See the Very First Solar Eclipse Captured on Film: A Magical Moment in Science and Filmmaking (1900)

in Film, History, Science | June 5th, 2019

The “con­quest of space,” so to speak—the human under­stand­ing of and trav­el to the cosmos—has come about through a suc­ces­sion of great sci­en­tif­ic minds, as well as some of the most inter­est­ing and accom­plished peo­ple all around. We nev­er seem to tire of learn­ing about their devo­tion to math­e­mat­ics, physics, med­i­cine, and sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­ery writ as large as pos­si­ble. But some­times the con­quest of space has required the unique tal­ents of magi­cians. From the ancient mages who excit­ed human imag­i­na­tion about the stars for thou­sands of years, to alchemists like Isaac New­ton and beyond.

Wit­ness the strange career of Mar­vel White­side Par­sons, bet­ter known as Jack Par­sons: sci-fi fanat­ic, occultist, dis­ci­ple of Aleis­ter Crow­ley, and one­time mag­i­cal part­ner of L. Ron Hub­bard. Par­sons is most famous for found­ing the Jet Propul­sion Lab­o­ra­to­ry, the research cen­ter that pow­ers NASA. Then we have magi­cian Nevil Maskelyne—son of magi­cian John Nevil Maske­lyne, and pos­si­ble descen­dent, so he said, of the fifth British Roy­al Astronomer, “also named Nevil Maske­lyne,” writes Jason Daley at Smith­son­ian. Maske­lyne the very much younger doc­u­ment­ed the first total solar eclipse ever cap­tured on film.

Grant­ed, he was a stage magi­cian, not a fol­low­er of “The Great Beast 666.” Maske­lyne’s inter­est in show­man­ship and spec­ta­cle drew him not to sex mag­ic but to film­mak­ing and astron­o­my, inter­ests he com­bined when he made the first film ever of a total solar eclipse. Nowa­days, mil­lions of peo­ple have the means to make such a film in their pock­et, pro­vid­ed they have a good view of the infre­quent cos­mic event (and do not ever look at it direct­ly). In 1900, when Maske­lyne under­took the chal­lenge, film­mak­ing was just emerg­ing from infan­cy into tod­dler­hood.

The Lumière broth­ers, often cred­it­ed as the first film­mak­ers, had held their first pub­lic screen­ing only five years ear­li­er. They called their ear­ly pro­duc­tions actu­al­ités, essen­tial­ly “real­i­ty films.” Some of these, like the leg­endary L’ar­rivée d’un train en gare de La Cio­tat, famous­ly shocked and ter­ri­fied audi­ences out of their seats. In 1900, film was still a kind of mag­ic, and “like mag­ic,” says Bry­ony Dixon, cura­tor at the British Film Insti­tute (BFI), film “com­bines both art and sci­ence.” The sto­ry of Maskelyne’s achieve­ment is “a sto­ry about mag­ic.”

Maskelyne’s love for film inspired in him a pas­sion for astron­o­my as well, and he even­tu­al­ly became a fel­low of the Roy­al Astro­nom­i­cal Soci­ety. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, his first cin­e­mat­ic con­tri­bu­tion to the field dis­ap­peared, nev­er to be seen again. Two years before he shot the footage above from the ground in North Car­oli­na on May 28, 1900, on a ven­ture fund­ed by the British Astro­nom­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion, Maske­lyne trav­eled to India to doc­u­ment a sim­i­lar event. The film can­nis­ter was stolen on his return trip home

But he had learned what he need­ed to, hav­ing designed “a spe­cial tele­scop­ic adapter for a movie cam­era,” just as he and his father had ear­li­er improved upon the film pro­jec­tor by build­ing their own. Maske­lyne had his spec­ta­cle. He showed the film in his the­ater, and the Roy­al Astro­nom­i­cal Soci­ety ensured that we could see it almost 120 years lat­er by archiv­ing a minute of the footage. Thanks to a part­ner­ship between the British Film Insti­tute and the RAS, the film has been restored, dig­i­tized in 4K res­o­lu­tion, and made freely avail­able online as part of a trove of Vic­to­ri­an-era films” just released by the BFI.

While thou­sands, maybe mil­lions, of dif­fer­ent mov­ing images of 2017’s solar eclipse exist on social media accounts, of this event 120 years ago there has exist­ed only one. Now that brief moment in time can reach mil­lions of peo­ple in an instant, and exist in an infi­nite num­ber of per­fect copies, a phe­nom­e­non that might have seemed in 1900 like an advanced form of mag­ic.

via Smith­son­ian

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Moons, Moons, They’re Every­where. The Unex­pect­ed Shad­ows of the Solar Eclipse

Last Night’s Solar Eclipse in a 60-Sec­ond, 700-Pic­ture Time­lapse Video

Solar Eclipse Seen From Out­er Space

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

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author Jared Diamond Describes How the U.S. Could Become a Dictatorship in 10 Years

in Politics | June 5th, 2019

It can hap­pen here, and it has.

By “it” I mean the enor­mous con­cen­tra­tion of wealth and polit­i­cal pow­er in the hands of a very few, and by “here” I mean the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca, a coun­try that adver­tis­es itself as a democ­ra­cy, but should right­ly be referred to as an oli­garchy, ruled by a wealthy elite.

But the coun­try is not a dic­ta­tor­ship yet. I say “yet” because that too can hap­pen here, giv­en the afore­men­tioned con­cen­tra­tion of wealth and pow­er, the increas­ing tol­er­ance for nation­al­ism, cru­el­ty, xeno­pho­bia, and near-con­stant lying, and the craven acqui­es­cence so many of the country’s legislators—who are sup­posed to put a check on such things—have shown to the whims of a bald­ly auto­crat­ic exec­u­tive.

