In the playlist above, Gregory Sadler presents a 24-lecture course on “Critical Thinking”–something the world could always use more of. Presented at Fayetteville State University, the course features lectures on topics like Deductive and Inductive Arguments, Fallacies, Rhetorical Devices, Appeals to Authority and much more. The textbook used (and referenced) in the course was Moore and Parker’s Critical Thinking. The individual lectures are as follows:
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In 1958, Hunter S. Thompson applied for a job with the Vancouver Sun. He was fresh out of the Air Force and struggling to make a living in New York City, though from the tone of the letter you wouldn’t know it.
People who are experts in such things say that good cover letters should match the employer’s needs with the applicant’s abilities, should be tailored specifically to the job in question and should show some personality. By those yardsticks, Thompson’s letter to the Vancouver Sun is a model to be followed. He lays out his eagerness to work: “I can work 25 hours a day if necessary, live on any reasonable salary.” Any HR manager would be tickled with lines like that. He succinctly describes his work experience: “most of my experience has been in sports writing, but I can write everything from warmongering propaganda to learned book reviews.” And for any other fault you might find with the letter, it definitely doesn’t lack in personality.
Yet the letter somehow failed to charm his would-be employer; Thompson never moved to Vancouver. Perhaps they were given pause by Thompson’s steady stream of insults directed towards his former editor — “It was as if the Marquis De Sade had suddenly found himself working for Billy Graham” — and towards journalism in general: “It’s a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity.” Or perhaps it was his intentionally off-putting arrogance, “I’d rather offend you now than after I started working for you.” In any case, it’s a hoot to read. More people should write job application letters like this.
Read the full letter below.
Vancouver Sun
TO JACK SCOTT, VANCOUVER SUN
October 1, 1958 57 Perry Street New York City
Sir,
I got a hell of a kick reading the piece Time magazine did this week on The Sun. In addition to wishing you the best of luck, I’d also like to offer my services.
Since I haven’t seen a copy of the “new” Sun yet, I’ll have to make this a tentative offer. I stepped into a dung-hole the last time I took a job with a paper I didn’t know anything about (see enclosed clippings) and I’m not quite ready to go charging up another blind alley.
By the time you get this letter, I’ll have gotten hold of some of the recent issues of The Sun. Unless it looks totally worthless, I’ll let my offer stand. And don’t think that my arrogance is unintentional: it’s just that I’d rather offend you now than after I started working for you.
I didn’t make myself clear to the last man I worked for until after I took the job. It was as if the Marquis de Sade had suddenly found himself working for Billy Graham. The man despised me, of course, and I had nothing but contempt for him and everything he stood for. If you asked him, he’d tell you that I’m “not very likable, (that I) hate people, (that I) just want to be left alone, and (that I) feel too superior to mingle with the average person.” (That’s a direct quote from a memo he sent to the publisher.)
Nothing beats having good references.
Of course if you asked some of the other people I’ve worked for, you’d get a different set of answers. If you’re interested enough to answer this letter, I’ll be glad to furnish you with a list of references — including the lad I work for now.
The enclosed clippings should give you a rough idea of who I am. It’s a year old, however, and I’ve changed a bit since it was written. I’ve taken some writing courses from Columbia in my spare time, learned a hell of a lot about the newspaper business, and developed a healthy contempt for journalism as a profession.
As far as I’m concerned, it’s a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity. If this is what you’re trying to get The Sun away from, then I think I’d like to work for you.
Most of my experience has been in sports writing, but I can write everything from warmongering propaganda to learned book reviews.
I can work 25 hours a day if necessary, live on any reasonable salary, and don’t give a black damn for job security, office politics, or adverse public relations.
I would rather be on the dole than work for a paper I was ashamed of.
It’s a long way from here to British Columbia, but I think I’d enjoy the trip.
If you think you can use me, drop me a line.
If not, good luck anyway.
