Why Incompetent People Think They’re Amazing: An Animated Lesson from David Dunning (of the Famous “Dunning-Kruger Effect”)

in Business, Psychology, TED Talks | December 6th, 2017

The business world has long had special jargon for the Kafkaesque incompetence bedeviling the ranks of upper management. There is “the Peter principle,” first described in a satirical book of the same name in 1968. More recently, we have the positive notion of “failing upward.” The concept has inspired a mantra, “fail harder, fail faster,” as well as popular books like The Gift of Failure. Famed research professor, author, and TED talker Brené Brown has called TED “the failure conference,” and indeed, a “FailCon” does exist, “in over a dozen cities on 6 continents around the globe.”

The candor about this most unavoidable of human phenomena may prove a boon to public health, lowering levels of hypertension by a significant margin. But is there a danger in praising failure too fervently? (Samuel Beckett’s quote on the matter, beloved by many a 21st century thought leader, proves decidedly more ambiguous in context.) Might it present an even greater opportunity for people to “rise to their level of incompetence”? Given the prevalence of the “Dunning-Kruger Effect,” a cognitive bias explained by John Cleese in a previous post, we may not be well-placed to know whether our efforts constitute success or failure, or whether we actually have the skills we think we do.

First described by social psychologists David Dunning (University of Michigan) and Justin Kruger (N.Y.U.) in 1999, the effect “suggests that we’re not very good at evaluating ourselves accurately.” So says the narrator of the TED-Ed lesson above, scripted by Dunning and offering a sober reminder of the human propensity for self-delusion. “We frequently overestimate our own abilities,” resulting in widespread “illusory superiority” that makes “incompetent people think they’re amazing.” The effect greatly intensifies at the lower end of the scale; it is often “those with the least ability who are most likely to overrate their skills to the greatest extent.” Or as Cleese plainly puts it, some people “are so stupid, they have no idea how stupid they are.”

Combine this with the converse effect—the tendency of skilled individuals to underrate themselves—and we have the preconditions for an epidemic of mismatched skill sets and positions. But while imposter syndrome can produce tragic personal results and deprive the world of talent, the Dunning-Kruger effect’s worst casualties affect us all adversely. People “measurably poor at logical reasoning, grammar, financial knowledge, math, emotional intelligence, running medical lab tests, and chess all tend to rate their expertise almost as favorably as actual experts do.” When such people get promoted up the chain, they can unwittingly do a great deal of harm.

While arrogant self-importance plays its role in fostering delusions of expertise, Dunning and Kruger found that most of us are subject to the effect in some area of our lives simply because we lack the skills to understand how bad we are at certain things. We don’t know the rules well enough to successfully, creatively break them. Until we have some basic understanding of what constitutes competence in a particular endeavor, we cannot even understand that we’ve failed.

Real experts, on the other hand, tend to assume their skills are ordinary and unremarkable. “The result is that people, whether they’re inept or highly skilled, are often caught in a bubble of inaccurate self-perception.” How can we get out? The answers won’t surprise you. Listen to constructive feedback and never stop learning, behavior that can require a good deal of vulnerability and humility.

Research Finds That Intellectual Humility Can Make Us Better Thinkers & People; Good Thing There’s a Free Course on Intellectual Humility

The Power of Empathy: A Quick Animated Lesson That Can Make You a Better Person

Free Online Psychology & Neuroscience Courses

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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The Van Gogh of Microsoft Excel: How a Japanese Retiree Makes Intricate Landscape Paintings with Spreadsheet Software

in Art, Software, Technology | December 6th, 2017

Just when you thought you’ve mastered Microsoft Excel–creating pivot tables, VLOOKUPs and the rest–you discover the feature you never knew was there. The one that lets you create Japanese landscape paintings. When Tatsuo Horiuchi retired, he found that feature and leaned on it, hard. Now 77 years old, he has enough landscape paintings to stage an exhibition–all made with the point and click of a mouse.

