Top 10 Alternative Christmas Movie Lists: Horror, Action, Comedy & More

in Film | December 23rd, 2025

Die Hard is a Christ­mas movie. That once-con­trar­i­an cat­e­go­riza­tion has increas­ing­ly been accept­ed over the past cou­ple of decades, at least since an edi­tor with whom I’ve often worked first declared it in a Slate roundup. As a result, John McTier­nan’s stur­dy piece of one-build­ing eight­ies Hol­ly­wood action may have dis­placed It’s a Won­der­ful Life as a hol­i­day home-video tra­di­tion in cer­tain house­holds. But it’s also stoked a broad­er desire for ever more alter­na­tive Christ­mas movies with sub­tle, even sub­ver­sive hol­i­day ele­ments. If you, too, can’t han­dle yet anoth­er view­ing of Mir­a­cle on 34th Street, A Christ­mas Sto­ry, or Home Alone this year, have a look at the top ten lists com­piled in these four videos, which offer a selec­tion of films beyond — some­times well beyond — the estab­lished sea­son­al canon.

These selec­tions come from a vari­ety of gen­res, includ­ing the super­hero pic­ture: if you haven’t seen Bat­man Returns in a few decades, you may have for­got­ten how thor­ough­ly Tim Bur­ton sat­u­rates it with Christ­mas imagery, albeit of a kind suit­ed to the dank, men­ac­ing Gotham City. Those who want to crank up the dark­ness fur­ther still would do well to put on the Cana­di­an soror­i­ty-house slash­er film Black Christ­mas, which also appears on more than one of these lists.

Joe Dan­te’s Yule­tide-set Grem­lins con­tains much high­er-bud­get spec­ta­cles of destruc­tion, albeit comedic ones; the humor of Ter­ry Gilliam’s Brazil, anoth­er elab­o­rate mid-eight­ies auteur project, runs to the dystopi­an, a sen­si­bil­i­ty cer­tain­ly present in the hol­i­day sea­son itself, if sel­dom treat­ed with such grotesque vivid­ness.

The work of no sin­gle pro­fes­sion­al makes these alter­na­tive Christ­mas movie lists more often than Shane Black, the writer of Lethal Weapon (with Die Hard, the mak­ings of a hol­i­day dou­ble bill if ever there was one) and The Long Kiss Good­night, as well as the writer-direc­tor of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Iron Man 3, and The Nice Guys. That all of those pic­tures are set at Christ­mas­time makes them feel — no mat­ter how height­ened, fan­tas­ti­cal, or visu­al effects-sat­u­rat­ed they may be — pal­pa­bly con­nect­ed to our own real­i­ty. It also tends to inten­si­fy the dra­ma: as Black remarked in one inter­view, “Christ­mas rep­re­sents a lit­tle stut­ter in the march of days, a hush in which we have a chance to assess and ret­ro­spect our lives.” Which hard­ly means, of course, that it can’t be enter­tain­ing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch San­ta Claus, the Ear­li­est Movie About San­ta in Exis­tence (1898)

Watch The Insects’ Christ­mas from 1913: A Stop Motion Film Star­ring a Cast of Dead Bugs

An Ani­mat­ed Christ­mas Fable by Mau­rice Sendak (1977)

The Junky’s Christ­mas: William S. Burrough’s Dark Clay­ma­tion Christ­mas Film Pro­duced by Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la (1993)

Stan­ley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, the Most Trou­bling Christ­mas Film Ever Made

Blue Christ­mas: A Cri­te­ri­on Video Essay

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.

Why Overconfidence Is Our Most Dangerous Cognitive Bias

in Psychology | November 17th, 2025

In the two-thou­sands, the magi­cian-come­di­ans Penn and Teller host­ed a tele­vi­sion series called Bull­shit! In it, they took on a vari­ety of cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­na they regard­ed as wor­thy of the tit­u­lar epi­thet, from ESP to Area 51, exor­cism to cre­ation­ism, feng shui to haute cui­sine. Their sar­don­ic argu­ments were enriched by clips of assort­ed inter­vie­wees —speak­ing in defense of the top­ic of the day. Penn once addressed the view­ers, say­ing that we might won­der why any­one agrees to come on the show, giv­en how they must know it will make them come off. But every­one, he explained, con­fi­dent­ly believes that their own ideas are the cor­rect ones.

That episode came right to mind while watch­ing the new Ver­i­ta­si­um video above, which deals with the phe­nom­e­non of over­con­fi­dence. Like the oft-cit­ed 93 per­cent of Amer­i­cans who believe them­selves bet­ter dri­vers than the medi­an, we all fall vic­tim to that afflic­tion at one time or anoth­er, to one degree or anoth­er; the more inter­est­ing mat­ter under inves­ti­ga­tion is why that should be so.

