Watch the Completely Unsafe, Vertigo-Inducing Footage of Workers Building New York’s Iconic Skyscrapers

in History | September 2nd, 2026

Would any­one in their right mind sign up for a job that had a high risk of mortality/disability? Or a job where red hot met­al is being hurled direct­ly at your face? Back in the 1920s this was the lot of the men who built New York’s sky­line, the men who con­struct­ed the Chrysler Build­ing and the Empire State, giant phal­lic sym­bols of America’s bur­geon­ing wealth and pow­er.

In this short clip (remas­tered and quite decent­ly col­orized) from the Smith­son­ian Chan­nel, we get a brief glimpse of the per­ils encoun­tered dai­ly on the build­ing site. Nick­named “rough­necks,” the nar­ra­tor points out that they work with­out har­ness­es, safe­ty ropes, or hard hats. Red hot riv­ets are thrown at men on the met­al beams high­er up and they are meant to catch them with what looks like a tin fun­nel. You can see the thinnest of ropes used to lift the now-icon­ic stain­less steel art-deco eagles into place by men wear­ing felt hats and no gloves.

The work­ers came from Europe, many who had trained on ships. Some came from Montreal’s Kah­nawake reser­va­tion. The lat­ter, known as Iron Walk­ers, were Mohawk, known for work­ing fear­less­ly at great heights.

“A lot of peo­ple think Mohawks aren’t afraid of heights; that’s not true,” Kyle Karon­hi­ak­tatie Beau­vais said in 2002. “We have as much fear as the next guy. The dif­fer­ence is that we deal with it bet­ter.”

Much of this work was doc­u­ment­ed by pho­tog­ra­ph­er Lewis Hine, who cap­tured a mix of brute strength and grav­i­ty-defy­ing courage along with pri­vate moments of rest, catch­ing a smoke or tak­ing lunch. You can see many of his famous pho­tos in this clip:

The Chrysler Build­ing was com­plet­ed in 1930, and reached a height of 1,046 feet (319 m), fea­tur­ing 77 floors. It held its fame as the world’s tallest build­ing for only 11 months. In 1931 work­ers com­plet­ed the Empire State Build­ing, stand­ing at 1,454 feet (443.2 m) and hous­ing 102 floors. (That’s dinky com­pared to the cur­rent record-hold­er: Dubai’s Burj Khal­i­fa, which stands at 2,722 feet (829.8 m)).

Heads up: The Smith­son­ian Chan­nel clip has some of the worst exam­ples of YouTube com­ments among the videos we’ve high­light­ed over the years, as if peo­ple still don’t work in ter­ri­ble and unsafe con­di­tions in order to feed their fam­i­lies and pay rent. And look! Here’s a guy who walks out onto the Chrysler eagle just for fun. Don’t say we didn’t warn you:

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2019.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Paris, New York & Havana Come to Life in Col­orized Films Shot Between 1890 and 1931

A Light Show on The Empire State Build­ing Gets Synced to the Dead’s Live Per­for­mance of “Touch of Grey” (6/24/2017)

Famous Archi­tects Dress as Their Famous New York City Build­ings (1931)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts.

When Roald Dahl Wrote a Story Predicting the Rise of ChatGPT and Other AI Large Language Models (1954)

in Literature, Technology | June 12th, 2026

Most of us who know the work of Roald Dahl grew up with it, even­tu­al­ly com­ing to con­sid­er the man a mas­ter of imag­i­na­tive, often grotesque tales for chil­dren. A bit lat­er on, when we heard that he’d also writ­ten books for adults, with titles like Kiss Kiss and Switch Bitch, some of us sought them out as a kind of for­bid­den lit­er­ary fruit. What tends to escape notice is that he also wrote for teenagers — or, in any case, that cer­tain of his sto­ries were pack­aged for teenagers into the posthu­mous vol­ume The Great Auto­mat­ic Gramma­ti­za­tor, whose title sto­ry has gained a new rel­e­vance in our age of Chat­G­PT, as explained in the new Tibees video above.

First pub­lished in 1954, “The Great Auto­mat­ic Gramma­ti­za­tor” con­cerns an enor­mous­ly com­plex, whol­ly ana­log machine that can gen­er­ate page after page of text at a then-unimag­in­able clip. Its inven­tor, a beat­en-down young cor­po­rate employ­ee called Adolph Knipe, designs it based on the same prin­ci­ples he’d used to cre­ate an elec­tric cal­cu­la­tor that pleased his boss, Mr. Bohlen. A frus­trat­ed writer of fic­tion by night, Knipe con­ceives of the Gramma­ti­za­tor as a tool of revenge against the mag­a­zine indus­try that spurned him. With the com­pa­ny’s back­ing to build the thing, he tells Bohlen, they could dom­i­nate the mar­ket for short sto­ries almost with­out effort — and make their own pres­ti­gious names as authors to boot.

“It stands to rea­son that an engine built along the lines of the elec­tric com­put­er could be adjust­ed to arrange words (instead of num­bers) in their right order accord­ing to the rules of gram­mar,” Dahl writes. “Give it the verbs, the nouns, the adjec­tives, the pro­nouns, store them in the mem­o­ry sec­tion as a vocab­u­lary, and arrange for them to be extract­ed as required. Then feed it with plots and leave it to write the sen­tences.” Though Bohlen accepts the tech­ni­cal propo­si­tion, he at first doubts the com­mer­cial one, at least until his employ­ee informs him that mag­a­zines like the Sat­ur­day Evening Post, Collier’s, and Ladies’ Home Jour­nal will pay for a sto­ry “any­thing up to twen­ty-five hun­dred dol­lars”: near­ly $40,000 today.

Of course, 1954 was a dif­fer­ent time. Today, the Sat­ur­day Evening Post, Collier’s, and Ladies’ Home Jour­nal have all gone, as has the prospect of earn­ing even a mea­ger liv­ing through short sto­ries. And a com­put­er of this kind, as Dahl describes it, would have been an enor­mous, noisy device laden with but­tons, dials, ped­als, and stops, each of which the “writer” would use to con­trol such vari­ables as theme, style, ten­sion, humor, and pas­sion. “The qual­i­ty may be infe­ri­or,” an increas­ing­ly pow­er-mad Knipe admits of the machine’s out­put, “but that doesn’t mat­ter. It’s the cost of pro­duc­tion that counts.” All of us now pos­sess Gramma­ti­za­tors of our own, far faster, cheap­er, more ver­sa­tile, and eas­i­er to use than any­thing Roald Dahl could have imag­ined. Yet how many of us can hope to be read more than 70 years in the future?

