Enter an Archive of 6,000 Historical Children’s Books, All Digitized and Free to Read Online

in Archives, Books, e-books, K-12, Literature | August 30th, 2016

We can learn much about how a his­tor­i­cal peri­od viewed the abil­i­ties of its chil­dren by study­ing its chil­dren’s lit­er­a­ture. Occu­py­ing a space some­where between the pure­ly didac­tic and the non­sen­si­cal, most children’s books pub­lished in the past few hun­dred years have attempt­ed to find a line between the two poles, seek­ing a bal­ance between enter­tain­ment and instruc­tion. How­ev­er, that line seems to move clos­er to one pole or anoth­er depend­ing on the pre­vail­ing cul­tur­al sen­ti­ments of the time. And the very fact that children’s books were hard­ly pub­lished at all before the ear­ly 18th cen­tu­ry tells us a lot about when and how mod­ern ideas of child­hood as a sep­a­rate cat­e­go­ry of exis­tence began.

“By the end of the 18th cen­tu­ry,” writes New­cas­tle Uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor M.O. Gren­by, “children’s lit­er­a­ture was a flour­ish­ing, sep­a­rate and secure part of the pub­lish­ing indus­try in Britain.” The trend accel­er­at­ed rapid­ly and has nev­er ceased—children’s and young adult books now dri­ve sales in pub­lish­ing (with 80% of YA books bought by grown-ups for them­selves).

Gren­by notes that “the rea­sons for this sud­den rise of children’s lit­er­a­ture” and its rapid expan­sion into a boom­ing mar­ket by the ear­ly 1800s “have nev­er been ful­ly explained.” We are free to spec­u­late about the social and ped­a­gog­i­cal winds that pushed this his­tor­i­cal change.

Or we might do so, at least, by exam­in­ing the children’s lit­er­a­ture of the Vic­to­ri­an era, per­haps the most inno­v­a­tive and diverse peri­od for children’s lit­er­a­ture thus far by the stan­dards of the time. And we can do so most thor­ough­ly by sur­vey­ing the thou­sands of mid- to late 19th cen­tu­ry titles at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Florida’s Bald­win Library of His­tor­i­cal Children’s Lit­er­a­ture. Their dig­i­tized col­lec­tion cur­rent­ly holds over 6,000 books free to read online from cov­er to cov­er, allow­ing you to get a sense of what adults in Britain and the U.S. want­ed chil­dren to know and believe.

Sev­er­al gen­res flour­ished at the time: reli­gious instruc­tion, nat­u­ral­ly, but also lan­guage and spelling books, fairy tales, codes of con­duct, and, espe­cial­ly, adven­ture stories—pre-Hardy Boys and Nan­cy Drew exam­ples of what we would call young adult fic­tion, these pub­lished prin­ci­pal­ly for boys. Adven­ture sto­ries offered a (very colo­nial­ist) view of the wide world; in series like the Boston-pub­lished Zig Zag and Eng­lish books like Afloat with Nel­son, both from the 1890s, fact min­gled with fic­tion, nat­ur­al his­to­ry and sci­ence with bat­tle and trav­el accounts. But there is anoth­er dis­tinc­tive strain in the children’s lit­er­a­ture of the time, one which to us—but not nec­es­sar­i­ly to the Victorians—would seem con­trary to the impe­ri­al­ist young adult nov­el.

For most Vic­to­ri­an stu­dents and read­ers, poet­ry was a dai­ly part of life, and it was a cen­tral instruc­tion­al and sto­ry­telling form in children’s lit. The A.L.O.E.’s Bible Pic­ture Book from 1871, above, presents “Sto­ries from the Life of Our Lord in Verse,” writ­ten “sim­ply for the Lord’s lambs, rhymes more read­i­ly than prose attract­ing the atten­tion of chil­dren, and fas­ten­ing them­selves on their mem­o­ries.” Chil­dren and adults reg­u­lar­ly mem­o­rized poet­ry, after all. Yet after the explo­sion in children’s pub­lish­ing the for­mer read­ers were often giv­en infe­ri­or exam­ples of it. The author of the Bible Pic­ture Book admits as much, beg­ging the indul­gence of old­er read­ers in the pref­ace for “defects in my work,” giv­en that “the vers­es were made for the pic­tures, not the pic­tures for the vers­es.”

This is not an author, or per­haps a type of lit­er­a­ture, one might sus­pect, that thinks high­ly of children’s aes­thet­ic sen­si­bil­i­ties.  We find pre­cise­ly the oppo­site to be the case in the won­der­ful Elfin Rhymes from 1900, writ­ten by the mys­te­ri­ous “Nor­man” with “40 draw­ings by Car­ton Moorepark.” Who­ev­er “Nor­man” may be (or why his one-word name appears in quo­ta­tion marks), he gives his read­ers poems that might be mis­tak­en at first glance for unpub­lished Christi­na Ros­set­ti vers­es; and Mr. Moorepark’s illus­tra­tions rival those of the finest book illus­tra­tors of the time, pre­sag­ing the high qual­i­ty of Calde­cott Medal-win­ning books of lat­er decades. Elfin Rhymes seems like a rare odd­i­ty, like­ly pub­lished in a small print run; the care and atten­tion of its lay­out and design shows a very high opin­ion of its read­ers’ imag­i­na­tive capa­bil­i­ties.

