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.

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

Tattoos Can Now Start Monitoring Your Medical Conditions: Harvard and MIT Researchers Innovate at the Intersection of Art & Medicine

in Art, Harvard, MIT, Science, Technology | February 28th, 2018

Once reserved for rebels and out­liers, tat­toos have gone main­stream in the Unit­ed States. Accord­ing to recent sur­veys, 21% of all Amer­i­cans now have at least one tat­too. And, among the 18–29 demo­graph­ic, the num­ber ris­es to 40%. If that num­ber sounds high, just wait until tat­toos go from being aes­thet­ic state­ments to bio­med­ical devices.

At Har­vard and MIT, researchers have devel­oped “smart tat­too ink” that can mon­i­tor changes in bio­log­i­cal and health con­di­tions, mea­sur­ing, for exam­ple, when the blood sug­ar of a dia­bet­ic ris­es too high, or the hydra­tion of an ath­lete falls too low. Pair­ing biosen­si­tive inks with tra­di­tion­al tat­too designs, these smart tat­toos could con­ceiv­ably pro­vide real-time feed­back on a range of med­ical con­di­tions. And also raise a num­ber of eth­i­cal ques­tions: what hap­pens when your health infor­ma­tion gets essen­tial­ly worn on your sleeve, avail­able for all to see?

To learn more about smart tat­toos, watch the Har­vard video above, and read the cor­re­spond­ing arti­cle in the Har­vard Gazette.

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Meet Amer­i­ca & Britain’s First Female Tat­too Artists: Maud Wag­n­er (1877–1961) & Jessie Knight (1904–1994)

Browse a Gallery of Kurt Von­negut Tat­toos, and See Why He’s the Big Goril­la of Lit­er­ary Tat­toos

A Daz­zling Gallery of Clock­work Orange Tat­toos

Free Online Biol­o­gy Cours­es 

175+ College Admissions Offices Promise Not to Penalize High School Students Who Get Suspended for Protesting Peacefully Against Gun Violence

in Current Affairs, Education | February 26th, 2018

Image by Lorie Shaull, via Flickr Com­mons

“Will my admis­sion get rescind­ed if I get sus­pend­ed for engag­ing in a school walk-out meant to bring atten­tion to the school shoot­ing issue?” That’s a ques­tion many high school stu­dents have posed to col­lege admis­sions offices around the coun­try, espe­cial­ly after some high school offi­cials threat­ened to sus­pend stu­dents tak­ing part in anti-gun demon­stra­tions.

Many lead­ing uni­ver­si­ties have since issued pol­i­cy state­ments and giv­en these stu­dents their bless­ing and sup­port. In a post called “In Sup­port of Stu­dent Protests,” Han­nah Mend­lowitz, from Yale’s Admis­sions Office, writes:

[W]e con­tin­ue to get the ques­tion: will Yale look unfa­vor­ably upon dis­ci­pline result­ing from peace­ful demon­stra­tions?

The answer is sim­ple: Of course not.

To the stu­dents who have reached out to us with these con­cerns, we have made clear that they should feel free to par­tic­i­pate in walk-out events to bring atten­tion to this issue with­out fear of reper­cus­sion. Yale will NOT be rescind­ing anyone’s admis­sion deci­sion for par­tic­i­pat­ing in peace­ful walk­outs for this or oth­er caus­es, regard­less of any high school’s dis­ci­pli­nary pol­i­cy. I, for one, will be cheer­ing these stu­dents on from New Haven.

And on the offi­cial Twit­ter feed for the Brown Uni­ver­si­ty, a tweet reads:

Appli­cants to Brown: Expect a social­ly con­scious, intel­lec­tu­al­ly inde­pen­dent cam­pus where free­dom of expres­sion is fun­da­men­tal­ly impor­tant. You can be assured that peace­ful, respon­si­ble protests against gun vio­lence will not neg­a­tive­ly impact deci­sions on admis­sion to Brown.

And that’s just the tip of the ice­berg. Below, find a list of 175+ uni­ver­si­ties that have grant­ed sim­i­lar assur­ances, along with links to their state­ments. The list comes from Alex Gar­cia, who is main­tain­ing a reg­u­lar­ly-updat­ed Google Doc. Access it online here.