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed con­tent:

How George Orwell Pre­dict­ed the Rise of “AI Slop” in Nine­teen Eighty-Four (1949)

Sci-Fi Writer Arthur C. Clarke Pre­dict­ed the Rise of Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence & the Exis­ten­tial Ques­tions We Would Need to Answer (1978)

Roald Dahl Gives a Tour of the Small Back­yard Hut Where He Wrote All of His Beloved Children’s Books

Read a Nev­er Pub­lished, “Sub­ver­sive” Chap­ter from Roald Dahl’s Char­lie and the Choco­late Fac­to­ry

Roald Dahl, Who Lost His Daugh­ter to Measles, Writes a Heart­break­ing Let­ter about Vac­ci­na­tions: “It Is Almost a Crime to Allow Your Child to Go Unim­mu­nised”

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.

How William S. Burroughs Used the Cut-Up Technique to Shut Down London’s First Espresso Bar (1972)

in Creativity, Film, Literature | June 10th, 2026

As we’ve not­ed before, the Eng­lish cof­fee­house has served as a stag­ing ground for rad­i­cal, some­times rev­o­lu­tion­ary social change. Cer­tain­ly this was the case dur­ing the Enlight­en­ment, as it was with the salons in France. And yet, by the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry it seems, cof­fee shops in Lon­don had grown scarcer and more hum­drum. That is until 1953 when the Moka Bar, the UK’s first Ital­ian espres­so bar, opened in Soho. On his blog The Great Wen, Peter Watts describes its arrival as “a momen­tous event”:

London’s first prop­er cof­fee shop—one equipped with a Gag­gia cof­fee machine—opened at 29 Frith Street. This was a place where teenagers too young for pubs could come and gath­er, and it is said by some that the intro­duc­tion of this cof­fee bar prompt­ed the youth cul­ture explo­sion that soon changed social life in Britain for­ev­er.

“By 1972,” Watts writes, “cof­fee bars were every­where and the teenage rev­o­lu­tion was firm­ly estab­lished.” Places like the Moka Bar might seem like the ide­al place for coun­ter­cul­tur­al maven William S. Bur­roughs—a Lon­don res­i­dent from the late six­ties to ear­ly seventies—to hob­nob with young dis­si­dents and out­siders. Bur­roughs, who so approv­ing­ly refers to the pos­si­bly apoc­ryphal anar­chist pirate colony of Lib­er­ta­tia in his Cities of the Red Night, would, one might think, appre­ci­ate the bud­ding anar­chism of British youth cul­ture, which would flower into punk soon enough.

But rather than join­ing the cof­fee bar scene, the can­tan­ker­ous Bur­roughs had tak­en to fre­quent­ing “plush gentlemen’s shops of the area, not to men­tion the ‘Dil­ly Boys,’ young male pros­ti­tutes who hus­tled for clients out­side the Regent Palace Hotel.”

And he had grown increas­ing­ly dis­il­lu­sioned with Lon­don, fum­ing, writes Ted Mor­gan in Bur­roughs’ biog­ra­phy Lit­er­ary Out­law, “at what he was pay­ing for his hole-in-the-wall apart­ment with a clos­et for a kitchen” and at the ris­ing price of util­i­ties. “Bur­roughs,” Mor­gan tells us, “began to feel that he was in ene­my ter­ri­to­ry.” And he thought the Moka cof­fee bar should pay the price for his indig­ni­ties.

There, “on sev­er­al occa­sions a snarling coun­ter­man had treat­ed him with out­ra­geous and unpro­voked dis­cour­tesy, and served him poi­so­nous cheese­cake that made him sick.” Bur­roughs “decid­ed to retal­i­ate by putting a curse on the place.” He chose a means of attack that he’d ear­li­er employed against the Church of Sci­en­tol­ogy, “turn­ing up… every day,” writes Watts, “tak­ing pho­tographs and mak­ing sound record­ings.” Then he would play them back a day or so lat­er on the street out­side the Moka. “The idea,” writes Mor­gan, “was to place the Moka Bar out of time. You played back a tape that had tak­en place two days ago and you super­im­posed it on what was hap­pen­ing now, which pulled them out of their time posi­tion.”

Bur­roughs also con­nect­ed the method to the Water­gate record­ings, the Gar­den of Eden, and the the­o­ries of Alfred Korzyb­s­ki. The trig­ger for the mag­i­cal oper­a­tion was, in his words, “play­back.” In a very strange essay called “Feed­back from Water­gate to the Gar­den of Eden,” from his col­lec­tion Elec­tron­ic Rev­o­lu­tion, Bur­roughs described his oper­a­tion in detail, a dis­rup­tion, he wrote, of a “con­trol sys­tem.”

Now to apply the 3 tape recorder anal­o­gy to this sim­ple oper­a­tion. Tape recorder 1 is the Moka Bar itself it is in pris­tine con­di­tion. Tape recorder 2 is my record­ings of the Moka Bar vicin­i­ty. These record­ings are access. Tape recorder 2 in the Gar­den of Eden was Eve made from Adam. So a record­ing made from the Moka Bar is a piece of the Moka Bar. The record­ing once made, this piece becomes autonomous and out of their con­trol. Tape recorder 3 is play­back. Adam expe­ri­ences shame when his dis­c­grace­ful behav­ior is played back to him by tape recorder 3 which is God. By play­ing back my record­ings to the Moka Bar when I want and with any changes I wish to make in the record­ings, I become God for this local. I effect them. They can­not affect me.

The the­o­ry made per­fect sense to Bur­roughs, who believed in a Mag­i­cal Uni­verse ruled by occult forces and who exper­i­ment­ed heav­i­ly with Sci­en­tol­ogy, Crow­ley-an Mag­ick, and the orgone ener­gy of Wil­helm Reich. The attack on the Moka worked, or at least Bur­roughs believed it did. “They are seething in there,” he wrote, “I have them and they know it.” On Octo­ber 30th, 1972  the estab­lish­ment closed its doors—perhaps a con­se­quence of those ris­ing rents that so irked the Beat writer—and the loca­tion became the Queens Snack Bar.

