Isaac Asimov Predicts the Future on The David Letterman Show (1980)

in Sci Fi, Television | December 10th, 2025

In 1980, Newsweek published a cantankerous and sadly on-the-nose diagnosis of the United States’ “cult of ignorance” — written by one Isaac Asimov, “professor of biochemistry at Boston University School of Medicine” and “author of 212 books, most of them on various scientific subjects for the general public.” Given this intimidating biography, and the fact that Asimov believed that “hardly anyone can read” in the U.S., we might expect the science fiction legend wanted nothing to do with television. We would be wrong.

Asimov seemed to love TV. In 1987, for example, the four-time Hugo winner wrote a humorously critical takedown of ALF for TV Guide. And he was a consummate TV entertainer, making his first major TV appearance on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show in 1968, appearing four times on The Mike Douglas Show in the next few years, and giving his final television interviews to Dick Cavett in a two-part series in 1989. The same year he wrote about America’s cult of ignorance, he appeared on The David Letterman show to crack wise with the biggest wiseass on TV. Asimov held his own and then some.

“Asimov, sixty in this video, proves himself a natural comedian,” writes the Melville House blog; “Letterman, thirty-three, can barely keep up.” Surely Asimov’s banter had nothing to do with The David Letterman Show’s cancellation three days later. (Letterman was back on the air for eleven seasons two years later.) Their interview ranges widely from pop culture (Asimov confesses his appreciation for both Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back) to “the future of medicine, space exploration, hope for mankind, and much more,” Vic Sage writes at Pop Culture Retrorama.

Asimov’s dry delivery — honed during his English-and-Yiddish-speaking Brooklyn childhood — is delightful. But the writer, teacher, and scientist hasn’t only come on TV to crack jokes, promote a book, and flaunt his muttonchops. He wants to educate his fellow Americans about the state of the future. (His Newsweek bio was outdated. As Letterman says, his appearance marked the publication of his 221st book.) Like Hari Seldon, the hero of his 1951 novel Foundation, Asimov felt confident in his ability to predict the course of human progress (or regress, as the case may be).

He also felt confident answering questions about what to do with outer space, and where to “put more men,” as Letterman says. His recommendation to build “factories” may strike us as a banal forerunner of Jeff Bezos’ even more banal plans for office parks in space. Asimov boasts of the vision he had of “pocket computers” in 1950 — hardly a reality in 1980. Dave complains about how complicated computers are, and Asimov accurately predicts that as technology catches up, they will get simpler to use. “But these are little things,” he says. “I never tried to predict. I just tried to write stories to pay my way through college.” He must have paid it several times over, and he seemed to get more right than he got wrong. See more of Asimov’s predictions in the links below.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2021.

In 1964, Isaac Asimov Predicts What the World Will Look Like Today: Self-Driving Cars, Video Calls, Fake Meats & More

Isaac Asimov Predicts in 1983 What the World Will Look Like in 2019: Computerization, Global Co-operation, Leisure Time & Moon Mining

Isaac Asimov Laments the “Cult of Ignorance” in the United States (1980)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.

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See What the Original Mona Lisa Likely Looked Like

in Art, History | December 9th, 2025

If you want to see the Mona Lisa in real life, your first thought may not be to head to the Prado. But according to a school of thought that has emerged in recent years, the Mona Lisa in Madrid has a greater claim to artistic faithfulness than the one in Paris. That’s because researchers have discovered compelling evidence suggesting that what was long considered just another copy of the most famous painting in the world wasn’t made after Leonardo had completed the original, but concurrently with the original, probably by one of his students. Over half a millennium, in this view, the Prado’s Mona Lisa has retained the colors and details the Louvre’s has lost, resulting in its preservation of Leonardo’s intentions today.

Infrared photography has even revealed, says the narrator of the new Inspiraggio video above, that both paintings “share the same changes in the original sketch. For years, it has been known that Leonardo made small corrections to the shape of the Mona Lisa’s hands, adjustments to the line of the eyes, and subtle modifications to the curve of the face,” the very same corrections that were found in the newly examined copy.