So what’s the moral of this story? Maybe it’s you’re never too old to make art. Or maybe it’s never too late to master those hidden features and push technology to the bleeding edge. In Tatsuo’s case, he’s doing both.

via Swiss Miss

A Hypnotic Look at How Japanese Samurai Swords Are Made

Download 2,500 Beautiful Woodblock Prints and Drawings by Japanese Masters (1600–1915)

The Art of the Japanese Teapot: Watch a Master Craftsman at Work, from the Beginning Until the Startling End

Enter a Digital Archive of 213,000+ Beautiful Japanese Woodblock Prints

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How Scientology Works: A Primer Based on a Reading of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Film, The Master

in Film, Psychology, Religion | December 6th, 2017

Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master focuses, with almost unbearable intensity, on two characters: Joaquin Phoenix’s impulsive ex-sailor Freddie Quell, and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Lancaster Dodd, “the founder and magnetic core of the Cause — a cluster of folk who believe, among other things, that our souls, which predate the foundation of the Earth, are no more than temporary residents of our frail bodily housing,” writes The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane in his review of the film. “Any relation to persons living, dead, or Scientological is, of course, entirely coincidental.”

Before The Master came out, rumor built up that the film mounted a scathing critique of the Church of Scientology; now, we know that it accomplishes something, par for the course for Anderson, much more fascinating and artistically idiosyncratic.

Few of its gloriously 65-millimeter-shot scenes seem to have much to say, at least directly, about Scientology or any other system of thought. But perhaps the most memorable, in which Dodd, having discovered Freddie stown away aboard his chartered yacht, offers him a session of “informal processing,” does indeed have much to do with the faith founded by L. Ron Hubbard — at least if you believe the analysis of Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter, who argues that the scene “bears an unmistakable reference to a vital activity within Scientology called auditing.”

Just as Dodd does to Freddie, “the auditor in Scientology asks questions of the ‘preclear’ with the goal of ridding him of ‘engrams,’ the term for traumatic memory stored in what’s called the ‘reactive mind.’ ” By thus “helping the preclear relive the experience that caused the trauma,” the auditor accomplishes a goal that, in a clip Puschak includes in the essay, Hubbard lays out himself: to “show a fellow that he’s mocking up his own mind, therefore his own difficulties; that he is not completely adrift in, and swamped by, a body.” Scientological or not, such notions do intrigue the desperate, drifting Freddie, and although the story of his and Dodd’s entwinement, as told by Anderson, still divides critical opinion, we can say this for sure: it beats Battlefield Earth.

The Career of Paul Thomas Anderson: A 5‑Part Video Essay on the Auteur of Boogie Nights, Punch-Drunk Love, The Master, and More

Space Jazz, a Sonic Sci-Fi Opera by L. Ron Hubbard, Featuring Chick Corea (1983)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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 or on Faceboo k.

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The Vibrant Color Wheels Designed by Goethe, Newton & Other Theorists of Color (1665–1810)

in Art, Science | December 6th, 2017

Maybe it’s the cloistered headiness of Rene Descartes, or the rigorous austerity of Isaac Newton; maybe it’s all the leathern breaches, gray waistcoats, sallow faces, and powdered wigs… but we tend not to associate Enlightenment Europe with an explosion of color theory. Yet, philosophers of the late 17th and 18th centuries were obsessed with light and sight. Descartes wrote a treatise on optics, as did Newton.

Newton first described in his 1672 Opticks the “revolutionary new theory of light and colour,” the University of Cambridge Whipple Library writes, “in which he claimed that experiments with prisms proved that white light was comprised of light of seven distinct colours.” Scientists debated Newton’s theory “well into the 19th century.”

One early opponent famously illustrated his rebuttal. Poet, writer, and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published Theory of Colors (see here), with its carefully hand-drawn and colored diagrams and wheels, in 1809. From Newton’s time onward, color theorists elaborated prevailing concepts with color wheels, the first attributed to Newton in 1704 (and drawn in black and white, above).

Newton’s wheel “arranged red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet into a natural progression on a rotating disk.” Four years later, painter Claude Boutet made his 7‑color and 12-color circles (top), based on Newton’s theories. Artists, chemists, mapmakers, poets, even entomologists… everyone seemed to have a pet theory of color, generally accompanied by elaborate colored charts and diagrams.