One can always point to what T. S. Eliot called “the end­less strug­gle to think well of them­selves”: want­i­ng to believe that we know it all, we take pains to present our­selves as if we do. But as explained by the pro­fes­sors inter­viewed here, Carnegie Mel­lon’s Baruch Fis­chhoff and Berke­ley’s Don A. Moore (author of Per­fect­ly Con­fi­dent: How to Cal­i­brate Your Deci­sions Wise­ly), the research has also revealed oth­er poten­tial fac­tors in play.

One impor­tant can­di­date is, as ever, stu­pid­i­ty. Much has been made of the Dun­ning-Kruger effect, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, which holds that the less com­pe­tent peo­ple are at a task, the more con­fi­dent they tend to be about their abil­i­ty to per­form it. That would seem to accord with much of our every­day expe­ri­ence, but we should also con­sid­er the role played by the basic cog­ni­tive lim­i­ta­tions that apply to us all. Our brains can only process so much at once, and when they come up against capac­i­ty, they default to sim­pli­fied, and often too-sim­pli­fied, ver­sions of the prob­lem before them. It all becomes more dif­fi­cult if we’re insu­lat­ed from direct, objec­tive feed­back, a con­di­tion that often results from the kind of suc­cess and esteem that can be achieved by pro­ject­ing — you guessed it — con­fi­dence.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Why Incom­pe­tent Peo­ple Think They’re Com­pe­tent: The Dun­ning-Kruger Effect, Explained

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.

AC/DC Plays a Short Gig at CBGB in 1977: Hear Metal Being Played on Punk’s Hallowed Grounds

in Music | November 17th, 2025

Punk rock and heavy met­al were two gen­res that evolved over the ‘70s, but seemed to run par­al­lel to each oth­er, despite shar­ing com­mon fash­ion, sounds, and atti­tudes. But then there are moments in his­to­ry, where every­body plays togeth­er in the same sand­box. For exam­ple, the above remas­tered audio, which cap­tures the Aus­tralian band AC/DC on their first Amer­i­can tour, play­ing New York’s CBGB, syn­ony­mous now with punk and new wave music.

The date is August 24, 1977, and AC/DC were on a cross-coun­try trip that had tak­en in both club dates and are­nas, where they supported—yes, hard to believe, I know—REO Speed­wag­on. Their album Let There Be Rock had just dropped in June. The band would be in the States until the win­ter.

This CBGB gig finds them on the same bill as Talk­ing Heads and the Dead Boys, accord­ing to a poster from the time. And while there’s no video for this show, you can find a few pho­tos that doc­u­ment the con­cert here. You can feel the mug­gy New York sum­mer in these pho­tos, but also the excite­ment of an unfor­get­table gig.

At 15 min­utes, the set is short, but still three min­utes longer than the Ramones’ first set at the same club three years ear­li­er. That’s pret­ty met­al, man.

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

NYC’s Icon­ic Punk Club CBG­Bs Comes Alive in a Bril­liant Short Ani­ma­tion, Using David Godlis’ Pho­tos of Pat­ti Smith, The Ramones & More

CBGB’s Hey­day: Watch The Ramones, The Dead Boys, Bad Brains, Talk­ing Heads & Blondie Per­form Live (1974–1982)

Lis­ten to Pat­ti Smith’s Glo­ri­ous Three Hour Farewell to CBGB’s on Its Final Night

The Talk­ing Heads Play CBGB, the New York Club That Shaped Their Sound (1975)

Watch an Episode of TV-CBGB, the First Rock ‘n’ Roll Sit­com Ever Aired on Cable TV (1981)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts.

A 400-Year-Old Ring that Unfolds to Track the Movements of the Heavens

in Astronomy, Design, Fashion, History | November 6th, 2025

Rings with a dis­creet dual pur­pose have been in use since before the com­mon era, when Han­ni­bal, fac­ing extra­di­tion, alleged­ly ingest­ed the poi­son he kept secret­ed behind a gem­stone on his fin­ger. (More recent­ly, poi­son rings gave rise to a pop­u­lar Game of Thrones fan the­o­ry…)

Vic­to­ri­ans pre­vent­ed their most close­ly kept secrets—illicit love let­ters, per­haps? Last wills and testaments?—from falling into the wrong hands by wear­ing the keys to the box­es con­tain­ing these items con­cealed in signet rings and oth­er state­ment-type pieces.

A tiny con­cealed blade could be lethal on the fin­ger of a skilled (and no doubt, beau­ti­ful) assas­sin. These days, they might be used to col­lect a bit of one’s attack­er’s DNA.

