Mark Twain Skewers Great Works of Art: The Mona Lisa (“a Smoked Haddock!”), The Last Supper (“a Mournful Wreck”) & More

in Art, Literature | September 17th, 2015

Some of the U.S.‘s great­est sec­u­lar sages also hap­pen to be some of its great­est cranks, con­trar­i­ans, and crit­ics. I refer to a cat­e­go­ry that includes Ambrose Bierce, H.L. Menck­en, and Hunter S. Thomp­son. The many dif­fer­ences between these char­ac­ters don’t eclipse a fun­da­men­tal sim­i­lar­i­ty: not a one embraced any of the usu­al pieties about the inher­ent, infal­li­ble great­ness of West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion, though each one in his own way made a sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tion to the West­ern canon. We would be great­ly remiss if we did not include among them per­haps the great­est Amer­i­can satirist of all, Mark Twain.

Twain skew­ered all com­ers, usu­al­ly with such wit and inven­tion that we smile and nod even when we feel the sting our­selves. Such was his tal­ent, to deflate puffery in West­ern lit­er­a­ture, pol­i­tics, reli­gion, and… as we will see, in art. “Through­out his career”—writes UC Berke­ley’s Ban­croft Library—“Twain expressed his strong reac­tions to West­ern paint­ing and sculp­ture, par­tic­u­lar­ly the Old Mas­ters, both in his pub­lished works and in pri­vate.” He offered up some hilar­i­ous­ly irrev­er­ent takes on some of the most revered works of art in his­to­ry: “his opin­ions are often pas­sion­ate, some­times eccen­tric, and always live­ly.” Take for exam­ple Twain’s tepid assess­ment of that most rec­og­niz­able of Renais­sance mas­ter­pieces, the Mona Lisa. In an unpub­lished draft called “The Inno­cents Adrift,” an account of an 1891 boat trip down the Rhone Riv­er, Twain “admit­ted to being puz­zled by the adu­la­tion accord­ed” the paint­ing.

To Twain, the Mona Lisa seemed “mere­ly a good rep­re­sen­ta­tion of a serene & sub­dued face… The com­plex­ion was bad; in fact it was not even human; there are no peo­ple of that col­or.” The paint­ing’s green­ish hue prompt­ed one of Twain’s com­pan­ions, pos­si­bly an inven­tion of the author’s, to exclaim in response, “that smoked had­dock!” “After some dis­cus­sion,” write the UC Berke­ley librar­i­ans, “the trav­el­ers con­cede that it requires a ‘trained eye’ to appre­ci­ate cer­tain aspects of art.” Such train­ing in art appre­ci­a­tion seemed to Twain as much gen­uine edu­ca­tion as instruc­tion in stud­ied, insin­cere pos­es.

The author took his first “grand tour” in 1867—travelling through Europe and the Lev­ant on the cruise ship Quak­er City in the com­pa­ny of many “prosperous—and very proper—passengers.” Unlike these bour­geois trav­el­ling com­pan­ions’ “con­ven­tion­al appre­ci­a­tion for all that they saw,” Twain—writing as a cor­re­spon­dent for the San Fran­cis­co Alta Cal­i­for­nia—con­fessed him­self under­whelmed. In par­tic­u­lar, he described anoth­er Da Vin­ci, The Last Sup­per—“the most cel­e­brat­ed paint­ing in the world”—as a “mourn­ful wreck.” (The work was then unre­stored; see it above as it looked 100 years lat­er in the 1970s.) Twain lat­er revised his obser­va­tions for his first full-length book, 1869’s Inno­cents Abroad, a car­i­ca­ture of ugly Amer­i­can tourists filled with what William Dean How­ells called “deli­cious impu­dence.” While the oth­ers mar­veled at Da Vin­ci’s crum­bling fres­co, Twain, in the cur­rent par­lance, expressed a great big “meh.”

The world seems to have become set­tled in the belief, long ago, that it is not pos­si­ble for human genius to out­do this cre­ation of Da Vin­ci’s.… The col­ors are dimmed with age; the coun­te­nances are scaled and marred, and near­ly all expres­sion is gone from them; the hair is a dead blur upon the wall, and there is no life in the eyes.… I am sat­is­fied that the Last Sup­per was a very mir­a­cle of art once. But it was three hun­dred years ago.

