The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Historical Primers That Help Explain the Century-Long Conflict

On October 7th, Hamas invaded Israel and brutally massacred 1,400 Israelis, mostly civilians. On a per capita basis, the attack amounted to twelve 9/11s (per The Economist). It also marked the single bloodiest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. Faced with an existential threat, Israel has launched its own devastating invasion of Gaza, with the goal of destroying Hamas leadership. Already, the assault has left 9,000 civilians dead and tipped the population into a humanitarian crisis. Barring a ceasefire, the casualties will almost certainly mount from here.

This explosion of violence represents the latest chapter in a century-long struggle between Jews and Arabs in the region. For those who have a tenuous grasp of the history of this conflict (it’s admittedly long and complicated), we’ve pulled together some helpful resources that explain key turning points in the struggle. Overall, these resources strive to offer a balanced account of the conflict, meaning they try to recognize the perspective of both sides and avoid offering a nakedly partisan account. While not perfect or comprehensive, the resources offer a starting point for putting today’s events in historical context.

To start, the Vox primer above traces the arc of the conflict, starting with the rise of nationalism and Zionism in the early 20th century, and the Balfour Declaration (1917) that announced support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. From there, the video covers the rising tension between Jews and Arabs during the 1930s, then the Holocaust and the United Nations’ plan (1947) to divide the contested territory into two states, one for Jews and one for Arabs. The Jews accepted the plan. The Arabs didn’t and launched an attack on the Jewish population, starting the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. Israel won, achieved statehood, seized lands originally delegated to the Palestinians and expelled residents, sometimes violently, from their homes. Next comes the Six-Day War of 1967 and the 1973 Yom Kippur War (oddly not mentioned by Vox). Then, we have the rise of the PLO and later Hamas (two organizations that have denied Israel’s right to exist); the vexing Israeli settler movement; the start of the first Intifada in 1987; attempts to make peace culminating in the Oslo Accords in 1993; and finally the breakdown of those peace efforts, thanks to extremists on both sides. Vox ends the narrative in about 2015, wondering about the future–the future we’re experiencing right now.

Immediately above, you can listen to a recent podcast hosted by The Atlantic‘s Derek Thompson. Featuring a conversation with two historians (Benny Morris and Zachary Foster), the podcast walks us through “the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, from antiquity to October 7”–reinforcing and elaborating on points made in the Vox video. Eventually, the host and historians also “share their thoughts on Israel’s military response, the future of the conflict, and the ‘missing moderate middle’ on both sides.”

We come next to a New York Times interview with David K. Shipler, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land. Here, the conversation focuses on the pivotal events of 1948, and how the Israelis and Palestinians have developed their own narratives of the events that took place that year. As Shipler explains, these narratives have shaped the Israeli-Palestinian struggle ever since, and they continue to shape the events on the ground in Gaza today. To understand the narratives is to understand why the conflict has endured for so long.

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Finally, we’re adding a video designed for a younger audience from John Green’s World History Crash Course. Completed in 2015, the video doesn’t cover the current crisis. But it provides another overview of the deeper historical conflict, while touching on the same narratives that Shipler outlines above.

We’ll try to post more resources as we find them…

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The Beatles Release Their Final Song, “Now and Then”: Hear the Song & Watch the Music Video Directed by Peter Jackson

The average music fan of the nineteen-sixties would surely have found it hard to believe that the Rolling Stones would put out a new album in 2023, let alone an album including a performance by Paul McCartney. Here in the twenty-twenties, of course, we’ve long since known that the “rivalry” between the young Stones and Beatles was ginned up by music media. Still, not to be outdone more than half a century after their breakup, the latter have put out the newly completed “Now and Then,” the last song featuring all the Fab Four that will ever be released.

“Now and Then,” or at least its title, will ring a bell in the minds of serious Beatles enthusiasts. For decades, it has been known as one of several promising songs John Lennon recorded without finishing. Others include “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love,” which McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr built upon in the studio and released in the mid-nineties to accompany the documentary The Beatles Anthology. At that time, Lennon’s home demo of “Now and Then” proved trickier to work with: “the piano was a little hard to hear,” says McCartney in its short making-of film, “and in those days, of course, we didn’t have the technology to do the separation” of one instrument or voice from the others.

