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

in History, Life, Religion, Uncategorized | January 29th, 2025

In 590 AD, Pope Gregory I unveiled a list of the Seven Deadly Sins – lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride – as a way to keep the flock from straying into the thorny fields of ungodliness. These days, though, for all but the most devout, Pope Gregory’s list seems less like a means to moral behavior than a description of cable TV programming.

So instead, let’s look to one of the saints of the 20th century–Mahatma Gandhi. On October 22, 1925, Gandhi published a list he called the Seven Social Sins in his weekly newspaper Young India.

Politics without principles.
Wealth without work.
Pleasure without conscience.
Knowledge without character.
Commerce without morality.
Science without humanity.
Worship without sacrifice.

The list sprang from a correspondence that Gandhi had with someone only identified as a “fair friend.” He published the list without commentary save for the following line: “Naturally, the friend does not want the readers to know these things merely through the intellect but to know them through the heart so as to avoid them.”

Unlike the Catholic Church’s list, Gandhi’s list is expressly focused on the conduct of the individual in society. Gandhi preached non-violence and interdependence and every single one of these sins are examples of selfishness winning out over the common good.

It’s also a list that, if fully absorbed, will make the folks over at the US Chamber of Commerce and Ayn Rand Institute itch. After all, “Wealth without work,” is a pretty accurate description of America’s 1%. (Investments ain’t work. Ask Thomas Piketty.) “Commerce without morality” sounds a lot like every single oil company out there and “knowledge without character” describes half the hacks on cable news. “Politics without principles” describes the other half.

In 1947, Gandhi gave his fifth grandson, Arun Gandhi, a slip of paper with this same list on it, saying that it contained “the seven blunders that human society commits, and that cause all the violence.” The next day, Arun returned to his home in South Africa. Three months later, Gandhi was shot to death by a Hindu extremist.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.

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Jonathan Crow is a writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications,

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How Frank Lloyd Wright Became Frank Lloyd Wright: A Video Introduction

in Architecture, History | January 29th, 2025

Frank Lloyd Wright is unlikely to be displaced as the archetype of the genius architect anytime soon, at least in America, but even he had to start somewhere. At nine years old, as architecture YouTuber Stewart Hicks explains in the video above, Wright received a set of blocks from his mother, who hoped that “her son would grow up to become a great architect, and she thought the creativity unlocked and practiced with these blocks could kick-start his journey.” Evidently, she wasn’t wrong: “by the time Wright attempted to design his first building years later, he spent countless hours arranging the blocks,” familiar as he was with “proportion, symmetry, balance, and other principles of design well before he ever picked up a pencil.”

Of course, most of us played with blocks in childhood, and few of us now bear much comparison to the man who designed Fallingwater and the Guggenheim. But his mother’s toy selection was just one of many factors that influenced the architectural development that continued throughout Wright’s long life.

In fifteen minutes, Hicks explains as many of them as possible: his early opportunity to work on “shingle-style” homes, whose cruciform layout he would adapt into his own designs; his arrival in a Chicago that was still rebuilding after its great fire of 1871, when there were vast skyscraper interiors to be created; the new Midwestern manufacturing money prepared to commission homes from him; and his inspiring encounters with Japanese aesthetics, both at home and in Japan itself.

After returning from a 1905 Japan trip, Wright got to work on Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois. He had it built with the relatively new material of reinforced concrete, thus getting “in on the ground floor of a technology that could completely transform what buildings could do,” making possible “soaring cantilevers, graceful curves,” and other elements that would become part of his architectural signature. A few decades later, the United States’ suburb-building boom made Wright’s rural-urban “Usonian” homes and “Broadacre City” plan look prescient; indeed, “almost every single house inside of a postwar suburb bears his trace.” His willingness to appear in print and on film, radio, and television kept him in the American public consciousness, and he made sure to instill his principles into generations of students. Frank Lloyd Wright may be long gone, but he made sure that his vision of America would live on.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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When Neapolitans Used to Eat Pasta with Their Bare Hands: Watch Footage from 1903

in Food & Drink, History | January 28th, 2025

Even if you don’t speak Italian, you can make a decent guess at the meaning of the word mangiamaccheroni. The tricky bit is that maccheroni refers not to the pasta English-speakers today call macaroni, tubular and cut into small curved sections, but to pasta in general. Or at least it did around the turn of the twentieth century, when i mangiamaccheroni still had currency as a nickname for the inhabitants of the pasta-production center that was Naples. That identity had already been long established even then: Atlas Obscura’s Adee Braun quotes Goethe’s observation, on a trip there in 1787, that pasta “can be bought everywhere and in all the shops for very little money.”

