75 Years of CIA Maps Now Declassified & Made Available Online

in Design, History, Maps | December 20th, 2016

russian-front-review

Satel­lite-con­nect­ed devices do all the hard work of nav­i­ga­tion for us: plan jour­neys, plot dis­tances, tell us where we are and where we’re going. The age of the high­ly skilled car­tog­ra­ph­er may be com­ing to an end. But in the past few hun­dred years—since Euro­pean states began carv­ing the world between them—the win­ners of colo­nial con­tests, World War bat­tles, and Cold War skir­mish­es were often those who had the best maps. In addi­tion to their indis­pens­able role in sea­far­ing and bat­tle strat­e­gy, “good maps,” writes Dan­ny Lewis at Smith­son­ian, have been “an inte­gral part of the trade­craft of espi­onage.”

The CIA will tell you as much… or they will now, at least, since they’ve declas­si­fied decades of once-secret maps from the days when they “relied on geo­g­ra­phers and car­tog­ra­phers for plan­ning and exe­cut­ing oper­a­tions around the world” rather than on “dig­i­tal map­ping tech­nolo­gies and satel­lite images.”

Now cel­e­brat­ing its 75th anniver­sary, the CIA’s Car­tog­ra­phy Cen­ter boasts of “a long, proud his­to­ry of ser­vice to the Intel­li­gence Com­mu­ni­ty,” at the Agency’s friend­ly web­site; “Since 1941, the Car­tog­ra­phy Cen­ter maps have told the sto­ries of post-WWII recon­struc­tion, the Suez cri­sis, the Cuban Mis­sile cri­sis, the Falk­lands War, and many oth­er impor­tant events in his­to­ry.”

ussr-gross-national-product

What­ev­er noble or nefar­i­ous roles the Agency may have played in these and hun­dreds of oth­er events, we can now see–thanks to this new online gallery at Flickr–what pres­i­dents, Direc­tors, and field agents saw when they planned their actions, begin­ning with the country’s first “non-depart­men­tal intel­li­gence orga­ni­za­tion,” the COI (Office of the Coor­di­na­tor of Infor­ma­tion). Once the U.S. entered WWII, it became the Office of Strate­gic Ser­vices (OSS). The Car­tog­ra­phy Center’s first chief, Arthur Robin­son, was only 26 and a grad­u­ate stu­dent in geog­ra­phy when COI direc­tor William Dono­van recruit­ed him to lead the orga­ni­za­tion. The office rapid­ly expand­ed dur­ing the war, and by 1943, “geo­g­ra­phers and car­tog­ra­phers amassed what would be the largest col­lec­tion of maps in the world.”

cuban-missiles-1962

In the ear­ly for­ties, “map lay­ers were draft­ed by hand using pen and ink on translu­cent acetate sheets mount­ed on large Strath­more boards.” These drafts were typ­i­cal­ly four times larg­er than the print­ed maps them­selves, one of which you can see at the top of the post, “The Russ­ian Front in Review.” In the fifties, “improved effi­cien­cy in map com­pi­la­tion and con­struc­tion” pro­duced visu­al­ly strik­ing doc­u­ments like that fur­ther up from 1955, “USSR: Region­al Dis­tri­b­u­tion of Gross Nation­al Prod­uct.” Not a map, but what we would call an info­graph­ic, this image shows how the Car­tog­ra­phy Cen­ter per­formed ser­vices far in excess of the usu­al map app—visualizing threats to the U.S. from Cuban sur­face-to-air mis­sile sites in 1962 (above) and threats to the African ele­phant pop­u­la­tion from poach­ers in 2013 (below). Fur­ther down, you can see a 2003 map of Bagh­dad, with the omi­nous­ly non-threat­en­ing note print­ed at the top and right, “This map is NOT to be used for TARGETING.”

african-elephant-range

These maps and many more can be found at the CIA Car­tog­ra­phy Flickr account, which has a cat­e­go­ry for each decade since the 1940s. Each map is down­load­able in low to high res­o­lu­tion scans. In addi­tion, one cat­e­go­ry, “Car­tog­ra­phy Tools,” fea­tures high-qual­i­ty pho­tog­ra­phy of vin­tage draughtsman’s instru­ments, all of them, like the Ger­man-made ink pens fur­ther down, sym­bols of the painstak­ing hand­i­craft map­mak­ing once required. While we can prob­a­bly draw any num­ber of polit­i­cal lessons or his­tor­i­cal the­ses from a deep analy­sis of this deep state archive, what it seems to ask of us first and fore­most is that we con­sid­er car­tog­ra­phy as not only a use­ful dis­ci­pline but as a fine art.

baghdad-2003

As the Car­tog­ra­phy Center’s first direc­tor put it, “a map should be aes­thet­i­cal­ly pleas­ing, thought-pro­vok­ing, and com­mu­nica­tive.” Giv­en these stan­dards we might see how cur­rent tech­nol­o­gy, for all its tremen­dous ease of use and unde­ni­able util­i­ty, might improve by look­ing to maps of the past. Vis­it the CIA’s flickr gallery here.

