Watch Anthony Bourdain’s First Food-and-Travel Series A Cook’s Tour Free Online (2002–03)

in Food & Drink, Television, Travel | August 24th, 2021

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:

Watch Antho­ny Bourdain’s Free Show Raw Craft, Where He Vis­its Crafts­men Mak­ing Gui­tars, Tat­toos, Motor­cy­cles & More (RIP)

Antho­ny Bour­dain Talks About the Big Break That Changed His Life — at Age 44

Life Lessons from Antho­ny Bour­dain: How He Devel­oped His Iron Pro­fes­sion­al­ism, Achieved Cre­ative Free­dom & Learned from Fail­ure

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.

How Caffeine Fueled the Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution & the Modern World: An Introduction by Michael Pollan

in Food & Drink, History | August 24th, 2021

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

Hon­oré de Balzac Writes About “The Plea­sures and Pains of Cof­fee,” and His Epic Cof­fee Addic­tion

“The Virtues of Cof­fee” Explained in 1690 Ad: The Cure for Lethar­gy, Scurvy, Drop­sy, Gout & More

The Hertel­la Cof­fee Machine Mount­ed on a Volk­swa­gen Dash­board (1959): The Most Euro­pean Car Acces­so­ry Ever Made

Michael Pol­lan Explains How Cook­ing Can Change Your Life; Rec­om­mends Cook­ing Books, Videos & Recipes

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.

Philosophy vs. Improv: A New Podcast from The Partially Examined Life and Chicago Improv Studio

in Comedy, Philosophy, Podcasts | August 24th, 2021

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.

360 Degree Virtual Tours of the Hagia Sophia

in Architecture, Art, History, Travel | August 23rd, 2021

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

Istan­bul Cap­tured in Beau­ti­ful Col­or Images from 1890: The Hagia Sophia, Top­ka­ki Palace’s Impe­r­i­al Gate & More

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

Become a Project Manager Without a College Degree with Google’s Project Management Certificate

in Google, Online Courses, Technology | August 23rd, 2021

As we first men­tioned last year, Google has launched a series of Career Cer­tifi­cate pro­grams that allow stu­dents to gain exper­tise in a field, ide­al­ly enough to start work­ing with­out a 4‑year col­lege degree. This ini­tia­tive now includes a Cer­tifi­cate in Project Man­age­ment, which con­sists of six cours­es.

• Foun­da­tions of Project Man­age­ment
• Project Ini­ti­a­tion: Start­ing a Suc­cess­ful Project
• Project Plan­ning: Putting It All Togeth­er
• Project Exe­cu­tion: Run­ning the Project
• Agile Project Man­age­ment
• Cap­stone: Apply­ing Project Man­age­ment in the Real World

Above, a Pro­gram Man­ag­er talks about “her path from drop­ping out of high school and earn­ing a GED, join­ing the mil­i­tary, and work­ing as a coder, to learn­ing about pro­gram man­age­ment and switch­ing into that career track.” An intro­duc­tion to the Project Man­age­ment cer­tifi­cate appears below.

The Project Man­age­ment pro­gram takes about six months to com­plete, and should cost about $250 in total. Stu­dents get charged $39 per month until they com­plete the pro­gram.

You can explore the Project Man­age­ment cer­tifi­cate here. And find oth­er Google career cer­tifi­cates in oth­er fields–e.g. UX Design and Data Ana­lyt­ics–over on this page. All Google career cours­es are host­ed on the Cours­era plat­form.

Note: Open Cul­ture has a part­ner­ship with Cours­era. If read­ers enroll in cer­tain Cours­era cours­es and pro­grams, it helps sup­port Open Cul­ture.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Google Intro­duces 6‑Month Career Cer­tifi­cates, Threat­en­ing to Dis­rupt High­er Edu­ca­tion with “the Equiv­a­lent of a Four-Year Degree”

Google & Cours­era Launch Career Cer­tifi­cates That Pre­pare Stu­dents for Jobs in 6 Months: Data Ana­lyt­ics, Project Man­age­ment and UX Design