Some especially hard-up Neapolitans could even eat it for free, or indeed get paid to eat it, provided they were prepared to do so at great speed, in full public view — and, as was the custom at the time, with their bare hands. “Many tourists took it upon themselves to organize such spectacles,” Braun writes. “Simply tossing a coin or two to the lazzaroni, the street beggars, would elicit a mad dash to consume the macaroni in their characteristic way, much to the amusement of their onlooking benefactors.” As you can see in the Edison film above, shot on the streets of Naples in 1903, their maccheroni came in long strands, more like what we know as spaghetti. (Fortunately, if that’s the word, tomato sauce had yet to catch on.)

“On my first visit there, in 1929, I acquired a distaste for macaroni, at least in Naples, for its insalubrious courtyards were jungles of it,” writes Waverley Root in The Food of Italy. “Limp strands hung over clotheslines to dry, dirt swirled through the air, flies settled to rest on the exposed pasta, pigeons bombed it from overhead,” and so on. By that time, what had been an aristocratic dish centuries earlier had long since become a staple even for the poor, owing to the proto-industrialization of its production (which Mussolini would relocate and greatly increase in scale). Nowadays, it goes without saying that Italy’s pasta is of the highest quality. And though Italians may not have invented the stuff, which was originally brought over from the Middle East, perhaps they did invent the mukbang.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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How Erik Satie’s ‘Furniture Music’ Was Designed to Be Ignored and Paved the Way for Ambient Music

in History, Music | January 27th, 2025

Imagine how many times someone born in the eighteen-sixties could ever expect to hear music. The number would vary, of course, depending on the individual’s class and family inclinations. Suffice it to say that each chance would have been more precious than those of us in the twenty-first century can easily understand. Our ability to hear practically any song we could possibly desire on command has changed our relationship to the art itself. Most of us now relate to it not as we would a special, even momentous event, but as we do to the water and electricity that come out of our walls — or, to put it in mid-nineteenth-century terms, as we do to our furniture.

Despite having been born in 1866 himself, Erik Satie understood humanity’s need to listen to music without really listening to it. The Inside the Score video above tells the story of how he developed musique d’ameublement, or “furniture music.” The artist Fernand Léger, a friend of Satie’s, recalled that after the two of them had been subjected to “unbearable vulgar music” in a restaurant, Satie spoke of the need for “music which would be part of the ambience, which would take account of it. I imagine it being melodic in nature: it would soften the noise of knives and forks without dominating them, without imposing itself.” The result was five deliberately ignorable compositions, each tailored to an ordinary space, which he wrote between 1917 and 1923.

Regarded in his lifetime less as a respectable composer than an unserious eccentric, he only managed to get one of those pieces played — and even when he did, everyone ignored his instructions to chat instead of listening. It was well after his death (in 1925) that such also-unconventional musical figures as John Cage and Brian Eno became famous for works similarly premised on a re-imagination of the relationship between music and listener. Eno, in particular, is now credited with the development of “ambient music” thanks to his albums like Music for Airports. Their popularity surely wouldn’t have surprised Satie; whether he could have foreseen ten-hour mixes of “chill lo-fi beats to study to” is another question entirely.

Watch Animated Scores of Erik Satie’s Most Famous Pieces: “Gymnopedie No. 1” and “Gnossienne No. 1”

Watch the 1917 Ballet “Parade”: Created by Erik Satie, Pablo Picasso & Jean Cocteau, It Provoked a Riot and Inspired the Word “Surrealism”

The Velvet Underground’s John Cale Plays Erik Satie’s Vexations on I’ve Got a Secret (1963)

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Brian Eno Explains the Origins of Ambient Music

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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The Oldest Beer Receipt (Circa 2050 BC)

in Food & Drink, History | January 23rd, 2025

Above, we have the Alulu Beer Receipt. Written in cuneiform on an old clay tablet, the 4,000-year-old receipt documents a transaction. A brewer, named Alulu, delivered “the best” beer to a recipient named Ur-Amma, who apparently also served as the scribe. The Mesopotamians drank beer daily. And while they considered it a staple of everyday life, they also regarded it as a divine gift—something that contributed to human happiness and well-being.