Enter the fic­tion­al world of James Bond, and you’ll find a num­ber of handy dandy spy rings includ­ing one that dou­bles as a cam­era, and anoth­er capa­ble of shat­ter­ing bul­let­proof glass with a sin­gle twist.

Armil­lary sphere rings like the ones in the British Muse­um’s col­lec­tion and the Swedish His­tor­i­cal Muse­um (top) serve a more benign pur­pose. Fold­ed togeth­er, the two-part out­er hoop and three inte­ri­or hoops give the illu­sion of a sim­ple gold band. Slipped off the wearer’s fin­ger, they can fan out into a phys­i­cal mod­el of celes­tial lon­gi­tude and lat­i­tude.

Art his­to­ri­an Jes­si­ca Stew­art writes that in the 17th cen­tu­ry, rings such as the above spec­i­men were “used by astronomers to study and make cal­cu­la­tions. These pieces of jew­el­ry were con­sid­ered tokens of knowl­edge. Inscrip­tions or zodi­ac sym­bols were often used as dec­o­ra­tive ele­ments on the bands.”

The armil­lary sphere rings in the British Museum’s col­lec­tion are made of a soft high-alloy gold.

Jew­el­ry-lov­ing mod­ern astronomers seek­ing an old school fin­ger-based cal­cu­la­tion tool that real­ly works can order armil­lary sphere rings from Brook­lyn-based design­er Black Adept.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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Relat­ed Con­tent: 

A 16th-Cen­tu­ry Astron­o­my Book Fea­tured “Ana­log Com­put­ers” to Cal­cu­late the Shape of the Moon, the Posi­tion of the Sun, and More

When Astronomer Johannes Kepler Wrote the First Work of Sci­ence Fic­tion, The Dream (1609)

The Rem­brandt Book Bracelet: Behold a Func­tion­al Bracelet Fea­tur­ing 1400 Rem­brandt Draw­ings

Behold the Astro­nom­icum Cae­sareum, “Per­haps the Most Beau­ti­ful Sci­en­tif­ic Book Ever Print­ed” (1540)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist in New York City.

Musician Plays the Last Stradivarius Guitar in the World, the “Sabionari” Made in 1679

in Music | September 30th, 2025

Last night, while the home team lost the big game on TVs at a local dive bar, my noisy rock band opened for a cham­ber pop ensem­ble. Elec­tric gui­tars and feed­back gave way to clas­si­cal acoustics, vio­lin, piano, accor­dion, and even a saw. It was an inter­est­ing cul­tur­al jux­ta­po­si­tion in an evening of cul­tur­al jux­ta­po­si­tions. The sports and music did­n’t gel, but an odd sym­me­try emerged from the two bands’ con­trast­ing styles, to a degree. The instru­ment above, on the oth­er hand, would have fit right in with the sec­ond act, whose old world charm would sure­ly find a place for a 1679 guitar—one craft­ed by the leg­endary mas­ter luthi­er Anto­nio Stradi­vari, no less.

If you know noth­ing at all about music or musi­cal instru­ments, you know the name Stradi­vari and the vio­lins that bear his name. They are such cov­et­ed, valu­able objects they some­times appear as the tar­get of crime capers in the movies and on tele­vi­sion. This Stradi­var­ius gui­tar, called the “Sabionari,” is even rar­er than the vio­lins. The Stradi­vari fam­i­ly, writes For­got­ten Gui­tar, “pro­duced over 1000 instru­ments, of which 960 were vio­lins.” Yet, “a small num­ber of gui­tars were also craft­ed, and as of today only one remains playable.” High­ly playable, you’ll observe in these videos, thanks to the restora­tion by luthiers Daniel Sinier, Fran­coise de Rid­der, and Loren­zo Frig­nani.

In the clip just above, Baroque con­cert gui­tarist Rolf Lisl­e­vand plays San­ti­a­go de Mur­ci­a’s “Taran­tela” on the restored gui­tar, whose sonorous ring­ing tim­bre recalls anoth­er Baroque instru­ment, the harp­si­chord.

So unique and unusu­al is the ten-string Stradi­var­ius Sabionari that it has its own web­site, where you’ll find many detailed, close-up pho­tos of the ele­gant design as well as more music, like the piece above, Ange­lo Michele Bar­tolot­ti’s Suite in G Minor as per­formed by clas­si­cal gui­tarist Krish­na­sol Jiménez, who, along with Lisl­e­vand, has been entrust­ed with the instru­ment for many live per­for­mances. Owned by a pri­vate col­lec­tor, the Sabionari very often appears at lec­tures on restora­tion and con­ser­va­tion of clas­si­cal instru­ments, as well as in per­for­mances around Europe. You’ll find on sabionari.com many more videos of the gui­tar in action (like that below of gui­tarist Ugo Nas­truc­ci impro­vis­ing), links to exhibits, descrip­tions of the chal­leng­ing­ly long neck and Baroque tun­ing, and a sense of just how much the Sabionari gets around for such a rare, antique instru­ment.