Twain and the pro­fes­sion­al crit­ics did not always dis­agree. Take J.M.W. Turn­er’s famous­ly riotous can­vas Slave Ship (or Slavers Over­throw­ing the Dead and Dying: Typhoon Com­ing On), above. John Ruskin may have praised the work as the “noblest sea… ever paint­ed by man” and it has come down to us as a vio­lent rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the hor­rors of the slave trade, occa­sioned in part, writes Stephen J. May, by Turn­er’s sense of “shared guilt about his own role and Eng­land’s role in con­don­ing and per­pet­u­at­ing slav­ery’s malev­o­lent lega­cy.” The anti-slav­ery, anti-impe­ri­al­ist Twain would sure­ly have appre­ci­at­ed the sen­ti­ment; the paint­ing, how­ev­er, not so much. Oth­er crit­ics felt sim­i­lar­ly, one call­ing Slave Ship a “gross out­rage on nature.” Twain’s sum­ma­tion in an 1878 note­book is much more col­or­ful, a piece of vin­tage Samuel Clemens under­cut­ting: “Slave Ship—Cat hav­ing a fit in a plat­ter of toma­toes.”

For all his snide por­traits of con­ven­tion­al mid­dle-class atti­tudes toward art, Twain could also be a bit of a prig, as we see in his response to Titian’s Venus of Urbino. In this, he was not so far removed from our own cul­tur­al atti­tudes (or Face­book and Google’s atti­tudes) about nudi­ty. The cen­sored ver­sion of the paint­ing above (see the orig­i­nal here) comes to us via Buz­zfeed, who write “Remem­ber kids, blood and gore are fine but boobs will make you blind.” Twain seemed to have uniron­i­cal­ly agreed, rail­ing in his 1880 trav­el book A Tramp Abroad against the “inde­cent license” afford­ed artists and call­ing Titian’s sug­ges­tive reclin­ing nude “the foulest, the vilest, the obscen­est pic­ture the world pos­sess­es.” (Ah, if only he had lived to see the inter­net’s foulest depths.)

Twain’s own mea­ger con­tri­bu­tions to the visu­al arts—consisting of a dozen sketch­es, like that above, made for A Tramp Abroad—fall some­what short of the stan­dards he set for oth­er artists. Nev­er­the­less, he recalled in The Inno­cents Abroad his dis­may at the “acres of very bad draw­ing, very bad per­spec­tive, and very incor­rect pro­por­tions” in the muse­ums and church­es across Europe. What, we might won­der, could pos­si­bly move such a harsh, unspar­ing crit­ic? In art, it seems, Twain val­ued “strict real­ism, grandeur of theme and scale, and propriety”—all on dis­play in abun­dance in Amer­i­can artist Fred­er­ic Edwin Church’s The Heart of the Andes, below.

After view­ing this ide­al­ized South Amer­i­can land­scape in St. Louis, Twain called the enor­mous (over five feet high by ten feet wide) can­vas a “most won­der­ful­ly beau­ti­ful paint­ing.” “We took the opera glass­es,” he wrote to his broth­er, “and exam­ined its beau­ties minute­ly…. There is no slur­ring of per­spec­tive about it.” He rec­om­mend­ed mul­ti­ple view­ings: “Your third vis­it will find your brain gasp­ing and strain­ing with futile efforts to take all the won­der in… and under­stand how such a mir­a­cle could have been con­ceived and exe­cut­ed by human brain and human hands.”

