College Bans Wikipedia
A History Department Bans Citing Wikipedia as a Research Source
“…the Middlebury history department notified its students this month that Wikipedia could not be cited in papers or exams, and that students could not “point to Wikipedia or any similar source that may appear in the future to escape the consequences of errors.
With the move, Middlebury, in Vermont, jumped into a growing debate within journalism, the law and academia over what respect, if any, to give Wikipedia articles, written by hundreds of volunteers and subject to mistakes and sometimes deliberate falsehoods.“
See full article from The New York Times
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The Very First Film Adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a Thomas Edison Production (1910)
The story of humans creating monstrous beings in their image may have perennial relevance, even if it seems specific to our contemporary cultural moment. What, after all, is Oscar Isaac’s AI inventor in Ex Machina but a 21st-century update of Victor Frankenstein? (Before Isaac went on to portray Victor himself in Guillermo del Toro’s 2025 film adaptation.) And what is Frankenstein’s monster but a Gothic recreation of the Golem, or any number of folkloric automatons in cultures far and wide? It’s an age-old archetypal story that seems to get an update every year.
People have imagined making artificial people, perhaps for as long as people have told stories. But each iteration of that story emerges from a historical matrix of particular technological, philosophical, and metaphysical anxieties. In the case of Ex Machina, we have not only a thinking, feeling humanoid, but one created out of mass data collection and designed to serve the prurient interests of a Nietzschean venture capitalist engineer.
In the original Frankenstein, a novel written by a woman, Mary Shelley, we have a very different kind of monster, born out of a Romantic convergence of interest in alchemy and the occult—the original domains of early modern scientists like Isaac Newton—and more modern, industrial scientific methods (hence the novel’s subtitle, The Modern Prometheus). Many critics have called the novel the first work of science fiction, and many, like Maurice Hindle in the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, have described its main theme as “the aspiration of modern masculinist scientists to be technically creative divinities.”
And yet, writes Ruth Franklin at the New Republic—drawing convincingly on Shelley’s own traumatic experiences with birth—Frankenstein might “also be a story about pregnancy.” Intriguing as this possibility may be, most interpretations of the novel have seen it as “a fable of masculine reproduction, in which a man creates life asexually.” That tradition continues in the movies with the first film adaptation of Frankenstein, made by Edison studios just over 100 years after the novel’s 1818 publication.
The 1910 short silent film, which you can watch above, bills itself as “a liberal adaptation from Mrs. Shelley’s famous story,” and opens in its first scene with Victor Frankenstein leaving home for college. Two years later, the Faustian mad scientist discovers the mystery of life, uses the knowledge to make his “creature”—a surprisingly grotesque scene—and, appalled at the sight of it, rejects the thing in horror. The rest of the story proceeds along the usual lines, as the monster, in rags and fright wig, seeks recognition from his creator/parent and wreaks havoc when he does not receive it.
This first Frankenstein film, directed by J. Searle Dawley, arrived two years after Edison’s Bronx, New York studios began full and very lucrative operations, and, by this time, writes Rich Drees, motion pictures had begun to receive unwelcome attention from “moral crusaders and reform groups, who decried the new medium as being dangerous and encouraging of immorality.” Edison responded quickly, fearing “a serious threat to his bottom line,” and ordered that his films’ production quality and “moral tone” be improved.
Frankenstein, writes Drees, “was the perfect choice to kick off production under this new moral banner. It’s a story that deals with the extremes of the human condition, life and death, and the dangers of tampering in God’s realm.” Edison released the film with the following disclaimer:
To those familiar with Mrs. Shelley’s story it will be evident that we have carefully omitted anything which might be any possibility shock any portion of the audience. In making the film the Edison Co. has carefully tried to eliminate all actual repulsive situations and to concentrate its endeavors upon the mystic and psychological problems that are to be found in this weird tale. Wherever, therefore, the film differs from the original story it is purely with the idea of eliminating what would be repulsive to a moving picture audience.
Five years after the Edison studio’s short, another silent adaptation, Life Without Soul, appeared. Made by the Ocean Film Corporation, this film is now lost to history, but it qualifies as the first feature-length adaptation at 70 minutes. A review of the film, writes the blog Frankensteinia, “reveals a story that hews fairly close to Mary Shelley’s novel,” making a “bold attempt at capturing the world-spanning sweep of the tale.”
