Benedict Cumberbatch Reads “the Best Cover Letter Ever Written”
In the 1930s, many a writer journeyed to Hollywood in order to make his fortune. The screenwriter’s life didn’t sit well with some of them — just ask F. Scott Fitzgerald or William Faulkner — but a fair few made more than a go of it out West. Take the Baltimore-born Robert Pirosh, whose studies at the Sorbonne and the University of Berlin landed him a job as a copywriter in New York. This work seems to have proven less than satisfactory, as evidenced by the piece of correspondence that, still in his early twenties, he wrote and sent to “as many directors, producers and studio executives as he could find.” It wasn’t just a request for work; it was what Letters Live today calls “the best cover letter ever written.”
Pirosh’s impressive missive, which you can hear read aloud by favorite Letters Live performer Benedict Cumberbatch in the video above, runs, in full, as follows:
Dear Sir:
I like words. I like fat buttery words, such as ooze, turpitude, glutinous, toady. I like solemn, angular, creaky words, such as straitlaced, cantankerous, pecunious, valedictory. I like spurious, black-is-white words, such as mortician, liquidate, tonsorial, demi-monde. I like suave “V” words, such as Svengali, svelte, bravura, verve. I like crunchy, brittle, crackly words, such as splinter, grapple, jostle, crusty. I like sullen, crabbed, scowling words, such as skulk, glower, scabby, churl. I like Oh-Heavens, my-gracious, land’s‑sake words, such as tricksy, tucker, genteel, horrid. I like elegant, flowery words, such as estivate, peregrinate, elysium, halcyon. I like wormy, squirmy, mealy words, such as crawl, blubber, squeal, drip. I like sniggly, chuckling words, such as cowlick, gurgle, bubble and burp.
I like the word screenwriter better than copywriter, so I decided to quit my job in a New York advertising agency and try my luck in Hollywood, but before taking the plunge I went to Europe for a year of study, contemplation and horsing around.
I have just returned and I still like words.
May I have a few with you?
Though not known as an unsubtle actor, Cumberbatch seizes the opportunity to deliver each and every one of these choice words with its own variety of exaggerated relish. Though none of these terms is especially recherché on its own, they must collectively have given the impression of a formidable mastery of the English language, especially to the ear of the average Hollywood big-shot. One way or another, Pirosh’s letter did the trick: according to Letters of Note, it “secured him three interviews, one of which led to his job as a junior writer at MGM. Fifteen years later,” he “won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for his work on the war film Battleground.”
A World War II picture, Battleground was written at least in part from Pirosh’s own experience: a few years into his Hollywood career, he enlisted and made a return to Europe, this time as a Master Sergeant in the 320th Regiment, 35th Infantry Division, seeing action in France and Germany. After the war he went right back to writing and producing, remaining active in the entertainment industry until at least the 1970s (and in fact, his writing credits include contributions to such programs that defined that decade as Mannix, Barnaby Jones, and Hawaii Five‑O). Pirosh’s was an enviable 20th-century career, and one that began with a suitably brazen — and still convincing — 20th-century advertisement for himself.
Related Content:
Hunter S. Thompson’s Ballsy Job Application Letter (1958)
Benedict Cumberbatch Reads Kurt Vonnegut’s Letter of Advice to People Living in the Year 2088
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...Medieval Scribes Discouraged Theft of Manuscripts by Adding Curses Threatening Death & Damnation to Their Pages
I’ve concluded that one shouldn’t lend a book unless one is prepared to part with it for good. But most books are fairly easy to replace. Not so in the Middle Ages, when every manuscript counted as one of a kind. Theft was often on the minds of the scribes who copied and illustrated books, a laborious task requiring literal hours of blood, sweat and tears each day.
Scribal copying took place “only by natural light — candles were too big a risk to the books,” Sarah Laskow writes at Atlas Obscura. Bent over double, scribes could not let their attention wander. The art, one scribe complained, “extinguishes the light from the eyes, it bends the back, it crushes the viscera and the ribs, it brings forth pain to the kidneys, and weariness to the whole body.”
The results deserved high security, and Medieval monks “did not hesitate to use the worst punishments they knew” for manuscript theft, writes Laskow, namely threats of “excommunication from the church and horrible, painful death.”
