Hear Readings of Albert Einstein’s Love Letters (and Chilly Divorce Letters) to His First Wife Mileva

in Letters, Science | October 1st, 2020

Beware the fake quo­ta­tion. They have become so ubiq­ui­tous they often appear in books and speech­es by politi­cians and their fam­i­ly mem­bers, not that any­one seems to care much. But most of us feel a mea­sure of shame at being duped, as Katharine Rose did when she found her­self moved by a let­ter sup­pos­ed­ly writ­ten by Albert Ein­stein to his daugh­ter, Lieserl, “regard­ing the ‘uni­ver­sal force’ of love.” The let­ter is a “beau­ti­ful read,” and it’s a fake. But many admir­ers of Ein­stein were eager to believe it.

Why? Like oth­er famous fig­ures to whom spu­ri­ous words are attrib­uted, Ein­stein isn’t just well-known, he is revered, a celebri­ty, and celebri­ties are peo­ple we feel we know inti­mate­ly. (A com­mon defense for fake-quote-shar­ing goes: “Well, if he didn’t say it, then it’s exact­ly the kind of thing he would say.”) Dis­cussing the theft of Einstein’s brain after his death, Ross Ander­son at Aeon observes that “an ordi­nary per­son can live and die pri­vate­ly, but a genius—and his grey matter—belongs to the world.” We might add, “and so do the inti­mate details of his pri­vate life.”

The details of Einstein’s mar­riage, and of his very unpleas­ant sep­a­ra­tion and divorce, from Mil­e­va Mar­ić have long been pub­lic knowl­edge. “Few pub­lic mar­riages have been sub­ject­ed to a more unnu­anced ver­dict,” Maria Popo­va writes at Brain Pick­ings. Their love let­ters first came to light in 1986, dis­cov­ered by Einstein’s grand­daugh­ter Eve­lyn. They were pub­lished in 1992 as The Love Let­ters, “a col­lec­tion of fifty-four mis­sives exchanged between the begin­ning of their romance” when they met as stu­dents in 1897 to their mar­riage in 1903. Dozens more are avail­able at Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty’s online col­lec­tion of Ein­stein’s papers.

The let­ters are real, and they are “spicy,” as YouTu­ber Tibees shows us in the video at the top. No awk­ward pri­vate expres­sion is safe: we begin with let­ters Ein­stein wrote to his high school girl­friend, Marie Win­tel­er, includ­ing a breakup let­ter at 3:13. The excerpts here are all time­stamped on the video’s YouTube page, with help­ful sum­maries like “Einstein’s mom try­ing to break them up” (them being Albert and Mil­e­va), “Ein­stein hav­ing an affair with his cousin Elsa,” “Break­ing up with Elsa,” and “Get­ting back with Elsa.”

Elsa, you may know, was Einstein’s sec­ond wife, in addi­tion to being his cousin, and the cause of his sep­a­ra­tion and divorce from Mil­e­va, to whom he had pro­fessed undy­ing devo­tion. In the inter­est of ful­ly invad­ing the genius’s pri­va­cy, we have, above, some read­ings of his harsh “divorce let­ters” to Mil­e­va, with hits like “Sep­a­ra­tion,” “Propos­ing divorce,” and “Court pro­ceed­ings.” Love may or may not be a “uni­ver­sal force”—we do not, sad­ly, have Einstein’s thoughts on the matter—but we do know he found it a trou­bling­ly chaot­ic, unpre­dictable one.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Albert Ein­stein Impos­es on His First Wife a Cru­el List of Mar­i­tal Demands

Hear Albert Ein­stein Read “The Com­mon Lan­guage of Sci­ence” (1941)

Albert Ein­stein Explains Why We Need to Read the Clas­sics

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

Hand-Colored Maps of Wealth & Poverty in Victorian London: Explore a New Interactive Edition of Charles Booth’s Historic Work of Social Cartography (1889)

in History, Maps | September 28th, 2020

Map­ping has always been con­tentious, no mat­ter where you look in time. Maps pre­serve ide­o­log­i­cal assump­tions on paper, ratio­nal­iz­ing phys­i­cal space as they ren­der it in two dimen­sions. No mat­ter how didac­tic, they can become polit­i­cal weapons. In the case of Charles Booth’s visu­al­ly impres­sive Maps Descrip­tive of Lon­don Pover­ty, we have a series of maps whose own assump­tions can some­times seem at odds with their osten­si­ble pur­pose: to improve the liv­ing con­di­tions of London’s poor.

Booth’s “colour­ful pover­ty maps were cre­at­ed between 1886 and 1903,” Zoe Craig writes at Lon­don­ist, as part of a “ground-break­ing study into the lives of ordi­nary Lon­don­ers.” A phil­an­thropist born into wealth in the ship­ping trade, Booth took it upon him­self to study pover­ty in Lon­don in order to ini­ti­ate social reforms.

He suc­ceed­ed. The study, con­duct­ed by Booth and a team of researchers, led to the cre­ation of Old Age pen­sions, which Booth called “lim­it­ed social­ism,” as well as school meals for hun­gry chil­dren. He was clear about that fact that he saw such reforms as a bul­wark against social­ist rev­o­lu­tion.

