How the World’s Oldest Computer Worked: Reconstructing the 2,200-Year-Old Antikythera Mechanism

in Astronomy, History, Technology | January 13th, 2017

In 1900, Greek sponge divers dis­cov­ered a ship­wreck off the Greek island of Antikythera. The arti­facts they came back up with includ­ed mon­ey, stat­ues, pot­tery, and var­i­ous oth­er works of art and craft, as well as a curi­ous lump of bronze and wood that turned out to be by far the most impor­tant item onboard. When an archae­ol­o­gist named Vale­rios Stais took a look at it two years lat­er, he noticed that the lump had a gear in it. Almost a half-cen­tu­ry lat­er, the sci­ence his­to­ri­an Derek J. de Sol­la Price thought this appar­ent­ly mechan­i­cal object might mer­it fur­ther exam­i­na­tion, and almost a quar­ter-cen­tu­ry after that, he and the nuclear physi­cist Char­alam­bos Karaka­los pub­lished their discovery–made by using X‑ray and gam­ma-ray images of the interior–that those divers had found a kind of ancient com­put­er.

“Under­stand­ing how the pieces fit togeth­er con­firmed that the Antikythera mech­a­nism was capa­ble of pre­dict­ing the posi­tions of the plan­ets with which the Greeks were famil­iar — Mer­cury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Sat­urn — as well as the sun and moon, and eclipses,” writes Big Think’s Rob­by Berman. “It even has a black and white stone that turns to show the phas­es of the moon.”

Deter­min­ing how it real­ly worked has required the build­ing of var­i­ous dif­fer­ent mod­els of var­i­ous dif­fer­ent kinds, one of which you can see assem­bled, oper­at­ed, and dis­as­sem­bled before your very eyes in the CGI ren­der­ing at the top of the post. Its design comes from the work of his­to­ri­an of mech­a­nism Michael T. Wright, who also put togeth­er the phys­i­cal recre­ation of the Antikythera mech­a­nism you can see him explain just above.

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

By its very nature, an arti­fact as fas­ci­nat­ing and as incom­plete as this draws all sorts of the­o­ries about the specifics of its design, pur­pose, and even its age. (It dates back to some­where between 205 and 100 BC.) In 2012, Tony Freeth and Alexan­der Jones pub­lished their own mod­el, dif­fer­ent from Wright’s, of this “machine designed to pre­dict celes­tial phe­nom­e­na accord­ing to the sophis­ti­cat­ed astro­nom­i­cal the­o­ries cur­rent in its day, the sole wit­ness to a lost his­to­ry of bril­liant engi­neer­ing, a con­cep­tion of pure genius, one of the great won­ders of the ancient world,” — but one which “didn’t real­ly work very well.” Some of the prob­lems has to do with the lim­i­ta­tions of ancient Greek astro­nom­i­cal the­o­ry, and some with the unre­li­a­bil­i­ty of its lay­ers of hand­made gears.

More recent research, adds Berman, has dis­cov­ered that “the device was built by more than one per­son on the island of Rhodes, and that it prob­a­bly wasn’t the only one of its kind,” indi­cat­ing that the ancient Greeks, despite the appar­ent defi­cien­cies of the Antikythera mech­a­nism itself, “were appar­ent­ly even fur­ther ahead in their astro­nom­i­cal under­stand­ing and mechan­i­cal know-how than we’d imag­ined.” Now watch the video just above, in which the Apple engi­neer makes his own Antikythera mech­a­nism with an entire­ly more mod­ern set of com­po­nents, and just imag­ine what the ancient Greeks could have accom­plished had they devel­oped Lego.

via Big Think

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Intro­duc­tion to Ancient Greek His­to­ry: A Free Online Course from Yale

How the Ancient Greeks Shaped Mod­ern Math­e­mat­ics: A Short, Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

How Ancient Greek Stat­ues Real­ly Looked: Research Reveals their Bold, Bright Col­ors and Pat­terns

Mod­ern Artists Show How the Ancient Greeks & Romans Made Coins, Vas­es & Arti­sanal Glass

Dis­cov­er the “Brazen Bull,” the Ancient Greek Tor­ture Machine That Dou­bled as a Musi­cal Instru­ment

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Watch 100 Randomly Ticking Metronomes Miraculously Achieve Synchronicity

in Math, Physics, Science | January 13th, 2017

It’s always sat­is­fy­ing to impose order on chaos, espe­cial­ly if it doesn’t involve bel­low­ing at a room­ful of jacked up teenagers.

Wit­ness the exper­i­ment above.

Mem­bers of Ikeguchi Lab­o­ra­to­ry, a Japan­ese orga­ni­za­tion ded­i­cat­ed to the analy­sis and pre­dic­tion of non­lin­ear phe­nom­e­na, placed 100 ran­dom­ly tick­ing metronomes on a hang­ing plat­form, curi­ous as to how long it would take them to syn­chro­nize.