Per­haps it is only a mat­ter of time, giv­en the above. How much time? Maybe ten years, argues Jared Dia­mond, Pulitzer Prize-win­ning anthro­pol­o­gist, geo­g­ra­ph­er, his­to­ri­an, and ecol­o­gist, and author of The Third Chim­panzee; Guns, Germs, and Steel; Col­lapse: How Soci­eties Choose to Fail or Suc­ceed; and The World Until Yes­ter­day.

In the Big Think video inter­view clip above, Dia­mond frames the prob­lem as one of an unwill­ing­ness to com­pro­mise, using the anal­o­gy of a hap­py mar­riage. “The best you can hope for in a mar­riage is an agree­ment on 80%. If you agree on 80%, that’s fan­tas­tic.” For any two peo­ple, mar­ried or oth­er­wise, 80% agree­ment seems opti­mistic. For an entire coun­try, it seems almost utopi­an.

But what­ev­er num­ber you want to set as a real­is­tic goal, the U.S. has fall­en far below it—at least when it comes to the way our gov­ern­men­tal bod­ies work, or don’t, togeth­er. This is not a prob­lem reducible to “both sides.” One par­ty in par­tic­u­lar has con­sis­tent­ly refused to work with the oth­er and used every dirty trick—from extreme ger­ry­man­der­ing to refus­ing to let a sit­ting Pres­i­dent appoint a Supreme Court Justice—to hold pow­er.

Pol­i­tics is a dirty busi­ness, you may say, and yes, it is. But—to return to Diamond’s point—a func­tion­ing democ­ra­cy requires com­pro­mise. These days, con­gress can­not pass leg­is­la­tion; “leg­is­la­tures are at odds with the judi­cia­ry” (Dia­mond cites the exam­ple of the Repub­li­can-con­trolled West Vir­ginia con­gress impeach­ing the state’s entire, Demo­c­ra­t­ic-major­i­ty, supreme court in 2018); state gov­ern­ments are suing the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment, and vice-ver­sa.

The fail­ure of com­pro­mise, says Dia­mond, is “the only prob­lem that could pre­cip­i­tate the Unit­ed States into the end of democ­ra­cy and into a dic­ta­tor­ship in the next decade.” The usu­al his­tor­i­cal exam­ples can be more or less instruc­tive on this point. But there are oth­er, more recent, dic­ta­tor­ships that do not receive near­ly enough attention—perhaps by design, since they have been “friend­ly” regimes that the U.S. helped cre­ate.

Dia­mond describes the sit­u­a­tion in Chile, for exam­ple, where he lived in the late 60s. When he first moved there, it had been “the most demo­c­ra­t­ic coun­try in Latin Amer­i­ca,” a coun­try that prid­ed itself on its abil­i­ty to com­pro­mise. But this qual­i­ty was in decline, he says, and its loss led to the country’s mil­i­tary coup in 1973, which brought the bru­tal dic­ta­tor Augus­to Pinochet to pow­er (with the help of the CIA and cer­tain Amer­i­can econ­o­mists).

The new Chilean gov­ern­ment “smashed world records for sadism and tor­ture,” says Dia­mond, shock­ing those Chileans who believed their coun­try was immune to the excess­es of oth­er Latin Amer­i­can nations that had suc­cumbed to repres­sive author­i­tar­i­an­ism. If that hap­pens here, he argues, it will not come through a mil­i­tary coup, but rather through “what we see going on now”—namely restric­tions on the right to vote and vot­er apa­thy.

Vot­ing is the pri­ma­ry solu­tion, Dia­mond claims, but vot­ing alone may not address the prob­lem of oli­garchy. When a hand­ful of the wealthy con­trol mass media, fund local and nation­al polit­i­cal cam­paigns, and oth­er­wise exert undue influ­ence, through mass sur­veil­lance, manip­u­la­tion, and the use of for­eign agents, the pos­si­bil­i­ty of free and fair elec­tions may dis­ap­pear, if it hasn’t already.

Nonethe­less, Diamond’s point deserves some seri­ous con­sid­er­a­tion. If we want to avert dic­ta­tor­ship in the U.S., how can we encour­age compromise—without, that is, relin­quish­ing our most fun­da­men­tal val­ues? It’s a point to pon­der.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Aldous Hux­ley Warns Against Dic­ta­tor­ship in Amer­i­ca

Umber­to Eco Makes a List of the 14 Com­mon Fea­tures of Fas­cism

Han­nah Arendt on “Per­son­al Respon­si­bil­i­ty Under Dic­ta­tor­ship:” Bet­ter to Suf­fer Than Col­lab­o­rate

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

136 Maps Reveal Where Tourists & Locals Take Photos in Major Cities Across the Globe

in Maps | June 5th, 2019

How to tell the tourists in a city from the locals? Poten­tial­ly reli­able indi­ca­tors include the lan­guage they speak, the terms they use, the way they dress, the way they walk, and whether they’re stand­ing in the mid­dle of the side­walk squint­ing at a map. But few fac­tors draw the line between tourist and local more stark­ly than where they go and don’t go: no mat­ter the city, one will soon­er or lat­er hear talk of places locals know that tourists don’t, places locals don’t go because tourists do know about them, places tourists go when they want to act like locals, places locals go when they want to act like tourists, and so on.

In his project “Tourists and Locals,” Eric Fis­ch­er has found one way of quan­ti­fy­ing this great divide: where do the mem­bers of each group take the pho­tos they upload to the inter­net? You can view the results in 136 dif­fer­ent city maps or explore a whole world map, both of which use the same col­or cod­ing: “The red bits indi­cate pho­tos tak­en by tourists,” says Bril­liant Maps, “while the blue bits indi­cate pho­tos tak­en by locals and the yel­low bits might be either.”