The study’s sev­en­teen vol­umes are filled with pic­turesque accounts. “Pick­ing through the tid­bits of infor­ma­tion from these people’s lives will make you feel a bit like a Vic­to­ri­an cos­tume dra­ma police detec­tive,” Craig remarks. This ref­er­ence to polic­ing feels point­ed, giv­en the role of the police in main­tain­ing class hier­ar­chies in Vic­to­ri­an Lon­don. As an Amer­i­can, it can be hard to look at Booth’s map and not also see the 20th redlin­ing prac­tices in U.S. cities. Con­sid­er, for exam­ple, the cat­e­gories Booth applied to London’s class­es:

Called ‘Inquiry Into the Life and Labour of the Peo­ple in Lon­don’, the epic work stud­ied fam­i­lies and res­i­dents liv­ing across Lon­don, and coloured the streets accord­ing to their finan­cial sit­u­a­tion: between black for ‘low­est class, vicious, semi-crim­i­nal’ through pink for mixed ‘some com­fort­able, some poor’ to orange for ‘wealthy’.

As in Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s pater­nal­is­tic 1965 report on the Black under­class in the U.S., the lan­guage rein­forces Social Dar­win­ist ideas that deem the “low­est class” unfit for full par­tic­i­pa­tion in civ­il society—“vicious, semi-crim­i­nal…”

Of course, the social and his­tor­i­cal con­text dif­fers marked­ly, but we might also con­sid­er Fear­gus O’Sullivan’s obser­va­tions at Bloomberg City­Lab. A new pub­lished edi­tion of the map, he writes, “accom­pa­nied by com­pelling if bleak peri­od pho­tos, reveals a city that pos­sess­es echoes of Lon­don today. It depicts, after all, a dense­ly-packed metrop­o­lis with a cos­mopoli­tan pop­u­la­tion where immense­ly wealthy peo­ple lived just around the cor­ner from neigh­bors who were strug­gling to make ends meet.”

Maps may not cre­ate the social con­di­tions they describe, but they can help per­pet­u­ate them, ren­der­ing peo­ple vis­i­ble in ways that allow for even more con­trol over their lives. Crit­i­cisms of Booth’s study claimed that not only did the pro­posed reforms not go far enough but that the report described London’s class struc­ture while offer­ing lit­tle to no analy­sis of the caus­es of pover­ty. In lan­guage that sound­ed less objec­tion­able to Vic­to­ri­an ears, the poor are most­ly blamed for their own con­di­tion.

None of the study’s par­tic­u­lar lim­i­ta­tions take away from the graph­ic achieve­ments of its maps and explana­to­ry charts. They are, the Lon­don School of Eco­nom­ics writes, a strik­ing “ear­ly exam­ple of social car­tog­ra­phy.” The LSE hosts an incred­i­bly detailed, search­able, high-res­o­lu­tion inter­ac­tive ver­sion of the maps, assem­bled togeth­er and over­laid on a mod­ern GPS map of Lon­don. They also detail the var­i­ous edi­tions of the maps as they appeared between 1898 and 1903.

Hand-col­ored and based on the 1869 Ord­nance Sur­vey, the maps seemed “suf­fi­cient­ly impor­tant” to Booth to war­rant “com­pre­hen­sive revi­sion.” Here, the police appear in per­son to guide the process. “Social inves­ti­ga­tors accom­pa­nied police­men on their beats across Lon­don,” the LSE writes, “and record­ed their own impres­sions of each street and the com­ments of the police­men.” You can read the police note­books from these sur­veys at the LSE and learn more about the 12 dis­trict maps and the demo­graph­ic data they rep­re­sent at Map­ping Lon­don. The LSE print­ed a hard­cov­er print edi­tion of Booth’s work in 2019, com­plete with 500 illus­tra­tions. You can pur­chase a copy here. Or vis­it the inter­ac­tive edi­tion here.

via Messy Nessy

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The 1855 Map That Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Dis­ease Pre­ven­tion & Data Visu­al­iza­tion: Dis­cov­er John Snow’s Broad Street Pump Map

Ani­ma­tions Visu­al­ize the Evo­lu­tion of Lon­don and New York: From Their Cre­ation to the Present Day

Syn­chro­nized, Time­lapse Video Shows Train Trav­el­ing from Lon­don to Brighton in 1953, 1983 & 2013

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

Why James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano Is “the Greatest Acting Achievement Ever Committed to the Screen”: A Video Essay

in Television | September 28th, 2020

The ongo­ing “gold­en age” of pres­tige tele­vi­sion dra­ma began more than twen­ty years ago, but how many shows have tru­ly sur­passed The Sopra­nos, the one that start­ed it all? How­ev­er many series come and go, rais­ing large and often obses­sive fan bases with their vary­ing mix­tures of crime, his­to­ry, pol­i­tics, sci­ence fic­tion, fan­ta­sy, and intrigue, none have shown the cul­tur­al stay­ing pow­er of this six-sea­son tale of a mob boss in turn-of-the-21st-cen­tu­ry New Jer­sey. That The Sopra­nos remains rel­e­vant owes in part to the vision of cre­ator David Chase as well as to the tour de force per­for­mance of star James Gan­dolfi­ni.

Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer, has stronger words of appro­ba­tion: Gan­dolfini’s is “prob­a­bly the great­est act­ing achieve­ment ever com­mit­ted to the screen, small or big.” In the video essay “How James Gan­dolfi­ni Nav­i­gates Emo­tion” he mar­shals in sup­port of this claim just one scene, but a scene that fea­tures Gan­dolfi­ni at the height of his dra­mat­ic pow­ers.

Tak­en from the fifth-sea­son episode “Uniden­ti­fied Black Males,” orig­i­nal­ly aired in 2004 (and co-writ­ten by Matthew Wein­er, lat­er to cre­ate the pres­tige-TV fran­chise Mad Men), this selec­tion takes place in the office of Tony’s psy­chi­a­trist Dr. Jen­nifer Melfi, played by Lor­raine Brac­co. (When The Sopra­nos debuted, two months before the pre­miere of Harold Ramis’ Ana­lyze This, a mob­ster in ther­a­py was very much a nov­el idea.)

“Tony Sopra­no is going to have a pan­ic attack in this ther­a­py ses­sion,” says Puschak, and “the way James Gan­dolfi­ni builds to that attack” demon­strates “how he car­ries us with him through a com­plex sequence of emo­tions.” Here Gan­dolfi­ni ris­es to the for­mi­da­ble chal­lenge of lying con­vinc­ing­ly: not con­vinc­ing­ly in the sense that Dr. Melfi believes him, but con­vinc­ing­ly in the sense that we believe the grap­ple with con­flict­ing truths and untruths that char­ac­ter­izes Tony’s life. Tony must pin his recent spate of pan­ic attacks on some­thing oth­er than his cousin Tony B, who com­mit­ted a hit he should­n’t have. That Tony does­n’t quite believe his own words Gan­dolfi­ni trans­mits with “his tone, his eyes, and the tilt of his head.” He uses the musi­cal­i­ty of Tony’s speech, “some com­bi­na­tion of left­over Ital­ian rhythms and a New York-inflect­ed North Jer­sey accent,” to build to “larg­er and larg­er crescen­does.”

As it fore­shad­ows the approach­ing emo­tion­al tur­moil, his “rhyth­mic anger, like waves crash­ing on the shore, is hyp­not­ic, draw­ing you deep­er into his men­tal and emo­tion­al space with each new cycle.” Tony then dou­bles down on his lie, try­ing to cov­er for his cousin by invent­ing on the spot a sto­ry about hav­ing been beat­en up by a gang of shoe thieves in 1986. Only lat­er in the scene does the truth come out, or at least par­tial­ly leak out, even as Gan­dolfi­ni por­trays Tony strug­gling to fight back the pan­ic attack that has emerged as a result of telling these sto­ries. For all the tech­nique it show­cas­es, the scene ends in a clas­si­cal­ly dra­mat­ic fash­ion, with a kind of cathar­sis — which, if you know The Sopra­nos, you know is hard­ly the word Tony has for it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How David Chase Breathed Life into the The Sopra­nos

David Chase Reveals the Philo­soph­i­cal Mean­ing of The Sopra­no’s Final Scene

James Gan­dolfi­ni Reads from Mau­rice Sendak’s Children’s Sto­ry In The Night Kitchen

Rewatch Every Episode of The Sopra­nos with the Talk­ing Sopra­nos Pod­cast, Host­ed by Michael Impe­ri­oli & Steve Schirri­pa

How Humphrey Bog­a­rt Became an Icon: A Video Essay

How David Lynch Manip­u­lates You: A Close Read­ing of Mul­hol­land Dri­ve

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

The Beastie Boys’ Final Concert Streaming Free Online This Weekend

in Music | September 26th, 2020

Until Mon­day, the Beast­ie Boys’ final concert–captured at Bon­na­roo on June 12, 2009–will stream free on YouTube. (Watch it above.) Just five weeks after the show, Adam “MCA” Yauch would announce that he had been diag­nosed with sali­vary gland can­cer. Orig­i­nal­ly opti­mistic, Yauch said “I just need to take a lit­tle time to get this in check, and then we’ll release the record and play some shows.” “It’s a pain in the neck (sor­ry had to say it) because I was real­ly look­ing for­ward to play­ing these shows, but the doc­tors have made it clear that this is not the kind of thing that can be put aside to deal with lat­er.” Sad­ly, the can­cer proved aggres­sive and took MCA’s life in May, 2012, leav­ing the show above as the Beast­ie Boys’ final live doc­u­ment. Find the setlist for the final show 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:

Watch 36 Beast­ie Boys Videos Now Remas­tered in HD

The Beast­ie Boys Release a New Free­wheel­ing Mem­oir, and a Star-Stud­ded 13-Hour Audio­book Fea­tur­ing Snoop Dogg, Elvis Costel­lo, Bette Midler, John Stew­art & Dozens More