(SPOILER ALERT! They start synch­ing up around the 1 minute, 20 sec­ond mark.)

How? Why? Is this some mys­ti­cal, musi­cal vari­ant of men­stru­al syn­chrony?

Nope. Physics is doing the heavy lift­ing here.

The key is that the plat­form hold­ing the metronomes is not fixed. It affects their move­ment by mov­ing in response to theirs.

To put it anoth­er way, KE = 0.5 • m • v2. Which is to say Kinet­ic Ener­gy = 0.5 • mass of object • (speed of object)2.

If you’re look­ing for anoth­er sci­en­tif­ic expla­na­tion, here’s how Giz­mo­do puts it: “the metronomes are trans­fer­ring ener­gy to the plat­form they’re on, which then trans­fers that ener­gy back to the metronomes—until they all sync up and start hit­ting the beat in one glo­ri­ous wave­length.”

By the two and a half minute mark, some view­ers will be rar­ing to delve into fur­ther study of ener­gy trans­fer­ence.

Oth­ers, their brains implod­ing, may elect to down­shift into a pure­ly audi­to­ry expe­ri­ence.

Close your eyes and lis­ten as the last hold outs fall into rhyth­mic step with the rest of the herd. A pleas­ant­ly har­mo­nious sound, not unlike that moment when a room­ful of jacked up teens sim­mers down, achiev­ing the sort of bliss­ful hive mind that’s a balm to teacher’s fraz­zled soul.

Crav­ing more?  Ikeguchi Lab­o­ra­to­ry also filmed their metronomes in tri­an­gu­lar, cir­cu­lar and X‑shaped for­ma­tions, avail­able for your view­ing plea­sure on the lab’s YouTube chan­nel.

via The Kid Should See This

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch What Hap­pens When 100 Metronomes Per­form Györ­gy Ligeti’s Con­tro­ver­sial Poème Sym­phonique

The Remark­able Physics of Ants: Watch Them Turn into Flu­ids and Solids at Will

The Mys­te­ri­ous Physics Behind How Bikes Ride by Them­selves

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her play Zam­boni Godot is open­ing in New York City in March 2017. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

Mesmerizing GIFs Illustrate the Art of Traditional Japanese Wood Joinery — All Done Without Screws, Nails, or Glue

in Animation, Architecture, Art | January 12th, 2017

Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese car­pen­try, whether used to build a din­ner table or the entire house con­tain­ing it, does­n’t use screws, nails, adhe­sives, or any oth­er kind of non-wood­en fas­ten­er. So how do its con­struc­tions hold togeth­er? How have all those thou­sands of wood­en hous­es, tables, and count­less oth­er objects and struc­tures stood up for dozens and even hun­dreds of years, and so solid­ly at that? The secret lies in the art of join­ery and its elab­o­rate cut­ting tech­niques refined, since its ori­gin in the sev­enth cen­tu­ry, through gen­er­a­tions and gen­er­a­tions of steadi­ly increas­ing mas­tery — albeit by a steadi­ly dwin­dling num­ber of mas­ters.

“Even until recent times when car­pen­try books began to be pub­lished, mas­tery of these wood­work­ing tech­niques remained the fierce­ly guard­ed secret of fam­i­ly car­pen­try guilds,” writes Spoon & Tam­ago’s John­ny Strat­e­gy. If you find it dif­fi­cult to grasp how sim­ply cut­ting two pieces of wood in a cer­tain way could unite them as if they’d grown togeth­er in the first place, have a look at a Twit­ter feed called The Join­ery, run by a young enthu­si­ast who has col­lect­ed a great many of these car­pen­try books. He’s used them, in com­bi­na­tion with mechan­i­cal design soft­ware skills pre­sum­ably honed in his career in the auto indus­try, to cre­ate ele­gant­ly ani­mat­ed visu­al expla­na­tions of Japan­ese car­pen­try’s tried-and-true join­ery meth­ods.

Arch­dai­ly points to the work of archi­tect Shigeru Ban as one exam­ple of how this “unique­ly Japan­ese wood aes­thet­ic” has sur­vived into the mod­ern day, but the man behind The Join­ery imag­ines even more ambi­tious pos­si­bil­i­ties: “3D print­ing and wood­work­ing machin­ery has enabled us to cre­ate com­pli­cat­ed forms fair­ly eas­i­ly,” he tells Spoon & Tam­a­go. “I want to orga­nize all the join­ery tech­niques and cre­ate a cat­a­log of them all,” so that any­one with the tools might poten­tial­ly make use of their beau­ty and stur­di­ness in hith­er­to unimag­ined new con­texts. And so anoth­er tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese craft that has looked doomed to out­mod­ed obliv­ion, what with all the more advanced and effi­cient fab­ri­ca­tion and con­struc­tion tech­niques devel­oped over the past 1400 years, may well thrive in the future. To learn more about the art of join­ery, you’ll want to explore this 1995 book, The Com­plete Japan­ese Join­ery.