• Agnes Scott
• Alfred Uni­ver­si­ty
• Amer­i­can
• Amherst
• Bald­win Wal­lace
• Bard
• Bates
• Bel­larmine
• Ben­ning­ton
• Berke­ley
• Berk­shire CC
• Bing­ham­ton
• Boston Col­lege
• Bow­doin
• Bran­deis
• Bridge­wa­ter State
• Brown
• Bryn Mawr
• BU
• Buck­nell
• Cal State U Sys­tem
• Cal­Tech
• Case West­ern
• Catholic
• Chap­man
• Clark
• CMU
• Col­by
• Col­gate
• Coll. of the Atlantic
• Col­lege of NJ
• Col­lege of Woost­er
• Col­orado Col­lege
• Col­orado State
• Colum­bia U.
• Conn. Col­lege
• Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty
• CU Boul­der
• CU Den­ver
• Dart­mouth
• David­son
• Deni­son
• DePaul
• Dick­in­son
• Domini­can U of Cal
• Drew
• Duke
• East­ern CT State
• Elmi­ra
• Emer­son
• Emory
• Flori­da
• Ford­ham
• George­town
• Get­tys­burg
• GMU
• Gon­za­ga
• Gouch­er
• Grin­nell
• Guil­ford
• GW
• Hamil­ton Col­lege
• Ham­line
• Hamp­shire
• Hanover
• Har­vard
• Har­vey Mudd
• Haver­ford
• Hof­s­tra
• Holy Cross
• Illi­nois State
• Indi­ana Uni­ver­si­ty
• Johns Hop­kins
• Juni­a­ta
• Kala­ma­zoo
• Keny­on Col­lege
• Knox
• Lafayette
• LawrenceU
• Lebanon Val­ley Col­lege
• Lehigh
• Lewis & Clark
• Lin­den­wood
• Loy­ola Mary­mount
• Macalester
• Man­ches­ter
• Mia­mi of Ohio
• Mid­dle­bury
• MIT
• Mt Holyoke
• Muh­len­berg Col­lege
• NCSU
• New School
• North­east­ern
• North­west­ern
• NYU
• Ober­lin
• Occi­den­tal
• Ohio Wes­leyan
• Pace
• Pacif­ic Luther­an
• Penn
• Penn State
• Pitzer Col­lege
• Ply­mouth State
• Pomona
• Prov­i­dence Col­lege
• Ran­dolph
• Reed
• Rhodes Col­lege
• Rice
• RIT
• Saint Mary’s
• Salve Regi­na
• Sarah Lawrence
• Seat­tle Uni­ver­si­ty
• Simon’s Rock
• Skid­more
• Smith
• St. Johns
• St. Lawrence
• Stan­ford
• Stet­son
• Stevens
• Suf­folk
• Swarth­more
• Sweet Bri­ar
• Syra­cuse
• Tem­ple
• Tran­syl­va­nia
• Trin­i­ty Col­lege
• Trin­i­ty Wash­ing­ton
• Tufts
• Tulane
• U. Day­ton
• U. Mary­land
• U. New Eng­land
• U. Puget Sound
• U. Rich­mond
• U. South Car­oli­na
• U. South­ern Cal­i­for­nia
• UCDavis
• UCLA
• UConn
• UIUC
• UMass-Amherst
• UMass Low­ell
• UMBC
• UNH
• UPitt
• UVA
• UVM
• UWash­ing­ton
• Vas­sar
• Vil­lano­va
• Vir­ginia Tech
• W&M
• Wake For­est
• Welles­ley
• Wes­leyan
• West­ern Mich. U.
• West­ern Wash­ing­ton
• Wheaton
• Whit­man col­lege
• Widen­er
• Willamette
• Williams
• Winthrop Uni­ver­si­ty
• Wis­con­sin
• Wit­ten­berg
• Worces­ter State
• WPI
• WUSTL
• WVU
• Yale

Again, you can refer to this Google Doc for more updates.

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!

What Made John Entwistle One of the Great Rock Bassists? Hear Isolated Tracks from “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” “Baba O’Riley” & “Pinball Wizard”

in Music | February 21st, 2018

Drum­mer Kei­th Moon was sure­ly the most kinet­ic mem­ber of The Who—which is real­ly say­ing a lot—but he was not the band’s best musi­cian, even if he is rou­tine­ly named one of the best drum­mers of all time. Moon knew the appeal of his play­ing often lay in the fact that it was like no one else’s: he described him­self as the “great­est Kei­th Moon-type drum­mer in the world.” Noth­ing in rock approached his untamed excess, mod­eled after the far more dis­ci­plined flights of his hero, Gene Kru­pa.

But if the band “can be said to have an instru­men­tal vir­tu­oso,” writes Chris Jisi at Drum! mag­a­zine, “it is John Alec Entwistle,” their true sol­id cen­ter (they called him “The Ox”) and the per­fect rhyth­mic foil to Moon, who “could sound like a drum kit falling down­stairs,” Entwistle says. The bass play­er not only kept time, he tells Jisi, since Moon didn’t, and fol­lowed Moon’s “mess of cym­bals” and “all over the place” snare drum, but he also filled in for a rhythm gui­tarist as Pete Town­shend slashed away.