The Beast­ie Boys & Rick Rubin Reunite and Revis­it Their For­ma­tive Time Togeth­er in 1980s NYC

Look How Young They Are!: The Beast­ie Boys Per­form­ing Live Their Very First Hit, “Cooky Puss” (1983)

Watch Chilling Footage of the Hiroshima & Nagasaki Bombings in Restored Color

in Film, History | September 24th, 2020

“You saw noth­ing in Hiroshi­ma. Noth­ing,” says Eiji Oka­da in the open­ing of Alain Resnais’ Hiroshi­ma mon amour. “I saw every­thing,” replies Emmanuelle Riva. “Every­thing.” The film goes on to show the effects of the Amer­i­can atom­ic-bomb attack that dev­as­tat­ed the tit­u­lar city near­ly fif­teen years before. This was the first many view­ers had seen of the lega­cy of that unprece­dent­ed act of destruc­tion, and now, six decades lat­er, the cul­tur­al image of Hiroshi­ma has con­flat­ed Resnais’ stark French New Wave vision with actu­al wartime doc­u­men­tary mate­ri­als. By now, we’ve all seen con­tem­po­rary pho­tographs (and even film clips) of the fate of Hiroshi­ma and sub­se­quent­ly atom­ic-bombed Nagasa­ki. Can we regard this world-his­toric destruc­tion with fresh eyes?

A Youtu­ber known as Rick88888888 offers one way of poten­tial­ly doing so: almost half an hour of col­orized (as well as motion-sta­bi­lized, de-noised, and oth­er­wise enhanced) footage of not just the explo­sions them­selves, but the ruined Japan­ese cities and their strug­gling sur­vivors, the air­planes that per­formed the bomb­ing, and the Unit­ed States Pres­i­dent who ordered it. “The Japan­ese began the war from the air at Pearl Har­bor,” says Har­ry Tru­man in a broad­cast on August 6, 1945, the day of the attack on Hiroshi­ma. “They have been repaid many fold. And the end is not yet.” From the Pres­i­dent, the Amer­i­can pub­lic first learned of the devel­op­ment of an atom­ic bomb, “a har­ness­ing of the basic pow­er of the uni­verse. The force from which the sun draws its pow­er has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.”

As we know now, this was the fruit of the Man­hat­tan Project, the secret U.S.-led research-and-devel­op­ment effort that cre­at­ed the first nuclear weapons. Its suc­cess, Tru­man says, pre­pared the Allies to “oblit­er­ate more rapid­ly and com­plete­ly every pro­duc­tive enter­prise the Japan­ese have above ground in any city. We shall destroy their docks, their fac­to­ries, and their com­mu­ni­ca­tions. Let there be no mis­take; we shall com­plete­ly destroy Japan’s pow­er to make war.” That they did, although mil­i­tary his­to­ri­ans argue about about the jus­ti­fi­a­bil­i­ty of drop­ping “the bomb” as well as the exact extent it played in the ulti­mate Allied vic­to­ry. But nobody can argue with the strik­ing vivid­ness of these “col­or” motion pic­tures of the event itself and its after­math, which reminds us that the era of poten­tial nuclear anni­hi­la­tion does­n’t belong to the dis­tant past — rather, it’s a chap­ter of his­to­ry that has only just begun.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

J. Robert Oppen­heimer Explains How He Recit­ed a Line from Bha­gavad Gita–“Now I Am Become Death, the Destroy­er of Worlds”–Upon Wit­ness­ing the First Nuclear Explo­sion

Haunt­ing Unedit­ed Footage of the Bomb­ing of Nagasa­ki (1945)

The “Shad­ow” of a Hiroshi­ma Vic­tim, Etched into Stone Steps, Is All That Remains After 1945 Atom­ic Blast

Hiroshi­ma After the Atom­ic Bomb in 360 Degrees

Way of Life: Rare Footage of the Hiroshi­ma After­math, 1946

Pho­tos of Hiroshi­ma by Hiroshi­ma Mon Amour Star Emmanuelle Riva (1958)

This 392-Year-Old Bon­sai Tree Sur­vived the Hiroshi­ma Atom­ic Blast & Still Flour­ish­es Today: The Pow­er of Resilience

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

The Internet Archive Will Digitize & Preserve Millions of Academic Articles with Its New Database, “Internet Archive Scholar”

in Archives, Data, Education, Internet Archive, Libraries | September 22nd, 2020

Open access pub­lish­ing has, indeed, made aca­d­e­m­ic research more acces­si­ble, but in “the move from phys­i­cal aca­d­e­m­ic jour­nals to dig­i­tal­ly-acces­si­ble papers,” Saman­tha Cole writes at Vice, it has also become “more pre­car­i­ous to pre­serve…. If an insti­tu­tion stops pay­ing for web host­ing or changes servers, the research with­in could dis­ap­pear.” At least a cou­ple hun­dred open access jour­nals van­ished in this way between 2000 and 2019, a new study pub­lished on arx­iv found. Anoth­er 900 jour­nals are in dan­ger of meet­ing the same fate.