drawing-instruments

via Smith­son­ian

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free: Nation­al Geo­graph­ic Lets You Down­load Thou­sands of Maps from the Unit­ed States Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey

New York Pub­lic Library Puts 20,000 Hi-Res Maps Online & Makes Them Free to Down­load and Use

19th Cen­tu­ry Maps Visu­al­ize Measles in Amer­i­ca Before the Mir­a­cle of Vac­cines

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

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Giant Dinosaurs Travel Down the Hudson River: See What Awestruck New Yorkers Witnessed in 1963

in Biology, History, Science, Travel | December 19th, 2016

Amaz­ing things hap­pen every day in New York City—some spon­ta­neous, some whose exe­cu­tion is care­ful­ly planned over weeks and months.

Equal­ly amaz­ing is the total igno­rance with which one can go about one’s busi­ness at just a few blocks remove … be it the Coney Island Mer­maid Parade, Egg Rolls and Egg Creams, or the Three Kings Day Parade, some folks only have eyes for brunch.

But it would have been dif­fi­cult for any­one to over­look sev­en ani­ma­tron­ic dinosaurs, trav­el­ing by barge on Octo­ber 15, 1963, bound for the Sin­clair Oil Cor­po­ra­tion’s “Dinoland” exhib­it at the 1964 World’s Fair.

In a stunt wor­thy of Bar­num, the syn­thet­ic beasts trekked 150 miles from the exhibit’s design­er, Jonas Stu­dios, to the World’s Fair site in Flush­ing, Queens, hailed by fire­boats and an enthu­si­as­tic throng. The spon­sor­ing cor­po­ra­tion, whose high­ly rec­og­niz­able logo was a bron­tosaurus, had fur­nished the pub­lic with a timetable of esti­mat­ed arrivals along the route.

dinopress

For good mea­sure, every fam­i­ly to vis­it the exhib­it with­in the first year was offered a coupon for a free gal­lon of gaso­line.

Installed in what the mar­velous­ly evoca­tive Jam Handy short below termed a “prime loca­tion sur­round­ed by titans of Amer­i­can indus­try,” the dinosaurs attract­ed over 10 mil­lion “car-own­ing, trav­el­ing” fans. (That’s a lot of fos­sil fuel.)

On the way out, vis­i­tors were encour­aged to avail them­selves of the Mold-A-Rama machine, which pumped out minia­ture plas­tic dinosaur sou­venirs at 25¢ a pop.

After the fair closed, the dinosaurs went on tour, put in an appear­ance in the Macy’s Thanks­giv­ing Day Parade, and even­tu­al­ly set­tled into zoos and nat­ur­al his­to­ry muse­ums around the coun­try.

Read the Dinoland guide­book here. A sam­ple:

Sin­clair uses the Dinosaur “Bron­tosaurus” as a sym­bol to dra­ma­tize the age and qual­i­ty of the crude oils from which Sin­clair Petro­le­um Prod­ucts are made — crudes which were mel­low­ing in the earth mil­lions of years ago when Dinosaurs lived.

via @Pickover

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ger­tie the Dinosaur: The Moth­er of all Car­toon Char­ac­ters (1914)

Watch Lost World (1925), the Grand­dad­dy of Giant Mon­ster Movies Like The Lost World: Juras­sic Park

Watch a Time­lapse Video Show­ing the Cre­ation of New York City’s Sky­line: 1500 to Present

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her play Zam­boni Godot is open­ing in New York City in March 2017. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Hear Controversial Versions of “The Star Spangled Banner” by Igor Stravinsky, Jimi Hendrix, José Feliciano & John Philip Sousa

in History, Music | December 13th, 2016

Debates over whether or not we should destroy or alter U.S. icons seem to turn on a crit­i­cal ques­tion: are nation­al sym­bols qua­si-reli­gious totems of some tran­scen­dent sacred order? The kind of impe­r­i­al project like­ly to end up a col­lec­tion of crum­bling mon­u­ments with every oth­er empire of the past? Or are they liv­ing emblems of a sec­u­lar repub­lic whose pri­ma­ry embod­i­ment is its peo­ple? A coun­try, like its peo­ple, that must recon­sti­tute itself with each gen­er­a­tion in order to sur­vive?

Either way, the nation’s sym­bols have always with­stood cre­ative destruc­tion, détourne­ment, and recon­tex­tu­al­iza­tion. Sub­ject­ing nation­al iconog­ra­phy to the inter­ven­tions of artists and activists restores a sense of pro­por­tion, show­ing us that our gov­ern­ment and its sym­bols belong to the peo­ple, rather than the oth­er way around. The idea is a pow­er­ful one. So much so that its expres­sion nev­er fails to excite con­tro­ver­sy. And few expres­sions have pro­voked more ire than per­for­mances of (or respons­es to) the nation­al anthem that devi­ate from the staid tra­di­tion­al arrange­ment.