Twain, won over by this sub­lime spec­ta­cle, seems to have tem­porar­i­ly sur­ren­dered his crit­i­cal fac­ul­ties. In read­ing his response, I found myself want­i­ng to egg him on: C’mon, what about this soft, gauzy light­ing, those lumpy moun­tains, and the kitschy, over­ly-sen­ti­men­tal look of the whole thing? But there was room enough in Twain’s crit­i­cal arse­nal for gen­uine awe as for amused con­tempt at what he saw as pho­ny expres­sions of the same. And that breadth of char­ac­ter is what made Mark Twain, well, Mark Twain.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mark Twain Cre­ates a List of His Favorite Books For Adults & Kids (1887)

Mark Twain Drafts the Ulti­mate Let­ter of Com­plaint (1905)

Mark Twain Writes a Rap­tur­ous Let­ter to Walt Whit­man on the Poet’s 70th Birth­day (1889)

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

Thomas Dolby Potty Trains His Cat, and There’s Video Proof

in Life, Music | September 17th, 2015

One of our favorite curiosi­ties is the The Charles Min­gus CAT-alogue for Toi­let Train­ing Your Cat–a pam­phlet writ­ten by the mer­cu­r­ial jazz musi­cian that offers step-by-step advice on how to get your cat to use the loo. The one thing Min­gus did­n’t pro­vide is video proof that it could actu­al­ly be done.

That’s where anoth­er musi­cian steps in. Above, we have video of Thomas Dol­by’s cat, “Mozart,” in action. Dol­by, best known for his 1982 hit “She Blind­ed Me with Sci­ence,” is a teacher at heart. The son of an Oxford and Cam­bridge don, he’s now the Pro­fes­sor of the Arts at Johns Hop­kins Uni­ver­si­ty. And, on his Youtube chan­nel, he explains how he pulled off the seem­ing­ly impos­si­ble:

This is my cat Mozart, a Cor­nish Rex, pee­ing on the toi­let. Many believed this was not pos­si­ble, but it’s 100% real. When he was a kit­ten we tried to teach him to use the toi­let, using a DVD. We thought it was a no go. But then aged about 3 he sud­den­ly start­ed to do it. Now some­times when I get up in the night to pee Mo nips in ahead of me and I have to wait till he’s done. Next we need to teach him to flush! ~TD

If any­one is famil­iar with the DVD he’s ref­er­enc­ing, please iden­ti­fy it in the com­ments below.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Charles Min­gus’ Instruc­tions For Toi­let Train­ing Your Cat, Read by The Wire’s Reg E. Cathey

Insane­ly Cute Cat Com­mer­cials from Stu­dio Ghi­b­li, Hayao Miyazaki’s Leg­endary Ani­ma­tion Shop

Marshall McLuhan’s 1969 Deck of Cards, Designed For Out-of-the-Box Thinking

in Creativity | August 24th, 2015

Image via EricMcluhan.com

Six years before Bri­an Eno and Peter Schmidt designed their first pack of Oblique Strate­gies cards—a set of ran­dom apho­risms meant to clear cre­ative blocks—communication the­o­rist and philoso­pher Mar­shall McLuhan had designed a very sim­i­lar deck in 1969, this one with a more direct nod to the clas­sic play­ing card deck.

The name of the card deck, Dis­tant Ear­ly Warn­ing, was a ref­er­ence to the 3,000 mile long DEW Line, a sys­tem of 63 radar sta­tions that act­ed as an ear­ly detec­tion inva­sion buffer dur­ing the Cold War. And in his 1964 book Under­stand Media, McLuhan explained,

“I think of art, at its most sig­nif­i­cant, as a DEW line, a Dis­tant Ear­ly Warn­ing sys­tem that can always be relied on to tell the old cul­ture what is begin­ning to hap­pen to it.”

And so with help from adver­tis­ing and pub­lish­ing guru Eugene Schwartz, The Mar­shall McLuhan DEW-Line Newslet­ter and its spin­off deck of cards was born. Schwartz saw the newslet­ter much like we see blogs today: a very imme­di­ate way of dis­sem­i­nat­ing infor­ma­tion, deep­er than tele­vi­sion and faster than books. The newslet­ter last­ed only two years, came in sev­er­al forms (one issue was a set of slides, anoth­er a record), and rep­re­sents the height of “McLuhan Mania” in Amer­i­can cul­ture. Busi­ness and thought lead­ers were its tar­get audi­ence.