The jour­nals in per­il include schol­ar­ship in the human­i­ties and sci­ences, though many pub­li­ca­tions may only be of inter­est to his­to­ri­ans, giv­en the speed at which sci­en­tif­ic research tends to move. In any case, “there shouldn’t real­ly be any decay or loss in sci­en­tif­ic pub­li­ca­tions, par­tic­u­lar­ly those that have been open on the web,” says study co-author Mikael Laasko, infor­ma­tion sci­en­tist at the Han­ken School of Eco­nom­ics in Helsin­ki. Yet, in dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing, there are no print­ed copies in uni­ver­si­ty libraries, cat­a­logued and main­tained by librar­i­ans.

To fill the need, the Inter­net Archive has cre­at­ed its own schol­ar­ly search plat­form, a “full­text search index” that includes “over 25 mil­lion research arti­cles and oth­er schol­ar­ly doc­u­ments” pre­served on its servers. These col­lec­tions span dig­i­tized and orig­i­nal dig­i­tal arti­cles pub­lished from the 18th cen­tu­ry to “the lat­est Open Access con­fer­ence pro­ceed­ings and pre-prints crawled from the World Wide Web.” Con­tent in this search index comes in one of three forms:

• pub­lic web con­tent in the Way­back Machine web archives (web.archive.org), either iden­ti­fied from his­toric col­lect­ing, crawled specif­i­cal­ly to ensure long-term access to schol­ar­ly mate­ri­als, or crawled at the direc­tion of Archive-It part­ners
• dig­i­tized print mate­r­i­al from paper and micro­form col­lec­tions pur­chased and scanned by Inter­net Archive or its part­ners
• gen­er­al mate­ri­als on the archive.org col­lec­tions, includ­ing con­tent from part­ner orga­ni­za­tions, uploads from the gen­er­al pub­lic, and mir­rors of oth­er projects

The project is still in “alpha” and “has sev­er­al bugs,” the site cau­tions, but it could, when it’s ful­ly up and run­ning, become part of a much-need­ed rev­o­lu­tion in aca­d­e­m­ic research—that is if the major aca­d­e­m­ic pub­lish­ers don’t find some legal pre­text to shut it down.

Aca­d­e­m­ic pub­lish­ing boasts one of the most rapa­cious legal busi­ness mod­els on the glob­al mar­ket, and one of the most exploita­tive: a dou­ble stan­dard in which schol­ars freely pub­lish and review research for the pub­lic ben­e­fit (osten­si­bly) and very often on the pub­lic dime; while pri­vate inter­me­di­aries rake in astro­nom­i­cal sums for them­selves with pay­walls. The open access mod­el has changed things, but the only way to tru­ly serve the “best inter­ests of researchers and the pub­lic,” neu­ro­sci­en­tist Shaun Khoo argues, is through pub­lic infra­struc­ture and ful­ly non-prof­it pub­li­ca­tion.

Maybe Inter­net Archive Schol­ar can go some way toward bridg­ing the gap, as a pub­licly acces­si­ble, non-prof­it search engine, dig­i­tal cat­a­logue, and library for research that is worth pre­serv­ing, read­ing, and build­ing upon even if it does­n’t gen­er­ate share­hold­er rev­enue. For a deep­er dive into how the Archive built its for­mi­da­ble, still devel­op­ing, new data­base, see the video pre­sen­ta­tion above from Jef­fer­son Bai­ley, Direc­tor of Web Archiv­ing & Data Ser­vices. And have a look at Inter­net Archive Schol­ar here. It cur­rent­ly lacks advanced search func­tions, but plug in any search term and pre­pare to be amazed by the incred­i­ble vol­ume of archived full text arti­cles you turn up.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Inter­net Archive Makes 2,500 More Clas­sic MS-DOS Video Games Free to Play Online: Alone in the Dark, Doom, Microsoft Adven­ture, and Oth­ers

Libraries & Archivists Are Dig­i­tiz­ing 480,000 Books Pub­lished in 20th Cen­tu­ry That Are Secret­ly in the Pub­lic Domain

The Boston Pub­lic Library Will Dig­i­tize & Put Online 200,000+ Vin­tage Records

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

Why The Wire is One of the Most Brilliant TV Shows Ever

in Television | September 21st, 2020

There were a lot of moments dur­ing my first view of The Wire when I real­ized I wasn’t watch­ing the usu­al cop pro­ce­dur­al. But the one that sticks in my head was when an obvi­ous­ly blitzed and blast­ed McNul­ty, the Irish-Amer­i­can detec­tive that you *might* think is the hero of the show, leaves a bar, gets into his car and prompt­ly totals it. In any oth­er show this would have been the turn­ing point for the char­ac­ter, either as a wake-up call, a rea­son for his boss to throw him off the case, or to gin up some sus­pense. But no. McNul­ty walks away from the acci­dent and…it’s nev­er real­ly spo­ken about. The cops took care of their own.

