The Paul McCartney is Dead Conspiracy Theory, Explained

in History, Music | September 4th, 2019

Hoaxes used to be fun, I imagine, before the internet turned them into weapons of mass disinformation. One shudders to think what kind of lunacy might have resulted had the Paul McCartney-is-dead-and-has-been-replaced-by-a-lookalike hoax first spread on Facebook instead of college newspapers, local radio stations, and good-old word of mouth. The hoax is emblematic not only of how misinformation spread differently fifty years ago, but also how the counterculture figured out information warfare, and used it to produce reams of satirical proto-viral content.

Whether the author of the original 1969 article—“Is Beatle Paul McCartney Dead?,” from the Drake University student newspaper the Times-Delphic—intended to fool the public hardly matters. His speculation reads like parody, like a star chart crossed with lurid tabloid gossip that, through a strange twist of fate created a network of people who believed that Paul was killed in a 1966 car crash and the band found an imposter named Billy Shears to replace him.

It should be noted that Paul McCartney is very much alive and has not been played by an impersonator for fifty years. There are no “two sides” to this story. There is the life of Paul McCartney and there is a strange and amusing rumor that never harmed anyone, except the Paul McCartney of its imagination. “Paul is Dead” ranks highly among “music’s most WTF conspiracy theories,” also the title of the Rolling Stone video above, which aims to explain “the original insane rock n’ roll conspiracy theory.”

The Beatles had a lot of fun with the conspiracy, doubly hoaxing their fans by playing along occasionally. McCartney responded with his classic wit: “If I were dead, I’d be the last to know it.” But publicly confirming or denying Paul McCartney’s body snatching didn’t matter. Like those who claimed Stanley Kubrick staged the moon landing and left clues in The Shining, true believers found evidence everywhere they looked.

The cover of Sgt. Pepper’s supposedly represents Paul’s funeral; his doppelgänger allegedly wears a patch with the letters O.P.D.—officially pronounced dead.” (It’s actually O.P.P., “Ontario Provincial Police.”); lyrics played backwards spell it out: “Paul is Dead.” As with most crackpot theories, there is one crucial missing element: motive. Why would the band not only cover up Paul’s death but leave trails of breadcrumbs on every subsequent record?

Why does the villain explain their entire plan to the hero as soon as they get the upper hand? Why do killers leave detailed, incriminating documents called “The Plan” on their hard drives on Dateline? Who can say? In the world of weird conspiracy theories, conspirators are compelled to place cryptic but decipherable clues all over the place. It’s like they want to be caught, or it’s like conspiracy fans desperately want to believe they do. Either way, as far as conspiracy theories go, “Paul is Dead” earns its “WTF” status. It also bears the distinction of never actually having involved anyone’s death.

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

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The History of Europe from 400 BC to the Present, Animated in 12 Minutes

in Animation, History | September 4th, 2019

What does the future of Europe look like? Geopolitical times such as these do make one ponder such questions as, say, “In what shape (if any) will the European Union make it through this century?” But as any historian of Europe knows, that continent has seldom had an easy time of it: European history is a history of conquests, rebellions, alliances made and broken, and of course, wars aplenty — a major piece of the rationale behind the creation of organizations like the European Union in the first place. As a result, the division of Europe by the many groups and individuals who have laid claim to pieces of it has, over the past 2500 years, seldom held steady for long, as you can see on the animated map above.

The Roman Empire did manage to paint the map red, literally, in the second and third centuries, but during all eras before and after it looks as multicolored as it was politically disunited. In earlier times, Europe was home to peoples with names like the Gauls, Iberians, Celts, and Scythians, as well as empires like the Achaemenid and Seleucid Empire.

After the First World War, though — and the dissolution of such entities as the Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth — the labels start to look more familiar. Most of us remember the event marked by the last big change to this map, the end of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (Many of us even spent years thereafter in classrooms whose world maps still depicted the USSR as one mighty bloc.)

