Jane Goodall, the revered conservationist, passed away today at age 91. In her honor, we’re featuring above a National Geographic documentary called Jane. Directed by Brett Morgen, the film draws “from over 100 hours of never-before-seen footage that has been tucked away in the National Geographic archives for over 50 years.” The documentary offers an intimate portrait of Goodall and her chimpanzee research that “challenged the male-dominated scientific consensus of her time and revolutionized our understanding of the natural world.” It’s set to an orchestral score by composer Philip Glass.
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Difficult as it may be to remember now, there was a time when Meryl Streep was not yet synonymous with silver-screen stardom — a time, in fact, when she had yet to appear on the silver screen at all. Half a century ago, she was just another young stage actress in New York, albeit one rapidly ascending the rungs of theatrical prestige, doing three Shakespeare plays and then starring in Weill, Hauptmann, and Brecht’s Happy End on Broadway. The Deer Hunter, Kramer vs. Kramer, Out of Africa, Postcards from the Edge, The Bridges of Madison County: all this lay in her future in 1976, the year of her feature debut.
Erikson conceived of each age of man as a struggle for resolution between two opposing forces: in infancy, for example, trust versus mistrust; in adolescence, identity versus role confusion; and so on.
The young Meryl Streep, or rather her voice, appears in the sixth stage, early adulthood, whose theme is love. She acts out that age’s contest of intimacy and isolation with Charles Levin, another up-and-comer who would go on to achieve wide recognition on television shows like Alice, Hill Street Blues, and (just once, but memorably) Seinfeld. In character as a young couple unsteadily feeling their way through their relationship, the two engage in a remarkably naturalistic conversation, all animated in a seventies watercolor style in the vision of director John Hubley. A prolific animator who’d worked on Disney’s Fantasia, Hubley was known as the creator of Mr. Magoo: a man who provided us all with an example of how to navigate late adulthood’s path between ego integrity and despair, however myopically.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
We’ve long used the French word milieu in English, but not with quite the same range of meanings it has back in France. For example, French society (and especially the members of its older generations) explicitly recognizes the value of a milieu in the sense of the collected friends, acquaintances, and relations with whom one has regular and frequent contact. Keeping a good milieu is a key task for living a good life. Robert Waldinger doesn’t use the word in the new hour-long Big Think video above, but then, he comes from a different cultural background: he’s American, for one, a Harvard psychiatrist, and he also happens to be a Zen Buddhist priest. But he would surely agree wholeheartedly about the importance of the milieu to human happiness.
As the fourth director of the long-term Harvard Study of Adult Development, which has been keeping an eye on the well-being of its subjects for more than 85 years now, Waldinger knows something about happiness. Early in the video, he cites findings that half of it is “a kind of biological set point,” 10 percent is “based on our current life circumstances,” and the remaining 40 percent is under our control. The single most important factor in the variability of our happiness, he explains, is our relationships. To take the measure of that aspect of our own lives, we should ask ourselves these questions: “Do I have enough connection in my life?” “Do I have relationships that are warm and supportive?” “What am I getting from relationships?”
There are, of course, good relationships and bad relationships, those that fill you with energy and those that drain you of energy. To a great extent, Waldinger says, good relationships can be cultivated, and even bad relationships can be modified or approached in an advantageous way. What makes learning to do so important is that a lack of relationships — that is, loneliness — can take as much of a physical toll as obesity or heavy smoking. Alas, since television made its way into the home after the Second World War, we’ve lived with a rapidly and ceaselessly multiplying array of forces that make it difficult to form and maintain relationships; at this point, we’re so “constantly distracted by our wonderful screens” that we have trouble paying attention to even the people we think we love. This is where Zen comes in.