Using “Map­Box and Twit­ter data from Gnip to cre­ate the maps,” Fis­ch­er defined locals as “those who tweet­ed from the same loca­tion for at least a month” and tourists as “those who were con­sid­ered local in anoth­er city but were tweet­ing in a dif­fer­ent loca­tion.”

Here, from the top of the post down, we have Fis­cher’s maps of Paris, Tokyo, Dublin, and San Fran­cis­co, all cities with vary­ing degrees of over­lap between the realm of the local and that of the tourist. Parisian attrac­tions like the Parc de Belleville and the Bassin de la Vil­lette show a rel­a­tive­ly healthy tourist-local bal­ance, where­as out­siders dom­i­nate in places like La Défense with its high­ly pho­tograph­able sky­scrap­ers, and of course the Lou­vre (to say noth­ing of the red-sat­u­rat­ed Ver­sailles, not pic­tured in this seg­ment of the map). Com­pare that with Tokyo, which of course has world-famous spots — the quaint­ly his­toric Asakusa, the sub­lime­ly urban Shibuya Cross­ing — but whose form does­n’t encour­age quite as strict a phys­i­cal sep­a­ra­tion of tourist and local.

The path a tourist takes through Dublin might over­lap a great deal with the one Leopold Bloom took on June 16, 1904, but less so with the paths an aver­age Dublin­er takes in the 2010s. The Irish cap­i­tal also offers a host of must-sees apart from the Ulysses tour — the Guin­ness Store­house, Trin­i­ty Col­lege’s Old Library, home of The Book of Kells— but vis­i­tors would do well to fol­low the exam­ple of Dublin’s locals and get a bit more dis­tance from the city cen­ter. They could do the same in San Fran­cis­co, a city of icon­ic tourist attrac­tions on which, before the tech boom, its very sur­vival seemed to depend. But do true trav­el­ers, as opposed to tourists, need this kind of data pro­cess­ing and infor­ma­tion design to know their time would be bet­ter spent some­where oth­er than Fish­er­man’s Wharf?

See 136 dif­fer­ent city maps here.

via Bril­liant Maps

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a Visu­al Jour­ney Through 181 Years of Street Pho­tog­ra­phy (1838–2019)

The Shift­ing Pow­er of the World’s Largest Cities Visu­al­ized Over 4,000 Years (2050 BC-2050 AD)

How Leonar­do da Vin­ci Drew an Accu­rate Satel­lite Map of an Ital­ian City (1502)

James Joyce’s Dublin Cap­tured in Vin­tage Pho­tos from 1897 to 1904

An Online Gallery of Over 900,000 Breath­tak­ing Pho­tos of His­toric New York City

A Won­der­ful Archive of His­toric Tran­sit Maps: Expres­sive Art Meets Pre­cise Graph­ic Design

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Marie Curie Became the First Woman to Win a Nobel Prize, the First Person to Win Twice, and the Only Person in History to Win in Two Different Sciences

in Gender, History, Science | June 4th, 2019

For most of sci­en­tif­ic his­to­ry, women who made con­tri­bu­tions to var­i­ous fields have been side­lined or ignored in favor of male col­leagues, who reaped fame, pro­fes­sion­al recog­ni­tion, and cash rewards that come with pres­ti­gious prizes like the Nobel. Cor­nell his­to­ri­an of sci­ence Mar­garet Rossiter coined the term “The Matil­da Effect” to describe sex­ist bias in the sci­ences. Rossiter’s work and pop­u­lar reap­praisals like book-turned-film Hid­den Fig­ures have inspired oth­er women in acad­e­mia to search for for­got­ten female sci­en­tists, and to find them, lit­er­al­ly, in foot­notes.

When sys­tem­at­ic dis­crim­i­na­tion lim­its oppor­tu­ni­ties for any group, those who do receive recog­ni­tion, the excep­tions to the rule, must often be tru­ly excep­tion­al to suc­ceed. There has been lit­tle doubt, both in her life­time and in the many decades after­ward, that Marie Curie was such a per­son. Although forced to study sci­ence in secret at a clan­des­tine “Float­ing Uni­ver­si­ty” in her native Poland—since the uni­ver­si­ties refused to admit women—Curie (born Marie Salomea Sklodows­ka in 1867) would achieve such renown in her field that she was award­ed not one, but two Nobel Prizes.

Curie and her hus­band Pierre shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Antoine Hen­ri Bec­quer­el, dis­cov­er­er of radioac­tiv­i­ty, in 1903. The sec­ond prize, in Chem­istry, was hers alone in 1911, “in recog­ni­tion of her ser­vices to the advance­ment of chem­istry by the dis­cov­ery of the ele­ments radi­um and polo­ni­um, by the iso­la­tion of radi­um and the study of the nature and com­pounds of this remark­able ele­ment.” Curie was not only the first woman to win a Nobel, but she was also the first per­son to win twice, and the only per­son to win in two dif­fer­ent sci­ences.

These are but a hand­ful of achieve­ments in a string of firsts for Curie: denied posi­tions in Poland, she earned a Ph.D. in France, award­ed the degree in 1903 by the Sor­bonne, the same year she won her first Nobel. “Her exam­in­ers,” notes the site Famous Sci­en­tists, “were of the view that she had made the great­est con­tri­bu­tion to sci­ence ever found in a Ph.D. the­sis.” Three years lat­er, after Pierre was killed in an acci­dent, Marie was offered his pro­fes­sor­ship and became the first female pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Paris.