Sincerely,
Hunter S. Thompson
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in April 2015.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
Humanity will remember the name of James Joyce for generations to come, not least because, as he once wrote about his best-known novel Ulysses, “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.” If Joyce was right, then the author of the mysterious Voynich manuscript (about which you can see an animated introduction here) has set a kind of standard for immortality. Filled with odd, not especially explanatory illustrations and written in a script not seen anywhere else, the early 15th-century text has perplexed scholars for at least 400 or so years of its existence.
But recent years have seen a few claims of having cracked the Voynich manuscript’s code: one effort made use of artificial intelligence, another concludes that the text was written in phonetic Old Turkish, and the latest declares the Voynich manuscript to have been composed in “the only known example of proto-Romance language.” University of Bristol Research Associate Gerard Cheshire, the man behind this new decoding, describes that language as “ancestral to today’s Romance languages including Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, Catalan and Galician. The language used was ubiquitous in the Mediterranean during the Medieval period, but it was seldom written in official or important documents because Latin was the language of royalty, church and government.”
And what, pray tell, is the Voynich manuscript actually about? Cheshire has revealed little about its content thus far, though he has described the text as “compiled by Dominican nuns as a source of reference for Maria of Castile, Queen of Aragon.” Though he has claimed to determine the nature of its unusual language — one without punctuation but with “diphthong, triphthongs, quadriphthongs and even quintiphthongs for the abbreviation of phonetic components” — deciphering its more than 200 pages of content stands as another task altogether. In the meantime, you can read his paper “The Language and Writing System of MS408 (Voynich) Explained,” originally published in the journal Romance Studies.
Although Cheshire’s discovery has produced headlines like the Express’ “Voynich Manuscript SOLVED: World’s Most Mysterious Book Deciphered After 600 Years,” others include Ars Techhnica’s “No, Someone Hasn’t Cracked the Code of the Mysterious Voynich Manuscript.” That article quotes Lisa Fagin Davis, executive director of the Medieval Academy of America (and vocal Voynich-translation skeptic), criticizing the foundation of Cheshire’s claim: “He starts with a theory about what a particular series of glyphs might mean, usually because of the word’s proximity to an image that he believes he can interpret. He then investigates any number of medieval Romance-language dictionaries until he finds a word that seems to suit his theory. Then he argues that because he has found a Romance-language word that fits his hypothesis, his hypothesis must be right.”
Fagin Davis adds that Cheshire’s “ ‘translations’ from what is essentially gibberish, an amalgam of multiple languages, are themselves aspirational rather than being actual translations,” and that “the fundamental underlying argument — that there is such a thing as one ‘proto-Romance language’ — is completely unsubstantiated and at odds with paleolinguistics.” Fagin Davis’ criticism doesn’t even stop there, and if she’s right, Cheshire’s approach will be unlikely to produce a coherent translation of the entire text. And so, at least for the moment, the Voynich manuscript’s life as a mystery continues, keeping busy not just professors but enthusiasts, technologists, Research Associates, and many others besides.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Every artist starts out as a fan, and in general we see the marks of early fandom on their mature work. The best, after all—as figures from Igor Stravinsky to William Faulkner have remarked—steal without compunction, taking what they like from their heroes and making it their own. But what exactly, we might wonder, did Draculaauthor Bram Stoker steal from his literary hero, Walt Whitman? I leave it to you to read the 1897 Gothic novel that spawned innumerable undead franchises and fandoms next to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, the book that most inspired Stoker when it made its British debut in 1868.
First published in 1855, then rewritten over the rest of Whitman’s life, the book of poetry boldly celebrated the same pleasure and sensuality that Stoker’s novel made so dangerous. But Draculawas the work of a 50-year old writer. When Stoker first read Whitman, he was only 22, wide-eyed and romantic, and “grown from a sickly boy into a brawny athlete,” writes Meredith Hindley at the National Endowment for the Humanities magazine.
Whitman—himself a champion of robust masculine health (he once penned a manual called “Manly Health & Training”)—so appealed to the young Irish writer’s deep sensibilities that he wrote the older poet a gushing letter two years later in 1870.