Several dozen film adaptations in the ensuing years have tracked more or less closely to Shelley’s narrative—giving Frankenstein’s monster a bride and having Victor Frankenstein reanimate his dead lover with the mind of a wrongly executed man. But none of these films, so far as I know, has drawn out the subtext of Frankenstein as a novel about pregnancy and childbirth. Such an adaptation remains to be made—although Maggie Gyllenhaal’s 2026 film The Bride! has become the first adaptation by a woman.
You can find Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in our collections of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books.
The film above will be added to our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
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.
Read More...The Women of the Bauhaus: See Hip, Avant-Garde Photographs of Female Students & Instructors at the Famous Art School
Take a look at photos of Bush Tetras — a three-girl-one-guy No Wave/Post-Punk band from the early 1980s downtown Manhattan scene. Now, look at the photograph above, “Marcel Breuer and His Harem,” by Bauhaus photographer Erich Consemüller, taken sometime around 1927. Except for the fact that Breuer looks more like Ron Mael of Sparks sans mustache than drummer Dee Pop, one might mistake this for a photo of the punk band. This raises a few questions: did art students Bush Tetras look to the women of the Bauhaus for their style? Or did the women of the Bauhaus look to the future and see punk? The second scenario seems more likely since the women of the Bauhaus have not, until recently, been terribly well-known.
I personally feel cheated after studying art and art history in college many years ago and only now getting introduced to several significant artists of the radical German art school founded by Walter Gropius. All of its famous exponents and art stars are men, but it seems the gender ratio of the Bauhaus was closer to that of the general population (as was, in many cases, that of the early punk and post-punk scenes).
But we don’t tend to learn the names or see the work of these artists, and, in some cases, their work has been posthumously attributed to their male colleagues. Nor are we familiar with their progressive personal style, essential in the Bauhaus’s total approach to revolutionizing the arts, including fashion, as a way to liberate humanity from the dogmas of the past.
How unfortunate that the memory of the Bauhaus, like the memory of punk, replicated the same old rules its artists broke. The school’s gender equality was radical, hence the photograph’s satirical title, which “expresses the precise opposite of what the photo itself shows,” notes the site Bauhaus Kooperation: “the modernity, emancipation, equality, or even superiority, of the women in it.” The “junior master” of the carpentry workshop, Breuer looks at the three artists to his left “skeptically, with his arms crossed,” as if to say, “ ‘These are ‘my’ women?!’ ” The artists of the “harem,” from left to right, are Breuer’s wife Martha Erps, Katt Both, and the photographer’s wife, Ruth Hollós, who “seems to be suppressing laughter as she looks towards the photographer (her husband).”
Erich Consemüller, who taught architecture at the Bauhaus, had been tasked by Gropius with documenting the school and its life. Gropius partnered him with photographer Lucia Moholy, wife of László Moholy-Nagy (see a photo of her above, taken by her husband sometime between 1924 and 28). Moholy took mostly exterior shots like the photograph by her further up of Erps and Hollós on the roof of the Atelierhaus in Dessau in the mid-1920s. Consemüller mainly focused on interiors in his work, with experimental exceptions like the “Mechanical Fantasy” series seen here, which uses clothing, poses, and double exposures to visually emphasize a kind of uniformity of purpose, placing and joining male and female Bauhaus artists in almost typological arrangements.
Indeed, nearly all of the artists of the Bauhaus — as was the school’s practice — tried their hand at photography, and many used the medium to document, in ways both casual and deliberate, the Bauhaus’s commitment to gender equity and the full inclusion of women artists in its programs, a statement painter and photographer T. Lux Feininger seems to underline in the group photograph below of the school’s weavers on the steps of the new Bauhaus building in 1927. (Artists in the shot: Léna Bergner, Gunta Stölzl, Ljuba Monastirsky, Otti Berger, Lis Beyer, Elisabeth Mueller, Rosa Berger, Ruth Hollós, and Lisbeth Oestreicher.)
