cut.

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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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 7 ) |

Why Humans Are Obsessed with Cats

A 1913 Children’s Book Lampoons Duchamp, Picasso & Other Avant-Garde Artists: Read The Cubies’ ABC Online

What Ancient Egyptian Sounded Like & How We Know It

A Flying Car Took to the Skies Back in 1949: See the Taylor Aerocar in Action

The Polygraph: The Proto-Photocopy Machine Machine Invented in 1803 That Changed Thomas Jefferson’s Life

A Curious Herbal: 500 Beautiful Illustrations of Medicinal Plants Drawn by Elizabeth Blackwell in 1737 (to Save Her Family from Financial Ruin)

How Errol Morris Became Obsessed with — and Figured Out — the Truth of a Famous War Photograph

Experience Blade Runner Like You Never Have Before Through a Feature-Length Remastered Soundtrack

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