Much like Oblique Strate­gies (you can still find vin­tage ver­sions online), the instruc­tions for Dis­tant Ear­ly Warn­ing (also avail­able online here) sug­gest that the user think of a per­son­al or busi­ness prob­lem, shuf­fle the deck, choose a card and inter­pret its mean­ing. Although div­ina­to­ry cards have long been a part of west­ern cul­ture, the idea of inde­ter­mi­na­cy and con­sult­ing the I Ching was very much in vogue through artists like John Cage.

The cards con­tain plays on apho­risms, like “The Vic­tor Belongs to the Spoils” or “Thanks for the Mam­maries.” Some­times they quote Vic­to­ri­an nov­el­ist Samuel But­ler, like “The chick­en was the egg’s idea for get­ting more eggs” or W.C. Fields (“How do you like kids?” “Well cooked,” he said stern­ly), or John Cage (“Silence is all the sounds of the envi­ron­ment at once.”) Many are McLuhan’s own quotes.

McLuhan and Schwartz’ ideas can still be felt in any num­ber of TED talks or when­ev­er a busi­ness leader talks about think­ing out­side the box. Steve Jobs was a walk­ing deck of these cards.

Should you feel like push­ing your brain lat­er­al­ly, check out the full deck here at this Flickr feed, and if you long to own a phys­i­cal copy, it can still be had for Cana­di­an dol­lars at the site run by McLuhan’s son.

via Flash­bak

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Vision­ary Thought of Mar­shall McLuhan, Intro­duced and Demys­ti­fied by Tom Wolfe

McLuhan Said “The Medi­um Is The Mes­sage”; Two Pieces Of Media Decode the Famous Phrase

Nor­man Mail­er & Mar­shall McLuhan Debate the Elec­tron­ic Age

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

Hear Dramatizations of H.P. Lovecraft’s Stories On His Birthday: “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Dunwich Horror,” & More

in Audio Books, Literature | August 20th, 2015

Hor­ror writer Howard Phillips Love­craft was a man who lived his life in fear—of peo­ple of oth­er races and nation­al­i­ties, of women, of real­i­ty itself. In a recent New York Review of Books write-up, Charles Bax­ter some­what deri­sive­ly char­ac­ter­izes Love­craft as a dis­en­chant­ed ado­les­cent (and favorite of dis­en­chant­ed ado­les­cents), who “nev­er real­ly grew up. ‘Adult­hood is hell,’ he once wrote in a let­ter.” Yet his fic­tion depicts more than a tor­ment­ed adult world, but an entire uni­verse brim­ming with name­less ancient horrors—and occa­sion­al­ly named ones like the crea­ture Cthul­hu, whose like­ness he once sketched out in a let­ter to a friend.

The cephalo­pod-faced mon­ster crys­tal­izes Lovecraft’s dis­gust with real­i­ty in all its strange­ness and, for him, all its vari­ety. It’s a per­fect image of alien­ation (just this past week we saw tongue-in-cheek spec­u­la­tion over whether octo­pus­es are aliens; a plau­si­ble con­ceit) and presents us with an ele­men­tal uncan­ni­ness that char­ac­ter­izes his entire body of work. “Fic­tion like Lovecraft’s can be bru­tal­ly hyp­not­ic,” writes Bax­ter, “the young read­er, intel­lec­tu­al­ly unde­fend­ed and eas­i­ly shak­en enters the writer’s fear-drenched uni­verse and can’t eas­i­ly get out of it.”

The Call of Cthul­hu — Part 1

Whether you dis­cov­ered Love­craft as a young read­er or an old­er one, you may have found your­self sim­i­lar­ly entrapped by the hor­rors of his imag­i­na­tion. And you could count your­self in the com­pa­ny of not only her­met­ic, mis­an­throp­ic, death-obsessed young men in punk bands but also of media friend­ly, death-obsessed writ­ers like Stephen King and Joyce Car­ol Oates. And, of course, thou­sands upon thou­sands of hor­ror fans across the world, includ­ing a great many actors, writ­ers, and direc­tors who over the years have adapt­ed Lovecraft’s fic­tion as old-fash­ioned radio dra­ma of the kind the author him­self might have con­sumed while iso­lat­ed from the wicked world in his New Eng­land home.