The color wheel was one among many forms—which often presented contrasting theories, like that of Jacques-Fabien Gautier, who argued that black and white were primary colors. But the wheel, and Newton’s basic ideas about it, have endured almost unchanged. The wheel further up (third one from top) by British entomologist Moses Harris from 1776 shows Newton’s 7‑color scheme simplified to the 6 primary and secondary colors we usually see, arranged in the complementary and analogous scheme, with tertiary gradations between them. Another entomologist, Ignaz Schiffermüller, drew the 12-color wheel right above.

Color is always representative. Newton’s original wheel included “musical notes correlated with color.” By the end of the 18th century, color theory had become increasingly tied to psychological theories and typologies, as in the wheel above, the “rose of temperaments,” made by Goethe and Friedrich Schiller in 1789 to illustrate “human occupations and character traits,” the Public Domain Review notes, including “tyrants, heroes, adventurers, hedonists, lovers, poets, public speakers, historians, teachers, philosophers, pedants, rulers,” grouped into the four temperaments of humoral theory.

It’s a fairly short leap from these psychologies of color to those used by advertisers and commercial designers in the 20th century—or from the artists and scientists’ color theories to abstract expressionism, the Bauhaus school, and the chemists and photographers who recreated the colors of the world on film. (Goethe’s color wheel, below, from Theory of Color, illustrates his chapter on “Allegorical, symbolic, and mystical use of colour.”) See more early color wheels, like Philipp Otto Runge’s 1810 Farbenkugel, as well as other conceptual color schemes, at the Public Domain Review.

via Public Domain Review

How Technicolor Revolutionized Cinema with Surreal, Electric Colors & Changed How We See Our World

A Pre-Pantone Guide to Colors: Dutch Book From 1692 Documents Every Color Under the Sun

Sir Isaac Newton’s Papers & Annotated Principia Go Digital

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Case for Why Kraftwerk May Be the Most Influential Band Since the Beatles

in Music | December 5th, 2017

They are performance artists of self-parody—four stiff Teutonic robots (sometimes played by actual robots), standing behind drum machines and sequencers, pushing buttons and singing things like “Wir fahr’n fahr’n fahr’n auf der Autobahn” and “it’s more fun to compute.” As if the Beach Boys had been reimagined from broken memory by German androids thousands of years in the future. Onstage, they match or exceed the commitment of later musical-theatrical acts they inspired like the Blue Man Group. Kraftwerk may be the most German of contributions to popular culture since Wagner.

For all their computerized industrial campiness, they really did come from the future, or they either anticipated or invented it, depending on your point of view. Kraftwerk (meaning “power station”) “essentially created the sonic blueprint from which the British new romantic and techno-pop movements arose, and provided the essential technology for much of hip-hop,” writes the Trouser Press Record Guide.

In addition to birthing Depeche Mode and Soft Cell’s synth pop and the smooth robo-funk of Afrika Bambaataa’s seminal “Planet Rock,” the band built the architecture of post-punk, techno, acid house, and Britpop with their experiments throughout the 70s and 80s, including the infamous “Autobahn.”

Kraftwerk began as two long-haired students, Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider, who met in Dusseldorf in 1969, playing experimental music with electric, acoustic, and electronic instruments and with a variety of musicians, including guitarist Michael Rother and drummer Klaus Dinger. In Dinger’s pounding, repetitive drumming, they found their mekanik sound as early as 1970 (above), but had not yet transitioned into pop, or the clean-cut suit and tie look, until fully absorbing the influence of British artists Gilbert and George and receiving the guidance of superproducer Conny Plank. The early incarnation of Kraftwerk—along with other so-called early “Krautrock” groups like Can, and especially Rother and Dinger’s hugely influential, if obscure, NEU!—created the scaffolding for bands from Joy Division to Suicide to Sonic Youth to Stereolab (and the hundreds and hundreds of bands those bands inspired).

The driving “motorik” beat played by Dinger, and later by a drum machine, has been described by Brian Eno as one of the three great beats of the 70s, next to Clyde Stubblefield’s funk and Tony Allen’s Afrobeat. But the band’s other, song-oriented elements are just as influential for different reasons. In “Autobahn,” they use a more typical beat, slowed to a leisurely cruise. Their deadpan sprechgesang over an entirely synthesized pop composition set the template for generations. “They were the first band to embrace modern technology—not only in the instruments they played, but in the subject matter of their songs,” William Cook writes at The Spectator, who argues that the “po-faced kraut-rockers have become the most influential pop group of all time.”