Stoker’s fan letter certainly shows the Whitmanian influence, “a long stream of sentiment cascading through various emotions,” as Brain Pickings’ Maria Popova describes it, including “surging confidence bordering on hubris, delicate self-doubt, absolute artist-to-artist adoration.” Whitman, flattered and charmed, wrote a reply, but only after four years, during which Stoker sat on his letter, ashamed to mail it. “For four years, it haunted his desk, part muse and part goblin.” When he finally gathered the courage in 1876 to rewrite the emotional letter and put it in the mail, he was rewarded with the kind of praise that must have absolutely thrilled him.
“You did so well to write to me,” Whitman replied, “so unconventionally, so fresh, so manly, and affectionately too.” Thus began a literary friendship that lasted until Whitman’s death in 1892 and seems to have been as welcome to Whitman as to his biggest fan. A stroke had nearly incapacitated the poet in 1873 and sapped his health and strength for the last two decades of his life, leaving him, as he wrote, with a physique “entirely shatter’d—doubtless permanently—from paralysis and other ailments.” But “I am up and dress’d,” he added, “and get out every day a little, live here quite lonesome, but hearty, and good spirits.”
One also wonders if Stoker would have received such a warm response if he had mailed his original letter unchanged. The “previously unsent effusion,” notes Popova, “opens with an abrupt directness unguarded even by a form of address.” Put another way, it’s blunt, melodramatic, and overly familiar to the point of rudeness: “If you are the man I take you to be,” he begins, “you will like to get this letter. If you are not I don’t care whether you like it or not and only ask that you put it in to the fire without reading any farther.” Contrast this with the revised communication, which begins with the respectful salutation, “My dear Mr. Whitman,” and continues in relatively formal, though still highly spirited, vein.
Stoker had mellowed and matured, but he never left behind his adoration for Whitman and Leaves of Grass. When he eloquently sums up the effect reading the book and its original 1855 preface had on him—he echoes the feelings of millions of fans throughout the ages who have found a voice that speaks to them from far away of feelings they know intimately but cannot express at home:
Be assured of this Walt Whitman—that a man of less than half your own age, reared a conservative in a conservative country, and who has always heard your name cried down by the great mass of people who mention it, here felt his heat leap towards you across the Atlantic and his soul swelling at the words or rather the thoughts.
Read Stoker’s original and revised letters and Whitman’s brief, touching response at Brain Pickings.
Heads up: Creative Commons has officially launched CC Search, a search engine that indexes over 300 million images from 19 image collections, “including cultural works from museums (the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art), graphic designs and art works (Behance, DeviantArt), photos from Flickr, and an initial set of CC0 3D designs from Thingiverse.” All of the indexed images are in the public domain and released under Creative Commons licenses–meaning the images are generally free to use in a non-commercial setting.
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Cities have long provided a rich environment for photography, at least to photographers not interested exclusively in nature. But only with the advent of the motion picture camera did the subject of cities find a photographic form that truly suited it. Hence the popularity in the 1920s of “city symphony” films, each of which sought to capture and present the real life of a different bustling industrial metropolis. But while city symphonies certainly hold up as works of art, they do make modern-day viewers wonder: what would all these capitals look like if I could gaze backward in time, looking not through the jittery, colorless medium of early motion-picture film, but with my own eyes?
Youtuber Ignacio López-Francos offers a step closer to the answer in the form of these four videos, each of which takes historical footage of a city, then corrects its speed and adds color to make it more lifelike.
At the top of the post we have “a collection of high quality remastered prints from the dawn of film taken in Belle Époque-era Paris, France from 1896–1900.” Shot by the Lumière company (which was founded by Auguste and Louis Lumière, inventors of the projected motion picture), the sights captured by the film include the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, Tuileries Garden, the then-new Eiffel Tower, and the now-soon-to-be-rehabilitated but then-intact Notre Dame cathedral.