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Why Sci­en­tists Can’t Recre­ate the Sound of Stradi­var­ius Vio­lins: The Mys­tery of Their Inim­itable Sound

Why Vio­lins Have F‑Holes: The Sci­ence & His­to­ry of a Remark­able Renais­sance Design

What Makes the Stradi­var­ius Spe­cial? It Was Designed to Sound Like a Female Sopra­no Voice, With Notes Sound­ing Like Vow­els, Says Researcher

Watch Price­less 17-Cen­tu­ry Stradi­var­ius and Amati Vio­lins Get Tak­en for a Test Dri­ve by Pro­fes­sion­al Vio­lin­ists

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

Ernst Haeckel’s Sublime Drawings of Flora & Fauna: The Beautiful Scientific Drawings That Influenced Europe’s Art Nouveau Movement (1889)

in Art, Biology, Science | September 24th, 2025

If you fol­low the ongo­ing beef many pop­u­lar sci­en­tists have with phi­los­o­phy, you’d be for­giv­en for think­ing the two dis­ci­plines have noth­ing to say to each oth­er. That’s a sad­ly false impres­sion, though they have become almost entire­ly sep­a­rate pro­fes­sion­al insti­tu­tions. But dur­ing the first, say, 200 years of mod­ern sci­ence, sci­en­tists were “nat­ur­al philosophers”—often as well versed in log­ic, meta­physics, or the­ol­o­gy as they were in math­e­mat­ics and tax­onomies. And most of them were artists too of one kind or anoth­er. Sci­en­tists had to learn to draw in order to illus­trate their find­ings before mass-pro­duced pho­tog­ra­phy and com­put­er imag­ing could do it for them. Many sci­en­tists have been fine artists indeed, rival­ing the greats, and they’ve made very fine musi­cians as well.

And then there’s Ernst Hein­rich Haeck­el, a Ger­man biol­o­gist and nat­u­ral­ist, philoso­pher and physi­cian, and pro­po­nent of Dar­win­ism who described and named thou­sands of species, mapped them on a genealog­i­cal tree, and “coined sev­er­al sci­en­tif­ic terms com­mon­ly known today,” This is Colos­sal writes, “such as ecol­o­gy, phy­lum, and stem cell.” That’s an impres­sive resume, isn’t it? Oh, and check out his art—his bril­liant­ly col­ored, ele­gant­ly ren­dered, high­ly styl­ized depic­tions of “far flung flo­ra and fau­na,” of microbes and nat­ur­al pat­terns, in designs that inspired the Art Nou­veau move­ment. “Each organ­ism Haeck­el drew has an almost abstract form,” notes Kather­ine Schwab at Fast Co. Design, “as if it’s a whim­si­cal fan­ta­sy he dreamed up rather than a real crea­ture he exam­ined under a micro­scope. His draw­ings of sponges reveal their intense­ly geo­met­ric structure—they look archi­tec­tur­al, like feats of engi­neer­ing.”

Haeck­el pub­lished 100 fab­u­lous prints begin­ning in 1889 in a series of ten books called Kun­st­for­men der Natur (“Art Forms in Nature”), col­lect­ed in two vol­umes in 1904. The aston­ish­ing work was “not just a book of illus­tra­tions but also the sum­ma­tion of his view of the world,” one which embraced the new sci­ence of Dar­win­ian evo­lu­tion whole­heart­ed­ly, writes schol­ar Olaf Brei­d­bach in his 2006 Visions of Nature.

Haeckel’s method was a holis­tic one, in which art, sci­ence, and phi­los­o­phy were com­ple­men­tary approach­es to the same sub­ject. He “sought to secure the atten­tion of those with an inter­est in the beau­ties of nature,” writes pro­fes­sor of zool­o­gy Rain­er Will­mann in a book from Taschen called The Art and Sci­ence of Ernst Haeck­el­, “and to empha­size, through this rare instance of the inter­play of sci­ence and aes­thet­ics, the prox­im­i­ty of these two realms.”

The gor­geous Taschen book includes 450 of Haeckel’s draw­ings, water­col­ors, and sketch­es, spread across 704 pages, and it’s expen­sive. But you can see all 100 of Haeckel’s orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished prints in zoomable high-res­o­lu­tion scans here. Or pur­chase a one-vol­ume reprint of the orig­i­nal Art Forms in Nature, with its 100 glo­ri­ous prints, through this Dover pub­li­ca­tion, which describes Haeckel’s art as “hav­ing caused the accep­tance of Dar­win­ism in Europe…. Today, although no one is great­ly inter­est­ed in Haeck­el the biol­o­gist-philoso­pher, his work is increas­ing­ly prized for some­thing he him­self would prob­a­bly have con­sid­ered sec­ondary.” It’s a shame his sci­en­tif­ic lega­cy lies neglect­ed, if that’s so, but it sure­ly lives on through his art, which may be just as need­ed now to illus­trate the won­ders of evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gy and the nat­ur­al world as it was in Haeckel’s time.