Enter Peter Jackson, a Beatlemaniac possessed of uncommon resources and technological know-how. It turns out that the artificial intelligence-based system developed to separate out the audio tracks for the Get Back documentary project, which he directed, could also be used to salvage the muddy “Now and Then.” At last, McCartney says, “we could mix it and make a proper record of it,” a task that also included his laying down a new bass part and Starr doing the same for the drums. Each element led to another: “I’d been vaguely thinking, ‘Strings might be a good thing.’ The Beatles did lots of strings, you know?” This was a job for none other than Giles Martin, son of George. (See the making-of video below.)

As luck would have it, Harrison, who died in 2001, also recorded a guitar part back in 1995, which inspired McCartney to add a slide guitar solo in the same style. The New York Times Jon Pareles also notes “backing vocals from ‘Here, There and Everywhere,’ ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and ‘Because’: ‘oohs’ and ‘ahs’ in harmony.” The result is a genuine Beatles song as well as a genuine Beatles recording, not just in personnel but also in spirit. No sooner did the band get famous, remember, than they began incorporating into their work every advanced studio device and technique at their command. If high technology was a vital factor in their music then, it’s even more of one now.

Note: The official music video above was directed by Peter Jackson.

Related content:

The Making of the Last Beatles Song, “Now and Then”: A Short Film

How Peter Jackson Used Artificial Intelligence to Restore the Video & Audio Featured in The Beatles: Get Back

Watch Paul McCartney Compose The Beatles Classic “Get Back” Out of Thin Air (1969)

A Sneak Peek of Peter Jackson’s New Beatles Documentary Get Back: Watch the New Trailer

Watch HD Versions of The Beatles’ Pioneering Music Videos: “Hey Jude,” “Penny Lane,” “Revolution” & More

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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 Facebook.

Alain de Botton Presents an ASMR Reading of Proust’s Swann’s Way

Marcel Proust wrote Remembrance of Things Past (À la recherche du temps perdu) over many years. The first volume, Swann’s Way (Du côté de chez Swann), came out in 1913, and the last volume, Time Regained (Le Temps retrouvé), was published posthumously in 1927. A monumental exploration of memory, time, and human experience, the seven-volume novel consists of 1,267,069 words. That doubles those in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, making it one of the longest novels ever written.

Above, you can hear Alain de Botton (author of How Proust Can Change Your Life) read the opening lines of Swann’s Way, with the goal of … well… putting you to sleep. His YouTube channel writes: Proust’s novel “is very beautiful – and in a way a little boring too. This is for all those among us who suffer from insomnia – to send you into the best kind of sleep.” Make sure you add this 26-minute recording to your sleep/ASMR playlist. For de Botton’s introduction to the literary philosophy of Marcel Proust, watch this video here.

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Watch the Trailer for the Long-Lost First Film Adaptation of The Great Gatsby (1926)

Despite being a perennial contender for the title of the Great American Novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has eluded a wholly satisfying cinematic adaptation. The most recent such attempt, now a decade old, was primarily a Baz Lurhmann kitsch extravaganza showcasing Leonardo DiCaprio; nor did its predecessors, which put in the title role such classic leading men as Robert Redford and Alan Ladd, ever distinguish themselves in an enduring way. But these pictures all met with happier fates than the very first Gatsby film, which came out in 1926 — just a year and a half after the novel itself — and seems not to have been seen since.

The first actor to portray Jay Gatsby on the silver screen was Warner Baxter, who would become the highest-paid star in Hollywood a decade later (and a fixture of Westerns, crime serials, and other B-movie genres half a decade after that). In the role of Daisy Buchanan was Lois Wilson, an Alabama beauty queen turned all-American silent-era starlet (who would later turn director); in that of Nick Carraway, Neil Hamilton, whom television audiences of the nineteen-sixties would come to know as Batman‘s Commissioner Gordon. But none of The Great Gatsby‘s casting choices will please the old-Hollywood connoisseur as much as that of a young, pre-Thin Man William Powell as George Wilson.

“The reckless driving that results in the death of Myrtle Wilson serves to bring out a sterling trait in Gatsby’s character,” New York Times critic Mourdaunt Hall wrote (in 1926) of a memorable scene in the novel that seems to have become a memorable scene in the film. “Powell, while not quite in his element, gives an unerring portrayal of the chauffeur.” Though Hall pronounced The Great Gatsby “quite a good entertainment” on the whole, he also pointed out that “it would have benefited by more imaginative direction” from Herbert Brenon, who “has succumbed to a number of ordinary movie flashes without inculcating much in the way of subtlety.”