via Arch­Dai­ly

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Japan­ese Wood­work­ing Mas­ters Cre­ate Ele­gant & Elab­o­rate Geo­met­ric Pat­terns with Wood

20 Mes­mer­iz­ing Videos of Japan­ese Arti­sans Cre­at­ing Tra­di­tion­al Hand­i­crafts

The Mak­ing of Japan­ese Hand­made Paper: A Short Film Doc­u­ments an 800-Year-Old Tra­di­tion

Watch a Japan­ese Crafts­man Lov­ing­ly Bring a Tat­tered Old Book Back to Near Mint Con­di­tion

The Art of Col­lo­type: See a Near Extinct Print­ing Tech­nique, as Lov­ing­ly Prac­ticed by a Japan­ese Mas­ter Crafts­man

Japan­ese Crafts­man Spends His Life Try­ing to Recre­ate a Thou­sand-Year-Old Sword

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

An Introduction to Confucius’ Life & Thought Through Two Animated Videos

in Philosophy | January 12th, 2017

Though it isn’t wide­ly acknowl­edged, there’s been a long­stand­ing and robust debate at least since the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry over whether or not a his­tor­i­cal Jesus exist­ed. The major­i­ty of Chris­tians dis­miss the evi­dence, or lack there­of, for rea­sons of belief, but on a wider view it’s not at all unique that the his­tor­i­cal founder of a reli­gion or school might be an inven­tion, or might have been noth­ing at all like the tra­di­tion sug­gests. Such ques­tions have arisen about the real­i­ty of the Bud­dha, for exam­ple, or the author­ship of Lao Tzu, writer of the Tao Te Ching, or the his­tor­i­cal exis­tence of his sup­posed con­tem­po­rary Con­fu­cius, founder of the sys­tem of phi­los­o­phy and ethics sim­ply known as Con­fu­cian­ism.

What do we know about Con­fu­cius? “Very lit­tle for cer­tain,” says Alain de Bot­ton in his School of Life intro­duc­to­ry video above. “He’s said to have been born in 551 BC in Chi­na,” and he may have been a stu­dent of Lao Tzu. Con­fu­cius sup­pos­ed­ly served as min­is­ter of crime under the ruler of the state of Lu. Many mun­dane sto­ries about the Chi­nese thinker make his exis­tence seem quite plau­si­ble, though his leg­end picked up mirac­u­lous fea­tures over time. But the say­ings sup­pos­ed­ly by and about Con­fu­cius, his­tor­i­cal or otherwise—like those of Jesus and the Buddha—were only writ­ten down many years after his death, col­lect­ed in the famous Analects (Lun­yu, or “edit­ed con­ver­sa­tions”).

These say­ings became enor­mous­ly pop­u­lar dur­ing the Euro­pean Enlight­en­ment and the 20th cen­tu­ry, writes Char­lotte Allen at The Atlantic, in part because Con­fu­cius remained “agnos­tic on whether a super­nat­ur­al world actu­al­ly exists.” Though he encour­aged par­tic­i­pa­tion in reli­gious rit­u­als, “The Mas­ter,” one of the analects remarks, “nev­er talked of: mir­a­cles; vio­lence; dis­or­ders; spir­its.” What he did talk about what was “the Gold­en Mean: all things in mod­er­a­tion, even mod­er­a­tion itself.” Con­fu­cius was a con­ser­v­a­tive thinker—in the sense that word once had of hold­ing fast to tra­di­tion, encour­ag­ing adher­ence to “rit­u­al pro­pri­ety” and fam­i­ly obser­vances, and respect­ing the rule of law.

His say­ings include a ver­sion of the Gold­en Rule, and he “is said to have taught his dis­ci­ples the cul­ti­va­tion of per­son­al virtue.… ven­er­a­tion of one’s par­ents, love of learn­ing, loy­al­ty to one’s supe­ri­ors, kind­ness to one’s sub­or­di­nates, and a high regard for all of the cus­toms, insti­tu­tions, and rit­u­als that make for civil­i­ty.” One can see his appeal to many lib­er­al West­ern philoso­phers, who have often advanced rad­i­cal the­ses along­side the con­ser­v­a­tive val­ues Max Weber char­ac­ter­ized as the Protes­tant eth­ic. Thomas Paine, writes Allen, “list­ed Con­fu­cius with Jesus and the Greek philoso­phers as the world’s great moral teach­ers” in the Age of Rea­son, and Ezra Pound had a par­tic­u­lar­ly high regard for the Chi­nese thinker.

