A heads up for Open Culture readers: This spring, Stanford Continuing Studies has a rich lineup of online courses, and they’re offering a special 15% discount to our readers. Just use the promo code CULTURE during checkout.
Serving lifelong learners everywhere, Stanford Continuing Studies will launch its spring curriculum next week (the week of April 3), letting you choose from over 100 courses. Among the courses, you will find some notable mentions:
Defending Democracy at Home and Abroad features three Stanford scholars (including the former US ambassador to Russia Mike McFaul) who will examine the uncertain state of democracy at home and abroad. Together, they will explore 1) the merits of democracy compared with the alternatives, 2) challenges to democracy both in the US and across the globe, and 3) solutions for protecting and advancing democracy everywhere.
With Stanford Monday University: 2023, five Stanford scholars will focus on important trends currently shaping our society, especially after the pandemic. What’s the future of working from home, and how will remote work affect the economy of the United States? Why have addictions—including to devices and screens—skyrocketed in the US, and how can a dopamine fast help bring them under control? Why has the modern economy left behind so many working-class communities in America, and how can investment in these communities help address the wealth inequalities in our country? These, and other questions, will be explored in the course.
Finally, in The Book of Change: Ovid, Art, and Us, art historian Alexander Nemerov–voted one of Stanford’s top 10 professors by Stanford students–will examine Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the great works of art inspired by the Roman classic. Along the way, he will explore paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, Diego Velázquez, and Nicolas Poussin, plus sculptures by Gian Lorenzo Bernini.
“Enable subtitles,” says the notification that appears before The Poor Man of Nippur — and you will need them, unless, of course, you happen to hail from the cradle of civilization. The short film is adapted from “a folktale based on a 2,700-year-old poem about a pauper,” says the University of Cambridge’s alumni news, acted out word-for-word by “Assyriology students and other members of the Mesopotamian community at the University.” The result qualifies as the world’s very first film in Babylonian, a language that has “been silent for 2,000 years.”
“Found on a clay tablet at the archaeological site of Sultantepe, in south-east Turkey,” the story of The Poor Man of Nippur hasn’t come down to us in perfectly complete form. The film represents the points of breakage in the tablet with VHS-style glitches, a neat parallel of forms of media degradation across the millennia.
That isn’t the only noticeable anachronism — taking the buildings of Cambridge for Mesopotamia in the seventh century BC demands a certain suspension of disbelief — but we can rest assured of the Babylonian dialogue’s historical accuracy, or at least that this is the most accurate Babylonian dialogue we’re likely to get.
According to Cambridge Assyriologist Martin Worthington, who oversaw the Poor Man of Nippur project (after serving as Babylonian consultant for The Eternals), determining its pronunciation involves “a mix of educated guesswork and careful reconstruction,” but one that benefits from existing “transcriptions into the Greek alphabet” as well as connections with stabler languages like Arabic and Hebrew. The result is an unprecedented historical-linguistic attraction, a compelling advertisement for the study of Babylonian at Cambridge, and also — in depicting the impoverished protagonist’s revenge on a thuggish town mayor — a demonstration that the underdog story transcends time, culture, and language.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
It has destroyed its natural spaces. It has created its own weather. It’s too big for its own good. They say Tokyo is like an amoeba that absorbs everything in its path.
It’s a far cry from the urban space Tokugawa Ieyasu, founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate, intended when planting the seeds for Edo, as Tokyo was originally called.
As the above excerpt from Naturopolis explains, the 16th-century city was innovative in its incorporation of green space.
The daimyō, or military lords, were required by the shogunate to keep residences in Edo. Each of these homes was furnished with a gardener and a landscaper to maintain the beauty of its al fresco areas.
Meanwhile, crops were cultivated in all communal outdoor open spaces, with irrigation canals supplying the necessary water for growing rice.
These plant-rich settings provided a hospitable environment for animals both wild and domestic. The carefully curated natural zones invited quiet contemplation of flora and fauna, giving rise to the seasonal celebrations and rites that are still observed throughout Japan.