The map’s animation begins in 400 BC and ends in 2017 with Europe as a collection of nation-states, each of which we now regard as not just politically but culturally distinct. But watching the full two-and-a-half-millennia time-lapse reminds us that every country in Europe has broken off from, joined with, or otherwise descended from another place, indeed many other places, most of which have long since ceased to exist. In the 21st century, one often hears Europe described as essentially unchanging, stuck in its ways, ossified, and an afternoon spent watching the proceedings of European Union bureaucracy would hardly disabuse anyone of that notion. But then, wouldn’t observers of Europe have felt the same way back in the heyday of Rome?

Watch World War I Unfold in a 6 Minute Time-Lapse Film: Every Day From 1914 to 1918

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The Entire History of Japan in 9 Quirky Minutes

Watch the History of the World Unfold on an Animated Map: From 200,000 BCE to Today

A History of the Entire World in Less Than 20 Minutes

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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 Faceboo k.

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What Makes Guernica So Shocking? An Animated Video Explores the Impact of Picasso’s Monumental Anti-War Mural

in Art, History | September 2nd, 2019

What emotion did you feel the first time you saw Picasso’s Guernica? Perhaps curiosity or fascination, and maybe even surprise, given how different the painting looks from everything else in a museum or an art-history textbook. There was almost certainly a dash of confusion as well, but you probably didn’t feel the kind of shock you would have if you had learned what many of its early viewers did. Just what gave Guernica its early impact is the central question of the animated TED-Ed video above, written by humanities scholar Iseult Gillespie. “How can we make sense of this overwhelming image,” asks its narrator, “and what exactly makes it a masterpiece of anti-war art?”

Finding the answer requires going back to April 26th, 1937, when “Fascist forces bombed the Basque village of Guernica in Northern Spain. It was one of the worst civilian casualties of the Spanish Civil War, waged between the democratic republic and General Franco’s fascist contingent.” For Picasso, it sparked the “frenzied period of work” in which he created this 25-and-a-half-foot-wide modernist mural named for the ruined village. Guernica’s “monumental canvas is disorienting from the start, rendered in the abstracted Cubist style Picasso pioneered.” That style “afforded viewers multiple and often impossible perspectives on the same object; a technique considered shocking even in Picasso’s domestic scenes.”

All great works of art unite form and substance, and here Picasso used a shocking technique to render shocking material: “The style offers a profoundly overwhelming view of violence, destruction, and casualties. Multiple perspectives only compound the horror on display — sending the eyes hurtling around the frame in a futile hunt for peace.” But the eyes find only a horse run through with a spike, a screaming woman holding a dead child, a villager about to be consumed by flames, and the helplessly broken statue of a soldier. “Each of these figures bordering the painting are horribly trapped, giving the work an acute sense of claustrophobia. And where you might expect the canvas’ massive size to counteract this feeling, its scale only highlights the nearly life-sized atrocities on display. ”

A lifelike depiction of such a scene would be more difficult to look at, but the aesthetic Picasso used, which at a modern viewer’s first glance might appear cartoonish and even humorous, makes Guernica much more haunting in the long term — a term that has exceeded 80 years now, during which the painting’s considerable power has grown more subtle as the events of the Spanish Civil War have grown distant. “Like the bombing of Guernica itself, Picasso’s painting is dense with destruction. But hidden beneath this supposed chaos are carefully crafted scenes and symbols, carrying out the painting’s multifaceted attack on fascism.” Yet it was also simple enough to rile up the Gestapo, one of whose officers barged into Picasso’s apartment in occupied Paris, pointed at a photograph of Guernica, and asked, “Did you do this?” No, the artist replied, “you did.”

Guernica: Alain Resnais’ Haunting Film on Picasso’s Painting & the Crimes of the Spanish Civil War

A 3D Tour of Picasso’s Guernica

14 Self-Portraits by Pablo Picasso Show the Evolution of His Style: See Self-Portraits Moving from Ages 15 to 90

A Classic Video of Pablo Picasso Marking Art, Set to the Song, “Pablo Picasso,” by Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers

The Scandalous Painting That Helped Create Modern Art: An Introduction to Édouard Manet’s Olympia

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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 Faceboo k.