The audio-visu­al cut-up tech­nique Bur­roughs used in his attack against the Moka Bar was a method derived by Bur­roughs and Brion Gysin from their exper­i­ments with writ­ten “cut-ups,” and Bur­roughs applied it to film as well. At the top of the post, see an inter­pre­tive “med­i­ta­tion” based on Bur­roughs’ use of audio/visual “mag­i­cal weapons” and incor­po­rat­ing his record­ings. On YouTube, you can watch “The Cut Ups,” a short film Bur­roughs him­self made in 1966 with cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Antony Balch, a dis­ori­ent­ing illus­tra­tion of the cut up tech­nique.

Not lim­it­ed to attack­ing annoy­ing Lon­don cof­fee­house own­ers, Bur­roughs’ sup­pos­ed­ly mag­i­cal inter­ven­tions in real­i­ty were in fact the fullest expres­sion of his cre­ativ­i­ty. As Ted Mor­gan writes, “the sin­gle most impor­tant thing about Bur­roughs was his belief in the mag­i­cal uni­verse. The same impulse that led him to put out curs­es was, as he saw it, the source of his writ­ing.” Read much more about Bur­roughs’ the­o­ry and prac­tice in Matthew Levi Stevens’ essay “The Mag­i­cal Uni­verse of William S. Bur­roughs,” and hear the author him­self dis­course on the para­nor­mal, tape cut-ups, and much more in the lec­ture below from a writ­ing class he gave in June, 1986.

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How David Bowie, Kurt Cobain & Thom Yorke Write Songs With William Bur­roughs’ Cut-Up Tech­nique

When William S. Bur­roughs Joined Sci­en­tol­ogy (and His 1971 Book Denounc­ing It)

How to Jump­start Your Cre­ative Process with William S. Bur­roughs’ Cut-Up Tech­nique

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

Watch Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page Rock the Theremin, the Early Soviet Electronic Instrument

in Music | May 21st, 2026

It can be frus­trat­ing for Led Zep­pelin fans to hear the band reduced to pla­gia­rism law­suits or the quin­tes­sence of sex­u­al­ly-aggres­sive rock-star enti­tle­ment (though much of that is deserved). For one thing, Zeppelin’s occult song­writ­ing ten­den­cies, cour­tesy of both Page and Plant, play just as promi­nent a role as their blues-rock come-ons (as sev­er­al gen­er­a­tions of fan­ta­sy met­al bands can attest). For anoth­er, their stu­dio pro­duc­tions and live shows are renowned for pio­neer­ing mash-ups of mod­ern rock, folk, and clas­si­cal instru­men­ta­tion, cour­tesy of both Page and Jones. And final­ly, the band’s record­ing tech­niques were—for the time—demonstrations of tech­ni­cal wiz­ardry.

Thus it should come as no sur­prise that tech­ni­cal wiz­ard Jim­my Page would play the Theremin, though he does play on it the kind of scream­ing, feed­back-laden bends he unleashed from his Les Paul. Intro­duced to the world by Sovi­et inven­tor Leon Theremin in 1919, the ear­ly elec­tron­ic instru­ment emits high-pitched singing when a play­er’s hands come with­in range of its invis­i­ble elec­tri­cal fields. “It hasn’t got six strings,” Page says in his demon­stra­tion at the top of the post, from the 2009 film It Might Get Loud, “but it’s a lot of fun.”

Page used a Son­ic Wave Theremin in his Zep­pelin days in a very gui­tar-like way—running it through a Mae­stro Echoplex and Orange amps and cab­i­nets. (Watch him revive the tech­nique in a 1995 French TV broad­cast above.) For sev­er­al months in 1971, writes fan­site Achilles Last Stand, Page “used a dou­ble-stacked Theremin” for twice the son­ic assault.

Though he seems to have gone back to just the one Theremin in the solo above, the effect is no less elec­tri­fy­ing, if you’ll excuse the pun, as he sends echoes of ray-gun noise cas­cad­ing around the the­ater. Well over five min­utes into the hyp­not­ic affair, Page takes to his Les Paul, cre­at­ing more ragged pat­terns with vio­lin bow and Echoplex. Even if you aren’t in a dazed and con­fused state, you’ll feel like you are if you give your­self over to this piece of per­for­mance art. Hero­ics? Yes, and indeed the bowed gui­tar act has its phal­lic over­tones. But it begins and ends with long stretch­es of the kind of dron­ing exper­i­men­tal noise one would expect to find onstage at an ear­ly Kraftwerk show.

Those in the know will know that Page put the theremin to use on one of the band’s most tech­ni­cal­ly exper­i­men­tal record­ings (though it also hap­pens to be an appro­pri­at­ed blues stom­per), “Whole Lot­ta Love” from 1969’s Led Zep­pelin II. “I always envi­sioned the mid­dle to be quite avant-garde,” Page told Gui­tar World, “The Theremin gen­er­ates most of the high­er pitch­es and my Les Paul makes the low­er sounds.” Watch him rip out a theremin-and-gui­tar solo above in the live per­for­mance from 1973. Tak­en with the psy­che­del­ic video effects, the per­for­mance reach­es mys­ti­cal planes of rhyth­mic abstrac­tion.

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sovi­et Inven­tor Léon Theremin Shows Off the Theremin, the Ear­ly Elec­tron­ic Instru­ment That Could Be Played With­out Being Touched (1954)

Learn How to Play the Theremin: A Free Short Video Course

Meet Clara Rock­more, the Pio­neer­ing Elec­tron­ic Musi­cian Who First Rocked the Theremin in the Ear­ly 1920s

Leon Theremin Adver­tis­es the First Com­mer­cial Pro­duc­tion Run of His Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Elec­tron­ic Instru­ment (1930)

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

The Lost Scenes of Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons Are Being Controversially Restored with AI

in Artificial Intelligence, Film, Technology | May 20th, 2026

When tele­vi­sion mogul Ted Turn­er died ear­li­er this month, it gave cinephiles occa­sion to remem­ber his brief but high-pro­file for­ay into col­oriza­tion. In the mid-nine­teen-eight­ies, he com­mis­sioned for broad­cast col­orized ver­sions of more than 100 clas­sic movies, from The Trea­sure of the Sier­ra Madre to It’s a Won­der­ful Life to Casablan­ca. It was only thanks to a clause spec­i­fy­ing a black-and-white pic­ture in Orson Welles’ con­tract with RKO that Cit­i­zen Kane nev­er got the full Turn­er treat­ment. That bless­ed­ly failed project is now being invoked again in com­par­i­son with the start­up Fable Stu­dio’s enter­prise, under­way even now, of using arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence to restore Welles’ sopho­more fea­ture The Mag­nif­i­cent Amber­sons, which was noto­ri­ous­ly muti­lat­ed by the stu­dio before its release in 1942.