In our archive, you can find the recipe for Sumerian beer and also watch it get made. That’s all free. No receipts will be issued.

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Watch Design for Disaster, a 1962 Film That Shows Why Los Angeles Is Always at Risk of Devastating Fires

in Current Affairs, History | January 16th, 2025

“This is fire season in Los Angeles,” Joan Didion once wrote, relating how every year “the Santa Ana winds start blowing down through the passes, and the relative humidity drops to figures like seven or six or three per cent, and the bougainvillea starts rattling in the driveway, and people start watching the horizon for smoke and tuning in to another of those extreme local possibilities — in this instance, that of imminent devastation.” The New Yorker published this piece in 1989, when Los Angeles’ fire season was “a particularly early and bad one,” but it’s one of many writings on the same phenomenon now circulating again, with the highly destructive Palisades Fire still burning away.

Back in 1989, longtime Angelenos would have cited the Bel Air Fire of 1961 as a particularly vivid example of what misfortune the Santa Ana winds could bring. Widely recognized as a byword for affluence (not unlike the now virtually obliterated Pacific Palisades), Bel Air was home to the likes of Dennis Hopper, Burt Lancaster, Joan Fontaine, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Aldous Huxley — all of whose houses counted among the 484 destroyed in the conflagration (in which, miraculously, no lives were lost). You can see the Bel Air Fire and its aftermath in “Design for Disaster,” a short documentary produced by the Los Angeles Fire Department and narrated by William Conrad (whose voice would still have been instantly recognizable as that of Marshal Matt Dillon from the golden-age radio drama Gunsmoke).

Los Angeles’ repeated affliction by these blazes is perhaps overdetermined. The factors include not just the dreaded Santa Anas, but also the geography of its canyons, the dryness of the vegetation in its chaparral (not, pace Didion, desert) ecology, and the inability of its water-delivery system to meet such a sudden and enormous need (which also proved fateful in the Palisades Fire). It didn’t help that the typical house at the time was built with “a combustible roof; wide, low eaves to catch sparks and fire; and a big picture window to let the fire inside,” nor that such dwellings were “closely spaced in brush-covered canyons and ridges serviced by narrow roads.” The Bel Air Fire brought about a wood-shingle roof ban and a more intensive brush-clearance policy, but the six decades of fire seasons since do make one wonder what kind of measures, if any, could ever subdue these particular forces of nature.

via Boing Boing

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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Watch Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo and Gertie the Dinosaur, and Witness the Birth of Modern Animation (1911–1914)

in Animation, Film, History | January 14th, 2025

“Considering that, in a cartoon, anything can happen that the mind can imagine, the comics have generally depicted pretty mundane worlds,” writes Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson. “Sure, there have been talking animals, a few spaceships and whatnot, but the comics have rarely shown us anything truly bizarre. Little Nemo’s dream imagery, however, is as mind-bending today as ever, and Winsor McCay remains one of the greatest innovators and manipulators of the comic strip medium.” And Little Nemo, which sprawled across entire newspaper pages in the early decades of the twentieth century, pushed artistic boundaries not just as a comic, but also as a film.

When first seen in 1911, the twelve-minute short Little Nemo was titled Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics. A mixture of live action and animation, it dramatizes McCay making a gentleman’s wager with his colleagues that he can draw figures that move — an idea that might have come with a certain plausibility, given that speed-drawing was already a successful part of his vaudeville act. Meeting this challenge entails drawing 4,000 pictures, a task as demanding for McCay the character as it was for McCay the real artist. This labor adds up to the four minutes that end the film, which contains moments of still-impressive fluidity, technique, and humor.

Clearly possessed of a sense of animation’s potential as an art form, McCay went on to make nine more films, and ultimately considered them his proudest work. Like the Little Nemo movie, he used his second such effort, Gertie the Dinosaur, in his vaudeville act, performing alongside the projection to create the effect of his giving the titular prehistoric creature commands. “In some ways, McCay was the forerunner of Walt Disney in terms of American animation,” writes Lucas O. Seastrom at The Walt Disney Family Museum. “In order to create a lovable dinosaur and accomplish these seemingly magical feats, McCay used mathematical precision and groundbreaking techniques, such as the process of inbetweening, which later became a Disney standard.”