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The Scandalous Painting That Helped Create Modern Art: An Introduction to Édouard Manet’s Olympia

in Art, History | August 30th, 2019

Here in the 21st century, only the most sheltered among us could be shocked by the sight of a naked body. It would seem that the whole of human history has at least that in common with us: only certain societies at certain times have considered nudity a force worth suppressing. But then, has the problem ever been nudity in general, or rather the context, the nature, and the implications of particular instances of nudity? It’s fair to say that Titian’s Venus of Urbino has scandalized practically no one. Yet three centuries later, Édouard Manet’s outwardly similar 1865 canvas Olympia sent shockwaves through the Paris art world. Why?

The rules of the Paris Academy of Fine Arts at the time dictated that “great art was supposed to convey a moral or intellectual message,” says the narrator of Vox’s video essay on Olympia above. “All acceptable art fell into one of five categories, ranked by their capacity to deliver those messages.” The lesser of these were still lifes and landscapes, in the middle fell genre paintings, and the greatest were portraits and historical works. And “equally important to what was painted was how it was painted,” with more points going to “idolized, prettified visions of the world, smooth and beautiful with no body hair and flawless skin,” all painted in a way “that follow the rules of depth and perspective, meaning it looks like it could exist in the real world.”

The Academy of Fine Arts would pay little regard, then, to the “stark and unnatural colors” of Olympia, its “rough and textured” brushstrokes, and its much “flatter and less complex” look than the Renaissance realism idolized in those days. That Manet would dare give his obvious “homage” to the Venus of Urbino a title like Olympia, a common nom de guerre for prostitutes in 19th-century Paris, caused some seriously ruffled feathers as well. So why did the Academy put Manet’s painting on display in the first place? “It probably had something to do with his growing popularity. You can see his influence so clearly in what came next. He led the charge towards Modernism in the late 1800s, starting with the Impressionists — Monet, Degas — who adopted his penchant for modern themes and lucent brushstrokes.”

A more 20th-century reading of Olympia holds up the painting as proof that “no one entity gets to decide what art should look like.” An episode of the ArtCurious podcast about Olympia goes further still, claiming for Manet’s subject the status of a feminist icon. But even the painting’s contemporary detractors saw something important in it. Émile Zola at first seemed to dismiss the work by writing, “You wanted a nude, and you chose Olympia, the first that came along.” But he also admitted that Olympia captured something more genuine than even the most gloriously realistic paintings could: “When our artists give us Venuses, they correct nature, they lie. Édouard Manet asked himself why lie, why not tell the truth; he introduced us to Olympia, this fille of our time, whom you meet on the sidewalks.”

A Quick Six Minute Journey Through Modern Art: How You Get from Manet’s 1862 Painting, “The Luncheon on the Grass,” to Jackson Pollock 1950s Drip Paintings

The Most Disturbing Painting: A Close Look at Francisco Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Son”

Van Gogh’s Ugliest Masterpiece: A Break Down of His Late, Great Painting, The Night Café (1888)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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 Faceboo k.

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

Watch the Completely Unsafe, Vertigo-Inducing Footage of Workers Building New York’s Iconic Skyscrapers

in History | August 29th, 2019

Would anyone in their right mind sign up for a job that had a high risk of mortality/disability? Or a job where red hot metal is being hurled directly at your face? Back in the 1920s this was the lot of the men who built New York’s skyline, the men who constructed the Chrysler Building and the Empire State, giant phallic symbols of America’s burgeoning wealth and power.

In this short clip (remastered and quite decently colorized) from the Smithsonian Channel, we get a brief glimpse of the perils encountered daily on the building site. Nicknamed “roughnecks,” the narrator points out that they work without harnesses, safety ropes, or hard hats. Red hot rivets are thrown at men on the metal beams higher up and they are meant to catch them with what looks like a tin funnel. You can see the thinnest of ropes used to lift the now-iconic stainless steel art-deco eagles into place by men weary felt hats and no gloves.

The workers came from Europe, many who had trained on ships. Some came from Montreal’s Kahnawake reservation. The latter, known as Iron Walkers, were Mohawk, known for working fearlessly at great heights.

“A lot of people think Mohawks aren’t afraid of heights; that’s not true,” Kyle Karonhiaktatie Beauvais said in 2002. “We have as much fear as the next guy. The difference is that we deal with it better.”