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

Relat­ed Con­tent

Down­load 435 High Res­o­lu­tion Images from John J. Audubon’s The Birds of Amer­i­ca

Explore a New Archive of 2,200 His­tor­i­cal Wildlife Illus­tra­tions (1916–1965): Cour­tesy of The Wildlife Con­ser­va­tion Soci­ety

Two Mil­lion Won­drous Nature Illus­tra­tions Put Online by The Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library

Cats in Japan­ese Wood­block Prints: How Japan’s Favorite Ani­mals Came to Star in Its Pop­u­lar Art

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

Revisit One of the Most Polarizing Albums in Rock History: Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, Which Came Out 50 Years Ago

in Music | July 18th, 2025

Fifty years ago this month, Lou Reed near­ly destroyed his own career with one dou­ble album. Met­al Machine Music sold 100,000 copies dur­ing the three weeks of sum­mer 1975 between its release and its removal from the mar­ket. More than a few of the many buy­ers who prompt­ly returned it would have been expect­ing some­thing like Sal­ly Can’t Dance, Reed’s solo album from the pre­vi­ous year, whose slick­ly pro­duced songs went down eas­i­er than any­thing he’d record­ed with the Vel­vet Under­ground. What they heard when they put the new album on their turnta­bles (or insert­ed the Quadro­phon­ic 8‑track tape into their decks) was “noth­ing, absolute­ly noth­ing but scream­ing feed­back noise record­ed at var­i­ous fre­quen­cies, played back against var­i­ous oth­er noise lay­ers, split down the mid­dle into two total­ly sep­a­rate chan­nels of utter­ly inhu­man shrieks and hiss­es.”

That descrip­tion comes from vol­u­ble Creem rock crit­ic and avowed enthu­si­ast of deca­dence Lester Bangs, who also hap­pened to be one of Met­al Machine Music’s most fer­vent defend­ers. At one point he declared it “the great­est record ever made in the his­to­ry of the human eardrum.” (“Num­ber Two: Kiss Alive!”)

Much of what we know about the inten­tions behind this baf­fling album come from Bangs’ writ­ings, includ­ing those that pur­port to tran­scribe con­ver­sa­tions with Reed him­self, who’d been one of the crit­ic’s read­i­est ver­bal spar­ring part­ners. The inspi­ra­tion, as Reed explained to Bangs, came from lis­ten­ing to com­posers Ian­nis Xenakis and La Monte Young, who dared to go beyond the bound­aries of what most lis­ten­ers would con­sid­er music at all. Reed also insist­ed that he’d delib­er­ate­ly insert­ed bits and pieces of Mozart, Beethoven, and oth­er clas­si­cal mas­ters into his son­ic mael­strom, though Bangs clear­ly did­n’t buy it.

“Met­al Machine Music does­n’t seem so weird now, does it?” asked an inter­view­er on Night Flight just a decade or so after the album’s release. “No, it does­n’t, does it?” Reed says. “In light of Eno and all this stuff that came out now, it’s not near­ly as insane and crazy as they said it was then.” Indeed, it sounds almost of a piece with an influ­en­tial work of ambi­ent music like Bri­an Eno’s Music for Air­ports, though that album was meant to calm its lis­ten­ers rather than dri­ve them from the room. Over the half-cen­tu­ry since its release, Met­al Machine Music has accrued enough appre­ci­a­tion to be paid trib­utes like the live per­for­mances by Ger­man ensem­ble Zeitkratzer that have con­tin­ued long after Reed’s death. The lega­cy of his “elec­tron­ic instru­men­tal com­po­si­tion,” as he said after one such con­cert in 2007, also includes a name­sake clause in record­ing con­tracts stip­u­lat­ing that “the artist must turn in a record that sound like the artist that the record com­pa­ny signed — not come in with Met­al Machine Music.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Huge Anthol­o­gy of Noise & Elec­tron­ic Music (1920–2007) Fea­tur­ing John Cage, Sun Ra, Cap­tain Beef­heart & More

Teenage Lou Reed Sings Doo-Wop Music (1958–1962)

Hear Ornette Cole­man Col­lab­o­rate with Lou Reed, Which Lou Called “One of My Great­est Moments”

David Bowie and Lou Reed Per­form Live Togeth­er for the First and Last Time: 1972 and 1997

Lou Reed Cre­ates a List of the 10 Best Records of All Time

Lou Reed Album With Demos of Vel­vet Under­ground Clas­sics Get­ting Released: Hear an Ear­ly Ver­sion of “I’m Wait­ing for the Man”

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.