Whether admiring blossoms and fireflies in spring and summer or autumn leaves and snowy winter scenes in the colder months, Edo’s citizens revered the natural world outside their doorsteps.
A long time ago, when excrement was a precious fertilizer, it naturally belonged to the person who produced it. Farmers used to buy excrement for cash or trade it for a comparable amount of vegetables. Fertilizer shortages were a chronic problem during the Edo period. As the standard of living in cities improved, surrounding villages needed an increasing amount of fertilizer…
(Anyone who’s shouldered the surprisingly heavy interactive–not THAT interactive–night soil buckets on display in Tokyo’s Edo Museum will have a feel for just how much of this necessary element each block of the capital city generated on a daily basis.)
The Meiji Restoration of 1868 brought many changes — a new government, a new name for Edo, and a race toward Western-style industrialization. Many parks and gardens were destroyed as Tokyo rapidly expanded beyond Edo’s original footprint.
But now, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government is looking to its past in an effort to combat the effects of climate change with a push toward environmental sustainability.
The goal is net zero CO2 emissions by 2050, with 2030 serving as a benchmark.
In addition to holding the business, financial, and energy sectors to environmentally responsible standard, the zero emission plan seeks to address the average citizen’s quality of life, with a literal return to more green spaces:
Accelerating climate change measures is important to preserve biodiversity and continue to reap its bounty. In recent years, the idea of green infrastructure that utilizes the functions of the natural environment has attracted attention. It is one of the most important considerations for the future: achieving both biodiversity conservation and climate change measures.
A United Nation report* pointed out that COVID-19 is potentially a zoonotic disease derived from wildlife, such infectious diseases will increase in the future, and one of the reasons is the destruction of nature by humans.
Read Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s Zero Transmission Strategy and Update here.
It doesn’t take long to learn how to pull a shot of espresso. Search for that phrase on Youtube, and you’ll find hours’ worth of sound instruction, most of it in the form of brief and easily digestible videos. All of them cover the same basic stages of the process: grinding, dosing, tamping, and brewing. When examined closely, each of those stages reveals a formidable body of knowledge to master. If any one Youtuber can lay claim to having mastered all of them, it must be James Hoffmann, previously featured here on Open Culture for his videos on subjects from deep-fried coffee to the classic Bialetti Moka Express. In the six-part series above, he offers viewers an overview of all they need to know to achieve a true understanding of espresso.
Episode by episode, Hoffmann explains how to choose the right dose of coffee, ratio between the amount of ground and liquid coffee, brew time, grind size, brew temperature, and pressure. Of course, there is no single universally correct setting or amount of any of these things: each is a variable with its own range of effects on the shot of espresso ultimately yielded.
Each drinker, too, has a different conception of the taste and texture of the ideal espresso shot, and consistently realizing those qualities — or at least getting close — necessitates no small amount of trial and error. But those who listen well to Hoffmann’s explanations will surely end up with fewer errors, and in any case get more enjoyment from the trials.
Watch “Understanding Espresso,” and you’re going to want to know how Hoffmann pulls shots for himself. This he addresses in a bonus episode — unsurprisingly, the longest one of the bunch — which shows his entire process in detail, from preparing the beans to stirring and sipping. Along the way, he also introduces the variety of specialized devices he uses: a strong draw for his many coffee-gearhead subscribers, but one he presents with the caveat that you really don’t need to go high-end all the way in order to live your best espresso life. Even so, the dedicated home enthusiast must put in considerably more time and attention than the average chain-coffee-shop barista. “Cafés want to make good espresso as quickly and easily as possible,” he reminds us. “We want to make incredible espresso every time.”
You can watch the entire playlist, from start to finish, at the very top of the post.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Long ago, in the ancient civilization of Mesopotamia, Akkadian was the dominant language. And, for centuries, it remained the lingua franca in the Ancient Near East. But then it was gradually squeezed out by Aramaic, and it faded into oblivion once Alexander the Great Hellenized (Greekified) the region.
