The reward of inventing a new field is having a slim bibliography.
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Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in June, 2015.
The Citigroup Center in Midtown Manhattan is also known by its address, 601 Lexington Avenue, at which it’s been standing for 47 years, longer than the median New Yorker has been alive. Though still a fairly handsome building, in a seventies-corporate sort of way, it now pops out only mildly on the skyline. At street level, though, the building continues to turn heads, placed as it is on a series of stilt-looking columns placed not at the corners, but in the middle of the walls. A visitor with no knowledge of structural engineering passing the Citigroup Center for the first time may wonder why it doesn’t fall down — which, for a few months in 1978, was a genuinely serious concern.
This story, told with a special explanatory vividness in the new Veritasium video above, usually begins with a phone call. An unidentified architecture student got ahold of William LeMessurier, the structural engineer of the Citicorp Center, as it was then known, to relay concerns he’d heard a professor express about the still-new skyscraper’s ability to withstand “quartering winds,” which blow diagonally at its corners. LeMessurier took the time to walk the student through the elements of his then-groundbreaking lightweight design, which included chevron-shaped braces that directed tension loads down to the columns and a 400-ton concrete tuned mass damper (or “great block of cheese,” as it got to be called) meant to counteract oscillation movements.
LeMessurier was a proud professional, but his professionalism outweighed his pride. When he went back to check the Citicorp Center’s plans, he received an unpleasant surprise: the construction company had swapped out the welded joints in those chevron braces for cheaper bolted ones. His office had approved the change, which made sense at the time, and had also taken into account only perpendicular winds, not quartering winds, as was then standard industry practice. Performing the relevant calculations himself, he determined that the whole tower could be brought down — and much in the surrounding area destroyed with it — by the kind of winds that have a one-in-sixteen chance of blowing in any given year.
It didn’t take LeMessurier long to realize that he had no choice but to reveal what he’d discovered to Citicorp, whose leadership cooperated with the accelerated, semi-clandestine project of shoring up their gleaming emblem’s structural joints by night. The work could hardly fail to draw the attention of the New York press, of course, but it received scant coverage thanks to an impeccably timed newspaper strike, and on its completion made the skyscraper perhaps the safest in the city. In fact, the story of the Citicorp Center disaster that wasn’t only came out publicly in a 1995 New Yorker piece by Joseph Morgenstern, which made LeMessurier a kind of hero among structural engineers. But it was the students who’d identified the building’s faults, not just one but two of whom came forward thereafter, who personified the life-saving power of asking the right questions.
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.
It can be tempting to view the box office’s domination by visual-effects-laden Hollywood spectacle as a recent phenomenon. And indeed, there have been periods during which that wasn’t the case: the “New Hollywood” that began in the late nineteen sixties, for instance, when the old studio system handed the reins to inventive young guns like Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorsese. But lest we forget, that movement met its end in the face of competition from late-1970s blockbusters like Jaws and Star Wars, a new kind of blockbuster that signaled a return to the simple thrills of silent cinema.
Even a century ago, many moviegoers expected two experiences above all: to be wowed, and to be made to laugh. No wonder that era saw visual comedians like Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, and Charlie Chaplin become not just the most famous actors in the world, but some of the most famous human beings in the world.
Staying on top required not just serious performative skill, but also equally serious technical ingenuity, as explained in the new Lost in Time video above. It breaks down just how Lloyd, Keaton, and Chaplin pulled off some of their career-defining stunts on film, putting the actual clips alongside CGI reconstructions of the sets as they would have looked during shooting.
When Lloyd hangs from the arms of a clock high above downtown Los Angeles in Safety Last! (1923), he’s really hanging high above downtown Los Angeles — albeit on a set constructed atop a building, shot from a carefully chosen angle. When the entire façade of a house falls around Keaton in Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), leaving him standing unharmed in a window frame, the façade actually fell around him — in a precisely choreographed manner, but with only a couple of inches of clearance on each side. When a blindfolded Chaplin skates perilously close to a multistory drop in Modern Times (1936), he’s perfectly safe, the edge of the floor being nothing more than a matte painting: one of those analog technologies of movie magic whose obsolescence is still bemoaned by classic-film enthusiasts, from whom CGI, no matter how expensive, never quite thrills or amuses in the same way.