How to Enter a ‘Flow State’ on Command: Peak Performance Mind Hack Explained in 7 Minutes

in Creativity, Productivity, Psychology | April 17th, 2025

You can be for­giv­en for think­ing the con­cept of “flow” was cooked up and pop­u­lar­ized by yoga teach­ers. That word gets a lot of play when one is mov­ing from Down­ward-Fac­ing Dog on through War­rior One and Two.

Actu­al­ly, flow — the state of  “effort­less effort” — was coined by Goethe, from the Ger­man “rausch”, a dizzy­ing sort of ecsta­sy.

Friedrich Niet­zsche and psy­chol­o­gist William James both con­sid­ered the flow state in depth, but social the­o­rist Mihaly Csik­szent­mi­ha­lyi, author of Cre­ativ­i­ty: Flow and the Psy­chol­o­gy of Dis­cov­ery and Inven­tion, is the true giant in the field. Here’s one of his def­i­n­i­tions of flow:

Being com­plete­ly involved in an activ­i­ty for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, move­ment, and thought fol­lows inevitably from the pre­vi­ous one, like play­ing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.

Author Steven Kotler, Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of the Flow Research Col­lec­tive, not only seems to spend a lot of time think­ing about flow, as a lead­ing expert on human per­for­mance, he inhab­its the state on a fair­ly reg­u­lar basis, too.

Chalk it up to good luck?

Good genes? (Some researchers, includ­ing retired NIH geneti­cist Dean Hamer and psy­chol­o­gist C. Robert Cloninger, think genet­ics play a part…)

As Kotler points out above, any­one can hedge their bets by clear­ing away dis­trac­tions — all the usu­al bad­dies that inter­fere with sleep, per­for­mance, or pro­duc­tiv­i­ty.

It’s also impor­tant to know thy­self. Kotler’s an ear­ly bird, who gets crackin’ well before sun­rise:

I don’t just open my eyes at 4:00 AM, I try to go from bed to desk before my brain even kicks out of its Alpha wave state. I don’t check any emails. I turn every­thing off at the end of the day includ­ing unplug­ging my phones and all that stuff so that the next morn­ing there’s nobody jump­ing into my inbox or assault­ing me emo­tion­al­ly with some­thing, you know what I mean?… I real­ly pro­tect that ear­ly morn­ing time.

By con­trast, his night owl wife doesn’t start clear­ing the cob­webs ’til ear­ly evening.

In the above video for Big Think, Kotler notes that 22 flow trig­gers have been dis­cov­ered, pre-con­di­tions that keep atten­tion focused in the present moment.

His web­site lists many of those trig­gers:

• Com­plete Con­cen­tra­tion in the Present Moment
• Imme­di­ate Feed­back
• Clear Goals
• The Chal­lenge-Skills Ratio (ie: the chal­lenge should seem slight­ly out of reach
• High con­se­quences 
• Deep Embod­i­ment 
• Rich Envi­ron­ment 
• Cre­ativ­i­ty (specif­i­cal­ly, pat­tern recog­ni­tion, or the link­ing togeth­er of new ideas)

Kotler also shares Uni­ver­si­ty of North Car­oli­na psy­chol­o­gist Kei­th Sawyer’s trig­ger list for groups hop­ing to flow like a well-oiled machine:

• Shared Goals
• Close Lis­ten­ing 
• “Yes And” (addi­tive, rather than com­bat­ive con­ver­sa­tions)
• Com­plete Con­cen­tra­tion (total focus in the right here, right now)
• A sense of con­trol (each mem­ber of the group feels in con­trol, but still)
• Blend­ing Egos (each per­son can sub­merge their ego needs into the group’s)
• Equal Par­tic­i­pa­tion (skills lev­els are rough­ly and equal every­one is involved)
• Famil­iar­i­ty (peo­ple know one anoth­er and under­stand their tics and ten­den­cies)
• Con­stant Com­mu­ni­ca­tion (a group ver­sion of imme­di­ate feed­back)
• Shared, Group Risk

One might think peo­ple in the flow state would be float­ing around with an expres­sion of ecsta­t­ic bliss on their faces. Not so, accord­ing to Kotler. Rather, they tend to frown slight­ly. Good news for any­one with rest­ing bitch face!

(We’ll thank you to refer to it as rest­ing flow state face from here on out.)

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2022.

