The Timeless Beauty of the Citroën DS, the Car Mythologized by Roland Barthes (1957)

in History, Literature | August 27th, 2019

In the post­war West­ern imag­i­na­tion, moder­ni­ty took three forms: the rock­et­ship, the jet­lin­er, and the auto­mo­bile. The first two may have more direct claim to defin­ing the “Space Age,” but only the third lay with­in reach of the aver­age (or slight­ly above aver­age) con­sumer. And at the 1955 Paris Auto Show the world first beheld a car that, aes­thet­i­cal­ly speak­ing, might as well have been a space­craft: the Cit­roën DS. Pro­nounced in French like déesse, that lan­guage’s word for “god­dess,” the car received 80,000 order deposits dur­ing the show, a record that stood for six decades until the debut of Tes­la’s Mod­el 3 — which, what­ev­er its respectabil­i­ty as a feat of design and engi­neer­ing, will nev­er have Roland Barthes to extol its beau­ty.

“Cars today are almost the exact equiv­a­lent of the great Goth­ic cathe­drals,” writes Barthes in an essay on the DS (which you can read in both Eng­lish trans­la­tion and the orig­i­nal French here) that appears in 1957’s Mytholo­gies, many of whose edi­tions bear the car’s image on the cov­er.

“I mean the supreme cre­ation of an era, con­ceived with pas­sion by unknown artists, and con­sumed in image if not in usage by a whole pop­u­la­tion which appro­pri­ates them as a pure­ly mag­i­cal object. It is obvi­ous that the new Cit­roen has fall­en from the sky inas­much as it appears at first sight as a superla­tive object.” Pos­sessed of all the fea­tures of “one of those objects from anoth­er uni­verse which have sup­plied fuel for the neo­ma­nia of the eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry and that of our own sci­ence-fic­tion: the Déesse is first and fore­most a new Nau­tilus.”

Smooth­ness, Barthes writes, “is always an attribute of per­fec­tion because its oppo­site reveals a tech­ni­cal and typ­i­cal­ly human oper­a­tion of assem­bling: Christ’s robe was seam­less, just as the air­ships of sci­ence-fic­tion are made of unbro­ken met­al.” Hence his detec­tion, in the unprece­dent­ed­ly smooth lines of the DS, of “the begin­nings of a new phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy of assem­bling, as if one pro­gressed from a world where ele­ments are weld­ed to a world where they are jux­ta­posed and hold togeth­er by sole virtue of their won­drous shape, which of course is meant to pre­pare one for the idea of a more benign Nature.” Here we have “a human­ized art, and it is pos­si­ble that the Déesse marks a change in the mythol­o­gy of cars,” rais­ing them from “the bes­tiary of pow­er” into the realm of the “spir­i­tu­al and more object-like.”

In the Influx video at the top of the post, British Cit­roën spe­cial­ist Matt Damper reads from Barthes’ essay to evoke the dis­tinc­tive joie de vivre of French car cul­ture in gen­er­al and clas­sic Cit­roëns in par­tic­u­lar. (It must be said, how­ev­er, that one of the main “unknown artists” to which the DS owes its unearth­ly beau­ty, sculp­tor turned indus­tri­al design­er Flaminio Bertoni, hailed from Italy.) “You have to dri­ve it in a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent way than you dri­ve any oth­er car, real­ly,” says Damper. “It’s that French­ness: it’s like, ‘We’re right. This is the cor­rect way of build­ing a car. Just get used to it.’ ” Wired’s Jack Stew­art echoes the sen­ti­ment in the video just above, “The 1955 Cit­roën DS Still Feels Ahead of Its Time.”

Stew­art names the “strange semi-auto­mat­ic gear­box that you have to get used to,” among the inno­v­a­tive or at least uncon­ven­tion­al fea­tures with which the DS debuted, a list that also includ­ed hydraulic sus­pen­sion (suit­ed to France’s still-sham­bol­ic roads) and disc brakes. “That’s just the thing with Cit­roëns: they’re unfor­giv­ing if you don’t know what you’re doing, so you real­ly have to learn how to dri­ve these cars.” Or as Cit­roën­s’s Amer­i­can ad cam­paign put it, “It takes a spe­cial per­son to dri­ve a spe­cial car.” The DS did­n’t sell state­side, in part due to its low-pow­ered engine made to dodge French auto­mo­bile tax struc­tures, but now car-lovers around the world rec­og­nize it as one of the great achieve­ments in motor­ing. The Cit­roën DS and the prose of Roland Barthes have a deep com­mon­al­i­ty: only those who under­stand that they have to approach the object on its own terms will find them­selves in the pres­ence of supe­ri­or craft — albeit of a dis­tinc­tive­ly Gal­lic vari­ety.

