The Fiske Reading Machine: The 1920s Precursor to the Kindle

in Books, History, Technology | November 9th, 2022

The Sony Lib­rie, the first e‑reader to use a mod­ern elec­tron­ic-paper screen, came out in 2004. Old as that is in tech years, the basic idea of a hand­held device that can store large amounts of text stretch­es at least eight decades far­ther back in his­to­ry. Wit­ness the Fiske Read­ing Machine, an inven­tion first pro­filed in a 1922 issue of Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can. “The instru­ment, con­sist­ing of a tiny lens and a small roller for oper­at­ing this eye­piece up and down a ver­ti­cal col­umn of read­ing-mat­ter, is a means by which ordi­nary type­writ­ten copy, when pho­to­graph­i­cal­ly reduced to one-hun­dredth of the space orig­i­nal­ly occu­pied, can be read with quite the facil­i­ty that the impres­sion of con­ven­tion­al print­ing type is now revealed to the unaid­ed eye,” writes author S. R. Win­ters.

Mak­ing books com­pat­i­ble with the Fiske Read­ing Machine involved not dig­i­ti­za­tion, of course, but minia­tur­iza­tion. Accord­ing to the patents filed by inven­tor Bradley Allen Fiske (eleven in all, between 1920 and 1935), the text of any book could be pho­to-engraved onto a cop­per block, reduced ten times in the process, and then print­ed onto strips of paper for use in the machine, which would make them read­able again through a mag­ni­fy­ing lens. A sin­gle mag­ni­fy­ing lens, that is: “A blind­er, attached to the machine, can be oper­at­ed in obstruct­ing the view of the unused eye.” (Win­ters adds that “the use of both eyes will doubt­less involve the con­struc­tion of a unit of the read­ing machine more elab­o­rate than the present design.”)

“Fiske believed he had sin­gle-hand­ed­ly rev­o­lu­tion­ized the pub­lish­ing indus­try,” writes Engad­get’s J. Rigg. “Thanks to his inge­nu­ity, books and mag­a­zines could be pro­duced for a frac­tion of their cur­rent price. The cost of mate­ri­als, press­es, ship­ping and the bur­den of stor­age could also be slashed. He imag­ined mag­a­zines could be dis­trib­uted by post for next to noth­ing, and most pow­er­ful­ly, that pub­lish­ing in his for­mat would allow every­one access to edu­ca­tion­al mate­r­i­al and enter­tain­ment no mat­ter their lev­el of income.” Con­sid­er­ing how the rela­tion­ship between read­ers and read­ing mate­r­i­al ulti­mate­ly evolved, thanks not to cop­per blocks and mag­ni­fiers and tiny strips of paper but to com­put­ers and the inter­net, it seems that Fiske was a man ahead of his time.

Alas, the Fiske Read­ing Machine itself was just on the wrong side of tech­no­log­i­cal his­to­ry. Even as Fiske was refin­ing its design, “micro­film was begin­ning to catch on,” and “while it ini­tial­ly found its feet in the busi­ness world — for keep­ing record of can­celled checks, for exam­ple — by 1935 Kodak had begun pub­lish­ing The New York Times on 35mm micro­film.” Despite the absolute preva­lence that for­mat soon attained in the world of archiv­ing, “the appetite for minia­tur­ized nov­els and hand­held read­ers nev­er mate­ri­al­ized in the way Fiske had imag­ined.” Nor, sure­ly, could he have imag­ined the form the dig­i­tal, elec­tron­ic-paper-screened, and slim yet huge­ly capa­cious form that the e‑reader would have to take before find­ing suc­cess in the mar­ket­place — yet some­how with­out quite dis­plac­ing the paper book as even he knew it.

via Engad­get

Relat­ed con­tent:

The e‑Book Imag­ined in 1935

Napoleon’s Kin­dle: See the Minia­tur­ized Trav­el­ing Library He Took on Mil­i­tary Cam­paigns

Behold the “Book Wheel”: The Renais­sance Inven­tion Cre­at­ed to Make Books Portable & Help Schol­ars Study Sev­er­al Books at Once (1588)

The Page Turn­er: A Fab­u­lous Rube Gold­berg Machine for Read­ers

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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.