Theft deterrence came in the form of ingenious curses, written into the manuscripts themselves, going “back to the 7th century BCE,” Rebecca Romney writes at Mental Floss. Appearing “in Latin, vernacular European languages, Arabic, Greek, and more,” they came in such creative flavors as death by roasting, as in a Bible copied in Germany around 1172: “If anyone steals it: may he die, may he be roasted in a frying pan, may the falling sickness [epilepsy] and fever attack him, and may he be rotated [on the breaking wheel] and hanged. Amen.”
A few hundred years later, a manuscript curse from 15th-century France also promises roasting, or worse:
Whoever steals this book
Will hang on a gallows in Paris,
And, if he isn’t hung, he’ll drown,
And, if he doesn’t drown, he’ll roast,
And, if he doesn’t roast, a worse end will befall him.
The plucking out of eyes also appears to have been a theme. “Whoever to steal this volume tries, Out with his eyes, out with his eyes!” warns the final couplet in a 13th-century curse from a Vatican Library manuscript. Another curse in verse, found by author Marc Drogin, author of Anathema! Medieval Scribes and the History of Book Curses, gets especially graphic with the eye gouging:
To steal this book, if you should try,
It’s by the throat you’ll hang high.
And ravens then will gather ’bout
To find your eyes and pull them out.
And when you’re screaming ‘oh, oh, oh!’
Remember, you deserved this woe.
The hoped-for consequences were not always so grimly humorous. “Gruesome as these punishments seem,” the British Library writes, “to most medieval readers the worst curses were those that put the eternal fate of their souls at risk rather than their bodily health.” These would often be marked with the Greek word “Anathema,” sometimes “followed by the Aramaic formula ‘Maranatha’ (‘Come, Lord!’).” Both appear in a curse added to a manuscript of letters and sermons from Lesnes Abbey. Yet, unlike most medieval curses, here the thief is given a chance to make restitution. “Anyone who removes it or does damage to it: if the same person does not repay the church sufficiently, may he be cursed.”
Curses were not the only security solutions of manuscript culture. Medieval monks also used book chains and locked chests to secure the fruit of their hard labor. As the old saying goes, “trust in God, but tie your camel.” But if locks and divine providence should fail, scribes trusted that the fear of punishment – even eternal damnation — down the road would be enough to make would-be book thieves think again.
Related Content:
160,000+ Medieval Manuscripts Online: Where to Find Them
Why Butt Trumpets & Other Bizarre Images Appeared in Illuminated Medieval Manuscripts
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...The Life & Music of the Godmother of Rock and Roll, Sister Rosetta Tharpe
When I was a wee lad I was interested in the history of rock and roll. Where did it come from? Who started it? But also when I was wee, there didn’t seem to be a lot of information around, certainly not in my library downtown. But when Muddy Waters died in 1983, I started to understand that rock and roll was sped-up blues, and pieces started to slot together. However, women weren’t part of the equation. (Blame Rolling Stone Magazine).
That’s a long way of saying the Sister Rosetta Tharpe should be better known than she is, especially as one dubbed the Godmother of Rock and Roll. Playing scratchy, distorted electric guitar and singing as if on a direct line to heaven, Tharpe would go on to influence everybody from Elvis Presley to Chuck Berry, and everybody who came after her. So why is she not more of a household name?
The 2011 BBC documentary above (split into four 15-minute chunks) resuscitates a legend who not only played a mean guitar but set the standard for the gospel-crossover artist, making a name on the gospel circuit, but making her fame in the secular nightclubs of America. Tharpe’s distinction is that she returned to gospel without losing any of her edge.
A precocious youngster in Arkansas during the early 1920s, she became the star of her Pentecostal church starting at four years old. Raised by her mother, then forced into an arranged marriage at 19-years-old to an older preacher, Thomas Tharpe, she kept his name when she left their abusive marriage. She and her mother relocated to Chicago, where blues and jazz were intermingling in a hothouse culture. Decca signed her, and although she told her churchgoing friends that she had to sing these secular songs because of that darned seven-year contract, Tharpe rose to fame quickly. The footage of her singing in front of the Cotton Club band led by Lucky Millinder is one of a cheeky, charming 23 year old.
As the doc makes clear, Tharpe had a rebellious streak, didn’t do what she was told, and pushed boundaries in a very segregated America. She invited the all-white Jordanaires to tour with her, surprising house managers and booking agents alike. And she carried on a love affair and creative partnership with fellow gospel singer Marie Knight for decades, very much on the down low.