This title is rep­re­sen­ta­tive of an emerg­ing genre of late Vic­to­ri­an children’s lit­er­a­ture, which still tend­ed on the whole, as it does now, to fall into the trite and for­mu­la­ic. Elfin Rhymes sits astride the fan­ta­sy boom at the turn of the cen­tu­ry, her­ald­ed by huge­ly pop­u­lar books like Frank L. Baum’s Wiz­ard of Oz series and J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. These, the Har­ry Pot­ters of their day, made mil­lions of young peo­ple pas­sion­ate read­ers of mod­ern fairy tales, rep­re­sent­ing a slide even fur­ther away from the once quite nar­row, “remorse­less­ly instruc­tion­al… or deeply pious” cat­e­gories avail­able in ear­ly writ­ing for chil­dren, as Gren­by points out.

Where the bound­aries for kids’ lit­er­a­ture had once been nar­row­ly fixed by Latin gram­mar books and Pilgrim’s Progress, by the end of the 19th cen­tu­ry, the influ­ence of sci­ence fic­tion like Jules Verne’s, and of pop­u­lar super­nat­ur­al tales and poems, pre­pared the ground for com­ic books, YA dystopias, magi­cian fic­tion, and dozens of oth­er children’s lit­er­a­ture gen­res we now take for grant­ed, or—in increas­ing­ly large numbers—we buy to read for our­selves. Enter the Bald­win Library of His­tor­i­cal Children’s Lit­er­a­ture here, where you can browse sev­er­al cat­e­gories, search for sub­jects, authors, titles, etc, see full-screen, zoomable images of book cov­ers, down­load XML ver­sions, and read all of the over 6,000 books in the col­lec­tion with com­fort­able read­er views. Find more clas­sics in our col­lec­tion, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The First Children’s Pic­ture Book, 1658’s Orbis Sen­su­al­i­um Pic­tus

The Anti-Slav­ery Alpha­bet: 1846 Book Teach­es Kids the ABCs of Slavery’s Evils

The Inter­na­tion­al Children’s Dig­i­tal Library Offers Free eBooks for Kids in Over 40 Lan­guages

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

Tilda Swinton Gets a Portrait Drawn by Art Critic John Berger

in Art, Film | August 30th, 2016

In the win­ter of 2012, just before Christ­mas, a car­ful of Britons made their way through the snow to a house in rur­al France. The roads would soon close, but no mat­ter; they’d planned to make some apple crum­bles, do some draw­ing, and enjoy some con­ver­sa­tion. This may all sound nor­mal enough, but the car did­n’t con­tain your aver­age cot­tage-stay­ing hol­i­day­mak­ers: the crit­ic and film­mak­er Col­in Mac­Cabe rode in it, as did Til­da Swin­ton, the actress as famed for her per­for­mances as for her range of artis­tic and intel­lec­tu­al inter­ests. They’d come to shoot a doc­u­men­tary on the occu­pant of the house at which they’d arrived: artist, crit­ic, writer, and self-described “sto­ry­teller” John Berg­er.

The nov­el G. won Berg­er the Book­er prize in 1972 (half of the prize mon­ey from which he famous­ly donat­ed to Britain’s Black Pan­ther Par­ty), but most of his read­ers encounter him through that same year’s Ways of See­ing, a text on the ide­ol­o­gy of images that ranks among the twen­ty most influ­en­tial aca­d­e­m­ic books of all time.

He and Swin­ton first became friends in the late 1980s, when she played a small part in a film based on one of his short sto­ries, in which he him­self also appeared. “The old intel­lec­tu­al and the young actress imme­di­ate­ly formed a close bond,” writes The Inde­pen­dent’s Geof­frey McNab.

“Both were born in Lon­don, on 5 Novem­ber — Berg­er in 1926, Swin­ton in 1960 — and their shared birth­day has, as Swin­ton puts it, ‘formed a bedrock to our com­plic­i­ty, the prac­ti­cal fan­ta­sy of twin­ship.’ ” This they dis­cuss in the McCabe-direct­ed “Ways of Lis­ten­ing,” the first of a quar­tet of seg­ments that con­sti­tute the new doc­u­men­tary The Sea­sons In Quin­cy: Four Por­traits of John Berg­er, a co-pro­duc­tion of Birk­beck, Uni­ver­si­ty of Lon­don’s Derek Jar­man Lab. “Some­times I think it’s as though, in anoth­er life, we met or did some­thing,” says Berg­er as he draws Swin­ton’s por­trait. “We are aware of it in some depart­ment which isn’t mem­o­ry, although it’s quite close to mem­o­ry. Maybe, in anoth­er life, we… touched togeth­er.”

“Ways of Lis­ten­ing” cap­tures an extend­ed con­ver­sa­tion between Berg­er and Swin­ton, though it also fea­tures their nar­ra­tion. In this scene, Berg­er reads from his recent med­i­ta­tion on the prac­tice of draw­ing for his book Ben­to’s Sketch­book: “We who draw do so not only to make some­thing vis­i­ble to oth­ers, but also to accom­pa­ny some­thing invis­i­ble to its incal­cu­la­ble des­ti­na­tion.” (Swin­ton, for her part, reads from Spin­oza.) But the talk returns to what brought them togeth­er in the first place. “Maybe we made an appoint­ment to see each oth­er again, in this life,” Berg­er pro­pos­es. “The fifth of Novem­ber. But it was­n’t the same year. That did­n’t mat­ter. We weren’t in that kind of time.”

“We got off at the same sta­tion.”