Google’s UX Design Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate: 7 Cours­es Will Help Pre­pare Stu­dents for an Entry-Lev­el Job in 6 Months

Alan Alda: 3 Ways to Express Your Thoughts So That Everyone Will Understand You

in Life, Psychology | August 20th, 2021

In need of some­one to per­form surgery in a com­bat zone, you prob­a­bly would­n’t choose Alan Alda, no mat­ter how many times you’ve seen him do it on tele­vi­sion. This sounds obvi­ous to those of us who believe that actors don’t know how to do any­thing at all. But a per­former like Alda does­n’t become a cul­tur­al icon by acci­dent: his par­tic­u­lar skill set has enabled him not just to com­mu­ni­cate with mil­lions at a time through film and tele­vi­sion, but also to nav­i­gate his off­screen and per­son­al life with a cer­tain adept­ness. In the Big Think video above, he reveals three of his own long-relied-upon strate­gies to “express your thoughts so that every­one will under­stand you.”

“I don’t real­ly like tips,” Alda declares. Stan­dard pub­lic-speak­ing advice holds that you should “vary the pace of your speech, vary the vol­ume,” for exam­ple, but while sound in them­selves, those strate­gies exe­cut­ed mechan­i­cal­ly get to be “kind of bor­ing.” Rather than oper­at­ing accord­ing to a fixed play­book, as Alda sees it, your vari­a­tions in pace and vol­ume — or your ges­tures, move­ments around the stage, and every­thing else — should occur organ­i­cal­ly, as a prod­uct of “how you’re talk­ing and relat­ing” to your audi­ence. A skilled speak­er does­n’t fol­low rules per se, but gauges and responds dynam­i­cal­ly to the lis­ten­er’s under­stand­ing even as he speaks.

But if pressed, Alda can pro­vide three tips “that I do kind of fol­low.” These he calls “the three rules of three”: first, “I try only to say three impor­tant things when I talk to peo­ple”; sec­ond, “If I have a dif­fi­cult thing to under­stand, if there’s some­thing I think is not going to be easy to get, I try to say it in three dif­fer­ent ways”; third, ” I try to say it three times through the talk.” He gets deep­er into his per­son­al the­o­ries of com­mu­ni­ca­tion in the sec­ond video below, begin­ning with a slight­ly con­trar­i­an defense of jar­gon: “When peo­ple in the same pro­fes­sion have a word that stands for five pages of writ­ten knowl­edge, why say five pages of stuff when you can say one word?” The trou­ble comes when words get so spe­cial­ized that they hin­der com­mu­ni­ca­tion between peo­ple of dif­fer­ent pro­fes­sions.

At its worst, jar­gon becomes a tool of dom­i­nance: “I’m smart; I talk like this,” its users imply, “You can’t real­ly talk like this, so you’re not as smart as me.” But when we active­ly sim­pli­fy our lan­guage to com­mu­ni­cate to the broad­est pos­si­ble audi­ence, we can dis­cov­er “what are the con­cepts that real­ly mat­ter” beneath the jar­gon. All the bet­ter if we can tell a dra­mat­ic sto­ry to illus­trate our point, as Alda does at the end of the video. It involves a med­ical stu­dent con­vey­ing a patien­t’s diag­no­sis more effec­tive­ly than his super­vi­sor, all thanks to his expe­ri­ence with the kind of “mir­ror­ing” exer­cis­es famil­iar to every stu­dent of act­ing. A doc­tor who can com­mu­ni­cate is always prefer­able to one who can’t; even a real-life Hawk­eye, after all, needs to make him­self under­stood once in a while.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Alan Alda Uses Improv to Teach Sci­en­tists How to Com­mu­ni­cate Their Ideas

What Is a Flame?: The First Prize-Win­ner at Alan Alda’s Sci­ence Video Com­pe­ti­tion

How to Speak: Watch the Lec­ture on Effec­tive Com­mu­ni­ca­tion That Became an MIT Tra­di­tion for Over 40 Years

Charles & Ray Eames’ A Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Primer Explains the Key to Clear Com­mu­ni­ca­tion in the Mod­ern Age (1953)

Erich Fromm’s Six Rules of Lis­ten­ing: Learn the Keys to Under­stand­ing Oth­er Peo­ple from the Famed Psy­chol­o­gist

How to Get Over the Anx­i­ety of Pub­lic Speak­ing?: Watch the Stan­ford Video, “Think Fast, Talk Smart,” Viewed Already 15 Mil­lion Times

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.