So perhaps this is the reason Tharpe has not been on our collective radar—we’ve been slow to admit that rock guitar was created by a queer black woman devoted to the Lord. Nobody in the audience knew this, though, at the abandoned railway station at Wilbraham Road, Manchester, in May 1964. On one side of the station’s tracks, British teenagers were gathered to hear raw, rock and roll from America. On the other side, Tharpe stands with her guitar, wearing a thick coat to protect her from the spring rain. Backed by her band, she channels a holy force and sings about the rain of the Great Flood, the lyrics abstract and repetitive, as if in a trance. The footage opens the documentary and makes as good a case as any of why Tharpe should be part of the pantheon of rock royalty. (You can see the whole clip here.) Back in the States, Tharpe had been eclipsed by Mahalia Jackson, but the Brits didn’t know any of that. They just sense they’ve tapped into one of the sources for the music exploding around them.
It took until 2018 for Tharpe to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, years after all those white boy copycats. Now is the time to re-discover her and hear what you’ve been missing.
Related Content:
New Web Project Immortalizes the Overlooked Women Who Helped Create Rock and Roll in the 1950s
An Introduction to Sister Rosetta Tharpe
Muddy Waters and Friends on the Blues and Gospel Train, 1964
Watch the Hot Guitar Solos of Sister Rosetta Tharpe
Revisit The Life & Music of Sister Rosetta Tharpe: ‘The Godmother of Rock and Roll’
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.
Read More...Saying Goodbye to Charlie Watts (RIP), the Engine of the Rolling Stones for Half a Century
Charlie Watts, the Rolling Stones’ iconic drummer since 1962, passed away yesterday from unspecified causes at the age of 80. His death is a great loss for rock and roll. “When Charlie Watts dies, the beat stops,” Rob Harvilla writes at the Ringer, “never to be played again with such mesmerizing force, with such ultra-suave propulsion, with such casually indomitable radness.” These are not technical terms, and Watts was not a technical drummer. “I’m not a paradiddle man,” he said in 2000. “It’s not technical, it’s emotional. One of the hardest things of all is to get that feeling across.”
Watts perfected the indefinable feel of rock and roll by way of jazz, playing along to his favorite records by Charlie Parker — first with a set of wire brushes on an unstrung banjo, then on the first drum kit his father bought him.
From the greats, he learned to swing and mastered dynamics. The commanding martial crack of Watts’ snare held a band of motley pirates together — without him, the Stones might have dissolved into a collection of preening antics and wandering blues licks; with him at the center, they coalesced into a team. “I don’t know how the hell that old sucker got to be so good,” Keef marveled.
Watts would be the last one to talk about how good he was — he hated interviews and stardom in general. “I’ve never been interested in all that stuff and still am not,” he said. “I don’t know what showbiz is and I’ve never watched MTV. There are people who just play instruments, and I’m pleased to know that I’m one of them.” His singular focus came from listening intently to what others were doing, as he says in the interview at the top, and copying what they did, a method he calls “one of my flaws…. I learned by watching.” But the means by which Watts learned to play made him the perfect drummer for the Stones. He watched, listened, learned the songs, then played them perfectly in tune with the band, keeping them in time while responding dynamically to Richards and Jagger’s interplay.
“I should have gone to school and learned how to do it,” Watts says, with typical self-deprecation. Instead, he made his school the jazz clubs of London and Paris, where he went to see Bud Powell’s drummer Kenny Clark. Just as he’d done in his room on his first drum kit, he listened intently and copied what he heard. Watts looked like a man who stood apart from the band, with his world-weary expression, endless collection of sharp suits and reserved demeanor. But when he played with the Stones, they locked together. It was love, he said, “I love this band.”
His life was a testament to the vitality of the music that made him, at 80, still want to go back on the road after announcing just two weeks ago that he’d have to sit out this year’s tour. Forty years ago, Watts couldn’t foresee the band he helped make world famous lasting very much longer. “I never thought it would last five minutes,” he said in 1981, “but I figured I’d live that five minutes to the hilt because I love them. They’re bigger than I am if you really want to know. I admire them, I like them as friends, I argue with them and I love them…. I don’t really care if it stops…. “ Now that he’s gone, it’s hard to see how the Stones can go on.