For Brenon, a prolific auteur who directed no fewer than five pictures that year, this criticism could only have stung so much. But as later came to light, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald judged this first adaptation of the novel much more harshly. “We saw The Great Gatsby in the movies,” Zelda wrote to their daughter Scottie. “It’s ROTTEN and awful and terrible and we left.” Only its trailer survives today, and the glimpses it offers give little indication of what, exactly, would have spurred them to walk out. But now that the original Great Gatsby has entered the public domain, any of us could try our hand at making an adaptation without having to shell out for the rights. Maybe our interpretations wouldn’t please the Fitzgeralds either, but then, what ever did?

Related content:

Free: The Great Gatsby & Other Major Works by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Gertrude Stein Sends a “Review” of The Great Gatsby to F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

83 Years of Great Gatsby Book Cover Designs: A Photo Gallery

The Great Gatsby Is Now in the Public Domain and There’s a New Graphic Novel

Haruki Murakami Translates The Great Gatsby, the Novel That Influenced Him Most

Revealed: The Visual Effects Behind The Great Gatsby

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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 Facebook.

The Making of the Last Beatles Song, “Now and Then”: A Short Film

During the pandemic, Peter Jackson’s documentary, Get Back, used cutting-edge software to restore footage from the Beatles’ Let It Be recording sessions. If you watched the film, you know it was magic. Now, his technology offers us another gift–the final Beatles song.

As the short film explains above, the making of the song, “Now and Then,” began in 1995, when Paul, George and Ringo started working with a demo recorded by John Lennon during the 1970s. The project eventually stalled out when the trio couldn’t pristinely extract Lennon’s vocals. Then George Harrison died, and another two decades slipped by. Last year, Jackson’s software salvaged the project, allowing the Beatles to capture the elusive Lennon vocal and complete their final song. “Now and Then” is set to be released on November 3, accompanied by a music video created by Jackson himself. Stay tuned for that.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

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Leonardo da Vinci Created the Design for the Miter Lock, Which Is Still Used in the Panama and Suez Canals

“A Man, a Plan, a Canal — Panama”: we all know the piece of infrastructure to which this famous palindrome refers. But who, exactly, is the man? Some might imagine President Theodore Roosevelt in the role, given his oversight of the project’s acquisition by the United States of America. But it’s more commonly thought to be George W. Goethals, the Roosevelt-appointed chief engineer who brought it to completion two years early. Then again, one could also make the case for French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps, who originally conceived of not only the Panama Canal but also the Suez Canal. And as long as we’re reaching back in history, how does Leonardo da Vinci strike you?

True, Leonardo died roughly four centuries before the Panama Canal broke ground. But that its mechanism works at all owes to one of his many inventions: the miter lock, documented in one of his notebooks from 1497. The design, as explained in the Lesics video above, involves “two V-shaped wooden gates” attached with hinges to the sides of a river.

Given their shape, the water flowing through the river naturally forces the gates to close, one side forming a neat joint with the other. Inside, “as the water level rises, the pressure on the gate increases,” which seals it even more tightly. To facilitate re-opening the “perfect watertight lock” thus formed, Leonardo also specified a set of sluice valves in the gates that can be opened to even out the water levels again.

The twentieth-century builders of the Panama Canal benefited from technologies unavailable in Leonardo’s time: powerful motors, for instance, that could open and close the gates more efficiently than human muscle. And though it has undergone improvements over the past century (such as the replacement of the geared system attached to those motors with even more effective hydraulic cylinders), its structure and operation remain visibly derived from Leonardo’s elegant miter lock, as do those of the Suez Canal. About 80 ships pass through those two famous waterways each and every day, and ships of a size scarcely imaginable in the fifteenth century at that: not bad for a couple pieces of 500-year-old engineering.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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 Facebook.

Animated: The Rise & Fall of the Largest Cities in the World, from 3,000 BC to the 2020s

This is the first era of human history when more of us live in cities than not. That’s what we’ve often been told in recent years, at least, though the specifics do depend on what kinds of urbanized areas  you count as proper cities. Still, this would seem to mark an important inflection point in human history, the past five millennia of which has also been the history of great cities rising and falling, in absolute terms but also relative to one another in size, power, and influence. You can see this animated in the video above from cartographical-historical Youtuber Ollie Bye, previously featured here on Open Culture for his visualizations of the history of London, of the British Empire, and of the entire world.