Bauhaus artists, both men and women, were very much like early punks in some ways, inventing new ways to shake up the establishment and break out of prescribed roles. But instead of a downtown alternative to the status quo, they offered a recipe for its full transformation through art. Who can say how far that movement would have progressed had it not been splintered by the Nazis? “Together,” as Gropius wrote, “let us call for, devise, and create the construction of the future, comprising everything in one form, architecture, sculpture and painting,” and most everything else in the built and visual environments, he might have added.
An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2022.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.
Read More...Why Americans Stopped Reading Books
The kids can’t read. Such has been the implication, even the declaration, made by a wave of articles in recent years. But the statement needs some qualification: the kids in question are American; what they can’t read is entire books, especially literary fiction; and it isn’t just the kids in the first place. It would be the rare reader, especially of a site like Open Culture, who could resist feeling any despair when confronted with, say, a study finding that only five percent of college English majors tested could understand the opening of Bleak House. But the real problem is broader, as reflected by the framing of the Jared Henderson video above, “Why Everyone Stopped Reading.”
Henderson points to several explanatory factors. The first is the way many American schools teach reading: for a time, they abandoned the method of phonics, which starts with basic individual sounds and builds from there, and went all in on something called “whole language learning,” which was based on teaching students to “infer the meanings of words from context.” The idea was that, rather than relying on rote drilling, the new system could cultivate a natural love for reading in young students. “The only problem is that whole language learning didn’t work,” and the resulting drop in literacy rates surely has something to do with the dramatic falloff of reading in general.
Other U.S. educational reforms, such as the nationwide push toward short informational texts and standardized testing, which prioritized information extraction over textual engagement, must also share the blame. This has produced an abundance of, to borrow the headline of Rose Horowitch’s much-circulated Atlantic piece from 2024, “Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” Those same students, of course, have all come of age in the time of the smartphone, which does provide us with an “endless stream of text,” albeit of low-to-nonexistent literary merit — to say nothing of the infinite scroll of hyper-stimulating short-form videos absorbing ever-greater proportions of daily life, and not just that of the young.
“Americans, once members of a proudly literate society, read much less than they used to,” writes Horowitch in a new, in-depth piece on the country’s “post-literacy.” “Fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38 percent read a novel or short story.” At the same time, “gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet.” The now-mainstream notion that America (and, in time, the world) is reverting from a textual to an oral culture was first foreseen by the likes of Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, and Walter J. Ong. But many here in the twenty-first century might hear their condition described in a more relatable fashion by David Bowie, in his Tin Machine period, nearly forty years ago.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...When the US Mail Was Delivered Underground at 35 MPH Through a Network of Pneumatic Tubes (1893–1953)
Twenty years ago, United States senator Ted Stevens drew long-lasting online ridicule by describing the internet as “a series of tubes.” While some commentators noted that the analogy wasn’t quite as outlandish as it seemed, most reacted with nothing more than amused bafflement. Where had Stevens come up with that image? Given that he was born in 1923, perhaps he was drawing on memories of a technological wonder of his childhood: the underground pneumatic systems through which mail was delivered in major American cities from the eighteen-nineties until the early nineteen-fifties, whose story is told in the It’s History video above.
Such series of tubes entered service in London, Paris, and Berlin in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1893, Philadelphia became the first American city to get one, thanks to the advocacy of technologically minded department store magnate-turned-Postmaster General John Wanamaker. At the inauguration, writes Hidden City’s Harry Kyriakodis, Wanamaker “placed a Bible wrapped in an American flag into a canister that went flying (underground) to the Central Post Office with a loud ‘whish’.” Philadelphia’s network expanded apace, eventually including nearly twenty miles of tunnels, and “New York City, Boston, Chicago, and St. Louis adopted similar delivery systems by 1898, all operated by the Post Office Department.”
Operated at a serious loss, that is: when the U.S. got involved in World War I, the Post Office suspended pneumatic service to conserve resources. Only in the twenties did the tubes start whishing again in parts of New York and Boston, whose high volumes of mail could potentially justify the operation. In fact, the sheer amount of mail eventually got to be too much for the steel capsules and the cast-iron tunnels through which compressed air pushed them. As retired U.S. Postal Inspector Robert A. Cohen explains it in his history of these systems, “It takes a certain amount of time for a gallon of liquid to travel through a funnel. Two gallons take twice as long to pass through. The value of the Pneumatic Tube Service decreased as mail volume increased.”
