At the 1910 World’s Exhibition in Brussels, Ludwig Hupfeld unveiled the Phonoliszt-Violina, an instrument once dubbed “the eighth wonder of the world.” A leading maker of automated instruments in Germany, Hupfeld built a company that produced everything from phonola push-up players to player pianos. In 1907 he created his most famous invention, the Phonoliszt-Violina. It featured three vertically mounted violins, each with a single active string, played by a rotating bow of 1,300 horsehairs. Meanwhile, pneumatic bellows pressed the strings according to perforated rolls. And a player piano could accompany the violins. Sold in upright home and commercial models, the Phonoliszt-Violina entertained patrons of upscale hotels, restaurants, and cafes, before gradually fading into obsolescence. The Wintergatan video above, along with the WelteMax video below, will give you a nice introduction to one of the most complex music players ever made.
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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.
“Early cookbooks were fit for kings,” writes Henry Notaker at The Atlantic. “The oldest published recipe collections” in the 15th and 16th centuries in Western Europe “emanated from the palaces of monarchs, princes, and grandseñores.” Cookbooks were more than recipe collections—they were guides to court etiquette and sumptuous records of luxurious living. In ancient Rome, cookbooks functioned similarly, as the extravagant fourth century Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome demonstrates.
Written by Apicius, “Europe’s oldest [cookbook] and Rome’s only one in existence today”—as its first English translator described it—offers “a better way of knowing old Rome and antique private life.” It also offers keen insight into the development of heavily flavored dishes before the age of refrigeration. Apicius recommends that “cooks who needed to prepare birds with a ‘goatish smell’ should bathe them in a mixture of pepper, lovage, thyme, dry mint, sage, dates, honey, vinegar, broth, oil and mustard,” Melanie Radzicki McManus notes at How Stuff Works.
Early cookbooks communicated in “a folksy, imprecise manner until the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s,” when standard (or metric) measurement became de rigueur. The first cookbook by an American, Amelia Simmons’ 1796 American Cookery, placed British fine dining and lavish “Queen’s Cake” next to “johnny cake, federal pan cake, buckwheat cake, and Indian slapjack,” Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald write at Smithsonian, all recipes symbolizing “the plain, but well-run and bountiful American home.” With this book, “a dialogue on how to balance the sumptuous with the simple in American life had begun.”
Cookbooks are windows into history—markers of class and caste, documents of daily life, and snapshots of regional and cultural identity at particular moments in time. In 1950, the first cookbook written by a fictional lifestyle celebrity, Betty Crocker, debuted. It became “a national best-seller,” McManus writes. “It even sold more copies that year than the Bible.” The image of the perfect Stepford housewife may have been bigger than Jesus in the 50s, but Crocker’s career was decades in the making. She debuted in 1921, the year of publication for another, more humble recipe book: the Pilgrim Evangelical Lutheran Church Ladies’ Aid Society of Chicago’s Pilgrim Cook Book.
As Ayun Halliday noted in an earlier post, this charming collection features recipes for “Blitz Torte, Cough Syrup, and Sauerkraut Candy,” and it’s only one of thousands of such examples at the Internet Archive’s Cookbook and Home Economics Collection, drawn from digitized special collections at UCLA, Berkeley, and the Prelinger Library. When we last checked in, the collection featured 3,000 cookbooks. It has grown since 2016 to a library of 12,700 vintage examples of homespun Americana, fine dining, and mass marketing.
Laugh at gag-inducing recipes of old; cringe at the pious advice given to women ostensibly anxious to please their husbands; and marvel at how various international and regional cuisines have been represented to unsuspecting American home cooks. (It’s hard to say whether the cover or the contents of a Chinese Cook Book in Plain English from 1917 seem more offensive.) Cookbooks of recipes from the American South are popular, as are covers featuring stereotypical “mammy” characters. A more respectful international example, 1952’s Luchow’s German Cookbook gives us “the story and the favorite dishes of America’s most famous German restaurant.”
There are guides to mushrooms and “commoner fungi, with special emphasis on the edible varieties”; collections of “things mother used to make” and, most practically, a cookbook for leftovers. And there is every other sort of cookbook and home ec manual you could imagine. Thearchive is stuffed with helpful hints, rare ingredients, unexpected regional cookeries, and millions of minute details about the habits of these books’ first hungry readers.
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Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2020.
“May you live in interesting times,” goes the apocryphal but nevertheless much-invoked “Chinese curse.” Egon Schiele, born in the Austria-Hungary of 1890, certainly did live in interesting times, and his work, as featured in the new Great Art Explained video above, can look like the creations of a cursed man. That’s especially true of those of his many self-portraits that, as host James Payne puts it, render his own body “more emaciated than it actually was, radically distorted and twisted, sometimes faceless or limbless, sometimes in abject terror.” Here Schiele worked at “an intersection of suffering and sex, as if he is disgusted by his own body.”
Such a preoccupation, as Payne suggests, may not seem completely unreasonable in a man who witnessed his own father’s death from syphilis — caught from a prostitute, on the night of his wedding to Schiele’s mother — when he was still in adolescence.