Curie suc­ceed­ed not in the absence of, but in spite of the sex­ist obsta­cles placed in her path at near­ly every stage in her career. After she received her doc­tor­ate, the Curies were invit­ed to the Roy­al Insti­tu­tion in Lon­don. Only Pierre was per­mit­ted to speak. That same year, the Nobel Com­mit­tee decid­ed to hon­or only her hus­band and Bec­quer­el. The Acad­e­my relent­ed when Pierre protest­ed. Curie fell vic­tim to a wave of xeno­pho­bia and anti-Semi­tism (though she was not Jew­ish) that swept through France in the 1900s, most famous­ly in the so-called “Drey­fus Affair.”

In 1911, the year of her sec­ond Nobel, Curie was passed over for mem­ber­ship in the French Acad­e­my of Sci­ences. It would take anoth­er 51 years before the first woman, Mar­guerite Perey, a for­mer doc­tor­al stu­dent of Curie, would be elect­ed to that body. That same year, Curie was per­se­cut­ed relent­less­ly by the French press, the pub­lic, and her sci­en­tif­ic rivals after it was revealed that she had had a brief affair with physi­cist Paul Langevin, one of Pierre Curie’s for­mer stu­dents.

But no mat­ter how many men in posi­tions of pow­er want­ed to deter Curie, there always seemed to be more influ­en­tial sci­en­tists and politi­cians who rec­og­nized the supreme val­ue of her work and the need to help her con­tin­ue it. After her sec­ond Nobel Prize, her native coun­try final­ly rec­og­nized her with the offer to direct her own lab­o­ra­to­ry in War­saw. Curie turned it down to focus on direct­ing the Curie Lab­o­ra­to­ry in the Radi­um Insti­tute of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Paris, which she found­ed in 1914, a major achieve­ment and, again, only a small part of her lega­cy.

Curie is known, of course, fore­most for her excep­tion­al sci­en­tif­ic work, but also for open­ing doors for women in sci­ence all over the world, though much of that door-open­ing may only have hap­pened decades after her death in 1934, and much of it hasn’t hap­pened at all yet. Inci­den­tal­ly, in the fol­low­ing year, the Curies’ daugh­ter Irène Joliot-Curie and her hus­band Frédéric Joliot-Curie were joint­ly award­ed the Nobel Prize in Chem­istry. Since then, only two oth­er women have claimed that hon­or, and only two women, includ­ing Marie Curie, have won the Prize in physics, out of 203 win­ners total.

There may be noth­ing yet like gen­der par­i­ty in the sci­ences, but those who know where to look can find the names of dozens of women sci­en­tists run­ning women-owned com­pa­nies, women-found­ed research insti­tutes and aca­d­e­m­ic depart­ments, and, like the famous Curies, mak­ing major con­tri­bu­tions to chem­istry. Per­haps not long from now, many of those excep­tion­al sci­en­tists will be as well-known and wide­ly cel­e­brat­ed as Marie Curie.

via Fan­tas­tic Facts

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Marie Curie Attend­ed a Secret, Under­ground “Fly­ing Uni­ver­si­ty” When Women Were Banned from Pol­ish Uni­ver­si­ties

Read the Uplift­ing Let­ter That Albert Ein­stein Sent to Marie Curie Dur­ing a Time of Per­son­al Cri­sis (1911)

How Amer­i­can Women “Kick­start­ed” a Cam­paign to Give Marie Curie a Gram of Radi­um, Rais­ing $120,000 in 1921

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

Watch the First Trailer for Martin Scorsese’s New Film, Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story 

in Film, Music | June 4th, 2019

Rolling Thun­der Revue: A Bob Dylan Sto­ry “cap­tures the trou­bled spir­it of Amer­i­ca in 1975, and the joy­ous music that Bob Dylan per­formed that fall [dur­ing the Rolling Thun­der Revue tour]. Mas­ter film­mak­er Mar­tin Scors­ese cre­ates a one-of-a-kind movie expe­ri­ence: part doc­u­men­tary, part con­cert film, part fever dream. Fea­tur­ing Joan Baez, Rubin Hur­ri­cane Carter, Sam Shep­ard, Allen Gins­berg, and Bob Dylan giv­ing his first on-cam­era inter­view in over a decade. The film goes beyond mere recla­ma­tion of Dylan’s extra­or­di­nary music—it’s a roadmap into the wild coun­try of artis­tic self-rein­ven­tion.”

Watch the brand new trail­er above, and mark June 12th on your cal­en­dar when the film arrives on Net­flix.

Relat­ed­ly, June 7th is when Dylan will release The Rolling Thun­der Revue: The 1975 Live Record­ings, a 14CD box set that fea­tures all five sets from the Rolling Thun­der Revue tour that were pro­fes­sion­al­ly record­ed.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Tan­gled Up in Blue: Deci­pher­ing a Bob Dylan Mas­ter­piece

Clas­sic Songs by Bob Dylan Re-Imag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers: “Like a Rolling Stone,” “A Hard Rain’s A‑Gonna Fall” & More

Watch Joan Baez Endear­ing­ly Imi­tate Bob Dylan (1972)

Hear Bob Dylan’s New­ly-Released Nobel Lec­ture: A Med­i­ta­tion on Music, Lit­er­a­ture & Lyrics

Exercise May Prove an Effective Natural Treatment for Depression & Anxiety, New Study Shows

in Health, Psychology, Science | June 4th, 2019

Image by cue­ga­los, via Flickr Com­mons

Maybe it seems intu­itive that exer­cise would be pre­scribed to treat anx­i­ety and depres­sion, low­er stress lev­els, and make peo­ple hap­pi­er. After all, exer­cise and nutri­tion­al inter­ven­tions are reg­u­lar­ly dis­cussed in the con­text of the U.S.’s oth­er major killers: heart dis­ease, dia­betes, var­i­ous can­cers, even Alzheimer’s. How often have we heard about the dan­gers of a seden­tary lifestyle or over-processed foods? Or read about reme­dies from walk­ing, yoga, and spin cycling to the Mediter­ranean diet?