An Asbestos-Bound, Fireproof Edition of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

in Books | November 9th, 2022

Even by the extreme stan­dards of dystopi­an fic­tion, the premise of Ray Bradbury’s Fahren­heit 451 can seem a lit­tle absurd. Fire­men whose job is to set fires? A soci­ety that bans all books? Writ­ten less than a decade after the fall of the Third Reich, which announced its evil inten­tions with book burn­ings, the nov­el explic­it­ly evokes the kind of total­i­tar­i­an­ism that seeks to destroy culture—and whole peoples—with fire. But not even the Nazis banned all books. Not a few aca­d­e­mics and writ­ers sur­vived or thrived in Nazi Ger­many by hew­ing to the ide­o­log­i­cal ortho­doxy (or at least not chal­leng­ing it), which, for all its ter­ri­fy­ing irra­tional­ism, kept up some sem­blance of an intel­lec­tu­al veneer.

The nov­el also recalls the Sovi­et vari­ety of state repres­sion. But the Par­ty appa­ra­tus also allowed a pub­lish­ing indus­try to oper­ate, under its strict con­straints. Nonethe­less, Sovi­et cen­sor­ship is leg­endary, as is the sur­vival of banned lit­er­a­ture through self-pub­lish­ing and mem­o­riza­tion, vivid­ly rep­re­sent­ed by the famous line in Mikhail Bulgokov’s The Mas­ter and Mar­gari­ta, “Man­u­scripts don’t burn.”

Bul­gakov, writes Nathaniel Rich at Guer­ni­ca, is say­ing that “great lit­er­a­ture… is fire­proof. It sur­vives its crit­ics, its cen­sors, and even the pas­sage of time.” Bul­gakov wrote from painful expe­ri­ence. When his diary was dis­cov­ered by the NKVD in 1929, then returned to him, he “prompt­ly burned it.” Some­time after­ward, dur­ing the long com­po­si­tion of his posthu­mous­ly pub­lished nov­el, he burned the man­u­script, then lat­er recon­struct­ed it from mem­o­ry.

These exam­ples bring to mind the exiled intel­lec­tu­als in Bradbury’s nov­el, who have mem­o­rized whole books in order to one day recon­struct lit­er­ary cul­ture. Europe’s total­i­tar­i­an regimes pro­vide essen­tial back­ground for the novel’s plot and imagery, but its key con­text, Brad­bury him­self not­ed in a 1956 radio inter­view, was the anti-Com­mu­nist para­noia of the U.S. in the ear­ly 1950s. “Too many peo­ple were afraid of their shad­ows,” he said, “there was a threat of book burn­ing. Many of the books were being tak­en off the shelves at that time.” Read­ing the nov­el as a chill­ing vision of a future when all books are banned and burned makes the arti­fact pic­tured above par­tic­u­lar­ly poignant—an edi­tion of Fahren­heit 451 bound in fire­proof asbestos.

Released in 1953 by Bal­lan­tine in a lim­it­ed run of two-hun­dred signed copies, the books were “bound in Johns-Manville Qin­ter­ra,” notes Lau­ren Davis at io9, “a chryso­lite asbestos mate­r­i­al.” Now the fire­proof cov­ers, with their “excep­tion­al resis­tance to pyrol­y­sis,” are “much sought after by col­lec­tors” and go for upwards of $20,000. A fire­proof Fahren­heit 451, on the one hand, can seem a lit­tle gim­micky (its pages still burn, after all). But it’s also the per­fect man­i­fes­ta­tion of a lit­er­al inter­pre­ta­tion of the nov­el as a sto­ry about ban­ning and book burn­ing. All of us who have read the nov­el have like­ly read it this way, as a vision of a repres­sive total­i­tar­i­an night­mare. As such, it feels like a prod­uct of mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry fears.

Rather than fear­ing mass book burn­ings, we seem, in the 21st cen­tu­ry, on the verge of being washed away in a sea of infor­ma­tion (and dis- and mis-infor­ma­tion). We are inun­dat­ed with writing—in print and online—such that some of us despair of ever find­ing time to read the accu­mu­lat­ing piles of books and arti­cles that dai­ly sur­round us, phys­i­cal­ly and vir­tu­al­ly. But although books are still pub­lished in the mil­lions, with sales ris­ing, falling, then ris­ing again, the num­ber of peo­ple who actu­al­ly read seems in dan­ger of rapid­ly dimin­ish­ing. And this, Brad­bury also said, was his real fear. “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a cul­ture,” he claimed, “just get peo­ple to stop read­ing them.”