But what tends to occupy most discussions of Schiele’s art is less his familial or psychological background than his line: the “thin line between beauty and suffering” that clearly obsessed him, yes, but also the line created by the hand with which he drew and painted. His art remains immediately recognizable today because “his line has a particular rhythm: angular, tense, and economically placed. It’s not just a means of describing form; it’s a voice.”
In this voice, Schiele composed not likenesses but “psychological portraits, a search for the self or the ego, a preoccupation of the time.” The figure of Sigmund Freud loomed large over fin-de-siècle Vienna, of course, and into the twentieth century, the city and its civilization were “caught between the old imperial order and modern democratic movements.” A “laboratory for psychoanalysis, radical art, music, and taboo-breaking literature,” Vienna had also given rise to the career of Schiele’s mentor Gustav Klimt. By the time Schiele hit his stride, he could express in his work “not just personal discomfort, but the sickness and fragility of an entire society” — before he fell victim to the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 at just 28 years old, along with his wife and unborn child. In a sense, he was unlucky to live when and where he did. But as his art also reminds us, we don’t merely inhabit our time and place; we’re created by them.
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.
They’re the ones who spur us to study hard, so we can make something of ourselves, in order to better our communities.
They name our babies, choose our clothes, decide what we’re hungry for.
They make and break laws, organize protests, fritter away hours on social media, and give us the green light to binge watch a bunch of dumb shows when we could be reading War and Peace.
They also plant the seeds for Fitzcarraldo-like creative endeavors that take over our lives and generate little to no income.
We may describe such endeavors as a labor of love, into which we’ve poured our entire heart and soul, but think for a second.
Who’s really responsible here?
The heart, that muscular fist-sized Valentine, content to just pump-pump-pump its way through life, lub-dub, lub-dub, from cradle to grave?
On a lighter note, it also told her to devote nine months to knitting an anatomically correct replica of the human brain.
(Twelve, if you count three months of research before casting on.)
How did her brain convince her to embark on this madcap assignment?
Easy. It arranged for her to be in the middle of a more prosaic knitting project, then goosed her into noticing how the ruffles of that project resembled the wrinkles of the cerebral cortex.
Coincidence?
Not likely. Especially when one of the cerebral cortex’s most important duties is decision making.
As she explained in an interview with The Telegraph, brain development is not unlike the growth of a knitted piece:
You can see very naturally how the ‘rippling’ effect of the cerebral cortex emerges from properties that probably have to do with nerve cell growth. In the case of knitting, the effect is created by increasing the number of stitches in each row.
Dr. Norberg—who, yes, has on occasion referred to her project as a labor of love—told Scientific American that such a massive crafty undertaking appealed to her sense of humor because “it seemed so ridiculous and would be an enormously complicated, absurdly ambitious thing to do.”
That’s the point at which many people’s brains would give them permission to stop, but Dr. Norberg and her brain persisted, pushing past the hypothetical, creating colorful individual structures that were eventually sewn into two cuddly hemispheres that can be joined with a zipper.
(She also let slip that her brain—by which she means the knitted one, though the observation certainly holds true for the one in her head—is female, due to its robust corpus callosum, the “tough body” whose millions of fibers promote communication and connection.)
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2019.
Karlheinz Stockhausen appears, among many other cultural figures, on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. His inclusion was more than a trendy gesture toward the European avant-garde; anyone who knows that pathbreaking electronic composer’s work will notice its influence on the album at first listen. Paul McCartney himself went on record with his notion that assuming the alter egos of the title would allow him and his fellow Beatles to branch out both culturally and intellectually in their music, incorporating pastiches of Ravi Shankar, B. B. King, Albert Ayler, the Doors, the Beach Boys, and indeed Stockhausen, whose Gesang der Jünglinge had already inspired “Tomorrow Never Knows” on Revolver.
Literally “Song of the Youths,” Gesang der Jünglinge was an early work for Stockhausen, who composed it in 1954, when he was still a PhD student in communications at the University of Bonn. Inspired by not just his technological interests but also his devout Catholicism, he decided to create a mass for electronic sounds and voices, with the intent to debut it at Cologne Cathedral. (Legend has it that he was rebuffed by religious authorities, who insisted that loudspeakers had no place in a house of worship, but sources disagreed on whether he actually sought their permission in the first place.)
He drew its words from a passage of the Old Testament story of three boys cast into the fire by King Nebuchadnezzar for their refusal to worship a golden idol and kept unharmed by the praise to God they sang amid the flames.
In Stockhausen’s high-tech rendering, the boys are represented by the voice of twelve-year-old Josef Protschka (who would grow up to become an acclaimed vocalist in his own right), and the fire by a collage of electronic sounds. Though the composer’s manipulations, part design and part chance, the human and mechanical halves of the piece become one: Protschka’s vocals break apart and reform into fragments of language never before heard, and the artificially generated tones bend uncannily toward the sound of sung vowels. All this, to say nothing of its playback in five-channel sound in a time when stereo was still a novelty, would have sounded deeply, even disturbingly unfamiliar to the audience at Gesang der Jünglinge’s premiere — and its impact probably hadn’t been much diminished by the time of the 2001 performance above. Stockhousen’s music may have been after the shock of the new, but it also faced the eternal.