Hear Philip K. Dick’s Famous Metz Speech: “If You Find this World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others” (1977)

in Literature, Philosophy, Sci Fi | August 20th, 2021

A news­pa­per arti­cle about this speech could well be titled: AUTHOR CLAIMS TO HAVE SEEN GOD BUT CAN’T GIVE ACCOUNT OF WHAT HE SAW. — PKD

In 1977, cult writer Philip K. Dick arrived at a sci­ence fic­tion con­ven­tion in Metz, France to deliv­er a speech called, “If You Find this World Bad, You Should See Some of the Oth­ers.” (Read an edit­ed tran­script here.) The audi­ence would leave bewil­dered, mys­ti­fied. His talk ranged wide­ly across such top­ics as cos­mo­log­i­cal time, the pos­si­bil­i­ty of the uni­verse as a com­put­er sim­u­la­tion, the expe­ri­ence of deja vu, and the oppres­sive regime of Richard Nixon. It would become a sort of rebus for decod­ing Dick’s fic­tion.

If the “Metz address” were only a key to the strange occur­rences in nov­els like A Scan­ner Dark­ly, Flow My Tears, The Police­man Said, and The Man in the High Cas­tle, it would be an extra­or­di­nary doc­u­ment for Philip K. Dick fans.

But just as Dick claimed that the events of his 1981 nov­el V.A.L.I.S. were real– he had actu­al­ly had a vision­ary encounter with “God” after den­tal surgery in 1974 — so here he claims to have actu­al­ly expe­ri­enced, or remem­bered, mul­ti­ple real­i­ties and, after said encounter, to have rec­og­nized them all as true.

I, in my sto­ries and nov­els, often write about coun­ter­feit worlds, semi-real worlds, as well as deranged pri­vate worlds inhab­it­ed, often, by just one per­son, while, mean­time, the oth­er char­ac­ters either remain in their own worlds through­out or are some­how drawn into one of the pecu­liar ones. …At no time did I have a the­o­ret­i­cal or con­scious expla­na­tion for my pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with these plu­ri­form pseudoworlds, but now I think I under­stand. What I was sens­ing was the man­i­fold or par­tial­ly actu­al­ized real­i­ties lying tan­gent to what evi­dent­ly is the most actu­al­ized one, the one that the major­i­ty of us, by con­sen­sus gen­tium, agree on.

“The world of Flow My Tears is an actu­al (or rather once actu­al) alter­nate world, and I remem­ber it in detail. I do not know who else does. Maybe no one else does. per­haps all of you were always — have always been — here. But I was not. In nov­el after nov­el, sto­ry after sto­ry, over a twen­ty-five year peri­od, I wrote repeat­ed­ly about a par­tic­u­lar oth­er land­scape, a dread­ful one. In March 1974, I under­stood why. …I had good rea­son to. My nov­els and sto­ries were, with­out my real­iz­ing it con­scious­ly, auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal. It was — this return of mem­o­ry — the most extra­or­di­nary expe­ri­ence of my life. …

The nar­row­er sub­ject of his speech, Dick says by way of intro­duc­tion, is “orthog­o­nal time,” or “right-angle time.” To explain this he calls up an image of par­al­lel uni­vers­es over­lap­ping at the edges of a “lat­er­al axis.” These blend and “come into focus,” as an enti­ty he calls “the Pro­gramer-Repro­gram­mer” changes the vari­ables, while a “coun­ter­en­ti­ty” he calls the “Dark Coun­ter­play­er” tries to mess things up. Despite the use of soft­ware terms, Dick’s imagery seems to draw as much from chess, or Tao­ism, as com­put­er sci­ence. The inter­play of programmer/counterprogrammer is a dialec­tic, result­ing in new syn­the­ses. God is not an inde­pen­dent, self-exis­tent being but some­thing more akin to Atman, “the view of the old­est reli­gion of India, and to some extent… of Spin­oza and Alfred North White­head …. God with­in the uni­verse… The Sufi say­ing [from Rumi] ‘The work­man is invis­i­ble with­in the work­shop’ applies here.”