Below Jay Leno gives you a close up view of his 1971 Cit­roën DS and its unique sus­pen­sion sys­tem.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Roland Barthes’s Mytholo­gies and How He Used Semi­otics to Decode Pop­u­lar Cul­ture

Hear Roland Barthes Present His 40-Hour Course, La Pré­pa­ra­tion du roman, in French (1978–80)

178,000 Images Doc­u­ment­ing the His­to­ry of the Car Now Avail­able on a New Stan­ford Web Site

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Why Should You Read Haruki Murakami? An Animated Video on His “Epic Literary Puzzle” Kafka on the Shore Makes the Case

in Animation, Books, Literature | August 27th, 2019

Haru­ki Murakami’s vast inter­na­tion­al fan base includes peo­ple ded­i­cat­ed to lit­er­a­ture. It also includes peo­ple who have bare­ly cracked any books in their lives — apart, that is, from Murakami’s nov­els with their dis­tinc­tive mix­ture of the light­heart­ed with the grim and the mun­dane with the uncan­ny. Since the pub­li­ca­tion of his first nov­el, Hear the Wind Sing, 40 years ago in his native Japan, Muraka­mi has become both a lit­er­ary phe­nom­e­non and an extra-lit­er­ary phe­nom­e­non, and dif­fer­ent read­ers endorse dif­fer­ent paths into his unique tex­tu­al realm.

The TED-Ed video above makes the case for one fan favorite in par­tic­u­lar: 2002’s Kaf­ka on the Shore, an “epic lit­er­ary puz­zle filled with time trav­el, hid­den his­to­ries, and mag­i­cal under­worlds. Read­ers delight in dis­cov­er­ing how the mind-bend­ing imagery, whim­si­cal char­ac­ters and eerie coin­ci­dences fit togeth­er.” So says the video’s nar­ra­tor, read­ing from a les­son writ­ten by lit­er­ary schol­ar Iseult Gille­spie (who has also made cas­es for Charles Dick­ens, Vir­ginia Woolf, and Ray Brad­bury).

Muraka­mi tells this sto­ry, and keeps it fresh through more than 500 pages, by alter­nat­ing between two point-of-view char­ac­ters: a teenag­er “des­per­ate to escape his tyran­ni­cal father and the fam­i­ly curse he feels doomed to repeat,” who “renames him­self Kaf­ka after his favorite author and runs away from home,” and an old man with “a mys­te­ri­ous knack for talk­ing to cats.”

When the lat­ter is com­mis­sioned to use his unusu­al skill to track down a lost pet, “he’s thrown onto a dan­ger­ous path that runs par­al­lel to Kafka’s.” Soon, “prophe­cies come true, por­tals to dif­fer­ent dimen­sions open up — and fish and leech­es begin rain­ing from the sky.” But it’s all of a piece with Murakami’s body of work, with its nov­els and sto­ries that “often forge fan­tas­tic con­nec­tions between per­son­al expe­ri­ence, super­nat­ur­al pos­si­bil­i­ties, and Japan­ese his­to­ry.” His “ref­er­ences to West­ern soci­ety and Japan­ese cus­toms tum­ble over each oth­er, from lit­er­a­ture and fash­ion to food and ghost sto­ries.”

All of it comes tied togeth­er with threads of music: “As the run­away Kaf­ka wan­ders the streets of a strange city, Led Zep­pelin and Prince keep him com­pa­ny,” and he lat­er befriends a librar­i­an who “intro­duces him to clas­si­cal music like Schu­bert.” Safe to say that such ref­er­ences put some dis­tance between Murakami’s work and that of his char­ac­ter Kafka’s favorite writer, to whom Muraka­mi him­self has been com­pared. Kaf­ka on the Shore show­cas­es Murakami’s sto­ry­telling sen­si­bil­i­ty, but is it in any sense Kafkaesque? You’ll have plen­ty more ques­tions after tak­ing the plunge into Murakami’s real­i­ty, but there’s anoth­er TED-Ed les­son that might at least help you answer that one.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Intro­duc­tion to the World of Haru­ki Muraka­mi Through Doc­u­men­taries, Sto­ries, Ani­ma­tion, Music Playlists & More

Read 6 Sto­ries By Haru­ki Muraka­mi Free Online

What Does “Kafkaesque” Real­ly Mean? A Short Ani­mat­ed Video Explains

Why Should We Read Charles Dick­ens? A TED-Ed Ani­ma­tion Makes the Case

Why Should We Read Ray Bradbury’s Fahren­heit 451? A New TED-Ed Ani­ma­tion Explains

Why Should We Read Vir­ginia Woolf? A TED-Ed Ani­ma­tion Makes the Case

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Klaus Nomi Performs with Kraftwerk on German Television (1982)

in Music | August 27th, 2019

You’ll hard­ly ever run into a descrip­tion of Ger­man New Wave wun­derkind Klaus Nomi that doesn’t con­tain a ref­er­ence to Weimar Ger­many. It would seem like a seri­ous over­sight not to men­tion Nomi’s embod­i­ment of Weimar cabaret man­ner­isms, fit­ted for a space-age late-20th cen­tu­ry. But the influ­ence was far more than a styl­is­tic bor­row­ing. Nomi wasn’t just “the most Ger­man act ever,” as blog­ger Debris Slide writes; “Weimar Repub­lic comes to Dance­te­ria, except with space­ships” may also have been the most his­tor­i­cal­ly gay act in mod­ern pop.