Life does not fol­low the con­tours of a tele­vi­sion dra­ma, and nei­ther did David Simon’s ground­break­ing HBO series. Beloved char­ac­ters get killed, or not, or they just trans­fer out of the show as in life. Nobody real­ly gets what they want. Nei­ther good nor evil wins.

As Simon told an audi­ence at Loy­ola Uni­ver­si­ty, Bal­ti­more in 2007: ““What we were try­ing to do was take the notion of Greek tragedy, of fat­ed and doomed peo­ple, and instead of these Olympian gods, indif­fer­ent, venal, self­ish, hurl­ing light­ning bolts and hit­ting peo­ple in the ass for no reason—instead of those guys whip­ping it on Oedi­pus or Achilles, it’s the post­mod­ern insti­tu­tions … those are the indif­fer­ent gods.”

The Wire still feels recent despite pre­mier­ing in 2002 and in 4:3 ratio, no widescreen HD here. It feels recent because the prob­lems depict­ed in the show still exist: cor­rup­tion at all lev­els of city gov­ern­ment and gov­er­nance, insti­tu­tion­al­ized racism, failed schools, a col­laps­ing fourth estate, a gut­ted econ­o­my, weak­ened unions, and a gen­er­al nihilism and despon­den­cy. Simon may not have seen the Black Lives Mat­ter move­ment com­ing, but the recipe for it, the warn­ing of it, is there in the show.

So there’s def­i­nite­ly a rea­son to give it a re-watch to see how we’ve changed. The above essay from 2019 makes the case for The Wire as a sub­ver­sion of the usu­al cop show, with Thomas Flight not­ing it “doesn’t try to grab and keep your atten­tion. It requires it. And if you give it your atten­tion it will reward you.”

It also reminds us of the lit­er­ary giants in the writ­ers’ room: crime nov­el­ists Den­nis Lehane, George Pele­canos, and Richard Price were on the team, as was jour­nal­ist Rafael Alvarez, and William F. Zorzi. That com­bined with David Simon’s years in jour­nal­ism cov­er­ing Bal­ti­more and Ed Burns’ expe­ri­ence on the police force meant the show feels right, and the writ­ers did research and actu­al Bal­ti­more extras were encour­aged to speak up if some­thing didn’t.

If that video essay intrigues you, there’s more in the series, though with many more spoil­ers, such as this one on Char­ac­ter and Theme.

Not long after The Wire fin­ished its fifth and final sea­son, there were plen­ty of books pub­lished on the show. And now we’re near­ly two decades in from its pre­miere, The Atlantic’s Jemele Hill and The Ringer’s Van Lath­an decid­ed to spend quar­an­tine kick­ing off a pod­cast where the two black cul­tur­al crit­ics give the show a spir­it­ed re-watch. Does the show fea­ture too much “copa­gan­da” as my left­ist crit­ics now con­tend? Does it hold up like white lib­er­als (its biggest fans, let’s be hon­est, despite Pres­i­dent Obama’s shout out) think it does? The hosts just wrapped up Sea­son Three, but if you’re ready to start the show again with com­men­tary, here’s their first episode:

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pres­i­dent Oba­ma Chats with David Simon About Drugs, The Wire & Omar

Revis­it­ing The Wire Dur­ing 2020’s Black Lives Mat­ter Move­ment
“The Wire” @ Har­vard

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

Good Movies as Old Books: 100 Films Reimagined as Vintage Book Covers

in Books, Design, Film | September 17th, 2020

At one time paper­back books were thought of as trash, a term that described their per­ceived artis­tic and cul­tur­al lev­el, pro­duc­tion val­ue, and utter dis­pos­abil­i­ty. This changed in the mid-20th cen­tu­ry, when cer­tain paper­back pub­lish­ers (Dou­ble­day Anchor, for exam­ple, who hired Edward Gorey to design their cov­ers in the 1950s) made a push for respectabil­i­ty. It worked so well that the sig­na­ture aes­thet­ics they devel­oped still, near­ly a life­time lat­er, pique our inter­est more read­i­ly than those of any oth­er era.

Even today, graph­ic design­ers put in the time and effort to mas­ter the art of the mid­cen­tu­ry paper­back cov­er and trans­pose it into oth­er cul­tur­al realms, as Matt Stevens does in his “Good Movies as Old Books” series. In this “ongo­ing per­son­al project,” Stevens writes, “I envi­sion some of my favorite films as vin­tage books. Not a best of list, just movies I love.”

These movies, for the most part, date from more recent times than the mid-20th cen­tu­ry. Some, like Jor­dan Peele’s Us, the Safdie broth­ers’ Uncut Gems, and Bong Joon-ho’s Par­a­site, came out just last year. The old­est pic­tures among them, such as Alfred Hitch­cock­’s The Birds, date from the ear­ly 1960s, when this type of graph­ic design had reached the peak of its pop­u­lar­i­ty.