While “today urban alienation is a common theme in pop music… back in the 1970s they seemed so avant-garde, it was almost impossible to take them seriously.” Those who know little of their legacy may still find this to be the case. A stiff satirical joke playing with German stereotypes as much as Monty Python telegraphed broadly hilarious versions of Englishness. But they are not soulless pranksters, but brilliant musicians whose finest work—like 1981’s “Computer Love,” from the album of the same name—is “cold, clean and clear—and wonderfully harmonious.” These haunting songs contain all of the ennui of the internet-dating age, before the internet (“I call this number / For a data date.”), the musical forebear of Her.

Cook argues that Kraftwerk did “more to shape modern music than anything since the Beatles,” an idea he shares with many other critics, such as the L.A. Times’ Randall Roberts, who names 1977’s “Trans Europe Express” as “the most important pop album of the last 40 years” and the “first high-art electronic pop record.” Looking on the album’s cover like computer programmers on their way to the prom, Kraftwerk, Roberts insists, was as influential as the experiments of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak around the same time. Dismiss these seemingly hyperbolic comparisons if you will, but consider the fish who do not know what water is. If you were born in the mid-seventies or later, there’s never been a time in your life when you haven’t heard the elements of Kraftwerk’s alienated, ultra-modern, and—at its best, a little tongue-in-cheek—sound coming from car, home, dance club, or shopping mall speakers.

So much more than a novelty act, the band created the gorgeous sounds of European electronic pop that defined the 80s, especially with singles like “Computer Love” and “Tour de France.” Their stylish revolution never stopped, though they withdrew for a few years only to return in the 90s and 2000s with fully updated sounds, and always with a perfectly synchronous vision. When Schnieder briefly left to pursue a solo career, The Independent remarked, “it has apparently taken Schneider and his musical partner Ralf Hütter, four decades to discover musical differences.” They have continued to tour, now in light-up, neoprene bodysuits, like robot surfers, who might be mistaken for Daft Punk or any number of other similar major dance music superstars…. Except that Kraftwerk got there first, and, many a die-hard fan would argue, did it best.

Kraftwerk Plays a Live 40-Minute Version of their Signature Song “Autobahn:” A Soundtrack for a Long Road Trip (1974)

Kraftwerk’s “The Robots” Performed by German First Graders in Adorable Cardboard Robot Outfits

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 8 ) |

A Salute to Every Frame a Painting: Watch All 28 Episodes of the Finely-Crafted (and Now Concluded) Video Essay Series on Cinema

in Film | December 5th, 2017

Documentaries about film itself have existed for decades, but only with the advent of short-form internet video — preceded by the advents of powerful desktop editing software and high-quality home-video formats — did the form of the cinema video essay that we know today emerge. Over the past few years, the Youtube channel Every Frame a Painting has become one of the modern cinema video essay’s most respected purveyors, examining everything from how editors think to the bland music of superhero films to why Vancouver never plays itself to the signature technique of auteurs like Martin Scorsese, Jackie Chan, and, yes, Michael Bay.

Alas, Every Frame a Painting has come to an end. “When we started this YouTube project, we gave ourselves one simple rule: if we ever stopped enjoying the videos, we’d also stop making them,” says series co-creator Taylor Ramos. “And one day, we woke up and felt it was time.”

She says it in the never-produced script for a concluding episode, a text that takes us on a journey from Every Frame a Painting’s inception — born, as co-creator Tony Zhou puts it, out of frustration at having to “discuss visual ideas with non-visual people” — through its evolution into a series about film form rather than content (“most YouTube videos seemed to focus on story and character, so we went in the opposite direction”) to its conclusion.

Just as Every Frame a Painting’s episodes reveal to us how movies work, this final script reveals to us how Every Frame a Painting works — or more specifically, what factors led to its video essays looking and feeling like they do. “Nearly every stylistic decision you see about the channel ‚” Zhou says by way of giving one example, “was reverse-engineered from YouTube’s Copyright ID,” trying to find ways around the platform’s automatic copyright-violation detection system that would occasionally reject even the kind of fair use they were doing. Other choices they made more deliberately, such as to do old-fashioned library research whenever possible. “It’s very tempting to use Google because it’s so quick and it’s right there,” says Zhou in a much-highlighted passage, “but that’s exactly why you shouldn’t go straight to it.”