We can­not see the work­ings of this mys­ti­cal intel­li­gence except when the illu­sion of seam­less­ness breaks down and mem­o­ries of past or alter­nate lives intrude. These are not mem­o­ries of a lin­ear time, but of oth­er pos­si­ble present times, all exist­ing at once just out of focus. Dystopi­an police states, an alter­nate present ruled by Nazi Ger­many and Impe­r­i­al Japan… These cur­rent­ly exist, Dick says, on the orthog­o­nal line of time, only we can­not see them because the vari­ables, and our mem­o­ries, have been changed to suit the lat­est ver­sion of real­i­ty, a syn­the­sis and updat­ed improve­ment. How­ev­er, it’s entire­ly pos­si­ble that we’re all expe­ri­enc­ing slight­ly dif­fer­ent real­i­ties, depend­ing on the “mem­o­ries” of alter­nate presents leak­ing into our expe­ri­ence.

Thus, the talk’s title: not only could the world be worse, he says, but it is cur­rent­ly worse in the mul­ti­verse of reject­ed alter­nate worlds we can’t (or can’t quite) see. Here, at the end of his speech, Dick gets the­o­log­i­cal, and tele­o­log­i­cal, again, claim­ing to have seen a vision of a “park­like” world that “was not what my Chris­t­ian train­ing had pre­pared me for at all.” His descrip­tion sounds ripped from the cov­er of a 70s pulp fan­ta­sy nov­el, com­plete with a naked god­dess and an alien “land­scape beyond a gold­en rec­tan­gle door­way.” He takes pains to dis­tance his vision from the Chris­t­ian gar­den of Eden, but his final remarks sound more like C.S. Lewis than the para­noid, drug-addled con­spir­acist his audi­ence might have been pre­pared to meet:

The best I can do …is to play the role of prophet, of ancient prophets and such ora­cles as the sibyl at Del­phi, and to talk of a won­der­ful gar­den world, much like that which once our ances­tors are said to have inhab­it­ed — in fact, I some­times imag­ine it to be exact­ly that same world restored, as if a false tra­jec­to­ry of our world will even­tu­al­ly be ful­ly cor­rect­ed and once more we will be where once, many thou­sands of years ago, we lived and were hap­py.

…I believe I know a great secret. When the work of restora­tion is com­plet­ed, we will not even remem­ber the tyran­nies, the cru­el bar­barisms of the Earth we inhab­it­ed… the vast body of pain and grief and loss and dis­ap­point­ment with­in us will be expunged as if it had nev­er been. I believe that process is tak­ing place now, has always been tak­ing place now. And, mer­ci­ful­ly, we are already being per­mit­ted to for­get that which for­mer­ly was. And per­haps in my nov­els and sto­ries I have done wrong to urge you to remem­ber.

Was Philip K. Dick out of his mind? He sounds per­fect­ly lucid in oth­er inter­views he gave at the same time, and dis­miss­es the notion that his ideas are the prod­uct of men­tal ill­ness. Travis Diehl writes at Art Papers that Dick has come to seem more like an actu­al than a self-styled prophet in the decades since this inter­view, and his “para­noia comes to seem more and more like pre­science,” fore­see­ing the major themes of The Matrix, Jean Baudrillard’s post­mod­ern clas­sic Sim­u­lacra and Sim­u­la­tion, and favorite philoso­pher of Sil­i­con Val­ley Nick Bostrom.

What­ev­er the source of the author’s expe­ri­ences, “the rup­ture that pushed Dick’s life toward a knowl­edge of oth­er worlds — towards gno­sis — was an aes­thet­ic one: Dick’s visions appeared accom­pa­nied, or induced, by art,” and it was only by means of art that he claimed to appre­hend them. “Our God is the deus abscon­di­tus: the hid­den god.” We can­not know what it is, he says. But this does not exempt us from the mak­ing and remak­ing of the world. No one is — to use a cur­rent term of art — a non-playable char­ac­ter. “Con­cealed though the form is,” Dick says, “the lat­ter will con­front us; we are involved in it — in fact, we are instru­ments by which it is accom­plished.”