This kind of ven­er­a­tion has meant that “to many edu­cat­ed West­ern­ers, Con­fu­cius is the very emblem of Chi­nese civ­i­liza­tion and reli­gious belief.” Or as the TED-Ed video above puts it, “most peo­ple rec­og­nize his name and know that he is famous for hav­ing said… some­thing.” In this video intro­duc­tion to Con­fu­cius, the philosopher’s biog­ra­phy plays a very promi­nent role, and it does make for an engag­ing sto­ry. But we should be aware that the details of his life are high­ly con­test­ed by schol­ars in the East and West. The only sources date from “well after his death,” notes the Stan­ford Ency­clo­pe­dia of Phi­los­o­phy, and “tak­en togeth­er paint con­tra­dic­to­ry pic­tures of his per­son­al­i­ty and the events in his life.” Some schol­ars even claim he was an inven­tion of the Jesuits, who may have cre­at­ed the Con­fu­cius char­ac­ter to accord with their West­ern desire for a per­son­al founder.

But we need not believe bio­graph­i­cal details or decide between schol­ar­ly con­tro­ver­sies to appre­ci­ate Con­fu­cian thought. As de Bot­ton makes clear, Con­fu­cius’ respect for tradition—though cer­tain­ly patri­ar­chal and hierarchical—also gives us a lot of insight into how and why we should heed peo­ple with exper­tise and supe­ri­or knowl­edge, why we should val­ue edu­ca­tion and dif­fi­cult study, and why per­son­al integri­ty mat­ters in civic life. Though we can­not ver­i­fy his life sto­ry, we can see it as a pop­u­lar nar­ra­tive alle­go­ry for his ideas. Con­fu­cius exhort­ed his dis­ci­ples to obey their lead­ers, yet he also insist­ed that those lead­ers be benev­o­lent and hon­or­able.

It is said that Con­fu­cius left Lu, where he had served faith­ful­ly as a min­is­ter, when the Duke received a gift of cour­te­sans and hors­es from a neigh­bor­ing ruler, and began to spend all his time cavort­ing, and mis­us­ing the state’s resources. Thus, accord­ing to the tra­di­tion, began a peri­od of wan­der­ing as the philoso­pher pon­dered the cul­ti­va­tion of char­ac­ter. You can read the Analects for your­self in a num­ber of translations—including this free online ver­sion from Robert Eno. And if you wish to immerse your­self more ful­ly in the study of Con­fu­cian­ism and Chi­nese phi­los­o­phy and cul­ture more gen­er­al­ly, you can do so for free through Harvard’s edX course on Chi­na or, through Coursera’s “Clas­sics of Chi­nese Human­i­ties: Guid­ed Read­ings,” taught by Ou Fan Leo Lee, Pro­fes­sor of Chi­nese Cul­ture at The Chi­nese Uni­ver­si­ty of Hong Kong.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

East­ern Phi­los­o­phy Explained with Three Ani­mat­ed Videos by Alain de Botton’s School of Life

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps Pod­cast, Now at 239 Episodes, Expands into East­ern Phi­los­o­phy

Alan Watts Intro­duces Amer­i­ca to Med­i­ta­tion & East­ern Phi­los­o­phy: Watch the 1960 TV Show, East­ern Wis­dom and Mod­ern Life

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

The Triumphant Night When a Teacher Saved His Students from a Motorcycle Gang: A True, Hand-Animated Story

in Animation, Education | January 12th, 2017

“Sur­vival of the fittest, this still exists even today. If you’re weak, peo­ple pick on you, they take advan­tage. And if you don’t respond to what they do, they will con­tin­u­al­ly pick on you. You have to fright­en them and attack first.”

Those strong words come from Ralph Whims, a teacher who, one night back in 1973, agreed to chap­er­one a school dance in a church base­ment. It was a pret­ty ordi­nary affair, until a 20-mem­ber bik­er gang barged in, unin­vit­ed, and start­ed harass­ing the kids. What to do? Retreat? Or step for­ward and restore order? That’s the sto­ry, appar­ent­ly all true, told by the short ani­ma­tion, The Chap­er­one, cre­at­ed by Fras­er Munden. (His own father once had Ralph Whims as an ele­men­tary school teacher in Mon­tre­al.) This empow­er­ing short film has been screened at 70 film fes­ti­vals and won 25 awards. You can get more back­sto­ry on the film by read­ing an inter­view with the direc­tor here.

The Chap­er­one will be added to the Ani­ma­tion sec­tion of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

James Joyce Picked Drunk­en Fights, Then Hid Behind Ernest Hem­ing­way; Hem­ing­way Called Joyce “The Great­est Writer in the World”

10 Rules for Stu­dents and Teach­ers Pop­u­lar­ized by John Cage

Hunter S. Thomp­son Gets Con­front­ed by The Hell’s Angels: Where’s Our Two Kegs of Beer? (1967)

Albert Einstein Explains How Slavery Has Crippled Everyone’s Ability to Think Clearly About Racism

in History, Politics, Science | January 11th, 2017

Image by Fer­di­nand Schmutzer, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

“Should we allow celebri­ties to dis­cuss pol­i­tics?” goes one vari­a­tion on an ever­green head­line and sup­pos­ed­ly legit­i­mate pub­lic debate. No amount of pub­lic dis­ap­proval could have stopped some of the most out­spo­ken pub­lic fig­ures, and we’d be the worse off for it in many cas­es. Muham­mad Ali, John Lennon, Nina Simone, George Car­lin, Roger Waters, Mar­garet Cho, and, yes, Meryl Streep—millions of peo­ple have been very grate­ful (and many not) for these artists’ polit­i­cal com­men­tary. When it comes to sci­en­tists, how­ev­er, we tend to see more base­less accu­sa­tions of polit­i­cal speech than over­whelm­ing evi­dence of it.