Whatever the origins of Zhou and Ramos’ rigorous process, it has ended up producing a series greatly appreciated by filmgoers and filmmakers alike. Binge-watch all 28 of Every Frame a Painting’s episodes (up top)— which will explain to you dramatic struggle as seen in The Silence of the Lambs, how the movies have depicted texting, the cinematic possibilities of the chair, and much more besides — and you’ll end up with, at the very least, an equivalent of a few semesters of film-school education. And maybe, just maybe, you’ll come away with the idea for a cinema video essay series of your own.

The Alchemy of Film Editing, Explored in a New Video Essay That Breaks Down Hannah and Her Sisters, The Empire Strikes Back & Other Films

Why Marvel and Other Hollywood Films Have Such Bland Music: Every Frame a Painting Explains the Perils of the “Temp Score”

How the Coen Brothers Put Their Remarkable Stamp on the “Shot Reverse Shot,” the Fundamental Cinematic Technique

Buster Keaton: The Wonderful Gags of the Founding Father of Visual Comedy

How Orson Welles’ F for Fake Teaches Us How to Make the Perfect Video Essay

Vancouver Never Plays Itself

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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 or on Faceboo k.

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How Technicolor Revolutionized Cinema with Surreal, Electric Colors & Changed How We See Our World

in Film | December 5th, 2017

Though only one process in a very long history of film coloring techniques, from hand-tinting to chemical and mechanical means, Technicolor has had the most influence of them all. During the Golden Age of cinema, the 1930s and 40s, the technology was “undoubtedly,” write Kristen Thompson and David Bordwell in their Film History, “the most striking innovation” of the era, and it came to dominate by way of massive hit films like The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind. It didn’t hurt that “the Technicolor company monopolized the process, supplying all cameras, providing supervisors for each production, and processing and printing the film.”

But Technicolor didn’t arise overnight. Founded in 1914, the Technicolor company produced color films for two decades that were “still experimental,” notes Atlantic editor Adrienne LaFrance, “oftentimes to the point of being absurd.” But by the mid-30s, Technicolor No. IV—which used prisms to split the light onto three strips of film for the three primary colors—could produce hyperreal, strikingly beautiful images. By 1939, when audiences saw the yellow brick road, lion, scarecrow, green-faced wicked witch, and those sparkling ruby slippers come alive before their eyes, Technicolor had triumphed.

In the video essay above from Vox, Phil Edwards explains what this means, and how “the technology shaped the look of the twentieth century,” and debunks three misconceptions about The Wizard of Oz, including the idea that it was the first Technicolor movie. Edwards explains the origins of the company with three colleagues from M.I.T., from which the “Tech” part of the name derived, and how the three-strip process came into its own seven years before The Wizard of Oz, in a 1932 Disney cartoon called “Flowers and Trees.” This animation was the first to feature the three-strip innovation, which used an “insanely difficult” dye-transfer process. (In the follow-up video below, Edwards addresses comments, questions, and corrections to his essay above.)

Despite Technicolor IV’s advance, live-action films throughout the 30s still used earlier features of the technique, “amping up” the contrast with a black and white layer of film underneath the color. Other technical limitations contributed to Technicolor’s distinctive, eye-popping look. The Wizard of Oz, for example, does not actually move from black and white to color when Dorothy leaves her displaced Kansas house and walks into Oz. Instead, the filmmakers painted the set sepia and used a Judy Garland double (also painted). Massive, and massively loud, cameras and a considerable expense added more burdens for Technicolor filmmaking, but the advantages outweighed these problems, Edwards argues, including the ability to adjust the dyes to use color in strikingly different ways from movie to movie.

Brilliant, oversaturated greens, yellows, and reds in films like The Wizard of Oz and Singin’ in the Rain led to new ways of using color to tell stories, such as those perfected by Stanley Kubrick over 40 years after Technicolor IV’s debut. “The three-color process,” LaFrance explains, “created films punctuated by colors so electric they were surreal.” Imagine the effects of these visions on young impressionable audiences in the forties and fifties—who went on to design the look of the sixties and seventies. We may forget that the dawn of Technicolor “was itself a reflection of film processes that created a richer, color-flooded version of the real world,” yet both film and the design of the real world came to look the way they did due in large part to Technicolor film.