The Paris footage was colorized using DeOldify, “a deep learning-based project for colorizing and restoring old images.” So was the footage just above, which shows New York City in 1911 as shot by the Swedish company Svenska Biografteatern and released publicly by the Museum of Modern Art. “Produced only three years before the outbreak of World War I, the everyday life of the city recorded here — street traffic, people going about their business — has a casual, almost pastoral quality that differs from the modernist perspective of later city-symphony films,” say the accompanying notes. “Take note of the surprising and remarkably timeless expression of boredom exhibited by a young girl filmed as she was chauffeured along Broadway in the front seat of a convertible limousine.”
Shot twenty years later, these clips of New York’s Theater District have also undergone the DeOldify treatment, which gets the bright lights (and numerous ballyhooing signs) of the big city a little closer to the stunning quality they must have had on a new arrival in the 1930s. The streets of Havana were seemingly quieter during that same decade, at least if the colorized footage below is to be believed. But then, the history of tourism in Cuba remembers the 1930s as something of a dull stretch after the high-living 1920s that came before, during the United States’ days of Prohibition — let alone the even more daiquiri- and mojito-soaked 1950s that would come later, speaking of eras one dreams of seeing for oneself.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
A quick heads up from Engadget: “Minecraft is celebrating its 10th birthday by making its Classic version easily playable on web browsers. You don’t need to download any files to make it work, and you don’t have to pay a cent for access. Since Classic was only the second phase in the game’s development cycle, its features are pretty limited. You’ll only have 32 blocks to work with, most of which are dyed wool, and it’s strictly creative mode only. But who needs zombies, skeletons and other mobs when you have the version’s decade-old bugs to contend with, anyway?”
Used to be, a few thousand years ago, if you wanted to learn philosophy, you’d hang out in the agora, the public space in ancient Greece whose name turned into verbs meaning both “to shop” and “to speak in public.” Politics and metaphysics mingled freely with commerce. If a Socrates-like sage took a liking to you, you might follow him around. If not, you might pay a sophist—a word meaning wise teacher before it became a term of abuse that Plato lobbed at rivals who charged for their services. Only certain people had the means and leisure for these pursuits. Nonetheless, philosophy was a public activity, not one sequestered in libraries and seminar rooms.
Even though philosophy moved indoors—to monasteries, colleges, and the libraries of aristocrats—it did not stay cooped up for long. With the modern age arrived new public squares, centered around coffeehouses where all sorts of people gathered, rubbed elbows, formed discussion groups. Philosophy may not have been the public spectacle it seemed to have been in antiquity, but neoclassical thinkers tried to recreate its character of free and open inquiry in public spaces.
Widespread literacy and publishing brought philosophy to the masses in new ways. Philosophical works trickled down in affordable editions to the intellectually curious, who might read and discuss them with like-minded laypeople. But philosophy also became a professional discipline, governed by associations, conferences, journals, and arcane vocabularies. Outside of France, philosophers rarely acted as public intellectuals addressing public issues. They were academics whose primary audiences were other academics.
The culture suffered immensely, one might argue, in the withdrawal of philosophy from public life.
The broad outline above does not pretend to be a history of philosophy, but rather a sketch of some of the ways Western culture has engaged with philosophy, treating it as a public good and resource, or a domain of specialists and an activity divorced from ordinary life. Unfortunately for us in the 21st century, dreams of a digital agora have collapsed in the dystopian surveillance schemes of social media and the toxic sludge of comments sections. But the internet has also, in a way, returned philosophy to the public square.
Philosophers can once again share knowledge freely and openly, and anyone with access can stream and download hundreds of lessons, courses, entertaining explainers, interviews, podcasts, and more. We have featured many of these resources over the years in hopes that more people will discover the art of thinking deeply and critically. Today, we gather them in a master list, below.
Learn the in-depth history of philosophy from Peter Adamson’s acclaimed series The History of Philosophy… Without Any Gaps; listen in on roundtable discussions on famous thinkers and theories with the Partially Examined Life podcast, or “repave the Agora with the rubble of the Ivory Tower!” with the accessible, comprehensive philosophy videos of Carneades. These are but a few of the many quality resources you’ll find below. Technology may never recreate the early atmosphere of public philosophy—for that you’ll need to get out and mingle. But it can deliver more philosophy than anyone has ever had before, literally right into the palms of our hands.