Unlike other copies, the Prado’s version uses “incredibly expensive pigments” such as lapis lazuli—imported from Afghanistan—for the sky. This only became evident during the 2012 restoration, when the background, long hidden under a thick layer of black, was finally uncovered.

Thereafter, the Prado Mona Lisa was exhibited alongside the Mona Lisa at the Louvre in a temporary exhibition. This gave the public the chance to see both how similar they look, and how different. Though undeniably La Gioconda, the copy doesn’t seem quite “right,” in large part because it hasn’t deteriorated in the manner or to the degree of the original. Leonardo painted it on a poplar wood panel that has given way to countless small cracks, and the layers of yellow varnish added over the centuries have darkened to give the whole image a sepia tone. The result, of course, is the texture and coloring we’ve come to associate with the Mona Lisa by ceaseless exposure to her in popular culture, even if we’ve never seen any version hanging in any museum. If the Prado’s copy really does reflect Leonardo’s original artistic choices, we can put at least one hotly debated matter to rest: the lady really did have eyebrows.

Did Leonardo da Vinci Paint a First Mona Lisa Before the Mona Lisa?

How Did the Mona Lisa Become the World’s Most Famous Painting?: It’s Not What You Think

Original Portrait of the Mona Lisa Found Beneath the Paint Layers of da Vinci’s Masterpiece

An Immaculate Copy of Leonardo’s The Last Supper Digitized by Google: View It in High Resolution Online

A Chinese Painter Specializing in Copying Van Gogh Paintings Travels to Amsterdam & Sees Van Gogh’s Masterpieces for the First Time

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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Read the Uplifting Letter That Albert Einstein Sent to Marie Curie During a Time of Personal Crisis (1911)

in Chemistry, Letters, Physics | December 9th, 2025

Marie Curie’s 1911 Nobel Prize win, her second, for the discovery of radium and polonium, would have been cause for public celebration in her adopted France, but for the nearly simultaneous revelation of her affair with fellow physicist Paul Langevin, the fellow standing to the right of a 32-year-old Albert Einstein in the above group photo from the 1911 Solvay Conference in Physics.

Both stories broke while Curie—unsurprisingly, the sole woman in the photo—was attending the conference in Brussels.

Equally unsurprisingly, the press preferred le scandale to la réalisation scientifique. Sex sells, then and now.

The fires of radium which beam so mysteriously…have just lit a fire in the heart of one of the scientists who studies their action so devotedly; and the wife and the children of this scientist are in tears.…

—Le Journal, November 4, 1911

There’s no denying that the affair was painful for Langevin’s family, particularly his wife, Jeanne, who supplied the media with incriminating letters from Curie to her husband. She must have been aware that Curie would be the one to bear the brunt of the public’s disapproval. Double standards with regard to gender are nothing new.

A furious throng gathered outside of Curie’s house and anti-Semitic papers, dissatisfied with labeling the pioneering scientist a mere home wrecker, declared—erroneously—that she was Jewish. The timeline was tweaked to suggest that Curie had taken up with Langevin prior to her husband’s death. Fellow radiochemist Bertram Boltwood seized the opportunity to declare that “she is exactly what I always thought she was, a detestable idiot.”

In the midst of this, Einstein, who had made Curie’s acquaintance at the conference, proved himself a true friend with a “don’t let the bastards get you down” letter, written on November 23. Other than a delicate allusion to Langevin as a person with whom he felt privileged to be in contact, he refrained from mentioning the cause of her misfortune.

A friendly word can go a long way in times of disgrace, and Einstein supplied his new friend with some stoutly unequivocal ones, denouncing the scandalmongers as “reptiles” feasting on sensationalistic “hogwash”:

Highly esteemed Mrs. Curie,

Do not laugh at me for writing you without having anything sensible to say. But I am so enraged by the base manner in which the public is presently daring to concern itself with you that I absolutely must give vent to this feeling. However, I am convinced that you consistently despise this rabble, whether it obsequiously lavishes respect on you or whether it attempts to satiate its lust for sensationalism! I am impelled to tell you how much I have come to admire your intellect, your drive, and your honesty, and that I consider myself lucky to have made your personal acquaintance in Brussels. Anyone who does not number among these reptiles is certainly happy, now as before, that we have such personages among us as you, and Langevin too, real people with whom one feels privileged to be in contact. If the rabble continues to occupy itself with you, then simply don’t read that hogwash, but rather leave it to the reptile for whom it has been fabricated.