But there have been those few sci­en­tists and philoso­phers who were also celebri­ties, and who made their polit­i­cal views well-known with­out reser­va­tion. Bertrand Rus­sell was such a per­son, as was Albert Ein­stein, who took up the caus­es of world peace and of racial jus­tice in the post-war years. As we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly not­ed, Einstein’s com­mit­ments were both phil­an­thropic and activist, and he formed close friend­ships with Paul Robe­son, W.E.B. Du Bois, Mar­i­an Ander­son, and oth­er promi­nent black lead­ers.

Ein­stein also co-chaired an anti-lynch­ing cam­paign and issued a scathing con­dem­na­tion of racism dur­ing a speech he gave in 1946 at the alma mater of Langston Hugh­es and Thur­good Mar­shall in which he called racism “a dis­ease of white peo­ple.” That same year, notes On Being’s exec­u­tive edi­tor Trent Gilliss, Ein­stein “penned one of his most artic­u­late and elo­quent essays advo­cat­ing for the civ­il rights of black peo­ple in Amer­i­ca.” Titled “The Negro Ques­tion” and pub­lished in the Jan­u­ary 1946 edi­tion of Pageant mag­a­zine, the essay, writes Gilliss, “was intend­ed to address a pri­mar­i­ly white read­er­ship.”

Ein­stein begins by answer­ing the inevitable objec­tion, “What right has he to speak about things which con­cern us alone, and which no new­com­er should touch?” To this, the famed physi­cist answers, “I do not think such a stand­point is jus­ti­fied.” Ein­stein believed he had a unique per­spec­tive: “One who has grown up in an envi­ron­ment takes much for grant­ed. On the oth­er hand, one who has come to this coun­try as a mature per­son may have a keen eye for every­thing pecu­liar and char­ac­ter­is­tic.” Speak­ing freely about his obser­va­tions, Ein­stein felt “he may per­haps prove him­self use­ful.”

Then, after prais­ing the country’s “demo­c­ra­t­ic trait” and its cit­i­zens’ “healthy self-con­fi­dence and nat­ur­al respect for the dig­ni­ty of one’s fel­low-man,” he plain­ly observes that this “sense of equal­i­ty and human dig­ni­ty is main­ly lim­it­ed to men of white skins.” Antic­i­pat­ing a casu­al­ly racist defense of “nat­ur­al” dif­fer­ences, Ein­stein replies:

I am firm­ly con­vinced that who­ev­er believes this suf­fers from a fatal mis­con­cep­tion. Your ances­tors dragged these black peo­ple from their homes by force; and in the white man’s quest for wealth and an easy life they have been ruth­less­ly sup­pressed and exploit­ed, degrad­ed into slav­ery. The mod­ern prej­u­dice against Negroes is the result of the desire to main­tain this unwor­thy con­di­tion.

The ancient Greeks also had slaves. They were not Negroes but white men who had been tak­en cap­tive in war. There could be no talk of racial dif­fer­ences. And yet Aris­to­tle, one of the great Greek philoso­phers, declared slaves infe­ri­or beings who were just­ly sub­dued and deprived of their lib­er­ty. It is clear that he was enmeshed in a tra­di­tion­al prej­u­dice from which, despite his extra­or­di­nary intel­lect, he could not free him­self.

Like the ancient Greeks, Amer­i­cans’ prej­u­dices are “con­di­tioned by opin­ions and emo­tions which we uncon­scious­ly absorb as chil­dren from our envi­ron­ment.” And racist atti­tudes are both caus­es and effects of eco­nom­ic exploita­tion, learned behav­iors that emerge from his­tor­i­cal cir­cum­stances, yet we “rarely reflect” how pow­er­ful the influ­ence of tra­di­tion is “upon our con­duct and con­vic­tions.” The sit­u­a­tion can be reme­died, Ein­stein believed, though not “quick­ly healed.” The “man of good will,” he wrote, “must have the courage to set an exam­ple by word and deed, and must watch lest his chil­dren become influ­enced by this racial bias.”