Courses
187 Free Philosophy Courses: In a neat, handy list, we’ve amassed a collection of free philosophy courses recorded at great universities. Pretty much every facet of philosophy gets covered here.
YouTube
Wireless Philosophy: Learn about philosophy with professors from Yale, Stanford, Oxford, MIT, and more. 130+ animated videos introduce people to the practice of philosophy. The videos are free, entertaining, interesting and accessible to people with no background in the subject.
School of Life: This collection of 35 animated videos offers an introduction to major Western philosophers—Wittgenstein, Foucault, Camus and more. The videos were made by Alain de Botton’s School of Life.
Gregory Sadler’s Philosophy Videos: After a decade in traditional academic positions, Gregory Sadler started bringing philosophy into practice, making complex classic philosophical ideas accessible for a wide audience of professionals, students, and life-long learners. His YouTube channel includes extensive lecture series on Kierkegaard,Sartre, Hegel and more.
Carneades: Repave the Agora with the rubble of the Ivory Tower! Put your beliefs to the test! Learn something about philosophy! Doubt something you thought you knew before. Find on this channel 400 videos on the subjects of philosophy and skepticism.
What the Theory?: This collection provides short introductions to theories and theoretical approaches in cultural studies and the wider humanities. Covers semiotics, phenomenology, postmodernism, marxist literary criticism, and much more.
Crash Course Philosophy: In 46 episodes, Hank Green will teach you philosophy. This course is based on an introductory Western philosophy college level curriculum. By the end of the course, you will be able to examine topics like the self, ethics, religion, language, art, death, politics, and knowledge. And also craft arguments, apply deductive and inductive reasoning, and identify fallacies.
Podcasts:
Partially Examined Life: Philosophy, philosophers and philosophical texts. This podcast features an informal roundtable discussion, with each episode loosely focused on a short reading that introduces at least one “big” philosophical question, concern, or idea. Recent episodes have focused on Nietzsche, Sartre and Aldous Huxley, and featured Francis Fukuyama as a guest.
Hi-Phi-Nation: Created by Barry Lam (Associate Professor of Philosophy at Vassar College), Hi-Phi Nation is a philosophy podcast “that turns stories into ideas.” Consider it “the first sound and story-driven show about philosophy, bringing together narrative storytelling, investigative journalism, and soundtracking.”
The History of Philosophy … Without Any Gaps: Created by Peter Adamson, Professor of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy at King’s College London, this podcast features more than 300 episodes, each about 20 minutes long, covering the PreSocratics (Pythagoras, Zeno, Parmenides, etc) and then Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and much more.
Philosophy Bites: David Edmonds (Uehiro Centre, Oxford University) and Nigel Warburton (freelance philosopher/writer) interview top philosophers on a wide range of topics. Two books based on the series have been published by Oxford University Press. There are over 400 podcasts in this collection.
In Our Time: Philosophy: In Our Time is a live BBC radio discussion series exploring the history of ideas, presented by Melvyn Bragg since October 1998. It is one of BBC Radio 4’s most successful discussion programmes, acknowledged to have “transformed the landscape for serious ideas at peak listening time.’”
Along with Michel Foucault’s critique of the medical model of mental illness, the work of Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing and other influential theorists and critics posed a serious intellectual challenge to the psychiatric establishment. Laing’s 1960 The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanityand Madnesstheorized schizophrenia as a philosophical problem, not a biological one. Other early works like Self and Othersand Knotsmade Laing something of a star in the 1960s and early 70s, though his star would fade once French theory began to take over the academy.
Glasgow-born Laing is described as part of the so-called “anti-psychiatry movement”—a loose collection of psychiatrists and characters like L. Ron Hubbard, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Foucault, and Erving Goffman, pioneering sociologist and author of The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. For his part, Laing did not deny the existence of mental illness, nor oppose treatment. But he questioned the biological basis of psychological disorders and opposed the prevailing chemical and electroshock cures. He was seen not as an antagonist of psychiatry but as a “critical psychiatrist,” continuing a tradition begun by Freud and Jung: “the alienist or ‘head shrinker’ as public intellectual,” as Duquesne University’s Daniel Burston writes.