Here, Bye charts the largest cities in the world between the year 3000 BC and today, indicating their size on the map while also ranking them on an ever-changing leaderboard below. Out front in the very beginning was Uruk, capital of the Mesopotamian cradle of civilization (and a prominent location in the Epic of Gilgamesh).

A thousand years later, it was the Egyptian capital of Thebes; a thousand years after that, it was the later Egyptian capital of Alexandria. From that point on, the shuffle at the bottom of the screen grows more and more rapid: the title of largest city in the world is lost by Constantinople to Ctesiphon; by Lin’an, briefly, to Cairo, and then to Hangzhou; by London to New York.

It was in the nineteen-fifties that Tokyo — a city left in shambles by the Second World War a decade earlier — overtook New York for the top spot. There it has remained ever since, seeing off such different challengers in different eras as Osaka, Mexico City, and New Delhi. When Bye’s animation leaves off, in 2021, that last has a population of 31.1 million against Tokyo’s 37.3 million. Whether the Japanese capital has proportionately more power or influence in the world today than Beijing, São Paulo, or Los Angeles is, of course, a separate and less objective question. But no visitor to Tokyo can deny that it must have achieved something like the pinnacle of urban civilization per se — and has somehow kept the rents reasonable to boot.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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 Facebook.

Hear Classic Readings of Poe’s “The Raven” by Vincent Price, James Earl Jones, Christopher Walken, Neil Gaiman & More

It can seem that the writing of literature and the theory of literature occupy separate great houses, Game of Thrones-style, or even separate countries held apart by a great sea. Perhaps they war with each other, perhaps they studiously ignore each other or obliquely interact at tournaments with acronymic names like MLA and AWP. Like Thomas Pynchon’s characterization of the political right and left, scholars and writers represent opposing poles, the hothouse and the street. That rare beast, the academic poet, can seem like something of a unicorn, or dragon.

…Or like the ominous talking raven in Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous of poems.

The divide between theory and practice is a recent development, a product of state budgeting, political brinksmanship, the relentless publishing mills of academia that force scholars to find a pigeonhole and stay there…. In days past, poets and scholar/theorists frequently occupied the same place at the same time—Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley, and, of course, Poe, whose perennially popular “The Raven” serves as a point-by-point illustration for his theory of composition just as thoroughly as Eliot’s great works bear out his notion of the “objective correlative.”

Poe’s object, the titular creature, is an “archetypal symbol,” writes Dana Gioia, in a poem that aims for what its author calls a “unity of effect.” In his 1846 essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” Poe the poet/theorist tells us in great detail how “The Raven” satisfies all of his other criteria for literature as well, such as achieving its intent in a single sitting, using a repeated refrain, and so on.

Should we have any doubt about how much Poe wanted us to see the poem as the deliberate outcome of a conceptual scheme, we find him three years later, in 1849, the year of his death, delivering a lecture on the “Poetic Principle,” and concluding with a reading of “The Raven.”

John Moncure Daniel of the Richmond Semi-Weekly Examiner remarked after attending one of these talks that “the attention of many in this city is now directed to this singular performance.” At that point, Poe, who hardly made a dime from “The Raven,” had to suffer the indignity of having all of his work go out of print during his brief, unhappy lifetime. Moncure and the Examiner thereby furnished readers “with the only correct copy ever published,” previous appearances, it seems, having contained punctuation errors.

Nonetheless, for all of Poe’s pedantry and penury, “The Raven”‘s first appearances made him semi-famous. His readings were a sensation, and it’s a sure bet that his audiences came to hear him read the poem, not deliver a lecture on its principles. Oh, for some proto-Edison in the room with an early recording device. What would it be like to hear the mournful, grief-stricken, alcoholic genius—master of the macabre and inventor of the detective story—intone the raven’s enigmatic “Nevermore”?

While Poe’s speaking voice has receded irretrievably into history, his poetic voice may live close to forever. So mesmerizing are his meter and diction that many great actors known especially for their voices have become possessed by “The Raven.”

Likely when we think of the poem, what first comes to the mind’s ear is the voice of Vincent Price, or James Earl Jones, Christopher Lee, or Christopher Walken, all of whom have given “The Raven” its due.

And so have many other notables, such as the great Stan Lee, Poe successor Neil Gaiman, original Gomez Addams actor John Astin, and venerable Beat poet/scholar Anne Waldman (listen here). You will find those recitations here at this round-up of notable “Raven” readings, and if this somehow doesn’t satiate you, then check out Lou Reed’s take on the poem, the Grateful Dead’s musical tribute, “Raven Space,” or a reading in 100 different celebrity impressions.