But men­tal health is seem­ing­ly different—the dis­ease mod­el that guid­ed depres­sion research for so long has fal­tered. “We do not have a biol­o­gy for men­tal ill­ness,” writes Derek Beres at Big Think. Researchers lack a med­ical pathol­o­gy for mood dis­or­ders that affect over­all health, careers, rela­tion­ships, and qual­i­ty of life for mil­lions. The anti­de­pres­sants once sold as a cure-all and pre­scribed to dizzy­ing degrees proved to have lim­it­ed effi­ca­cy and unfor­tu­nate side effects. No one seems to know exact­ly how or why or if they work. “Men­tal health scripts are guess­work,” Beres writes, “more of an art than sci­ence.”

Where does this leave the state of men­tal health research these days? One team of sci­en­tists at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ver­mont found evi­dence that exer­cise sig­nif­i­cant­ly improved mood in patients with severe and chron­ic men­tal ill­ness­es. As Newsweek reports, “a total of 100 patients signed up to par­tic­i­pate in the study,” whose results were pub­lished recent­ly in the jour­nal Glob­al Advances in Health and Med­i­cine. The study vol­un­teers came from “wards that dealt with con­di­tions such as bipo­lar dis­or­der, depres­sion, bor­der­line per­son­al­i­ty dis­or­der, gen­er­al­ized anx­i­ety dis­or­der and schiz­o­phre­nia.”

After a work­out sched­ule that includ­ed car­dio, resis­tance, and flex­i­bil­i­ty train­ing, four times a week for six­ty min­utes at a time, as well as nutri­tion­al pro­grams “tai­lored” for each patient, 95 per­cent of the par­tic­i­pants “said their mood has improved… and 63 per­cent said they were ‘hap­py’ or ‘very hap­py,’ rather than ‘neu­tral,’ ‘sad,’ or ‘very sad.’” 97.6 said they were moti­vat­ed to con­tin­ue work­ing out and eat­ing bet­ter. “The research yield­ed pos­i­tive out­comes in all areas inves­ti­gat­ed,” write authors David Tomasi, Sheri Gates, and Emi­ly Reyns of the study’s results. They con­clude that phys­i­cal exer­cise may con­tribute to “a more bal­anced and inte­grat­ed sense of self.”

The researchers also rec­om­mend exer­cise as a treat­ment before the pre­scrip­tion of psy­chi­atric drugs. There may not yet be a clear med­ical expla­na­tion for why it works. But that may be because mod­ern med­i­cine has only recent­ly begun to see the mind and the body as one, at a time when our cul­tur­al evo­lu­tion sends us hurtling toward a greater arti­fi­cial divide between the two. “We’ve con­struct­ed a world in which most of the pop­u­la­tion sur­vives by per­form­ing min­i­mal phys­i­cal activ­i­ty.” A world soon to be engulfed in VR, AR, self-dri­ving cars, and an “inter­net of things” that promis­es to elim­i­nate the few phys­i­cal tasks we have left.

We are in dan­ger of for­get­ting that our men­tal and emo­tion­al health are direct­ly tied to the needs of our phys­i­cal bod­ies, and that our bod­ies need to move, stretch, and bend in order to stay alive and thrive. Read more sum­ma­ry of the study at Newsweek and see the full results from Glob­al Advances in Health and Med­i­cine here.

via Big Think/Newsweek

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What’s a Sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly-Proven Way to Improve Your Abil­i­ty to Learn? Get Out and Exer­cise

This Is Your Brain on Exer­cise: Why Phys­i­cal Exer­cise (Not Men­tal Games) Might Be the Best Way to Keep Your Mind Sharp

How Stress Can Change Your Brain: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

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

What If We’re Wrong?: An Animated Video Challenges Our Most Deeply Held Beliefs–With the Help of a Ludwig Wittgenstein Thought Experiment

in Philosophy, Politics | June 3rd, 2019

Philoso­pher Lud­wig Wittgen­stein asked us to imag­ine a rope stretched around the earth at the equa­tor (and imag­ine the earth as a per­fect sphere). Were we to add one more yard to the rope, then stretch it out taut again, would any­one be able to notice the dif­fer­ence? Most of us will intu­it that it couldn’t pos­si­bly be so, a yard would dis­ap­pear in the immen­si­ty of the Earth’s cir­cum­fer­ence.

Some geom­e­try and alge­bra show, in fact, that the rope would hov­er about 6 inch­es off the ground, becom­ing a haz­ardous trip­wire span­ning the globe. The video above from the Cen­ter for Pub­lic Phi­los­o­phy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, San­ta Cruz begins with this odd thought exper­i­ment and ends with a call to action: to apply more skep­ti­cism to our polit­i­cal posi­tions.

If we can be so wrong about a prob­lem with a math­e­mat­i­cal proof, we’re asked, “how should an open-mind­ed hon­est per­son regard her own cer­tain­ty in areas where there are often no proofs, like pol­i­tics, phi­los­o­phy, ethics, or aes­thet­ics? Maybe we should be a lot less con­fi­dent in our beliefs. After all, we might be wrong more than we real­ize.” Maybe so. But it seems there’s some slip­pery use of ter­mi­nol­o­gy here.