He kept his bass riffs rel­a­tive­ly sim­ple, he had to, and he “added top end or tre­ble… to cut through the rest of the noise.” It works, for sure. He is right­ful­ly sin­gled out as one of the great­est rock bass play­ers ever for his phe­nom­e­nal skill and poise.

A less­er play­er try­ing to com­pete with Moon’s wall of drums and Townshend’s mas­sive pow­er chords might dis­ap­pear entire­ly. Entwistle always stands out. His com­ments about Moon’s play­ing might sound dis­parag­ing, but they come off in con­text as hon­est and accu­rate, as do his descrip­tions of his own play­ing.

Entwistle sug­gests he wouldn’t be the play­er he became with­out Moon and the rest of the band. “We con­struct­ed our music to fit ‘round each oth­er,” he says. “It was some­thing very pecu­liar that none of us played the same way as oth­er peo­ple.” In their best moments, some parts “slid togeth­er by mag­ic and were gone for­ev­er.” This is the essence, real­ly, of rock and roll, the serendip­i­tous tran­scen­dence that aris­es from wild­ly col­lid­ing waves of sound.

But such con­trolled chaos can require, espe­cial­ly in a band like The Who, one cool, well-trained vir­tu­oso who can­not be ruf­fled, no mat­ter what, whose per­fec­tion looks effort­less and who nev­er breaks a sweat. The eter­nal arche­type of that play­er is John Entwistle. At the top, hear Entwistle’s iso­lat­ed bass in a live take of “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” (He comes in at 1:45, after a much-extend­ed intro). Below it, you’ll eas­i­ly pick out his every note in the stu­dio ver­sion. And fur­ther up, after anoth­er extend­ed syn­the­siz­er intro, hear him solo at 1:25 on “Baba O’Ri­ley,” also live at Shep­per­ton Stu­dios in 1978. (The stu­dio record­ing is above).

And just above, in one of his most ener­getic per­for­mances, hear him play a live ver­sion of “Pin­ball Wiz­ard” (start­ing at 0:36). And then catch one more jaw-drop­ping solo, just for good mea­sure, record­ed live at Roy­al Albert Hall.

Entwistle is some­times com­pared to Jimi Hen­drix, but in some ways, The Ox came first with his fuzzed-out sound. The mild-man­nered play­er “pio­neered the use of feed­back in music and smash­ing his instru­ment,” writes Ulti­mate Clas­sic Rock, “with Jimi Hen­drix fol­low­ing suit after see­ing Entwistle do it.” For all his reserved Eng­lish cool­ness, Entwistle first pushed the bound­aries of loud­ness, “using 200 watts of pow­er when most bands used 50,” just one of the rea­sons, as you’ll hear in these tracks, for his oth­er nick­name: “Thun­derfin­gers.”

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Makes Flea Such an Amaz­ing Bass Play­er? A Video Essay Breaks Down His Style

The Genius of Paul McCartney’s Bass Play­ing in 7 Iso­lat­ed Tracks

The Jimi Hen­drix of the Bass: Watch a Busker Shred the Bass on the Streets of New­cas­tle

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

Noam Chomsky Explains What’s Wrong with Postmodern Philosophy & French Intellectuals, and How They End Up Supporting Oppressive Power Structures

in Philosophy | February 13th, 2018

Noam Chom­sky has always had iras­ci­ble tendencies—when he doesn’t like some­thing, he lets us know it, with­out ever rais­ing his voice and usu­al­ly with plen­ty of foot­notes. It’s a qual­i­ty that has made the emer­i­tus MIT pro­fes­sor and famed lin­guist such a potent crit­ic of U.S. empire for half a cen­tu­ry, vig­or­ous­ly denounc­ing the Viet­nam War, the Iraq War(s), and the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a cat­a­stroph­ic war with North Korea. Chom­sky isn’t a pro­fes­sion­al his­to­ri­an or polit­i­cal philoso­pher; these are avo­ca­tions he has tak­en on to bol­ster his argu­ments. But those argu­ments are strength­ened by his will­ing­ness to engage with pri­ma­ry sources and take them seri­ous­ly.

When it comes, how­ev­er, to his much-pub­li­cized feud with “Post­mod­ernism,” a term he uses lib­er­al­ly at times to describe almost all post-war French intel­lec­tu­al cul­ture, Chom­sky rarely con­fronts his oppo­nents in their own terms. That’s large­ly because, as he’s said on many occa­sions, he can’t make any sense of them. It’s not exact­ly an orig­i­nal cri­tique. Man­darins of French thought like Jean-Fran­cois Lyotard, Jacques Lacan, and Jean Bau­drillard have been accused for decades, and not with­out mer­it, of know­ing­ly ped­dling bull­shit to a French read­er­ship that expects, as Michel Fou­cault once admit­ted, a manda­to­ry “ten per­cent incom­pre­hen­si­ble.” (Soci­ol­o­gist Pierre Bour­dieu asserts that the num­ber is much high­er.)