We’ve mis­read Fahren­heit 451, Brad­bury told us in his lat­er years. It is an alle­go­ry, a sym­bol­ic rep­re­sen­ta­tion of a gross­ly dumb­ed-down soci­ety, huge­ly oppres­sive and destruc­tive in its own way. The fire­men are not lit­er­al gov­ern­ment agents but sym­bol­ic of the forces of mass dis­trac­tion, which dis­sem­i­nate “fac­toids,” lies, and half-truths as sub­sti­tutes for knowl­edge. The nov­el, he said, is actu­al­ly about peo­ple “being turned into morons by TV.” Add to this the pro­lif­er­at­ing amuse­ments of the online world, video games, etc. and we can see Brad­bury’s Fahren­heit 451 not as a dat­ed rep­re­sen­ta­tion of 40s fas­cism or 50s repres­sion, but as a too-rel­e­vant warn­ing to a dis­tractible soci­ety that deval­ues and destroys edu­ca­tion and fac­tu­al knowl­edge even as we have more access than ever to lit­er­a­ture of every kind.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ray Brad­bury Reveals the True Mean­ing of Fahren­heit 451: It’s Not About Cen­sor­ship, But Peo­ple “Being Turned Into Morons by TV”

Ray Brad­bury Explains Why Lit­er­a­ture is the Safe­ty Valve of Civ­i­liza­tion (in Which Case We Need More Lit­er­a­ture!)

Helen Keller Writes a Let­ter to Nazi Stu­dents Before They Burn Her Book: “His­to­ry Has Taught You Noth­ing If You Think You Can Kill Ideas” (1933)

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

Discover Friedrich Nietzsche’s Typewriter, the Curious “Malling-Hansen Writing Ball” (Circa 1881)

in Philosophy, Technology | November 9th, 2022

Dur­ing his final decade, Friedrich Nietzsche’s wors­en­ing con­sti­tu­tion con­tin­ued to plague the philoso­pher. In addi­tion to hav­ing suf­fered from inca­pac­i­tat­ing indi­ges­tion, insom­nia, and migraines for much of his life, the 1880s brought about a dra­mat­ic dete­ri­o­ra­tion in Nietzsche’s eye­sight, with a doc­tor not­ing that his “right eye could only per­ceive mis­tak­en and dis­tort­ed images.”

Niet­zsche him­self declared that writ­ing and read­ing for more than twen­ty min­utes had grown exces­sive­ly painful. With his intel­lec­tu­al out­put reach­ing its peak dur­ing this peri­od, the philoso­pher required a device that would let him write while mak­ing min­i­mal demands on his vision.

So he sought to buy a type­writer in 1881. Although he was aware of Rem­ing­ton type­writ­ers, the ail­ing philoso­pher looked for a mod­el that would be fair­ly portable, allow­ing him to trav­el, when nec­es­sary, to more salu­bri­ous cli­mates. The Malling-Hansen Writ­ing Ball seemed to fit the bill:

In Dieter Eberwein’s free Niet­zch­es Screibkugel e‑book, the vice pres­i­dent of the Malling-Hansen Soci­ety explains that the writ­ing ball was the clos­est thing to a 19^th cen­tu­ry lap­top. The first com­mer­cial­ly-pro­duced type­writer, the writ­ing ball was the 1865 cre­ation of Dan­ish inven­tor Ras­mus Malling-Hansen, and was shown at the 1878 Paris Uni­ver­sal Exhi­bi­tion to jour­nal­is­tic acclaim:

“In the year 1875, a quick writ­ing appa­ra­tus, designed by Mr. L. Sholes in Amer­i­ca, and man­u­fac­tured by Mr. Rem­ing­ton, was intro­duced in Lon­don. This machine was supe­ri­or to the Malling-Hansen writ­ing appa­ra­tus; but the writ­ing ball in its present form far excels the Rem­ing­ton machine. It secures greater rapid­i­ty, and its writ­ing is clear­er and more pre­cise than that of the Amer­i­can instru­ment. The Dan­ish appa­ra­tus has more keys, is much less com­pli­cat­ed, built with greater pre­ci­sion, more sol­id, and much small­er and lighter than the Rem­ing­ton, and more­over, is cheap­er.”

Despite his ini­tial excite­ment, Niet­zsche quick­ly grew tired of the intri­cate con­trap­tion. Accord­ing to Eber­wein, the philoso­pher strug­gled with the device after it was dam­aged dur­ing a trip to Genoa; an inept mechan­ic try­ing to make the nec­es­sary repairs may have bro­ken the writ­ing ball even fur­ther. Still, Niet­zsche typed some 60 man­u­scripts on his writ­ing ball, includ­ing what may be the most poignant poet­ic treat­ment of type­writ­ers to date:

“THE WRITING BALL IS A THING LIKE ME:

MADE OF IRON YET EASILY TWISTED ON JOURNEYS.