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In the late twelfth and early thirteenth century there lived a mechanically inclined polymath named Badi’ al-Zaman Abu-‘l-‘Izz Ibn Isma’il Ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari, whom we might prefer simply to call Al-Jazari. A resident of Diyar-Bakir, in modern-day Turkey, he was employed as a court engineer, and indeed, proved to be the finest engineer for which a Mesopotamian ruler of that era could hope. He worked out a variety of functional camshafts, crankshafts, pumps, fountains, and clocks, not to mention his more ambitious designs, including a host of humanoid automata meant to handle tasks like serving beverages and even playing music.
Lying between the practical and the fanciful are such Al-Jazarian inventions as the “perpetual flute,” a diagram of which you can see at the site of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Involving “two adjacent tanks, each with a plug attached to a chain,” the setup would work when “the pipe on an axle with a bowl fills with water from a channel at the upper right and tips so that water flows into one tank. The air in the tank is thus forced through a pipe attached to a jar that plays a flute until the tank is filled. Then the pipe tilts to fill the other tank with water, causing the other flute to play.” Like a pre-modern Rube Goldberg, Al-Jazari created mechanical concepts that are better seen than explained, and you’ll find many more of them illustrated at Flashbak.
These works of schematic art come not from Al-Jazari’s own hand, but from an Arabic manuscript created some three to six centuries after his death. It appears to pay a kind of tribute to his popular Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, which itself drew upon a ninth-century Book of Ingenious Devices written by three Persian brothers known as the Banu Musa. All of these artistic and technical works, and their continued availability in different forms through the generations, reflect the serious work of intellectual custodianship and development across the civilizations of the Middle East after the fall of the Roman Empire — a project that greatly benefited from the occasional sui generis imagination like Al-Jazari’s.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Pulp Fiction will likely hold up generations from now, but the resonance of its title may already be lost to history. Pulp magazines, or “the pulps,” as they were called, once held special significance for lovers of adventure stories, detective and science fiction, and horror and fantasy. Acquiring the name from the cheap paper on which they were printed, pulp magazines might be said, in large part, to have shaped the pop culture of our contemporary world, publishing respected authors like H.G. Wells and Jules Verne and many an unknown newcomer, some of whom became household names (in certain houses), like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Philip K. Dick.
Beginning in the late 19th century, the pulps opened up the publishing space that became flooded with comic books and popular novels like those of Stephen King and Michael Crichton in the latter half of the twentieth century.
They varied widely in quality and subject matter but all share certain preoccupations. Sexual taboos are explored in their naked essence or through various genre devices. Monsters, aliens, and other features of the “weird” predominate, as do the forerunners of DC and Marvel’s superhero empires in characters like the Shadow and the Phantom Detective.
Unlike higher-rent “slicks” or “glossies,” pulp magazines had license to go places respectable publications feared to tread. Genre fiction now spawns multimillion dollar franchises, one after another, purged of much of the pulps’ salacious content. But paging through the thousands of back issues available at thePulp Magazine Archivewill give you a sense of just how outré such magazines once were—a quality that survived in the underground comics and zines of the 60s and beyond and in genre tabloids like Scream Queens.
The enormous archive contains thousands of digitized issues of such titles as If, True Detective Mysteries, Witchcraft and Sorcery, Weird Tales, Uncensored Detective, Captain Billy’s WhizBang, and Adventure (“America’s most exciting fiction for men!”). It also features early celebrity rags like Movie Pictorial and Hush Hush, and retrospectives like Dirty Pictures, a 1990s comic reprinting the often quite misogynist pulp art of the 30s.
There’s great science fiction, no small amount of creepy teen boy wish-fulfillment, and lots of lurid, noir appeals to fantasies of sex and violence. Swords and sorcery, guns and trussed-up pin-ups, and plenty of creature features. The pulps were once mass culture’s id, we might say, and they have now become its ego.
