The History of Birth Control: From Alligator Dung to The Pill
The history of birth control is almost as old as the history of the wheel.
Pessaries dating to Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt provide the launching pad for documentarian Lindsay Holiday’s overview of birth control throughout the ages and around the world.
Holiday’s History Tea Time series frequently delves into women’s history, and her pledge to donate a portion of the above video’s ad revenue to Pathfinder International serves as reminder that there are parts of the world where women still lack access to affordable, effective, and safe means of contraception.
One goal of the World Health Organization’s Ending Preventable Maternal Mortality initiative is for 65% of women to be able to make informed and empowered decisions regarding sexual relations, contraceptive use, and their reproductive health by 2025.
As Holiday points out, expense, social stigma, and religious edicts have impacted ease of access to birth control for centuries.
The further back you go, you can be certain that some methods advocated by midwives and medicine women have been lost to history, owing to unrecorded oral tradition and the sensitive nature of the information.
Holiday still manages to truffle up a fascinating array of practices and products that were thought — often erroneously — to ward off unwanted pregnancy.
Some that worked and continue to work to varying degrees, include barrier methods, condoms, and more recently the IUD and The Pill.
Definitely NOT recommended: withdrawal, holding your breath during intercourse, a post-coital sneezing regimen, douching with Lysol or Coca-Cola, toxic cocktails of lead, mercury or copper salt, anything involving alligator dung, and slugging back water that’s been used to wash a corpse.
As for silphium, an herb that likely did have some sort of spermicidal properties, we’ll never know for sure. By 1 CE, demand outstripped supply of this remedy, eventually wiping it off the face of the earth despite increasingly astronomical prices. Fun fact: silphium was also used to treat sore throat, snakebite, scorpion stings, mange, gout, quinsy, epilepsy, and anal warts
The history of birth control can be considered a semi-secret part of the history of prostitution, feminism, the military, obscenity laws, sex education and attitudes toward public health.
From Margaret Sanger and the 60,000 women executed as witches in the 16th and 17th centuries, to economist Thomas Malthus’ 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population and legendary adventurer Giacomo Casanova’s satin ribbon-trimmed jimmy hat, this episode of History Tea Time with Lindsay Holiday touches on it all.
- Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
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Read More...A Master List of 1,700 Free Courses From Top Universities: A Lifetime of Learning on One Page
For the past 15 years, we’ve been busy rummaging around the internet and adding courses to an ever-growing list of Free Online Courses, which now features 1,700 courses from top universities. Let’s give you the quick overview: The list lets you download audio & video lectures from schools like Stanford, Yale, MIT, Oxford, Harvard and many other institutions. Generally, the courses can be accessed via YouTube, iTunes or university web sites, and you can listen to the lectures anytime, anywhere, on your computer or smart phone. We haven’t done a precise calculation, but there’s about 50,000 hours of free audio & video lectures here. Enough to keep you busy for a very long time–something that’s useful during these socially distant times.
Right now you’ll find 200 free philosophy courses, 105 free history courses, 170 free computer science courses, 85 free physics courses and 55 Free Literature Courses in the collection, and that’s just beginning to scratch the surface. You can peruse sections covering Astronomy, Biology, Business, Chemistry, Economics, Engineering, Math, Political Science, Psychology and Religion.
Here are some highlights from the complete list of Free Online Courses. We’ve added a few unconventional/vintage courses in the mix just to keep things interesting.
- A History of Philosophy in 81 Video Lectures: From Ancient Greece to Modern Times — Free Online Video — Arthur Holmes, Wheaton College
- A Romp Through Ethics for Complete Beginners - Various Formats – Marianne Talbot, Oxford University
- Ancient Greek History — Various Formats — Donald Kagan, Yale
- Creative Reading and Writing by William S. Burroughs — Free Online Audio — Naropa University
- Critical Reasoning for Beginners — Various Formats – Marianne Talbot, Oxford
- Deep Learning — Free Online Video — Vincent Vanhoucke, Google
- Edible Education 101 – Free Online Video – Michael Pollan, UC Berkeley
- Financial Markets — Various Formats — Robert Shiller, Yale
- Growing Up in the Universe – Free Online Video – Richard Dawkins, Oxford
- Harvard’s Introductory Computer Science Course - Free Online Course — David Malan, Harvard
- Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner – Various Formats – Wai Chee Dimock, Yale
- How to Listen to Music — Various Formats — Craig Wright, Yale
- Human Behavioral Biology – Various Formats – Robert Sapolsky, Stanford
- Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) – Free Online Video — Christine Hayes, Yale.