“Exact­ly.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Til­da Swin­ton Recites Poem by Rumi While Reek­ing of Vetiv­er, Heliotrope & Musk

Wittgen­stein: Watch Derek Jarman’s Trib­ute to the Philoso­pher, Fea­tur­ing Til­da Swin­ton (1993)

Watch David Bowie’s New Video for ‘The Stars (Are Out Tonight)’ With Til­da Swin­ton

The Moby Dick Big Read: Til­da Swin­ton & Oth­ers Read a Chap­ter a Day from the Great Amer­i­can Nov­el

The 20 Most Influ­en­tial Aca­d­e­m­ic Books of All Time: No Spoil­ers

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

1850s Japan Comes to Life in 3D, Color Photos: See the Stereoscopic Photography of T. Enami

in History, Photography | August 29th, 2016

For about a quar­ter of a mil­len­ni­um, Japan had a pol­i­cy called sakoku, lit­er­al­ly mean­ing “closed coun­try,” which put to death for­eign­ers who dared enter to Japan, or Japan­ese who dared to leave it. It came to an end with the Mei­ji Restora­tion, the peri­od between 1868 to 1912, dur­ing which Japan put the Emper­or back in charge and, as his­to­ri­ans often say, began to “open up” to the out­side world, light­ing out on the path to its own kind of moder­ni­ty. For­eign­ers would still have had only a vague idea of Japan­ese life at the time — at least those with­out access to a stere­o­scope, and who thus could­n’t lay eyes on the vivid 3D pho­tog­ra­phy of Yoko­hama’s T. Ena­mi.

“To many whose lives revolved around pho­tog­ra­phy — includ­ing both Japan­ese and for­eign pro­fes­sion­als, as well as seri­ous ama­teurs — Ena­mi was not just a pho­tog­ra­ph­er, but a ‘pho­tog­ra­pher’s pho­tog­ra­ph­er,’ ” writes Ena­mi enthu­si­ast Rob Oech­sle on his site t‑enami.org. He also dubs his pho­to­graph­ic hero (who was born Nobuku­ni Ena­mi in 1859 and lived until 1929, see­ing the end of the Mei­ji era but not the begin­ning of the sec­ond world war) “King of the Stere­oview, Mas­ter of the Lantern-Slide, Pro­lif­ic, Anony­mous Con­trib­u­tor To the World of Mei­ji-era Yoko­hama Album Views, Ded­i­cat­ed Street Pho­tog­ra­ph­er, and Hon­ored Alum­nus of Nation­al Geo­graph­ic Mag­a­zine.”

That first title has grant­ed a por­tion of Enam­i’s large body of work a sur­pris­ing recent after­life. Fol­low­ing in his teacher’s foot­steps, Ena­mi refined the Japan­ese use of the stere­o­graph­ic cam­era, a device that pro­duced, writes the Vic­to­ria and Albert Muse­um’s Zoe Clay­ton, a stere­o­graph: “two pic­tures mount­ed next to each oth­er, viewed with a set of lens­es known as a stere­o­scope.  Tak­en around 7cm apart, rough­ly cor­re­spond­ing to the spac­ing of the eyes, the left pic­ture rep­re­sents what the left eye would see, and like­wise for the right, so when observ­ing the pic­tures through a stereo­scop­ic view­er, the pair of pho­tographs con­verge into a sin­gle three-dimen­sion­al image.”

Adver­tised with slo­gans like “See the world from your par­lor!,” this “opti­cal mar­vel took the world by storm in the mid 19th cen­tu­ry, becom­ing the first ever mass-pro­duced pho­to­graph­ic images sold,” their pop­u­lar­i­ty such that “every Vic­to­ri­an home — regard­less of class — had a stere­o­scope and a col­lec­tion of views.” And though the years have made stere­o­scopes a lit­tle hard to come by, the inter­net has dis­cov­ered that you can enjoy some­thing like the same 3D effect Vic­to­ri­an view­ers did by look­ing at an ani­mat­ed GIF that oscil­lates quick­ly between the left pic­ture and the right one. Ena­mi hand-tint­ed many of his stere­o­graphs, result­ing in col­ored his­tor­i­cal images that look, even in two dimen­sions, star­tling­ly real­is­tic today.

Here we present only a few of Enam­i’s stere­o­graphs, but you can see a much fuller col­lec­tion at Oeschle’s “Old Japan in 3D” Flickr page. He sur­vived 1923’s Great Kan­tō earth­quake, but his stu­dio did­n’t; he rebuilt it and lat­er passed it on to his son, who ran the place until it under­went a sec­ond destruc­tion in 1945 by Allied bombs. Though Enam­i’s name remains known pri­mar­i­ly to fans of Mei­ji-era pho­tog­ra­phy, his posthu­mous rep­u­ta­tion has slow­ly but steadi­ly grown: one of his pho­tos even appeared on the cov­er of the first edi­tion of Odyssey: the Art of Pho­tog­ra­phy at Nation­al Geo­graph­ic. These GIFs have already sparked an inter­est in Enam­i’s work among a new gen­er­a­tion. When 3D mon­i­tors catch on, per­haps he’ll rise to his true place in the pho­to­graph­ic pan­theon.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hand-Col­ored 1860s Pho­tographs Reveal the Last Days of Samu­rai Japan

Hand-Col­ored Pho­tographs of 19th Cen­tu­ry Japan

Adver­tise­ments from Japan’s Gold­en Age of Art Deco

Glo­ri­ous Ear­ly 20th-Cen­tu­ry Japan­ese Ads for Beer, Smokes & Sake (1902–1954)

Ear­ly Japan­ese Ani­ma­tions: The Ori­gins of Ani­me (1917–1931)

A Pho­to­graph­ic Tour of Haru­ki Murakami’s Tokyo, Where Dream, Mem­o­ry, and Real­i­ty Meet

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Angelo Badalamenti Reveals How He and David Lynch Composed the Twin Peaks’ “Love Theme”

in Music, Television | August 26th, 2016

On my last trip to New York, some friends took me to a favorite new-wave Chi­nese place of theirs. When I asked where to find the bath­room, they said to go down­stairs. The stair­case deposit­ed me into one of the most sur­re­al bath­room approach­es I’ve ever expe­ri­enced: a long, nar­row, ful­ly mir­rored hall­way with a haunt­ing­ly famil­iar com­po­si­tion piped in from speak­ers installed along its length. Not until I resur­faced and asked what the deal was could I iden­ti­fy the music: the “Love Theme” from David Lynch’s ear­ly-1990s tele­vi­sion series Twin Peaks.