In any case, the short video is not, we should point out, a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of Wittgenstein’s thought, only a riff on his imag­in­ing a rope around the world. What did Wittgen­stein him­self have to say about skep­ti­cism and cer­tain­ty? It’s com­pli­cat­ed. Attempt­ing to char­ac­ter­ize his thought in brief might be an impos­si­ble task. He can seem like a high­ly con­tra­dic­to­ry thinker, refut­ing the ideas in his first book, the Trac­ta­tus Logi­co-Philo­soph­i­cus, in his posthu­mous­ly pub­lished Philo­soph­i­cal Inves­ti­ga­tions, for exam­ple.

But per­haps it is more so the case—as A.C. Grayling writes of anoth­er posthu­mous­ly pub­lished Wittgen­stein col­lec­tion, On Cer­tain­ty—that the stages of the enig­mat­ic thinker’s career were each “a col­lec­tion of pro­vi­sion­al notes, record­ing a jour­ney not an arrival.” He had begun in the Trac­ta­tus by con­sid­er­ing phi­los­o­phy “a spu­ri­ous enter­prise.” Most famous­ly, Wittgen­stein wrote, “Where­of one can­not speak, there­of one must be silent,” sweep­ing away with one lofty ges­ture all meta­physics and abstract spec­u­la­tion.

In On Cer­tain­ty, he appears to final­ly accept philosophy’s “legit­i­ma­cy.” Any con­flict with his ear­li­er posi­tions does not trou­ble him at all. Wittgen­stein attempts to refute skep­ti­cism, return­ing to the image of a “world pic­ture” that recurs again and again in his work, build­ing his case with apho­risms like “I have a world pic­ture. Is it true or false? Above all it is the sub­stra­tum of all my enquir­ing and assert­ing.” Draw­ing on the foun­da­tion­al­ism of G.E. Moore, Wittgen­stein deploys rhetoric that sounds down­right fun­da­men­tal­ist:

If I say ‘we assume that the earth has exist­ed for many years past’ (or some­thing sim­i­lar), then of course it sounds strange that we should assume such a thing. But in the entire sys­tem of our lan­guage-games it belongs to the foun­da­tions. The assump­tion, one might say, forms the basis of action, and there­fore, nat­u­ral­ly, of thought.

Isn’t the ques­tion this: ‘What if you had to change your opin­ion even on these most fun­da­men­tal things?’ And to that the answer seems to me to be: ‘You don’t have to change. That is just what their being “fun­da­men­tal” is.’

This does not sound like a per­son like­ly to ever change their mind about what one might call their “strong­ly-held beliefs.” Wittgen­stein con­structs anoth­er view at the very same time. His sec­ond argu­ment “is not com­fort­ably con­sis­tent with—perhaps, indeed, under­mines” the first. While defend­ing cer­tain­ty, he argues for “rel­a­tivism… the view that truth and knowl­edge are not absolute or invari­able, but depen­dent upon view­point, cir­cum­stances or his­tor­i­cal con­di­tions.”

Our thoughts about the world, or our “world-pic­ture,” writes Wittgen­stein, “might be part of a kind of mythol­o­gy…. The mythol­o­gy may change back into a state of flux, the riv­er-bed of thoughts may shift.” Our beliefs change as the “lan­guage-game” changes. We put on new dis­cur­sive cloth­ing, con­tin­gent on our present cir­cum­stances. “The dif­fi­cul­ty,” writes the philoso­pher, with almost a hint of sym­pa­thy, “is to real­ize the ground­less­ness of our believ­ing.”

Nei­ther of these positions—that we are jus­ti­fied in believ­ing “fun­da­men­tal,” self-evi­dent propo­si­tions because they’re fun­da­men­tal; or that we change our beliefs because of a change in rel­a­tive “language-games”—fit neat­ly with the idea that we should try to be less cer­tain and more open to chang­ing our minds. Nor is any ref­er­ence in Wittgen­stein like­ly to help resolve our polit­i­cal dis­agree­ments.

We may find it a com­fort, or a deeply unset­tling propo­si­tion, that cer­tain beliefs might be anchored more deeply than proof or skep­ti­cism can reach. Or as Wittgen­stein put it: “And now if I were to say ‘It is my unshake­able con­vic­tion that etc.,’ this means in the present case too that I have not con­scious­ly arrived at the con­vic­tion by fol­low­ing a par­tic­u­lar line of thought, but that it is anchored in all my ques­tions and answers, so anchored that I can­not touch it.” Yet, per­haps it is the case that we share more of these con­vic­tions than we know.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Hear Wittgenstein’s Trac­ta­tus Logi­co-Philo­soph­i­cus Sung as a One-Woman Opera

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

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.

Watch John Bonham’s Blistering 13-Minute Drum Solo on “Moby Dick,” One of His Finest Moments Live Onstage (1970)

in Music | June 3rd, 2019

Some­times I play air drums, when at home before a roar­ing pair of speak­ers. No one would know it, but I’m not half bad. Except when it comes to jazz. Then it’s too ridicu­lous even for soli­tary goof­ing off. But I’m just com­pe­tent enough to fake most basic rock beats… most… that is, but those of the most loud­ly sung drum­mers in clas­sic rock: Kei­th Moon and John Bon­ham.

In cat­e­gories all their own, it’s no sur­prise both drum­mers loved jazz, espe­cial­ly the hyper­ki­net­ic Gene Kru­pa. (Trag­i­cal­ly, they also shared an inter­est in fatal overindul­gence.) They took some com­mon influ­ences, how­ev­er, in very dif­fer­ent direc­tions.