- Lectures on Digital Photography — Free Online Video — Marc Levoy, Stanford/Google
- Physics for Future Presidents – Free Online Video – Richard Muller, UC Berkeley
- Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to the Science of Soft Matter — Various Formats — Team taught, Harvard
- Speak Italian with Your Mouth Full - Various Formats — MIT, Dr. Paola Rebusco
- The American Novel Since 1945 – Various Formats – Amy Hungerford, Yale
- The Central Philosophy of Tibet — Free Online Audio – Robert Thurman, Columbia University
- The Character of Physical Law (1964) - Free Online Video — Richard Feynman, Cornell
- The Tempest - Free Online Audio — Allen Ginsberg, Naropa
- Walter Kaufmann Lectures on Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Sartre — Free Online Audio
The complete list of courses can be accessed here: 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities. For more enriching material, see our other collections below.
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1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free.
4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
Learn 45+ Languages Online for Free: Spanish, Chinese, English & More.
200 Online Certificate & Microcredential Programs from Leading Universities & Companies.
Read More...
The Sistine Chapel: A $22,000 Art-Book Collection Features Remarkable High-Resolution Views of the Murals of Michelangelo, Botticelli & Other Renaissance Masters
Michelangelo didn’t want to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Having considered himself more of a sculptor than a painter — and, given his skill with stone, not without cause — he felt that taking on such an ambitious project could bring him to ruin. But one does not simply turn down a job offer from the Vatican, and especially not when one is among the most respected artists in sixteenth-century Italy. In the event, Michelangelo proved equal to the task, or rather, much more than equal: he completed his ceiling frescoes in 1512 for Pope Julius II, and 23 years later was commissioned again by Pope Paul III to paint the Last Judgment over the altar.
Long before Michelangelo touched a brush to the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling, a team of painters including Sandro Botticelli, Pietro Perugino, and Pinturicchio had already adorned the building’s interior with frescoes depicting the lives of Moses and Jesus Christ.
Taken together, the Sistine Chapel has long been regarded as one of the greatest achievements in Western art, if not the greatest of them all. Hence the six million tourists who visited it each year before COVID-19; hence, more recently, the painstaking care that has gone into the production of The Sistine Chapel, a three-volume at-book set that brings the building’s Biblical visions as close as any earthly reader cold hope to see them.
The fruit of a half-decade-long collaboration between the Vatican and two publishers, Callaway Arts & Entertainment and Scripta Maneant, The Sistine Chapel demanded 65 nights of consecutive work from its photographers, who shot 270,000 high-resolution images. Capturing the masterworks on the walls and ceiling down to the textures of their paint and brushstrokes necessitated climbing up on scaffolding, just as Michelangelo himself famously did to make his contributions in the first place. Limited by the Vatican to a print run of 1,999 copies, the set is now available for purchase at AbeBooks, though it will cost you $22,000. In a sense that’s a small price to pay, for as Goethe put it, “without having seen the Sistine Chapel one can form no appreciable idea of what one man is capable of achieving.” Find The Sistine Chapel book collection here.
Related Content:
Michelangelo’s David: The Fascinating Story Behind the Renaissance Marble Creation
New Video Shows What May Be Michelangelo’s Lost & Now Found Bronze Sculptures
Michelangelo’s Handwritten 16th-Century Grocery List
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.
Read More...The History of Iron Maiden: A Documentary Streaming Free Online
From the official Iron Maiden YouTube channel comes the two-part documentary The History of Iron Maiden. Released in 2004, Part 1: The Early Days (above) moves from the band’s beginnings in London’s East End in 1975, to the Piece of Mind album and tour in 1983. Part 2 (below) was later included on the Live After Death DVD release in 2008.
The History of Iron Maiden will be added to our collection of Free Documentaries, a subset of our collection 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
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!
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1980s Metalhead Kids Are Alright: Scientific Study Shows That They Became Well-Adjusted Adults
Who Invented Heavy Metal Music?: A Search for Origins
Read More...100-Year-Old Music Recordings Can Now Be Heard for the First Time, Thanks to New Digital Technology
If you were listening to recorded music around the turn of the twentieth century, you listened to it on cylinders. Not that anyone alive today was listening to recorded music back then, and much of it has since been lost. Invented by Alexander Graham Bell (better known for his work on an even more popular device known as the telephone), the recording cylinder marked a considerable improvement on Thomas Edison’s earlier tinfoil phonograph. Never hesitant to capitalize on an innovation — no matter who did the innovating — Edison then began marketing cylinders of his own, soon turning his own name into the format’s most popular and recognizable brand.
