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The 50 Best Ambient Albums of All Time: A Playlist Curated by Pitchfork

in Music | May 31st, 2018

What makes a good ambi­ent record? I’m not sure I can even begin to answer that ques­tion, and I count myself a long­time fan of the genre, such as it is. Though con­ceived, osten­si­bly, by Bri­an Eno as mod­ernist mood music—“as ignor­able as it is inter­est­ing,” he wrote in the lin­er notes to 1978’s Ambi­ent 1: Music for Air­ports—the term has come to encom­pass “tracks you can dance to all the way to harsh noise.” This descrip­tion from com­pos­er and musi­cian Kei­th Fuller­ton Whit­man at Pitch­fork may not get us any clos­er to a clear def­i­n­i­tion in prose, though “cloud of sound” is a love­ly turn of phrase.

Unlike oth­er forms of music, there is no set of standards—both in the jazz sense of a canon and the for­mal sense of a set of rules. Rever­ber­at­ing key­boards, squelch­ing, burp­ing syn­the­siz­ers, dron­ing gui­tar feed­back, field record­ings, found sounds, lap­tops, strings… what­ev­er it takes to get you there—“there” being a state of sus­pend­ed emo­tion, “drift­ing” rather than “dri­ving,” the sounds “sooth­ing, sad, haunt­ing, or omi­nous.” (Cheer­ful, upbeat ambi­ent music may be a con­tra­dic­tion in terms.)

Giv­en the loose­ness of these cri­te­ria, it only stands to rea­son that “good” ambi­ent must be judged on far more sub­jec­tive terms than most any oth­er kind of music. Next to “atmos­pher­ic,” a pri­ma­ry oper­a­tive word in an ambi­ent crit­i­cal lex­i­con is “evoca­tive,” and what the music evokes will dif­fer vast­ly from lis­ten­er to lis­ten­er. “No one agrees on the lan­guage sur­round­ing this music,” Whit­man admits, “not the musi­cians who make it, not the audi­ence.”

Ambient’s close asso­ci­a­tion with trends in avant-garde min­i­mal­ism, from Erik Satie to Steve Reich, La Monte Young, and Charle­magne Pales­tine, may pre­pare us for its many crossover strains in elec­tron­ic music, but not, per­haps, for the seem­ing syn­er­gy between ambi­ent and cer­tain devel­op­ments in heavy met­al (though Lou Reed seems to have pre­saged this evo­lu­tion). “There are many roads one can take into this par­tic­u­lar sec­tor,” writes Whit­man, “vir­tu­al­ly every extant sub- and micro-genre has an ambi­ent shad­ow.”

Such ecu­meni­cal­ism is a fea­ture: it means that a list like Pitchfork’s “50 Best Ambi­ent Albums of All Time” (stream most of those albums on the Spo­ti­fy playlist above) can pull from an impres­sive­ly wide array of musi­cal domains, from the ear­ly exper­i­men­tal elec­tron­ic music of Lau­rie Spiegel to the spir­i­tu­al jazz of Alice Coltrane; the chill-out elec­tron­i­ca of The Orb and The KLF to the ethe­re­al indie post-folk dream­pop of Grouper, a very rare entry with vocals.

If the genre has stars, Tim Heck­er and William Basin­s­ki might be con­sid­ered two of them; if it has august fore­bears, Pauline Oliv­eros, Ter­ry Riley, and of course Eno are three. (Music for Air­ports comes in at num­ber one, though anoth­er very well-cho­sen inclu­sion here is Eno and Harold Budd’s utter­ly gor­geous The Pearl.) Oth­er entries I’m very pleased to see on this list include albums by Gas, com­pos­er Max Richter, and vocal exper­i­men­tal­ist Juliana Bar­wick, artists who might nev­er share a stage, but sit quite com­fort­ably next to each oth­er here.

What’s miss­ing? Maybe the glacial­ly slow, gui­tar and bass drones of Sunn O))) or the deeply unnerv­ing noise of Pruri­ent or the lush elec­tro-acoustic com­po­si­tions of Ash­ley Bel­louin, I don’t know. These aren’t com­plaints but sug­ges­tions on the order of if you like Pitchfork’s “50 Best Ambi­ent Albums of All Time,” check out…. I could go on, but I’d rather leave it to you, read­er. What’s on your list that didn’t make the cut?

Vis­it Pitch­fork’s list here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The “True” Sto­ry Of How Bri­an Eno Invent­ed Ambi­ent Music

10 Hours of Ambi­ent Arc­tic Sounds Will Help You Relax, Med­i­tate, Study & Sleep

Hear “Weight­less,” the Most Relax­ing Song Ever Made, Accord­ing to Researchers (You’ll Need It Today)

Moby Lets You Down­load 4 Hours of Ambi­ent Music to Help You Sleep, Med­i­tate, Do Yoga & Not Pan­ic

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

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Patti Smith, The Godmother of Punk, Is Now Putting Her Pictures on Instagram

in Life, Music, Photography, Poetry | May 28th, 2018

As evi­denced by her Insta­gram feed the God­moth­er is just like you and me. She posts pic­tures of her kids.

She gives her mom a Moth­ers Day shout out…

She cel­e­brates her friends’ birth­days, posts self­ies, trav­el shots, and pet pics…

She’s not above self-pro­mo­tion if the sit­u­a­tion war­rants.