PATIENCE AND TACT ARE REQUIRED IN ABUNDANCE

AS WELL AS FINE FINGERS TO USE US.”

In addi­tion to view­ing sev­er­al of Nietzsche’s orig­i­nal type­scripts at the Malling-Hansen Soci­ety web­site, those want­i­ng a clos­er look at Nietzsche’s mod­el can view it in the video below.

Note: This post orig­i­nal­ly appeared on our site in Decem­ber 2013.

Ilia Blin­d­er­man is a Mon­tre­al-based cul­ture and sci­ence writer. Fol­low him at @iliablinderman.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mark Twain Wrote the First Book Ever Writ­ten With a Type­writer

The Keaton Music Type­writer: An Inge­nious Machine That Prints Musi­cal Nota­tion

The Endur­ing Ana­log Under­world of Gramer­cy Type­writer

An AI Generated, Never-Ending Discussion Between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek

in Philosophy | November 3rd, 2022

From the site Infi­nite Con­ver­sa­tion comes an AI gen­er­at­ed, nev­er-end­ing dis­cus­sion between Wern­er Her­zog and Slavoj Žižek. What’s the point of this AI gen­er­at­ed con­ver­sa­tion? The cre­ator explains:

As of late 2022, it’s cheap and easy to pro­duce AI-gen­er­at­ed con­tent that is super­fi­cial­ly good and sur­pris­ing­ly sim­i­lar to “the real thing”. This applies to videos resem­bling celebri­ties (com­mon­ly known as Deep­fakes) or, as in the case of the Infi­nite Con­ver­sa­tion, speech.

This project aims to raise aware­ness about the ease of using tools for syn­the­siz­ing a real voice. Right now, any moti­vat­ed fool can do this with a lap­top in their bed­room. This changes our rela­tion­ship with the media we con­sume online and rais­es ques­tions about the impor­tance of author­i­ta­tive sources, breach of trust and gulli­bil­i­ty.

Will this tech­nol­o­gy lead to a mas­sive pro­lif­er­a­tion of sub-opti­mal-qual­i­ty con­tent? Should we sim­ply dis­trust any­thing we see online? As new tools are devel­oped to help iden­ti­fy gen­er­at­ed con­tent, I rec­om­mend main­tain­ing a skep­ti­cal stance, par­tic­u­lar­ly when the source/channel of infor­ma­tion does­n’t seem reli­able and when the claims seem pre­pos­ter­ous or out­ra­geous.

Ulti­mate­ly, I don’t see this as a tech­ni­cal prob­lem, but as a human one. We all share a duty to edu­cate the com­ing gen­er­a­tions about the new par­a­digm while focus­ing on form­ing com­pas­sion­ate indi­vid­u­als who would not mis­use these awe­some pow­ers.

As an AI opti­mist, I remain hope­ful that we will be able to reg­u­late our­selves, and that we will take exper­i­ments such as the Infi­nite Con­ver­sa­tion for what they are: a play­ful way to help us imag­ine what our favorite peo­ple would do, if we had unlim­it­ed access to their minds. Art and Phi­los­o­phy, here exem­pli­fied by Bavar­i­an direc­tor Wern­er Her­zog and Sloven­ian philoso­pher Slavoj Žižek, can guide us while nav­i­gat­ing these treach­er­ous waters.

Lis­ten to the end­less Her­zog-Žižek con­ver­sa­tion here.

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

Wern­er Her­zog Offers 24 Pieces of Film­mak­ing and Life Advice

Slavoj Žižek: What Ful­fils You Cre­ative­ly Isn’t What Makes You Hap­py

Wern­er Her­zog Nar­rates the Touch­ing, Exis­ten­tial Jour­ney of a Plas­tic Bag

Bruce Springsteen Performs Moving Acoustic Versions of “Thunder Road,” “The Rising” & “Land of Hope & Dreams” on the Howard Stern Show

in Music | November 2nd, 2022

After try­ing for 35 years, the Howard Stern Show final­ly land­ed an inter­view with Bruce Springsteen–an inter­view that last­ed 2 hours and 15 min­utes and cov­ered a tremen­dous amount of ground. Along the way, Spring­steen talked about his song-writ­ing process and the ori­gins of his clas­sic songs, and then per­formed some acoustic ver­sions, alter­nat­ing between gui­tar and piano. Above and below, you can watch stir­ring per­for­mances of  “Thun­der Road,” “The Ris­ing,” “Land of Hope and Dreams,” “Born to Run, and “Tougher Than the Rest.”