With most amicable regards to you, Langevin, and Perrin, yours very truly,

A. Einstein

PS I have determined the statistical law of motion of the diatomic molecule in Planck’s radiation field by means of a comical witticism, naturally under the constraint that the structure’s motion follows the laws of standard mechanics. My hope that this law is valid in reality is very small, though.

That deliberately geeky postscript amounts to another sweet show of support. Perhaps it fortified Curie when a week later, she received a letter from Nobel Committee member Svante Arrhenius, urging her to skip the Prize ceremony in Stockholm. Curie rejected Arrhenius’ suggestion thusly:

The prize has been awarded for the discovery of radium and polonium. I believe that there is no connection between my scientific work and the facts of private life. I cannot accept … that the appreciation of the value of scientific work should be influenced by libel and slander concerning private life.

For a more in-depth look at Marie Curie’s nightmarish November, refer to “Honor and Dishonor” the sixteenth chapter in Barbara Goldsmith’s Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2018.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator and theater maker in NYC.

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How Frank Gehry (RIP) and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Changed Architecture

in Architecture | December 8th, 2025

It felt, for quite some time there, like the age of Frank Gehry would never end. But now that the latest defining figure of American architecture — or technically, Canadian-American architecture — has died at the age of 96, the time has come to ask when, exactly, his age began. Or rather, with which building: Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles? The Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris? The radical renovation of his own humble Santa Monica home often cited at the origin point of the metallic, deliberately incongruous, often nearly alien aesthetic now recognized around the world? According to the B1M video above, it is to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao we must look to if we wish to understand the architecture of Frank Gehry — and much else besides.

The Guggenheim Bilbao was a challenging project when it was first conceived in the early nineteen-nineties, but then, Bilbao was a challenged setting. Once a prosperous port city, the Basque metropolis had fallen on hard times indeed, rapidly deindustrializing without much in the way of alternative appeal. Bilbao’s slight history with tourism went back to the mid-nineteenth century, but for many Spaniards, the prospect of turning the place into an international destination seemed remote at best. Still, an ambitious development plan was devised involving new infrastructure, including the city’s first metro system, centered around a branch of New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

With its original Fifth Avenue location designed by Frank Lloyd Wright (Gehry’s predecessor in the cultural role of the one architect, or “starchitect,” of whom everyone has heard), that institution had a certain degree of experience with daring building designs. Familiar though the look of its gleaming sculptural curves may be today, actually constructing their non-Euclidean geometric forms in reality required technologies never before widely employed in architecture, including the early 3D-modeling system CATIA (this video’s sponsor, incidentally). Nor was the search for the right exterior texture to reflect Bilbao’s distinctively cloudy skies especially straightforward, but it did benefit from good timing: Gehry determined that titanium could do the job, whereupon the mass decommissioning of Soviet submarines happened to dump a great deal of that material on the market.

In these technological, political, and economic ways, the Guggenheim Bilbao was a product of its time. As it happened, it and the associated redevelopments did, in fact, breathe new life into the city, which has inspired a decades-long “Bilbao effect” on projects around the world with similar goals, some of them also featuring Gehry-designed cultural institutions. As the B1M host Fred Mills puts it, “Telling a story like this really is like reading out a list of things that we, today, take for granted: the idea that a museum could be an international tourist attraction, the technology, the 3D design.” And, like most architects, Gehry is survived by not just his built legacy, but also a series of projects not yet complete — including the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, scheduled to open its doors next year.

You can see a photo gallery of Gehry’s other groundbreaking architectural projects at The Guardian.

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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 and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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“The Matilda Effect”: How Pioneering Women Scientists Have Been Written Out of Science History

in Gender, History, Science | December 8th, 2025

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

The history of science, like most every history we learn, comes to us as a procession of great, almost exclusively white, men, unbroken but for the occasional token woman—well-deserving of her honors but seemingly anomalous nonetheless. “If you believe the history books,” notes the Timeline series The Matilda Effect, “science is a guy thing. Discoveries are made by men, which spur further innovation by men, followed by acclaim and prizes for men. But too often, there is an unsung woman genius who deserves just as much credit” and who has been overshadowed by male colleagues who grabbed the glory.