Many TV themes have lodged them­selves into our col­lec­tive mem­o­ry, most­ly through sheer rep­e­ti­tion, but few have retained as much evoca­tive pow­er as the one Lynch’s com­pos­er, Ange­lo Badala­men­ti, record­ed for his short-lived post­mod­ern detec­tive show.

It had that pow­er from the moment Badala­men­ti put his fin­gers to the key­board, a sto­ry told in the clip above. “What do you see, David?” he remem­bers ask­ing the direc­tor as he sits down before the very same Fend­er Rhodes on which he com­posed Twin Peaks’ major themes all those years ago. “Just talk to me.”

“We’re in a dark woods,” Badala­men­ti recalls Lynch first say­ing. “There’s a soft wind blow­ing through sycamore trees. There’s a moon out, some ani­mal sounds in the back­ground. You can hear the hoot of an owl. Just get me into that beau­ti­ful dark­ness.” Badala­men­ti plays as he played then, which drew an imme­di­ate response from Lynch: “Ange­lo, that’s great. I love that. That’s a good mood. But can you play it slow­er?” With the feed­back loop between the scene in Lynch’s mind and the mood of Badala­men­ti’s music engaged, Lynch added a detail: “From behind a tree, in the back of the woods, is this very lone­ly girl. Her name is Lau­ra Palmer.”

Badala­men­ti light­ens his impro­vi­sa­tion in a way that makes it some­how eerier. “That’s it!” The com­pos­er and the direc­tor play off one anoth­er’s ideas, almost like two long-col­lab­o­rat­ing musi­cians in a jam ses­sion. “She’s walk­ing toward the cam­era, she’s com­ing clos­er… just keep build­ing it! Just keep build­ing it!” Even­tu­al­ly, they’ve cre­at­ed an entire ris­ing and falling dra­mat­ic arc in this sin­gle piece of music (arguably more dra­mat­ic than the one cre­at­ed by the series itself, which Lynch left after two sea­sons). “David got up, gave me a big hug, and said, ‘Ange­lo, that’s Twin Peaks’ ” — and to this day, a part of the cul­ture.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the Music of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Played by the Dan­ish Nation­al Sym­pho­ny Orches­tra

Play the Twin Peaks Video Game: Retro Fun for David Lynch Fans

David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Title Sequence, Recre­at­ed in an Adorable Paper Ani­ma­tion

David Lynch Draws a Map of Twin Peaks (to Help Pitch the Show to ABC)

Hear the Music of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Played by the Exper­i­men­tal Band, Xiu Xiu: A Free Stream of Their New Album

Ele­men­tary School Stu­dents Per­form in a Play Inspired by David Lynch’s Twin Peaks

David Lynch Directs a Mini-Sea­son of Twin Peaks in the Form of Japan­ese Cof­fee Com­mer­cials

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Star Trek Postage Stamps Coming Soon: Celebrating 50 Years of Exploring the Final Frontier

in Sci Fi, Television | August 24th, 2016

The orig­i­nal Star Trek TV series took to the air­waves near­ly 5o years ago–on Sep­tem­ber 8, 1966. Poor rat­ings meant that the show did­n’t last very long (only three years). But every­thing changed once the show went into syn­di­ca­tion. It achieved cult sta­tus. And a fran­chise was born. The orig­i­nal Star Trek has now spawned five addi­tion­al tv series, 13 fea­ture films, and a num­ber of fan-made sequels.

To cel­e­brate 50 years of Star Trek, the US Postal Ser­vice has decid­ed to release a com­mem­o­ra­tive set of stamps inspired by the orig­i­nal show. The four stamps (shown above) depict the fol­low­ing:

• The Star­ship Enter­prise inside the out­line of a Starfleet insignia against a gold back­ground.
• The sil­hou­ette of a crew­man in a trans­porter against a red back­ground.
• The sil­hou­ette of the Enter­prise from above against a green back­ground.
• The Enter­prise inside the out­line of the Vul­can salute (Spock’s icon­ic hand ges­ture) against a blue back­ground.