Suit­ably, Stevens also gives the retro treat­ment to a few already styl­ized peri­od pieces like Steven Spiel­berg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, Joe John­ston’s The Rock­e­teer, and Andrew Nic­col’s Gat­taca, a sci-fi vision of the future itself imbued with the aes­thet­ics of the 1940s. Each and every one of Stevens’ beloved-movies-turned-old-books looks con­vinc­ing as a work of graph­ic design from rough­ly the decade and a half after the Sec­ond World War, and some even include real­is­tic creas­es and price tags. This makes us reflect on the con­nec­tions cer­tain of these films have to lit­er­a­ture, most obvi­ous­ly those, like David Fincher’s Fight Club and Stephen Frears’ High Fideli­ty, adapt­ed from nov­els in the first place.

More sub­tle are Rian John­son’s recent Knives Out, a thor­ough­go­ing trib­ute to (if not an adap­ta­tion of) the work of Agatha Christie; Rid­ley Scot­t’s Blade Run­ner, which hybridizes a Philip K. Dick novel­la with pulp detec­tive noir; and Wes Ander­son­’s Rush­more, a state­ment of its direc­tor’s intent to revive the look and feel of the ear­ly 1960s (its books and oth­er­wise) for his own cin­e­mat­ic pur­pos­es. Stevens has made these imag­ined cov­ers avail­able for pur­chase as prints, but some retro design-inclined, bib­lio­philic film fans may pre­fer to own them in 21st-cen­tu­ry book form. See all of his adap­ta­tions in web for­mat here.

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

157 Ani­mat­ed Min­i­mal­ist Mid-Cen­tu­ry Book Cov­ers

Vin­tage Book & Record Cov­ers Brought to Life in a Mes­mer­iz­ing Ani­mat­ed Video

When Edward Gorey Designed Book Cov­ers for Clas­sic Nov­els: See His Iron­ic-Goth­ic Take on Dick­ens, Con­rad, Poe & More

Songs by David Bowie, Elvis Costel­lo, Talk­ing Heads & More Re-Imag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers

Clas­sic Songs Re-Imag­ined as Vin­tage Book Cov­ers Dur­ing Our Trou­bled Times: “Under Pres­sure,” “It’s the End of the World as We Know It,” “Shel­ter from the Storm” & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

The Joy of Watching Old, Damaged Things Get Restored: Why the World is Captivated by Restoration Videos

in Design, History | September 15th, 2020

The inter­net has giv­en us a few new ways to watch things, but many more new things to watch. It’s not just that we now tune in to our favorite shows online rather than on tele­vi­sion, but that our “favorite shows” have assumed forms we could­n’t have imag­ined before. Thir­ty years ago, if you’d gone to a TV net­work and pitched a pro­gram con­sist­ing of noth­ing but the process of antique restora­tion — no music, no nar­ra­tion, no sto­ry, and cer­tain­ly no stars — you’d have been told nobody want­ed to watch that. In 2020, we know the truth: not only do peo­ple want to watch that, but quite a lot of peo­ple want to watch that, as evi­denced by the enor­mous view counts of Youtube restora­tion videos.

At Vice, Mike Dozi­er pro­files the Swiss Youtube restora­tion chan­nel My Mechan­ics. Its “videos don’t just appeal to peo­ple inter­est­ed in antique restora­tion, which they sure­ly do, but many view­ers watch because they find the process relax­ing.”

Some come for the tech­niques and stay for the “hyp­not­ic qual­i­ty — the sounds of clink­ing met­al, the grind­ing of sand­pa­per and the whirring of a lathe pop­u­late each video. And watch­ing some­thing, like a rusty old cof­fee grinder, come back to life, shiny and look­ing brand-new, is unique­ly sat­is­fy­ing.” This verges on the new­ly carved-out ter­ri­to­ry of “autonomous sen­so­ry merid­i­an response,” or ASMR, a genre of video engi­neered specif­i­cal­ly to deliv­er psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly pleas­ing sounds.

In Korea, where I live, ASMR has attained dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly mas­sive pop­u­lar­i­ty — though not quite the pop­u­lar­i­ty of muk­bang, the style of long-form eat­ing-on-cam­era video that has gone inter­na­tion­al in recent years. One the­o­ry of the appeal of muk­bang holds that it offers vic­ar­i­ous sat­is­fac­tion to view­ers who are diet­ing, broke, or oth­er­wise unable to con­sume enor­mous meals them­selves. That may also be true, to a degree, of restora­tion videos. To bring a 19th-cen­tu­ry screw­driv­er, say, or a World War II mil­i­tary watch back to like-new con­di­tion requires not just the right equip­ment but for­mi­da­ble amounts of knowl­edge and dex­ter­i­ty as well. Click­ing on a Youtube video asks of us much less in the way of time and ded­i­ca­tion. And yet, among the bil­lions of views restora­tion videos have racked up, there are sure­ly fans who have act­ed on the inspi­ra­tion and built old-school skills of their own.