Read the full essay at On Being, and learn more about Einstein’s com­mit­ted anti-racist activism from Fred Jerome and Rodger Taylor’s 2006 book Ein­stein on Race and Racism.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Albert Ein­stein Called Racism “A Dis­ease of White Peo­ple” in His Lit­tle-Known Fight for Civ­il Rights

Lis­ten as Albert Ein­stein Calls for Peace and Social Jus­tice in 1945

Albert Ein­stein Express­es His Admi­ra­tion for Mahat­ma Gand­hi, in Let­ter and Audio

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

How the French New Wave Changed Cinema: A Video Introduction to the Films of Godard, Truffaut & Their Fellow Rule-Breakers

in Film | January 11th, 2017

You could describe every act of film­mak­ing as an act of film crit­i­cism, and for no group of direc­tors has that held truer than those of the French New Wave. In one of the most excit­ing chap­ters of cin­e­ma his­to­ry thus far, the late 1950s and 1960s saw such new­ly emer­gent auteurs as Jean-Luc Godard, François Truf­faut, Agnès Var­da, Jacques Demy, Claude Chabrol, Éric Rohmer, Jacques Riv­ette, and André Bazin turn away from the estab­lished prac­tices of film­mak­ing and, by a mix­ture of incli­na­tion and neces­si­ty, start a few of their own.

They fol­lowed these new rules to come up with pic­tures like Le Beau Serge, Breath­less, The 400 Blows, Last Year at Marien­bad, Cléo from 5 to 7, and La Jetée. Those and the oth­er movies of the Nou­velle Vague star­tled view­ers with their bold­ness of form and con­tent, but what of impor­tance do they have to say in film cul­ture today? Lewis Bond of Chan­nel Criswell, source of video essays pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here about film­mak­ers like Andrei Tarkovsky and Aki­ra Kuro­sawa, looks at the last­ing achieve­ments of the move­ment in “Break­ing the Rules.”

The mem­bers of the French New Wave told per­son­al sto­ries that reflect­ed per­son­al philoso­phies, shoot­ing doc­u­men­tary-style with hand­held cam­eras, cut­ting those shots togeth­er with pre­vi­ous­ly unheard of con­spic­u­ous­ness, and using a vari­ety of oth­er visu­al and nar­ra­tive tech­niques to estab­lish a new rela­tion­ship between films and their view­ers. “If you’re still skep­ti­cal as to whether the nou­velle vague inten­tion­al­ly toyed with the audi­ence’s expec­ta­tions,” says Bond over a selec­tion of fourth-wall-break­ing shots, “just look at how many times their movies direct­ly acknowl­edge them. The nou­velle vague want­ed to have the audi­ence test­ed as to what could be a movie and how they could push the bound­aries of sto­ry­telling, not just with their tech­niques but with their con­tent too.”

And what do we jad­ed 21st-cen­tu­ry view­ers and film­mak­ers still have to learn from all this? “Just watch the films. They’re so ahead of their time, it’s not dif­fi­cult to see” the influ­ence of their edit­ing on the Scors­eses of the world, their con­cept of the auteur on the Taran­ti­nos, and their cam­era move­ment on the Luzbekis of today. “The thing that the film­mak­ers of la nou­velle vague did was uti­lize one of the most impor­tant process­es I think there is for an artist: look at what works in your medi­um and think, ‘How can it be done dif­fer­ent­ly?’ Because if you don’t have any­thing new to say, what’s the point of say­ing any­thing?” And, now as in the mid-2oth-cen­tu­ry as in the cen­turies before cin­e­ma itself, if you do have some­thing new to say, you can’t say it by fol­low­ing the old rules.

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:

An Intro­duc­tion to Jean-Luc Godard’s Inno­v­a­tive Film­mak­ing Through Five Video Essays

How Truf­faut Became Truf­faut: From Pet­ty Thief to Great Auteur

Watch a Video Essay on the Poet­ic Har­mo­ny of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Film­mak­ing, Then View His Major Films Free Online

How Aki­ra Kurosawa’s Sev­en Samu­rai Per­fect­ed the Cin­e­mat­ic Action Scene: A New Video Essay

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The American Novel Since 1945: A Free Yale Course on Novels by Nabokov, Kerouac, Morrison, Pynchon & More

in Literature, Online Courses, Yale | January 11th, 2017

Taught by pro­fes­sor Amy Hunger­ford, The Amer­i­can Nov­el Since 1945 offers an intro­duc­tion to the fer­tile lit­er­ary peri­od that fol­lowed World War II. The course descrip­tion reads:

In “The Amer­i­can Nov­el Since 1945” stu­dents will study a wide range of works from 1945 to the present. The course traces the for­mal and the­mat­ic devel­op­ments of the nov­el in this peri­od, focus­ing on the rela­tion­ship between writ­ers and read­ers, the con­di­tions of pub­lish­ing, inno­va­tions in the nov­el­’s form, fic­tion’s engage­ment with his­to­ry, and the chang­ing place of lit­er­a­ture in Amer­i­can cul­ture. The read­ing list includes works by Richard Wright, Flan­nery O’Con­nor, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Ker­ouac, J. D. Salinger, Thomas Pyn­chon, John Barth, Max­ine Hong Kingston, Toni Mor­ri­son, Mar­i­lynne Robin­son, Cor­mac McCarthy, Philip Roth and Edward P. Jones. The course con­cludes with a con­tem­po­rary nov­el cho­sen by the stu­dents in the class.