“Edison set up coin-operated phonograph machines that would play pre-recorded wax cylinders in train stations, hotel lobbies, and other public places throughout the United States,” writes Atlas Obscura’s Sarah Durn. They also became the medium choice for hobbyists. “One of the most famous is Lionel Mapleson,” says Jennifer Vanasco in an NPR story from earlier this month.
“He recorded his family,” but “he was also the librarian for the Metropolitan Opera. And in the early 1900s, he recorded dozens of rehearsals and performances. Listening to his work is the only way you can hear pre-World War I opera singers with a full orchestra”: German soprano Frieda Hempel, singing “Evviva la Francia!” above.
The “Mapleson Cylinders” constitute just part of the New York Public Library’s collection of about 2,700 recordings in that format. “Only a small portion of those cylinders, around 175, have ever been digitized,” writes Durn. “The vast majority of the cylinders have never even been played in the generations since the library acquired them.” Most have become too fragile to withstand the needles of traditional players. Enter Endpoint Audio Labs’ $50,000 Cylinder and Dictabelt Machine, which uses a combination of needle and laser to read and digitize even already-damaged cylinders without harm. Only seven of Endpoint’s machines exist in the world, one of them a recent acquisition of the NYPL’s, which will now be able to play many of its cylinders for the first time in more than a century.
Some of these cylinders are unlabeled, their contents unknown. Curator Jessica Wood, as Velasco says, is hoping to “hear a birthday party or something that tells us more about the social history at the time, even someone shouting their name and explaining they’re testing the machine, which is a pretty common thing to hear on these recordings.” She knows that the NYPL’s collection has “about eight cylinders from Portugal, which may be some of the oldest recordings ever made in the country,” as well as “five Argentinian cylinders that have preserved the sound of century-old tango music.” In the event, from the first cylinder she puts on for NPR’s microphone issue familiar words: “Hello, my baby. Hello, my honey. Hello, my ragtime gal.” This listening experience perhaps felt like something less than time travel. But then, were you really to go back to 1899, what song would you be more likely to hear?
Related content:
Hear Singers from the Metropolitan Opera Record Their Voices on Traditional Wax Cylinders
A Beer Bottle Gets Turned Into a 19th Century Edison Cylinder and Plays Fine Music
400,000+ Sound Recordings Made Before 1923 Have Entered the Public Domain
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.
Read More...The Woman Who Theorized Color: An Introduction to Mary Gartside’s New Theory of Colours (1808)
“I shall only say that those ladies who study the rules of the art, secure a never-ceasing source of pleasure to themselves, which is always at their own command.… while those who pursue the practical part alone, can make no progress whenever their teacher or copy is withdrawn.”
The history of color theory is a story we tell based on available facts. Like many histories, it has mostly been a story by and about men. Isaac Newton’s experiments with optics inspired the broader inquiry. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1810 Theory of Colors set a standard — visually and philosophically — for books about color in the following centuries. A series of lesser-known names surround them, to the founders of color monopolist Pantone and beyond.
Maybe the story would be different if Mary Gartside’s work had been more readily available to her contemporaries and successors. Gartside, an English watercolor teacher and painter of botanical subjects, published An Essay on Light and Shade in 1805, and an expanded edition, An Essay on a New Theory of Colours in 1808. The obscure study constitutes “one of the rarest and most unusual books about color ever published,” says Alexandra Loske, curator at Brighton’s Royal Pavilion and herself a historian of color.
Loske found that Gartside is “one of the only nineteenth-century women to have composed ‘theoretical treatises on colour,’ ” as Public Domain Review writes, “nearly a century before Emily Noyes Vanderpoel published her Color Problems (1902).”
Gartside wrote in conversation with Newton and in critique of “eighteenth-century theories proposed by Gerard de Lairesse and William Herschel.” Gartside’s book anticipates Goethe and James Sowerby’s 1809 A New Elucidation of Colours and draws “parallel conclusions” about “the eye of the beholder as the centre and origin of colour perception.”