Attention, as one of Waldinger’s own teachers in that tradition put it, is “the most basic form of love,” and meditation has always been a reliable way to cultivate it. Such a practice reveals our own minds to be “messy and chaotic,” and from that realization, it’s not far to the understanding that “everybody’s minds are messy and chaotic.” Attaining a clear view of our own questionable impulses and irritating deficiencies helps us to accept those same qualities in others. “We can sometimes imagine that other people have it all figured out, and we’re the only one who has ups and downs in our life,” says Waldinger, but the truth is that “everybody has ups and downs. We never figure it out, ultimately.” The fleeting nature of satisfaction constitutes just one facet of the impermanence Zen requires us to accept. Nothing lasts forever: certainly not our lives, nor those of the members of our milieu, so if we want to enjoy them, we’d better start paying attention to them while we still can.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
These days, we hear much said on social media — surely too much — in favor of the “hustle culture” and the “grind mindset” (or, abbreviated for maximum efficiency, the “grindset”). Dedication to your work is to be admired, provided that the work itself is of value, but the more of a day’s hours you devote to it, the likelier returns are to diminish. Oliver Burkeman, a popular writer on productivity and time management, has made this point in a variety of ways, usually returning to the same finding: look at the work habits of a range of luminaries including Charles Darwin, Henri Poincaré, Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, J.G. Ballard, Ingmar Bergman, Alice Munro, John le Carré, and Adam Smith, and you’ll find that they all put in about three or four hours of concentrated effort per day.
“You almost certainly can’t consistently do the kind of work that demands serious mental focus for more than about three or four hours a day,” Burkeman writes on his site. If you do work of that kind, it would behoove you to “just focus on protecting four hours — and don’t worry if the rest of the day is characterized by the usual scattered chaos.”
Doing so entails making an “internal psychological move: to give up demanding more of yourself than three or four hours of daily high-quality mental work.” You’ll also finally have to “abandon the delusion that if you just managed to squeeze in a bit more work, you’d finally reach the commanding status of feeling ‘in control’ and ‘on top of everything’ at last.”
The “the truly valuable skill here,” Burkeman continues, “isn’t the capacity to push yourself harder, but to stop and recuperate despite the discomfort of knowing that work remains unfinished, emails unanswered, other people’s demands unfulfilled.” This is easier said than done, of course, but any attempt to implement what Burkeman calls the “three-to-four-hour rule” must begin with a bit of trial and error: about when best in the day to schedule those hours, but also about how best to eliminate distractions during those hours. Underneath all this lies the need to accept life’s finitude, as Burkeman explains in the interview at the top of the post, with its implication that we can only get so much done in what he often describes as our allotted 4,000 weeks — minus however many thousand we’ve already lived so far.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
In 2012, archaeologists discovered in Southern Turkey a well-preserved mosaic featuring a skeleton savoring a loaf of bread and a pitcher of wine, surrounded by the Greek words “Be cheerful and live your life.” Dating back to the 3rd century BCE, the mosaic likely adorned the dining room of a wealthy villa in the ancient Greco-Roman city of Antioch. It’s a kind of memento mori, a reminder that life is short and you should enjoy it while you can. Or so that’s how many have interpreted the message of the mosaic.
If you would like to delve deeper, it’s worth reading the analysis and background information provided by The History Blog. Meanwhile, this separate post on Tumblr highlights other translations and interpretations of the mosaic’s key inscription.
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A hundred years ago, Mobile X‑Ray Units were a brand new innovation, and a godsend for soldiers wounded on the front in WW1. Prior to the advent of this technology, field surgeons racing to save lives operated blindly, often causing even more injury as they groped for bullets and shrapnel whose precise locations remained a mystery.
Marie Curie was just setting up shop at Paris’ Radium Institute, a world center for the study of radioactivity, when war broke out. Many of her researchers left to fight, while Curie personally delivered France’s sole sample of radium by train to the temporarily relocated seat of government in Bordeaux.
“I am resolved to put all my strength at the service of my adopted country, since I cannot do anything for my unfortunate native country just now…,” Curie, a Pole by birth, wrote to her lover, physicist Paul Langevin on New Year’s Day, 1915.
To that end, she envisioned a fleet of vehicles that could bring X‑ray equipment much closer to the battlefield, shifting their coordinates as necessary.
Rather than leaving the execution of this brilliant plan to others, Curie sprang into action.
She studied anatomy and learned how to operate the equipment so she would be able to read X‑ray films like a medical professional.
She learned how to drive and fix cars.
She used her connections to solicit donations of vehicles, portable electric generators, and the necessary equipment, kicking in generously herself. (When she got the French National Bank to accept her gold Nobel Prize medals on behalf of the war effort, she spent the bulk of her prize purse on war bonds.)