We could point to very obvi­ous anthem con­tro­ver­sies, like Roseanne Barr’s irrev­er­ent 1990 ren­di­tion. But cer­tain oth­er inter­pre­ta­tions have had much more seri­ous artis­tic intent, like that of nat­u­ral­ized cit­i­zen Igor Stravin­sky, whose 1944 ver­sion (top) came from his “desire to do my bit in these griev­ous times toward fos­ter­ing and pre­serv­ing the spir­it of patri­o­tism in this coun­try.” Stravinsky’s earnest ambi­tion was thwart­ed. He couldn’t help but add his sig­na­ture, in this case a dom­i­nant sev­enth chord, to the arrange­ment.

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The Boston police respond­ed by issu­ing him a warn­ing, claim­ing, we not­ed in a pre­vi­ous post, “there was a law against tam­per­ing with the nation­al anthem” (there wasn’t). Stravin­sky “grudg­ing­ly” pulled the anthem from his Boston Sym­pho­ny bill. Over twen­ty years lat­er, the blind Puer­to Rican folk singer José Feli­ciano played the anthem before the 1968 World Series in his own emo­tion­al­ly-charged style. And like Stravin­sky, he was moti­vat­ed by love of coun­try. “I had set out to sing an anthem of grat­i­tude to a coun­try that had giv­en me a chance,” he lat­er recalled, “that had allowed me, a blind kid from Puer­to Rico—a kid with a dream—to reach far above my own lim­i­ta­tions.”

Much of the coun­try did not respond in kind. Even dur­ing the per­for­mance, Feli­ciano could “feel the dis­con­tent with­in the waves of cheers and applause that spurred on the first pitch.” After­wards, he learned that “a great con­tro­ver­sy was explod­ing across the coun­try because I had cho­sen to alter my ren­di­tion.… Vet­er­ans, I was being told, had thrown their shoes at the tele­vi­sion as I sang; oth­ers ques­tioned my right to stay in the Unit­ed States.” Feli­ciano admits, “yes, it was dif­fer­ent but I promise you,” he says, “it was sin­cere.” So was the most rad­i­cal of “Star-Span­gled Ban­ner” inter­pre­ta­tions, Jimi Hendrix’s feed­back-laden ver­sion at Wood­stock the fol­low­ing year.

A vet­er­an him­self, Hen­drix wasn’t moti­vat­ed by wartime patri­o­tism or per­son­al grat­i­tude, but by a desire, per­haps, to tell the truth about what his coun­try was doing to thou­sands of peo­ple in South­east Asia—“Napalm bombs,” as he said at the time, “peo­ple get­ting burned up on TV.” It’s a sub­ject he occa­sion­al­ly touched on lyri­cal­ly; here he let the gui­tar tell it, “turn­ing the music to a lit­er­al inter­pre­ta­tion of the lyrics: bombs burst­ing in air, rock­ets light­ing up the night,” writes Andy Cush at Spin, “Hen­drix began to sly­ly use the music’s own mar­tial bom­bast to reflect the vio­lence car­ried out under his nation’s flag.” He was hard­ly the first to exploit the song’s inher­ent bom­bast.

Almost 100 years before Woodstock—before the nation­al anthem was even the nation­al anthem—one of the most icon­ic of Amer­i­can of com­posers re-arranged “The Star Span­gled Ban­ner.” John Philip Sousa (who would go on to write “Stars and Stripes For­ev­er”) con­ceived the song in the “man­ner of Wagner’s Tannhäuser Over­ture,” New York­er music crit­ic Alex Ross tells us. (You can stream the Wag­ner­ian adap­ta­tion of “The Star Span­gled Ban­ner” here.) He was “young and lit­tle known at that time,” Ross remarks, “and his sly­ly Wag­ner­ian take on the future nation­al anthem was eclipsed by the famous­ly mediocre and expen­sive Cen­ten­ni­al March that Wag­n­er him­self penned for the occa­sion.” There’s no indi­ca­tion Sousa’s arrange­ment pro­voked a nation­al upset. But it did set a prece­dent for what we might as well call an Amer­i­can tra­di­tion of musi­cians alter­ing the anthem, using it to speak not to Fran­cis Scott Key’s Amer­i­ca, but to their own.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Isaac Asi­mov: “I Am Crazy, Absolute­ly Nuts, About our Nation­al Anthem” (1991)

William Shat­ner Sings O Cana­da (and Hap­py Cana­da Day)

Slavoj Žižek Exam­ines the Per­verse Ide­ol­o­gy of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy

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

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Medieval Doodler Draws a “Rockstar Lady” in a Manuscript of Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy (Circa 1500)

in History, Life, Philosophy | December 13th, 2016

Sloane 554 f 53

By the ear­ly 6th cen­tu­ry, the West­ern Roman Empire had effec­tive­ly come to an end after the depo­si­tion of the final emper­or and the instal­la­tion of Ger­man­ic kings. Under the sec­ond such ruler, Theodor­ic the Great, emerged one of the most influ­en­tial works of lit­er­a­ture of the Euro­pean Mid­dle Ages: The Con­so­la­tion of Phi­los­o­phy. Its author, sen­a­tor and philoso­pher Boethius, wrote the text while impris­oned and await­ing exe­cu­tion.