But the accom­pa­ny­ing cap­tions set punk’s poet lau­re­ate apart. No LOLs here.  It’s clear that the award-win­ning author of Just Kids  and M Train thinks about her con­tent, care­ful­ly craft­ing each post before she pub­lish­es. Each is a bite-sized reflec­tion, a page-a-day med­i­ta­tion on what it means to be alive:

This is day two of my Venice report.

I bummed around think­ing of 

Venice in the sev­en­ties. It had

a strong Ras­ta vibe with Reg­gae

music drift­ing from the head shops

and boom box­es on the beach. 

Burn­ing Spear and Jim­my Cliff

and Bob Mar­ley. Venice has an 

ever chang­ing atmos­phere but 

I always like walk­ing around, 

anony­mous, just anoth­er freak. 

On Pacif­ic next to the Cafe Col­lage

I had steamed dumplings and 

gin­ger tea at Mao’s Kitchen. 

The food is great and rea­son­able.

Because it was ear­ly it was 

near­ly emp­ty. Since I was awake

since 4am i was near­ly hyp­no­tized 

by the turn­ing of their over­head 

fan. Before I left they gave me a

for­tune cook­ie. It was a true one.

Reflect­ing my past and cer­tain­ly 

my future. A very good day.

Fol­low Pat­ti Smith on Insta­gram here.

via W Mag­a­zine

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pat­ti Smith’s 40 Favorite Books

Pat­ti Smith Cre­ates a Detailed Pack­ing List for Going on Tour: Haru­ki Muraka­mi Books, Loquat Tea & More

Hear Pat­ti Smith Read the Poet­ry that Would Become Hors­es: A Read­ing of 14 Poems at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty, 1975

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her solo show Nurse!, in which one of Shakespeare’s best loved female char­ac­ters hits the lec­ture cir­cuit to set the record straight pre­mieres in June at The Tank in New York City. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The First 100 Years of the Bicycle: A 1915 Documentary Shows How the Bike Went from Its Clunky Birth in 1818, to Its Enduring Design in 1890

in History, Technology | May 10th, 2018

Back in 1915, French film­mak­ers decid­ed to revis­it the evo­lu­tion of the bicy­cle dur­ing the 19th cen­tu­ry, mov­ing from the inven­tion of the bicy­cle in 1818, to the bikes that emerged dur­ing the 1890s. As the result­ing film above shows, the bike went from being clunky, cum­ber­some and seem­ing­ly per­ilous to ride, to tak­ing on the tried and true shape that we still rec­og­nize today.

This film was pre­served by the Nether­lands’ EYE Film Insti­tute. Hence the sub­ti­tles are in Dutch. But thanks to Aeon Mag­a­zine, you can read Eng­lish trans­la­tions below:

1. The drai­sine was invent­ed only a cen­tu­ry ago, in 1818 by Baron Drais de Sauer­brun.
2. [This sub­ti­tle nev­er appears in the film.
3. The vehi­cle that lies between the drai­sine and the 1850 bicy­cle has an improved steer­ing wheel and a fit­ted brake.
4. In 1863, Pierre Lalle­ment invent­ed ped­als that worked on the front wheel.
5. Around 1868, a third wheel was added. Although these tri­cy­cles were heav­ier than the two-wheel­ers, they were safer.
6. Between 1867 and 1870, var­i­ous improve­ments were made, includ­ing the increased use of rub­ber tyres.
7. In 1875, fol­low­ing an inven­tion by the engi­neer Tri­ef­fault, the frame was made of hol­low pipes.
8. Fol­low­ing the fash­ion of the day, the front wheel was made as large as pos­si­ble.
9. In 1878, Renard cre­at­ed a bicy­cle with a wheel cir­cum­fer­ence of more than 7 feet. Just sit­ting down on one of these was an ath­let­ic feat!
11. At the begin­ning of 1879, Rousseau replaced the large front wheel with a small­er one, and the chain was intro­duced on the front wheel for dri­ving pow­er.
12. The bicy­cle of today.

For anoth­er look at the Birth of the Bike, you can watch a 1937 news­reel that gives its own nar­ra­tive account. It comes the from British Pathé film archives.

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.

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

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Young Frank Zap­pa Plays the Bicy­cle on The Steven Allen Show (1963)

Watch Boy and Bicy­cle: Rid­ley Scott’s Very First Film (1965)

Watch The Bicy­cle Trip: An Ani­ma­tion of The World’s First LSD Trip Which Took Place on April 19, 1943

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The Diderot Effect: Enlightenment Philosopher Denis Diderot Explains the Psychology of Consumerism & Our Wasteful Spending

in Economics, Philosophy, Psychology | April 26th, 2018

In point­ing out the clear and present dan­gers posed by out-of-con­trol con­sumerism, there is no need for Marx­ism 101 terms like “com­mod­i­ty fetishism.” Sim­ply state in plain terms that we revere cheap­ly-mass-pro­duced goods, made for the sake of end­less growth and con­sump­tion, for no par­tic­u­lar rea­son oth­er than per­pet­u­al nov­el­ty and the cre­ation of wealth for a few. Every­one nods in agree­ment, then gets back to scrolling through their social media feeds and inbox­es, con­vinc­ing them­selves, as I con­vince myself, that tar­get­ed adver­tis­ing in dig­i­tal networks—what Jaron Lanier calls “mass behav­ior-mod­i­fi­ca­tion regimes”—could not pos­si­bly have any effect on me!