But Chomsky’s cri­tique goes fur­ther, in a direc­tion that doesn’t get near­ly as much press as his charges of obscu­ran­tism and overuse of insu­lar jar­gon. Chom­sky claims that far from offer­ing rad­i­cal new ways of con­ceiv­ing the world, Post­mod­ern thought serves as an instru­ment of oppres­sive pow­er struc­tures. It’s an inter­est­ing asser­tion giv­en some recent argu­ments that “post-truth” post­mod­ernism is respon­si­ble for the rise of the self-described “alt-right” and the rapid spread of fake infor­ma­tion as a tool for the cur­rent U.S. rul­ing par­ty seiz­ing pow­er.

Not only is there “a lot of mate­r­i­al reward,” Chom­sky says, that comes from the aca­d­e­m­ic super­star­dom many high-pro­file French philoso­phers achieved, but their position—or lack of a clear position—“allows peo­ple to take a very rad­i­cal stance… but to be com­plete­ly dis­so­ci­at­ed from every­thing that’s hap­pen­ing.” Chom­sky gives an exam­ple above of an anony­mous post­mod­ernist crit­ic brand­ing a talk he gave as “naïve” for its dis­cus­sion of such out­mod­ed “Enlight­en­ment stuff” as mak­ing moral deci­sions and refer­ring to such a thing as “truth.” In his brief dis­cus­sion of “the strange bub­ble of French intel­lec­tu­als” at the top of the post, Chom­sky gets more spe­cif­ic.

Most post-war French philoso­phers, he alleges, have been Stal­in­ists or Maoists (he uses the exam­ple of Julia Kris­te­va), and have uncrit­i­cal­ly embraced author­i­tar­i­an state com­mu­nism despite its doc­u­ment­ed crimes and abus­es, while reject­ing oth­er modes of philo­soph­i­cal thought like log­i­cal pos­i­tivism that accept the valid­i­ty of the sci­en­tif­ic method. This may or may not be a fair cri­tique: polit­i­cal ori­en­ta­tions shift and change (and at times we accept a thinker’s work while ful­ly reject­ing their per­son­al pol­i­tics). And the post­mod­ern cri­tique of sci­en­tif­ic dis­course as form of oppres­sive pow­er is a seri­ous one that need­n’t entail a whole­sale rejec­tion of sci­ence.

Are there any post-struc­tural­ist thinkers Chom­sky admires? Though he takes a lit­tle dig at Michel Fou­cault in the clip above, he and the French the­o­rist have had some fruit­ful debates, “on real issues,” Chom­sky says, “and using lan­guage that was per­fect­ly comprehensible—he speak­ing French, me Eng­lish.” That’s not a sur­prise. The two thinkers, despite the immense dif­fer­ence in their styles and frames of ref­er­ence, both engage heav­i­ly with pri­ma­ry his­tor­i­cal sources and both con­sis­tent­ly write his­to­ries of ide­ol­o­gy.

It is part­ly through the inter­play between Fou­cault and Chomsky’s ideas that we might find a syn­the­sis of French Marx­ist post-struc­tural­ist thought and Amer­i­can anar­chist polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy. Rather than see­ing them as pro­fes­sion­al wrestlers in the ring, with the post­mod­ernist as the heel and head­lines like “Chom­sky DESTROYS Post­mod­ernism,” we could look for com­ple­men­tar­i­ty and points of agree­ment, and gen­uine­ly read, as dif­fi­cult as that can be, as many of the argu­ments of post­mod­ern French philoso­phers as we can (and per­haps this defense of obscu­ran­tism) before decid­ing with a sweep­ing ges­ture that none of them make any sense.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Noam Chom­sky Calls Post­mod­ern Cri­tiques of Sci­ence Over-Inflat­ed “Poly­syl­lab­ic Tru­isms”

Noam Chom­sky Slams Žižek and Lacan: Emp­ty ‘Pos­tur­ing’

Clash of the Titans: Noam Chom­sky & Michel Fou­cault Debate Human Nature & Pow­er on Dutch TV, 1971

MIT Is Dig­i­tiz­ing a Huge Archive of Noam Chomsky’s Lec­tures, Papers and Oth­er Doc­u­ments & Will Put Them Online

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

A Map Shows What Happens When Our World Gets Four Degrees Warmer: The Colorado River Dries Up, Antarctica Urbanizes, Polynesia Vanishes

in Environment, Maps, Science | February 5th, 2018

Human­i­ty faces few larg­er ques­tions than what, exact­ly, to do about cli­mate change — and, in a sense larg­er still, what cli­mate change even means. We’ve all heard a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent future sce­nar­ios laid out, each of them based on dif­fer­ent data. But data can only make so much of an impact unless trans­lat­ed into a form with which the imag­i­na­tion can read­i­ly engage: a visu­al form, for instance, and few visu­al forms come more tried and true than the map.