A con­ver­sa­tion the despon­dent author has with his muse, Lady Phi­los­o­phy, the book seeks the nature of hap­pi­ness and the nature of God, in the midst of great loss, dis­grace, and tyran­ny. The Con­so­la­tion of Phi­los­o­phy belongs to a long tra­di­tion of prison lit­er­a­ture that extends to Don Quixote, “Civ­il Dis­obe­di­ence,” and “Let­ter from a Birm­ing­ham Jail.” Almost a thou­sand years after Boethius’s 524 exe­cu­tion, one late Medieval read­er of his book—perhaps inspired by the text, or not—left the draw­ing you see above on the last page of a 15th cen­tu­ry Eng­lish illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­script.

medieval-rocker-2

Such doo­dling was com­mon prac­tice at the time, notes Medieval book his­to­ri­an Erik Kwakkel. Blank pages in man­u­scripts “often filled up with pen tri­als, notes, doo­dles, or draw­ings.” But this par­tic­u­lar doo­dle “is not what you’d expect: a full-on draw­ing of a maid­en play­ing the lute, which she holds just like a gui­tar.” Boethius may have dis­missed poet­ry in his search for hap­pi­ness in the midst of despair, but his lit­er­ary efforts might put us in mind of poet Berthold Brecht, who famous­ly wrote while in exile from Ger­many in the 1930s, “In the dark times/Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing/About the dark times.”

As if to remind us of the neces­si­ty not only of phi­los­o­phy, but also of song in dark times, our anony­mous read­er drew a “rock­star lady,” whose pose con­notes noth­ing but pure joy. We could jux­ta­pose her with the joy­ful gui­tar pos­es of any num­ber of mod­ern blues and rock stars, who have played through any num­ber of dark times. The draw­ing appears in a trans­la­tion by John Wal­ton dat­ing from between 1410 and 1500, a cen­tu­ry in Europe with no short­age of its own polit­i­cal crises and tyran­ni­cal rulers. “Even in the dark­est of times,” wrote Han­nah Arendt in her essay col­lec­tion pro­fil­ing artists and writ­ers like Boethius and Brecht, “we have the right to expect some illu­mi­na­tion,” whether from phi­los­o­phy or poet­ry. We also have the right—the medieval doo­dler in Boethius’ book seemed to sug­gest some 500-odd years ago—to rock out.

via Erik Kwakkel

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wear­able Books: In Medieval Times, They Took Old Man­u­scripts & Turned Them into Clothes

Medieval Cats Behav­ing Bad­ly: Kit­ties That Left Paw Prints … and Peed … on 15th Cen­tu­ry Man­u­scripts

Won­der­ful­ly Weird & Inge­nious Medieval Books

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

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How To Understand a Picasso Painting: A Video Primer

in Art, History, How to Learn for Free | December 12th, 2016

night-fishing-picasso

Some­times it’s hard for the untrained eye to fig­ure out what exact­ly is going on in a Picas­so.

For­tu­nate­ly, the artist leaned toward infor­ma­tive, work­man­like titles.

Had he titled “Night Fish­ing at Antibes,” below, some­thing a bit more opaque—“Untitled No. 2,” say—the une­d­u­cat­ed eye might well per­ceive the nar­ra­tive as some­thing clos­er to “Drunk­en Night in a Con­vey­er Belt Sushi Joint.”

Even know­ing the cor­rect title, my gut still argues that the boomerang-head­ed lady with boobs like lips is singing karaoke…

But after watch­ing the above video by Evan Puschak, aka The Nerd­writer, I’m will­ing to con­cede that she’s stand­ing on a jet­ty, a like­ly amal­ga­ma­tion of two of Picas­so’s lovers.

(The less volup­tuous crea­ture stand­ing next to her is his wife, and my gut is eager to know why it looks like she’s top­less, a point on which Pushak is frus­trat­ing­ly mum.)

His process for under­stand­ing a Picas­so takes the gut response into account, but then flesh­es things out with four addi­tion­al steps. You can apply them to many oth­er artists’ work too.

  1. First reac­tion
  2. Con­tent
  3. Form
  4. His­tor­i­cal con­text
  5. Per­son­al con­text

It’s cer­tain­ly help­ful to know that the paint­ing was made in 1939.

You prob­a­bly don’t need the Inter­net to guess what world events were like­ly a source of pre­oc­cu­pa­tion for the artist, whose “Guer­ni­ca” was com­plet­ed just two years ear­li­er.