Those who have the Sir­ius XM app can watch the entire per­for­mance online. For those who don’t, you can always sign up for a free tri­al to the ser­vice.

Land of Hope and Dreams

The Ris­ing

Tougher Than the Rest

Born to Run

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

Bruce Spring­steen and the E Street Band Impro­vis­es and Plays, Com­plete­ly Unre­hearsed, Chuck Berry’s “You Nev­er Can Tell,” Live Onstage (2013)

Bruce Spring­steen Lists 20 of His Favorite Books: The Books That Have Inspired the Song­writer & Now Mem­oirist

Bruce Spring­steen Plays East Berlin in 1988: I’m Not Here For Any Gov­ern­ment. I’ve Come to Play Rock

Making Sense of Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal with Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #136

in Comedy, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Television | November 2nd, 2022

Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Lawrence Ware, Sarahlyn Bruck, and Al Bak­er con­vene an emer­gency pod­cast record­ing to react to this mind-bend­ing, pos­si­bly immoral HBO com­e­dy docuseries, where­in Field­er helps ordi­nary peo­ple rehearse dif­fi­cult per­son­al con­fronta­tions, but this plan goes off the rails after 1.5 episodes out of the six that made up its first sea­son.

This series builds upon Fielder’s pre­vi­ous show where he comed­ical­ly tried to help busi­ness­es, Nathan for You, whose ground-break­ing finale (“Find­ing Frances”) dis­cov­ered The Rehearsal‘s for­mat. Is Nathan him­self the main butt of the joke, or is he punch­ing down? Are there bet­ter ways to show the fail­ings of real­i­ty TV? How does this kind of embar­rass­ment humor dif­fer from Borat and its ilk? Maybe the show is not as much about these peo­ple going through their rehearsals as an exam­i­na­tion of the process of rehears­ing itself that Field­er has devised.

Feel free to lis­ten to us to find out what it’s all about, but you will be best served by watch­ing this inde­scrib­able show your­self before expe­ri­enc­ing this episode.

A few rel­e­vant arti­cles also con­sid­er­ing the show include:

• “Four Ways of Look­ing at The Rehearsal” by Alis­sa Wilkin­son
• “The Cru­el and Arro­gant Gaze of Nathan Fielder’s ‘The Rehearsal’” by Richard Brody
• “How The Rehearsal Push­es the Bound­aries of Real­i­ty TV” by Adri­an Hor­ton
• “Nathan Field­er Can’t Stop Fak­ing It in The Rehearsal” by Joy Press
• “Ore­gon-filmed ‘The Rehearsal’ inspires crit­i­cal debate: ‘Intense­ly com­i­cal’ or ‘cru­el?’” by Kristi Turn­quist

Fol­low us @law_writes, @sarahlynbruck, @ixisnox, @MarkLinsenmayer.

Hear more Pret­ty Much Pop. Sup­port the show and hear bonus talk­ing for this and near­ly every oth­er episode at patreon.com/prettymuchpop or by choos­ing a paid sub­scrip­tion through Apple Pod­casts. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

Watch World War II Unfold Day by Day: An Animated Map

in History | November 1st, 2022

In the sto­ry of World War II we all know, a hand­ful of mur­der­ous vil­lains and flawed yet capa­ble defend­ers of democ­ra­cy dri­ve the nar­ra­tive. The authors of a Kings Col­lege Lon­don project argue that this con­ven­tion­al his­to­ry shows “a pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with the cul­pa­bil­i­ty of states­men.…. Above all else, the debate about war in 1939 revolves around per­son­al­i­ties.” But there is anoth­er way to see the caus­es of war: through the esca­lat­ing arms race of the 1930s, despite the glob­al push for dis­ar­ma­ment fol­low­ing World War I’s dev­as­ta­tion.

The lead­ers of Ger­many, Italy and Japan want­ed war, yet their abil­i­ty to wage it, and the ways in which that war played out, came down to logis­ti­cal con­tests between war machines. “First in Berlin, then in Rome and final­ly in Tokyo,” writes his­to­ri­an Joseph Maio­lo, “the ebb and flow of arms com­pe­ti­tion com­pelled lead­ers to make now-or-nev­er deci­sions about war.” Such deci­sions pro­duced a wealth of unin­tend­ed con­se­quences, and led to cat­a­stroph­ic loss­es of life. Air, sea, and land pow­er cre­at­ed at an unheard-of indus­tri­al scale turned war into an assem­bly line-like process that “would see humans as no more than pieces of a larg­er mil­i­tary-indus­tri­al machine,” as the­o­rist of war Manuel De Lan­da writes.