Gartside dressed her philosophy in what Ann Bermingham calls “the very modesty of the genre” of watercolor painting guides, the writing of which constituted a respectable outlet for women, where critical thought was not. The author gestures toward this state of affairs in her introduction, stating that she does not “offer my opinion unasked,” and noting emphatically she can only teach “to the best of my knowledge.” Her knowledge turns out to be considerable. Moreover, Public Domain Review writes, her “hand colored illustrations for the Essay, unique to each volume, have been deemed some of the earlier examples of abstraction in painting.”
Indeed, Gartside’s detailed instructions on the practical application of theory seem to presage the abstractions of Vasily Kandinsky, who brought his personal metaphysics to the formulae in the 1923 book Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Unlike the Romantics of her time — and like the Modernists of two hundred years later — Gartside de-emphasized individual genius while stressing the importance of theoretical understanding. Only through a knowledge of color theory and psychology, she writes boldly, could one achieve “command” of the art and make it their own, as she surely did in her illustrations. Joseph Litts points out in an essay for Material Matters:
Gartside used her medium of watercolor painting to engage with contemporary debates on color. Her understanding of color and color theory is the significant contribution of her book. She recasts both Isaac Newton’s theory of prismatic color and Sir William Herschel’s theory of radial color by creating a “color ball” that wraps the chromatic prism into a continual spectrum. Such a color ball anticipates Goethe’s attempts to put color into wheels, a shift from earlier grid representations.
Though Gartside would not claim the mantle of genius for herself or her readers (and she avoids fuzzy talk of inspiration, the muses, and so forth), we may place her confidently in the company of great color theorists and illustrators. And we might also see how her work shows an approach not taken, or not taken until a couple centuries later.
“There is no other example of a representation of colour systems,” Loske writes, “that is as inventive and radical as Gartside’s colour blots.” Learn more about Loske’s discovery of Gartside’s work in Kelly Grover’s BBC essay “The Women Who Redefined Colour.” See more of Gartside’s watercolors at the Public Domain Review.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...The Efficacy of Protest Songs — Four Songwriters Discuss on Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #121
Are protest songs effective, either as protest or songs? Your host Mark Linsenmayer is joined by Lilli Lewis, Rod Picott, and Tyler Hislop to discuss how protest works in various musical genres, who it’s aimed at, and when it goes wrong. Has the day of the protest song passed, or is it alive and well?
Rod mentions how Bruce Springsteen clarified the political character of “Born in the U.S.A.” by rearranging it (and so did Neil Young with “Rockin’ in the Free World.”) We also mention “1913 Massacre,” “Fuck the Police,” “Signs,” “Ohio,” “We Are the World,” “Why We Build the Wall,” crappy protest songs against COVID restrictions, Hip Hop for Respect, and more.
Lilli mentions Crys Matthews. Mark mentions this article about Twisted Sister and their song used for Ukraine. Visit worldunited.live re. Ukraine.
Each of us has written some kind of political song: Rod, Lilli, Tyler, and Mark. Learn more about Lilli and Rod’s current releases at folkrockdiva.com and rodpicott.com.
Some articles with more lists and such include:
- “The 50 Greatest Protest Songs” by Martin O’Gorman
- “Rolling Stone Readers’ Poll: The 10 Best Protest Songs of All Time” by Andy Greene
- “The Popdose 100: The Greatest Protest Songs of All Time“
- “The Most Misunderstood Political Songs Ever: 10 Tracks You Didn’t Get” by Brett Milan
- “10 of the Worst Political Songs You’ll Ever Hear” by Tom Hawking
- “The Ten Least Effective Protest Songs” by Tim Worthington
- “Protest Music: Songs and Free Speech” at First Amendment Museum
Follow us @folkrockdiva, @RodPicott, @sacrifice_mc, and @MarkLinsenmayer.
This episode includes bonus discussion featuring all of our guests that you can access by supporting the podcast 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.
Read More...The Birth of the Blues Brothers: How Dan Aykroyd & John Belushi Started Introducing a New Generation to the Blues
What were the Blues Brothers? A comedy sketch? A parody act? A real band? A celebrity soul artist tribute? All of the above, yes. The musical-comedic duo of Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi turned a ludicrous beginning in bumble bee costumes — not dark suits, fedoras, and Ray-Bans — into a musical act that “exposed a generation to the brilliance of blues and soul legends like John Lee Hooker and Aretha Franklin,” as Darren Weale writes at Loudersound.