Con­tent-wise, Puschak truf­fles up some inter­est­ing geo­graph­i­cal ref­er­ences that elude most online analy­sis of the work. For instance, those pur­ple blocks in the upper left cor­ner now house the Musée Picas­so.

There may well be a sixth step. Ear­li­er, when a fan of the Nerdwriter’s week­ly video essay series asked Puschak how to under­stand art, he respond­ed:

All good art is try­ing to tell you some­thing about your life. Your life… specif­i­cal­ly. So under­stand­ing art is a process of under­stand­ing your­self, and vice ver­sa. In both cas­es, you only learn by engag­ing. Watch­ing isn’t enough, nei­ther is read­ing or lis­ten­ing or think­ing for that mat­ter. From my per­spec­tive, engage­ment means writ­ing. An idea that’s been snaking around in my videos for a long time is that we learn by say­ing, not think­ing. You know some­thing when you can artic­u­late it, and for that you need words and sen­tences and para­graphs. So intro­spect, write down what your mind is doing. And when you watch a movie or look at a paint­ing, write down how you feel about it. You’ll be amazed how one informs the oth­er, and before long you’ll see some beau­ti­ful sparks. 

Below are some of the resources Puschak cred­its with inform­ing this Nerd­writer episode:

Rudolf Arn­heim, “Picas­so’s Night Fish­ing at Antibes” The Jour­nal of Aes­thet­ics and Art Crit­i­cism — Vol. 22, No. 2 (Win­ter, 1963), pp. 165–167

Dou­glas N. Mor­gan, “Picas­so’s Peo­ple: A Les­son in Mak­ing Sense” The Jour­nal of Aes­thet­ics and Art Crit­i­cism Vol. 22, No. 2 (Win­ter, 1963), pp. 167–171

Nina Coraz­zo, “Picas­so’s ‘Night Fish­ing at Antibes’: A New Source” The Burling­ton Mag­a­zine Vol. 132, No. 1043 (Feb., 1990), pp. 99–101

Mark Rosen­thal, “Picas­so’s Night Fish­ing at Antibes: A Med­i­ta­tion on Death” The Art Bul­letin Vol. 65, No. 4 (Dec., 1983), pp. 649–658

Albert Boime, “Picas­so’s “Night Fish­ing at Antibes”: One More Try” The Jour­nal of Aes­thet­ics and Art Crit­i­cism Vol. 29, No. 2 (Win­ter, 1970), pp. 223–226

Tim­o­thy Anglin Bur­gard, “Picas­so’s Night Fish­ing at Antibes: Auto­bi­og­ra­phy, Apoc­a­lypse, and the Span­ish Civ­il War” The Art Bul­letin Vol. 68, No. 4 (Dec., 1986), pp. 657–672

Lawrence D. Steefel, Jr., “Body Imagery in Picas­so’s “Night Fish­ing at Antibes” Art Jour­nal Vol. 25, No. 4 (Sum­mer, 1966), pp. 356–363+376

You can view the Nerdwriter’s oth­er videos on his web­site or sub­scribe to his YouTube chan­nel where a new video is pub­lished every Wednes­day.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Picas­so Cre­ate Entire Paint­ings in Mag­nif­i­cent Time-Lapse Film (1956)

The Mys­tery of Picas­so: Land­mark Film of a Leg­endary Artist at Work, by Hen­ri-Georges Clouzot

How to Look at Art: A Short Visu­al Guide by Car­toon­ist Lyn­da Bar­ry

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her play Zam­boni Godot is open­ing in New York City in March 2017. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Techie Working at Home Creates Bigger Archive of Historical Newspapers (37 Million Pages) Than the Library of Congress

in Archives, History | December 12th, 2016

“Real news, fake news, who cares, it’s all the same, am I right?”

… Not to make light of an exis­ten­tial cri­sis in jour­nal­ism and the pub­lic trust—a dis­turb­ing devel­op­ment. Cyn­i­cism threat­ens to erode the very foun­da­tions of… well, ring your own alarm bell. Per­haps it’s time we (re)drew some hard lines around what we mean by the word “news.”

How to do that? I leave it to the experts—professors of jour­nal­ism, reporters and archivists and his­to­ri­ans who do the hard work of con­struct­ing genealo­gies and tax­onomies of news, dis­cov­er­ing its muta­tions and dead ends.

Jour­nal­ism libraries around the coun­try ful­fill the needs of these schol­ars, as does the Library of Con­gress. But if you real­ly want to dig into a com­pre­hen­sive collection—one that bests even the august Fed­er­al gov­ern­ment library (sort of)—you’ll need to vis­it the web­site of one Tom Trynis­ki, pri­vate cit­i­zen, retired “com­put­er expert,” writes Jim Epstein at Rea­son, and ded­i­cat­ed ama­teur, “work­ing alone.”