Thus, we see the enor­mi­ty of the casu­al­ties of WWII. Mil­lions of sol­diers were fed to the front lines in “the need to pre­pare for future total wars that would demand sweep­ing mobi­liza­tion,” writes Maio­lo. Wars for glob­al suprema­cy demand­ed all of the state’s cap­i­tal, espe­cial­ly its human resources. The ani­mat­ed map above tells that sto­ry in raw num­bers: “WWII Every Day with Army Sizes.” Begin­ning with Ger­many’s dec­la­ra­tion of war on Poland on Sep­tem­ber 1st, 1939, the map cov­ers the entire­ty of the war, show­ing num­bers — some­times in the tens of mil­lions — fluc­tu­at­ing wild­ly along the front lines of every the­ater.

1939 may be the only log­i­cal start­ing point for this pre­sen­ta­tion. Yet when it comes to under­stand­ing why World War II claimed more lives than any oth­er war in his­to­ry, the expla­na­tion must begin sev­er­al years ear­li­er with arms deal­ers and gen­er­als seek­ing big­ger and big­ger bud­gets for more sophis­ti­cat­ed weapon­ry. As tech­ni­cal prob­lems increased so too did the human costs, until the strug­gle for glob­al suprema­cy dur­ing WWII became a pro­lif­er­at­ing race toward mutu­al­ly assured destruc­tion after the war’s end.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch World War II Rage Across Europe in a 7 Minute Time-Lapse Film: Every Day From 1939 to 1945

The Stag­ger­ing Human Cost of World War II Visu­al­ized in a Cre­ative, New Ani­mat­ed Doc­u­men­tary

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

Discover Nüshu, a 19th-Century Chinese Writing System That Only Women Knew How to Write

in History, Language, Writing | October 25th, 2022

Lit­er­a­cy in Chi­nese may now be wide­ly attained, but it isn’t eas­i­ly attained. Just a cen­tu­ry ago it was­n’t wide­ly attained either, at least not by half of the Chi­nese speak­ers alive. As a rule, women once weren’t taught the thou­sands of logo­graph­ic char­ac­ters nec­es­sary to read and write in the lan­guage. But in one par­tic­u­lar sec­tion of the land, Jiangy­ong Coun­ty in Hunan province, some did mas­ter the 600 to 700 char­ac­ters of a pho­net­ic script made to reflect the local dialect and now called Nüshu (女书), or “wom­en’s writ­ing.”

In its hey­day, Nüshu’s users had a vari­ety of names for it, “includ­ing ‘mos­qui­to writ­ing,’ because it is a lit­tle slant­ed and with long ‘legs,’ ” writes Ilar­ia Maria Sala in a Quartz piece on the scrip­t’s his­to­ry. Its great­est con­cen­tra­tion of prac­ti­tion­ers lived in “the vil­lage of Shangjiangxu, where young girls exchanged small tokens of friend­ly affec­tion, such as fans dec­o­rat­ed with cal­lig­ra­phy or hand­ker­chiefs embroi­dered with a few aus­pi­cious words.”

Oth­er, more for­mal occa­sions for the use of Nüshu, includ­ed when girls decid­ed to “make a full-fledged pact of close­ness with one anoth­er that they were ‘best friends’ — jiebai zimei or ‘sworn sis­ters’ — a rela­tion­ship that was rec­og­nized as valu­able and even nec­es­sary for them in the local social sys­tem. Such a once-obscure chap­ter of Chi­nese his­to­ry has proven irre­sistible to read­ers from a vari­ety of cul­tures in recent decades.

“Most inter­pre­ta­tions and head­lines have been about a ‘secret lan­guage’ that women used, prefer­ably to com­mu­ni­cate their pain,” writes Sala, which struck her as evi­dence of peo­ple tak­ing the sto­ry of Nüshu and “read­ing into it what they want­ed, regard­less of what it meant.” Yet such an inter­pre­ta­tion has sure­ly done its part to spread inter­est in the near-extinc­t’s scrip­t’s revival, described by BBC.com’s Andrew Loft­house as orig­i­nat­ing in “the tiny vil­lage of Puwei, which is sur­round­ed by the Xiao riv­er and only acces­si­ble via a small sus­pen­sion bridge.” After three Nüshu writ­ers were dis­cov­ered there in the eight­ies, “it became the focal point for Nüshu research. In 2006, the script was list­ed as a Nation­al Intan­gi­ble Cul­tur­al Her­itage by the State Coun­cil of Chi­na, and a year lat­er, a muse­um was built on Puwei Island.”

