The Secret Language of Trees: A Charming Animated Lesson Explains How Trees Share Information with Each Other

in Biology, Environment, Nature | July 5th, 2019

Shel Silverstein’s bit­ter­sweet clas­sic The Giv­ing Tree paints an inac­cu­rate view of trees as sim­ple, eas­i­ly vic­tim­ized lon­ers.

If only the tit­u­lar char­ac­ter had had a same-species best friend around to talk some sense into her when her human pal start­ed help­ing him­self to her branch­es… You’ve Got­ta Be Kid­ding Me Tree, or maybe No Bull­shit Tree.

You’ve Got­ta Be Kid­ding Me Tree could’ve passed some vital nutri­ents to The Giv­ing Tree, whose self care reg­i­men is clear­ly not cut­ting it, via the myc­or­rhizae sys­tem, a vast net­work of fil­a­ment-like tree roots and sym­bi­ot­ic soil fun­gi.

That same sys­tem could serve as the switch­board by which You’ve Got­ta Be Kid­ding Me Tree could alert the extend­ed Tree fam­i­ly to the dan­gers of pro­longed asso­ci­a­tion with cute, but needy kids.

Imag­ine the upbeat end­ing, had Sil­ver­stein gone light—The Giv­ing Tree N’ Friends.

Not as poignant per­haps, but not entire­ly inac­cu­rate from a sci­en­tif­ic stand­point.

As for­est ecol­o­gists Suzanne Simard and Camille Defrenne point out in the ani­mat­ed TED-Ed les­son, “The Secret Lan­guage of Trees,” above, trees have large fam­i­ly (for­give me) trees, whose liv­ing mem­bers are in con­stant com­mu­ni­ca­tion, using the myc­or­rhizae sys­tem.

Host­ing mul­ti­ple fun­gal species allows each tree to con­nect with a wider net­work, as each group of sym­bi­ot­ic shrooms spreads infor­ma­tion to their own per­son­al crews, par­ty line style.

On the oth­er end, the receiv­ing tree can iden­ti­fy its rela­tion to the tree of ori­gin, whether they are both mem­bers of what we humans refer to as a nuclear fam­i­ly, or much more dis­tant rela­tions.

And while this giant sub­ter­ranean sys­tem for shar­ing infor­ma­tion and resources is spe­cif­ic to trees, when we con­sid­er how many oth­er for­est denizens depend on trees for food and shel­ter, the mes­sage sys­tem seems even more vital to the planet’s health.

Defrenne and Simard’s full TED-Ed les­son, com­plete with quiz, cus­tomiz­able les­son plan, and dis­cus­sion top­ics, can be found here.

Simard delves more deeply into the top­ic in the 18-minute TED Talk, “How Trees Talk to Each Oth­er,” below.

View more of ani­ma­tor Avi Ofer’s charm­ing work here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Social Lives of Trees: Sci­ence Reveals How Trees Mys­te­ri­ous­ly Talk to Each Oth­er, Work Togeth­er & Form Nur­tur­ing Fam­i­lies

This 392-Year-Old Bon­sai Tree Sur­vived the Hiroshi­ma Atom­ic Blast & Still Flour­ish­es Today: The Pow­er of Resilience

3,000-Year-Old Olive Tree on the Island of Crete Still Pro­duces Olives Today

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

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The End of an Era: MAD Magazine Will Publish Its Last Issue With Original Content This Fall

in Comics/Cartoons, Magazines | July 5th, 2019

As a cul­tur­al ref­er­ence, MAD mag­a­zine may have died decades ago. This is a not a dis­par­age­ment, but a state­ment of fact. The kind of satire the august, anar­chic com­ic first unleashed on the world of 1952 debuted in a cul­tur­al milieu that is no more, and a form—the illus­trat­ed, satir­i­cal periodical—that is increas­ing­ly niche. MAD left an indeli­ble impres­sion on Amer­i­can publishing’s past, but as the magazine’s leg­endary car­toon­ist Al Jaf­fee tells The Wash­ing­ton Post, “it’s most­ly nos­tal­gia now.”