She was hampered only by backwards-thinking bureaucrats whose feathers ruffled at the prospect of female technicians and drivers, no doubt forgetting that most of France’s able-bodied men were otherwise engaged.
Curie, no stranger to sexism, refused to bend to their will, delivering equipment to the front line and X‑raying wounded soldiers, assisted by her 17-year-old daughter, Irène, who like her mother, took care to keep her emotions in check while working with maimed and distressed patients.
“In less than two years,” writes Amanda Davis at The Institute, “the number of units had grown substantially, and the Curies had set up a training program at the Radium Institute to teach other women to operate the equipment.” Eventually, they recruited about 150 women, training them to man the Little Curies, as the mobile radiography units came to be known.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.
Despite developing in Asia, as the Chinese form of a religion originally brought over from India and later refined in Japan, Zen Buddhism has long appealed to Westerners as well. Some of that owes to the spare, elegant aesthetics with which popular culture associates it, and more to the promise it holds out: freedom from stress, anxiety, and indeed suffering of all kinds. In theory, the Zen practitioner attains that freedom not through mastering a body of knowledge or ascending a hierarchy, but through direct experience of reality, unmediated by thoughts, unwarped by desires, and undivided by the classification schemes that separate one thing from another. That’s easier said than done, of course, and for some, not even a lifetime of meditation does the trick.
In the interview clip above, Rinzai zen monk Yodo Kono explains how he arrived in the world of Zen. Having come from a line of monks, he inherited the role after the deaths of his grandfather and his father. Already in his late twenties, he’d been working as a physics teacher, an occupation that — however fashionable the supposed concordances between advanced physical and Buddhist truths — hardly prepared him for the rigors of the temple.
“I entered a role completely opposite to logic,” he remembers, “a world where logic doesn’t exist.” Think of the Zen kōans we’ve all heard, which demand seemingly impossible answers about the sound of one hand clapping, or the appearance of your face before your parents were born.
Advised by his master to stop trying to gain knowledge, skills, and understanding, the frustrated Yodo Kono began to realize that “Zen is everything,” the key question being “how to live without worries within Zen.” That can’t be learned from any amount of study, but experience alone. Only directly can one feel how we create our own suffering in our minds, and also that we can’t help but do so. This leaves us no choice but to relinquish our notions of control over reality. In daily life, he explains in the clip just above (also from the documentary Freedom From Suffering, about the varieties of Buddhism), one must be able to move freely between “the undivided Zen world and the divided world,” the latter being where nearly all of us already spend our days: not without our pleasures, of course, but also not without wondering, every so often, if we can ever know permanent satisfaction.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
As a New York City subway rider, I am constantly exposed to public health posters. More often than not these feature a photo of a wholesome-looking teen whose sober expression is meant to convey hindsight regret at having taken up drugs, dropped out of school, or forgone condoms. They’re well-intended, but boring. I can’t imagine I’d feel differently were I a member of the target demographic. The Chelsea Mini Storage ads’ saucy regional humor is far more entertaining, as is the train wreck design approach favored by the ubiquitous Dr. Jonathan Zizmor.
Public health posters were able to convey their designated horrors far more memorably before photos became the graphical norm. Take Salvador Dalí’s sketch (below) and final contribution (top) to the WWII-era anti-venereal disease campaign.
Which image would cause you to steer clear of the red light district, were you a young soldier on the make?
A portrait of a glum fellow soldier (“If I’d only known then…”)?
Or a grinning green death’s head, whose choppers double as the frankly exposed thighs of two faceless, loose-breasted ladies?
Created in 1941, Dalí’s nightmare vision eschewed the sort of manly, militaristic slogan that retroactively ramps up the kitsch value of its ilk. Its message is clear enough without:
Stick it in—we’ll bite it off!
(Thanks to blogger Rebecca M. Bender for pointing out the composition’s resemblance to the vagina dentata.)
As a feminist, I’m not crazy about depictions of women as pestilential, one-way deathtraps, but I concede that, in this instance, subverting the girlie pin up’s explicitly physical pleasures might well have had the desired effect on horny enlisted men.
A decade later Dalí would collaborate with photographer Philippe Halsman on “In Voluptas Mors,” stacking seven nude models like cheerleaders to form a peacetime skull that’s far less threatening to the male figure in the lower left corner (in this instance, the very dapper Dalí himself).
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.
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