Relat­ed Con­tent

Cre­ativ­i­ty, Not Mon­ey, is the Key to Hap­pi­ness: Dis­cov­er Psy­chol­o­gist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly’s The­o­ry of “Flow”

How to Enter Flow State, Increase Your Abil­i­ty to Con­cen­trate, and Let Your Ego Fall Away : An Ani­mat­ed Primer

How to Get into a Cre­ative “Flow State”: A Short Mas­ter­class

David Lynch Explains How Sim­ple Dai­ly Habits Enhance His Cre­ativ­i­ty

“The Phi­los­o­phy of “Flow”: A Brief Intro­duc­tion to Tao­ism

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

Who Really Built the Egyptian Pyramids—And How Did They Do It?

in History, Technology | April 5th, 2025

Although it’s cer­tain­ly more plau­si­ble than hypothe­ses like ancient aliens or lizard peo­ple, the idea that slaves built the Egypt­ian pyra­mids is no more true. It derives from cre­ative read­ings of Old Tes­ta­ment sto­ries and tech­ni­col­or Cecil B. Demille spec­ta­cles, and was a clas­sic whataboutism used by slav­ery apol­o­gists. The notion has “plagued Egypt­ian schol­ars for cen­turies,” writes Eric Betz at Dis­cov­er. But, he adds emphat­i­cal­ly, “Slaves did not build the pyra­mids.” Who did?

The evi­dence sug­gests they were built by a force of skilled labor­ers, as the Ver­i­ta­si­um video above explains. These were cadres of elite con­struc­tion work­ers who were well-fed and housed dur­ing their stint. “Many Egyp­tol­o­gists,” includ­ing archae­ol­o­gist Mark Lehn­er, who has exca­vat­ed a city of work­ers in Giza, “sub­scribe to the hypothe­ses that the pyra­mids were… built by a rotat­ing labor force in a mod­u­lar, team-based kind of orga­ni­za­tion,” Jonathan Shaw writes at Har­vard Mag­a­zine. Graf­fi­ti dis­cov­ered at the site iden­ti­fies team names like “Friends of Khu­fu” and “Drunk­ards of Menkau­re.”

The exca­va­tion also uncov­ered “tremen­dous quan­ti­ties of cat­tle, sheep, and goat bone, ‘enough to feed sev­er­al thou­sand peo­ple, even if they ate meat every day,’ adds Lehn­er,” sug­gest­ing that work­ers were “fed like roy­al­ty.” Anoth­er exca­va­tion by Lehner’s friend Zahi Hawass, famed Egypt­ian archae­ol­o­gist and expert on the Great Pyra­mid, has found work­er ceme­ter­ies at the foot of the pyra­mids, mean­ing that those who per­ished were buried in a place of hon­or. This was incred­i­bly haz­ardous work, and the peo­ple who under­took it were cel­e­brat­ed and rec­og­nized for their achieve­ment.

Labor­ers were also work­ing off an oblig­a­tion, some­thing every Egypt­ian owed to those above them and, ulti­mate­ly, to their pharaoh. But it was not a mon­e­tary debt. Lehn­er describes what ancient Egyp­tians called bak, a kind of feu­dal duty. While there were slaves in Egypt, the builders of the pyra­mids were maybe more like the Amish, he says, per­form­ing the same kind of oblig­a­tory com­mu­nal labor as a barn rais­ing. In that con­text, when we look at the Great Pyra­mid, “you have to say ‘This is a hell of a barn!’’’

The evi­dence unearthed by Lehn­er, Hawass, and oth­ers has “dealt a seri­ous blow to the Hol­ly­wood ver­sion of a pyra­mid build­ing,” writes Shaw, “with Charl­ton Hes­ton as Moses inton­ing, ‘Pharaoh, let my peo­ple go!’” Recent arche­ol­o­gy has also dealt a blow to extrater­res­tri­al or time-trav­el expla­na­tions, which begin with the assump­tion that ancient Egyp­tians could not have pos­sessed the know-how and skill to build such struc­tures over 4,000 years ago. Not so. Ver­i­ta­si­um explains the incred­i­ble feats of mov­ing the out­er stones with­out wheels and trans­port­ing the gran­ite core of the pyra­mids 620 miles from its quar­ry to Giza.

Ancient Egyp­tians could plot direc­tions on the com­pass, though they had no com­pass­es. They could make right angles and lev­els and thus had the tech­nol­o­gy required to design the pyra­mids. What about dig­ging up the Great Pyramid’s 2 mil­lion blocks of yel­low lime­stone? As we know, this was done by a skilled work­force, who quar­ried an “Olympic swimming-pool’s worth of stone every eight days” for 23 years to build the Great Pyra­mid, notes Joe Han­son in the PBS It’s Okay to Be Smart video above. They did so using the only met­al avail­able to them, cop­per.