Respond­ing to the market’s cues, MAD will more or less dis­ap­pear from news­stands, pub­lish­ing lega­cy con­tent on a sub­scrip­tion-only basis and on the direct mar­ket, “a.k.a. spe­cial­ty and com­ic book stores,” writes Giz­mo­do, “like the vast major­i­ty of DC’s comics out­put is already.” MAD shaped itself in oppo­si­tion to Cold War para­noia and nev­er seemed to find a new edge after favorite tar­gets like Richard Nixon and Ronald Rea­gan left the scene. The mag­a­zine turned almost exclu­sive­ly to pop cul­ture par­o­dy in the 90s. As ABC News reports, MAD “peaked at 2.8 mil­lion sub­scribers in 1973,” then began its decline, with only “140,000 left as of 2017.”

The magazine’s found­ing edi­tor, car­toon­ist Har­vey Kurtz­man, passed away in 1993. His suc­ces­sor Al Feld­stein, who brought the mag­a­zine to inter­na­tion­al promi­nence, died in 2014. MAD’s long­time, tight-knit staff of writ­ers and car­toon­ists are most­ly retired, and most are san­guine about the wind­ing down. “It’s been a log­i­cal devel­op­ment,” com­ments anoth­er MAD car­toon­ing leg­end, Ser­gio Aragonés. To wit, after Issue 10 (MAD re-num­bered last June) comes out this fall, there will be no new con­tent, “except for the end-of-year spe­cials,” notes The Post. “All issues after that will be repub­lished con­tent culled from 67 years of pub­li­ca­tion.”

This still rep­re­sents a great way for new­com­ers to MAD to catch up on its wild­ly skewed view of the last half of the 20th cen­tu­ry, though some imag­i­na­tion is required to appre­ci­ate how sub­ver­sive their humor was for much of its run. MAD inspired count­less off­shoots in the decade after its found­ing, set­ting the tone for rad­i­cal cam­pus pub­li­ca­tions, coun­ter­cul­tur­al car­toon­ists, and com­ic writ­ers, some of whom went on to become Stephen Col­bert and Judd Apa­tow, who both wrote in the pages of MAD about how much the mag­a­zine meant to them dur­ing their appren­tice years.

The list of MAD devo­tees, both famous and not (I count myself among the lat­ter), runs into the mil­lions, but it runs along some obvi­ous demo­graph­ic divides. As the mag­a­zine is poised to become a gift-shop ver­sion of itself, trib­utes have poured in for its edi­tors, writ­ers, and cartoonists—all of them, to a man, well, men. And most of those tributes—those from promi­nent car­toon­ists and writ­ers claim­ing MAD as a for­ma­tive influ­ence, at least—are also from men of a cer­tain gen­er­a­tion, most of them straight and white.

Such mar­ket seg­men­ta­tion, one might say, speaks to the way MAD’s brand of polit­i­cal satire remained embed­ded in its hey­day. As laid-back car­toon­ists Jaf­fee and Aragonés rec­og­nize, you can’t stay young and rel­e­vant forever—though MAD had a remark­ably good run. The Post offers a notable exam­ple of Mad’s pas­sage into his­to­ry. When the cur­rent pres­i­dent “mock­ing­ly referred to Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Pete Buttigieg as Alfred E. Neuman”—the once-ubiq­ui­tous, gap-toothed sym­bol of take-no-pris­on­ers irreverence—the 37-year-old Buttigieg replied, “I’ll be hon­est. I had to Google that.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Gallery of Mad Magazine’s Rol­lick­ing Fake Adver­tise­ments from the 1960s

Al Jaf­fee, the Longest Work­ing Car­toon­ist in His­to­ry, Shows How He Invent­ed the Icon­ic “Folds-Ins” for Mad Mag­a­zine