As nearly every member of the band, especially Richards, has said at one time or another, no Charlie Watts, no Rolling Stones. “Charlie’s the engine,” said Ronnie Wood in the Stones documentary Tip of the Tongue. “We don’t go anywhere without the engine.” Wherever they go now, there’s no question the Rolling Stones would have been a different band entirely without him. See some of his best live moments in the clips above and learn what Charlie himself thought of his playing in the short documentary at the top, “If It Ain’t Got That Swing,” a record of his approach to drumming and life in general that captures the true spirit of a rock legend.
Related Content:
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...How the COVID-19 Vaccines Could Be Created So Quickly: Two Animated Videos Explain the How mRNA Vaccines Were Developed, and How They Work
The world now has COVID-19 vaccines, of which more and more people are receiving their doses every day. A year and a half ago the world did not have COVID-19 vaccines, though it was fast becoming clear how soon it would need them. The subsequent development of the ones now being deployed around the world took not just less than a year and a half but less than a year, an impressive speed even to many of us who never dug deep into medical science. The achievement owes in part to the use of mRNA, a term most of us may recall only dimly from biology classes; through the pandemic, messenger ribonucleic acid, to use its full name, has proven if not the savior of humanity, then at least the very molecule we needed.
One shouldn’t get “the idea that these vaccines came out of nowhere.” On Twitter, Dan Rather — these days a more outspoken figure than ever — calls the prevalence such a notion “a failure of science communication with tragic results,” describing the vaccines as “the result of DECADES of basic research in MULTIPLE fields building on the BREADTH and DEPTH of human knowledge.”
You can get a clearer sense of what that research has involved through videos like the animated TED-Ed explainer above. “In the twentieth century, most vaccines took well over a decade to research, test, and produce,” says its narrator. “But the vaccines for COVID-19 cleared the threshold for use in less than eleven months.” The “secret”? mRNA.
A “naturally occurring molecule that encodes the instructions for occurring proteins,” mRNA can be used in vaccines to “safely introduce our body to a virus.” Researchers first “encode trillions of mRNA molecules with instructions for a specific viral protein.” Then they inject those molecules into a specially designed “nanoparticle” also containing lipids, sugars, and salts. When it reaches our cells, this nanoparticle triggers our immune response: the body produces “antibodies to fight that viral protein, that will then stick around to defend against future COVID-19 infections.” And all of this happens without the vaccine altering out DNA,
While mRNA vaccines will “have a big impact on how we fight COVID-19,” says the narrator of the Vox video above, “their real impact is just beginning.” Their development marked “a turning point for the pandemic,” but given their potential applications in the battles against a host of other, even deadlier diseases (e.g., HIV), “the pandemic might also be a turning point for vaccines.”
Related Content:
How Fast Can a Vaccine Be Made?: An Animated Introduction
How Do Vaccines (Including the COVID-19 Vaccines) Work?: Watch Animated Introductions
How Vaccines Improved Our World In One Graphic
19th Century Maps Visualize Measles in America Before the Miracle of Vaccines
Yo-Yo Ma Plays an Impromptu Performance in Vaccine Clinic After Receiving 2nd Dose
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 Wicked Scene in Amadeus When Mozart Mocked the Talents of His Rival Antonio Salieri: How Much Does the Film Square with Reality?
Pity the ghost of Antonio Salieri, “one of history’s all-time losers — a bystander run over by a Mack truck of malicious gossip,” writes Alex Ross at The New Yorker. The rumors began even before his death. “In 1825, a story that he had poisoned Mozart went around Vienna. In 1830, Alexander Pushkin used that rumor as the basis for his play ‘Mozart and Salieri,’ casting the former as the doltish genius and the latter as a jealous schemer.” The stories became further embellished in an opera by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, then again in 1979 by British playwright Peter Shaffer, whose Amadeus, “a sophisticated variation on Pushkin’s concept, …became a mainstay of the modern stage.”
In 1984, these fictions became the basis of Miloš Forman’s Amadeus, written by Shaffer for the screen. The film further solidifies Salieri’s villainy in F. Murray Abraham’s Oscar-winning performance of his envy and despair. Like all great cinematic villains, Salieri is shown to have good reason for his hatred of the hero, played as a manic toddler by Thomas Hulce, who was nominated for the same best-actor award Abraham won. In their first meeting (above), Mozart humiliates Salieri in the presence of the Emperor, insulting him several times and showing that Salieri’s years of toil and devotion are worth little more than what the German prodigy mastered as a small child, and could improve upon immeasurably with hardly any effort at all.