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.
On Tuesday, the cardinals locked themselves into the Sistine Chapel, officially beginning the conclave to elect the 267th pope. First formalized by Pope Gregory X in 1274, the conclave (a word derived from the Latin words cum clave, meaning “with a key”) follows a highly scripted process honed over the past 800 years. How the conclave works, and how it came into being—all of that gets covered in the Religion for Breakfast video above. It’s hosted by the religious studies scholar Dr. Andrew M. Henry.
Below, you can also delve into the more recent history of papal elections. Created by Useful Charts, this video covers every papal conclave since 1958 and includes a prediction for who the next pope will be once the white smoke rises. Who is the next likely pontiff? No spoilers here. You’ll have to watch the video to find out.
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Today, 133 cardinals from around the world enter the conclave to determine the next pope, during which they’ll cast their votes in the Sistine Chapel. Despite being one of the most famous tourist attractions in Europe, the Sistine Chapel still serves as a venue for such important official functions, just as it has since its completion in 1481. When its namesake Pope Sixtus IV commissioned it, he also ordered its walls covered in frescoes by some of the finest artists of that period of the Renaissance, including Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, and Cosimo Rosselli. He also made the unusual choice of having the cross-vault ceiling covered by a blue-and-gold painting of the night sky, ably executed by Piermatteo Lauro de’ Manfredi da Amelia.
No longer do the cardinals vote for their next leader under the stars, nor have they for about half a millennium. Even if you’ve never set foot in the Sistine Chapel, you surely know it as the building whose ceiling was painted by Michelangelo, lying flat on a scaffold all the while (a pleasing but highly doubtful image in the collective cultural memory).
In fact, that master of Renaissance masters didn’t touch his brush to the place until 1508. He’d been brought in by a later pope, Julius II, after having first resisted the commission, insisting that he was a sculptor first, not a painter. Fortunately for Renaissance art enthusiasts, not only did Julius II prevail upon Michelangelo, so, nearly thirty years later, did Paul III, who had him paint over the altar the work that turned out to be the Last Judgment.
In the video at the top of the post, history-and-architecture YouTuber Manuel Bravo (previously featured here on Open Culture for his explanations of historic places like Venice, Pompeii, the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, and St. Peter’s Basilica, which was also touched by the hand of Michelangelo) narrates a 3D virtual tour of the Sistine Chapel. That format makes it possible to see not only its numerous works of Biblical art, by Michelangelo and a host of other painters besides, from every possible angle, but also the building itself just as it would have looked in eras past, even before Michelangelo made his contribution. The more you understand each individual element, the better you can appreciate this “veritable Divina Commedia of the Renaissance,” as Bravo calls it, when next you can see it in person. That, of course, will only be after the conclave finishes up: in a few hours, or days, or weeks, or maybe — a phenomenon not unexampled in the history of the church — a few years.
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.
Several years back, Colin Marshall highlighted George Orwell’s essay, “A Nice Cup of Tea,” which first ran in the Evening Standard on January 12, 1946. In that article, Orwell weighed in on a subject the English take seriously–how to make the perfect cup of tea. (According to Orwell, “tea is one of the mainstays of civilization.”) And he proceeded to offer 11 rules for making that perfect cup. Above, Luís Sá condenses Orwell’s suggestions into a short animation, made with kinetic typography. Below, you can read the first three of Orwell’s 11 rules, and find the remaining eight here.
First of all, one should use Indian or Ceylonese tea. China tea has virtues which are not to be despised nowadays — it is economical, and one can drink it without milk — but there is not much stimulation in it.…
Secondly, tea should be made in small quantities — that is, in a teapot.… The teapot should be made of china or earthenware. Silver or Britanniaware teapots produce inferior tea and enamel pots are worse.…
Thirdly, the pot should be warmed beforehand. This is better done by placing it on the hob than by the usual method of swilling it out with hot water.