The proliferation of automobiles and the expansion of their supporting infrastructure dealt an even more serious blow: after World War II, delivering mail on the roads had clearly become more efficient than doing it underground. Some “rocketeers,” as the system’s operators were called, stuck it out until December 12, 1953, when pneumatic mail service was officially suspended all across the country.
This marked the end of an era, especially for the rocketeers said to have used the network to surreptitiously receive orders from their favorite sandwich shops. Remembering Ted Stevens’ notorious remark, it’s tempting to describe the series of tubes that were pneumatic mail delivery systems as an early version of the internet — and even more so it was already getting people hooked on food delivery.
] 
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...
Hear the Earliest Known Piece of Polyphonic Music: This Composition, Dating Back to 900 AD, Changed Western Music
Like digging for fossils or panning for gold, the research process can be a tedious affair. But for any researcher, long days of searching and reading will eventually result in discovery. These are the moments scholars cherish. It’s the chance discovery, however rare, that makes the long hours and bleary late nights worthwhile. And some finds can change an entire field. Such was the discovery of St. John’s College PhD student, and now Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Pavia, Giovanni Varelli, who, in 2014, found what is believed to be, writes Cambridge University, “the earliest known practical example of polyphonic music,” that is, music consisting of two or more melodic lines working together simultaneously.
You can hear the short composition—written in praise of the patron saint of Germany, Saint Boniface—performed above by St. John’s undergraduates Quintin Beer and John Clapham. Prior to Varelli’s discovery of this piece of music, the earliest polyphonic music was thought to date to the year 1000, from a collection called The Winchester Troper. Varelli’s discovery may date to 100 years earlier, around the year 900, and was found at the end of a manuscript of the Life of Bishop Maternianus of Reims. One reason musicologists have so far overlooked the piece, Varelli says, is that “we are not seeing what we expected.”
Typically, polyphonic music is seen as having developed from a set of fixed rules and almost mechanical practice. This changes how we understand that development precisely because whoever wrote it was breaking those rules. It shows that music at this time was in a state of flux and development.
Varelli’s specialization in early music notation also provided him with the training needed to recognize the piece, which was written using “an early form of notation that predates the invention of the stave” (see the piece below). According to former British Library curator Nicolas Bell, “when this manuscript was first catalogued in the 18th century, nobody was able to understand these unusual symbols.” Varelli’s discovery shows a deviation from “the convention laid out in treatises at the time” and points toward the development of a musical technique that “defined most European music up until the 20th century.”
Varelli gives us a sense of how important this discovery is to scholars of early music: “the rules being applied here laid the foundations for those that developed and governed the majority of western music history for the next thousand years. This discovery shows how they were evolving, and how they existed in a constant state of transformation, around the year 900.”
So there you have it. If you’re stuck in the doldrums of a research project, waiting for the wind to pick up, don’t despair. The next rare artifact, treatise, or manuscript may be waiting for someone with exactly your specialized insights to decipher its secrets.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.
Read More...Where Did the Monk’s Haircut Come From? A Look at the Rich and Contentious History of the Tonsure
One might assume from a modern viewpoint that the hairstyles worn by monks arose to deal with male pattern baldness anxiety. As in the school uniform approach, you can’t single out one person’s baldness when everyone is bald. But this, again, would be a modern view, full of the vanity the tonsured—those with religiously shaven heads—ostensibly vowed to renounce. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, the tonsure (from the Latin verb for “to shear”) began as a “badge of slavery” among Greeks and Romans. It was adopted “on this very account” by early monastic orders, to mark the total surrender of the will.
Would it surprise you, then, to learn that there were tonsure wars? Probably not if you know anything about church history. Every article of clothing and of faith has sparked some major controversy at one time or another. So too with the tonsure, of which—we learn in the Vox video above—there were three styles. The first, the coronal (or Roman or Petrine) tonsure, is the one we see in countless Medieval and Renaissance paintings: a bald pate at the crown surrounded by a fringe of hair, possibly meant to evoke the crown of thorns. Next is the Pauline, a fully shaved head, seen much less in Western art since it was “used more commonly in Eastern Orthodoxy.”