For one thing, Moon hat­ed drum solos, that sta­ple of the jazz drummer’s kit. The one excep­tion to his rule may be Moon’s last appear­ance onstage in 1977, play­ing per­cus­sion in a cameo on Bonham’s solo on “Moby Dick,” one of the Led Zep­pelin drummer’s finest moments. “Bon­ham was known to solo on this song for up to 30 min­utes live!” writes Drum! mag­a­zine. It’s even said he “some­times drew blood per­form­ing ‘Moby Dick’ from using his bare hands to beat his snare and tom toms.”

The live ver­sion above, clock­ing in at a mere 15 min­utes, comes from a 1970 show at Roy­al Albert Hall. Robert Plant intro­duces the drum­mer with his full name, John Hen­ry Bon­ham, before he even names the song. Then, after a minute of Page, Bon­ham, and Jones play­ing the open­ing riff togeth­er, the solo begins.

Bon­ham leads us in slow­ly at first, then, with jaw-drop­ping skill, puts on dis­play what made him “a very spe­cial drum­mer” indeed, as the site Clas­sic Rock writes: “doing things with a bass ped­al that it took two of James Brown’s drum­mers to try and emulate—and they knew a bit about rhythm.”

His “pio­neer­ing use of bass drum triplets” is only a small part of his “impor­tant dis­cov­ery that all drum­ming is just triplets, or should be,” declares Michael Fowler’s rev­er­ent­ly tongue-in-cheek McSweeney’s trib­ute. “The next step, he saw, was in speed­ing up the beat with­out los­ing the basic triplet pat­tern… fly­ing around the kit with blind­ing speed, hit­ting every drum and cym­bal in those neg­li­gi­ble spaces.”

Bonham’s ridicu­lous­ly fast and com­plex patterns—whether deployed in half-hour solos or five-sec­ond drum fills (as above in “Achilles Last Stand” from 1979)—“shouldn’t be human­ly pos­si­ble,” Dave Grohl once said. But they were pos­si­ble for the great John Bon­ham, born on May 31st, 1948.

“Let’s face it,” writes Fowler, “no one else does or ever will” sound like Led Zeppelin’s drum­mer. Cel­e­brate his just-belat­ed birth­day by revis­it­ing more of his great­est live moments at Drum! and, just below, hear Robert Plant sing “Hap­py Birth­day” to his cel­e­brat­ed band­mate in 1973.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Makes John Bon­ham Such a Good Drum­mer? A New Video Essay Breaks Down His Inim­itable Style

John Bonham’s Iso­lat­ed Drum Track For Led Zeppelin’s ‘Fool in the Rain’

Kei­th Moon Plays Drums Onstage with Led Zep­pelin in What Would Be His Last Live Per­for­mance (1977)

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

Why You Should Read The Master and Margarita: An Animated Introduction to Bulgakov’s Rollicking Soviet Satire

in Books, History, Literature | June 3rd, 2019

Which are the essen­tial Russ­ian nov­els? Quite a few unde­ni­able con­tenders come to mind right away: Fathers and Sons, Crime and Pun­ish­ment, War and Peace, Anna Karen­i­na, The Broth­ers Kara­ma­zov, Dr. Zhiva­go, One Day in the Life of Ivan Deniso­vich. But among seri­ous enthu­si­asts of Russ­ian lit­er­a­ture, nov­els don’t come much less deni­able than The Mas­ter and Mar­gari­ta, Mikhail Bul­gakov’s tale of the Dev­il’s vis­it to Sovi­et Moscow in the 1930s. This “sur­re­al blend of polit­i­cal satire, his­tor­i­cal fic­tion, and occult mys­ti­cism,” as Alex Gendler describes it in the ani­mat­ed TED-Ed video above, “has earned a lega­cy as one of the 20th century’s great­est nov­els — and one of its strangest.”

The Mas­ter and Mar­gari­ta con­sists of two par­al­lel nar­ra­tives. In the first, “a meet­ing between two mem­bers of Moscow’s lit­er­ary elite is inter­rupt­ed by a strange gen­tle­man named Woland, who presents him­self as a for­eign schol­ar invit­ed to give a pre­sen­ta­tion on black mag­ic.” Then, “as the stranger engages the two com­pan­ions in a philo­soph­i­cal debate and makes omi­nous pre­dic­tions about their fates, the read­er is sud­den­ly trans­port­ed to first-cen­tu­ry Jerusalem,” where “a tor­ment­ed Pon­tius Pilate reluc­tant­ly sen­tences Jesus of Nazareth to death.”

The nov­el oscil­lates between the sto­ry of the his­tor­i­cal Jesus — though not quite the one the Bible tells — and that of Woland and his entourage, which includes an enor­mous cat named Behe­moth with a taste for chess, vod­ka, wise­cracks, and firearms. Dark humor flows lib­er­al­ly from their antics, as well as from Bul­gakov’s depic­tion of “the USSR at the height of the Stal­in­ist peri­od. There, artists and authors worked under strict cen­sor­ship, sub­ject to impris­on­ment, exile, or exe­cu­tion if they were seen as under­min­ing state ide­ol­o­gy.”

The dev­il­ish Woland plays this over­bear­ing bureau­crat­ic life like a fid­dle, and “as heads are sep­a­rat­ed from bod­ies and mon­ey rains from the sky, the cit­i­zens of Moscow react with pet­ty-self inter­est, illus­trat­ing how Sovi­et soci­ety bred greed and cyn­i­cism despite its ideals.” Such con­tent would nat­u­ral­ly ren­der a book unpub­lish­able at the time, and though Bul­gakov’s ear­li­er satire The Heart of a Dog (in which a sur­geon trans­plants human organs into a dog and then insists he behave as a human) cir­cu­lat­ed in samiz­dat form, he could­n’t even com­plete The Mas­ter and Mar­gari­ta before his death in 1940.