Enjoy!
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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.
A few years ago, Forbes published author Roberta Chinsky Matuson’s sensible advice to businesspeople seeking to shoot up that golden ladder. These lawful tips espoused such familiar virtues as hard work and community involvement, and as such, were easily adaptable to the rabble—artists, teachers, anyone in the service industry or non-profit sector…
It must pain her that so many billionaires have been behaving so badly of late. Let’s hope so, anyway.
While there’s nothing inherently wrong with aspiring to amass lots of money, the next generation of billionaires is playing fast and loose with their souls if their primary role models are the ones dominating today’s headlines.
Given the peripatetic lifestyle of these migratory workers, it was up to the individual to hold himself or herself to this knightly standard. Hoboes prided themselves on their self-reliance and honesty, as well as their compassion for their fellow humans.
The environment and the most vulnerable members of our society stand to benefit if tomorrow’s billionaires take it to heart.
The Hobo Ethical Code
1. Decide your own life; don’t let another person run or rule you.
2. When in town, always respect the local law and officials, and try to be a gentleman at all times.
3. Don’t take advantage of someone who is in a vulnerable situation, locals or other hobos.
4. Always try to find work, even if temporary, and always seek out jobs nobody wants. By doing so you not only help a business along, but ensure employment should you return to that town again.
5. When no employment is available, make your own work by using your added talents at crafts.
6. Do not allow yourself to become a stupid drunk and set a bad example for locals’ treatment of other hobos.
7. When jungling in town, respect handouts, do not wear them out, another hobo will be coming along who will need them as badly, if not worse than you.
8. Always respect nature, do not leave garbage where you are jungling.
9. If in a community jungle, always pitch in and help.
10. Try to stay clean, and boil up wherever possible.
11. When traveling, ride your train respectfully, take no personal chances, cause no problems with the operating crew or host railroad, act like an extra crew member.
12. Do not cause problems in a train yard, another hobo will be coming along who will need passage through that yard.
13. Do not allow other hobos to molest children; expose all molesters to authorities…they are the worst garbage to infest any society.
14. Help all runaway children, and try to induce them to return home.
15. Help your fellow hobos whenever and wherever needed, you may need their help someday.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.
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.
You may believe that you’ve had a close enough view of Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. You may have gone to The Hague and seen the painting in person at the Mauritshuis. You may have zoomed into the ten billion-pixel scan we featured here on Open Culture in 2021. But if you haven’t spent time with the new 108 billion-pixel scan, can you really claim to have seen Girl with a Pearl Earring at all?
At that 108-gigapixel resolution, notes Jason Kottke, “each pixel is 1.3 microns in size — 1000 microns is 1 millimeter.” You can learn more about the technology behind the project in this making-of video produced by Hirox Europe, the local branch of the Japanese digital microscope company responsible for both the ten billion-pixel scan and this 108 billion-pixel one, which necessitated 88 hours of non-stop scanning this relatively small canvas of 15 inches by 17.5 inches, a process that resulted in 41,000 3D images.
Yes, 3D images: though Girl with a Pearl Earring, known as “the Mona Lisa of the North,” may be known far and wide in flat representations on pages, screens, posters, and T‑shirts, it is, after all, a work of oil on canvas.
Vermeer achieved his ultra-realistic effects not just by putting the right colors in the right places, but applying them at the right thicknesses and with the right textures — all of which have been replicated in a “mega-sized” physical 3D print, 100 times larger than the original work, commissioned by the Mauritshuis for its Who’s that Girl? exhibition.
You can perform your own topographical examination of sections of the painting — the eyes, the lips, a fold of the turban, the earring, and even the reflection on the earring — by clicking the “3D” button at the bottom of the scan’s viewing interface. A look this close reveals much about how Vermeer created this world-famous image, as well as how it’s weathered the past 360 years. It does not reveal, of course, the answers to such long-standing mysteries as the identity of the subject or the motivations behind her striking presentation. Whether or not the girl with the pearl earring even existed, we can, at this point, be sure of one thing: she must feel seen. Enter the new 108 billion-pixel scan here.