Is there truth to this scene? In general, the history of Amadeus is “laughably wrong,” Alex von Tunzelmann writes at The Guardian, though maybe the joke’s on us if we believe it. As Forman’s film takes pains to show, what we see on screen is not an objective point of view, but that of an aged, embittered, insane man remembering his past with regret. Salieri is a most unreliable narrator, and Forman an unreliable storyteller. The supposed “Welcome March” composed for Mozart in the scene above is not a Salieri composition at all, but a simplification of the aria from Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, which Hulce-as-Mozart then transforms into the actual tune of the aria.
Other inaccuracies abound. The Salieri of history was not “a sexually frustrated, dried-up old bachelor,” von Tunzelmann notes. “He had eight children by his wife, and is reputed have had at least one mistress.” He was also more colleague and friendly competitor than enemy of the newly-arrived Mozart in Vienna. The two even composed a piece together for singer Nancy Storace, who played the first Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro. While Mozart wrote to his father of a shadowy cabal arrayed against him at court, there is no evidence of a plot, and Mozart could be, by all accounts, just as puerile and obnoxious as his portrayal in the film.
Mozart did die a pauper from a mysterious illness at 34. (He did not dictate the final passages of his Requiem to Salieri). And Salieri did later confess to poisoning Mozart while he was aged and in a temporary state of mental illness, then retracted the claim when he later recovered. (“Let’s be honest,” writes von Tunzelmann, “nobody seriously thinks Salieri murdered Mozart.”) These are the barest historical facts upon which Amadeus’s infamous rivalry rests. The Salieri of the film is a fictional construction, created, as actor Simon Callow said of Shaffer’s play, to serve “a vast meditation on the relationship between genius and talent.”
In Forman’s film, the theme becomes the relationship between genius and mediocrity. But to call Salieri a mediocrity — or the “patron saint of mediocrities,” as Shaffer does in his play — “sets the bar for mediocrity too high,” Ross argues. “His music is worth hearing. Mozart was a greater composer, but not immeasurably greater.” Furthermore, “amid the procession of megalomaniacs, misanthropes, and basket cases who make up the classical pantheon, [Salieri] seems to have been one of the more likable fellows.”
Learn more about Salieri’s life and work in Ross’s New Yorker profile, and hear “4 Operas by Antonio Salieri You Should Listen To” at Opera Wire.
Related Content:
Mozart’s Diary Where He Composed His Final Masterpieces Is Now Digitized and Available Online
The Letters of Mozart’s Sister Maria Anna Get Transformed into Music
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Watch Anthony Bourdain’s First Food-and-Travel Series A Cook’s Tour Free Online (2002–03)
At the time of his death in 2018, Anthony Bourdain was quite possibly the most famous cook in the world. Without question he held the title of the most famous cook-traveler, a status resting primarily on No Reservations and Parts Unknown, the television shows he hosted on the Travel Chanel and CNN, respectively. But it all began with A Cook’s Tour, which the Food Network originally broadcast in 2002 and 2003. That series, Bourdain’s very first, took him from Japan to Morocco to Mexico to Australia to Thailand — and through many points in between — in search of the world’s most stimulating eating experiences.
Now A Cook’s Tour has come available free to watch on Youtube, thanks to the streaming channel GoTraveler (who also offer the show through their own service).
A Portuguese slaughtering-and-roasting party; vodka-fueled ice fishing in St. Petersburg; an exploration of the American “Barbecue Triangle” constituted by Kansas City, Houston, and North Carolina; and a best-faith effort to lose himself in Chiang Mai: if you caught these or other of Bourdain’s early international culinary adventures those nearly twenty years ago, you can relive them, and if you missed out, you can enjoy them for the first time.
During the launch phase of his rise to fame (after decades of restaurant work and years of writing, an effort that first produced a couple of food-themed murder-mystery novels), Bourdain managed to tap into a new wave of gastronomic interest then rising in America. He did so with a street-smart sense of humor that appealed even to viewers with no particular investment in the world of cooking and dining, as long as they had an interest in the world itself. With A Cook’s Tour, he took food television out of the kitchen — way out of the kitchen — and over the eighteen years since its conclusion, the series’ influence has become so pervasive as almost to be invisible. Anthony Bourdain may be gone, but parts of his personality live on in every high-profile traveler out there cooking, eating, and getting lost today.