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Hear VALIS, an Opera Based on Philip K. Dick’s Meta­phys­i­cal Nov­el

Robert Crumb Illus­trates Philip K. Dick’s Infa­mous, Hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry Meet­ing with God (1974)

The Penul­ti­mate Truth About Philip K. Dick: Doc­u­men­tary Explores the Mys­te­ri­ous Uni­verse of PKD

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

Mattel’s Barbie Turns Women of Medicine, Including COVID Vaccine Developer, Into Dolls

in Biology, Gender, Science | August 20th, 2021

The multi­na­tion­al toy man­u­fac­tur­er Mat­tel is encour­ag­ing young­sters to play doc­tor — not a euphemism — and hon­or­ing first respon­ders with the recent release of three health­care-themed “Career Bar­bi­es.”

The com­pa­ny is putting its mon­ey where its mouth is by donat­ing $5 to the First Respon­ders Children’s Foun­da­tion for every doc­tor, para­medic, or nurse Bar­bie pur­chased at Tar­get through August 28.

Mat­tel has also iden­ti­fied six female health­care pio­neers whose efforts dur­ing the pan­dem­ic mer­it a one-of-a-kind Bar­bie who shares their like­ness.

Vac­ci­nol­o­gist Sarah Gilbert, who led the team that devel­oped the Oxford/AstraZeneca vac­cine, describes this unex­pect­ed hon­or as “a very strange con­cept” (pre­sum­ably as com­pared to being award­ed a dame­hood or receiv­ing a stand­ing ova­tion at Wim­ble­don.)

The 59-year-old Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor added that she hoped the char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly smooth plas­tic doll would be “part of mak­ing it more nor­mal for girls to think about careers in sci­ence, although, to be hon­est, when I was a young girl I nev­er believed that I would­n’t have a career in sci­ence.”

If the doll falls short of inspir­ing girls to con­sid­er a career in STEM, Women in Sci­ence & Engi­neer­ing (WISE), the non­prof­it orga­ni­za­tion Pro­fes­sor Gilbert chose to receive a dona­tion from Mat­tel on her behalf, can take up the slack.

One of the most com­pelling of the six cus­tom-made Front Line Respon­der Bar­bi­es is based on vet­er­an nurse Amy O’Sullivan, a heav­i­ly tat­tooed, queer moth­er of three, who cared for the first COVID-19 patient (soon to become New York City’s first offi­cial COVID death) in Brooklyn’s Wycoff Hos­pi­tal.

Soon there­after, she sur­vived being put on a ven­ti­la­tor with COVID her­self, even­tu­al­ly wind­ing up on the cov­er of Time Mag­a­zine, in the same neck­er­chief, flo­ral socks, eye catch­ing sur­gi­cal cap and woven bracelets her tiny scrub-suit­ed dop­pel­ganger wears.

Sure­ly Amy O’Sullivan is a bet­ter all around role mod­el than the sim­i­lar­ly inked Toki­do­ki Bar­bie or Total­ly Tat­too Bar­bie, or for that mat­ter, the non-cus­tom made First Respon­der Nurse, whose descrip­tion on Target’s web­site seems a bit ret­ro­grade, giv­en the events of the last year and a half:

Wear­ing cute scrubs fea­tur­ing a med­ical-tool print top, pink pants and white shoes, Bar­bie nurse doll (12-in/30.40-cm) is ready make her rounds and check on patients!

The real life O’Sullivan, who was very involved in the cre­ation of her cus­tom doll, seems tick­led by Mattel’s faith­ful recre­ation, telling The New York Post:

When I was younger I always felt like an out­sider — nobody ever looked like me, talked like me, walked like me. I had no role mod­el at all when I was grow­ing up. So if I can be some lit­tle girl’s role mod­el that feels like this, I would love that. 