And so “lead­ing glob­al strate­gist, world trav­el­er, and best-sell­ing author” Parag Khan­na has cre­at­ed the map you see above (view in a larg­er for­mat here), which shows us the state of our world when it gets just four degrees cel­sius warmer. “Microne­sia is gone – sunk beneath the waves,” writes Big Think’s Frank Jacobs in an exam­i­na­tion of Khan­na’s map. “Pak­istan and South India have been aban­doned. And Europe is slow­ly turn­ing into a desert.”

But “there is also good news: West­ern Antarc­ti­ca is no longer icy and unin­hab­it­able. Smart cities thrive in new­ly green and pleas­ant lands. And North­ern Cana­da, Scan­di­navia, and Siberia pro­duce boun­ti­ful har­vests to feed the hun­dreds of mil­lions of cli­mate refugees who now call those regions home.”

Not quite as apoc­a­lyp­tic a cli­mate-change vision as some, to be sure, but it still offers plen­ty of con­sid­er­a­tions to trou­ble us. Lands in light green, accord­ing to the map’s col­or scheme, will remain or turn into “food-grow­ing zones” and “com­pact high-rise cities.” Yel­low indi­cates “unin­hab­it­able desert,” brown areas “unin­hab­it­able due to floods, drought, or extreme weath­er.” In dark green appear lands with “poten­tial for refor­esta­tion,” and in red those places that ris­ing sea lev­els have ren­dered utter­ly lost.

Those last include the edges of many coun­tries in Asia (and all of Poly­ne­sia), as well as the area where the south­east of the Unit­ed States meets the north­east of Mex­i­co and the north and south coasts of South Amer­i­ca. But if you’ve ever want­ed to live in Antarc­ti­ca, you won’t have to move into a research base: with­in a cou­ple of decades, accord­ing to Khan­na’s data, that most mys­te­ri­ous con­ti­nent could become unrec­og­niz­able and “dense­ly pop­u­lat­ed with high-rise cities,” pre­sum­ably with their own hip­ster quar­ters. But where best to grow the ingre­di­ents for its avo­ca­do toast?

Any­one inter­est­ed in Parag Khan­na’s map will want to check out his book, Con­nec­tog­ra­phy: Map­ping the Future of Glob­al Civ­i­liza­tion.

via Big Think

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Glob­al Warm­ing: A Free Course from UChica­go Explains Cli­mate Change

A Cen­tu­ry of Glob­al Warm­ing Visu­al­ized in a 35 Sec­ond Video

Ani­ma­tions Show the Melt­ing Arc­tic Sea Ice, and What the Earth Would Look Like When All of the Ice Melts

132 Years of Glob­al Warm­ing Visu­al­ized in 26 Dra­mat­i­cal­ly Ani­mat­ed Sec­onds

Music for a String Quar­tet Made from Glob­al Warm­ing Data: Hear “Plan­e­tary Bands, Warm­ing World”

A Song of Our Warm­ing Plan­et: Cel­list Turns 130 Years of Cli­mate Change Data into Music

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.

Werner’s Nomenclature of Colour, the 19th-Century “Color Dictionary” Used by Charles Darwin (1814)

in Art, Books, History, Science | February 5th, 2018

Before Pan­tone invent­ed “a uni­ver­sal col­or lan­guage” or big box hard­ware stores arose with pro­pri­etary dis­plays of col­or­ful­ly-named paints—over a cen­tu­ry before, in fact—a Ger­man min­er­al­o­gist named Abra­ham Got­t­lob Wern­er invent­ed a col­or sys­tem, as detailed and thor­ough a guide as an artist might need. But rather than only cater to the needs of painters, design­ers, and man­u­fac­tur­ers, Werner’s Nomen­cla­ture of Colours also served the needs of sci­en­tists. “Charles Dar­win even used the guide,” writes This is Colos­sal, “dur­ing his voy­age to the Madeira, Canary, and Cape Verde islands on the H.M.S. Bea­gle.”

Werner’s is one of many such “col­or dic­tio­nar­ies” from the 19th cen­tu­ry, “designed to give peo­ple around the world a com­mon vocab­u­lary,” writes Daniel Lewis at Smith­son­ian, “to describe the col­ors of every­thing from rocks and flow­ers to stars, birds, and postage stamps.” These guides appealed espe­cial­ly to nat­u­ral­ists.