While 18th-cen­tu­ry French philosophe Denis Diderot in no way pre­dict­ed (as Lanier large­ly did) the mass behav­ior-mod­i­fi­ca­tion schemes of the inter­net, he under­stood some­thing crit­i­cal­ly impor­tant about human behav­ior and the nascent com­mod­i­ty cul­ture tak­ing shape around him, a cul­ture of anx­ious dis­qui­et and games of one-upman­ship, played, if not with oth­ers, then with one­self. Renowned, among oth­er things, for co-found­ing the Ency­clopédie (the first Wikipedia!), Diderot has also acquired a rep­u­ta­tion for the insights in his essay “Regrets on Part­ing with My Old Dress­ing Gown,” which inspired the con­cept of the “Diderot Effect.”

This prin­ci­ple states that mod­ern con­sump­tion requires us to “iden­ti­fy our­selves using our pos­ses­sions,” as Esther Inglis-Arkell writes at io9. Thus, when per­suad­ed by naked lust or the entice­ments of adver­tis­ing to pur­chase some­thing new and shiny, we imme­di­ate­ly notice how out of place it looks amongst our old things. “Once we own one thing that stands out, that doesn’t fit our cur­rent sense of uni­ty, we go on a ram­page try­ing to recon­struct our­selves” by upgrad­ing things that worked per­fect­ly well, in order to main­tain a coher­ent sense of who we are in rela­tion to the first new pur­chase.

The phe­nom­e­non, “part psy­cho­log­i­cal, and part delib­er­ate manip­u­la­tion,” dri­ves heed­less shop­ping and cre­ates need­less waste. Diderot describes the effect in terms con­sis­tent with the tastes and prej­u­dices of an edu­cat­ed gen­tle­man of his time. He does so with per­spi­ca­cious self-aware­ness. The essay is worth a read for the rich hyper­bole of its rhetoric. Begin­ning with a com­par­i­son between his old bathrobe, which “mold­ed all the folds of my body” and his new one (“stiff, and starchy, makes me look stodgy”), Diderot builds to a near-apoc­a­lyp­tic sce­nario illus­trat­ing the “rav­ages of lux­u­ry.”

The pur­chase of a new dress­ing gown spoiled his sense of him­self as “the writer, the man who works.” The new robe strikes a jar­ring, dis­so­cia­tive note. “I now have the air of a rich good for noth­ing. No one knows who I am…. All now is dis­cor­dant,” he writes, “No more coor­di­na­tion, no more uni­ty, no more beau­ty.” Rather than get rid of the new pur­chase, he feels com­pelled to become the kind of per­son who wears such a thing, by means of fur­ther pur­chas­es which he could only new­ly afford, after receiv­ing an endow­ment from Cather­ine the Great. Before this wind­fall, points out James Clear, he had “lived near­ly his entire life in pover­ty.”

Clear gives sev­er­al exam­ples of the Diderot effect that take it out of the realm of 18th cen­tu­ry aes­thet­ics and into our mod­ern big-box/A­ma­zon real­i­ty. “We are rarely look­ing to down­grade, to sim­pli­fy,” he writes, “Our nat­ur­al incli­na­tion is always to accu­mu­late.” To counter the ten­den­cy, he rec­om­mends cor­rec­tive behav­iors such as mak­ing sure new pur­chas­es fit in with our cur­rent pos­ses­sions; set­ting self-imposed lim­its on spend­ing; and reduc­ing expo­sure to “habit trig­gers.” This may require admit­ting that we are sus­cep­ti­ble to the ads that clut­ter both our phys­i­cal and dig­i­tal envi­ron­ments, and that lim­it­ing time spent on ad-dri­ven plat­forms may be an act not only of self-care, but of social and envi­ron­men­tal care as well. Algo­rithms now per­form Diderot effects for us con­stant­ly.

Is the Diderot effect uni­ver­sal­ly bad? Inglis-Arkell argues that “it’s not pure evil… there’s a dif­fer­ence between an Enlight­en­ment screed and real life.” So-called green consumerism—“replacing exist­ing waste­ful goods with more durable, clean­er, more respon­si­bly-made goods”—might be a healthy use of Diderot-like avarice. Besides, she says, “there’s noth­ing wrong with want­i­ng to com­mu­ni­cate one’s sense of self through aes­thet­ic choic­es” or crav­ing a uni­fied look for our phys­i­cal spaces. Maybe, maybe not, but we can take respon­si­bil­i­ty for how we direct our desires. In any case, Diderot’s essay is hard­ly a “screed,” but a light-heart­ed, yet can­did self exam­i­na­tion. He is not yet so far gone, he writes: “I have not been cor­rupt­ed…. But who knows what will hap­pen with time?”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bertrand Rus­sell & Buck­min­ster Fuller on Why We Should Work Less, and Live & Learn More

How Infor­ma­tion Over­load Robs Us of Our Cre­ativ­i­ty: What the Sci­en­tif­ic Research Shows

Every­day Eco­nom­ics: A New Course by Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion Uni­ver­si­ty Where Stu­dents Cre­ate the Syl­labus

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

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Braille Neue: A New Version of Braille That Can Be Simultaneously Read by the Sighted and the Blind

in Design | April 26th, 2018

Pho­to via Kosuke Taka­hashi

To those of us who’ve nev­er had rea­son to learn it, the Braille alpha­bet can have an appeal­ing­ly retro-futur­is­tic look, not least because Braille sig­nage in Amer­i­ca seems most often installed in pre-2000s pub­lic build­ings. But it must smack of the past to many of the visu­al­ly impaired as well, who these days have a host of ever high­er-tech read­ing devices avail­able to them (thanks to which, of course, they can read sites like this one). And though pub­lic sup­port for pro­duc­ing mate­ri­als in Braille exists, the edu­ca­tion­al pro­grams need­ed to spread Braille lit­er­a­cy in the first place have few­er cham­pi­ons. Braille itself, per­haps, needs an upgrade for the 21st cen­tu­ry.