That’s quite an accomplishment for a couple of improv comedians on a fledgling late-night comedy show that did not seem, in its first year, like it would stick around long. It was during that anarchic period when the Killer Bees became recurring characters on the show, appearing 11 times (despite the studio note, “Cut the bees,” which Lorne Michaels pointedly ignored).
The bees were the first incarnation of the Blues Brothers, two years before their actual debut in Season 4. (See a later appearance from that season, introduced by Garrett Morris, just above).
A January 17, 1976 appearance of the bees featured “Howard Shore and his All Bee Band,” consisting of “Aykroyd on the harmonica and Belushi on vocals belting out a blues classic very much in the style of the future Elwood and ‘Joliet’ Jake Blues,” notes History.com. They had the beginnings of an act, but the look and the personas would come later, “during the hiatus between SNL seasons two and three” in 1977, while Belushi filmed Animal House in Eugene, Oregon and fell under the spell of local bluesman Curtis Salgado, future harmonica player for Robert Cray.
Salgado “sure turned John on to blues music,” says Aykroyd. “He steeped him in blues culture.” Salgado himself describes how Belushi won him over on their first meeting: “I’m packing up my harps, trying to break free, when he says, ‘I’m going to have Ray Charles on the show.’ ” Salgado also gave Belushi a lesson in playing it straight, even when he played the blues for laughs. When the comic performed the song “Hey Bartender” to a packed house one night, in character as Joe Cocker, his mentor gave him a post-show dressing down.
“He asks me, ‘What did you think?’”
“I say, ‘John, it’s Joe Cocker.’”
‘Yes, I do Joe on Saturday Night Live.’
“I punch his chest and say, ‘You need to do this from here [pointing at his heart] and be yourself.’ After that he didn’t mimic any more. He was himself.”
Taking the look of Jake and Elwood from Salgado, but developing the character as his swaggering self, Belushi “came back from Oregon with a lust for the blues,” his widow, Judith, recalls. “He had tapes in his pockets and went to clubs.” (See the duo play “Hey Bartender” at the Universal Amphitheater in 1978, below.)
The name was the brainchild of SNL musical director Howard Shore (who would go on to write the Lord of the Rings film scores), who happened to be present when the two conceived the characters at a bar. Their 1978 debut — made over the protests of Lorne Michaels (who didn’t get it) — made them instant stars.
Paul Shaffer spun their origin story in his introduction, “claiming that they had been discovered in 1969 by the fictional ‘Marshall Checker,” writes Mental Floss. He went on:
Today they are no longer an authentic blues act, but have managed to become a viable commercial product. So now, let’s join “Joliet” Jake and his silent brother Elwood — the Blues Brothers.
With that, the never-authentic blues act did, indeed, become a viable commercial product. “Things started to move quickly,” Weale writes. “Record executive Michael Klenfner took John and Dan to see Ahmet Ertegün at Atlantic Records. He signed the Blues Brothers up.” They were a real act, and two years later, real movie stars with the release of John Landis’ The Blues Brothers, a film that fully delivered on the duo’s comic promises, while gleefully giving the spotlight away to its huge cast of soul and blues legends
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Saturday Night Live’s Very First Sketch: Watch John Belushi Launch SNL in October, 1975
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...What Great Archaeological Sites Used To Actually Look Like: Machu Picchu, the Colossus of Rhodes, Hadrian’s Wall & More in All Their Glory
With national border restrictions now loosening up, many of us are reviving our years-dormant world travel plans. For some, the pandemic-induced suspension of easy access to other countries has even inspired journeys they might not otherwise have taken. Stuck at home, they realized that they’d never seen the wonders of the ancient world — or at any rate, what remains of the wonders of the ancient world. Ruin tourism has a long and prestigious history, of course, but it also has the undesirable side effect of subconsciously convincing us that our ancient forebears lived amid a more shambolic built environment than they really did. To see these ruins as they were before their ruination demands a strong imagination.
Alternatively, you can watch the video above, which presents artistic reconstructions of such still-frequented sites as Pompeii, Machu Picchu, Chichen Itza, the Parthenon, and the Great Pyramid of Giza. You can still see some these structures for yourself, of course, albeit only now that the ravages of time — as well as those of various plunderers, scavengers, and institutions — have taken their terrible toll.