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.
Originally built for the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, the organ ended up in Philadelphia’s Wanamaker’s department store in 1911. More than a century later, the organ still resides in the same store. But Macy’s eventually took over Wanamaker’s, and Macy’s now plans to close the store, leaving the fate of the organ unknown. Where will the 28,000-pipe organ find a new home? That’s still TBD, something that’s likely to get resolved in the months to come.
No artist became a Renaissance master through a single piece of work, though now, half a millennium later, that may be how most of us identify them. Leonardo? Painter of the Mona Lisa. Michelangelo? Painter of the Sistine Chapel ceiling (or, perhaps, the sculptor of the most famous David, depending on your medium of choice). Raphael? Painter of The School of Athens, as recently featured here on Open Culture. Raphael painted that masterwork in Vatican City’s Apostolic Palace between the years 1509 and 1511, when he was in his mid-twenties. Understanding how he could have attained that level of skill by that age requires examining his other work, as Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter, does in the new video above.
Specifically, Puschak examines Raphael’s Madonnas, a subject to which he returned over and over again throughout the course of his short but productive career. In what seems to have been his first rendition of Mary and her holy son, Puschak says, “you can see that Raphael has a better sense of three-dimensional bodies and how to make them feel like they’re part of the space that they’re in” than his father, who’d been a well-regarded painter himself, or even than Piero della Francesca, from whom his father learned.
“Yet the painting also suffers from “an awkwardness in the arrangement of the figures,” as well as a lack of “emotion, relationships, or any sense of narrative” — much like “a thousand other Madonnas that came before.”
Yet Raphael was a quick study, a trait reflected in the development of the many Madonnas he painted thereafter. From Leonardo he learned techniques like sfumato, the creation of soft transitions between colors; from Michelangelo, “how to use the human body as an expressive tool.” But what most clearly emerges is the concept contemporary theorist Leon Battista Alberti called historia: a narrative that plays out even within the confines of a static image. In Raphael’s circular, abundantly detailed Alba Madonna of 1511, Puschak sees the infant Jesus “not so much taking as grabbing his future and pulling it closer” as Mary looks on with emotions subtly layered into her face. How, exactly, Raphael honed his instinct for drama is a question for art historians. But would it be too much of a reach to guess that he also learned a thing or two from his time as a stage-set designer?
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 Toronto, 7,000 singers participated in Choir Choir Choir’s tribute to Ozzy Osbourne, all taking part in a giant sing-along of “Paranoid.” The first single on Black Sabbath’s second album (1970), “Paranoid” reached #4 in the UK market and put Sabbath on the map. The song also became an early heavy metal classic. Watch Sabbath perform the song live in 1970 here; or watch them perform it for the very last time on July 5, 2025 here. Then enjoy the Choir Choir Choir tribute above.
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As the founding myth has it, the city of Rome was established by a man named Romulus, one of two orphaned twin brothers raised by a she-wolf on the banks of the Tiber river. The legend of Romulus and Remus, which involves the former’s fratricidal slaying of the latter, lends itself to striking imagery, though it also gives forth more questions than answers. “The Latin for wolf, lupa, also means prostitute,” for example, “so was it actually a prostitute who came to the rescue?” So asks historian Mary Beard in Rome: Empire Without Limit, a four-part series you can watch in its entirety above.
In a sense, the story works either way: the mortal clash of brother against brother makes for a recurring metaphorical theme in the long history of Rome, but so does the irrepressible power of commerce. Crisscrossing the European continent, Great Britain, the Mediterranean, and Africa by car, boat, bicycle, subway train, and above all on foot, Beard uses the traces of the mightiest ancient empire to explain how the whole operation actually worked, and what its day-to-day experience was like for its subjects. When it originally aired in 2016, Empire Without Limit followed up her acclaimed book SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, which covers some of the same themes.
Those who’ve followed Beard’s work in print, on television, or in other media know that her version of Roman history is hardly another succession of emperors and military campaigns. While she does devote time to discussing such signal figures as Julius Caesar (who definitely didn’t say “Et tu, Brute?”), Augustus, Hadrian, and Constantine, she displays equal or greater interest in a four-year-old silver miner in what’s now Spain, say, or an anonymous young woman the shape of whose skull suggests the extent of migration within the empire. And just as worthy of consideration as any particular Roman citizenship is the concept of Roman citizenship itself, which ultimately extended across the vastest empire the world had ever known.
All roads lead to Rome, as the saying goes, and in the heyday of the Roman empire, as Beard points out, it was actually true. The ancient Romans were the first to build what she calls “a joined-up world,” where getting on a path in Rome and following it could get you all the way to places like Spain or Greece. (And also unprecedentedly, you could take a glance at mile markers along that road and immediately “place yourself in the world.”) Roman dominance may have ended long ago, but the parts of the world have continued to join up in much the same way since, and indeed, the broad Roman worldview survives. As Beard puts it, “there’s a little bit of the Romans in the head of every one of us” — especially those of us who think about their empire every day.
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.
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