In 1993, Cornell University historian of science Margaret Rossiter dubbed the denial of recognition to women scientists “the Matilda effect,” for suffragist and abolitionist Matilda Joslyn Gage, whose 1893 essay “Woman as an Inventor” protested the common assertion that “woman… possesses no inventive or mechanical genius.” Such assertions, Gage proceeded to demonstrate, “are carelessly or ignorantly made… although woman’s scientific education has been grossly neglected, yet some of the most important inventions of the world are due to her.”

Over 100 years later, Rossiter’s tenacious work in unearthing the contributions of U.S. women scientists inspired the History of Science Society to name a prestigious prize after her. The Timeline series profiles a few of the women whom it describes as prime examples of the Matilda effect, including Dr. Lise Meitner, the Austrian-born physicist and pioneer of nuclear technology who escaped the Nazis and became known in her time as “the Jewish Mother of the Bomb,” though she had nothing to do with the atomic bomb. Instead, “Meitner led the research that ultimately discovered nuclear fission.” But Meitner would become “little more than a footnote in the history of Nazi scientists and the birth of the Atomic age.”

Instead, Meitner’s colleague Otto Hahn received the accolades, a Nobel Prize in Chemistry and “renown as the discoverer of nuclear fission. Meitner, who directed Hahn’s most significant experiments and calculated the energy release resulting from fission, received a few essentialist headlines followed by decades of obscurity.” (See Meitner and Hahn in the photo above.) Likewise, the name of Alice Augusta Ball has been “all but scrubbed from the history of medicine,” though it was Ball, an African American chemist from Seattle, Washington, who pioneered what became known as the Dean Method, a revolutionary treatment for leprosy.

Ball conducted her research at the University of Hawaii, but she tragically died at the age of 24, in what was likely a lab accident, before the results could be published. Instead, University President Dr. Arthur Dean, who had co-taught chemistry classes with Ball, continued her work. But he failed “to mention Ball’s key contribution” despite protestations from Dr. Harry Hollmann, a surgeon who worked with Ball on treating leprosy patients. Dean claimed credit and published their work under his name. Decades later, “the scant archival trail of Alice Ball was rediscovered…. In 2000, a plaque was installed at the University of Hawaii commemorating Ball’s accomplishments.”

Other women in the Matilda effect series include bacterial geneticist Esther Lederberg, who made amazing discoveries in genetics that won her husband a Nobel Prize; Irish astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who discovered the first radio pulsars in 1967, but was excluded from the Nobel awarded to her thesis supervisor Antony Hewish and astronomer Martin Ryle. A similar fate befell Dr. Rosalind Franklin, the chemist excluded from the Nobel awarded to her colleagues James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins for the discovery of DNA.

These prominent examples are but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to women who made significant contributions to scientific history and were rewarded by being written out of it and denied awards and recognition in their lifetime. For more on the history of U.S. women in science and the social forces that worked to exclude them, see Margaret Rossiter’s three-volume Women Scientists in America series: Struggles and Strategies to 1940, Before Affirmative Action, 1940–1972, and Forging a New World since 1972. And read Timeline’s Matilda Effect series of articles here.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2018.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.

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The Gnostic Gospels: An Introduction to the Forbidden Teachings of Jesus

in History, Religion | December 5th, 2025

It would be impossible to understand Western civilization without understanding the history of Christianity. But in order to do that, it may serve us well to think of it as the history of Christianities, plural. So suggests Hochelaga creator Tommie Trelawny in the new video above, which explains the Gnostic Gospels, the “forbidden teachings of Jesus.” As a system of beliefs, Gnosticism is a fairly far cry from the mainstream forms of Christianity with which most of us are familiar today. But its surviving texts may sound uncannily familiar, despite also involving outlandish-sounding elements that seem to belong to another civilization entirely. Gnostic teachings have long been considered heresy by Christians, but do they really represent just a different evolutionary branch of the faith: another Christianity?