Indeed, the book began—before Scot­tish painter Patrick Syme updat­ed the sys­tem in Eng­lish, with swatch­es of exam­ple colors—as a naturalist’s guide to the col­ors of the world, nam­ing them accord­ing to Werner’s poet­ic fan­cy. “With­out an image for ref­er­ence,” the orig­i­nal text “pro­vid­ed immense hand­writ­ten detail describ­ing where each spe­cif­ic shade could be found on an ani­mal, plant, or min­er­al. Many of Wern­er’s unique col­or names still exist in com­mon usage, though they’ve detached from his scheme ages ago.

Pruss­ian Blue, for instance, which can be locat­ed “in the beau­ty spot of a mallard’s wing, on the sta­mi­na of a bluish-pur­ple anemone, or in a piece of blue cop­per ore.” Oth­er exam­ples, notes Fast Company’s Kelsey Camp­bell-Dol­laghan, include “’Skimmed Milk White,’” or no. 7… found in ‘the white of the human eye’ or in opals,” and no. 67, or “’Wax Yel­low’… found in the lar­vae of large Water Bee­tles or the green­ish parts of a Non­pareil Apple.” It would have been Syme’s 1814 guide that Dar­win con­sult­ed, as did sci­en­tists, nat­u­ral­ists, and artists for two cen­turies after­ward, either as a tax­o­nom­ic col­or ref­er­ence or as an admirable his­toric artifact—a painstak­ing descrip­tion of the col­ors of the world, or those encoun­tered by two 18th and 19th cen­tu­ry Euro­pean observers, in an era before pho­to­graph­ic repro­duc­tion cre­at­ed its own set of stan­dards.

The book is now being repub­lished in an afford­able pock­et-size edi­tion by Smith­son­ian Books, who note that the Edin­burgh flower painter Syme, in his illus­tra­tions of Werner’s nomen­cla­ture, “used the actu­al min­er­als described by Wern­er to cre­ate the col­or charts.” This degree of fideli­ty to the source extends to Syme’s use of tables to neat­ly orga­nize Werner’s pre­cise descrip­tions. Next to each color’s num­ber, name, and swatch, are columns with its loca­tion on var­i­ous ani­mals, veg­eta­bles and min­er­als. “Orpi­ment Orange,” named after a min­er­al, though none is list­ed in its col­umn, will be found, Wern­er tells us, on the “neck ruff of the gold­en pheas­ant” or “bel­ly of the warty newt.” Should you have trou­ble track­ing these down, sure­ly you’ve got some “Indi­an cress” around?

While its ref­er­ences may not be those your typ­i­cal indus­tri­al design­er or graph­ic artist is like­ly to find help­ful, Werner’s Nomen­cla­ture of Colours will still find a trea­sured place in the col­lec­tions of design­ers and visu­al artists of all kinds, as well as his­to­ri­ans, writ­ers, poets, and the sci­en­tif­ic inher­i­tors of 19th cen­tu­ry nat­u­ral­ism, as a “charm­ing arti­fact from the gold­en age of nat­ur­al his­to­ry and glob­al explo­ration.” Flip through a scanned ver­sion of the 1821 sec­ond edi­tion just above, includ­ing Wern­er’s intro­duc­tion and care­ful lists of col­or prop­er­ties, or read it in a larg­er for­mat at the Inter­net Archive. The new edi­tion is now avail­able for pur­chase here.

via This Is Colos­sal/Fast Co

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Vibrant Col­or Wheels Designed by Goethe, New­ton & Oth­er The­o­rists of Col­or (1665–1810)

Goethe’s Col­or­ful & Abstract Illus­tra­tions for His 1810 Trea­tise, The­o­ry of Col­ors: Scans of the First Edi­tion

How Tech­ni­col­or Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Cin­e­ma with Sur­re­al, Elec­tric Col­ors & Changed How We See Our World

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

Photographer Puts Her Archive of Photos Documenting the 1970s New York Punk Scene on Instagram: Iggy Pop, Debbie Harry, Lydia Lunch, Tom Verlaine, and Even Jean Michel Basquiat

in Music, Photography | February 1st, 2018

A post shared by Julia_gorton_nowave (@julia_gorton_nowave) on Aug 30, 2017 at 6:10am PDT

Just when you think the fabled down­town New York 70s punk scene cen­tered around CBG­Bs has no more secrets to offer, anoth­er home­grown doc­u­men­tar­i­an appears to show us pho­tographs (on Insta­gram) we’ve nev­er seen and tell some pret­ty nifty sto­ries to go along with them. Julia Gor­ton came to New York from her native Delaware in 1976 and used a Polaroid cam­era to cap­ture her first­hand encoun­ters with leg­ends like Deb­bie Har­ry, Pat­ti Smith, David Byrne, Tom Ver­laine, Iggy Pop, Richard Hell, and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks’ Lydia Lunch (below), “a nat­ur­al for the glam­orous black-and-white pho­tos I liked to make,” she says, and a “a real part­ner” in Gorton’s enter­prise and her most-pho­tographed sub­ject.