This being Rea­son, the pre­serve of “free minds and free mar­kets,” you can expect a good bit of crow­ing about the entre­pre­neur­ial spir­it of Tryniski’s accom­plish­ment—an archive of 37,439,000 his­toric news­pa­per pages from the U.S. and Cana­da, “orders of mag­ni­tude big­ger and more pop­u­lar than one cre­at­ed by a fed­er­al bureau­cra­cy with mil­lions of dol­lars to spend.” The video above says it suc­cinct­ly in a tagline: “Ama­teur beats gov’t at dig­i­tiz­ing news­pa­pers.”

Should you take an inter­est in what Tryniski—the sole employ­ee of Old Ful­ton New York Post­cards—spends, Epstein pro­vides a full account­ing of the site’s impres­sive­ly mea­ger oper­at­ing bud­get. Should you won­der where the LoC’s mon­ey goes, and why it uses so many more resources than one retiree, you may wish to do your own com­par­i­son between Tryniski’s site and the Feds’ online news archive, Chron­i­cling Amer­i­ca. (And maybe pay their place a vis­it in the flesh.) There’s more to a library than num­bers of pages and views.

port-chester-journal

In some ways, it’s not a fair com­par­i­son. Trynis­ki may be a com­put­er expert, but he’s not a web design­er (or he’s an ornery, old-school purist). His site (last updat­ed in 2014), with its frames and heavy use of Flash and GIFs, reflects the web’s anar­chic 90s hey­day. And where the LoC’s site chron­i­cles all of Amer­i­ca, Tryniski’s most­ly sticks to New York, with local papers like The Port Chester Jour­nal (above) rep­re­sent­ed heav­i­ly.

That said, the site’s search func­tions are much cool­er than those of glossier com­peti­tors, with options for “fuzzy search­ing,” “phon­ic search­ing” (for those of us who can’t spell), “and “user-defined syn­onyms.” Trynis­ki also knows his way around micro­film and a micro­film scan­ner, despite (we’re express­ly told for some rea­son in the video and Epstein’s arti­cle) his being “a high school grad­u­ate.”

In this tri­umph of the every­man sto­ry, how­ev­er, Trynis­ki does not intro­duce his own col­lec­tion with ful­mi­na­tions of the “old man shakes fist at” vari­ety. Instead he describes his col­lec­tion as a means of time trav­el. “It’s the day-to-day life,” he says, “that you could not imag­ine today. Read­ing the actu­al news­pa­per seems to bring it back into cur­rent con­text. Peo­ple… sit there and it’s like, they move back into that time, and it’s like they’re liv­ing in the same time as their grand­par­ents and great-grand­par­ents.”

Nobody needs to fix jour­nal­ism, libraries, or fed­er­al spend­ing to have this expe­ri­ence, and it’s one every­one should have—whether by trav­el­ing through the pages of old news­pa­pers or a fam­i­ly trove of pho­tos and let­ters. His­to­ry can seem like lit­tle more than a sto­ry we tell our­selves about the past, but the pri­ma­ry doc­u­ments have tales to tell that we could nev­er imag­ine.

Learn more about Tryniski’s col­lec­tion at Rea­son, and vis­it the quirky, decep­tive­ly ful­some Old Ful­ton NY Post Cards (named as such because the site began as a scanned col­lec­tion of post­cards from Tryniski’s home­town of Ful­ton, NY). You’ll find in its charm­ing­ly clunky envi­rons a fas­ci­nat­ing repos­i­to­ry of vin­tage news and pho­tos. And remem­ber, “If you did not read about it on Old Ful­ton NY Post Cards, IT DID NOT HAPPEN!!!”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

From the Annals of Opti­mism: The News­pa­per Indus­try in 1981 Imag­ines its Dig­i­tal Future

“Titan­ic Sink­ing; No Lives Lost” and Oth­er Ter­ri­bly Innacu­rate News Reports from April 15, 1912

Archive of Hemingway’s News­pa­per Report­ing Reveals Nov­el­ist in the Mak­ing

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

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200,000 Years of Staggering Human Population Growth Shown in an Animated Map

in Health, History, Life, Science | December 9th, 2016

Last night, dur­ing a talk on his new book Rais­ing the Floor, long­time labor leader and cur­rent senior fel­low at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty Andy Stern told the sto­ry of a king and a chess­mas­ter engaged in pitched bat­tle. “If you win,” said the over­con­fi­dent king, “you may have any­thing you desire.” Lo, the chess­mas­ter wins the game, but being a hum­ble man asks the king only to pro­vide him with some rice. The king smug­ly agrees to his eccen­tric con­di­tions: he must place a grain of rice on the first square of the chess­board, then dou­ble the amount of each suc­ces­sive square. Once he reach­es the mid­dle, the king stops and has the chess­mas­ter exe­cut­ed. The request would have cost him his entire king­dom and more.