You can hear some choice exam­ples here: at the top of the post we have Richard Coyle’s read­ing of the novel­la At the Moun­tains of Mad­ness. (You can also hear his read­ing of “The Shad­ow Over Inns­mouth” here.)  Next, we have a 1945 drama­ti­za­tion of “The Dun­wich Hor­ror,” per­formed by Acad­e­my Award-win­ning actor Ronald Col­man. And then hear the infa­mous “Call of Cthul­hu,” parts one and two, pro­duced by the Atlanta Radio The­atre Com­pa­ny, who have record­ed no small num­ber of Love­craft radio plays. Just above, lis­ten to a read­ing of “Behind the Wall of Sleep” from old-time radio sci-fi read­ings archive Mind Webs (which we’ve cov­ered in a pre­vi­ous post). Final­ly, below, lis­ten on Spo­ti­fy to the HP Love­craft Radio Hour Vol 1, a col­lec­tion of dra­ma­tized Love­craft sto­ries. 

Should you hap­pen to tear through these record­ings and find your­self in des­per­ate need of more to feed your Love­craft obses­sion, fear not; you would have a very hard time exhaust­ing all the options. The World’s Largest H.P. Love­craft Audio Links Gate­way, for exam­ple, deliv­ers exact­ly what it promis­es. Should that expan­sive data­base some­how leave out a read­ing or drama­ti­za­tion, you’ll per­haps find it over at the H.P. Love­craft Archive’s size­able col­lec­tion. And you must, if you’re a Love­craft fan, vis­it the H.P. Love­craft His­tor­i­cal Soci­ety, who host plen­ty of Love­craft merch, and links to much more Love­craft audio, includ­ing albums inspired by his work and a pod­cast.

And on the off chance you knew lit­tle or not at all of Love­craft before read­ing this post, beware. You may, after lis­ten­ing to some of his weird tales of hor­ror, come away a devot­ed Love­craft cultist.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

H.P. Lovecraft’s Clas­sic Hor­ror Sto­ries Free Online: Down­load Audio Books, eBooks & More

H.P. Lovecraft’s Mon­ster Draw­ings: Cthul­hu & Oth­er Crea­tures from the “Bound­less and Hideous Unknown”

Love­craft: Fear of the Unknown (Free Doc­u­men­tary)

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

A Vintage Infographic of the Human Brain: The Wonders Within Your Head (1938)

in Biology, Magazines | August 12th, 2015

Click here to view the info­graph­ic in a larg­er for­mat.

From the Decem­ber 6, 1938 issue of LOOK mag­a­zine comes this vin­tage “info­graph­ic” show­ing “The Won­ders With­in Your Head.” It takes the human brain/head and presents it as a series of rooms, each car­ry­ing out a dif­fer­ent func­tion. Drawn a lit­tle more than a decade after Calvin Coolidge famous­ly declared “The busi­ness of Amer­i­ca is busi­ness,” it’s not sur­pris­ing that the cog­ni­tive func­tions are depict­ed in cor­po­rate or indus­tri­al terms.

Besides for this visu­al­iza­tion, the same edi­tion of LOOK fea­tured arti­cles on Jean Har­low, Joan Craw­ford, Pres­i­dent Roo­sevelt, and the Tragedy of the Euro­pean Jews. Kristall­nacht, or the “Night of Bro­ken Glass,” had tak­en place a month before in Nazi Ger­many — anoth­er sign that the world was about to become a very, very dark place.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Tree of Lan­guages Illus­trat­ed in a Big, Beau­ti­ful Info­graph­ic

Down­load 78 Free Online His­to­ry Cours­es: From Ancient Greece to The Mod­ern World

4000 Years of His­to­ry Dis­played in a 5‑Foot-Long “His­tom­ap” (Ear­ly Info­graph­ic) From 1931

Free Online Biol­o­gy Cours­es

Hear Mahler’s 9th Played in 6 Minutes on the Squeezebox by “The Greatest Accordionist in the World”

in Music | August 10th, 2015

NPR called William Schim­mel “the great­est accor­dion­ist in the world,” and thanks to NPR you can hear Schim­mel at work, tak­ing Gus­tav Mahler’s sprawl­ing Ninth Sym­pho­ny and “squeez­ing this immense musi­cal can­vas down to just 6 1/2 min­utes.” That’s a feat in itself.