Much of this work was documented by photographer Lewis Hine, who captured a mix of brute strength and gravity defying courage along with private moments of rest, catching a smoke or taking lunch. You can see many of his famous photos in this clip:

The Chrysler Building was completed in 1930, and reached a height of 1,046 feet (319 m), featuring 77 floors. It held its fame as the world’s tallest building for only 11 months. In 1931 workers completed the Empire State Building, standing at 1,454 feet (443.2 m) and housing 102 floors. (That’s dinky compared to the current record-holder: Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, which stands at 2,722 feet (829.8 m)).

Heads up: The Smithsonian Channel clip has some of the worst examples of YouTube comments among the videos we’ve highlighted over the year, as if people still don’t work in terrible and unsafe conditions in order to feed their families and pay rent. And look! Here’s a guy who walks out onto the Chrysler eagle just for fun. Don’t say we didn’t warn you:

A Light Show on The Empire State Building Gets Synced to the Dead’s Live Performance of “Touch of Grey” (6/24/2017)

Famous Architects Dress as Their Famous New York City Buildings (1931)

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

by Ted Mills | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Glorious Poster Art of the Soviet Space Program in Its Golden Age (1958–1963)

in Design, History, Science | August 29th, 2019

How do you sell a government program that spends tens of millions of dollars on research and development for space travel? While the average taxpayer may love the idea of braving new frontiers, far fewer are apt to vote for funding scientific research, the space program’s ostensible reason for being.

During the Cold War, however, when the biggest breakthroughs in space flight occurred, selling the program didn’t involve sophisticated methods, only the broadest themes of heroism, patriotism, futurism, and, in more or less subtle ways, militarism. The appeal to science always went hand-in-hand with an appeal to the sublimely austere beauty of the heavens (which we’d hate to lose to the other guys.)

All of these were strategies NASA utilized, and then some. In addition to planting a U.S. flag on the moon, they delivered the first color image of Earth from space. On the ground, they enlisted artists like Andy Warhol, Norman Rockwell, and Laurie Anderson and actors like Star Trek’s Nichelle Nichols to sell the program.

Recently, NASA has seemed to be in a reflective mood, from its antiquarian preparations for the 50th anniversary of the moon landing to its ad campaign of retro posters that resemble not only vintage sci-fi book jackets and movie ads, but also the futuristic social realism of their former Soviet rivals.

There’s almost something of an admission in NASA’s retro posters: we may have won the “space race,” but it wasn’t winner take all. There were some things the Soviets just did better—and when it came to making space travel look like the most monumentally heroic and exciting thing ever, they excelled, as you can see in this early collection of Soviet space posters from 1958–1963.

There’s something for, well, not everyone, but for men, women, young, old, young adults. Sci-fi geeks and model builders, people celebrating the new year, children celebrating the new year, a gaggle of young students who somehow all look just like Mary Tyler Moore. The artists are not celebrities, they’re fellow workers who “foresaw a Utopia in space,” writes Flashbak.

The Communists would bring peace and prosperity not only to the people of Earth but also to the technology-enabled, God-free Great Beyond. The artists created Soviet Space posters, vivid, energising and inspiring visions of the rosy-fingered dawn of tomorrow. They’re terrific.

They’re maybe even more terrific when we consider that ordinary citizens didn’t have much say, at all, in the funding and direction of the U.S.S.R.’s space program. (Whether American citizens did is another question.) It was important that Soviets know, however, that “We will open the distant worlds!” as one poster reads, and, as the sixties teenage cigarette ad on a train above proclaims, “In the 20th century, the rockets race to the stars, the trains are going to the lands of achievements!”

The number of posters here is but a smattering of those posted on All about Russia (here and here) and Flashbak. Each poster has its own enchanting quality: emulating the propaganda of the 1930s; turning industrial laborers into anonymous towering heroes; and reaching some very heavy metal heights of bombast, as in the ad above, which declares, “Glory to the conquerors of the universe!”

One poster superimposes the beaming faces of four cosmonauts, lined up like Kraftwerk, over a scene of four rockets leaving the earth. “Gagarin, Titov, Nikolaev, Popoviich—the mighty knights of our days.” (I’m not sure how that pun works in Russian.) The Soviets could also proclaim “Glory to the first woman cosmonaut!,” Valentina Tereshkova, who became the first woman to fly in space in 1963.