Finally, we would be remiss not to mention The Simpsons’ James Earl Jones-narrated parody, a worthy teaching tool for distracted young visual learners. Is it a shame that we now think of “The Raven” as a Halloween yarn fit for the Treehouse of Horror or any number of enjoyable exercises in spooky oratory—rather than the theoretical thought experiment its author seemed to intend? Does Poe rotisserie in his grave as Homer snores in a wingback chair? Probably. But as the author told us himself at length, the poem works! It still never fails to excite our morbid curiosity, enchant our gothic sensibility, and maybe send a chill or two down the spine. Maybe we never really needed Poe to explain it to us.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017. We’re bringing it back for Halloween.

Related Content:

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

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Meet the Man Who Created the Iconic Emblem of the Day of the Dead: José Guadalupe Posada

Odds are you’re acquainted with the lady pictured above.

She’s called La Catrina, and her likeness adorns countless t-shirts and tote bags.

She is a popular Halloween costume and a mainstay of Day of the Dead celebrations.

She pops up in the animated family feature, Coco, to guide its young hero to the Land of the Dead. 

She’s spent the better part of a century making cameos in numerous artists works, most famously Diego Rivera’s surreal 1947 mural, Sueño de una Tarde Dominical en la Alameda Central, a fever dream that places her front and center, arm in arm with a distinguished-looking, mustachioed gent in a bowler hat.

That gent is her original creator, José Guadalupe Posada, a hardworking printmaker and political cartoonist who produced over 20,000 images during his lifetime, on subjects ranging from the Mexican Revolution and other events, both current and historical, to popular entertainment and the daily lives of average men and women. 

The artist frequently hammered his point home by depicting the parties in his works as calaveras – exuberant skeletons seemingly unaware they had lost all flesh and blood. 

Posada was still a teenager in 1871 when a hometown paper picked up his first cartoons. One reportedly enraged a local politician to such a degree that the paper was forced to cease publication.

La Catrina was published posthumously in 1913, as a broadsheet illustration accompanying a satirical poem about chickpea vendors. It’s believed that Posada intended his image to be a jab at upper class Mexican women obsessed with European fashions.

(Rivera was the one who changed her name from La Cucaracha – the cockroach – to the much more lyrical La Catrina. He also planted the seed that Posada, who died penniless and largely forgotten, had been a revolutionary. The Mexican progressive printmaking collective El Taller Grafica Popular took graphic inspiration from his calaveras, while embracing and disseminating this myth.

What’s that they say about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery?

After Posada’s death, his colleagues at the publishing firm of Antonio Vanegas Arroyor, saved time and money by continuing to produce work from his blocks and plates. 

As Jim Nikas, founding director of the Posada Art Foundation told Atlas Obscura “If the image was neutral enough, you could change the text and use it as an illustration for any story.”

Whether increasing public awareness of harmful agricultural pesticides, protesting American immigration policies, or, uh, selling tequila, 21st century artists, activists, and entrepreneurs continue to harness Posada’s vision for their own purposes.

Nikas, who sampled Posada’s La Calavera de Don Quixote for an Occupy Wall Street collaboration with Art Hazelwood and Marsha Shaw writes that “the calavera is something we all have biologically in common and, accordingly, may be used to convey messages:

Posada and his publishers used depictions of calaveras not only to remind us of our collective mortality but also to shed light. His illustrations were often satirical caricatures uprooted from the current political climate and used to poke fun at our human condition. This use was evolutionary, occurring over time, and as applicable today as it was over a century ago.

See more of José Guadalupe Posada’s calaveras in the Library of Congress’ Prints and Photographs Division collection.

– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

Jerry Garcia Explains How Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein Changed His Life (1995)

If you’re looking for a classic monster movie to watch this Halloween, and one that will also give you a few non-ironic laughs along the way, you’d do well to put on Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. But don’t take this recommendation from me: take it from the Grateful Dead’s own Jerry Garcia, who recalls his own formative viewing experience in the clip above from a 1995 broadcast of AMC’s The Movie that Changed My Life. When Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein came out, in 1948, he was just six years old: too tender an age, it seems, to appreciate the monstrous spectacle to which his mother had taken him. “I mostly hid behind the seats,” he remembers. “It was just pure panic.”