Kosuke Taka­hashi may be just the graph­ic design­er to pro­vide that upgrade. He’s come up with Braille Neue, “a uni­ver­sal type­face that com­bines braille with exist­ing char­ac­ters. This type­face com­mu­ni­cates to both the sight­ed and blind peo­ple in the same space.” He has, in oth­er words, designed a read­able alpha­bet that allows for the over­lay­ing of Eng­lish with the cor­re­spond­ing raised Braille dots, keep­ing both leg­i­ble at a glance — or at a touch, as the case may be. Oth­er design­ers have tried their hand at the same project, but unlike Taka­hashi, none of their alpha­bets sup­port pho­net­ic Japan­ese char­ac­ters as well. “Our aim is to use this uni­ver­sal type­set for [the] Tokyo Olympics and Par­a­lympics 2020 to cre­ate a tru­ly uni­ver­sal space where any­one can access infor­ma­tion,” says Taka­hashi’s Braille Neue page.

Pho­to via Kosuke Taka­hashi

Based on the exist­ing Hel­veti­ca Neue font, Braille Neue — whose design­er, accord­ing to My Mod­ern Met, “is still exper­i­ment­ing with cost-effec­tive print­ing and is refin­ing the font pri­or to final release” — has the poten­tial to spread not just aware­ness but lit­er­a­cy of Braille, giv­en that it essen­tial­ly shows sight­ed non-Braille read­ers a key every time they read it. As any non-Japan­ese per­son who has lived in Taka­hashi’s native land knows, even if you start with no idea of how to read a char­ac­ter in an unknown writ­ing sys­tem, you’ll start to get a sense of it almost auto­mat­i­cal­ly if you see it often enough in con­text with your own. They’ll also know that if any coun­try can imple­ment retro­fu­tur­is­tic design in a way that fas­ci­nates the world, it’s Japan.

via Colos­sal/My Mod­ern Met

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Helen Keller Had Impec­ca­ble Hand­writ­ing: See a Col­lec­tion of Her Child­hood Let­ters

The Pra­do Muse­um Cre­ates the First Art Exhi­bi­tion for the Visu­al­ly Impaired, Using 3D Print­ing

Font Based on Sig­mund Freud’s Hand­writ­ing Com­ing Cour­tesy of Suc­cess­ful Kick­starter Cam­paign

How to Write Like an Archi­tect: Short Primers on Writ­ing with the Neat, Clean Lines of a Design­er

Jorge Luis Borges, After Going Blind, Draws a Self-Por­trait

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Radiooooo: Discover the Musical Time Machine That Lets You Hear What Played on the Radio in Different Times & Places

in History, Music, Radio, Technology | April 13th, 2018

Radio has always been a fair­ly trans­portive medi­um.

Dur­ing the Great Depres­sion, entire fam­i­lies clus­tered round the elec­tron­ic hearth to enjoy a vari­ety of enter­tain­ments, includ­ing live remote broad­casts from the glam­orous night­clubs and hotels where celebri­ty band­lead­ers like Count Basie and Duke Elling­ton held sway.

1950s teens’ tran­sis­tors took them to a head space less square than the white bread sub­urbs their par­ents inhab­it­ed.

Dur­ing the Viet­nam War, South Viet­namese sta­tions played home­grown ren­di­tions of the rock and soul sounds dom­i­nat­ing Amer­i­can air­waves.

The Radiooooo.com site (there’s also a ver­sion avail­able for the iPhone and Android) allows mod­ern lis­ten­ers to expe­ri­ence a bit of that mag­i­cal time trav­el­ing sen­sa­tion, via an inter­ac­tive map that allows you to tune in to spe­cif­ic coun­tries and decades.

The con­tent here is user-gen­er­at­ed. Reg­is­ter for a free account, and you too can begin shar­ing eccen­tric faves.

Find a user whose tastes mir­ror your own? Click their pro­file for a stat card of tracks they’ve favor­it­ed and uploaded, as well as any oth­er sundry details they may feel like shar­ing, such as coun­try of ori­gin and age.

There are fun awards to be earned here, with the most sought after pelts going to the first to upload a song to an emp­ty coun­try, or upload a track from 1910–1920. (Cameroon, 1940 … go!)

As with an actu­al radio, you are not select­ing the actu­al playlist, though you can nudge the nee­dle a bit by tog­gling to your desired mood—slow, fast and/or weird.

And you need not lim­it your­self to a sin­gle des­ti­na­tion. Embark on a strange musi­cal trip by using Radiooooo’s taxi func­tion to car­ry you to mul­ti­ple coun­tries and decades. (I closed my eyes and wound up shut­tling between Ukraine and Mau­ri­ta­nia in the 60s and 80s.)

Dot­ted around the map are island icons, where the ever-grow­ing col­lec­tion is sort­ed accord­ing to themes like Hawaii, Nev­er­land (“for chil­dren big and small”), and 8‑Bit video game music. Le Club, float­ing mid­way between Europe and North Amer­i­ca, con­tains brand new releas­es from con­tem­po­rary labels.

The Now Play­ing win­dow includes an option to buy, when pos­si­ble, as well as the artist’s name and album art­work. Share, like, get your groove on…

And stay tuned for Radiooooo’s lat­est baby, Le Globe, an inter­ac­tive 3‑D map of the world and a decade selec­tor dial mount­ed on a “beau­ti­ful con­nect­ed object.”