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.
When inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville sang a nursery rhyme into his phonoautogram in 1860, he had no plans to ever play back this recording. A precursor to the wax cylinder, the phonoautogram took inputs for the study of sound waves, but could not be turned into an output device. How amazing then, that 150 or so years later, we can hear the voice of Scott in what is now considered the first ever recording of human sound.
What you will hear in the above video are the various stages of reconstructing and reverse engineering the voice that sang on that April day in 1860, until, like wiping away decades of dirt and soot, the original art is revealed.
Scott had looked to the invention of photography and wondered if something similar could be done with sound waves, focused as he was on improving stenography. And so the phonoautogram took in sound vibrations through a diaphragm, which moved a stylus against a rotating cylinder covered in lampblack. What was left was a wiggly line in a concentric circle.
But how to play them back? That was the problem. Scott’s invention never turned a profit and he went back to bookselling. The invention and some of the paper cylinders went into museums.
In 2008, American audio historians discovered the scribbles and turned to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a software called IRENE. The software was designed to extract sounds from wax cylinders without touching the delicate surfaces, and the first pass revealed what they thought at first was a young woman or child singing “Au Clair de la lune,” the French nursery rhyme (not the Debussy piano work).
However, a further examination of Scott’s notes revealed that the recording was at a much slower speed, and it was a man—most probably Scott—singing the lullaby.
The video shows the stages that brought Scott back to life: Denoising a lot of extraneous sound; stretching the recording back to natural time; “tuning and quantizing”–correcting for imperfections in the human-turned cylinder; cleaning up harmonics; and finally adding further harmonics, reverb and a stereo effect.
The result is less an unrecognizable ghost signal and more a touching sound of humanity, desiring somehow to have their voice live on.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2019.
Image via Hereford Cathedral and Hereford Mappa Mundi Trust
At this point, every aspect of William Shakespeare’s life has produced more speculation than any of us could digest in a lifetime. That goes for his professional life, of course, but also his even more scantily documented personal life. As far as his marriage is concerned, the known facts are these: on November 27th, 1582 a marriage license was issued in Worcester to the 18-year-old William Shakespeare and the approximately 26-year-old Anne Hathaway. Six months later came the first of their three children, Susanna. For most of his professional life, William lived in London, while Anne — willed only her husband’s “second-best bed” — remained in his hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon.
According to one common interpretation, the Shakespeares’ was a shotgun wedding avant la lettre, motivated less by romance than expediency. That would certainly explain their apparent choice to live apart, though William’s career would probably have brought him to London anyway, and without a good reason to be in the city, it wasn’t a bad idea to keep the kids out of plague range. (As for his best bed, it would customarily have been reserved for guests.) But according to a new interpretation of an old document by the University of Bristol professor Matthew Steggle, the couple could not only have remained in communication, but also lived together in the capital for a time.
“Hereford Cathedral Library holds a fragmentary seventeenth-century letter addressed to a ‘Mrs Shakspaire,’ concerning her husband’s dealings with a fatherless apprentice,” writes Steggle in his research paper recently published in the journal Shakespeare. “Of the Shakespeares recorded in London, William Shakespeare is the only viable candidate to fit with the letter’s details.” In Steggle’s analysis, it “paints a picture of William and Anne Shakespeare together in London, and living, perhaps around 1599–1603, in Trinity Lane. It further suggests an Anne Shakespeare who is not absent from her husband’s London life, but present and engaged in his financial and social networks.”
The New York Times’ Ephrat Livni quotes Steggle as saying that “this letter, if it belongs to them, offers a glimpse of the Shakespeares together in London, both involved in social networks and business matters, and, on the occasion of this request, presenting a united front against importunate requests to help poor orphans.” This, Livni adds, would “lend some heft to feminist readings of Shakespeare’s life,” as well as to the pop-culture trend of “rethinking the marriage and Hathaway’s role in it.” Each era thus continues to create the Shakespeare for whom it feels the need — and the Mrs. Shakespeare as well.
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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