Ludwig van Beethoven died in 1827, a bit early to be subjected to the kinds of DNA analysis that have become so prevalent today. Luckily, the German-speaking world of the early nineteenth century still adhered to the custom of saving locks of hair from the deceased — particularly lucky for an archaeology student named Tristan Begg and his collaborators in the study “Genomic analyses of hair from Ludwig van Beethoven,” published just this month in Current Biology. In the video from Cambridge University just above, Begg introduces the research project and describes what new information it reveals about the composer whose life and work have been so intensively studied for so long.
“Working with an international team of scientists, I identified five genetically matching, authentic locks of hair and used them to sequence Beethoven’s genome,” Begg says. “We discovered significant genetic risk factors for liver disease and evidence that Beethoven contracted the Hepatitis B virus in, at the latest, the months before his final illness.”
And “while we couldn’t pinpoint the cause of Beethoven’s deafness or gastrointestinal problems, we did find modest genetic risk for Systemic Lupus Erythematosus,” an autoimmune disease. History remembers Beethoven as a not particularly healthy man; now we have a clearer idea of which conditions he could have suffered.
But this study’s most revelatory discoveries concern not what has to do with Beethoven, but what doesn’t. The famous lock of hair “once believed to have been cut from the dead composer’s head by the fifteen-year-old musician Ferdinand Hiller” turns out to have come from a woman. Nor was Beethoven himself “descended from the main Flemish Beethoven lineage,” which is shown by genetic evidence that “an extramarital relationship resulted in the birth of a child in Beethoven’s direct paternal line at some point between 1572 and 1770.” This news came as a shock to “the five people in Belgium whose last name is van Beethoven and who provided DNA for the study,” writes the New York Times’ Gina Kolata. But then, Beethoven’s music still belongs to them — just as it belongs to us all.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Nearly a century after Claude Monet painted them, the Nymphéas, or Water Lilies, still impress as a vision of a seemingly minor subject realized at a grand scale. The paintings installed in a dedicated room at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris make an especially strong impact on their viewers — an impact surely not lost on Ai Weiwei, who has lately re-created another set of Water Lilies (a triptych whose original resides at the Museum of Modern Art) entirely out of Lego bricks. Titled Water Lilies #1, this 50-foot-long plastic homage will go on display at London’s Design Museum as part of Ai Weiwei: Making Sense, which opens on April 7th and runs until July 30th.
“Ai used 650,000 Lego bricks in 22 colors in his version of the famous Impressionist triptych,” writes ARTnews’ Karen K. Ho. Apart from simply replicating, brick by pixel-like brick, the brushstrokes with which Monet replicated the lily pond at his Giverny home, Weiwei also included “a dark area on the right-hand side. The Design Museum said it represents the underground dugout in Xinjiang province where Ai and his father, Ai Qing, lived in forced exile in the 1960s.” On one level, this is an unexpected addition; on another, it’s just the touch one might expect from the most famous dissident Chinese artist alive.
Image by Ela Bialkowska/OKNO Studio
Experienced in the medium of Lego, Ai has also used everyone’s favorite building blocks “to produce portraits of political prisoners. In 2017, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Gallery exhibited 176 of these Lego artworks.” Making Sense will also include a new Lego piece called Untitled (Lego Incident), which, as the Guardian’s Caroline Davies writes, “comprises thousands of Lego blocks donated by members of the public after Lego briefly refused to sell their products to him in 2014.” It seems that Lego had reservations about being associated with such a politically charged project. The statement made by Water Lilies #1 may be less direct, but — enriched by its large scale, its cross-cultural inspiration, and its materials that have long been a near-universal fixture of childhood — it won’t be any less powerful.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
In the early 1950s, archaeologists unearthed several clay tablets from the 14th century BCE. Found, WFMU tells us, “in the ancient Syrian city of Ugarit,” these tablets “contained cuneiform signs in the hurrian language,” which turned out to be the oldest known piece of music ever discovered, a 3,400 year-old cult hymn. Anne Draffkorn Kilmer, professor of Assyriology at the University of California, produced the interpretation below in 1972. (She describes how she arrived at the musical notation—in some technical detail—in this interview.) Since her initial publications in the 60s on the ancient Sumerian tablets and the musical theory found within, other scholars of the ancient world have published their own versions.