The third style of tonsure caused all the trouble. Or rather, it was this style that served as a visible sign of religious differences between the Roman Catholic Church and the churches in Britain and Ireland. “Celtic Catholicism was ‘out of sync’ with the Roman Catholic Church,” notes Vox. “Roman Catholics would use the differences between them to portray Celtic Catholicism as pagan, or even as an offshoot, celebrating the power-hungry magician, Simon Magus.” The Celtic tonsure fell under a cloud, but how exactly did it differ from the others? Since it disappeared in the early Middle Ages and few images seem to have survived, no one seems sure.
Daniel McCarthy, fellow emeritus at Trinity College, Dublin set out to solve the mystery. He speculates that the Celtic tonsure, as you’ll see on a computer-simulated monk’s head, was a triangular shape, with the apex at the front. When the Roman Catholics took over Ireland, all of the vestments, dates, and haircuts were slowly brought into line with the dominant view. The practice of tonsure officially ended in 1972, and fell out of favor in English-speaking countries centuries earlier, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia. But in any case, McCarthy sees the tonsure not as a spurning of fashion, but as a cult-like devotion to style. In that sense, we can see people who adopt similar haircuts around the world as still visually signaling their membership in some kind of order, religious or otherwise.
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.
Read More...How Nashville Became Home to a Full-Scale Replica of the Parthenon
Asked to identify “the Athens of the South,” many Americans might well point to Athens, Georgia, especially if they happen to be fans of REM, the B‑52s, or Of Montreal. In fact, that title was claimed by Nashville, Tennessee as early as the eighteen-fifties, when the city put into action its ambitious plans for a public education system. By the end of that century, Nashville boasted not just more than 20 colleges and universities (Vanderbilt being the best known today), but also a full-scale replica of the Parthenon, the ancient temple to the goddess Athena. It was built for the state’s Centennial Exhibition in 1897, when no display of local grandeur was too much.
Nearly 130 years later, the Nashville Parthenon remains a major local attraction alongside the likes of the Grand Ole Opry, the Country Music Hall of Fame, and the Honky Tonk Highway. The structure currently situated in Centennial Park (also the home of that modern site of pilgrimage, the Taylor Swift Bench) isn’t the same one at which visitors marveled in 1897.
After a couple of decades of deterioration, writes Artsy’s Isaac Kaplan, “massive renovations were undertaken in 1920, overseen by an architect named Russell Hart, who committed to making the building both enduring and as historically true to the original Parthenon as possible,” an extensive rebuild that even entailed making casts of the original marbles.
Unlike the bombed-out ruin in the Athens of Greece, the Nashville Parthenon stands proudly intact. But does it pass muster with serious enthusiasts of classical civilization? In the video at the top of the post, Garrett Ryan of ancient-history YouTube channel Told in Stone makes the trip. He notes that, though it does contain a gold-plated (or rather, gold-leaf plated) statue of Athena much like the one originally sculpted by Phidias, the building is “not an exact replica. It’s made of concrete, not marble, it has no frieze, the colors are all wrong, and the interior is very different from the original. But it gives a sense of the scale of the Parthenon,” and “captures the experience of visiting a temple of this size.” The parking lot right alongside it does some harm to the illusion, granted, but it does encourage the visitor to reflect upon the nature of civilization: American civilization, that is.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Meet the Syntopicon: The Ambitious Index That Tried to Organize All of Western Thought (1952)
Mortimer J. Adler rose to cultural prominence in the mid-twentieth-century United States, not that a figure like him could have done so in any other place or time. A haphazard professional and intellectual path involving copy-boy work at the New York Sun, night school, and an incomplete Columbia degree eventually led to a faculty position teaching philosophy of law at the University of Chicago. In 1945, he commenced work on what would become the Great Books of the Western World, a 54-volume set published by Encyclopædia Britannica including the works of everyone from Homer to Virgil to Darwin to Hemingway. Sold door-to-door, it became an unlikely success by the early nineteen-sixties, and for a time it was a fairly common, if bookshelf-dominating, sight in the aspirational homes of suburban America.