Stern used the sto­ry to illus­trate the expo­nen­tial growth of tech­nol­o­gy, which now advances at a rate we can nei­ther con­fi­dent­ly pre­dict nor con­trol. Some­thing very sim­i­lar has hap­pened to the human pop­u­la­tion in the past two-hun­dred years, as you can see illus­trat­ed in the video above from the Amer­i­can Muse­um of Nat­ur­al His­to­ry.

Evolv­ing some 200,000 years ago in Sub-Saha­ran Africa, and migrat­ing across the globe some 100,000 years ago, mod­ern humans remained rel­a­tive­ly few in num­ber for sev­er­al thou­sand years. That is, until the tech­no­log­i­cal break­through of agri­cul­ture. “By AD 1,” the video text tells us, “world pop­u­la­tion reached approx­i­mate­ly 170 mil­lion peo­ple.”

After a very rapid expan­sion, the num­bers rose and fell slow­ly in the ensu­ing cen­turies as wars, dis­ease, and famines dec­i­mat­ed pop­u­la­tions. World pop­u­la­tion reached only 180 mil­lion by the year 200 AD, then dwin­dled through the Mid­dle Ages, only pick­ing up again slow­ly around 700. Through­out this his­to­ri­o­graph­ic mod­el of pop­u­la­tion growth, the video info­graph­ic pro­vides help­ful sym­bols and leg­ends that chart his­toric cen­ters like the Roman Empire and Han Dynasty, and show major world events like the Bubon­ic plague.

Then we reach the world-shak­ing dis­rup­tions that were the birth of Cap­i­tal­ism, the Atlantic slave trade, and the Sci­en­tif­ic and Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tions, when “mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy and med­i­cine bring faster growth.”

That’s quite the under­state­ment. The growth, like the grains of rice on the chess­board, pro­ceed­ed expo­nen­tial­ly, reach­ing 1 bil­lion peo­ple around 1800, then explod­ing to over 7 bil­lion today. As the yel­low dots—each rep­re­sent­ing a node of 1 mil­lion people—take over the map, the video quick­ly becomes an alarm­ing call to action. While the num­bers are lev­el­ing off, and fer­til­i­ty has dropped, “if cur­rent trends con­tin­ue,” we’re told, “glob­al pop­u­la­tion will peak at 11 bil­lion around 2100.” Peak num­bers could be low­er, or sub­stan­tial­ly high­er, depend­ing on the pre­dic­tive val­ue of the mod­els and any num­ber of unknow­able vari­ables.

Andy Stern’s research has focused on how we build economies that sup­port our mas­sive glob­al population—as machines stand poised in the next decade or so to edge mil­lions of blue and white col­lar work­ers out of an already pre­car­i­ous labor mar­ket. The Amer­i­can Muse­um of Nat­ur­al His­to­ry asks some dif­fer­ent, but no less urgent ques­tions that take us even far­ther into the future. How can the planet’s finite, and dwin­dling, resources, with our cur­rent abuse and mis­use of them, sup­port such large and grow­ing num­bers of peo­ple?

It may take anoth­er tech­no­log­i­cal break­through to mit­i­gate the dam­age caused by pre­vi­ous tech­no­log­i­cal break­throughs. Or it may take an enor­mous, rev­o­lu­tion­ary polit­i­cal shift. In either case, the “choic­es we make today” about fam­i­ly plan­ning, con­sump­tion, envi­ron­men­tal reg­u­la­tion, and con­ser­va­tion “affect the future of our species—and all life on Earth.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Crowd­ed House: How the World’s Pop­u­la­tion Grew to 7 Bil­lion Peo­ple

Hans Rosling Uses Ikea Props to Explain World of 7 Bil­lion Peo­ple

The Birth Con­trol Hand­book: The Under­ground Stu­dent Pub­li­ca­tion That Let Women Take Con­trol of Their Bod­ies (1968)

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

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George Orwell Tries to Identify Who Is Really a “Fascist” and Define the Meaning of This “Much-Abused Word” (1944)

in History, Politics | December 7th, 2016

via Wikimedia Commons

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Two neol­o­gisms, “Post-truth” and “Alt-right,” have entered polit­i­cal dis­course in this year of tur­moil and upheaval, words so noto­ri­ous they were cho­sen as the win­ner and run­ner-up, respec­tive­ly, for Oxford Dic­tio­nar­ies’ word of the year. These “Orwellian euphemisms,” argues Noah Berlatsky “con­ceal old evils” and “white­wash fas­cism,” recall­ing “in form and con­tent… Orwell’s old words—specifically some of the newspeak from 1984. ‘Crime­think,’ ‘thought­crime,’ and ‘unper­son’.… They even sound the same, with their sim­ple, thunk-thunk con­struc­tion of sin­gle syl­la­bles mashed togeth­er.”