Trum­peter Wyn­ton Marsalis makes an appear­ance on the track, which comes from the new­ly-released album, The­ater of the Accor­dion: William Schim­mel. Enjoy.

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Audrey Hepburn’s Moving Screen Test for Roman Holiday (1953)

in Film, Life | August 8th, 2015

When you think of Audrey Hep­burn, you think of Roman Hol­i­day, the 1953 film that launched her career. How can you for­get Hep­burn as Princess Anne? Orig­i­nal­ly, the part was writ­ten for Eliz­a­beth Tay­lor, then a major star. But some­thing hap­pened dur­ing the cast­ing that changed all of that. In his biog­ra­phy of Ms. Hep­burn, the author Bar­ry Paris writes:

Her Roman Hol­i­day test took place at Pinewood Stu­dio in Lon­don, Sep­tem­ber 18, 1951, under [Thorold] Dick­in­son’s direc­tion. “We did some scenes out of the script,” he said, but “Para­mount also want­ed to see what Audrey was actu­al­ly like not act­ing a part, so I did an inter­view with her. We loaded a thou­sand feet of film into a cam­era and every foot of it went on this con­ver­sa­tion. She talked about her expe­ri­ences in the war, the Allied raid on Arn­hem, and hid­ing out in a cel­lar. A deeply mov­ing thing.”

Lat­er, so the sto­ry goes, the direc­tor William Wyler watched the footage (shown above) in Rome and found it irre­sistible. He claimed: “She had every­thing I was look­ing for: charm, inno­cence and tal­ent. She also was very fun­ny. She was absolute­ly enchant­i­ng, and we said, ‘That’s the girl!’ ”

In watch­ing the footage, one thing will leap out. Hep­burn’s ado­les­cence was hard­ly suit­ed for a princess. Liv­ing in the Dutch town of Arn­hem dur­ing World War II, she expe­ri­enced the harsh Ger­man occu­pa­tion first­hand and suf­fered from mal­nu­tri­tion, acute ane­mia, res­pi­ra­to­ry prob­lems, and ede­ma by the war’s end. It was a for­ma­tive expe­ri­ence that lat­er made her a devot­ed activist for children’s rights.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mar­lene Dietrich’s Tem­pera­men­tal Screen Test for The Blue Angel (1929)

Mar­lon Bran­do Screen Tests for Rebel With­out A Cause (1947)

Bruce Lee Audi­tions for The Green Hor­net

Adorn Your Garden with Howard the Zinn Monk

in History, Random | August 5th, 2015

In Jan­u­ary, in the dead of win­ter, we got you think­ing about warmer times by high­light­ing the Noam Chom­sky Gar­den Gnome, a real prod­uct described as fol­lows:

Stand­ing at just under 17 inch­es, Gnome Chom­sky the Gar­den Noam clutch­es his clas­sic books, ‘The Man­u­fac­ture of Com­post’ and ‘Hedgerows not Hege­mo­ny’ – with his open right hand ready to hold the polit­i­cal slo­gan of your choos­ing. His clothes rep­re­sent a relaxed but classy ver­sion of reg­u­lar gnome attire, includ­ing: a nice suit jack­et-tunic, jeans, boots, tra­di­tion­al gnome cap, and glass­es. Addi­tion­al­ly, Noam Gnome stands on a base com­plete with a carved title – for any­one who may not imme­di­ate­ly real­ize the iden­ti­ty of this hand­some and schol­ar­ly gnome.

Now that it’s sum­mer, imag­ine Gnome Chom­sky hang­ing in your gar­den with Howard the Zinn Monk. Zinn Monk, get it?