The Weimar Repub­lic is well known as “a peri­od of remark­able artis­tic ener­gy,” writes Andrew Dick­son at the British Library, “a roar­ing surge of mod­ernist art, the­atre, design, dance and film.” It was also a time when “the con­straints of 19th-cen­tu­ry man­ners and mores were torn down.” Hid­den sex­u­al­i­ties could emerge in pub­lic in Berlin, thanks a relaxed polic­ing pol­i­cy, as his­to­ri­an Robert Beachy shows in his book Gay Berlin. The fine arts and cul­ture of Weimar flour­ished along­side the cabaret scene, whose camp showed up in every­thing from Ger­man Expres­sion­ist film to avant-garde opera.

“I think there prob­a­bly had nev­er been any­thing like this before,” Beachy tells NPR, “and there was no cul­ture as open again until the 1970s.” Klaus Nomi arrived in the 70s with his cabaret space alien act to announce that the cre­ative and per­son­al free­doms of Weimar had returned, and he was their avatar, freely mix­ing opera and pop with aston­ish­ing facil­i­ty, incor­po­rat­ing mime and vaude­ville. “The influ­ence of play­wright and the­atri­cal icon Bertolt Brecht would come to serve as a defin­i­tive touch­stone” for Nomi’s career, writes Evan Zwisler at Fly­pa­per.

“One of the ideas that Nomi incor­po­rat­ed into his own act was Ver­frem­dungsef­fekt (or, ‘the dis­tanc­ing effect’)”—drawing height­ened atten­tion to the per­for­mance as per­for­mance, a sig­nif­i­cant fea­ture of near­ly all avant-garde the­ater in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry. Klaus Nomi was also the most Mod­ernist act ever, at least in pop music. He would have fit in with a Dada cabaret revue of six­ty years ear­li­er. I’m not sure what it says about Berlin in the 70s that Nomi only tru­ly found him­self while onstage in New York. He moved to the city in 1972 after work­ing as an ush­er in Berlin opera hous­es, where his aston­ish­ing sopra­no went unap­pre­ci­at­ed.

Nomi became “a qui­et­ly rev­o­lu­tion­ary part of the New York City art scene,” notes Zwisler, inspir­ing Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kei­th Har­ing. He appeared on Sat­ur­day Night Live with David Bowie in 1979 and in the 1981 doc­u­men­tary Urgh! A Music War. Had AIDS not claimed his life in 1983, Nomi’s fame may have spread even far­ther and wider. As it stood, how­ev­er, the year before his death, it had at least spread to his home coun­try, where he was wel­comed by TV host Thomas Gottschalk on the Ger­man pro­gram No Sowas!, per­form­ing with Kraftwerk, the biggest Ger­man pop cul­tur­al export to date.

See Nomi sing the aria from Camille Saint-Saens’ “Sam­son and Delilah.” Then, we have a rare treat: the very Cali­gari-like cabaret of Kraftwerk, at the height of their aus­tere synth pop fame. Nomi returns to sing “Total Eclipse” from his first album. You can read an Eng­lish trans­la­tion of Nomi’s between-song inter­view with Gottschalk here. The host wraps up this seg­ment by say­ing, “he is already a big name in Amer­i­ca, and now we present him here in Ger­many.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Enchant­i­ng Opera Per­for­mances of Klaus Nomi

Klaus Nomi: Watch the Final, Bril­liant Per­for­mance of a Dying Man

David Bowie and Klaus Nomi’s Hyp­not­ic Per­for­mance on SNL (1979)

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

Harvard Gives Free Online Access to 40 Million Pages of U.S. Case Law: Explore 6.4 Million Cases Dating Back to 1658

in Archives, Harvard, Law, Libraries | August 26th, 2019

There was a time—a strange time in pop cul­ture his­to­ry, I’ll grant—when legal dra­mas were every­where in tele­vi­sion, pop­u­lar fic­tion, and film. Next to the barn-burn­ing court­room set pieces in A Few Good Men and A Time to Kill, for exam­ple, scenes of lawyers por­ing over case law with loos­ened ties, high heels kicked off, and mar­ti­nis and scotch­es in hand were ren­dered with max­i­mum dra­mat­ic ten­sion, despite the fact that case law is a nigh unread­able jum­ble of jar­gon, cita­tions, archa­ic dic­tion and syn­tax, etc… any­thing but brim­ming with cin­e­mat­ic poten­tial.

Do law stu­dents and legal schol­ars dis­agree with this assess­ment? It’s beside the point, many might say. The cen­turies-old web of case law—reinforcing, con­tra­dict­ing, over­turn­ing, cre­at­ing pat­terns and structures—is the very stuff the law is made of.

It’s a ref­er­en­tial tra­di­tion, and when most of the doc­u­ments are in the hands of only a few peo­ple, only those peo­ple under­stand why the law works the way it does. The rest of us are left to won­der why the legal sys­tem is so Byzan­tine and incom­pre­hen­si­ble. Real life rarely has the clar­i­ty of a sat­is­fy­ing court­room dra­ma.

Last year, The Har­vard Crim­son report­ed a seem­ing­ly rev­o­lu­tion­ary shift in that dynam­ic, when Har­vard Law’s Caselaw Access Project “dig­i­tized more than 40 mil­lion pages of U.S. state, fed­er­al, and ter­ri­to­r­i­al case law doc­u­ments from the Law School library,” dat­ing back to 1658.  The Crim­son issued one caveat: the full data­base is acces­si­ble to the pub­lic, but “users are lim­it­ed to five hun­dred full case texts per day.” Plan your intense, scotch-soaked all-nighters accord­ing­ly.