The Color Palettes of Your Favorite Films: The Royal Tenenbaums, Reservoir Dogs, A Clockwork Orange, Blade Runner & More

Early Experiments in Color Film (1895–1935)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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New App, Litlong, Lets You Take a Literary Tour of Edinburgh: Features 50,000 Book Excerpts

in Literature | December 5th, 2017

FYI. The University of Edinburgh and Napier University have teamed up to create Litlong, a website and mobile app that lets you explore Edinburgh and its rich literary tradition. Writes the Scottish newspaper The Nationa l:

From Sir Walter Scott to Dame Muriel Spark, Ian Rankin and many others, the city of Edinburgh has inspired countless writers over the centuries.

Now students, visitors and readers around the world will be able to explore the capital’s literary highlights via a free interactive app containing a staggering 50,000 book excerpts.

The app guides users to 1,600 locations in the city made famous by writers from Robert Louis Stevenson to Irvine Welsh, then highlights what they wrote about these parts of the city.

The resource, called LitLong, has excerpts from classic and contemporary texts so users can experience the Unesco City of Literature’s attractions.

Made with “natural language processing technology informed by literary scholars’ input,” Litlong draws on digital collections from across the world, including the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, and Project Gutenberg. Access Litlong here.

via The National

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Stanford University Launches Free Course on Developing Apps with iOS 10

Free Online Literature Courses

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Neil Young Offers His Entire Catalog of Music Free Online (Until June), at the Highest Digital Audio Quality Possible

in Music | December 4th, 2017

Neil Young has always been an artist in conversation with the world around him—a troubadour, truth-teller, town crier, and chronicler of the excesses and evils of his age. His is not always a subtle art, but is often all the better for it. When he speaks out in song, people listen. And though Canadian, he’s done as much as any American songwriter of his generation to crystalize the U.S.’s seemingly perpetual domestic and foreign conflicts.

Young often works quickly and to spec, so to speak, to the needs of the moment. (He wrote his classic After the Gold Rush album in three weeks.) 1970’s Kent State-shooting response “Ohio” is plain-spoken and spare, its most indelible line a stark newspaper headline: “Four dead in Ohio.” It’s such an effectively poignant treatment that the song still resonates deeply forty-seven years later in a recent cover by Gary Clark, Jr. Young reportedly wrote the song in fifteen minutes.

His early 70s songs “Southern Man” and “Alabama” inspired one of the most famous, and famously misunderstood, feuds in rock history when Lynyrd Skynyrd responded with “Sweet Home Alabama.” Ronnie Van Zandt claimed he wrote the song as a joke, and he and Young were always mutual admirers and friends. But Young’s deservedly angry lyrics made millions of people furious in return. (He has since looked back on “Alabama” with some regret, calling it, “not fully thought out” and saying it “ richly deserved the shot” Van Zandt took at him.)

As a longtime fan of Young’s loose, noisy, abstract psychedelic garage rock and of his tender acoustic ballads, I feel that it’s profoundly reductive to call him a protest singer. He’s had a long and incredibly varied career, which he now invites us to survey, all of it, with the release of the Neil Young Archives, a smart, chronologically-organized online catalog spanning over 50 years, 39 studio albums, records made with Buffalo Springfield and CSNY, ten unreleased albums, and a few unreleased films.

The archive, Young says, “is designed to be a living document, constantly evolving and including every new recording and film as it is made.” All of this music is currently free, until June 30th, though you’ll have to create an account. After that date, users can subscribe for an unspecified but “very modest” cost.

The breadth of Young’s songwriting interests is on full display, from gentle love songs to dusty western sagas. In each decade, however, he has never hesitated to get political when he feels the call. And when Neil Young writes a protest song, he goes all in.

He’s taken in the past few years to writing entire protest albums. There’s the 2006 Iraq War protest, Living with War, a rush release Young penned quickly and recorded in only 9 days after seeing a USA Today headline. It went on to earn a Grammy nomination.

There’s the 2015 The Monsanto Years, recorded with his recent band Promise of the Real (which includes Willie Nelson’s sons Lukas and Micah). Recorded in live sessions at a converted movie theater, the album prompted Billboard to solicit responses from the corporations Young takes to task, including not only Monsanto but also Starbucks, Chevron, and Walmart.