The recut hap­pened in Welles’ absence. After the attack on Pearl Har­bor, he received what sounds like some­thing more than a request from Nel­son Rock­e­feller, then the government’s Coor­di­na­tor of Inter-Amer­i­can Affairs, to go to Brazil and shoot a doc­u­men­tary about Car­ni­val in the inter­est of “Pan-Amer­i­can uni­ty.” Due to a dis­as­trous test screen­ing, as Welles explains in the clip from a 1982 Are­na broad­cast above, “it was thought by every­one in Hol­ly­wood, while I was in South Amer­i­ca, that it was too ‘down­beat,’ a famous Hol­ly­wood word at the time.” Yet the entire film, to his mind, was about the down­fall of the tit­u­lar fam­i­ly, who lose their wealth and pres­tige as the soci­ety they knew slips out from under­neath them dur­ing the trans­for­ma­tions of the ear­ly auto­mo­bile age: not a wide­ly res­o­nant theme, it seems, in mid-twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca.

“They destroyed Amber­sons,” Welles says of the RKO’s recut, “and the pic­ture itself destroyed me.” Yet even the Bowd­ler­ized ver­sion has more than a few admir­ers. Among them is Edward Saatchi, the movie-lov­ing adver­tis­ing-com­pa­ny scion behind this AI restora­tion and/or recon­struc­tion project. “His Ama­zon-backed generative‑A.I. plat­form, Showrun­ner, would feed off the data from the extant ver­sion of the film to prompt entire new scenes, based on volu­mi­nous pro­duc­tion mate­ri­als that sur­vived, includ­ing scripts, pho­tographs, and detailed notes,” writes the New York­er’s Michael Schul­man. “For emo­tion­al authen­tic­i­ty, Fable would first shoot live actors, then over­lay the footage with the dig­i­tized voic­es and like­ness­es of the long-dead cast mem­bers.” The result has the poten­tial to be unset­tling on sev­er­al lev­els at once.

As Schul­man empha­sizes, the film’s con­cern with the human cost of a tech­no­log­i­cal rev­o­lu­tion is hard­ly lost on Saatchi. “With all their speed for­ward, they may be a step back­ward in civ­i­liza­tion,” says Joseph Cot­ten’s char­ac­ter, an ear­ly auto­mo­bile investor, in a scene from the stu­dio cut. “It may be that they won’t add to the beau­ty of the world or the life of men’s souls — I’m not sure. But auto­mo­biles have come, and almost all out­ward things are going to be dif­fer­ent because of what they bring.” Even the human mind, he spec­u­lates, will be “changed in sub­tle ways,” a process clear­ly in effect by the for­ties. As far as the con­se­quences of AI, we can already see how it’s begun chang­ing the think­ing of its ear­ly adopters. Saatchi him­self dis­plays an ambiva­lence about the tech­nol­o­gy, describ­ing it as “poten­tial­ly the end of human cre­ativ­i­ty” but also going full-speed-ahead with his unau­tho­rized work on The Mag­nif­i­cent Amber­sons — which, at the very least, he’s keep­ing in black-and-white.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch the New Trail­er for Orson Welles’ Lost Film The Oth­er Side of the Wind: A Glimpse of Footage from the Final­ly Com­plet­ed Film

AI “Com­pletes” Kei­th Haring’s Unfin­ished Paint­ing and Con­tro­ver­sy Erupts

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Brings to Life Fig­ures from 7 Famous Paint­ings: The Mona Lisa, Birth of Venus & More

Dis­cov­er the Lost Films of Orson Welles

Isaac Asi­mov Describes How Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Will Lib­er­ate Humans & Their Cre­ativ­i­ty: Watch His Last Major Inter­view (1992)

When Ted Turn­er Tried to Col­orize Cit­i­zen Kane: See the Only Sur­viv­ing Scene from the Great Act of Cin­e­mat­ic Sac­ri­lege

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.

Hear Seven Hours of Women Making Electronic Music (1938–2014)

in Music | March 13th, 2026

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

A num­ber of years ago, in a post on the pio­neer­ing com­pos­er of the orig­i­nal Doc­tor Who theme, we wrote that “the ear­ly era of exper­i­men­tal elec­tron­ic music belonged to Delia Der­byshire.” Derbyshire—who almost gave Paul McCart­ney a ver­sion of “Yes­ter­day” with an elec­tron­ic back­ing in place of strings—helped invent the ear­ly elec­tron­ic music of the six­ties through her work with the Radio­phon­ic Work­shop, the sound effects lab­o­ra­to­ry of the BBC. She went on to form one of the most influ­en­tial, if large­ly obscure, elec­tron­ic acts of the decade, White Noise. And yet, call­ing the ear­ly eras of elec­tron­ic music hers is an exag­ger­a­tion. Of course her many col­lab­o­ra­tors deserve men­tion, as well as musi­cians like Bruce Haack, Pierre Hen­ry, Kraftwerk, Bri­an Eno, and so many oth­ers. But what gets almost com­plete­ly left out of many his­to­ries of elec­tron­ic music, as with so many oth­er his­to­ries, is the promi­nent role so many women besides Der­byshire played in the devel­op­ment of the sounds we now hear around us all the time.

In recog­ni­tion of this fact, musi­cian, DJ, and “escaped housewife/schoolteacher” Bar­bara Gold­en devot­ed two episodes of her KPFA radio pro­gram “Crack o’ Dawn” to women in elec­tron­ic music, once in 2010 and again in 2013. She shares each broad­cast with co-host Jon Lei­deck­er (“Wob­bly”), and in each seg­ment, the two ban­ter in casu­al radio show style, offer­ing his­to­ry and con­text for each musi­cian and com­pos­er. High­light­ed on Ubu’s for­mer Twit­ter stream, the first show, “Women in Elec­tron­ic Music 1938–1982 Part 1” (above) gives Der­byshire her due, with three tracks from her, includ­ing the Doc­tor Who theme.