Religious scholars of many stripes have concerned themselves with few matters as intensively as they have with theodicy, that is, the matter of how to square the notion of a good, omnipotent deity with the obvious existence of evil down here in the world. Since its loose coalition of beliefs came together in the late first century, Gnosticism has proposed an elegant solution: that the deity is not, in fact, good, or rather, that under the transcendent, unknowable God is a much more poorly behaved “demiurge” who displays an indifference, at best, to the lot of humanity. In this view, our resulting world is less a perfect creation than a cosmic mistake — a proposition that would account for certain of its qualities we experience on the day-to-day level, even if we have no particular religious proclivities.

Thanks to the discovery of Egypt’s Nag Hammadi library in 1945, we can directly access many of the teachings of the so-called “Gnostic Gospels.” They tell us, to make a few grand simplifications, that our reality is illusory and that we can only come to grasp the true nature of both it and ourselves through esoteric learning, gnosis being the ancient Greek term for knowledge. This worldview may bring to mind that of certain Greek philosophers, or indeed that of The Matrix, a near-obligatory reference for a video like this. A quarter-century on from that movie, it’s not hard to understand why it resonated with the sizable-enough proportion of humanity who feel alienated from who they really are or what the world really is — and who, any millennium now, would make reasonably promising candidates to bring about a Gnostic revival.

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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 and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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George Orwell’s Six Rules for Writing Clear and Tight Prose

in Politics, Writing | December 4th, 2025

Image via Wikimedia Commons

Most everyone who knows the work of George Orwell knows his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” (published here), in which he rails against careless, confusing, and unclear prose. “Our civilization is decadent,” he argues, “and our language… must inevitably share in the general collapse.” The examples Orwell quotes are all guilty in various ways of “staleness of imagery” and “lack of precision.”

Ultimately, Orwell claims, bad writing results from corrupt thinking, and often attempts to make palatable corrupt acts: “Political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.” His examples of colonialism, forced deportations, and bombing campaigns find ready analogues in our own time. Pay attention to how the next article, interview, or book you read uses language “favorable to political conformity” to soften terrible things.

Orwell’s analysis identifies several culprits that obscure meaning and lead to whole paragraphs of bombastic, empty prose:

Dying metaphors: essentially clichés, which “have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.”

Operators or verbal false limbs: these are the wordy, awkward constructions in place of a single, simple word. Some examples he gives include “exhibit a tendency to,” “serve the purpose of,” “play a leading part in,” “have the effect of.” (One particular peeve of mine when I taught English composition was the phrase “due to the fact that” for the far simpler “because.”)

Pretentious diction: Orwell identifies a number of words he says “are used to dress up a simple statement and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgments.” He also includes in this category “jargon peculiar to Marxist writing” (“petty bourgeois,” “lackey,” “flunkey,” “hyena”).

Meaningless words: Abstractions, such as “romantic,” “plastic,” “values,” “human,” “sentimental,” etc. used “in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader.” Orwell also damns such political buzzwords as “democracy,” “socialism,” “freedom,” “patriotic,” “justice,” and “fascism,” since they each have “several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another.”

Most readers of Orwell’s essay inevitably point out that Orwell himself has committed some of the faults he finds in others, but will also, with some introspection, find those same faults in their own writing. Anyone who writes in an institutional context—be it academia, journalism, or the corporate world—acquires all sorts of bad habits that must be broken with deliberate intent. “The process” of learning bad writing habits “is reversible” Orwell promises, “if one is willing to take the necessary trouble.” How should we proceed? These are the rules Orwell suggests:

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

What constitutes “outright barbarous” wording he does not say, exactly. As the internet cliché has it: Your Mileage May Vary. You may find creative ways to break these rules without thereby being obscure or justifying mass murder.

But Orwell does preface his guidelines with some very sound advice: “Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose—not simply accept—the phrases that will best cover the meaning.” Not only does this practice get us closer to using clear, specific, concrete language, but it results in writing that grounds our readers in the sensory world we all share to some degree, rather than the airy world of abstract thought and belief that we don’t.