The bound­aries are extreme­ly per­me­able here.

Have a browse through Radiooooo’s Insta­gram feed for a feast of cov­er art or head to France for one of their in-per­son lis­ten­ing par­ties. (There’s one next week in the secret lis­ten­ing room of Paris’ Grand Hotel Amour.)

Read­ers, if your explo­rations unearth an excep­tion­al track, please share it in the com­ments, below.

Down­load the Radioooo app for Mac or Android here, or lis­ten on the web­site. (You may need to fool around with var­i­ous browsers to find the one that works best for you.)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear 1,500+ Gen­res of Music, All Mapped Out on an Insane­ly Thor­ough Inter­ac­tive Graph

Behold the MusicMap: The Ulti­mate Inter­ac­tive Geneal­o­gy of Music Cre­at­ed Between 1870 and 2016

Google’s Music Time­line: A Visu­al­iza­tion of 60 Years of Chang­ing Musi­cal Tastes

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her radio dial is set to Roma­nia 1910 in antic­i­pa­tion of the third install­ment of her lit­er­ary-themed vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain , Mon­day, April 23 at the New York Soci­ety Library. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Stream 47 Hours of Classic Sci-Fi Novels & Stories: Asimov, Wells, Orwell, Verne, Lovecraft & More

in Audio Books, Sci Fi | April 10th, 2018

The pro­nounce­ments of French the­o­rist Jean Bau­drillard could sound a bit sil­ly in the ear­ly 1990s, when the inter­net was still in its infan­cy, a slow, clunky tech­nol­o­gy whose promis­es far exceed­ed what it could deliv­er. We hoped for the cyber­punk spaces of William Gib­son, and got the beep-boop tedi­um of dial-up. Even so, in his 1991 essay “Sim­u­lacra and Sci­ence Fic­tion,” Bau­drillard con­tend­ed that the real and the imag­i­nary were no longer dis­tin­guish­able, and that the col­lapse of the dis­tance between them meant that “there is no more fic­tion.” Or, con­verse­ly, he sug­gest­ed, that there is no more real­i­ty.

What seemed a far-fetched claim about the total­i­ty of “cyber­net­ics and hyper­re­al­i­ty” in the age of AOL and Netscape now sounds far more plau­si­ble. After all, it will soon be pos­si­ble, if it is not so already, to con­vinc­ing­ly sim­u­late events that nev­er occurred, and to make mil­lions of peo­ple believe they had, not only through fake tweets, “fake news,” and age-old pro­pa­gan­da, but through sophis­ti­cat­ed manip­u­la­tion of video and audio, through aug­ment­ed real­i­ty and the onset of “real­i­ty apa­thy,” a psy­cho­log­i­cal fatigue that over­whelms our abil­i­ties to dis­tin­guish true and false when every­thing appears as a car­toon­ish par­o­dy of itself.

Tech­nol­o­gist Aviv Ovadya has tried since 2016 to warn any­one who would lis­ten that such a col­lapse of real­i­ty was fast upon us—an “Info­ca­lypse,” he calls it. If this is so, accord­ing to Bau­drillard, “both tra­di­tion­al SF and the­o­ry are des­tined to the same fate: flux and impre­ci­sion are putting an end to them as spe­cif­ic gen­res.” In an apoc­a­lyp­tic pre­dic­tion, he declaimed, “fic­tion will nev­er again be a mir­ror held to the future, but rather a des­per­ate rehal­lu­ci­nat­ing of the past.” The “col­lec­tive mar­ket­place” of glob­al­iza­tion and the Bor­ge­sian con­di­tion in which “the map cov­ers all the ter­ri­to­ry” have left “no room any more for the imag­i­nary.” Com­pa­nies set up shop express­ly to sim­u­late and fal­si­fy real­i­ty. Pained irony, pas­tiche, and cheap nos­tal­gia are all that remain.

It’s a bleak sce­nario, but per­haps he was right after all, though it may not yet be time to despair—to give up on real­i­ty or the role of imag­i­na­tion. After all, sci-fi writ­ers like Gib­son, Philip K. Dick, and J.G. Bal­lard grasped long before most of us the con­di­tion Bau­drillard described. The sub­ject proved for them and many oth­er late-20th cen­tu­ry sci-fi authors a rich vein for fic­tion. And per­haps, rather than a great disruption—to use the lan­guage of a start-up cul­ture intent on break­ing things—there remains some con­ti­nu­ity with the naïve con­fi­dence of past par­a­digms, just as New­ton­ian physics still holds true, only in a far more lim­it­ed way than once believed.

Isaac Asimov’s short essay “The Rel­a­tiv­i­ty of Wrong” is instruc­tive on this last point. Maybe the the­o­ry of “hyper­re­al­i­ty” is right, in some fash­ion, but also incom­plete: a future remains for the most vision­ary cre­ative minds to dis­cov­er, as it did for Asimov’s “psy­chohis­to­ri­an” Hari Sel­don in The Foun­da­tion Tril­o­gy. You can hear a BBC drama­ti­za­tion of that ground­break­ing fifties mas­ter­work in the 47-hour sci­ence fic­tion playlist above, along with read­ings of clas­sic stories—like Orson Welles’ infa­mous radio broad­cast of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds (and an audio­book of the same read by Eng­lish actor Maxwell Caulfield). From Jules Verne to H.P. Love­craft to George Orwell; from the mid-fifties time trav­el fic­tion of Andre Nor­ton to the 21st-cen­tu­ry time-trav­el fic­tion of Ruth Boswell….