A post shared by Julia_gorton_nowave (@julia_gorton_nowave) on Oct 6, 2017 at 10:40am PDT

In Christi­na Cacouris’ inter­view with Gor­ton at Garage, we learn that the pho­tog­ra­ph­er “end­ed up meet­ing Tom’s mom [Tele­vi­sion singer and gui­tarist Tom Ver­laine] at the flea mar­ket in Wilm­ing­ton [Delaware]. She was a proud mom who played her son’s sin­gle on a cas­sette play­er in the back of her sta­tion wag­on while she sold things on a fold­ing table.”

A post shared by Julia_gorton_nowave (@julia_gorton_nowave) on Feb 26, 2017 at 7:18am PST

Exact­ly this kind of inti­ma­cy and fam­i­ly atmos­phere per­vades Gorton’s work in the punk clubs, down­town streets, and record stores. Like most of the per­form­ers onstage, Gor­ton was a rel­a­tive ama­teur, learn­ing her craft along­side the musi­cians and artists she pho­tographed. “You didn’t need to be per­fect before you start­ed,” she says.

A post shared by Julia_gorton_nowave (@julia_gorton_nowave) on May 25, 2017 at 6:07am PDT

Although she found her lack of tech­ni­cal abil­i­ty frus­trat­ing, in hind­sight, Gor­ton says, “images that I per­ceived at the time as fail­ures actu­al­ly rep­re­sent the true char­ac­ter of the time peri­od more hon­est­ly and pow­er­ful­ly than the images I thought were ‘suc­cess­ful.’” In many cas­es, how­ev­er, it has tak­en 21st cen­tu­ry dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy to unearth some of her most reveal­ing shots.

A post shared by Julia_gorton_nowave (@julia_gorton_nowave) on Dec 29, 2016 at 6:03am PST

The cost of film pro­hib­it­ed her from tak­ing mul­ti­ple expo­sures, and the dark­ness of CBG­Bs left many prints too murky. Using Pho­to­shop, Gor­ton has been able to revis­it many of these seem­ing­ly failed attempts, like the moody por­trait above of Tom Ver­laine. “I was able to scan and final­ly pull him out of the shad­ows of decades past,” she mus­es.

A post shared by Julia_gorton_nowave (@julia_gorton_nowave) on Jun 1, 2017 at 4:41am PDT

Along with the glam­our of her por­traits, Gorton’s can­did shots of the peri­od cap­ture down­town leg­ends in rare moments and pos­es. (Check out John Cale above at CBG­Bs, for exam­ple, or Jean Michel Basquiat, then known as SAMO, danc­ing on the right, below.) Shot while she was a stu­dent at the Par­sons School of Design, Gorton’s pho­tos of the punk, New Wave, and No Wave scene were the begin­ning of her long career as a pho­tog­ra­ph­er, illus­tra­tor, and graph­ic design­er.

A post shared by Julia_gorton_nowave (@julia_gorton_nowave) on May 25, 2017 at 6:16am PDT

On her Insta­gram feed, 70s and 80s images mix in with her cur­rent projects, and the jux­ta­po­si­tion of con­tem­po­rary musi­cians and artists with their coun­ter­parts from 40 years ago gives a sense of the long con­ti­nu­ity reflect­ed in Gorton’s engage­ment with street art and under­ground rock cul­ture. Explore her pho­to col­lec­tion here.

A post shared by Julia_gorton_nowave (@julia_gorton_nowave) on Nov 15, 2016 at 7:15am PST

via Vice

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

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

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of CBGB, the Ear­ly Home of Punk and New Wave

Pat­ti Smith Plays at CBGB In One of Her First Record­ed Con­certs, Joined by Sem­i­nal Punk Band Tele­vi­sion (1975)

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

Artificial Intelligence May Have Cracked the Code of the Voynich Manuscript: Has Modern Technology Finally Solved a Medieval Mystery?

in Books, Computer Science, History, Science | January 30th, 2018

What is it about the Voyn­ich Man­u­script—that cryp­tic, illus­trat­ed 15th cen­tu­ry text of unknown ori­gin and meaning—that has so fas­ci­nat­ed and obsessed schol­ars for cen­turies? Writ­ten in what appears to be an invent­ed lan­guage, with bizarre illus­tra­tions of oth­er­world­ly botany, mys­te­ri­ous cos­mol­o­gy, and strange anato­my, the book resem­bles oth­er pro­to-sci­en­tif­ic texts of the time, except for the fact that it is total­ly inde­ci­pher­able, “a cer­tain rid­dle of the Sphinx,” as one alchemist described it. The 240-page enig­ma inspires attempt after attempt by cryp­tol­o­gists, lin­guists, and his­to­ri­ans eager to under­stand its secrets—that is if it doesn’t turn out to be a too-clever Medieval joke.