There train­ing is pro­vid­ed to the few select “inter­preters or ‘inher­i­tors’ of the lan­guage, learn­ing to read, write, sing and embroi­der Nüshu.” Iron­i­cal­ly, Loft­house adds, “much of what we know about Nüshu is due to the work of male researcher Zhou Shuoyi” who hap­pened to hear of it in the nine­teen-fifties and was lat­er per­se­cut­ed dur­ing Mao Zedong’s Cul­tur­al Rev­o­lu­tion — a treat­ment that includ­ed 21 years in a labor camp — for hav­ing researched such an arti­fact of the feu­dal past. Once a use­ful tool for express­ing emo­tions and per­form­ing social rit­u­als social­iza­tion, Nüshu had become polit­i­cal­ly dan­ger­ous. What it becomes now, half a cen­tu­ry lat­er and with its renew­al only just begin­ning, is up to its new learn­ers.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Free Chi­nese Lessons

The Improb­a­ble Inven­tion of Chi­nese Type­writ­ers & Com­put­er Key­boards: Three Videos Tell the Tech­no-Cul­tur­al Sto­ry

The World’s Old­est Mul­ti­col­or Book, a 1633 Chi­nese Cal­lig­ra­phy & Paint­ing Man­u­al, Now Dig­i­tized and Put Online

How Writ­ing Has Spread Across the World, from 3000 BC to This Year: An Ani­mat­ed Map

How to Write in Cuneiform, the Old­est Writ­ing Sys­tem in the World: A Short, Charm­ing Intro­duc­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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.

There Are Eight Forms of Intelligence, Not Just One: Which Apply to You?

in Psychology | October 25th, 2022

Intel­li­gence is a fraught sub­ject of dis­cus­sion, and only becom­ing more so. Among the frame­works devel­oped safe­ly to approach it, one has gained spe­cial promi­nence: the the­o­ry cham­pi­oned by devel­op­men­tal psy­chol­o­gist Howard Gard­ner, author of the book Frames of Mind: The The­o­ry of Mul­ti­ple Intel­li­gences. And how many such intel­li­gences are there? In the Big Think video above — post­ed in 2016, 33 years after Frames of Mind — he names ten: lan­guage, log­ic and math­e­mat­ics, musi­cal, spa­tial, bod­i­ly-kines­thet­ic, inter­per­son­al, intrap­er­son­al, nat­u­ral­ist, teach­ing, and exis­ten­tial. 

Some of these may strike you as only tan­gen­tial­ly relat­ed to intel­li­gence, tra­di­tion­al­ly defined. Gard­ner has con­sid­ered this: “Peo­ple say, ‘Well, music’s a tal­ent, it’s not an intel­li­gence.’ And I say, ‘Well, why, if you’re good with words, is that an intel­li­gence, but if you’re good with tones and rhythms and tim­bres…”

Nobody, in his telling, has ever come up with a con­vinc­ing response. Hence his mis­sion to expand the def­i­n­i­tion of intel­li­gence beyond the aggre­gate mea­sure of brain­pow­er long known as the gen­er­al intel­li­gence fac­tor — or more com­mon­ly, “g fac­tor” — to encom­pass the sort of skills whose use­ful­ness we can see in the real world, away from the con­struct­ed rig­ors of psy­cho­me­t­ric tests.

“Whether there’s eight intel­li­gences or ten or twelve is less impor­tant to me than hav­ing bro­ken the monop­oly of a sin­gle intel­li­gence, which sort of labels you for all time,” says Gard­ner. You can see eight of his intel­li­gences bro­ken down in more detail — and per­haps even iden­ti­fy your own strongest suit — in the Prac­ti­cal Psy­chol­o­gy video just above. Gard­ner also express­es opti­mism about our abil­i­ty to devel­op dif­fer­ent intel­li­gences: you can choose to con­cen­trate on a spe­cif­ic one, but “if you want to be a jack of all trades and be very well-round­ed, then you’re prob­a­bly going to want to nur­ture the intel­li­gences which aren’t that strong.” What­ev­er your own view on mul­ti­ple intel­li­gences, don’t for­get how the old say­ing orig­i­nal­ly went in full: “Jack of all trades, mas­ter of none, though often bet­ter than a mas­ter of one.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Secret to High Per­for­mance and Ful­fil­ment: Psy­chol­o­gist Daniel Gole­man Explains the Pow­er of Focus