It also includes music from twen­ty one oth­er com­posers, begin­ning with Clara Rock­more, a refin­er and pop­u­lar­iz­er of the theremin, that weird instru­ment designed to sim­u­late a high, tremu­lous human voice. Also fea­tured is Wendy Carlos’s “Timesteps,” an orig­i­nal piece from her A Clock­work Orange score.

The sec­ond show, above, fills in sev­er­al gaps in the orig­i­nal broad­cast and “could eas­i­ly be six hours” says co-host Lei­deck­er, giv­en the sheer amount of elec­tron­ic music out there com­posed and record­ed by women over the past sev­en­ty years. This show includes one of our host Golden’s own com­po­si­tions, “Melody Sum­n­er Car­na­han,” as well as music from Lau­rie Ander­son and musique con­crete com­pos­er Doris Hays. These two broad­casts alone cov­er an enor­mous range of styl­is­tic and tech­no­log­i­cal ground, but for even more disco­graph­i­cal his­to­ry of women in elec­tron­ic music, see the playlist below, com­piled by “Nerd­girl” Antye Greie-Ripat­ti. Com­mis­sioned by Club Trans­me­di­ale Berlin, the mix includes such well-known names as Yoko Ono, Bjork, and M.I.A., as well as fore­moth­ers Der­byshire and Car­los, and dozens more.

In lieu of the radio-show chat­ter of Gold­en and Lei­deck­er, we have Greie-Ripatti’s post detail­ing each artist’s time peri­od, coun­try of ori­gin, and con­tri­bu­tions to elec­tron­ic music his­to­ry. Many of the com­posers rep­re­sent­ed here worked for major radio and film stu­dios, scored fea­ture films (like 1956’s For­bid­den Plan­et), invent­ed and inno­vat­ed new instru­ments and tech­niques, wrote for orches­tras, and passed on their knowl­edge as edu­ca­tors and pro­duc­ers. Greie-Ripatti’s page quotes a Dan­ish elec­tron­ic pro­duc­er and per­former say­ing “there is a lot of women in elec­tron­ic music… invis­i­ble women.” Thanks to efforts like hers and Golden’s, these pio­neer­ing cre­ators need no longer go unseen or, more impor­tant­ly, unheard.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Meet Delia Der­byshire, the Dr. Who Com­pos­er Who Almost Turned The Bea­t­les’ “Yes­ter­day” Into Ear­ly Elec­tron­i­ca

Watch Com­pos­er Wendy Car­los Demo an Orig­i­nal Moog Syn­the­siz­er (1989)

Meet Four Women Who Pio­neered Elec­tron­ic Music: Daphne Oram, Lau­rie Spiegel, Éliane Radigue & Pauline Oliv­eros

New Doc­u­men­tary Sis­ters with Tran­sis­tors Tells the Sto­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music’s Female Pio­neers

Mr. Rogers Intro­duces Kids to Exper­i­men­tal Elec­tron­ic Music by Bruce Haack & Esther Nel­son (1968)

Hear Elec­tron­ic Lady­land, a Mix­tape Fea­tur­ing 55 Tracks from 35 Pio­neer­ing Women in Elec­tron­ic Music

Thomas Dol­by Explains How a Syn­the­siz­er Works on a Jim Hen­son Kids Show (1989)

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

The Futurist Cookbook (1930) Tried to Turn Italian Cuisine into Modern Art

in Art, Food & Drink | March 10th, 2026

With the sav­age cuts in arts fund­ing, per­haps we’ll return to a sys­tem of noblesse oblige famil­iar to stu­dents of The Gild­ed Age, when artists need­ed inde­pen­dent wealth or patron­age, and wealthy indus­tri­al­ists often decid­ed what was art, and what wasn’t. Unlike fine art, how­ev­er, haute cui­sine has always relied on the patron­age of wealthy donors—or din­ers. It can be mar­ket­ed in pre­made pieces, sold in cook­books, and made to look easy on TV, but for rea­sons both cul­tur­al and prac­ti­cal, giv­en the nature of food, an exquis­ite­ly-pre­pared dish can only be made acces­si­ble to a select few.

Still, we would be mis­tak­en, sug­gest­ed Futur­ist poet and the­o­rist F.T. Marinet­ti (1876–1944), should we neglect to see cook­ing as an art form akin to all the oth­ers in its moral and intel­lec­tu­al influ­ence on us. While hard­ly the first or the last artist to pub­lish a cook­book, Marinetti’s Futur­ist Cook­book seems at first glance dead­ly, even aggres­sive­ly, seri­ous, lack­ing the whim­sy, imprac­ti­cal weird­ness, and sur­re­al­ist art of Sal­vador Dali’s Les Din­ers de Gala, for exam­ple, or the eclec­tic wist­ful­ness of the MoMA’s Artist’s Cook­book.

Just as he had sought with his ear­li­er Futur­ist Man­i­festo to rev­o­lu­tion­ize art, Marinet­ti intend­ed his cook­book to foment a “rev­o­lu­tion of cui­sine,” as Alex Rev­el­li Sori­ni and Susan­na Cuti­ni point out. You might even call it an act of war when it came to cer­tain sta­ples of Ital­ian eat­ing, like pas­ta, which he thought respon­si­ble for “slug­gish­ness, pes­simism, nos­tal­gic inac­tiv­i­ty, and neu­tral­ism” (antic­i­pat­ing scads of low and no-carb diets to come).

Believ­ing that peo­ple “think, dream and act accord­ing to what they eat and drink,” Marinet­ti for­mu­lat­ed strict rules not only for the prepa­ra­tion of food, but also the serv­ing and eat­ing of it, going so far as to call for abol­ish­ing the knife and fork. A short excerpt from his intro­duc­tion shows him apply­ing to food the tech­no-roman­ti­cism of his Futur­ist theory—an ethos tak­en up by Ben­i­to Mus­soli­ni, whom Marinet­ti sup­port­ed:

The Futur­ist culi­nary rev­o­lu­tion … has the lofty, noble and uni­ver­sal­ly expe­di­ent aim of chang­ing rad­i­cal­ly the eat­ing habits of our race, strength­en­ing it, dynamiz­ing it and spir­i­tu­al­iz­ing it with brand-new food com­bi­na­tions in which exper­i­ment, intel­li­gence and imag­i­na­tion will eco­nom­i­cal­ly take the place of quan­ti­ty, banal­i­ty, rep­e­ti­tion and expense.