Like many other philosophically-minded intellectuals in his field, Laing not only offered compelling alternative theories of mental illness but also pioneered alternative therapies. He was inspired by Existentialism; the many hours he had spent “in padded cells with the men placed in his custody” while apprenticed in psychiatry in the British Army; and to a large extent by Foucault. (Laing edited the first English translation of Foucault’s Madness and Civilization.) Armed with theory and clinical experience, he co-founded the Philadelphia Association in 1965, an organization “centred on a communal approach to wellbeing,” writes Aeon, “where people who are experiencing acute mental distress live together in a Philadelphia Association house, with routine visits from therapists.”
Based not in the Pennsylvania city, but in London, the Philadelphia Association still operates—along with several similar orgs influenced by Laing’s vision of therapeutic communities. In “Critical Living,” the animated stop-motion film above, filmmaker Alex Widdowson excerpts interviews with “a current house therapist, a former house resident, and the UK author and cultural historian Mike Jay, to explore the thinking behind the organization’s methodology and contextualize its legacy.” For Laing, mental illnesses, even extreme psychoses like schizophrenia, are personal struggles that can best be worked through in interpersonal settings which eliminate distinctions between doctor and patient and abolish methods Laing called “confrontational.”
Laing’s work began to be discredited in the mid-seventies, as breakthroughs in brain imaging provided neurological evidence for mainstream psychiatric theories, and as the culture changed and left his theories behind. A friend of Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, and Allen Ginsberg, and an intellectual hero to many in the counterculture, Laing began to move into stranger territory, holding workshops for “rebirthing” therapies and giving people around him reason to doubt his own grasp on reality. Burston lists a number of other reasons his experiments with “therapeutic community” largely fell into obscurity, including the significant investment of time and effort required. “We want a quick fix: something clean and cost-effective, not messy and time consuming.”
But for many, Laing’s ideas of mental illness as an existential problem—one which could be just as much a breakthrough as a breakdown—continue to resonate, as do the many political and social critiques he and his contemporaries raised. “In the system of psychiatry,” says one interviewee in the video above, “there’s a huge emphasis on goals, and on an ending. In the more in-depth therapies, they’re more sensitive to the fact that the psyche can’t be rushed, it takes time.”
The vast majority of us have no inclination to kill anyone, much less a small child. But what if we had the chance to kill baby Adolf Hitler, preventing the Holocaust and indeed the Second World War? That hypothetical question has endured for a variety of reasons, touching as it does on the concepts of genocide and infant murder in forms even more highly charged than usual. It also presents, in the words of Time Travel: A History author James Gleick, “two problems at once. There’s a scientific problem — you can set your mind to work imagining, ‘Could such a thing be possible and how would that work?’ And then there’s an ethical problem. ‘If I could, would I, should I?’ ”
By the simplest analysis, writes Vox’s Dylan Matthews, the question comes down to, “Is it ethical to kill one person to save 40-plus million people?” But time-travel fiction has been around long enough that we’ve all internalized the message that it’s not quite so simple. We can even question the assumption that killing baby Hitler would prevent the Holocaust and World War II in the first place.
Maybe those terrible events happen on any timeline, regardless of whether Hitler lives or dies: that would align with the Novikov self-consistency principle, which holds that “time travel could be possible, but must be consistent with the past as it has already taken place,” and which has been dramatized in time-travel stories from La Jetée to The Terminator.