The stamps will be offi­cial­ly avail­able on Sep­tem­ber 2, though they can be pre-ordered here.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Star Trek Con­tin­ues: The Crit­i­cal­ly-Acclaimed, Fan-Made Sequel to the Orig­i­nal TV Series

How Isaac Asi­mov Went from Star Trek Crit­ic to Star Trek­Fan & Advi­sor

Nichelle Nichols Explains How Mar­tin Luther King Con­vinced Her to Stay on Star Trek

The Com­plete Star Wars “Fil­mu­men­tary”: A 6‑Hour, Fan-Made Star Wars Doc­u­men­tary, with Behind-the-Scenes Footage & Com­men­tary

Hard­ware Wars: The Moth­er of All Star Wars Fan Films (and the Most Prof­itable Short Film Ever Made)

Star Wars Uncut: The Epic Fan Film

Penn Jillette Makes the Philosophical & Pragmatic Case for Libertarianism

in Politics | August 24th, 2016

For an anar­chist like Noam Chom­sky, lib­er­tar­i­an­ism as it’s under­stood in the U.S. is a cor­rup­tion of the term. Through­out their polit­i­cal his­to­ry, Chom­sky argues, “real” Lib­er­tar­i­ans have been anti-Capitalist—and he includes under this head­ing such clas­si­cal lib­er­als as Adam Smith and Thomas Jef­fer­son, as well as mod­ern anar­cho-social­ists like him­self. Mod­ern U.S. Lib­er­tar­i­ans like Ron and Rand Paul, Mil­ton Fried­man, and Robert Noz­ick have all meant some­thing very dif­fer­ent by the term, and cer­tain­ly haven’t agreed on what that is. So what exact­ly is Lib­er­tar­i­an­ism?

Giv­en pop­u­lar misconceptions—and some less than stel­lar pub­lic rela­tions moments—one per­haps gets a clear­est idea of what Amer­i­can Lib­er­tar­i­an­ism is by read­ing about what it isn’t, as in this essay from one of its most con­trar­i­an the­o­rists, Mur­ray Roth­bard. Or we can spend a few min­utes with that vol­u­ble comedic magi­cian Penn Jil­lette, a well-known face of Lib­er­tar­i­an and athe­ist thought for many years. Jillette’s the­sis in his eigh­teen-minute Big Think video above comes down to this: “we think you should take as lit­tle from oth­er peo­ple by force as pos­si­ble and you should be able to do what­ev­er you think is right.” Lib­er­tar­i­an­ism, Jil­lette elab­o­rates, “is the strongest sense of ‘please, do what you want, try not to hurt me.”

The con­cept he refers to is one Isa­iah Berlin wrote of as “neg­a­tive lib­er­ty,” or the prin­ci­ple of non­in­ter­fer­ence, a sta­ple of all Lib­er­tar­i­an thought. The heavy stress on indi­vid­ual rights has come in for cri­tique as naïve, but as Roth­bard notes, “no indi­vid­u­al­ist denies that peo­ple are influ­enc­ing each oth­er all the time.” Lib­er­tar­i­an thinkers have wres­tled with the con­flict (if not con­tra­dic­tion) between max­i­mal indi­vid­ual free­dom and free­dom from harm. Robert Noz­ick, for exam­ple, extend­ed his dis­cus­sion beyond our respon­si­bil­i­ties to each oth­er to a moral case study of our duties toward ani­mals. Respon­si­bil­i­ty stands as a key term in Jillette’s artic­u­la­tion of Libertarianism—a sine qua non of a Lib­er­tar­i­an soci­ety.

But is there such a thing as a func­tion­ing Lib­er­tar­i­an soci­ety? Or does Jil­lette describe an unre­al­iz­able utopia that depends not only on most peo­ple act­ing respon­si­bly, but also on most peo­ple act­ing ratio­nal­ly? As he him­self says, “Lib­er­tar­i­an­ism is tak­ing a right on mon­ey, your first left on sex, and look­ing for utopia straight ahead.” This lan­guage aside, he doesn’t seem to oper­ate under the illu­sion that peo­ple always make the best choic­es for them­selves or their fam­i­lies. As part of his argu­ment, how­ev­er, he admits he isn’t qual­i­fied or desirous to make those choic­es for oth­er peo­ple when he can often bare­ly dis­cern the right course of action for him­self. As it gen­er­al­ly does, this course of rea­son­ing brings us to the prob­lem of tax­a­tion in Lib­er­tar­i­an thought.

Jillette’s appeal seems com­mon­sen­si­cal and prag­mat­ic, and after his gen­er­al pitch, he launch­es into a cri­tique of cor­po­rate cap­i­tal­ism that could come right out of a Chom­sky talk—in some small part, that is. Jil­lette believes that, absent most gov­ern­ment inter­fer­ence, we would have such a thing as a “true free mar­ket” in which every­one could com­pete fair­ly and with­out coer­cion. This is a posi­tion even Noz­ick soft­ened on many years after his clas­sic Anar­chy, State, and Utopia, call­ing it “seri­ous­ly inad­e­quate” and admit­ting that many demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions Lib­er­tar­i­ans want to abol­ish pre­serve “our equal human dig­ni­ty, our auton­o­my and pow­ers of self-direc­tion.”

What­ev­er we make of Jillette’s lais­sez faire ide­ol­o­gy, his cri­tiques of gov­ern­ment speak to Lib­er­tar­i­ans on either side of the eco­nom­ics divide. He makes an inci­sive case against Clin­ton, then tears into Trump’s will­ing­ness to “give easy answers.” Hold­ing up career politi­cians Bernie Sanders and Gary John­son as “paragons” may seem a bit much, giv­en Jillette’s force­ful argu­ment for a healthy and thor­ough­go­ing mis­trust of gov­ern­ment. As he says in the ear­li­er Big Think inter­view above, “part of the joy and the won­der and the bril­liance of the ideas of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca that whoever’s in pow­er is ques­tioned and beat up.”