Nurse O’Sullivan had stronger words for those who have aged out of the demo­graph­ic, in a recent inter­view with Time:

I see these young peo­ple not wear­ing masks. And, you know, those are the peo­ple that COVID is affect­ing now, the younger gen­er­a­tion. They’re becom­ing very sick. And it’s nev­er going to go away until we get vac­ci­nat­ed and wear masks.

That might be a bit heavy for those on the younger end of Career Bar­bi­e’s rec­om­mend­ed 3 and up age group (“espe­cial­ly those inter­est­ed in care­tak­ing and help­ing oth­ers!”), but hope­ful­ly her words will car­ry some weight with those respon­si­ble for pro­tect­ing those chil­dren.

The oth­er cus­tom-made Bar­bi­es hon­or:

Dr. Audrey Cruz, who col­lab­o­rat­ed with oth­er Asian-Amer­i­can physi­cians to bat­tle anti-Asian-relat­ed bias spring­ing from the pan­dem­ic

Cana­di­an psy­chi­a­try res­i­dent at who bat­tled sys­temic racism in health­care a doc­tor in Las Vegas who is cam­paign­ing against racial bias against Asian-Amer­i­can physi­cians

Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to psy­chi­a­try res­i­dent, Chi­ka Sta­cy Ori­uwa, whose activism includes cre­at­ing ini­tia­tives to boost the num­ber of Black stu­dents apply­ing to med­ical school and cre­ate net­works of sup­port for schol­ar­ly and pro­fes­sion­al advance­ment with­in the Black com­mu­ni­ty.

Bio­med­ical researcher Dr Jaque­line Goes de Jesus whose team sequenced the SARS-CoV­‑2 genome with­in 48 hours of receiv­ing sam­ples from the first infect­ed Brazil­ian patient, dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing the vari­ant from the one that caused infec­tions ear­li­er in the pan­dem­ic.

Dr Kir­by White, founder of Gowns for Doc­tors,  an Aus­tralian ini­tia­tive that addressed a nation­wide short­age of per­son­al PPE by deliv­er­ing free, wash­able, vol­un­teer-made reusable gowns to front­line staff.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Women Sci­en­tists Launch a Data­base Fea­tur­ing the Work of 9,000 Women Work­ing in the Sci­ences

How Zora Neale Hurston & Eleanor Roo­sevelt Helped Cre­ate the First Real­is­tic African Amer­i­can Baby Doll (1951)

The New David Bowie Bar­bie Doll Released to Com­mem­o­rate the 50th Anniver­sary of “Space Odd­i­ty”

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.Follow her@AyunHalliday

Songs That Use “Word Painting”: The Art of Creating Music That Sounds Like the Lyrics

in Music | August 19th, 2021

“There’s no love song fin­er, but how strange the change from major to minor, every­time we say good­bye.”

In the line above from Cole Porter’s “Every Time We Say Good­bye,” we’re moved from the hap­pi­ness of love to the sad­ness of part­ing, and so too do the chords change, from major to minor, thus sub­tly chang­ing the mood of the song. The tech­nique is a clever exam­ple of a song­writ­ing method called “word paint­ing,” or prosody, when lyrics are accom­pa­nied by a rhyth­mic, melod­ic, or har­mon­ic shift that com­ple­ments their mean­ing. We hear it in pop music all the time, draw­ing our atten­tion to sig­nif­i­cant moments, and shap­ing the emo­tion­al impact of words and phras­es.

The word “Stop,” for exam­ple, appears over and over in pop music, as the video above from David Ben­nett shows, accom­pa­nied by a full stop from the band. Span­ish-lan­guage hit “Despaci­to” (which means “slow­ly”) slows the tem­po while the tit­u­lar word is sung. There are innu­mer­able exam­ples of melodies ris­ing and falling to lyrics like “high, up, down” and “low.” A more sophis­ti­cat­ed exam­ple of word pain­ing comes from Leonard Cohen’s “Hal­lelu­jah,” which tells us exact­ly what the music’s doing — “It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall, the major lift.”