(The food hall of Nero’s palace still stands, but the water-powered rotation system that made it history’s first revolving restaurant has long since gone out of order.) Others of them nobody has seen since antiquity itself: the Colossus of Rhodes once stood a hundred feet tall over that Greek island, but it only did so for 54 years until its toppling by an Earthquake in 226 BC.
Yet over the two-and-a-quarter millennia since, the Colossus has come to take on much greater proportions in our minds. “The famous imagery of it straddling the harbor,” says the video, only “came about centuries later, and was touted by historians in the Middle Ages who had never seen the monument. The harbor itself is almost the same width as an American football field, so to be proportionally accurate, the statue would have to stand a stupendous 1,640 feet tall. This was firmly impossible at the time.” Even today, nowhere on Earth boasts a statue that’s so much as half that size. And indeed, this may constitute the enduring appeal of ruins: however glorious they would have been when whole, their worn, discolored fragments fire our imaginations to much greater heights.
Related content:
Pompeii Rebuilt: A Tour of the Ancient City Before It Was Entombed by Mount Vesuvius
How Ancient Greek Statues Really Looked: Research Reveals Their Bold, Bright Colors and Patterns
Roman Statues Weren’t White; They Were Once Painted in Vivid, Bright Colors
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.
Read More...In 1968, Stanley Kubrick Makes Predictions for 2001: Humanity Will Conquer Old Age, Watch 3D TV & Learn German in 20 Minutes
Image by Moody Man, via Flickr Commons
1968. Revolution was in the air and the future seemed bright. That year, Stanley Kubrick released his masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey – a big-budget, experimental rumination on the evolution of mankind. The film was a huge box office hit when it came out; its mind-bending metaphysics resonated with the culture’s newfound interest in chemically altered states and in spirituality.
In the September issue from that year, Playboy magazine published a lengthy interview with Kubrick. Even at a time when public figures were supposed to sound like intellectuals (boy, times have changed), Kubrick comes across as insanely well read. During the course of the interview, he quotes from the likes of media critic Marshall McLuhan, Winston Churchill, and 19th Century poet Matthew Arnold along with a handful of prominent academics.
Kubrick is characteristically cagey about offering any explanations of his enigmatic movie but he does readily expound on philosophical questions about God, the meaning of life (or lack thereof) and the possibility of extraterrestrial life. But perhaps the most interesting part of the 17-page interview is his vision of what 2001 might look like. It’s fascinating to see what he got right, what might be right a bit further into the future, and what’s completely wrong. Check them out below:
“Within ten years, in fact, I believe that freezing of the dead will be a major industry in the United States and throughout the world; I would recommend it as a field of investment for imaginative speculators.”
“Perhaps the greatest breakthrough we may have made by 2001 is the possibility that man may be able to eliminate old age.”
“I’m sure we’ll have sophisticated 3‑D holographic television and films, and it’s possible that completely new forms of entertainment and education will be devised.”
“You might have a machine that taps the brain and ushers you into a vivid dream experience in which you are the protagonist in a romance or an adventure. On a more serious level, a similar machine could directly program you with knowledge: in this way, you might, for example, easily be able to learn fluent German in 20 minutes.”
“I believe by 2001 we will have devised chemicals with no adverse physical, mental or genetic results that can give wings to the mind and enlarge perception beyond its present evolutionary capacities…there should be fascinating drugs available by 2001; what use we make of them will be the crucial question.”
“The so-called sexual revolution, mid-wifed by the pill, will be extended. Through drugs, or perhaps via the sharpening or even mechanical amplification of latent ESP functions, it may be possible for each partner to simultaneously experience the sensations of the other; or we may eventually emerge into polymorphous sexual beings, with male and female components blurring, merging and interchanging. The potentialities for exploring new areas of sexual experience are virtually boundless.”
“Looking into the distant future, I suppose it’s not inconceivable that a semisentient robot-computer subculture could evolve that might one day decide it no longer needed man.”
For such a famously pessimistic filmmaker, Kubrick’s vision of the future is remarkably groovy – lots of sex, drugs and holographic television. He wasn’t, of course, the only one out there who thought about the future. You can see more bold predictions below:
Isaac Asimov Predicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like Today — in 2014
Arthur C. Clarke Predicts the Future in 1964 … And Kind of Nails It
Walter Cronkite Imagines the Home of the 21st Century … Back in 1967
The Internet Imagined in 1969
Marshall McLuhan Announces That The World is a Global Village
Note: Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in November 2014.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.
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