One recent try, by Nicholas Gibbs, has per­haps not lived up to the hype. Anoth­er recent attempt by Stephen Bax, who wrote the short TED Ed les­son above, has also come in for its share of crit­i­cism. Giv­en the invest­ment of schol­ars since the 17th cen­tu­ry in crack­ing the Voyn­ich code, both of these efforts might jus­ti­fi­ably be called quite opti­mistic. The Voyn­ich may for­ev­er elude human under­stand­ing, though it was, pre­sum­ably, cre­at­ed by human hands. Per­haps it will take a machine to final­ly solve the puz­zle, an arti­fi­cial brain that can process more data than the com­bined efforts of every schol­ar who has ever applied their tal­ents to the text. Com­put­er sci­en­tists at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Alber­ta think so and claim to have cracked the Voyn­ich code with arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI).

Com­put­er sci­ence pro­fes­sor Greg Kon­drak and grad­u­ate stu­dent Bradley Hauer began their project by feed­ing a com­put­er pro­gram 400 dif­fer­ent lan­guages, tak­en from the “Uni­ver­sal Dec­la­ra­tion of Human Rights.” While “they ini­tial­ly hypoth­e­sized that the Voyn­ich man­u­script was writ­ten in [ancient] Ara­bic,” reports Jen­nifer Pas­coe, “it turned out that the most like­ly lan­guage was [ancient] Hebrew.” (Pre­vi­ous guess­es, the CBC notes, “have ranged from a type of Latin to a deriva­tion of Sino-Tibetan.”) The next step involved deci­pher­ing the manuscript’s code. Kon­drak and Hauer dis­cov­ered that “the let­ters in each word… had been reordered. Vow­els had been dropped.” The the­o­ry seemed promis­ing, but the pair were unable to find any Hebrew schol­ars who would look at their find­ings.

With­out human exper­tise to guide them, they turned to anoth­er AI, whose results, we know, can be noto­ri­ous­ly unre­li­able. Nonethe­less, feed­ing the first sen­tence into Google trans­late yield­ed the fol­low­ing: “She made rec­om­men­da­tions to the priest, man of the house and me and peo­ple.” It’s at least gram­mat­i­cal, though Kon­drak admits “it’s a kind of strange sen­tence to start a man­u­script.” Oth­er analy­ses of the first sec­tion have turned up sev­er­al oth­er words, such as “farmer,” “light,” “air,” and “fire”—indeed the sci­en­tists have found 80 per­cent of the man­u­scrip­t’s words in ancient Hebrew dic­tio­nar­ies. Fig­ur­ing out how they fit togeth­er in a com­pre­hen­si­ble syn­tax has proven much more dif­fi­cult. Kon­drak and Hauer admit these results are ten­ta­tive, and may be wrong. With­out cor­rob­o­ra­tion from Hebrew experts, they are also unlike­ly to be tak­en very seri­ous­ly by the schol­ar­ly com­mu­ni­ty.

But the pri­ma­ry goal was not to trans­late the Voyn­ich but to use it as a means of cre­at­ing algo­rithms that could deci­pher ancient lan­guages. “Impor­tant­ly,” notes Giz­mo­do, “the researchers aren’t say­ing they’ve deci­phered the entire Voyn­ich man­u­script,” far from it. But they might have dis­cov­ered the keys that oth­ers may use to do so. Or they may—as have so many others—have been led down anoth­er blind alley, as one com­menter at IFL Sci­ence sug­gests, sar­cas­ti­cal­ly quot­ing the wise Bull­win­kle Moose: “This time for sure!”

You can find the Voyn­ich Man­u­script scanned at Yale’s Bei­necke Rare Book & Man­u­script Library. Copies can be pur­chased in book for­mat as well.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to “the World’s Most Mys­te­ri­ous Book,” the 15th-Cen­tu­ry Voyn­ich Man­u­script

Behold the Mys­te­ri­ous Voyn­ich Man­u­script: The 15th-Cen­tu­ry Text That Lin­guists & Code-Break­ers Can’t Under­stand

1,000-Year-Old Illus­trat­ed Guide to the Med­i­c­i­nal Use of Plants Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online

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