These “elementary” rules do not cover “the literary use of language,” writes Orwell, “but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought.” In the almost eighty years since his essay, the quality of English prose has likely not improved, but our ready access to writing guides of all kinds has. Those who care about clarity of thought and responsible use of rhetoric would do well to consult them often, and to read, or re-read, Orwell’s essay.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.

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Did Tintin Creator Hergé Collaborate with the Nazis? A Historical Investigation

in Art, Comics/Cartoons, History | December 4th, 2025

The Adventures of Tintin may be a children’s comic series from mid-twentieth-century Europe, but its appeal has long since transcended the boundaries of form, culture, and generation. In fact, many if not most seriously dedicated fans of Tintin are in middle age and beyond, and few of them can have avoided ever considering the question of his creator’s activities during the Second World War. Georges Remi, known by the nom de plume Hergé, was born to a lower-middle-class family in a Brussels suburb in 1907: utterly mundane beginnings, perhaps, but ones that would lead to what the apocryphal ancient Chinese curse calls interesting times, even for a young man whose interests didn’t run far past scouting and drawing.

After serving in the Belgian army, explains history YouTuber Mark Felton in his new video above, Remi was hired by the conservative Catholic paper Le Vingtième Siècle to draw comics for its children’s supplement Le Petit Vingtième. It was there that he became Hergé and created the boy reporter Tintin, whom the paper’s editor asked to be sent to a fictionalized Soviet Union in order to expose the evils of the Bolsheviks. Popularity came immediately, and built up to the degree that an actor was hired to put his hair into a quiff and “return” by train to an appreciative crowd in Brussels upon the story’s conclusion. There followed the further adventures of Tintin in the Congo (at the time, a Belgian colony) and Tintin in America, both of which have since come in for a great deal of criticism for their reliance on stereotypes.

Though very much his own artist, Hergé at this stage let the politics of Tintin stories be dictated by higher-ups. Conceived in response to Japan’s invasion of Manchuria, The Blue Lotus, from 1934, did offer him an opportunity to increase the realism of his art, rendering the look and feel of China as accurately as his research could make possible; he continued to incorporate large amounts of detail from all over the world into The Broken Ear, The Black Island, and King Ottokar’s Sceptre. Though that last deals with fictional European countries, it also clearly satirizes the invasive tendencies of Hitler’s Germany — which would come for Hergé’s homeland in 1940, shutting down Le Petit Vingtième, putting him out of a job, and even requisitioning his home.

Eventually, Hergé landed on his feet and joined Le Soir, Belgium’s largest French-language newspaper. Though he could publish Tintin there, the Nazis had turned it into their ideological mouthpiece, a fact that didn’t reflect well on Hergé after the Allied victory. He found himself blacklisted and categorized with the thousands of Belgian collaborators who could receive the death penalty or life in prison, but an investigation into his case found him to be “a blunderer rather than a traitor” — shades of P. G. Wodehouse making broadcasts about the lighter side of internment for the Gestapo. His good standing as a citizen and artist was eventually restored, though even today, his wartime activities are occasionally called into question. Still, he was able to continue Tintin’s adventures until he died in 1983, engaging in only the kind of collaboration he could do with his staff at Studios Hergé.

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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 and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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Why Do Filmmakers Call The Battle of Algiers the Greatest War Movie Ever?: Watch It Free Online

in Film, History | December 3rd, 2025

Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film, the loose Thomas Pynchon adaptation One Battle After Another, serves up many a memorable scene. But for a certain kind of cinephile, nothing — not the terrorist attacks, not the chases, not the swerves into askew comedy — sticks in the mind quite so much as the moment in which Leonardo diCaprio’s stoned protagonist tunes in to a broadcast of Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers. First released in 1966 (and currently free to watch on YouTube in certain regions), that picture has now been a mainstay of film-studies syllabi long enough that one forgets just how much it would have startled its earliest viewers, more than a few of whom had no idea whether they were watching a war movie or genuine Algerian War newsreel footage.