“The sheer ugly clum­si­ness is sup­posed to make the lan­guage seem futur­is­tic and cut­ting edge,” Berlatsky writes, “The world to come will be util­i­tar­i­an, slangy, and up-to-the-minute in its inel­e­gance. So the future was in Orwell’s day; so it is in 2016.” As in Orwell’s day, our cur­rent jar­gon gets mobi­lized in “defense of the indefensible”—as the nov­el­ist, jour­nal­ist, and rev­o­lu­tion­ary fight­er wrote in his 1946 essay “Pol­i­tics and the Eng­lish Lan­guage.” And just as in his day, the euphemisms pret­ty up con­stant, bla­tant lying and racist ide­olo­gies. We can also draw anoth­er lin­guis­tic com­par­i­son to Orwell’s time: the wide­spread use of the word “fas­cism.”

Berlatsky uses the word with­out defin­ing it (when he talks about “white­wash­ing fas­cism”), except to say that “fas­cism thrives on false­hoods.” That may well be the case, but is it enough of a cri­te­ri­on for an entire polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic sys­tem? The word begs for a cogent analy­sis. Even Umber­to Eco, who grew up under Mussolini’s rule, felt the need for clar­i­ty, giv­en that “Amer­i­can rad­i­cals,” he wrote in 1995, abused the phrase “fas­cist pig” as a pejo­ra­tive for any author­i­ty, such that the word hard­ly meant any­thing thir­ty years after World War II.

But sure­ly Orwell—who fought fas­cism in Spain in 1936, and whose omi­nous post­war dystopi­an nov­els have done more than any lit­er­ary work to illus­trate its menace—could define the word with con­fi­dence? Alas, when we look to his work, even before the war had end­ed, we find him writ­ing, “‘Fas­cism,’ is almost entire­ly mean­ing­less.” His short 1944 essay, “What is Fas­cism?” does not, how­ev­er, push to abol­ish the word. He calls instead for “a clear and gen­er­al­ly accept­ed def­i­n­i­tion of it” against the ten­den­cy to “degrade it to the lev­el of a swear­word.”

But Orwell (being Orwell) is not opti­mistic. One rea­son a def­i­n­i­tion had been so dif­fi­cult to come by, he writes, is that any group to whom it is applied would have to make “admis­sions” most of them are not “will­ing to make”—admissions as to the real nature of their ide­ol­o­gy and objec­tives, behind the euphemisms, lies, and dou­ble-speak. If no one is a fas­cist, then every­one poten­tial­ly is. Even in the 40s, Orwell wrote, “if you exam­ine the press you will find that there is almost no set of people—certainly no polit­i­cal par­ty or orga­nized body of any kind—which has not been denounced as Fas­cist.”

He enu­mer­ates those so accused: “Con­ser­v­a­tives, Social­ists, Com­mu­nists, Trot­sky­ists, Catholics, War Resisters, Sup­port­ers of the war, Nation­al­ists.…” What of the text­book exam­ples just on the oth­er side of the front lines? “When we apply the term ‘Fas­cism’ to Ger­many or Japan or Mussolini’s Italy,” Orwell con­cedes, “we know broad­ly what we mean.” But appeal­ing to these extreme gov­ern­ments does lit­tle good, “because even the major Fas­cist states dif­fer from one anoth­er a good deal in struc­ture and ide­ol­o­gy.” Umber­to Eco is con­tent to say that fas­cism adopts the cul­tur­al trap­pings of the nations in which it aris­es, yet still shares sev­er­al con­stant, if con­tra­dic­to­ry, ide­o­log­i­cal traits. Orwell isn’t so sure he knows what those are.

So what can Orwell say about the word, one he is eager to hold on to but at a loss to pin down? Though he believes it must name a “polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic” sys­tem as well, Orwell final­ly opts for an ordi­nary lan­guage def­i­n­i­tion, to which we “attach at any rate an emo­tion­al sig­nif­i­cance.” Whether we “reck­less­ly fling” the word “in every direc­tion” or use it in more pre­cise ways, we always mean “rough­ly speak­ing, some­thing cru­el, unscrupu­lous, arro­gant, obscu­ran­tist, anti-lib­er­al, and anti-work­ing class. Except for the rel­a­tive­ly small num­ber of Fas­cist sym­pa­thiz­ers, almost any Eng­lish per­son would accept ‘bul­ly’ as a syn­onym for ‘Fas­cist.’” Those today who are not bullies—or unapolo­getic fas­cist sympathizers—and who don’t need euphemisms for these words, would like­ly agree.

You can read “What is Fas­cism?” here. You can find the short essay pub­lished in this vol­ume, The Col­lect­ed Essays, Jour­nal­ism and Let­ters of George Orwell.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Umber­to Eco Makes a List of the 14 Com­mon Fea­tures of Fas­cism

George Orwell Reviews Mein Kampf: “He Envis­ages a Hor­ri­ble Brain­less Empire” (1940)

George Orwell Explains in a Reveal­ing 1944 Let­ter Why He’d Write 1984

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

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