Unaware even of who Abbott and Costello were, the young Garcia could hardly have perceived the outwardly horrific picture’s lighthearted comic intentions. Yet it compelled him nevertheless, and even resonated with him on other emotional levels not having to do with fear.

“My father had died the previous year, in ’47, so that also made it kind of a heavy time in my life, emotionally,” he says, and one that perhaps gave him a certain receptiveness to the notion of “a dead thing brought to life.” Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein features not just the titular doctor’s monster, played by Glenn Strange, but also Lon Chaney Jr. as the Wolf Man and Bela Lugosi as Dracula. “This was a juicy cast, and it was the last time these characters had dignity.”

For Garcia, these Hollywood monsters “became figures of tremendous fascination,” which led him to discover cultural movements like German expressionist theater and film. While they cast a spell of primal fear — “I think there was some desire on my part to embrace that, to not let that control me” — Abbott and Costello, for their part, suggested to him the great promise of comedy: “It’s a smart strategy to get by in life. If you’re not powerful, if you’re not huge, if you’re not muscular, if intimidation is too much work for you, it works good at disarming powerful adversaries.” Garcia’s “general fascination with the bizarre” also originated with Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, which showed him that “there are things in this world that are really weird” — a fact of which we could all stand to remind ourselves each and every Halloween.

Related content:

The Very First Film Adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a Thomas Edison Production (1910)

New Jerry Garcia Web Site Features 5,000 Hours of Free Music, Plus Some Fantastic Archival Material

Reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein on Its 200th Anniversary: An Animated Primer to the Great Monster Story & Technology Cautionary Tale

Jerry Garcia Talks About the Birth of the Grateful Dead & Playing Kesey’s Acid Tests in New Animated Video

Bela Lugosi Discusses His Drug Habit as He Leaves the Hospital in 1955

Stream a Massive Archive of Grateful Dead Concerts from 1965-1995

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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 Facebook.

The Writing Systems of the World Explained, from the Latin Alphabet to the Abugidas of India

The Korean alphabet, hangul, is “the most scientific writing system.” One often hears that in South Korea, a society that has taken to heart Asia scholar Edwin O. Reischauer’s description of hangul as “perhaps the most scientific system of writing in general use in any country.” But whatever their scientific credentials, all the other writing systems in use (and indeed out of use) have fascinating qualities of their own, a range of which are explained in the UsefulCharts video above on the writing systems of the world — not just the alphabets of the world, mind you, but also the abjads, the syllabaries, the logo-syllabaries, and the abugidas.

The symbols used in an abjad, like that of Hebrew or Arabic (or ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs), represent only consonants; as for vowels, “the readers are expected to add them in on their own, based on context.” In a syllabary, like the hiragana and katakana used in Japanese, each character represents a syllable: に for “ni,” ほ for “ho,” ん for “n” (though linguists no doubt argue about whether that last should really count as a syllable).

But most of the Japanese writing is adapted from the Chinese one, a logo-syllabary in which “a single character can stand for a unique syllable or an entire word or idea,” which results in “thousands of characters that need to be learned for basic literacy.”

Abugidas, primarily used in Indian and southeast Asian languages (but also to write Amharic, the language of Ethiopia), “have unique characters both for vowels and for consonants. However, these vowel letters are generally only used in situations where a word begins with a vowel.” Otherwise, a “small change” made to a consonant character indicates which vowel follows. However mechanically or aesthetically diverse they may appear, none of these writing systems (all pictured on a poster from UsefulCharts, available for $19.95 USD) are so fundamentally different that they can’t be mastered by a non-native with time and effort. Not that they’re all as easy as hangul, which — as its commissioner King Sejong the Great put it, in another quotable quote — a wise man can learn before the morning is over, and a stupid man can learn in ten days.

Related Content:

How Writing Has Spread Across the World, from 3000 BC to This Year: An Animated Map

The Evolution of the Alphabet: A Colorful Flowchart, Covering 3,800 Years, Takes You From Ancient Egypt to Today

How to Read Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs: A British Museum Curator Explains

The Atlas of Endangered Alphabets: A Free Online Atlas That Helps Preserve Writing Systems That May Soon Disappear

Discover Nüshu, a 19th-Century Chinese Writing System That Only Women Knew How to Write

How to Write in Cuneiform, the Oldest Writing System in the World: A Short, Charming Introduction

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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 Facebook.

 


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