Some of those viewers included major filmmakers, not least Stanley Kubrick, who later described all films as “false documentaries,” and Pontecorvo’s work as an especially impressive example thereof. Anthony Frewin, who worked as Kubrick’s personal assistant, remembers the director telling him that “I couldn’t really understand what cinema was capable of without seeing The Battle of Algiers. He was still enthusing about it prior to his death.”

The new StudioBinder video at the top of the post also includes testimonials from a host of other auteurs including Werner Herzog, Steven Soderbergh, Oliver Stone, Alfonso Cuarón, Spike Lee, Mira Nair, and Christopher Nolan.

Kathryn Bigelow — who, as the director of pictures like The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, knows something about spinning recent military conflicts into compelling, realistic thrillers — pulled The Battle of Algiers from the shelves on her visit to the Criterion Collection’s closet. She calls it “probably my favorite movie of all time,” adding that “the metronome of tension is almost insufferable, but I say that as a compliment.” A young Roger Ebert, in his contemporary review of the film, warned that it “may be a deeper film experience than many audiences can withstand: too cynical, too true, too cruel and too heartbreaking. It is about the Algerian war, but those not interested in Algeria may substitute another war.”

Such a “universal frame of reference” is also common to the other highlights of the Italian neorealist movement, which also include Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City, Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, and Luchino Visconti’s The Earth Trembles, with their stark black-and-white cinematography, their real, often still war-torn locations, and their mostly non-professional actors. Despite their venerability, these films can remind even us twenty-first-century viewers who feel as if we’ve seen it all just how much cinematic potential remains untapped. As Paul Thomas Anderson puts it, “It’s always a good idea to watch The Battle of Algiers again, just as a cinematic exercise to get you excited” — no alteration of consciousness required beforehand.

Fear and Desire: Stanley Kubrick’s First and Least-Seen Feature Film (1953)

How Postwar Italian Cinema Created La Dolce Vita and Then the Paparazzi

Animated Introductions to Edward Said’s Groundbreaking Book Orientalism

The Film Music of Ennio Morricone (RIP) Beautifully Performed by the Danish National Symphony Orchestra Play: “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” & Much More

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Oldest Known Depiction of Human Sexuality: The Turin Papyrus (Circa 1150 B.C.E.)

in Archaeology, History, Life | December 3rd, 2025

Image via Wikimedia Commons

With the old joke about every generation thinking they invented sex, Listverse brings us the papyrus above, the oldest depiction of sex on record. Painted sometime in the Ramesside Period (1292–1075 B.C.E.), the fragments above—called the “Turin Erotic Papyrus” because of their “discovery” in the Egyptian Museum of Turin, Italy—only hint at the frank versions of ancient sex they depict (see a graphic partial reconstruction at the bottom of the post—probably NSFW). The number of sexual positions the papyrus illustrates—twelve in all—“fall somewhere between impressively acrobatic and unnervingly ambitious,” one even involving a chariot. Apart from its obvious fertility symbols, writes archaeology blog Ancient Peoples, the papyrus also has a “humorous and/or satirical” purpose, and probably a male audience—evidenced, perhaps, by its resemblance to 70’s porn: “the men are mostly unkempt, unshaven, and balding […], whereas the women are the ideal of beauty in Egypt.”

In fact the erotic portion of the papyrus was only made public in the 1970s. Egyptologists have known of the larger scroll, technically called “Papyrus Turin 55001” since the 1820s. On the right side of the papyrus (above) animals perform various human tasks as musicians, soldiers, and artisans. The artist meant this piece too as satire, Ancient Peoples alleges. Like ancient Roman and Greek satirical art, the animals may represent supposed archetypal aspects of the artists and tradesmen shown here. All very interesting, but of course the real interest in Papyrus Turin 55001 is of the prurient variety.

Egyptology student Caroline Seawright points us toward the rather lurid History Channel segment on the erotic papyrus, which calls the pictures “one of the most shocking sets of images in the whole of antiquity.” Against a perception of ancient Egyptians as “buttoned-up and repressed,” the video, and Seawright, detail the ways in which the culture reveled in a stylized ritual sexuality quite different from our own limited mores.