As inge­nious as these moves are, Ben­nett goes on to show us how word paint­ing can be “even more nuanced” in clas­sics like The Doors’ “Rid­ers on the Storm.” As Ray Man­zarek him­self explains in an inter­view clip, his key­board part led to an ono­matopoeia effect: lyrics, melody, and sound effects all com­ing togeth­er to express the entire theme. Ben­nett shows in his sec­ond word paint­ing video, above, how stu­dio effects can also be used to sync music and lyrics, such as the murky eq effect applied to Bil­lie Eilish’s voice on the word “under­wa­ter” in her song “Every­thing I Want­ed.”

Exam­ples of effects like this date back at least to Jimi Hen­drix, who pio­neered the stu­dio as a song­writ­ing tool, but word paint­ing as a song­writ­ing method requires no spe­cial tech­nol­o­gy. The Jack­son Five’s “ABC,” for instance, lands on E♭ and C dur­ing the line “I before E except after C,” and the famous cho­rus is sung to the notes A♭, B♭m7, and C. Here, the notes them­selves tell the sto­ry, sim­ple but undoubt­ed­ly effec­tive. All of the exam­ples Ben­nett adduces may come from pop­u­lar music, but word paint­ing is as old as poet­ry, which was once insep­a­ra­ble from song. For as long as humans have com­mu­ni­cat­ed with lit­er­ary epics, funer­al rites, tragedies, come­dies, and love songs, we have used prosody to shape words with music, and music accord­ing to the mean­ing of our words.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Tom Pet­ty Takes You Inside His Song­writ­ing Craft

Naked­ly Exam­ined Music Pod­cast Explores Song­writ­ing with Crack­er, King Crim­son, Cut­ting Crew, Jill Sob­ule & More

How David Bowie Used William S. Bur­roughs’ Cut-Up Method to Write His Unfor­get­table Lyrics

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

How Doctor Who First Started as a Family Educational TV Program (1963)

in Education, Sci Fi, Television | August 19th, 2021

Those who grew up with the BBC sci-fi series Doc­tor Who watched from “behind the sofa,” a pop­u­lar phrase asso­ci­at­ed with the show for the rub­bery, bug-eyed mon­sters it held in store each week for loy­al view­ers. Although it may be hard for those who didn’t expe­ri­ence it in their for­ma­tive years to under­stand, Doc­tor Who has fre­quent­ly been vot­ed the scari­est TV show of all time, over gris­li­er, big-bud­get series like The Walk­ing Dead, and has done so with­out los­ing its sense of humor, a tes­ta­ment to the con­ceit of “regen­er­a­tion” keep­ing things fresh by updat­ing the Doc­tor and his com­pan­ions every few years.

Space mon­sters, Daleks, Cyber­men, and a revolv­ing cast, how­ev­er, were not part of Doc­tor Who’s orig­i­nal remit. The show began as an edu­ca­tion­al pro­gram on the BBC, and this explains many of its inte­gral parts, which have remained through­out its first run from 1963 to 1989 and its revival from 2005 to the present. These ele­ments include the TARDIS, com­pan­ions of var­i­ous ages, the Coal Hill School, and the Doc­tor him­self, a Time Lord from the plan­et Gal­lifrey with inter­stel­lar tech­nol­o­gy and a dodgy mem­o­ry.

We find the core premise in the show’s pilot episode and orig­i­nal 4‑part series, An Unearth­ly Child, which intro­duced William Hart­nell as the Doc­tor, Car­ole Ann Ford as his grand­daugh­ter, Susan Fore­man (orig­i­nal­ly named Bar­bara, or “Bid­dy”), and Jaque­line Hill and William Rus­sell as school teach­ers Bar­bara Wright and Ian Chester­ton. BBC dra­ma head Syd­ney New­man had tasked writ­ers with cre­at­ing a fam­i­ly edu­ca­tion­al show to meet the network’s pub­lic ser­vice man­date, and came up with the idea of a sci­ence fic­tion show as a way to have char­ac­ters vis­it his­tor­i­cal peri­ods and talk about sci­ence in an enter­tain­ing way.