You can watch the 26 lec­tures from the course above, or find them on YouTube and iTunes (video — audio). To get more infor­ma­tion about the course, includ­ing the syl­labus, vis­it this Yale web­site.

The main texts used in this course include:

• Richard Wright, Black Boy (1945)
• Flan­nery O’Con­nor, Wise Blood (1949)
• Vladimir Nabokov, Loli­ta (1955)
• Jack Ker­ouac, On the Road (1957)
• J.D. Salinger, Fran­ny and Zooey (1961)
• John Barth, Lost in the Fun­house (1963–68)
• Thomas Pyn­chon, The Cry­ing of Lot 49 (1967)
• Toni Mor­ri­son, The Bluest Eye (1970)
• Max­ine Hong Kingston, The Woman War­rior (1976)
• Mar­i­lynne Robin­son, House­keep­ing (1980)
• Cor­mac McCarthy, Blood Merid­i­an (1985)
• Philip Roth, The Human Stain (2000)
• Edward P. Jones, The Known World (2003)
• Jonathan Safran Foer, Every­thing is Illu­mi­nat­ed (2002)

The Amer­i­can Nov­el Since 1945 will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties. There you can find a spe­cial­ized list of Free Online Lit­er­a­ture Cours­es.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Vladimir Nabokov Names the Great­est (and Most Over­rat­ed) Nov­els of the 20th Cen­tu­ry

Flan­nery O’Connor Reads ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ in Rare 1959 Audio

Cor­mac McCarthy’s Three Punc­tu­a­tion Rules, and How They All Go Back to James Joyce

Hear Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters” Covered in Unexpected Styles: Gregorian Choir, Cello Ensemble, Finnish Bluegrass, Jazz Vocal & More

in Music | January 11th, 2017

They may have arrived on the scene in the 80s as one of the four horse­men of thrash metal—kin to such cud­dly acts as Anthrax, Megadeth, and Slayer—but believe or not, Metal­li­ca had some seri­ous crossover appeal from the start. Grant­ed, that appeal was lim­it­ed to a small sub­set of punks and skaters who came to appre­ci­ate met­al thanks to Metallica’s cov­ers of hor­ror-punks The Mis­fits on their 1987 Garage Days Revis­it­ed EP. Nonethe­less, it showed that the band always had a sense of humor and an appre­ci­a­tion for other—albeit very closely-related—genres.

Since then, Metal­li­ca has grown up, some­times awk­ward­ly. We watched them do it with the help of a ther­a­pist in the 2003 doc­u­men­tary Some Kind of Mon­ster. We lis­tened to their grown-up angst on that bum­mer of an album, St. Anger.  That year, they also took on a fourth mem­ber, bassist Robert Tru­jil­lo, whose extra-genre affini­ties are broad and deep—from his love for Motown, funk, and the ath­let­ic fusion of Jaco Pas­to­rius to his dab­bling in fla­men­co. The band may have returned to their thrash roots with 2008’s Death Mag­net­ic and this year’s Hard­wired… to Self-Destruct, but they’ll like­ly take a few more weird excur­sions (like their puz­zling 2011 col­lab­o­ra­tion with Lou Reed) in com­ing years.

And yes, they gained a rep­u­ta­tion as being stingy with their cat­a­log dur­ing that whole Nap­ster dust-up. But as you can hear James Het­field and Kirk Ham­mett dis­cuss in a recent Nerdist pod­cast (stream it at the bot­tom of this post), their “cre­ative rest­less­ness” has made them very appre­cia­tive of what oth­er artists have done with their music, stretch­ing it into alien gen­res and unex­pect­ed instru­men­ta­tion and arrange­ments.

In his self-dep­re­cat­ing way, Het­field con­fess­es, “there’s a lot of bet­ter ver­sions of ‘Noth­ing Else Mat­ters’ than ours.” Ham­mett agrees, and here you’ll find most of those they mention—from Scott D. Davis on solo piano at the top of the post, to a choir at San­ti­a­go de Com­postela with their Gre­go­ri­an Chant ver­sion below it, and, just above, Finnish cel­lo ensem­ble Apoc­a­lyp­ti­ca.

It may not be many people’s favorite Metal­li­ca song, but I think the vast range of wor­thy inter­pre­ta­tions speaks to the strengths of its com­po­si­tion. “Noth­ing Else Mat­ters” has even trans­lat­ed to blue­grass, thanks to Finnish pick­ers Steve ‘N’ Seag­ulls, who spe­cial­ize in such tongue-in-cheek coun­try met­al cov­ers. And Het­field and Ham­mett both men­tion with awe Macy Gray’s smoky lounge-jazz cov­er, below. “That’s an hon­or,” says Het­field, “that is a huge com­pli­ment, when some­one takes your song and legit­i­mate­ly does it their style.… It’s real­ly cool to think that the song is that good it can work in any dif­fer­ent genre.”