Gleick doesn’t have a straight answer in the Vox video on the killing-baby-hitler question above as to whether he himself would go back to 1889 and put baby Hitler out of action. “When you change history,” he says of the moral of the countless many time travel stories he’s read, “you don’t get the result you’re looking for. Every day, everything we do is a turning point in history, whether it’s obvious to us or not.” This in contrast to former Florida governor and United States presidential candidate Jeb Bush, who, when he had the big baby-Hitler question put to him by the Huffington Post, returned a hearty “Hell yea I would.” But given time to reflect, even he concluded that such an act “could have a dangerous effect on everything else.” It appears that some of the lessons of time-travel stories have been learned, but as for what humanity will do if it actually develops time-travel technology — maybe we’d rather not peer into the future to find out.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
We remember Oliver Sacks as a neurologist, but we remember him not least because he wrote quite a few books as well. If you read those books, you’ll get a sense of Sacks’ wide range of interests — invention, perception and misperception, hallucination, and more — few of which lack a connection to the human mind. His passion for ferns, the core subject of a travelogue he wrote in Oaxaca as well as an unexpectedly frequent object of reference in his other writings and talks, may seem an outlier. But for Sacks, ferns offered one more window into the kingdom of nature that produced humanity, and which throughout his life he tried to understand by observing from as many different angles as possible.
Tracing the development of the human brain and mind would, of course, lead to an interest in biology and evolution, here resulting in such picks as Edward O. Wilson’s Naturalist, Carl Zimmer’s Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, and the journals Charles Darwin kept aboard the Beagle.
But Sacks wasn’t just an observer of the brain: some of his most interesting writings come out of the times he used himself as a kind of research subject — as when he found out what he could learn on amphetamines and LSD. A similar line of inquiry no doubt showed him the value of Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, and in less altered states the likes of Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. But whichever paths took Sacks toward his knowledge, he ultimately had to get that knowledge down on paper himself, and the prose of Vladimir Nabokov, the poetry of W.H. Auden and the philosophy of David Hume surely did their part to inspire his incisive and evocative style. We would all, whatever our interests, like to write like Oliver Sacks: if these books shaped him as a writer and thinker, who are we to demur from, say, A Natural History of Ferns?
A Natural History of Ferns by Robbin C. Moran
A Rum Affair: A True Story of Botanical Fraud by Karl Sabbagh
A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume
A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine by Mike Jay
Actual Minds, Possible Worlds by Jerome Bruner
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande
Cannery Row (Steinbeck Centennial Edition (1902–2002)) by John Steinbeck
Challenger & Company: the Complete Adventures of Professor Challenger and His Intrepid Team-The Lost World, The Poison Belt, The Land of Mists, The Disintegration Machine and When the World Screamed by Arthur Conan Doyle
Collected Poems by W.H. Auden
Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond by Robert R. Provine
Darwin and the Barnacle: The Story of One Tiny Creature and History’s Most Spectacular Scientific Breakthrough by Rebecca Stott
Disturbing the Universe by Freeman Dyson
Earth Abides by George R. Stewart
Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea by Carl Zimmer
Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing by Laura J. Snyder
God’s Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine by Victoria Sweet
Ignorance: How It Drives Science by Stuart Firestein
Imagining Robert: My Brother, Madness, and Survival by Jay Neugeboren
In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind by Eric R. Kandel
Inward Bound: Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World by Abraham Pais
Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics by Ruth Lewin Sime
Lost in America: A Journey with My Father by Sherwin B. Nuland
Music, Language, and the Brain by Aniruddh D. Patel
Naturalist by Edward O. Wilson
Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind by V.S. Ramachandran
Plutonium: A History of the World’s Most Dangerous Element by Jeremy Bernstein
Same and Not the Same by Roald Hoffmann
Selected Poems by Thom Gunn
Silent Thunder: In the Presence of Elephants by Katy Payne
Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited by Vladimir Nabokov
Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer by Lynne Cox
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes
The Anatomist: A True Story of Gray’s Anatomy by Bill Hayes
The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell by Aldous Huxley
The Elephanta Suite by Paul Theroux
The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness by Antonio Damasio
The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud
The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World by Jenny Uglow
The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory by A. R. Luria
The Principles of Psychology (Volume Two) by William James
The World Without Us by Alan Weisman
Thinking in Pictures: And Other Reports from My Life with Autism by Temple Grandin
Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior by Jonathan Weiner
Voyage of the Beagle: Charles Darwin’s Journals of Researches by Charles Darwin
What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses by Daniel Chamovitz
What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery by Francis Crick
Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History by Stephen Jay Gould
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
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