The piece, writes Richard Fink in a 1988 Archeologia Musicalis article, confirms a theory that “the 7‑note diatonic scale as well as harmony existed 3,400 years ago.” This, Fink tells us, “flies in the face of most musicologists’ views that ancient harmony was virtually non-existent (or even impossible) and the scale only about as old as the Ancient Greeks.”
Kilmer’s colleague Richard Crocker claimed that the discovery “revolutionized the whole concept of the origin of western music.” So, academic debates aside, what does the oldest song in the world sound like? Listen to a midi version below and hear it for yourself. Doubtless, the midi keyboard was not the Sumerians instrument of choice, but it suffices to give us a sense of this strange composition, though the rhythm of the piece is only a guess.
Kilmer and Crocker published an audio book on vinyl (now on CD) called SoundsFrom Silence in which they narrate information about ancient Near Eastern music, and, in an accompanying booklet, present photographs and translations of the tablets from which the song above comes. They also give listeners an interpretation of the song, titled “A Hurrian Cult Song from Ancient Ugarit,” performed on a lyre, an instrument likely much closer to what the song’s first audiences heard. Unfortunately, for that version, you’ll have to make a purchase, but you can hear a different lyre interpretation of the song by Michael Levy below, as transcribed by its original discoverer Dr. Richard Dumbrill.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014. It’s old but gold. So we hope you enjoy revisiting it again.
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Before the Industrial Revolution, few had occasion to consider the impact of technology on their lives. A few decades in, however, certain segments of society thought about little else. That, in any case, is the impression given by the debate over what the English press of the early nineteenth century called the “March of Intellect,” a label for the apparently polarizing discourse that arose from not just the development of industrial technology but the dissemination of “useful knowledge” that followed in its wake. Was this sort of education an engine of progress, or simply of disorder?
The March of Intellect’s most vivid legacy consists of a series of newspaper cartoons published in the eighteen-twenties. They depict a world, as Hunter Dukes writes at the Public Domain Review, where “extravagantly dressed ladies window-shop for pastel finery and forgo stairwells in favor of belt-driven slides” while “a child is moments away from being paved into the road by a carriage at full gallop”; where “men gorge themselves on pineapples and guzzle bottles at the Champagne Depot” and “postmen flit around with winged capes”; where “even convicts have it better: they embark for New South Wales on a gargoyle zeppelin, but still have panoramic views.”
So far, so Victorian. One could argue more or less in favor of the world described above, as rendered by artist William Heath. But in the future as envisioned in the cartoon at the top of the post by Robert Seymour (now best known as the original illustrator of Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers), the March of Intellect takes on a flamboyantly malign aspect.
In it “a jolly automaton stomps across society,” writes Dukes. “Its head is a literal stack of knowledge — tomes of history, philosophy, and mechanic manuals power two gas-lantern eyes. It wears secular London University as a crown.” It sweeps away “pleas, pleadings, delayed parliamentary bills, and obsolete laws. Vicars, rectors, and quack doctors are turned on their heads.”
Nearly two centuries later, most would side instinctively with the participants in the March of Intellect debate who saw the provision of technical and scientific knowledge to then-less-educated groups — women, children, the working class — as an unambiguous good. Yet we may also feel trepidation about the technologies emerging in our own time, when, to name a current example, “artificially intelligent chatbots have fueled ongoing anxieties about the mechanization of intellectual labor.” Every day brings new apocalyptic speculations about the rise of powerful thinking machines running roughshod over humanity. If no artist today is illustrating them quite so entertainingly as Heath and Seymour did, so much the worse for our time.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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