In our increas­ing­ly dig­i­tal age — char­ac­ter­ized by noth­ing more acute­ly than our ten­den­cy to spend hours click­ing through increas­ing­ly spe­cial­ized Youtube videos — skilled phys­i­cal work has become an impres­sive spec­ta­cle in itself. As every­where on the inter­net, sub­gen­res have pro­duced sub-sub­gen­res: take the vin­tage toy restora­tion chan­nel Res­cue & Restore or art restor­er Julian Baum­gart­ner (who pro­duces both nar­rat­ed and ASMR ver­sion of his videos), both pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. If those don’t absorb you, have a look at Cool Again Restora­tion, Iron Man Restora­tion, Hand Tool Res­cue, MrRes­cue (a mod­el-car spe­cial­ist), Restora­tion and Met­al, Ran­dom Hands… and the list goes on, giv­en how much needs restor­ing in this world.

via metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Bat­tered & Bruised Vin­tage Toys Get Mes­mer­iz­ing­ly Restored to Near Mint Con­di­tion

Watch an Art Con­ser­va­tor Bring Clas­sic Paint­ings Back to Life in Intrigu­ing­ly Nar­rat­ed Videos

How an Art Con­ser­va­tor Com­plete­ly Restores a Dam­aged Paint­ing: A Short, Med­i­ta­tive Doc­u­men­tary

Watch a 17th-Cen­tu­ry Por­trait Mag­i­cal­ly Get Restored to Its Bril­liant Orig­i­nal Col­ors

The Art of Restor­ing a 400-Year-Old Paint­ing: A Five-Minute Primer

The Art of Restor­ing Clas­sic Films: Cri­te­ri­on Shows You How It Refreshed Two Hitch­cock Movies

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Monty Python’s Michael Palin Is Also an Art Critic: Watch Him Explore His Favorite Paintings by Andrew Wyeth & Other Artists

in Art, Television | September 14th, 2020

Many a par­ent who caught their kid watch­ing Mon­ty Python’s Fly­ing Cir­cus in the 1970s felt, as one 70s Amer­i­can dad pro­claimed, that “it was the sin­gu­lar­ly dumb­est thing ever broad­cast on the tube.” Fans of the show know oth­er­wise. The Pythons cre­at­ed some of sharpest satire of con­ser­v­a­tive author­i­ty fig­ures and mid­dle-class mores. But they did it in the broad­ly sil­li­est of ways. The troupe, who met at Oxford and Cam­bridge, where they’d been study­ing for pro­fes­sion­al careers, decid­ed they pre­ferred to fol­low in the foot­steps of their heroes on The Goon Show. What must their par­ents have thought?

But the Pythons made good. They grew up to be avun­cu­lar author­i­ties them­selves, of the kind they might have skew­ered in their younger days. After sev­er­al decades of mak­ing high­ly regard­ed trav­el doc­u­men­taries, Michael Palin became pres­i­dent of the Roy­al Geo­graph­i­cal Soci­ety, an office one can imag­ine him occu­py­ing in the short-pants uni­form of a Bruce. Instead, pho­tographed in aca­d­e­m­ic casu­al hold­ing a globe, he was dubbed by The Inde­pen­dent as “a man with the world in his hands.”

Unlike fel­low accom­plished Python John Cleese, who can nev­er resist get­ting in a joke, Palin has most­ly played the straight man in his TV pre­sen­ter career. He brings to this role an earnest­ness that endeared view­ers for decades. It’s a qual­i­ty that shines through in his doc­u­men­taries on art for BBC Scot­land, in which he explores the worlds of his favorite painters with­out a hint of the pre­ten­tious­ness we would find in a Python car­i­ca­ture. Just above, Palin trav­els to Maine to learn about the life of Andrew Wyeth and the set­ting of his most famous work, Christina’s World.

Palin’s pas­sion for art and for trav­el are of a piece—driven not by ideas about what art or trav­el should be, but rather by what they were like for him. Palin brings this per­son­al approach to the con­ver­sa­tion above with Car­o­line Camp­bell, Head of Cura­to­r­i­al at the British Nation­al Gallery. Here, he dis­cuss­es “ten paint­ings which I can­not avoid when I’m going in the gallery. They always catch my eye, and each one means some­thing to me.” Artists includ­ed in his “rather eso­teric” col­lec­tion include the late-Medieval/ear­ly-Renais­sance pio­neer Duc­cio, Hans Hol­bein the Younger, William Hog­a­rth, and Joseph Mal­lord William Turn­er.

While these may be famil­iar names to any art lover, the works Palin choos­es from each artist may not be. His thought­ful, per­cep­tive respons­es to these works are not those of the pro­fes­sion­al crit­ic or of the pro­fes­sion­al come­di­an. They are the respons­es of a fre­quent trav­el­er who notices some­thing new on every trip.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mon­ty Python Pays Trib­ute to Ter­ry Jones: Watch Their Mon­tage of Jones’ Beloved Char­ac­ters in Action

John Cleese Revis­its His 20 Years as an Ivy League Pro­fes­sor in His New Book, Pro­fes­sor at Large: The Cor­nell Years

New Ani­mat­ed Film Tells the Life Sto­ry of Mon­ty Python’s Gra­ham Chap­man

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