We’ve even got a late entry from the­atri­cal prog rock mas­ter­mind Rick Wake­man, who fol­lowed up his musi­cal adap­ta­tion of Jour­ney to the Cen­tre of the Earth with a sequel he penned him­self, record­ed in 1974, and released in 1999, called Return to the Cen­tre of the Earth, with nar­ra­tion by Patrick Stew­art and guest appear­ances by Ozzy Osbourne, Bon­nie Tyler, and the Moody Blues’ Justin Hay­ward. Does revis­it­ing sci-fi, “weird fic­tion,” and oper­at­ic con­cept albums of the past con­sti­tute a “des­per­ate rehal­lu­ci­nat­ing” of a bygone “lost object,” as Bau­drillard believed? Or does it pro­vide the raw mate­r­i­al for today’s psy­chohis­to­ri­ans? I sup­pose it remains to be seen; the future—and the future of sci­ence fiction—may be wide open.

The 47-hour sci­ence fic­tion playlist above will be added to our col­lec­tion of 900 Free Audio Books.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free: Isaac Asimov’s Epic Foun­da­tion Tril­o­gy Dra­ma­tized in Clas­sic Audio

Sci-Fi Radio: Hear Radio Dra­mas of Sci-Fi Sto­ries by Ray Brad­bury, Philip K. Dick, Ursu­la K. LeGuin & More (1989)

Free: 355 Issues of Galaxy, the Ground­break­ing 1950s Sci­ence Fic­tion Mag­a­zine

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

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A Shazam for Nature: A New Free App Helps You Identify Plants, Animals & Other Denizens of the Natural World

in Biology, K-12, Photography, Science, Technology | March 30th, 2018

Do you ever long for those not-so-long-ago days when you skipped through the world, breath­less with the antic­i­pa­tion of catch­ing Poké­mon on your phone screen?

If so, you might enjoy bag­ging some of the Pokeverse’s real world coun­ter­parts using Seek, iNaturalist’s new pho­to-iden­ti­fi­ca­tion app. It does for the nat­ur­al world what Shaz­am does for music.

Aim your phone’s cam­era at a non­de­script leaf or the grasshop­per-ish-look­ing crea­ture who’s camped on your porch light. With a bit of luck, Seek will pull up the rel­e­vant Wikipedia entry to help the two of you get bet­ter acquaint­ed.

Reg­is­tered users can pin their finds to their per­son­al col­lec­tions, pro­vid­ed the app’s recog­ni­tion tech­nol­o­gy pro­duces a match.

(Sev­er­al ear­ly adopters sug­gest it’s still a few house­plants shy of true func­tion­al­i­ty…)

Seek’s pro­tec­tive stance with regard to pri­va­cy set­tings is well suit­ed to junior spec­i­men col­lec­tors, as are the vir­tu­al badges with which it rewards ener­getic upload­ers.

While it doesn’t hang onto user data, Seek is build­ing a pho­to library, com­posed in part of user sub­mis­sions.

(Your cat is ready for her close up, Mr. DeMille…)

(Dit­to your Por­to­bel­lo Mush­room burg­er…)

Down­load Seek for free on iTunes or Google Play.

via Earth­er/My Mod­ern Met

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Watch 50 Hours of Nature Sound­scapes from the BBC: Sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly Proven to Ease Stress and Pro­mote Hap­pi­ness & Awe

How Walk­ing Fos­ters Cre­ativ­i­ty: Stan­ford Researchers Con­firm What Philoso­phers and Writ­ers Have Always Known

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Watch Ta-Nehisi Coates Speak French Before & After Attending Middlebury’s Immersion Program

in Language Lessons | March 12th, 2018

The many fans of Ta-Nehisi Coates, long­time Atlantic cor­re­spon­dent and author of books like The Beau­ti­ful Strug­gle and Between the World and Me (not to men­tion his more recent role as a writer of Black Pan­ther comics), know a thing or two about the tri­als and tribu­la­tions he went through to become one of Amer­i­ca’s best-known pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als, but few­er of them know how intense a bat­tle he’s waged, over the past few years, on the side: that of mas­ter­ing the French lan­guage in his 30s and 40s.

“I’m tak­ing an hour a week to try to teach myself French,” Coates wrote on his blog at The Atlantic in the sum­mer of 2011, explain­ing that his wife “went to Paris five years ago and loved it. She wants me to go back with her, and I want to go. But I refuse to do so until I have a rudi­men­ta­ry under­stand­ing of the lan­guage. This isn’t about impress­ing the French — I expect my accent to mocked — it’s about how I inter­pret the world. Lan­guage is a big part of it.” After start­ing to dig into the For­eign Ser­vice Insti­tute’s French mate­ri­als (avail­able free in our lan­guage-learn­ing col­lec­tion), he crossed out the word week in “an hour a week” to replace it with day, already sens­ing, no doubt, the unex­pect­ed demands this par­tic­u­lar lan­guage would make on him.