He does not, of course, mean that last part in any lit­er­al sense. While Lib­er­tar­i­an­ism has per­haps been tarred by asso­ci­a­tion with an increas­ing­ly vio­lent right, it would be a mis­take to lump Jil­lette in with cer­tain polit­i­cal oppor­tunists who at one time or anoth­er have used the term to describe them­selves. His com­mit­ment to anti-war and drug legal­iza­tion poli­cies is unwa­ver­ing, and he makes a strong, well-rea­soned case for his pol­i­tics. It’s one worth hear­ing out whether you agree or not in the end.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

6 Polit­i­cal The­o­rists Intro­duced in Ani­mat­ed “School of Life” Videos: Marx, Smith, Rawls & More

A The­o­ry of Jus­tice, the Musi­cal Imag­ines Philoso­pher John Rawls as a Time-Trav­el­ing Adven­tur­er

Noam Chom­sky on Whether the Rise of Trump Resem­bles the Rise of Fas­cism in 1930s Ger­many

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

The Accidental Origin of the Hit Song ‘American Woman’: Randy Bachman Tells the Story

in Music | August 23rd, 2016

In one of our favorite old posts, gui­tarist Randy Bach­man did us a favor when he mer­ci­ful­ly demys­ti­fied the open­ing chord of The Bea­t­les’ ‘A Hard Day’s Night.’ Mys­tery final­ly solved.

Today, he returns and brings us inside the mak­ing of anoth­er clas­sic song–“Amer­i­can Woman,” which Bach­man co-wrote as a mem­ber of The Guess Who in 1970. In the clip above, the musi­cian reflects on his “anti­war protest song” and its mem­o­rable riff. You know it. It goes dum dum dada­da dada dada dada dum dum dada­da dada da dum. The riff came about by acci­dent, the hap­py byprod­uct of a bro­ken gui­tar string and some spur of the moment impro­vi­sa­tion. I’ll let Randy tell you the rest of the sto­ry.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Gui­tarist Randy Bach­man Demys­ti­fies the Open­ing Chord of The Bea­t­les’ ‘A Hard Day’s Night’

Pro­duc­er Tony Vis­con­ti Breaks Down the Mak­ing of David Bowie’s Clas­sic “Heroes,” Track by Track

Enter Bri­an Wilson’s Cre­ative Process While Mak­ing The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds 50 Years Ago: A Fly-on-the Wall View

Prof. Brian Cox Has a Maddening Conversation with a Climate Science-Denying Politician

in Current Affairs, Environment, Science | August 22nd, 2016

Accord­ing to NASA’s God­dard Insti­tute for Space Stud­ies, July 2016 was the warmest month ever record­ed. 2016 will like­ly be the warmest year on record. And the decades ahead will only get worse, much worse.

And yet, notes physi­cist Lawrence Krauss in The New York­er this week­end, we have the GOP’s Franken­stein try­ing to dem­a­gogue his way into the pres­i­den­cy by call­ing cli­mate sci­ence into ques­tion. Krauss writes:

In May, for instance, while speak­ing to an audi­ence of West Vir­ginia coal min­ers, Trump com­plained that reg­u­la­tions designed to pro­tect the ozone lay­er had com­pro­mised the qual­i­ty of his hair spray. Those reg­u­la­tions, he con­tin­ued, were mis­guid­ed, because hair spray is used main­ly indoors, and so can have no effect on the atmos­phere out­side.…

Often, Trump is sim­ply wrong about sci­ence, even though he should know bet­ter. Just as he was a per­sis­tent “birther” even after the evi­dence con­vinc­ing­ly showed that Pres­i­dent Oba­ma was born in the Unit­ed States, Trump now con­tin­ues to prop­a­gate the notion that vac­cines cause autism in spite of con­vinc­ing and wide­ly cit­ed evi­dence to the con­trary… In oth­er cas­es, Trump treats sci­en­tif­ic facts the way he treats oth­er facts—he ignores or dis­torts them when­ev­er it’s con­ve­nient. He has denied that cli­mate change is real, call­ing it pseu­do­science and advanc­ing a con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry that “the con­cept of glob­al warm­ing was cre­at­ed by and for the Chi­nese in order to make U.S. man­u­fac­tur­ing non­com­pet­i­tive.”

And way across the pond, we have anoth­er politi­cian, Aus­tralian Sen­a­tor Mal­colm Roberts, mak­ing his own kind of laugh­able claims. In a recent tele­vi­sion broad­cast, Roberts asks physi­cist Bri­an Cox for empir­i­cal proof that cli­mate change exists. Cox offers evi­dence gath­ered by NASA, to which Roberts responds, NASA’s “data has been cor­rupt­ed and manip­u­lat­ed.” Not good enough. If you reg­u­lar­ly read our site, you know that this is not the first time that NASA has been accused of manip­u­lat­ing data. Con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists have long accused NASA and Stan­ley Kubrick of fak­ing the moon land­ing in 1969. Roberts bris­tles at being asso­ci­at­ed with these loons. But frankly it’s an apt com­par­i­son. And if any­one should be both­ered by the com­par­i­son, it’s the moon land­ing con­spir­acists. How­ev­er strange their the­o­ries might be, no one doubts that they’re heart­felt, gen­uine, and seem­ing­ly free from the hint of polit­i­cal and finan­cial influ­ence.