Indeed. Have a lis­ten to SHEL’s haunt­ing cov­er of anoth­er Metal­li­ca dirge, “Enter Sand­man” or Stary Olsa’s riff on the most­ly dirge-like “One.” And it doesn’t only work with the slow tunes either. Just check out this killer ban­jo ver­sion of “Mas­ter of Pup­pets.”

Hear Metal­li­ca talk cov­er ver­sions (around 50:00), the joys and woes of still tour­ing after all these years, and more at the Nerdist pod­cast just above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Metal­li­ca Play­ing “Enter Sand­man” on Class­room Toy Instru­ments

Metallica’s Bassist Robert Tru­jil­lo Plays Metal­li­ca Songs Fla­men­co-Style, Joined by Rodri­go y Gabriela

With Medieval Instru­ments, Band Per­forms Clas­sic Songs by The Bea­t­les, Red Hot Chili Pep­pers, Metal­li­ca & Deep Pur­ple

Finnish Musi­cians Play Blue­grass Ver­sions of AC/DC, Iron Maid­en & Ron­nie James Dio

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

David Bowie Offers Advice for Aspiring Artists: “Go a Little Out of Your Depth,” “Never Fulfill Other People’s Expectations”

in Life, Music | January 10th, 2017

Jan­u­ary 10th, 2017–David Bowie died one year ago today. Revis­it­ing my own mem­o­ries of him, it so often seemed impos­si­ble that he could grow old, much less pass away, even as we all watched him age over the decades. He did it much bet­ter than most, that’s for sure, and grew into the role of elder states­man with incred­i­ble poise and grace, though he also didn’t let that role be his last one.

What else should we have expect­ed from the artist who wrote “Changes”—the defin­i­tive cre­ative state­ment on fac­ing time and mortality—at the age of 24, before he’d even achieved the inter­na­tion­al super­star­dom that Zig­gy Star­dust brought him? Bowie was always an old soul. “It’s not age itself,” he told the BBC in 2002. “Age doesn’t both­er me. So many of my heroes were old­er guys.… I embrace that aspect of it.” And so, in his lat­er years, he became an old­er guy hero to mil­lions.

In 1997, after his drum and bass-inspired Earth­ling, Bowie gave an inter­view in which he offered the time­less wis­dom to younger artists in the clip above:

Nev­er play to the gallery.… Nev­er work for oth­er peo­ple in what you do. Always remem­ber that the rea­son that you ini­tial­ly start­ed work­ing was that there was some­thing inside your­self that you felt that if you could man­i­fest in some way, you would under­stand more about your­self and how you co-exist with the rest of soci­ety.… I think it’s ter­ri­bly dan­ger­ous for an artist to ful­fill oth­er people’s expec­ta­tions.

It’s advice we’ve like­ly heard some ver­sion of before—perhaps even from one of Bowie’s own old­er-guy heroes, William S. Bur­roughs (here by way of Pat­ti Smith). But I’ve nev­er heard it stat­ed so suc­cinct­ly and with so much con­vic­tion and feel­ing. We nat­u­ral­ly asso­ciate David Bowie with art­ful inau­then­tic­i­ty, with a suc­ces­sion of masks. He encour­aged that impres­sion at every turn, even telling a grad­u­at­ing Berklee Col­lege of Music class in 1999, “it seemed that authen­tic­i­ty and the nat­ur­al form of expres­sion wasn’t going to be my forte.”

But in hind­sight, and espe­cial­ly in the rapt, posthu­mous atten­tion paid to Bowie’s final work, Black­star, it can seem that his embrace of pos­es was often itself a pose. Bowie has always been can­did, in var­i­ous moments of self-reflec­tion, about his mis­steps and excess­es. But not to have tak­en the risks he did, not to have placed him­self in uncom­fort­able sit­u­a­tions, would have meant impov­er­ish­ing his work. “The oth­er thing I would say,” he goes on, “is that if you feel safe in the area you’re work­ing in, you’re not work­ing in the right area. Always go a lit­tle fur­ther into the water than you feel you are capa­ble of being in. Go a lit­tle bit out of your depth. When you don’t feel that your feet are quite touch­ing the bot­tom, you’re just about in the right place to do some­thing excit­ing.”

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:

David Bowie Gives Grad­u­a­tion Speech At Berklee Col­lege of Music: “Music Has Been My Door­way of Per­cep­tion” (1999)

The Sto­ry of Zig­gy Star­dust: How David Bowie Cre­at­ed the Char­ac­ter that Made Him Famous

Pat­ti Smith Shares William S. Bur­roughs’ Advice for Writ­ers and Artists

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