“ ‘Et alors’ is sim­i­lar to our ‘So what?’ But ‘Et Alors’ does­n’t sim­ply sound dif­fer­ent, it feels dif­fer­ent, it car­ries anoth­er con­no­ta­tion, anoth­er music,” he wrote in an ear­ly 2012 fol­low-up. “I don’t know if that means any­thing to peo­ple who don’t write pro­fes­sion­al­ly, but for me it means a ton.” It seems only right, he con­clud­ed, “that a writer should explore lan­guages and try to spend time with as many as he or she can. That I should arrive at such an obvi­ous con­clu­sion at this late date is hum­bling.” And so he pressed stead­fast­ly on, mem­o­riz­ing French vocab­u­lary words and gram­mat­i­cal struc­tures, tak­ing class­es, meet­ing with a tutor, and after receiv­ing his first pass­port at the age of 37, study­ing and prac­tic­ing in real Fran­coph­o­ne places like Paris and Switzer­land.

Coates stepped up to a high­er lev­el of French skill — and a much high­er lev­el of French chal­lenge — when he signed up for Mid­dle­bury Col­lege’s sev­en-week French immer­sion pro­gram, throw­ing him­self into an envi­ron­ment of much younger and “fiercer” class­mates with­out the pos­si­bil­i­ty of lean­ing on his native lan­guage. When he sat down for the four-minute video inter­view at the top of the post before ship­ping out to Mid­dle­bury, he lat­er revealed, “there were sev­er­al moments when I did­n’t even under­stand the ques­tion.” No such prob­lems when he sat for anoth­er short con­ver­sa­tion after the sev­en weeks, cap­tured in the video just above: “What changed most at Mid­dle­bury, for me, was not in how I talked, but how I heard.”

Though Mid­dle­bury clear­ly helped push him for­ward, Coates does­n’t seem to con­sid­er par­tic­i­pa­tion in such a pro­gram a require­ment for even the ambi­tious French learn­er. Main­tain­ing the right atti­tude, how­ev­er, is non-nego­tiable: “I expect to suck for awhile. Then I expect to slow­ly get bet­ter. The point is nei­ther mas­tery, nor flu­en­cy. The point is hard study — the repeat­ed appli­ca­tion of a prin­ci­ple until the eyes and ears bleed a lit­tle.” Grap­pling with French has taught him, among oth­er life lessons he’s writ­ten about, “that it is much bet­ter to focus on process, than out­comes. The ques­tion isn’t ‘When will I mas­ter the sub­junc­tive?’ It’s ‘Did I put in my hour of study today?’ ”

How you feel about your process of study, Coates empha­sizes, “it is as impor­tant as any objec­tive real­i­ty. Hope­less­ness feeds the fatigue that leads the stu­dent to quit. It is not the study of lan­guage that is hard, so much as the ‘feel­ing’ that your present lev­el is who you are and who you will always be. I remem­ber return­ing from France at the end of the sum­mer of 2013, and being con­vinced that I had some kind of brain injury which pre­vent­ed me from hear­ing French vow­el sounds. But the real ene­my was not any injury so much as the ‘feel­ing’ of despair. That is why I ignore all the research about chil­dren and their lan­guage advan­tage. I don’t want to hear it. I just don’t care.”

After less than a year of study­ing French, Coates found, his brain had begun to “hunger for that feel­ing of stu­pid­i­ty” that comes from less-than-sat­is­fac­to­ry com­pre­hen­sion. “There is absolute­ly noth­ing in this world like the feel­ing of suck­ing at some­thing and then improv­ing at it,” he wrote in a more recent reflec­tion on his ongo­ing (and now sure­ly life­long) engage­ment with French. “Every­one should do it every ten years or so.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free French Lessons

French in Action: Cult Clas­sic French Lessons from Yale (52 Episodes) Avail­able Online

A Map Show­ing How Much Time It Takes to Learn For­eign Lan­guages: From Eas­i­est to Hard­est

Learn 48 Lan­guages Online for Free: Span­ish, Chi­nese, Eng­lish & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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How Much Money Do You Need to Be Happy? A New Study Gives Us Some Exact Figures

in Economics, Life, Psychology | March 2nd, 2018

“If I gave you a mil­lion dol­lars, would you…?” (insert pos­si­bly life-alter­ing risk, humil­i­a­tion, or soul-sell­ing crime here). What about ten mil­lion? 100 mil­lion? One BILLION dol­lars? Put anoth­er way, in the terms social sci­en­tists use these days, how much mon­ey is enough to make you hap­py?

If you’re Mont­gomery Burns, it’s at least a bil­lion dol­lars, lest you be forced to suf­fer the tor­ments of the Millionaire’s Camp. (“Just kill me now!”) As it tends to do, The Simp­sons’ dark humor nails the insa­tiable greed that seems the scourge of our time, when the rich­est 1 per­cent take 82 per­cent of the world’s wealth, and the poor­est 50 per­cent get noth­ing at all.

Hypo­thet­i­cal wind­falls aside, the ques­tion of how much is enough is an urgent one for many peo­ple: as in, how much to feed a fam­i­ly, sup­ply life’s neces­si­ties, pur­chase just enough leisure for some small degree of per­son­al ful­fil­ment?

As the mis­ery of Mon­ty Burns demon­strates, we have a sense of the 1% as eter­nal­ly unful­filled. He’s the wicked heir to more seri­ous trag­ic fig­ures like Charles Fos­ter Kane and Jay Gats­by. But satire is one thing, and desire, that linch­pin of the econ­o­my, is anoth­er.

“What we see on TV and what adver­tis­ers tell us we need would indi­cate there is no ceil­ing when it comes to how much mon­ey is need­ed for hap­pi­ness,” says Pur­due Uni­ver­si­ty psy­chol­o­gist Andrew T. Jebb, “but we now see there are some thresh­olds.” In short: mon­ey is a good thing, but there is such a thing as too much of it.