The Visitors, Young’s new album with Promise of the Real, released just yesterday, may not be a full protest album, but it does have some straightforward protest songs, “Already Great” (top) contains the lyrics “You’re already great / You’re the promised land / You’re the helping hand” and ends with chants of “Whose streets? Our streets!” The track “Children of Destiny,” with its earnestly patriotic video (above) recalls, in some respects, Bruce Springsteen’s anthem “The Rising,” but with unambiguously lefty messaging referencing, among other things, the brutally repressed Standing Rock protests and the need to “stand up for the land.”

Young looks around him and looks ahead even when he’s looking back, seeking out new sounds, styles, recording techniques and technologies. Fittingly, on the day of The Visitors’ release, Young announced the Archives, which provides, as he wrote in a tweet, “fans & music historians with access to all of my music and to my entire archives in one location.” True to his forward-looking vision, he has updated the sound quality of these recordings to suit the needs of a digital age.

Rather than succumbing to the trend of streaming services’ low quality mp3s—a phenomenon he has long fought—Young offers all of this music at the highest quality possible, “not compromised,” he writes on the site, “by compression schemes to save memory.” He promises “the clarity richness, transparency, and detail of the original performance.” He doesn’t promise that the hundreds of live, studio, and unreleased songs in the archive merit this careful, high-tech treatment, but if you’re a Neil Young fan, you’re already convinced most of them do, from the most earnest political anthems to the quietest ballads and most raucous free-form jams.

Visit the Neil Young Archive here.

Great Story: How Neil Young Introduced His Classic 1972 Album Harvest to Graham Nash

The Time Neil Young Met Charles Manson, Liked His Music, and Tried to Score Him a Record Deal

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 10 ) |

George Orwell’s Rules for Making the Perfect Cup of Tea: A Short Animation

in Food & Drink | December 4th, 2017

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. And he proceeded to offer 11 rules for achieving that result. 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.

An Animated History of Tea

10 Golden Rules for Making the Perfect Cup of Tea (1941)

“The Virtues of Coffee” Explained in 1690 Ad: The Cure for Lethargy, Scurvy, Dropsy, Gout & More

The Art of the Japanese Teapot: Watch a Master Craftsman at Work, from the Beginning Until the Startling End

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Hear a Complete Reading of the Newly-Discovered Kurt Vonnegut Story, “The Drone King”

in Animation, Audio Books, Literature, Magazines, Sci Fi | December 4th, 2017

Twenty some years before a young engineer named Ray Tomlinson invented email, writer Kurt Vonnegut invented bee-mail in “The Drone King,” a story that didn’t see the light of day until his friend and fellow author Dan Wakefield unearthed it while going through old papers for a new Vonnegut collection.

The collection’s co-editor, Vonnegut scholar Jerome Klinkowitz, estimates that it was written in the early 50s, likely before the publication of his first novel, Player Piano, in 1952.

This early work, recently published in The Atlantic as well as Wakefield and Klinkowitz’s collection, shows an author whose gallows humor is already firmly in place.

Several of his favorite themes crop up, too: the enthusiasm of the misguided entrepreneur, the battle of the sexes, and technology taken to absurd extremes (i.e. bees delivering scraps of messages in soda straws tied to their thoraxes).

If we’re not mistaken Indianapolis, Vonnegut’s boyhood home, now host to his Memorial Library, puts in an unbilled appearance, as well. The story’s Millennium Club bears an uncanny resemblance to that city’s Athletic Club, now defunct.

The self-pitying male haplessness Vonnegut spoofs so ably feels just as skewer-able in the post-Weinstein era, though the doddering black waiter’s dialect is rather queasy-making, especially in the mouth of the white narrator reading the story, above.

You can buy “The Drone King” as part of Kurt Vonnegut Complete Stories collection or read it free online here. The Atlantic was also good enough to create an audio version. It’s excerpted up top. And it appears in its entirety right above.

“The Drone King” will be added to our Free Audio Books and Free eBooks collections.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

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Hear a Complete Reading of the Newly-Discovered Kurt Vonnegut Story, “The Drone King”

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