In the mean­time, in a new video from NASA, you can see the Arc­tic ice lev­els retreat­ing to one of the low­est lev­els in record­ed his­to­ry. Call the video “cor­rupt­ed” and “manip­u­lat­ed” at your own per­il.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Glob­al Warm­ing: A Free Course from UChica­go Explains Cli­mate Change

Michio Kaku & Noam Chom­sky School Moon Land­ing and 9/11 Con­spir­a­cy The­o­rists

Carl Sagan Presents His “Baloney Detec­tion Kit”: 8 Tools for Skep­ti­cal Think­ing

Richard Feyn­man Cre­ates a Sim­ple Method for Telling Sci­ence From Pseu­do­science (1966)

Sal­ly Ride Warns Against Glob­al Warm­ing; Won­ders If Tech­nol­o­gy Can Save Us From Our­selves

Oliver Sacks’ Final Interview: A First Look

in Biology, Life, Neuroscience | August 22nd, 2016

It’s been near­ly a year since the poet lau­re­ate of med­i­cine, author and neu­rol­o­gist Oliv­er Sacks, took his final bow as a sen­tient being on this beau­ti­ful plan­et, suc­cumb­ing, at 82, to metas­tases of ocu­lar melanoma which spread to his liv­er.

The New York­er marks the occa­sion by pub­lish­ing Sacks’ fel­low neu­rol­o­gist and author Dr. Orrin Devin­sky’s rec­ol­lec­tion of their long­stand­ing friend­ship. Devin­sky paints a vivid pic­ture of an excep­tion­al­ly com­pas­sion­ate man, who felt a kin­ship not only with starfish, jel­ly­fish, and octopi, but also humans in both finan­cial and emo­tion­al need.

The piece becomes even more pow­er­ful in light of Sacks’ final inter­view, above, part of film­mak­er Ric Burns’ upcom­ing doc­u­men­tary, Oliv­er Sacks: His Own Life.

Sacks pep­pers his remarks with aston­ish­ing bio­log­i­cal tid­bits, a com­pul­sion that delight­ed his friend Devin­sky on their fre­quent ear­ly morn­ing bike rides along New York City’s west side.

(Palatal myoclonus—or rhyth­mic pulsing—in the palate, eardrum and strap mus­cles are ves­ti­gial evi­dence that humans once had gills!)

(The dandelion’s name evolved from dent de lion, French for lion’s tooth, a struc­ture the spikes on its ser­rat­ed leaves could be said to resem­ble. Also, cer­tain dan­de­lion species repro­duce asex­u­al­ly, and Sacks had no fear about eat­ing an unwashed spec­i­men he plucked from the ques­tion­ably san­i­tary grounds of River­side Park!)

The mus­ings that war­rant the melan­choly piano and strings accom­pa­ny­ing Burns’ excerpt are of a more per­son­al nature. Sacks’ was total­ly immersed in his cho­sen sub­ject. His moth­er was a com­par­a­tive anatomist and sur­geon, and his boy­ish inter­est in the hard sci­ences is what led him to biol­o­gy. A life­time of sci­en­tif­ic obser­va­tion and clin­i­cal inter­ac­tion only add to the poet­ry of his thoughts on death:

My gen­er­a­tion is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abrup­tion, a tear­ing away of part of myself. There will be nobody like us when we are gone, but then there is nobody like any­body ever. When peo­ple die they can­not be replaced. They leave holes that can­not be filled. It is the fate, the genet­ic and neur­al fate of every human being to be a unique indi­vid­ual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death. Even so, I am shocked and sad­dened at the sen­tence of death, and I can­not pre­tend I am with­out fear. But my pre­dom­i­nant feel­ing is one of grat­i­tude. I have loved and been loved. I have been giv­en much and I have giv­en some­thing in return. I have read and trav­eled and thought and writ­ten. I have had an inter­course with the world, the spe­cial inter­course of writ­ers and read­ers. Above all, I have been a sen­tient being, a think­ing ani­mal on this beau­ti­ful plan­et, and this in itself has been an enor­mous priv­i­lege and adven­ture.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Oliv­er Sacks Explains the Biol­o­gy of Hal­lu­ci­na­tions: “We See with the Eyes, But with the Brain as Well”

A Fas­ci­nat­ing Case Study by Oliv­er Sacks Inspires a Short Ani­mat­ed Film, The Lost Mariner

Oliv­er Sacks’ Last Tweet Shows Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” Mov­ing­ly Flash­mobbed in Spain

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her lat­est com­ic con­trasts the birth of her sec­ond child with the uncen­sored gore of Game of Thrones. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

Read the Original 32-Page Program for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927)

in Film, Sci Fi | August 19th, 2016

One of the very first fea­ture-length sci-fi films ever made, Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis took a dar­ing visu­al approach for its time, incor­po­rat­ing Bauhaus and Futur­ist influ­ences in thrilling­ly designed sets and cos­tumes. Lang’s visu­al lan­guage res­onat­ed strong­ly in lat­er decades. The film’s rather stun­ning alchem­i­cal-elec­tric trans­fer­ence of a woman’s phys­i­cal traits onto the body of a destruc­tive android—the so-called Maschi­nen­men­sch—for exam­ple, began a very long trend of female robots in film and tele­vi­sion, most of them as dan­ger­ous and inscrutable as Lang’s. And yet, for all its many imi­ta­tors, Metrop­o­lis con­tin­ues to deliv­er sur­pris­es. Here, we bring you a new find: a 32-page pro­gram dis­trib­uted at the film’s 1927 pre­mier in Lon­don and recent­ly re-dis­cov­ered.

In addi­tion to under­writ­ing almost one hun­dred years of sci­ence fic­tion film and tele­vi­sion tropes, Metrop­o­lis has had a very long life in oth­er ways: Inspir­ing an all-star sound­track pro­duced by Gior­gio Moroder in 1984,with Fred­die Mer­cury, Lover­boy, and Adam Ant, and a Kraftwerk album. In 2001, a recon­struct­ed ver­sion received a screen­ing at the Berlin Film Fes­ti­val, and UNESCO’s Mem­o­ry of the World Reg­is­ter added it to their ros­ter. 2002 saw the release of an excep­tion­al Metrop­o­lis-inspired ani­me with the same title. And in 2010 an almost ful­ly restored print of the long-incom­plete film—recut from footage found in Argenti­na in 2008—appeared, adding a lit­tle more sophis­ti­ca­tion and coher­ence to the sim­plis­tic sto­ry line.