In hind­sight, the fas­cist over­tones in Marinetti’s lan­guage seem glar­ing. In 1932, when the Futur­ist Cook­book was pub­lished, his Futur­ism seemed like a much-need­ed “jolt to all the prac­ti­cal and intel­lec­tu­al activ­i­ties,” note Sori­ni and Cuti­ni.  “The sub­ject [of cook­ing] need­ed a good shake to reawak­en its spir­it.” And that’s just what it got. The Futur­ist Cook­book act­ed as “a pre­view of Ital­ian-style Nou­velle Cui­sine,” with such inno­va­tions as “addi­tives and preser­v­a­tives added to food, or using tech­no­log­i­cal tools in the kitchen to mince, pul­ver­ize, and emul­si­fy.”

Yet, for all the high seri­ous­ness with which Marinet­ti seems to treat his sub­ject, “what the media missed” at the time, writes Maria Popo­va, “was that the cook­book was arguably the great­est artis­tic prank of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry.” In an intro­duc­tion to the 1989 edi­tion, British jour­nal­ist and his­to­ri­an Les­ley Cham­ber­lain called the Futur­ist Cook­book “a seri­ous joke, rev­o­lu­tion­ary in the first instance because it over­turned with rib­ald laugh­ter every­thing ‘food’ and ‘cook­books’ held sacred.” Marinet­ti first swept away tra­di­tion in favor of cre­ative din­ing events the Futur­ists called “aer­oban­quets,” such as one in Bologna in 1931 with a table shaped like an air­plane and dish­es called “spicy air­port” (Olivi­er sal­ad) and “ris­ing thun­der” (orange risot­to). Lam­br­us­co wine was served in gas cans.

It’s per­for­mance art wor­thy of Dal­i’s bizarre cos­tumed din­ner par­ties, but fueled by a gen­uine desire to rev­o­lu­tion­ize food, if not the actu­al eat­ing of it, by “bring­ing togeth­er ele­ments sep­a­rat­ed by bias­es that have no true foun­da­tion.” So remarked French chef Jules Main­cave, a 1914 con­vert to Futur­ism and inspi­ra­tion for what Marinet­ti calls “flex­i­ble fla­vor­ful com­bi­na­tions.” See sev­er­al such recipes excerpt­ed from the Futur­ist Cook­book at Brain Pick­ings, read the full book in Ital­ian here, and, just below, see Marinetti’s rules for the per­fect meal, first pub­lished in 1930 as the “Man­i­festo of Futur­ist Cui­sine.”

Futur­ist cui­sine and rules for the per­fect lunch

1. An orig­i­nal har­mo­ny of the table (crys­tal ware, crock­ery and glass­ware, dec­o­ra­tion) with the fla­vors and col­ors of the dish­es.

2. Utter orig­i­nal­i­ty in the dish­es.

3. The inven­tion of flex­i­ble fla­vor­ful com­bi­na­tions (edi­ble plas­tic com­plex), whose orig­i­nal har­mo­ny of form and col­or feeds the eyes and awak­ens the imag­i­na­tion before tempt­ing the lips.

4. The abo­li­tion of knife and fork in favor of flex­i­ble com­bi­na­tions that can deliv­er prelabi­al tac­tile enjoy­ment.

5. The use of the art of per­fumery to enhance taste. Each dish must be pre­ced­ed by a per­fume that will be removed from the table using fans.

6. A lim­it­ed use of music in the inter­vals between one dish and the next, so as not to dis­tract the sen­si­tiv­i­ty of the tongue and the palate and serves to elim­i­nate the fla­vor enjoyed, restor­ing a clean slate for tast­ing.

7. Abo­li­tion of ora­to­ry and pol­i­tics at the table.

8. Mea­sured use of poet­ry and music as unex­pect­ed ingre­di­ents to awak­en the fla­vors of a giv­en dish with their sen­su­al inten­si­ty.

9. Rapid pre­sen­ta­tion between one dish and the next, before the nos­trils and the eyes of the din­ner guests, of the few dish­es that they will eat, and oth­ers that they will not, to facil­i­tate curios­i­ty, sur­prise, and imag­i­na­tion.

10. The cre­ation of simul­ta­ne­ous and chang­ing morsels that con­tain ten, twen­ty fla­vors to be tast­ed in a few moments. These morsels will also serve the ana­log func­tion […] of sum­ma­riz­ing an entire area of life, the course of a love affair, or an entire voy­age to the Far East.

11. A sup­ply of sci­en­tif­ic tools in the kitchen: ozone machines that will impart the scent of ozone to liq­uids and dish­es; lamps to emit ultra­vi­o­let rays; elec­trolyz­ers to decom­pose extract­ed juices etc. in order to use a known prod­uct to achieve a new prod­uct with new prop­er­ties; col­loidal mills that can be used to pul­ver­ize flours, dried fruit and nuts, spices, etc.; dis­till­ing devices using ordi­nary pres­sure or a vac­u­um, cen­trifuge auto­claves, dial­y­sis machines.

The use of this equip­ment must be sci­en­tif­ic, avoid­ing the error of allow­ing dish­es to cook in steam pres­sure cook­ers, which leads to the destruc­tion of active sub­stances (vit­a­mins, etc.) due to the high tem­per­a­tures. Chem­i­cal indi­ca­tors will check if the sauce is acidic or basic and will serve to cor­rect any errors that may occur: lack of salt, too much vine­gar, too much pep­per, too sweet.”