This may sound incred­i­ble, but mod­ern exper­i­ments have shown that this amount of stone could be quar­ried and moved, using the tech­nol­o­gy avail­able, by a team of 1,200 to 1,500 work­ers, around the same num­ber of peo­ple archae­ol­o­gists believe to have been on-site dur­ing con­struc­tion. The lime­stone was quar­ried direct­ly at the site (in fact the Sphinx was most­ly dug out of the earth, rather than built atop it). How was the stone moved? Egyp­tol­o­gists from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Liv­er­pool think they may have found the answer, a ramp with stairs and a series of holes which may have been used as a pul­ley sys­tem.

Learn more about the myths and the real­i­ties of the builders of Egypt’s pyra­mids in the It’s Okay to Be Smart “Who Built the Pyra­mids, Part 1″ video above.

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

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

What the Great Pyra­mids of Giza Orig­i­nal­ly Looked Like

A Walk­ing Tour Around the Pyra­mids of Giza: 2 Hours in Hi Def

Take a 360° Inter­ac­tive Tour Inside the Great Pyra­mid of Giza

Take a 3D Tour Through Ancient Giza, Includ­ing the Great Pyra­mids, the Sphinx & More

What the Great Pyra­mid of Giza Would’ve Looked Like When First Built: It Was Gleam­ing, Reflec­tive White

The Grate­ful Dead Play at the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids, in the Shad­ow of the Sphinx (1978)

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

How Medieval Islamic Engineering Brought Water to the Alhambra

in Architecture, History | December 13th, 2024

Between 711 and 1492, much of the Iber­ian Penin­su­la, includ­ing mod­ern-day Spain, was under Mus­lim rule. Not that it was easy to hold on to the place for that length of time: after the fall of Tole­do in 1085, Al-Andalus, as the ter­ri­to­ry was called, con­tin­ued to lose cities over the sub­se­quent cen­turies. Cór­do­ba and Seville were recon­quered prac­ti­cal­ly one right after the oth­er, in 1236 and 1248, respec­tive­ly, and you can see the inva­sion of the first city ani­mat­ed in the open­ing scene of the Pri­mal Space video above. “All over the land, Mus­lim cities were being con­quered and tak­en over by the Chris­tians,” says the com­pan­ion arti­cle at Pri­mal Neb­u­la. “But amidst all of this, one city remained uncon­quered, Grana­da.”

“Thanks to its strate­gic posi­tion and the enor­mous Alham­bra Palace, the city was pro­tect­ed,” and there the Alham­bra remains today. A “thir­teenth-cen­tu­ry pala­tial com­plex that’s one of the world’s most icon­ic exam­ples of Moor­ish archi­tec­ture,” writes BBC.com’s Esme Fox, it’s also a land­mark feat of engi­neer­ing, boast­ing “one of the most sophis­ti­cat­ed hydraulic net­works in the world, able to defy grav­i­ty and raise water from the riv­er near­ly a kilo­me­ter below.”

The jew­el in the crown of these elab­o­rate water­works is a white mar­ble foun­tain that “con­sists of a large dish held up by twelve white myth­i­cal lions. Each beast spurts water from its mouth, feed­ing four chan­nels in the patio’s mar­ble floor that rep­re­sent the four rivers of par­adise, and then run­ning through­out the palace to cool the rooms.”

The fuente de los Leones also tells time: the num­ber of lions cur­rent­ly indi­cates the hour. This works thanks to an inge­nious design explained both ver­bal­ly and visu­al­ly in the video. Any­one vis­it­ing the Alham­bra today can admire this and oth­er exam­ples of medieval opu­lence, but trav­el­ers with an engi­neer’s cast of mind will appre­ci­ate even more how the palace’s builders got the water there at all. “The hill was around 200 meters above Granada’s main riv­er,” says the nar­ra­tor, which entailed an ambi­tious project of damming and redi­rec­tion, to say noth­ing of the pool above the palace designed to keep the whole hydraulic sys­tem pres­sur­ized. The Alham­bra’s heat­ed baths and well-irri­gat­ed gar­dens rep­re­sent the lux­u­ri­ous height of Moor­ish civ­i­liza­tion, but they also remind us that, then as now, beneath every lux­u­ry lies an impres­sive feat of tech­nol­o­gy.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Did Roman Aque­ducts Work?: The Most Impres­sive Achieve­ment of Ancient Rome’s Infra­struc­ture, Explained

The Bril­liant Engi­neer­ing That Made Venice: How a City Was Built on Water

How Toi­lets Worked in Ancient Rome and Medieval Eng­land

The Amaz­ing Engi­neer­ing of Roman Baths

A 13th-Cen­tu­ry Cook­book Fea­tur­ing 475 Recipes from Moor­ish Spain Gets Pub­lished in a New Trans­lat­ed Edi­tion

His­toric Spain in Time Lapse Film

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.