The Soviet space program deserves plenty of recognition for its many historic firsts, and also for the wildly enthusiastic optimism of its ad campaigns. They sold grand ideas about the exploration and, yes, conquest of space (and “the universe”) with the same verve and populist appeal as U.S. companies sold cars, cigarettes, and washing machines. Glory to the unsung Mad Men of the Soviet space poster!

NASA Enlists Andy Warhol, Annie Leibovitz, Norman Rockwell & 350 Other Artists to Visually Document America’s Space Program

Download 14 Free Posters from NASA That Depict the Future of Space Travel in a Captivatingly Retro Style

Watch Interplanetary Revolution (1924): The Most Bizarre Soviet Animated Propaganda Film You’ll Ever See

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

The Timeless Beauty of the Citroën DS, the Car Mythologized by Roland Barthes (1957)

in History, Literature | August 27th, 2019

In the postwar Western imagination, modernity took three forms: the rocketship, the jetliner, and the automobile. The first two may have more direct claim to defining the “Space Age,” but only the third lay within reach of the average (or slightly above average) consumer. And at the 1955 Paris Auto Show the world first beheld a car that, aesthetically speaking, might as well have been a spacecraft: the Citroën DS. Pronounced in French like déesse, that language’s word for “goddess,” the car received 80,000 order deposits during the show, a record that stood for six decades until the debut of Tesla’s Model 3 — which, whatever its respectability as a feat of design and engineering, will never have Roland Barthes to extol its beauty.

“Cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals,” writes Barthes in an essay on the DS (which you can read in both English translation and the original French here) that appears in 1957’s Mythologies, many of whose editions bear the car’s image on the cover.

“I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object. It is obvious that the new Citroen has fallen from the sky inasmuch as it appears at first sight as a superlative object.” Possessed of all the features of “one of those objects from another universe which have supplied fuel for the neomania of the eighteenth century and that of our own science-fiction: the Déesse is first and foremost a new Nautilus.”

Smoothness, Barthes writes, “is always an attribute of perfection because its opposite reveals a technical and typically human operation of assembling: Christ’s robe was seamless, just as the airships of science-fiction are made of unbroken metal.” Hence his detection, in the unprecedentedly smooth lines of the DS, of “the beginnings of a new phenomenology of assembling, as if one progressed from a world where elements are welded to a world where they are juxtaposed and hold together by sole virtue of their wondrous shape, which of course is meant to prepare one for the idea of a more benign Nature.” Here we have “a humanized art, and it is possible that the Déesse marks a change in the mythology of cars,” raising them from “the bestiary of power” into the realm of the “spiritual and more object-like.”

In the Influx video at the top of the post, British Citroën specialist Matt Damper reads from Barthes’ essay to evoke the distinctive joie de vivre of French car culture in general and classic Citroëns in particular. (It must be said, however, that one of the main “unknown artists” to which the DS owes its unearthly beauty, sculptor turned industrial designer Flaminio Bertoni, hailed from Italy.) “You have to drive it in a completely different way than you drive any other car, really,” says Damper. “It’s that Frenchness: it’s like, ‘We’re right. This is the correct way of building a car. Just get used to it.’ ” Wired’s Jack Stewart echoes the sentiment in the video just above, “The 1955 Citroën DS Still Feels Ahead of Its Time.”

Stewart names the “strange semi-automatic gearbox that you have to get used to,” among the innovative or at least unconventional features with which the DS debuted, a list that also included hydraulic suspension (suited to France’s still-shambolic roads) and disc brakes. “That’s just the thing with Citroëns: they’re unforgiving if you don’t know what you’re doing, so you really have to learn how to drive these cars.” Or as Citroëns’s American ad campaign put it, “It takes a special person to drive a special car.” The DS didn’t sell stateside, in part due to its low-powered engine made to dodge French automobile tax structures, but now car-lovers around the world recognize it as one of the great achievements in motoring. The Citroën DS and the prose of Roland Barthes have a deep commonality: only those who understand that they have to approach the object on its own terms will find themselves in the presence of superior craft — albeit of a distinctively Gallic variety.

Below Jay Leno gives you a close up view of his 1971 Citroën DS and its unique suspension system.