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

Relat­ed Con­tent

When Ital­ian Futur­ists Declared War on Pas­ta (1930)

Sal­vador Dalí’s 1973 Cook­book Gets Reis­sued: Sur­re­al­ist Art Meets Haute Cui­sine

MoMA’s Artists’ Cook­book (1978) Reveals the Meals of Sal­vador Dalí, Willem de Koon­ing, Andy Warhol, Louise Bour­geois & More

The Artists’ and Writ­ers’ Cook­book Col­lects Recipes From T.C. Boyle, Mari­na Abramović, Neil Gaiman, Joyce Car­ol Oates & More

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

RIP Gladys Mae West, the Pioneering Black Mathematician Who Helped Lay the Foundation for GPS

in History, Math, Technology | January 28th, 2026

Gladys Mae West was born in rur­al Vir­ginia in 1930, grew up work­ing on a tobac­co farm, and died ear­li­er this month a cel­e­brat­ed math­e­mati­cian whose work made pos­si­ble the GPS tech­nol­o­gy most of us use each and every day. Hers was a dis­tinc­tive­ly Amer­i­can life, in more ways than one. Seek­ing an escape from the agri­cul­tur­al labor she’d already got­ten to know all too well, she won a schol­ar­ship to Vir­ginia State Col­lege by becom­ing her high school class vale­dic­to­ri­an; after earn­ing her bach­e­lor’s and mas­ter’s degrees in math­e­mat­ics, she taught for a time and then applied for a job at the naval base up in Dahlgren. She first dis­tin­guished her­self there by ver­i­fy­ing the accu­ra­cy of bomb­ing tables with a hand cal­cu­la­tor, and from there moved on up to the com­put­er pro­gram­ming team.

This was the ear­ly nine­teen-six­ties, when pro­gram­ming a com­put­er meant not cod­ing, but labo­ri­ous­ly feed­ing punch cards into an enor­mous main­frame. West and her col­leagues used IBM’s first tran­sis­tor­ized machine, the 7030 (or “Stretch”), which was for a few years the fastest com­put­er in the world.

It cost an equiv­a­lent of $81,860,000 in today’s dol­lars, but no oth­er com­put­er had the pow­er to han­dle the project of cal­cu­lat­ing the pre­cise shape of Earth as affect­ed by grav­i­ty and the nature of the oceans. About a decade lat­er, anoth­er team of gov­ern­ment sci­en­tists made use of those very same cal­cu­la­tions when putting togeth­er the mod­el employed by the World Geo­det­ic Sys­tem, which GPS satel­lites still use today. Hence the ten­den­cy of cel­e­bra­to­ry obit­u­ar­ies to under­score the point that with­out West­’s work, GPS would­n’t be pos­si­ble.

Nor do any of them neglect to point out the fact that West was black, one of just four such math­e­mati­cians work­ing for the Navy at Dahlgren. Sto­ries like hers have drawn much greater pub­lic inter­est since the suc­cess of Hid­den Fig­ures, the Hol­ly­wood adap­ta­tion of Mar­got Lee Shet­ter­ly’s book about the black female math­e­mati­cians at NASA dur­ing the Space Race. When that movie came out, in 2016, even West­’s own chil­dren did­n’t know the impor­tance of the once-clas­si­fied work she’d done. Only in 2018, when she pro­vid­ed that infor­ma­tion on a bio­graph­i­cal form she filled out for an event host­ed by her col­lege soror­i­ty, did it become pub­lic. She thus spent the last years of her long life as a celebri­ty, sought out by aca­d­e­mics and jour­nal­ists eager to under­stand the con­tri­bu­tions of anoth­er no-longer-hid­den fig­ure. But to their ques­tions about her own GPS use, she report­ed­ly answered that she pre­ferred a good old-fash­ioned paper map.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Mar­garet Hamil­ton, Lead Soft­ware Engi­neer of the Apol­lo Project, Stands Next to Her Code That Took Us to the Moon (1969)

Women’s Hid­den Con­tri­bu­tions to Mod­ern Genet­ics Get Revealed by New Study: No Longer Will They Be Buried in the Foot­notes

Meet Grace Hop­per, the Pio­neer­ing Com­put­er Sci­en­tist Who Helped Invent COBOL and Build the His­toric Mark I Com­put­er (1906–1992)

Joce­lyn Bell Bur­nell Dis­cov­ered Radio Pul­sars in 1974, But the Cred­it Went to Her Advi­sor; In 2018, She Gets Her Due, Win­ning a $3 Mil­lion Physics Prize

Hen­ri­et­ta Lacks Gets Immor­tal­ized in a Por­trait: It’s Now on Dis­play at the Nation­al Por­trait Gallery

Black His­to­ry in Two Min­utes: Watch 93 Videos Writ­ten & Nar­rat­ed by Hen­ry Louis Gates Jr.

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.

Can Genius Be Taught? The Polgár Sisters and the Experiment That Put the Question to the Test

in Education, Games | January 8th, 2026

As any new par­ent soon finds out, there exists a robust mar­ket for prod­ucts, ser­vices, and media that promise to boost a child’s intel­li­gence. Some of these offer­ings come as close as legal­ly pos­si­ble to hold­ing out the promise of putting any tot on the path to genius, brazen­ly beg­ging the ques­tion of whether it’s pos­si­ble to raise a genius in the first place. Still, the efforts par­ents have delib­er­ate­ly made in that direc­tion have occa­sion­al­ly pro­duced notable results, from epochal fig­ures like Mozart or John Stu­art Mill to the promis­ing-math­e­mati­cian-turned-street­car-trans­fer-obsessed-recluse William Sidis. More recent­ly came the Pol­gár sis­ters, who were suc­cess­ful­ly raised to become some of the great­est female chess play­ers in his­to­ry.

Hav­ing stud­ied the nature of intel­li­gence at uni­ver­si­ty, their father Lás­zló got it in his head that, since most genius­es start­ed learn­ing their sub­jects inten­sive­ly and ear­ly, par­ents could cul­ti­vate genius-lev­el per­for­mance in their chil­dren by direct­ing that learn­ing process them­selves. He sought out a wife both intel­lec­tu­al­ly promis­ing and will­ing to devote her­self to test­ing this hypoth­e­sis. Togeth­er they went on to father three daugh­ters, putting them through a rig­or­ous, cus­tom-made edu­ca­tion ori­ent­ed toward chess mas­tery. Chess became the pro­jec­t’s cen­tral sub­ject in large part because of its sheer objec­tiv­i­ty, all the bet­ter for Lás­zló Pol­gár to mea­sure the results of this domes­tic exper­i­ment.