Is this altru­ism, civic duty, a move in the right direc­tion of free­ing pub­licly fund­ed research for pub­lic use?  Sev­er­al Har­vard Law fac­ul­ty have said as much. “Case law is the prod­uct of pub­lic resources poured into our court sys­tem,” writes Pro­fes­sor I. Glenn Cohen. “It’s great that the pub­lic will now have bet­ter access to it.” It is indeed, Pro­fes­sor Christo­pher T. Bavitz says: “If we want to ensure that peo­ple have access to jus­tice, that means that we have to ensure that they have access to cas­es. The text of cas­es is the law.”

The law is not a set of abstract prin­ci­ples, the­o­ries, or rules, in oth­er words, but a series of his­tor­i­cal exam­ples, woven togeth­er into a social nar­ra­tive. Machines can ana­lyze data from The Caselaw Access Project far faster and more effi­cient­ly than any human, giv­ing us broad­er views of legal his­to­ry and prece­dent, and great­ly expand­ing pub­lic under­stand­ing of the sys­tem. Harvard’s Library Inno­va­tion Lab has itself already cre­at­ed sev­er­al apps for just this pur­pose.

There’s Cal­i­for­nia Word­clouds, which shows the most-used words in Cal­i­for­nia caselaw between 1852 and 2015, and Witch­craft in Caselaw, which does what it says, with an inter­ac­tive map of all appear­ances of witch­craft in cas­es across the coun­try. There’s “Fun Stuff” too, like a Caselaw Lim­er­ick Gen­er­a­tor, a visu­al data­base that ana­lyzes col­ors in case law, and “Gavel­fury,” which ana­lyzes “all instances of ‘!,’” giv­ing us gems like “Do you remem­ber if it was mur­der!” from Bowl­ing v. State, 229 Ark. 876 (Dec. 22, 1958).

One new graph­ing tool, His­tor­i­cal Trends, announced in June, makes it easy for users to “visu­al­ize word usage in court opin­ions over time,” writes the Library Inno­va­tion Lab. (Exam­ples include com­par­ing the “fre­quen­cy of ‘com­pen­sato­ry dam­ages’ and ‘puni­tive dam­ages’ in New York and Cal­i­for­nia” and com­par­ing “pri­va­cy” with “pub­lic­i­ty.”) Any­one can build their own data visu­al­iza­tion using their own search terms. (Learn how and get start­ed here.) Case law may nev­er be glam­orous, exact­ly, or fun to read, but it may be far more inter­est­ing, and empow­er­ing, than we imag­ine.

Be aware that the Caselaw Access Project could still find ways to restrict or mon­e­tize access, for a short time, at least. “The project was fund­ed part­ly through a part­ner­ship with Rav­el, a legal ana­lyt­ics start­up found­ed by two Stan­ford Law School stu­dents,” reports the Crim­son. The com­pa­ny “earned ‘some com­mer­cial rights’ through March 2024 to charge for greater access to files.” The start­up has issued no word on whether this will hap­pen. In the mean­time, pub­lic inter­est legal schol­ars may wish to do their own dig­ging through this trove of caselaw to bet­ter under­stand the public’s right to infor­ma­tion of all kinds.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bound by Law?: Free Com­ic Book Explains How Copy­right Com­pli­cates Art

Pos­i­tive Psy­chol­o­gy: A Free Course from Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty

Har­vard Launch­es a Free Online Course to Pro­mote Reli­gious Tol­er­ance & Under­stand­ing

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

Discover the Spelling Dictionary That Ludwig Wittgenstein Created for Elementary School Students

in Books | August 26th, 2019

He only pub­lished two books of phi­los­o­phy, and only one of them in his life­time, but Lud­wig Wittgen­stein’s influ­ence on 20th cen­tu­ry thought is incal­cu­la­ble. Both of his books, the Trac­ta­tus Logi­co-Philo­soph­i­cus and the posthu­mous Philo­soph­i­cal Inves­ti­ga­tions, con­sti­tute major turn­ing points in ana­lyt­ic philosophy—the one inspir­ing the 1920s log­i­cal pos­i­tivism of the Vien­na Cir­cle, the oth­er repu­di­at­ing Wittgenstein’s ear­li­er thought and invig­o­rat­ing mid-cen­tu­ry prag­ma­tism and the Ordi­nary Lan­guage school.

“By the 1930s,” notes Tim Rayn­er at Phi­los­o­phy for Change, “Wittgen­stein had decid­ed” that the the­o­ry of lan­guage he had advanced in the Trac­ta­tus “was quite wrong. He devot­ed the rest of his life to explain­ing why.” This marked a dra­mat­ic shift away from the work that first made him famous, but Wittgen­stein nev­er did any­thing halfway. After pub­lish­ing the Trac­ta­tus—part­ly com­posed while he fought in World War I—the Aus­tri­an son of a wealthy Vien­nese indus­tri­al­ist announced that he had solved all of the prob­lems in phi­los­o­phy. Noth­ing more need­ed to be said on the mat­ter.