Hear Roland Barthes Present His 40-Hour Course, La Préparation du roman, in French (1978–80)

178,000 Images Documenting the History of the Car Now Available on a New Stanford Web Site

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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 Faceboo k.

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

Why Route 66 Became America’s Most Famous Road

in History, Travel | August 23rd, 2019

Most Americans know Route 66, but sometimes it seems like non-Americans know it better. I happen to be an American living outside America myself, and whenever conversations turn to the subject of road trips in my homeland, it’s only a matter of time before I hear the usual question: “Have you driven Route 66?” Originally commissioned in 1926, the 2,448-mile road from Chicago to Santa Monica enjoyed about three decades of primacy before its eclipse by the Interstate Highway System. Quaint though Route 66 may now seem compared to that vast postwar infrastructural project, it somehow hasn’t quite let go of its hold on the American imagination, and even less so the world’s imagination about America.

“Route 66 has been in the shadows twice as long as it was in the spotlight,” says Vox’s Phil Edwards, “but there’s still this energy around it.” In the video “Why Route 66 Became America’s Most Famous Road,” Edwards does the iconic road trip himself, and along the way tells the story behind what John Steinbeck called “the mother road, the road of flight.”

This naturally involves an abundance of both cinematically empty landscapes, flamboyantly unhealthy cuisine, and richly kitschy Americana, the kind of thing featured in Atlas Obscura’s robust Route 66 category. Edwards visits colossal cowboy statues, the American Quarter Horse Hall of Fame and Museum (“horses must be dead to be considered”), and a roadhouse where, if you “eat 72 ounces of steak and sides in under an hour, you get it for free” — and those are just in Texas.

Route 66 can’t but appeal to American history buffs, but in recent decades it has also attracted connoisseurs of desolation. Originally shaped by a variety of lobbying interests, including an especially vigorous promoter of Tulsa, Oklahoma named Cyrus Avery, the “Main Street of America” turned many of the hamlets along its path into, if not destinations, then places worth spending the night. Fascinating artifacts remain of Route 66’s vibrant midcentury “motel culture,” but not even the most America-besotted visitors from foreign lands could overlook how thoroughly history seems to have passed most of these places by. I saw this first-hand myself when I drove across the United States on Interstate 40, the continent-spanning freeway that follows Route 66 in places and certainly hastened its demise. You can see it and much else on Route 66 besides in the “aerial documentary” above.

Edwards’ interviewees include denizens of Route 66 making a go of reversing the decline of this 34-years-decommissioned road, such as the proprietor of the Motel Safari, a veritable 1950s time-capsule in Tucumcari, New Mexico. He also talks to the editor of Route 66 News, an elderly Texan lady with a thing for dinosaurs, a modern-day Cyrus Avery looking to promote the glories of Route 66’s Oklahoma stretch, and Route 66 road-trippers of various ages and nationalities, including a guy who actually ate that 72-ounce steak within an hour. “There was dessert as far as the eye can see,” says one still-marveling young European. He almost surely meant desert, but as far as the charms of America’s open roads go, both interpretations are equally true.

12 Classic Literary Road Trips in One Handy Interactive Map

Four Interactive Maps Immortalize the Road Trips That Inspired Jack Kerouac’s On the Road

Jack Kerouac’s On The Road Turned Into Google Driving Directions & Published as a Free eBook

Download Digitized Copies of The Negro Travelers’ Green Book, the Pre-Civil Rights Guide to Traveling Safely in the U.S. (1936–66)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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 Faceboo k.

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

The Paul McCartney is Dead Conspiracy Theory, Explained

The History of Europe from 400 BC to the Present, Animated in 12 Minutes

What Makes Guernica So Shocking? An Animated Video Explores the Impact of Picasso’s Monumental Anti-War Mural

The Scandalous Painting That Helped Create Modern Art: An Introduction to Édouard Manet’s Olympia

Watch the Completely Unsafe, Vertigo-Inducing Footage of Workers Building New York’s Iconic Skyscrapers

The Glorious Poster Art of the Soviet Space Program in Its Golden Age (1958–1963)

The Timeless Beauty of the Citroën DS, the Car Mythologized by Roland Barthes (1957)

Why Route 66 Became America’s Most Famous Road

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