Even at the film’s ini­tial recep­tion, with­out any miss­ing footage, crit­ics did not warm to its sto­ry. For all its intense visu­al futur­ism, it has always seemed like a very quaint, naïve tale, struck through with earnest reli­gios­i­ty and inex­plic­a­ble archaisms. Con­tem­po­rary review­ers found its nar­ra­tive of gen­er­a­tional and class con­flict uncon­vinc­ing. H.G. Wells—“something of an author­i­ty on sci­ence fiction”—pronounced it “the sil­li­est film” full of “every pos­si­ble fool­ish­ness, cliché, plat­i­tude, and mud­dle­ment about mechan­i­cal progress and progress in gen­er­al served up with a sauce of sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty that is all its own.” Few were kinder when it came to the sto­ry, and despite its overt reli­gious themes, many saw it as Com­mu­nist pro­pa­gan­da.

Viewed after sub­se­quent events in 20th cen­tu­ry Ger­many, many of the film’s scenes appear “dis­turbing­ly pre­scient,” writes the Unaf­fil­i­at­ed Crit­ic, such as the vision of a huge indus­tri­al machine as Moloch, in which “bald, under­fed humans are led in chains to a fur­nace.” Lang and his wife Thea von Harbou—who wrote the nov­el, then screenplay—were of course com­ment­ing on indus­tri­al­iza­tion, labor con­di­tions, and pover­ty in Weimar Ger­many. Metrop­o­lis’s “clear mes­sage of clas­sism,” as io9 writes, comes through most clear­ly in its arrest­ing imagery, like that hor­ri­fy­ing, mon­strous fur­nace and the “loom­ing sym­bol of wealth in the Tow­er of Babel.”

The visu­al effects and spec­tac­u­lar set pieces have worked their mag­ic on almost every­one (Wells exclud­ed) who has seen Metrop­o­lis. And they remain, for all its silli­ness, the pri­ma­ry rea­son for the movie’s cul­tur­al preva­lence. Wired calls it “prob­a­bly the most influ­en­tial sci-fi movie in his­to­ry,” remark­ing that “a sin­gle movie poster from the orig­i­nal release sold for $690,000 sev­en years ago, and is expect­ed to fetch even more at an auc­tion lat­er this year.”

We now have anoth­er arti­fact from the movie’s pre­miere, this 32-page pro­gram, appro­pri­ate­ly called “Metrop­o­lis” Mag­a­zine, that offers a rich feast for audi­ences, and text at times more inter­est­ing than the film’s script. (You can view the pro­gram in full here.) One imag­ines had they pos­sessed back­lit smart phones, those ear­ly movie­go­ers might have found them­selves strug­gling not to browse their pro­grams while the film screened. But, of course, Metrop­o­lis’s visu­al excess­es would hold their atten­tion as they still do ours. Its scenes of a futur­is­tic city have always enthralled view­ers, film­mak­ers, and (most) crit­ics, such that Roger Ebert could write of “vast futur­is­tic cities” as a sta­ple of some of the best sci­ence fic­tion in his review of the 21st-cen­tu­ry ani­mat­ed Metrop­o­lis—“visions… goofy and yet at the same time exhil­a­rat­ing.”

The pro­gram real­ly is an aston­ish­ing doc­u­ment, a trea­sure for fans of the film and for schol­ars. Full of pro­duc­tion stills, behind-the-scenes arti­cles and pho­tos, tech­ni­cal minu­ti­ae, short columns by the actors, a bio of Thea von Har­bau, the “authoress,” excerpts from her nov­el and screen­play placed side-by-side, and a short arti­cle by her. There’s a page called “Fig­ures that Speak” that tal­lies the pro­duc­tion costs and cast and crew num­bers (includ­ing very crude draw­ings and num­bers of “Negroes” and “Chi­nese”). Lang him­self weighs in, lacon­i­cal­ly, with a breezy intro­duc­tion fol­lowed by a clas­sic silent-era line: “if I can­not suc­ceed in find­ing expres­sion on the pic­ture, I cer­tain­ly can­not find it in speech.” Film his­to­ry agrees, Lang found his expres­sion “on the pic­ture.”

“Only three sur­viv­ing copies of this pro­gram are known to exist,” writes Wired, and one of them, from which these pages come, has gone on sale at the Peter Har­ring­ton rare book shop for 2,750 pounds ($4,244)—which seems rather low, giv­en what an orig­i­nal Metrop­o­lis poster went for. But mar­kets are fick­le, and what­ev­er its cur­rent or future price, ”Metrop­o­lis” Mag­a­zine is invalu­able to cineast­es. See all 32 pages of the pro­gram at Peter Harrington’s web­site.

via Wired

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Metrop­o­lis: Watch a Restored Ver­sion of Fritz Lang’s Mas­ter­piece (1927)

Fritz Lang Tells the Riv­et­ing Sto­ry of the Day He Met Joseph Goebbels and Then High-Tailed It Out of Ger­many

Metrop­o­lis II: Dis­cov­er the Amaz­ing, Fritz Lang-Inspired Kinet­ic Sculp­ture by Chris Bur­den

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