Nor could it have hurt, giv­en the impor­tance of retain­ing the inter­est of chil­dren, that chess was a game — and one with evoca­tive toy-like pieces — that offers imme­di­ate feed­back and feel­ings of accom­plish­ment. For his daugh­ters, Pol­gár has empha­sized, learn­ing involved none of the drudgery and busy­work of school. “A child does not like only play: for them it is also enjoy­able to acquire infor­ma­tion and solve prob­lems,” he writes in his book Raise a Genius! “A child’s work can also be enjoy­able; so can learn­ing, if it is suf­fi­cient­ly moti­vat­ing, and if it means a con­stant sup­ply of prob­lems to solve that are appro­pri­ate for the lev­el of the child’s needs. A child does not need play sep­a­rate from work, but mean­ing­ful action.”

The proof of Pol­gár’s the­o­ries is in the pud­ding — or at any rate, in the rat­ings. All three of his daugh­ters became elite chess play­ers. Sofia, the mid­dle one, became the sixth-strongest female play­er in the world; Susan, the eldest, the top-ranked female play­er in the world; Judit, the youngest, the strongest female chess play­er of all time. This despite the fact that their father was an unex­cep­tion­al chess play­er, and their moth­er not a chess play­er at all. Some eager­ly take the sto­ry of the Pol­gár sis­ters as a vin­di­ca­tion of nur­ture over nature; oth­ers, sci­en­tif­ic researchers includ­ed, argue that it only shows that prac­tice is a nec­es­sary con­di­tion for this kind of genius, not a suf­fi­cient one. For my part, hav­ing kept an eye on a pair of infant twins while writ­ing this, I’d be hap­py if my own kids could just mas­ter hold­ing on to their bot­tles.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Learn How to Play Chess Online: Free Chess Lessons for Begin­ners, Inter­me­di­ate Play­ers & Beyond

Meet Alma Deutsch­er, the Clas­si­cal Music Prodi­gy: Watch Her Per­for­mances from Age 6 to 14

The Mag­ic of Chess: Kids Share Their Unin­hib­it­ed, Philo­soph­i­cal Insights about the Ben­e­fits of Chess

Hear the Pieces Mozart Com­posed When He Was Only 5 Years Old

Read an 18th-Cen­tu­ry Eye­wit­ness Account of 8‑Year-Old Mozart’s Extra­or­di­nary Musi­cal Skills

The Renewed Pop­u­lar­i­ty of Chess and The Queen’s Gam­bit: Pret­ty Much Pop Cul­ture Pod­cast Dis­cus­sion #78 with Chess Expert J. J. Lang

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.

What’s Entering the Public Domain in 2026: Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, All Quiet on the Western Front, Betty Boop & More

in Books, Comics/Cartoons, Film, Law, Music | January 1st, 2026

Though it isn’t the kind of thing one hears dis­cussed every day, seri­ous Dis­ney fans do tend to know that Goofy’s orig­i­nal name was Dip­py Dawg. But how many of the non-obses­sive know that Mick­ey’s faith­ful pet Plu­to was first called Rover? (We pass over in dig­ni­fied silence the qua­si-philo­soph­i­cal ques­tion of why the for­mer dog is humanoid and the lat­ter isn’t.) It is Rover, as dis­tinct from Plu­to, who pass­es into the pub­lic domain this new year, one of a cast of now-lib­er­at­ed char­ac­ters includ­ing Blondie and Dag­wood as well as Bet­ty Boop — who, upon mak­ing her debut in Fleis­ch­er Stu­dios’ Dizzy Dish­es of 1930, has a some­what canoid appear­ance her­self. You can see them all in the video above from Duke Uni­ver­si­ty’s Cen­ter for the Study of the Pub­lic Domain, with much more infor­ma­tion avail­able in their blog post mark­ing this year’s “Pub­lic Domain Day.”

The year 1930, write the Cen­ter’s Jen­nifer Jenk­ins and James Boyle, was one “of detec­tives, jazz, speakeasies, and icon­ic char­ac­ters step­ping onto the cul­tur­al stage — many of whom have been locked behind copy­right for near­ly a cen­tu­ry.”

Nov­els that come avail­able this year include William Faulkn­er’s As I Lay Dying, Dashiell Ham­met­t’s The Mal­tese Fal­con, and Agatha Christie’s The Mur­der at the Vic­arage; among the films are Lewis Mile­stone’s Best Pic­ture-win­ning All Qui­et on the West­ern Front, Vic­tor Heer­man’s Marx Broth­ers pic­ture Ani­mal Crack­ers, and Luis Buñuel and Sal­vador Dalí’s L’Âge d’Or. In music, com­po­si­tions like “I Got Rhythm” and “Embrace­able You” by the Gersh­win Broth­ers as well as record­ings like “Nobody Knows the Trou­ble I’ve Seen” by Mar­i­an Ander­son and “Sweet Geor­gia Brown” by Ben Bernie and His Hotel Roo­sevelt Orches­tra have also, at long last, gone pub­lic.

Reflec­tion on some of these works them­selves sug­gests some­thing about the impor­tance of the pub­lic domain. With the title of Cakes and Ale, anoth­er book in this year’s crop, Som­er­set Maugh­am makes ref­er­ence to “a clas­sic pub­lic domain work, in this case Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night”; so, for that mat­ter, does Faulkn­er, giv­en that the line “as I lay dying” comes from the Odyssey. “To tell new sto­ries, we draw from old­er ones,” write Jenk­ins and Boyle. “One work of art inspires anoth­er — that is how the pub­lic domain feeds cre­ativ­i­ty.” Today, we’re free to take explic­it inspi­ra­tion for our own work from Nan­cy Drew, “Just a Gigo­lo,” Blondie, Mon­dri­an’s Com­po­si­tion with Red, Blue, and Yel­low, Hitch­cock­’s Mur­der!, and much else besides. And by all means use Rover, but if you also want to bring in Dip­py Dawg, you’re going to have to wait until 2028.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What’s Enter­ing the Pub­lic Domain in 2025: Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Ear­ly Hitch­cock Films, Tintin and Pop­eye Car­toons & More

The Harlem Jazz Singer Who Inspired Bet­ty Boop: Meet the Orig­i­nal Boop-Oop-a-Doop, “Baby Esther”

Car­toon­ists Draw Their Famous Car­toon Char­ac­ters While Blind­fold­ed (1947)

Watch Restored Ver­sions of Clas­sic Fleis­ch­er Car­toons on Youtube, Fea­tur­ing Bet­ty Boop, Koko the Clown & Oth­ers

Vin­tage Audio: William Faulkn­er Reads From As I Lay Dying

16 Free Hitch­cock Movies Online

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.