“Bulgakov’s expe­ri­ences with cen­sor­ship and artis­tic frus­tra­tion lend an auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal air to the sec­ond part of the nov­el, when we are final­ly intro­duced to its name­sake,” says Gendler. “The Mas­ter is a name­less author who’s worked for years on a nov­el but burned the man­u­script after it was reject­ed by pub­lish­ers — just as Bul­gakov had done with his own work. Yet the true pro­tag­o­nist is the Master’s mis­tress Mar­gari­ta,” whose “devo­tion to her lover’s aban­doned dream bears a strange con­nec­tion to the dia­bol­i­cal company’s escapades — and car­ries the sto­ry to its sur­re­al cli­max.”

In the event, a cen­sored ver­sion of The Mas­ter and Mar­gari­ta was first pub­lished in the 1960s, and an as-com­plete-as-pos­si­ble ver­sion even­tu­al­ly appeared in 1973. Against the odds, the man­u­script that Bul­gakov left behind sur­vived him to become a mas­ter­piece that has inspired not just oth­er Russ­ian writ­ers, but cre­ators like the Rolling Stones, Pat­ti Smith, and (in a per­haps less than safe-for-work man­ner) H.R. Giger as well. Per­haps the author him­self had some pre­mo­ni­tion of the book’s poten­tial: man­u­scripts, as he famous­ly has Woland say to the Mas­ter, don’t burn.

Look­ing for free, pro­fes­sion­al­ly-read audio books from Audible.com? (This could include The Mas­ter and Mar­gari­ta.) Here’s a great, no-strings-attached deal. If you start a 30 day free tri­al with Audible.com, you can down­load two free audio books of your choice. Get more details on the offer here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Mas­ter and Mar­gari­ta, Ani­mat­ed in Two Min­utes

Pat­ti Smith’s Musi­cal Trib­utes to the Russ­ian Greats: Tarkovsky, Gogol & Bul­gakov

Why You Should Read Crime and Pun­ish­ment: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Dostoevsky’s Moral Thriller

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

Why You Should Read One Hun­dred Years of Soli­tude: An Ani­mat­ed Video Makes the Case

Watch the Sur­re­al­ist Glass Har­mon­i­ca, the Only Ani­mat­ed Film Ever Banned by Sovi­et Cen­sors (1968)

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Elton John Takes Us Through the Creative Process of His Early Hit “Tiny Dancer” (1970)

in Film, Life, Music | June 3rd, 2019

We all have our favorites from Elton John’s vast cat­a­log, and I’ll admit that 1970’s “Tiny Dancer” has nev­er been one of mine.

Call me crass, but I tend to get it con­fused with 1973’s “Can­dle in the Wind,” which John retooled so swift­ly for Princess Diana’s 1997 funer­al.

But then Sir Elton—or “Reg” as close friends and long-time lyri­cist Bernie Taupin call the artist for­mer­ly known as Regi­nald Ken­neth Dwight—has always had a knack for work­ing quick­ly, as Taupin explains above.

I’d nev­er been curi­ous enough to inves­ti­gate, but assumed, cor­rect­ly, that the lyric “seam­stress for the band” referred to an actu­al per­son.

John actu­al­ly seems a bit blasé, explain­ing that it’s about Taupin’s then girl­friend and even­tu­al first wife, Max­ine Feibel­man, whom I must thank for inad­ver­tent­ly sup­ply­ing the title of my favorite track, “The Bitch is Back,” which was her code phrase for “Elton’s in a mood.”

As per Sir Elton, “Tiny Dancer”’s lyrics informed the sound, which is more bal­le­ri­na than pirate smile.

And while the orig­i­nal lin­er notes’ ded­i­ca­tion sug­gests that “Tiny Dancer” is indeed a trib­ute to Feibel­man, three wives lat­er, Taupin revised things a bit, telling author Gavin Edwards:

We came to Cal­i­for­nia in the fall of 1970, and sun­shine radi­at­ed from the pop­u­lace. I was try­ing to cap­ture the spir­it of that time, encap­su­lat­ed by the women we met—especially at the clothes stores up and down the Strip in L.A. They were free spir­its, sexy in hiphug­gers and lacy blous­es, and very ethe­re­al, the way they moved. So dif­fer­ent from what I’d been used to in Eng­land. And they all want­ed to sew patch­es on your jeans. They’d moth­er you and sleep with you—it was the per­fect Oedi­pal com­plex.

Writer-direc­tor Cameron Crowe must’ve absorbed that mes­sage, to go by his mem­o­rable use of the song in Almost Famous’ tour bus scene,

Those com­mu­nal good vibes per­me­ate direc­tor Max Weiland’s win­ning entry in a recent John-spon­sored con­test on The Cut, which, like the open­ing scene of La La Land, gets a lot of mileage from LA’s rep­u­ta­tion for traf­fic jams.

Can tick­et buy­ers expect to find the song fea­tured promi­nent­ly in the just released John biopic, Rock­et­man?

No.

(Just kid­ding. Why else would John and his Rock­et­man dop­pel­gänger, actor Taron Egerton choose that one for a duet at John’s annu­al Oscar par­ty?)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A New Christ­mas Com­mer­cial Takes You on a Sen­ti­men­tal Jour­ney Through Elton John’s Rich Musi­cal Life

Elton John Sings His Clas­sic Hit ‘Your Song’ Through the Years

Elton John Proves He Can Turn any Text into a Song: Watch Him Impro­vise with Lines from Hen­rik Ibsen’s Play, Peer Gynt

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in New York City this June for the next install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.