How Read­ing Increas­es Your Emo­tion­al Intel­li­gence & Brain Func­tion: The Find­ings of Recent Sci­en­tif­ic Stud­ies

Why You Do Your Best Think­ing In The Show­er: Cre­ativ­i­ty & the “Incu­ba­tion Peri­od”

You Don’t “Find” Your Pas­sion in Life, You Active­ly Devel­op It, Explains Psy­chol­o­gist Car­ol Dweck, The­o­rist of the “Growth Mind­set”

Why Incom­pe­tent Peo­ple Think They’re Amaz­ing: An Ani­mat­ed Les­son from David Dun­ning (of the Famous “Dun­ning-Kruger Effect”)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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.

The Internet Archive Launches Democracy’s Library, a Free Online Library of 500,000 Documents Supporting Democracy

in Archives, Politics | October 24th, 2022

“Democ­ra­cy is the worst form of gov­ern­ment except all those oth­er forms that have been tried from time to time.” So said Win­ston Churchill, per­haps not sus­pect­ing how fre­quent­ly the remark would be quot­ed in the decades there­after. Time and expe­ri­ence con­tin­ue to reveal to us democ­ra­cy’s lia­bil­i­ties, but also — at least in cer­tain soci­eties — the nature of its sur­pris­ing stay­ing pow­er. Since well before Churchill’s time, democ­ra­cy and its work­ings have been objects of fas­ci­na­tion the world over. So have its cen­tral ques­tions, not least the one of just how to main­tain the “informed cit­i­zen­ry” on which its oper­a­tion sup­pos­ed­ly depends.

The Inter­net Archive has just launched its own kind of answer in the form of Democ­ra­cy’s Library. “A free, open, online com­pendi­um of gov­ern­ment research and pub­li­ca­tions from around the world,” the site offers cit­i­zens a way to “lever­age use­ful research, learn about the work­ings of their gov­ern­ment, hold offi­cials account­able, and be more informed vot­ers.”

Col­lect­ed from a vari­ety of gov­ern­men­tal bod­ies like the Unit­ed States’ Nation­al Agri­cul­tur­al Library, For­eign Broad­cast Infor­ma­tion Ser­vice, and Nation­al Insti­tute of Stan­dards and Tech­nol­o­gy Research Library — as well as Sta­tis­tics Cana­da and Pub­lic Accounts of Cana­da — its mate­ri­als were osten­si­bly pro­duced for the pub­lic, but haven’t always been easy to find. It total, there are more than 500,000 doc­u­ments in the col­lec­tion.

“Gov­ern­ments have cre­at­ed an abun­dance of infor­ma­tion and put it in the pub­lic domain, but it turns out the pub­lic can’t eas­i­ly access it,” says Brew­ster Kahle, founder of the Inter­net Archive. He gives one of the series of talks that com­prise “Build­ing Democ­ra­cy’s Library,” the launch cel­e­bra­tion that took place last week and that you can still watch in the video above. Its pro­ceed­ings go into quite a bit of detail about the efforts of acqui­si­tion and orga­ni­za­tion that went into this project, as well as the nature of its mis­sion. For this isn’t just an effort to doc­u­ment democ­ra­cy, but to strength­en it by mak­ing the infor­ma­tion it pro­duces avail­able as con­ve­nient­ly as pos­si­ble to as many cit­i­zens as pos­si­ble. And no mat­ter the coun­try of which you count your­self a cit­i­zen, you can start brows­ing Democ­ra­cy’s Library here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

His­to­ri­an Tim­o­thy Sny­der Presents 20 Lessons for Defend­ing Democ­ra­cy Against Tyran­ny in a New Video Series

Why Socrates Hat­ed Democ­ra­cies: An Ani­mat­ed Case for Why Self-Gov­ern­ment Requires Wis­dom & Edu­ca­tion

Han­nah Arendt Explains Why Democ­ra­cies Need to Safe­guard the Free Press & Truth … to Defend Them­selves Against Dic­ta­tors and Their Lies

Does Democ­ra­cy Demand the Tol­er­ance of the Intol­er­ant? Karl Popper’s Para­dox

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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.