He “retired” to try his hand at sev­er­al oth­er trades, includ­ing grade school teacher, for a peri­od of about six years in rur­al vil­lages in Aus­tria. “By the time he decid­ed to teach,” Spencer Robins notes at The Paris Review, “Wittgen­stein was well on his way to being con­sid­ered the great­est philoso­pher alive.” He couldn’t have cared less. “Con­vinced he was a moral fail­ure, he took extreme steps to change his cir­cum­stances, divest­ing him­self of his enor­mous fam­i­ly for­tune” and choos­ing a pro­fes­sion “influ­enced by a roman­tic idea of what it would be like to work with peasants—an idea he’d got­ten from read­ing Tol­stoy.”

Wittgen­stein was an unspar­ing taskmas­ter, by all accounts. His brief ele­men­tary teach­ing career end­ed abrupt­ly in 1926 when he vicious­ly attacked a stu­dent. While his per­son­al­i­ty did not suit him to the role at all, his ped­a­gogy was appar­ent­ly very effec­tive. Wittgen­stein  “engaged his stu­dents in a sort of ‘project-based learn­ing’ that wouldn’t be out of place in the best ele­men­tary class­rooms today,” writes Robins. In the last years of teach­ing, he worked with his stu­dents to pro­duce what is tech­ni­cal­ly his sec­ond pub­lished book—Wörter­buch für Volkss­chulen, a Ger­man spelling dic­tio­nary for ele­men­tary schools.

One of the shocks that await­ed the philoso­pher when he arrived in rur­al schools was the expense of books, and stu­dents’ inabil­i­ty to obtain them. “I had nev­er real­ized dic­tio­nar­ies would be so might­i­ly expen­sive,” he told edu­ca­tion­al­ist Lud­wig Hansel. “I think, if I live long enough, I will pro­duce a small dic­tio­nary for ele­men­tary schools.” Often a prag­ma­tist in life, if not always in his thought, Wittgen­stein took the oppor­tu­ni­ty to turn this promise into a teach­able moment, test­ing drafts of his dic­tio­nary in the class­room. “The improve­ment of spelling was aston­ish­ing,” he remarked.

The dic­tio­nary, and Wittgenstein’s teach­ing meth­ods in gen­er­al dur­ing this peri­od, “reveal his con­tin­ued inter­est in the phi­los­o­phy of lan­guage and its prac­ti­cal, every­day man­i­fes­ta­tions,” as Désirée Weber, Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor of Polit­i­cal The­o­ry at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Woost­er in Ohio, writes at the British Wittgen­stein Soci­ety site. Copies of the 42-page book are extreme­ly rare. The page above comes from a set of proof pages dis­cov­ered and exam­ined by Weber. The pages show the philoso­pher tai­lor­ing his ref­er­ence guide to the world his stu­dents knew and the lan­guage they already spoke.

“Although there is some ques­tion” which, or whether, the var­i­ous edi­to­r­i­al marks are in Wittgenstein’s own hand, “the con­tents of the dic­tio­nary and the cor­rec­tions yield a fas­ci­nat­ing view of the words that Wittgen­stein deemed cen­tral to the forms of life and lan­guage-games in which his stu­dents were immersed.” He cap­tured “the speci­fici­ty of the rur­al Aus­tri­an dialect,” Weber writes at the Wittgen­stein Ini­tia­tive, as well as “words that per­tained to cul­tur­al prac­tices that were part of their com­mu­ni­ty and with which they would have been well acquaint­ed.”

Wittgen­stein elab­o­rates his prac­ti­cal pur­pose in an intro­duc­tion, show­ing his intent to ini­ti­ate his stu­dents into their “lan­guage-using com­mu­ni­ty” and into “the respon­si­bil­i­ty this car­ries,” Weber writes. The project also shows him engag­ing in the the­o­ret­i­cal work that would occu­py him for the rest of his career.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lud­wig Wittgenstein’s Short, Strange & Bru­tal Stint as an Ele­men­tary School Teacher

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Lud­wig Wittgen­stein & His Philo­soph­i­cal Insights on the Prob­lems of Human Com­mu­ni­ca­tion

In Search of Lud­wig Wittgenstein’s Seclud­ed Hut in Nor­way: A Short Trav­el Film

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

Stream Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, a BBC Production Featuring Derek Jacobi (Free for a Limited Time)

in Audio Books, Literature | August 25th, 2019

A nice tip from Metafil­ter: “BBC Radio 4 is air­ing Mar­cel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time in 10 episodes run­ning to about nine hours in total. With a star­ry cast head­ed by Derek Jaco­bi as the Nar­ra­tor, the adap­ta­tion is writ­ten by U.S.-born, UK-based play­wright Tim­ber­lake Werten­bak­er.”