Sacred temple prostitutes held a privileged position and mythological narratives incorporated unbiased descriptions of homosexuality and transgenderism. Ancient Egyptians even expected to have sex after death, attaching fabricated organs to their mummies. The above applies mainly to a certain class of Egyptian. As archaeologist David O’Connor points out, the Turin Erotic Papyrus’ high “artistic merit” marks it as within the provenance of “an elite owner and audience.” You can find more detailed images from a different reconstruction of the erotic papyrus here.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.

3,200-Year-Old Egyptian Tablet Records Excuses for Why People Missed Work: “The Scorpion Bit Him,” “Brewing Beer” & More

Sex and Alcohol in Medieval Times: A Look into the Pleasures of the Middle Ages

Scientists Discover that Ancient Egyptians Drank Hallucinogenic Cocktails from 2,300 Year-Old Mug

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

The Unlikely Friendship of Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla

in History, Literature, Technology | December 2nd, 2025

Mark Twain was, in the estimation of many, the United States of America’s first truly homegrown man of letters. And in keeping with what would be recognized as the can-do American spirit, he couldn’t resist putting himself forth now and again as a man of science — or, more practically, a man of technology. Here on Open Culture, we’ve previously featured his patented inventions (including a better bra strap), the typewriter of which he made pioneering use to write a book, and even the internet-predicting story he wrote in 1898. Given Twain’s inclinations, his fame, and the time in which he lived, it may come as no surprise to hear that he also struck up a friendship with the much-romanticized inventor Nikola Tesla.

As it happens, Tesla had become a fan of Twain’s long before they met, having found solace in the American writer’s books provided during a long, near-fatal stretch of childhood illness. He credits his recovery with the laughter that reading material provided him, and one imagines seeing life in the U.S. through Twain’s eyes played some part in his eventual emigration there.

By that point, Twain himself was living in Europe, though his frequent visits to New York meant that he could drop by Tesla’s lab and see how his latest experiments with electricity were going. It was there, in 1894, that the two men took the photograph above, in which Twain holds a vacuum lamp engineered by Tesla and powered (out of frame) by the electromagnetic coil that bears his name.

As Ian Harvey writes at The Vintage News, “Tesla was a scientist whose work largely revolved around electricity; at that time, making your living as a scientist and inventor could often mean having to be somewhat of a showman,” a pressure Twain understood. History has recorded that Tesla provided Twain with — in addition to an electricity-based constipation cure that worked rather too well — advice against putting his money into an uncompetitive automatic typesetting machine that, unfortunately, went unheeded. The onetime riverboat captain went on to make an even more unsound investment in a powder called Plasmon, which promised to end world hunger. Perhaps Tesla’s spiritual descendants are to be found in today’s Silicon Valley, inventing the future; Mark Twain’s certainly are, underwriting any number of far-fetched schemes, if with far less of a sense of humor.

Mark Twain Wrote the First Book Ever Written With a Typewriter

Mark Twain’s Patented Inventions for Bra Straps and Other Everyday Items

Mark Twain Predicts the Internet in 1898: Read His Sci-Fi Crime Story, “From The ‘London Times’ in 1904”

Nikola Tesla’s Predictions for the 21st Century: The Rise of Smart Phones & Wireless, The Demise of Coffee & More (1926/35)

When David Bowie Became Nikola Tesla: Watch His Electric Performance in The Prestige (2006)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Isaac Asimov Predicts the Future on The David Letterman Show (1980)

See What the Original Mona Lisa Likely Looked Like

Read the Uplifting Letter That Albert Einstein Sent to Marie Curie During a Time of Personal Crisis (1911)

How Frank Gehry (RIP) and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Changed Architecture

“The Matilda Effect”: How Pioneering Women Scientists Have Been Written Out of Science History

The Gnostic Gospels: An Introduction to the Forbidden Teachings of Jesus

George Orwell’s Six Rules for Writing Clear and Tight Prose

Did Tintin Creator Hergé Collaborate with the Nazis? A Historical Investigation

Why Do Filmmakers Call The Battle of Algiers the Greatest War Movie Ever?: Watch It Free Online

The Oldest Known Depiction of Human Sexuality: The Turin Papyrus (Circa 1150 B.C.E.)

The Unlikely Friendship of Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla

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