How many of those families regularly pulled their Great Books off the shelf is another matter. Despite having come through an intensive process of curation, they could still look rather imposing as the wall of knowledge they formed all together. To this problem, Adler offered a characteristically ambitious and idiosyncratic solution: a concept-oriented index called the Syntopicon — or rather, “A Syntopicon.”
“He believed these two volumes to be just the ‘assistance’ that the average man needed to dig into the books that formed Western Civilization,” writes Jonathan White, an alumnus of the similarly Western canon-based St. John’s College. They “comprised an exhaustive catalogue of each time one of the 102 ‘Great Ideas of Western Civilization’ was mentioned in the 431 ‘Great Books’ enshrined in Britannica’s collection.”
Good and evil, logic and love, pleasure and pain, universal and particular: all the big ideas, at least as Adler defined them, were there in A Syntopicon. Customers reportedly found it unwieldy, but the notion behind it holds out a certain appeal still today. It’s even inspired the launch of Syntopi.com, a digital successor that enables you to navigate “the Great Conversation” in a variety of ways including a 3D visualization and a personal curriculum-creation tool. The Great Books of the Western World’s mid-century readers — professionals and businessmen looking to fill the gaps in their general knowledge, veterans ready to learn more after their G.I. Bill-funded college education, housewives hoping to get a handle on what intelligent people were supposed to know about — could have had fun with it. And we could benefit, no doubt, from rediscovering a little of their earnestly self-improving spirit ourselves. You can view an edition of A Syntopicon on the Internet Archive, or this site.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Before Bill Nye, There Was Julius Sumner Miller: Watch Complete Episodes of His Classic Science Show, Why Is It So?, Free Online (1962–73)
“We are approaching a darkness in the land. Boys and girls are emerging from every level of school with certificates and degrees, but they can’t read, write or calculate. We don’t have academic honesty or intellectual rigor.” That quote may sound like a familiar lament today, but it’s actually drawn from an interview conducted about half a century ago with the physicist and television host Julius Sumner Miller. If that name sounds familiar to you, there’s a fair chance you’re an Australian who grew up between the sixties and the eighties — and it’s hardly impossible that, thanks to his program Why Is It So?, you went on to pursue a career in science or engineering.
Generations of young viewers down under and elsewhere learned from Why Is It So? that physics and its principles could be fun. Even if you weren’t among them at the time, you can now watch full episodes of the show uploaded to YouTube by ABC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
As you may notice after just a few seconds of listening to him, Miller himself was American. The Massachusetts-born son of immigrants from Latvia and Lithuania, he studied physics at Boston University and thereafter taught and performed research at various institutions (befriending Albert Einstein along the way) before taking a long-term position at El Camino College in Torrance, California in 1952.
Miller’s popularity at El Camino, the school’s proximity to Hollywood, and television’s rapid expansion into a mass medium led to his launching Why Is It So? on KNXT in Los Angeles in 1959. By the mid-sixties, he was also explaining scientific phenomena on Disney’s Mickey Mouse Club, Great Moments in Science, and Science and Its Magic, as well as on Steve Allen’s late-night talk show. He made his debut on Australian television when the University of Sydney brought him out as a visiting lecturer. The appearance went wrong when he couldn’t perform his standard trick of driving a drinking straw through a potato, but what it nevertheless got him — apart from an office filled with the domestic straws he’d jokingly criticized on-air — was a new home for Why Is It So? on ABC.
ABC has so far made available seven full broadcasts originally aired between the early sixties and the early seventies. Despite their black-and-white production and lack of visual effects, they hold up well today in both educational and entertainment value. However engaging his personality as what we would now call a science communicator, it seems that “Miller could be a terror in the classroom,” according to his Los Angeles Times obituary from 1987, “intolerant of misspelled words or misplaced punctuation” and insistent that “most faculty were not rigid enough and that students were not learning enough.” He’d hardly be pleased with what’s happened to intellectual standards in the nearly four decades since his death, but he’d surely appreciate that his teaching continues to reach “everybody ages four to 94,” as he liked to describe his audience. Age, nationality, and even credentials didn’t matter; what counted was genuine curiosity and the willingness to pursue it, whether in the classroom or the living room.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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