The entire audio col­lec­tion will remain stream­able for the next 28 days. Here are the indi­vid­ual episodes:

Episodes 1 and 2

Episode 3

Episode 4

Episode 5

Episode 6

Episode 7

Episode 8

Episode 9

Episode 10

Find more audio books in our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

The First Known Footage of Mar­cel Proust Dis­cov­ered: Watch It Online

An Intro­duc­tion to the Lit­er­ary Phi­los­o­phy of Mar­cel Proust, Pre­sent­ed in a Mon­ty Python-Style Ani­ma­tion

When James Joyce & Mar­cel Proust Met in 1922, and Total­ly Bored Each Oth­er

16-Year-Old Mar­cel Proust Tells His Grand­fa­ther About His Mis­guid­ed Adven­tures at the Local Broth­el

Mar­cel Proust Fills Out a Ques­tion­naire in 1890: The Man­u­script of the ‘Proust Ques­tion­naire’

Why Route 66 Became America’s Most Famous Road

in History, Travel | August 23rd, 2019

Most Amer­i­cans know Route 66, but some­times it seems like non-Amer­i­cans know it bet­ter. I hap­pen to be an Amer­i­can liv­ing out­side Amer­i­ca myself, and when­ev­er con­ver­sa­tions turn to the sub­ject of road trips in my home­land, it’s only a mat­ter of time before I hear the usu­al ques­tion: “Have you dri­ven Route 66?” Orig­i­nal­ly com­mis­sioned in 1926, the 2,448-mile road from Chica­go to San­ta Mon­i­ca enjoyed about three decades of pri­ma­cy before its eclipse by the Inter­state High­way Sys­tem. Quaint though Route 66 may now seem com­pared to that vast post­war infra­struc­tur­al project, it some­how has­n’t quite let go of its hold on the Amer­i­can imag­i­na­tion, and even less so the world’s imag­i­na­tion about Amer­i­ca.

“Route 66 has been in the shad­ows twice as long as it was in the spot­light,” says Vox’s Phil Edwards, “but there’s still this ener­gy around it.” In the video “Why Route 66 Became Amer­i­ca’s Most Famous Road,” Edwards does the icon­ic road trip him­self, and along the way tells the sto­ry behind what John Stein­beck called “the moth­er road, the road of flight.”

This nat­u­ral­ly involves an abun­dance of both cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly emp­ty land­scapes, flam­boy­ant­ly unhealthy cui­sine, and rich­ly kitschy Amer­i­cana, the kind of thing fea­tured in Atlas Obscu­ra’s robust Route 66 cat­e­go­ry. Edwards vis­its colos­sal cow­boy stat­ues, the Amer­i­can Quar­ter Horse Hall of Fame and Muse­um (“hors­es must be dead to be con­sid­ered”), and a road­house where, if you “eat 72 ounces of steak and sides in under an hour, you get it for free” — and those are just in Texas.

Route 66 can’t but appeal to Amer­i­can his­to­ry buffs, but in recent decades it has also attract­ed con­nois­seurs of des­o­la­tion. Orig­i­nal­ly shaped by a vari­ety of lob­by­ing inter­ests, includ­ing an espe­cial­ly vig­or­ous pro­mot­er of Tul­sa, Okla­homa named Cyrus Avery, the “Main Street of Amer­i­ca” turned many of the ham­lets along its path into, if not des­ti­na­tions, then places worth spend­ing the night. Fas­ci­nat­ing arti­facts remain of Route 66’s vibrant mid­cen­tu­ry “motel cul­ture,” but not even the most Amer­i­ca-besot­ted vis­i­tors from for­eign lands could over­look how thor­ough­ly his­to­ry seems to have passed most of these places by. I saw this first-hand myself when I drove across the Unit­ed States on Inter­state 40, the con­ti­nent-span­ning free­way that fol­lows Route 66 in places and cer­tain­ly has­tened its demise. You can see it and much else on Route 66 besides in the “aer­i­al doc­u­men­tary” above.

Edwards’ inter­vie­wees include denizens of Route 66 mak­ing a go of revers­ing the decline of this 34-years-decom­mis­sioned road, such as the pro­pri­etor of the Motel Safari, a ver­i­ta­ble 1950s time-cap­sule in Tucum­cari, New Mex­i­co. He also talks to the edi­tor of Route 66 News, an elder­ly Tex­an lady with a thing for dinosaurs, a mod­ern-day Cyrus Avery look­ing to pro­mote the glo­ries of Route 66’s Okla­homa stretch, and Route 66 road-trip­pers of var­i­ous ages and nation­al­i­ties, includ­ing a guy who actu­al­ly ate that 72-ounce steak with­in an hour. “There was dessert as far as the eye can see,” says one still-mar­veling young Euro­pean. He almost sure­ly meant desert, but as far as the charms of Amer­i­ca’s open roads go, both inter­pre­ta­tions are equal­ly true.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

If You Dri­ve Down a Stretch of Route 66, the Road Will Play “Amer­i­ca the Beau­ti­ful”

12 Clas­sic Lit­er­ary Road Trips in One Handy Inter­ac­tive Map

Four Inter­ac­tive Maps Immor­tal­ize the Road Trips That Inspired Jack Kerouac’s On the Road

Jack Kerouac’s On The Road Turned Into Google Dri­ving Direc­tions & Pub­lished as a Free eBook

Down­load Dig­i­tized Copies of The Negro Trav­el­ers’ Green Book, the Pre-Civ­il Rights Guide to Trav­el­ing Safe­ly in the U.S. (1936–66)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Mister Rogers Demonstrates How to Cut a Record

in K-12, Music, Technology, Television | August 23rd, 2019

When I was a lit­tle boy, I thought the great­est thing in the world would be to be able to make records. — Fred Rogers

By 1972, when the above episode of Mis­ter Rogers’ Neigh­bor­hood aired, host Fred Rogers had already cut four records, includ­ing the hit-filled A Place of Our Own.