Related Content:
Anthony Bourdain Talks About the Big Break That Changed His Life — at Age 44
Al Jazeera Travel Show Explores World Cities Through Their Street Food
Watch 26 Free Episodes of Jacques Pépin’s TV Show, More Fast Food My Way
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...How Caffeine Fueled the Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution & the Modern World: An Introduction by Michael Pollan
According to the current research, caffeine, “contributes much more to your health than it takes away.” These words come from a thinker no less vigilant about the state of food-and-drink science than Michael Pollan, and perhaps they’re all you feel you need to know on the subject. In fact, you’re probably taking in some form of caffeine even while reading this now. I know I’m doing so while writing it, and this, according to the Pollan-starring Wired video above, gives us something in common with the central figures of the Enlightenment. “Isaac Newton was a big coffee fan,” says Pollan, and Voltaire “apparently had 72 cups a day. I don’t know quite how you do that.”
The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, and the Industrial Revolution also owe much to the intellectual and commercial churn of the coffee house, an institution that emerged in 17th-century London. “There were coffee houses dedicated to literature, and writers and poets would congregate there,” says Pollan.
“There was a coffee house dedicated to selling stock, and that turned into the London Stock Exchange eventually. There was another one dedicated to science, tied to the Royal Institution, where great scientists of the period would get together.” Consumed in dedicated houses or elsewhere, the “new, sober, more civil drink was changing the way people thought and the way they worked.”
The relevant contrast is with alcohol, once an element of practically all beverages in Europe. Before caffeine got there, “people were drunk or buzzed most of the day. People would have alcohol with breakfast” — children included, since it was still healthier than contaminated water. This custom hardly encouraged clear, linear thought; Diderot, Pollan tells us, wrote the Encyclopédie while drinking coffee, but imagine the result, if any, had he been drinking wine. More than a quarter-millennium later, we have solid evidence that caffeine “does improve focus and memory, and the ability to learn,” if at the cost of a decent night’s sleep. Not that this seems to have bothered coffee-pounding Enlightenment thinkers: what’s a little tossing and turning, after all, when there’s a worldview to be revolutionized?
Pollan elaborates on the role coffee plays in our lives in his new book, This Is Your Mind on Plants. And separately see his short audio book, Caffeine: How Caffeine Created the Modern World.
Related Content:
The Curious Story of London’s First Coffeehouses (1650–1675)
Philosophers Drinking Coffee: The Excessive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard
“The Virtues of Coffee” Explained in 1690 Ad: The Cure for Lethargy, Scurvy, Dropsy, Gout & More
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...Philosophy vs. Improv: A New Podcast from The Partially Examined Life and Chicago Improv Studio
The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast has been sharing reading-group discussions on classic philosophy texts for well over a decade, with over 40 million downloads to date.
However, interactive conversations about texts you probably haven’t read can be difficult to follow no matter how much we try to make them accessible, and a decade of history means that many names that might be dropped that those newly checking in may or may not be familiar with.
I’m one of the hosts of that podcast, and while I’m very happy with the format and thrilled to have reached so many people with it, I also appreciate the dynamic of a one-on-one tutoring interchange, and I stand firmly behind one of the original rules of The Partially Examined Life: No name-dropping.
As we read more complicated texts, our interest becomes figuring out what the philosopher meant, and only secondarily whether that meaning actually relates to something in people’s actual lives. Yes, we are critical (some say too critical) of the subject-matter, but we’re also big fans; we could bask in the literary glow of Hegel or Plato or Simone de Beauvoir or Hannah Arendt all day, and have often done so.
My newest podcast, Philosophy vs. Improv, is reciprocal tutoring realized as comedy (or at least performance art?). As someone who studied philosophy for many years in school and has then been hosting The Partially Examined Life for so long, I’m in a good position to come up with particular philosophical points worth teaching to a new learner.
My Philosophy vs. Improv co-host is Bill Arnett, founder of the Chicago Improv Studio, author of The Complete Improviser, and the former training director at Chicago’s famed iO Theater. He has appeared repeatedly on the Hello From the Magic Tavern improv comedy podcast as a character named Metamore who leads the show’s hosts (who are all fantasy characters a la Tolkein or Narnia) in a table-top role-playing game called Offices and Bosses. This and other shows ignited in me an urge to learn the fundamentals of improv comedy, and so each Philosophy vs. Improv episode, Bill comes up with some trick of the trade to try to teach me.