More than once, McCay the animator drew inspiration from the work of McCay the newspaper artist: in 1921, he made a couple of motion pictures out of his pre-Little Nemo sleep-themed comic strip Dream of the Rarebit Fiend. But for his most ambitious animated work, he turned toward history — and, at the time, rather recent history — to re-create the sinking of the RMS Lusitania, an event that his employer, the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, had insisted on downplaying at the time due to his stance against the U.S.’ joining the Great War. Decades thereafter, Looney Tunes animator Chuck Jones said that “the two most important people in animation are Winsor McCay and Walt Disney, and I’m not sure which should go first.” Watch these and McCay’s other surviving films on this Youtube playlist, and you can decide for yourself.

H/T Izzy

Visit the World of Little Nemo Artist Winsor McCay: Three Classic Animations

Watch Fantasmagorie, the World’s First Animated Cartoon (1908)

Winsor McCay Animates the Sinking of the Lusitania in the Earliest Animated Propaganda Film (1918)

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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Discover the Playful Drawings That Charles Darwin’s Children Left on His Manuscripts

in History, Science | January 13th, 2025

Charles Darwin’s work on heredity was partly driven by tragic losses in his own family. Darwin had married his first cousin, Emma, and “wondered if his close genetic relation to his wife had had an ill impact on his children’s health, three (of 10) of whom died before the age of 11,” Katherine Harmon writes at Scientific American. (His suspicions, researchers surmise, may have been correct.) He was so concerned about the issue that, in 1870, he pressured the government to include questions about inbreeding on the census (they refused).

Darwin’s children would serve as subjects of scientific observation. His notebooks, says Alison Pearn of the Darwin Correspondence Project at Cambridge University Library, show a curious father “prodding and poking his young infant,” Charles Erasmus, his first child, “like he’s another ape.” Comparisons of his children’s development with that of orangutans helped him refine ideas in On the Origin of Species, which he completed as he raised his family at their house in rural Kent, and inspired later ideas in Descent of Man.

But as they grew, the Darwin children became far more than scientific curiosities. They became their father’s assistants and apprentices. “It’s really an enviable family life,” Pearn tells the BBC. “The science was everywhere. Darwin just used anything that came to hand, all the way from his children right through to anything in his household, the plants in the kitchen garden.” Steeped in scientific investigation from birth, it’s little wonder so many of the Darwins became accomplished scientists themselves.

Down House was “by all accounts a boisterous place,” writes McKenna Staynor at The New Yorker, “with a wooden slide on the stairs and a rope swing on the first-floor landing.” Another archive of Darwin’s prodigious writing, Cambridge’s Darwin Manuscripts Project, gives us even more insight into his family life, with graphic evidence of the Darwin brood’s curiosity in the dozens of doodles and drawings they made in their father’s notebooks, including the original manuscript copy of his magnum opus.

The project’s director, David Kohn, “doesn’t know for certain which kids were the artists,” notes Staynor, “but he guesses that at least three were involved: Francis, who became a botanist; George, who became an astronomer and mathematician; and Horace, who became an engineer.” One imagines competition among the Darwin children must have been fierce, but the drawings, “though exacting, are also playful.” One depicts “The Battle of Fruits and Vegetables.” Others show anthropomorphic animals and illustrate military figures.

There are short stories, like “The Fairies of the Mountain,” which “tells the tale of Polytax and Short Shanks, whose wings have been cut off by a ‘naughty fairy.’” Imagination and creativity clearly had a place in the Darwin home. The man himself, Maria Popova notes, felt significant ambivalence about fatherhood. “Children are one’s greatest happiness,” he once wrote, “but often & often a still greater misery. A man of science ought to have none.”

It was an attitude born of grief, but one, it seems, that did not breed aloofness. The Darwin kids “were used as volunteers,” says Kohn, “to collect butterflies, insects, and moths, and to make observations on plants in the fields around town.” Francis followed his father’s path and was the only Darwin to co-author a book with his father. Darwin’s daughter Henrietta became his editor, and he relied on her, he wrote, for “deep criticism” and “corrections of style.”

Despite his early fears for their genetic fitness, Darwin’s professional life became intimately bound to the successes of his children. The Darwin Manuscripts Project, which aims to digitize and make public around 90,000 pages from the Cambridge University Library’s Darwin collection will have a profound effect on how historians of science understand his impact. “The scope of the enterprise, of what we call evolutionary biology,” says Kohn, “is defined in these papers. He’s got his foot in the twentieth century.”

The archive also shows the development of Darwin’s equally important legacy as a parent who inspired a boundless scientific curiosity in his kids. See many more of the digitized Darwin children’s drawings at The Marginalian.