“Doc­tor Who’s ear­ly his­tor­i­cal sto­ries empha­size edu­ca­tion by down­play­ing the programme’s fan­ta­sy with min­i­mal sci­ence-fic­tion ele­ments,” writes Tom Stew­ard at Dele­tion. The idea of a time machine big­ger on the inside than the out­side came from New­man. Writer Antho­ny Coburn turned it into a police box after a note from New­man ask­ing for a “tan­gi­ble” sym­bol. New­man “instruct­ed writ­ers to ‘get across the basis of teach­ing of edu­ca­tion­al expe­ri­ence.’ ” When they came back with a sto­ry about Daleks, he balked: “No bug-eyed mon­sters,” he wrote, no alien bad­dies, no actors in rub­ber suits. This was to be a seri­ous show about seri­ous edu­ca­tion­al sub­jects. Script changes and tech­ni­cal chal­lenges meant months of set­back and delays.

It was dif­fi­cult for some crit­ics to take the result­ing four episode arc par­tic­u­lar­ly seri­ous­ly. The first episode showed Bar­bara and Ian dis­cov­er­ing the TARDIS in a Lon­don junk­yard. Then they are all trans­port­ed to the pre­his­toric past, where they observe (and escape) a pow­er strug­gle among pre­his­toric cave peo­ple. (Guardian crit­ic Mary Crozi­er lament­ed that the “wigs and fur­ry pelts and clubs were all ludi­crous.”) The show’s debut was also inaus­pi­cious: Novem­ber 23, 1963, the day after John F. Kennedy’s assas­si­na­tion. The BBC reran the first episode the next week and picked up anoth­er 2 mil­lion view­ers.

Still, it had become clear after the first series that in order to sur­vive, Doc­tor Who would have “to give the pub­lic what they want­ed,” Stew­ard writes, “rather than what was good for them.” Thus, the Daleks debuted in the sec­ond sea­son, and by the mid-60s, his­tor­i­cal sto­ries were replaced with “fan­tasies in his­tor­i­cal cos­tume fea­tur­ing anachro­nis­tic vil­lains or mon­sters.” The show became a week­ly crea­ture fea­ture and intro­duced ter­ri­fy­ing vil­lains like Davros, the Daleks’ cre­ator, a cross between a Strangelove-like Nazi sci­en­tist and Star Wars’ clone-hap­py Emper­or Pal­pa­tine (Davros came first).

The cos­tumes may look sil­ly in hind­sight, but as child­hood Who fan Char­lie Jane Anders writes at io9, “those of us who are adults now did­n’t have huge screen HD tele­vi­sions when we were kids.” (And those of us who remem­ber it, remem­ber being ter­ri­fied by equal­ly goofy cos­tum­ing in The Land of the Lost.) Look past the low-bud­get effects and Doc­tor Who becomes pure hor­ror, explor­ing very dark ter­ri­to­ry with only a son­ic screw­driv­er, a few friends, and a quirky sense of humor — or 13 quirky sens­es of humor, includ­ing Jodie Whit­tak­er’s as the cur­rent Doc­tor and first woman to fill the role.

As you can see from the clips of the first episode above, Doc­tor Who estab­lished its weird air of exis­ten­tial dread from the start with Delia Der­byshire’s oth­er­world­ly theme and some avant-garde cam­era effects in lieu of big­ger-bud­get spec­ta­cles. The show did not retain much from its edu­ca­tion­al begin­nings aside from the key char­ac­ters and the look and feel of the TARDIS. It was “seen to have failed as ped­a­gogy,” writes Stew­ard, but as a body of sci­ence fic­tion lore that con­tin­ues to stay rel­e­vant, it has all sorts of lessons to teach about courage, com­pan­ion­ship, and the val­ue of the right tool for the right job.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

30 Hours of Doc­tor Who Audio Dra­mas Now Free to Stream Online

The Fas­ci­nat­ing Sto­ry of How Delia Der­byshire Cre­at­ed the Orig­i­nal Doc­tor Who Theme

A Detailed, Track-by-Track Analy­sis of the Doc­tor Who Theme Music

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