First pub­lished in 1980, Zin­n’s famous book A People’s His­to­ry of the Unit­ed States tells “America’s sto­ry from the point of view of—and in the words of—America’s women, fac­to­ry work­ers, African-Amer­i­cans, Native Amer­i­cans, the work­ing poor, and immi­grant labor­ers.” It has sold more than two mil­lion copies over the past 35 years. And, as I write this post, it’s the #1 best­selling book in US his­to­ry on Ama­zon.

Howard the Zinn Monk isn’t quite sell­ing at the same brisk clip. But the web site justsaygnome.net might make you a Zinn gnome if you ask nice­ly.

In the mean­time, you can watch and enjoy this illus­trat­ed video: Howard Zinn’s “What the Class­room Didn’t Teach Me About the Amer­i­can Empire.”

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Why Sitting Is The New Smoking: An Animated Explanation

in Biology, Health | August 4th, 2015

Dur­ing the past year, sit­ting has become the new smok­ing. “Past stud­ies have found,” declares a 2014 arti­cle in The New York Times, “the more hours that peo­ple spend sit­ting, the more like­ly they are to devel­op dia­betes, heart dis­ease and oth­er con­di­tions, and poten­tial­ly to die pre­ma­ture­ly — even if they exer­cise reg­u­lar­ly.” What’s the sci­ence behind this alarm­ing claim? The ani­mat­ed TED-ED video (above) begins to paint the pic­ture. But it does­n’t get into the lat­est and per­haps most impor­tant research. Accord­ing to sci­ence writer Gretchen Reynolds, a recent Swedish study pub­lished in the British Jour­nal of Sports Med­i­cine sug­gests that when you sit all day, your telom­eres (the tiny caps on the ends of DNA strands) get short­er. Which is not a good thing. As telom­eres get short­er, the rate at which the body ages and decays speeds up. Con­verse­ly, the study found “that the telom­eres in [those] who were sit­ting the least had length­ened. Their cells seemed to be grow­ing phys­i­o­log­i­cal­ly younger.”

Sev­er­al months ago, KQED radio in San Fran­cis­co aired a pro­gram ded­i­cat­ed to this ques­tion, fea­tur­ing med­ical and ergonom­ics experts. To delve deep­er into it, lis­ten below. Or click here.

Mean­while, if you have advice on how to incor­po­rate move­ment into your day, please share it with your fel­low read­ers in the com­ments sec­tion below.

And if your mind imme­di­ate­ly drifts to buy­ing a stand­ing desk, then check out our relat­ed post: Who Wrote at Stand­ing Desks? Kierkegaard, Dick­ens and Ernest Hem­ing­way Too

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Endangered Species (Including Cecil the Lion) Projected Onto the Empire State Building

in Art | August 2nd, 2015

Any­one with a Face­book or Twit­ter account last week could­n’t avoid hear­ing about Wal­ter James Palmer, the Min­neso­ta den­tist who alleged­ly went tro­phy hunt­ing in Zim­bab­we and killed Cecil the Lion, a local favorite who had been ille­gal­ly lured away from a pro­tect­ed wildlife pre­serve. I won’t say any­thing more about it, oth­er than that you can sign a peti­tion to get Palmer extra­dit­ed to Zim­bab­we and let him defend his actions to local author­i­ties.

Mean­while, back in New York City, two artists Travis Threlkel and Louie Psi­hoyos were get­ting ready to turn The Empire State build­ing into a Noah’s Ark of Endan­gered Ani­mals. And that’s exact­ly what hap­pened on Sat­ur­day night. Plac­ing “40 stacked, 20,000-lumen pro­jec­tors on the roof of a near­by build­ing,” Threlkel and Psi­hoyos pro­ject­ed an array of endan­gered ani­mals “onto a space 375 feet tall and 186 feet wide cov­er­ing 33 floors,” reports The New York Times. You can see pho­tos of the ani­mals over at the Rac­ing Extinc­tion Twit­ter stream. Touch­ing­ly, there was an homage to Cecil the Lion. A video from the Times appears above; anoth­er from The New York­er below.

To learn more about how Project Map­ping works, and to see oth­er exam­ples of Threlkel’s work, see the videos on this page.

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