But a child­like curios­i­ty com­pelled him to explore on cam­era how a vir­gin disc could become that most won­drous thing—a record.

So he bor­rowed a “spe­cial machine”—a Rek-O-Kut M12S over­head with an Audax mono head, for those keep­ing score at home—so he could show his friends, on cam­era, “how one makes records.”

This tech­nol­o­gy was already in decline, oust­ed by the vast­ly more portable home cas­sette recorder, but the record cut­ter held far more visu­al inter­est, yield­ing hair-like rem­nants that also became objects of fas­ci­na­tion to Mis­ter Rogers.

What we wouldn’t give to stum­ble across one of those machines and a stash of blank discs in a thrift store…

Wait, scratch that, imag­ine run­ning across the actu­al plat­ter Rogers cut that day!

Though we’d be remiss if we failed to men­tion that a mem­ber of The Secret Soci­ety of Lathe Trolls, a forum devot­ed to “record-cut­ting deviants, rene­gades, pro­fes­sion­als & exper­i­menters,” claims to have had an aunt who worked on the show, and accord­ing to her, the “repro­duc­tion” was faked in post.

(“It sound­ed like they record­ed the repro on like an old Stenorette rim dri­ve reel to reel or some­thing and then piped that back in,” anoth­er com­menter prompt­ly responds.)

The Trolls’ episode dis­cus­sion offers a lot of vin­tage audio nerd nit­ty grit­ty, as well as an inter­est­ing his­to­ry of the one-off self-recod­ed disc craze.

The mid-cen­tu­ry gen­er­al pub­lic could go to a coin-oper­at­ed portable sound booth to record a track or two. Spo­ken word mes­sages were pop­u­lar, though singers and bands also took the oppor­tu­ni­ty to lay down some grooves.

Radio sta­tions and record­ing stu­dios also kept machines sim­i­lar to the one Rogers is seen using. Sun Records’ sec­re­tary, Mar­i­on Keisker, oper­at­ed the cut­ting lathe the day an unknown named Elvis Pres­ley showed up to cut a lac­quered disc for a fee of $3.25.

The rest is his­to­ry.

More recent­ly, The Shins, The Kills, and Sea­sick Steve, below, record­ed live direct-to-acetate records on a mod­i­fied 1953 Scul­ly Lathe at Nashville’s Third Man Records.

(Leg­end has it that James Brown’s “It’s A Man’s World” was cut on that same lathe… Cut a hit of your own dur­ing a tour of Third Man’s direct-to-acetate record­ing facil­i­ties.)

via @wfmu

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Old School Records Were Made, From Start to Fin­ish: A 1937 Video Fea­tur­ing Duke Elling­ton

Watch a Nee­dle Ride Through LP Record Grooves Under an Elec­tron Micro­scope

How Vinyl Records Are Made: A Primer from 1956

An Inter­ac­tive Map of Every Record Shop in the World

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inkyzine, cur­rent issue the just-released #60.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Sep­tem­ber 9 for anoth­er sea­son of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

What Happens To Your Body & Brain If You Don’t Get Sleep? Neuroscientist Matthew Walker Explains

in Health, Neuroscience, Science | August 22nd, 2019

As an insom­ni­ac in a morn­ing person’s world, I wince at sleep news, espe­cial­ly from Matthew Walk­er, neu­ro­sci­en­tist, Berke­ley pro­fes­sor, and author of Why We Sleep. Some­thing of a “sleep evan­ge­list,” as Berke­ley News calls him (he prefers “sleep diplo­mat”), Walk­er has tak­en his mes­sage on the road—or the 21st cen­tu­ry equiv­a­lent: the TED Talk stages and ani­mat­ed explain­er videos.

One such video has Walk­er say­ing that “sleep when you’re dead” is “mor­tal­ly unwise advice… short sleep pre­dicts a short­er life.” Or as he elab­o­rates in an inter­view with Fresh Air’s Ter­ry Gross, “every dis­ease that is killing us in devel­oped nations has causal and sig­nif­i­cant links to a lack of sleep.”

Yeesh. Does he lay it on thick? Nope, he’s got the evi­dence and wants to scare us straight. It’s a psy­cho­log­i­cal tac­tic that hasn’t always worked so well, although next to “sleep or die” ser­mons, there’s good news: sleep, when har­nessed prop­er­ly (yes, some­where in the area of 8 hours a night) can also be a “super­pow­er.” Sleep does “won­der­ful­ly good things… for your brain and for your body,” boost­ing mem­o­ry, con­cen­tra­tion, and immu­ni­ty, just for starters.

But back to the bad.…

In the Tech Insid­er video above, Walk­er deliv­ers the grim facts. As he fre­quent­ly points out, most of us need to hear it. Sleep depri­va­tion is a seri­ous epidemic—brought on by a com­plex of socio-eco­nom­ic-politi­co-tech­no­log­i­cal fac­tors you can prob­a­bly imag­ine. See Walker’s com­par­isons (to the brain as an email inbox and a sewage sys­tem) ani­mat­ed, and learn about how lack of sleep con­tributes to a 24% increase in heart attacks and numer­ous forms of can­cer. (The World Health Orga­ni­za­tion has recent­ly “clas­si­fied night­time shift work as a prob­a­ble car­cino­gen.”)