Jebb and his col­leagues from Pur­due and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia addressed ques­tions in their study “Hap­pi­ness, income sati­a­tion and turn­ing points around the world” like, “Does hap­pi­ness rise indef­i­nite­ly with income, or is there a point at which high­er incomes no longer lead to greater well­be­ing?” What they found in data from an inter­na­tion­al Gallup World Poll sur­vey of over 1.7 mil­lion peo­ple in 164 coun­tries varies wide­ly across the world.

Peo­ple in wealth­i­er areas seem to require more income for hap­pi­ness (or “Sub­jec­tive Well Being” in the social sci­ence ter­mi­nol­o­gy). In many parts of the world, high­er incomes, “beyond satiation”—a met­ric that mea­sures how much is enough—“are asso­ci­at­ed with low­er life eval­u­a­tions.” The authors also note that “a recent study at the coun­try lev­el found a slight but sig­nif­i­cant decline in life eval­u­a­tion” among very high earn­ers “in the rich­est coun­tries.”

You can see the wide vari­ance in hap­pi­ness world­wide in the “Hap­pi­ness” study. As Dan Kopf notes at Quartz, these research find­ings are con­sis­tent with those of oth­er researchers of hap­pi­ness and income, though they go into much more detail. Prob­lems with the method­ol­o­gy of these studies—primarily their reliance on self-report­ed data—make them vul­ner­a­ble to sev­er­al cri­tiques.

But, assum­ing they demon­strate real quan­ti­ties, what, on aver­age, do they tell us? “We found that the ide­al income point,” aver­aged out in U.S. dol­lars, “is $95,000 for [over­all life sat­is­fac­tion],” says Jebb, “and $60,000 to $75,000 for emo­tion­al well-being,” a mea­sure of day-to-day hap­pi­ness. These are, mind you, indi­vid­ual incomes and “would like­ly be high­er for fam­i­lies,” he says.

Peter Dock­rill at Sci­ence Alert sum­ma­rizes some oth­er inter­est­ing find­ings: “Glob­al­ly, it’s cheap­er for men to be sat­is­fied with their lives ($90,000) than women ($100,000), and for peo­ple of low ($70,000) or mod­er­ate edu­ca­tion ($85,000) than peo­ple with high­er edu­ca­tion ($115,000).”

Yes, the study, like those before it, shows that after the “sati­a­tion point,” hap­pi­ness decreas­es, though per­haps not to Mon­ty Burns lev­els of dis­sat­is­fac­tion. But where does this leave most of us in the new Gild­ed Age? Giv­en that “sati­a­tion” in the U.S. is around $105K, with day-to-day hap­pi­ness around $85K, the major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans fall well below the hap­pi­ness line. The medi­an salary for U.S. work­ers at the end of 2017 was $44, 564, accord­ing to the Bureau of Labor Sta­tis­tics. Man­agers and pro­fes­sion­als aver­aged $64,220 and ser­vice work­ers around $28,000. (As you might imag­ine, income inequal­i­ty diverged sharply along racial lines.)

And while the mid­dle class saw a slight bump in income in the last cou­ple years, medi­an house­hold income was still only $59,039 in 2016. How­ev­er, we mea­sure it the “mid­dle class… has been declin­ing for four decades,” admits Busi­ness Insid­er—“iden­ti­fy­ing with the mid­dle class is, in part, a state of mind” rather than a state of debt-to-income ratios. (One study shows that Mil­len­ni­als make 20% less than Baby Boomers did at the same age.) Mean­while, as wealth increas­es at the top, “the country’s bot­tom 20% of earn­ers became worse off.”

This may all sound like bad news for the hap­pi­ness quo­tient of the major­i­ty, if hap­pi­ness (or Sub­jec­tive Well Being) requires a cer­tain amount of mate­r­i­al secu­ri­ty. Maybe one pos­i­tive take­away is that it doesn’t require near­ly the amount of vast pri­vate wealth that has accu­mu­lat­ed in the hands of a very few peo­ple. Accord­ing to this research, sig­nif­i­cant­ly redis­trib­ut­ing that wealth might actu­al­ly make the wealthy a lit­tle hap­pi­er, and less Mr. Burns-like, even as it raised hap­pi­ness stan­dards a great deal for mil­lions of oth­ers.

Not only are high­er incomes “usu­al­ly accom­pa­nied by high­er demands,” as Jebb and his col­leagues conclude—on one’s time, and per­haps on one’s conscience—but “addi­tion­al fac­tors” may also play a role in decreas­ing hap­pi­ness as incomes rise, includ­ing “an increase in mate­ri­al­is­tic val­ues, addi­tion­al mate­r­i­al aspi­ra­tions that may go unful­filled, increased social com­par­isons,” etc. The long­stand­ing tru­ism about mon­ey not buy­ing love—or ful­fill­ment, mean­ing, peace of mind, what-have-you—may well just be true.

You can dig fur­ther into Andrew T. Jeb­b’s study here: “Hap­pi­ness, income sati­a­tion and turn­ing points around the world.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Are the Keys to Hap­pi­ness?: Take “The Sci­ence of Well-Being,” a Free Online Ver­sion of Yale’s Most Pop­u­lar Course

Albert Einstein’s Ele­gant The­o­ry of Hap­pi­ness: It Just Sold for $1.6 Mil­lion at Auc­tion, But You Can Use It for Free

Will You Real­ly Achieve Hap­pi­ness If You Final­ly Win the Rat Race? Don’t Answer the Ques­tion Until You’ve Watched Steve Cutts’ New Ani­ma­tion

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

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