There are two rules of engagement: First, we can’t just state up front what the lesson is. We can ask each other questions, go through exercises, and otherwise discuss the material, but the lesson should emerge naturally. Second, we don’t take turns in trying to teach each other. As he’s making me act out scenes, I’m trying to set up those scenes or have my character react in such a way to exemplify my philosophical point. As we’re discussing philosophy, Bill is relating it to comparable points about improv. Of course, we’re both interested in learning as well as teaching, so the “vs.” in the show’s title is not so much competition between us as between which lesson ends up more nearly producing its intended effect in the other person.
It is surprising how smoothly these dueling lessons often fit together, as lessens about ethics in particular, about the art of living, are very much relevant to the improvisational skills of being present, presenting yourself, discovering the reality of a situation, and exploring truths of character. Fiction is often a very effective vehicle for addressing philosophy, whether the characters themselves are talking philosophically (even if they’re animals, cave men, or otherwise in a non-typical situation for discussion), or perhaps we’re embodying some political situation or thought experiment that we’re subjecting to philosophical analysis.
Likewise, back to the days of Plato, a dose of irony in discussing philosophy can be useful, and this format allows us to not just be ourselves on a podcast discussing philosophy, but at any point to launch into some comedy bit, and in this way show the absurdity of views we’re arguing against or just play with the ideas in a manner that I think enhances mental flexibility, which is essential both for improvisation and for philosophical creativity.
Listen to the latest episode (#7), entitled “Meritocracy Now!”
Start listening with Philosophy vs. Improv episode 1.
For more information, see philosophyimprov.com.
Mark Linsenmayer is the host of four podcasts: Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast, Nakedly Examined Music, The Partially Examined Life, and Philosophy vs. Improv.
Read More...360 Degree Virtual Tours of the Hagia Sophia
Last year, when Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced that Hagia Sophia would be reconverted into a mosque, he assured a concerned UNESCO that changes to the 1,500-year-old former cathedral-turned-mosque would have “no negative impact” on its status as World Heritage Site. “A state must make sure that no modification undermines the outstanding universal value of a site listed on its territory,” the world body has said. Claims to the contrary notwithstanding, the “universal value” of the site does seem to have been undermined.
Designated a museum by the secular Turkish Republic in 1934, the site contains hundreds of years of history for both the Christian and Islamic worlds, and the shared heritage between them in the shifting mix of peoples who conquered, settled, and moved through the city first called Byzantium, then Constantinople, then Istanbul.
“The World Heritage site was at the centre of both the Christian Byzantine and Muslim Ottoman empires and is today one of Turkey’s most visited monuments,” Reuters noted last year.
The mosque is open to the public for prayers, and anyone can visit. What they’ll find — as you can see in this recent tour video — is ugly green carpeting covering the floor, and screens, panels, and plywood obscuring the Byzantine Christian art. (The same thing was done in the smaller Hagia Sophia in the city of Trabzon.) These changes are not only distressing for UNESCO, but also for lovers of art and history around the world, myself included, who had hoped to one day see the millennia-and-a-half of blended religious and aesthetic traditions for themselves.
It’s possible Turkish politics will allow Hagia Sophia to return to its status as a museum in the future, restoring its “universal value” for world history and culture. If not, we can still visit the space virtually — as it was until last year — in the 360 degree video views above, both of which allow you to look around in any direction as they play. You can also swivel around a spherical panoramic image at 360 cities.
The BBC video at the top narrates some of the significant features of the incredible building, once the largest church in the world, including its “colored marble from around the Roman Empire” and “10,000 square meters of gold mosaic.” Learn much more about Hagia Sophia history in the video above from Khan Academy’s executive directors (and former deans of art and history), Dr. Steven Zucker and Dr. Beth Harris.
Related Content:
An Introduction to Hagia Sophia: After 85 Years as a Museum, It’s Set to Become a Mosque Again
Hear the Sound of the Hagia Sophia Recreated in Authentic Byzantine Chant
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Support Us
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
About Us
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
Advertise With Us
FREE UPDATES!
GET OUR DAILY EMAIL
Get the best cultural and educational resources on the web curated for you in a daily email. We never spam. Unsubscribe at any time.
FOLLOW ON SOCIAL MEDIA
Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
Advertise With Us