On the upside, rarely is health sci­ence so unam­bigu­ous. If nutri­tion­ists could only give us such clear-cut advice. Whether we’d take it is anoth­er ques­tion. Learn more about the mul­ti­ple, and some­times fatal, con­se­quences of sleep depri­va­tion in the ani­mat­ed TED-Ed video above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sleep or Die: Neu­ro­sci­en­tist Matthew Walk­er Explains How Sleep Can Restore or Imper­il Our Health

How Sleep Can Become Your “Super­pow­er:” Sci­en­tist Matt Walk­er Explains Why Sleep Helps You Learn More and Live Longer

10 Hours of Ambi­ent Arc­tic Sounds Will Help You Relax, Med­i­tate, Study & Sleep

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

Marilyn Monroe Recounts Her Harrowing Experience in a Psychiatric Ward (1961)

in Film, Letters, Life | August 22nd, 2019

By the end of 1960, Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe was com­ing apart.

She spent much of that year shoot­ing what would be her final com­plet­ed movie – The Mis­fits (see a still from the trail­er above). Arthur Miller penned the film, which is about a beau­ti­ful, frag­ile woman who falls in love with a much old­er man. The script was pret­ty clear­ly based on his own trou­bled mar­riage with Mon­roe. The pro­duc­tion was by all accounts spec­tac­u­lar­ly pun­ish­ing. Shot in the deserts of Neva­da, the tem­per­a­ture on set would reg­u­lar­ly climb north of 100 degrees. Direc­tor John Hus­ton spent much of the shoot rag­ing­ly drunk. Star Clark Gable dropped dead from a heart attack less than a week after pro­duc­tion wrapped. And Mon­roe watched as her hus­band, who was on set, fell in love with pho­tog­ra­ph­er Inge Morath. Nev­er one blessed with con­fi­dence or a thick skin, Mon­roe retreat­ed into a daze of pre­scrip­tion drugs. Mon­roe and Miller announced their divorce on Novem­ber 11, 1960.

A few months lat­er, the emo­tion­al­ly exhaust­ed movie star was com­mit­ted by her psy­cho­an­a­lyst Dr. Mar­i­anne Kris to the Payne Whit­ney Psy­chi­atric Clin­ic in New York. Mon­roe thought she was going in for a rest cure. Instead, she was escort­ed to a padded cell. The four days she spent in the psych ward proved to be among the most dis­tress­ing of her life.

In a riv­et­ing 6‑page let­ter to her oth­er shrink, Dr. Ralph Green­son, writ­ten soon after her release, she detailed her ter­ri­fy­ing expe­ri­ence.

There was no empa­thy at Payne-Whit­ney — it had a very bad effect — they asked me after putting me in a “cell” (I mean cement blocks and all) for very dis­turbed depressed patients (except I felt I was in some kind of prison for a crime I had­n’t com­mit­ted. The inhu­man­i­ty there I found archa­ic. They asked me why I was­n’t hap­py there (every­thing was under lock and key; things like elec­tric lights, dress­er draw­ers, bath­rooms, clos­ets, bars con­cealed on the win­dows — the doors have win­dows so patients can be vis­i­ble all the time, also, the vio­lence and mark­ings still remain on the walls from for­mer patients). I answered: “Well, I’d have to be nuts if I like it here.”

Mon­roe quick­ly became des­per­ate.

I sat on the bed try­ing to fig­ure if I was giv­en this sit­u­a­tion in an act­ing impro­vi­sa­tion what would I do. So I fig­ured, it’s a squeaky wheel that gets the grease. I admit it was a loud squeak but I got the idea from a movie I made once called “Don’t Both­er to Knock”. I picked up a light-weight chair and slammed it, and it was hard to do because I had nev­er bro­ken any­thing in my life — against the glass inten­tion­al­ly. It took a lot of bang­ing to get even a small piece of glass — so I went over with the glass con­cealed in my hand and sat qui­et­ly on the bed wait­ing for them to come in. They did, and I said to them “If you are going to treat me like a nut I’ll act like a nut”. I admit the next thing is corny but I real­ly did it in the movie except it was with a razor blade. I indi­cat­ed if they did­n’t let me out I would harm myself — the fur­thest thing from my mind at that moment since you know Dr. Green­son I’m an actress and would nev­er inten­tion­al­ly mark or mar myself. I’m just that vain.

Dur­ing her four days there, she was sub­ject­ed to forced baths and a com­plete loss of pri­va­cy and per­son­al free­dom. The more she sobbed and resist­ed, the more the doc­tors there thought she might actu­al­ly be psy­chot­ic. Monroe’s sec­ond hus­band, Joe DiMag­gio, res­cued her by get­ting her released ear­ly, over the objec­tions of the staff.

You can read the full let­ter (where she also talks about read­ing the let­ters of Sig­mund Freud) over at Let­ters of Note. And while there, make sure you pick up a copy of the very ele­gant Let­ters of Note book.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in August 2015.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The 430 Books in Mar­i­lyn Monroe’s Library: How Many Have You Read?

Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe Reads Joyce’s Ulysses at the Play­ground (1955)

Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe Reads Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1952)

Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe Explains Rel­a­tiv­i­ty to Albert Ein­stein (in a Nico­las Roeg Movie)

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. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.