Mad Magazine’s Al Jaf­fee & Oth­er Car­toon­ists Cre­ate Ani­ma­tions to End Dis­tract­ed Dri­ving

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

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The Walkman Turns 40: See Every Generation of Sony’s Iconic Personal Stereo in One Minute

in Music, Technology | July 5th, 2019

Do you remem­ber your first Walk­man? If you grew up after the cas­sette era, of course, you might have owned a CD-play­ing Dis­c­man instead, or maybe — just maybe — even a Mini­disc Walk­man. Nowa­days you prob­a­bly have an iPod or iPod-like dig­i­tal audio play­er as well as a cell­phone equipped to serve the same pur­pose. But all the ways in which you’ve ever tak­en your tunes on the go evolved from a com­mon tech­no­log­i­cal ances­tor: Sony’s TPS-L2, which debuted on the mar­ket 40 years ago this month. First mar­ket­ed in the Unit­ed States as the Sound­about and the Unit­ed King­dom as the Stow­away, it did­n’t take long to achieve world­wide suc­cess under the Japan­ese-Eng­lish brand name that long ago became a byword for the per­son­al stereo.

“To cel­e­brate the Walk­man’s 40th anniver­sary, Sony has opened an exhi­bi­tion in Tokyo’s bustling Gin­za dis­trict,” writes design­boom’s Juliana Neira. “Titled #009 WALKMAN IN THE PARK 40 Years Since ‘the Day the Music Walked,’ the exhi­bi­tion focus­es on the peo­ple for whom the Walk­man has been a part of their every­day life.”

It also includes a wall “fea­tur­ing around 230 ver­sions of the Walk­man through­out its 40-year his­to­ry. From the nos­tal­gic old­er mod­els, all the way up to the lat­est mod­els, the exhib­it allows vis­i­tors to take in the changes in designs, spec­i­fi­ca­tions, and media for­mats over the years.” You can see all the rep­re­sen­ta­tive Walk­man mod­els from through­out the device’s four decades of his­to­ry in the minute-long offi­cial video above.

The Walk­man defined an era of per­son­al tech­nol­o­gy, but its brand has­n’t weath­ered so well in the 21st cen­tu­ry. “The beau­ti­ful­ly designed, easy-to-use TPS-L2 was the device that lib­er­at­ed the cas­sette from liv­ing room hi-fis and car tape decks to tru­ly make music portable,” writes Quartz’s Mike Mur­phy. But “a great many of the prod­ucts that Sony once dom­i­nat­ed with have been replaced, or have been con­sol­i­dat­ed into oth­er devices. Over the years, Sony has made fan­tas­tic cam­corders, stereo com­po­nents, cam­eras, portable media play­ers, and phones. Rel­a­tive­ly few peo­ple buy most of these prod­ucts any­more, with the smart­phone usurp­ing many of these devices’ func­tions.” Today’s Walk­man devices don’t reflect “the influ­en­tial (and often exper­i­men­tal) Sony of yes­ter­day. And with Apple grap­pling with its own exis­ten­tial ques­tions about its future, who is left to take up the man­tle of the king of con­sumer elec­tron­ics?”

Still, when we put on our head­phones or pop in our ear­buds on the morn­ing com­mute and see that every­one else around us has done the same, we have to admit that we live in the world the Walk­man cre­at­ed. This has its down­sides, as Aman­da Petru­sich acknowl­edges in a New York­er piece on pub­lic head­phone-wear­ing: these include “the dis­con­nec­tion they facil­i­tate” (and the hand-wring­ing about that dis­con­nec­tion they encour­age) as well as the engi­neer­ing of music itself to accom­mo­date low-qual­i­ty audio repro­duc­tion. But then, “ambling down a city street with head­phones on — you know, maybe it’s dusk, maybe it’s mid­sum­mer, maybe you had a real­ly nice day — is, with­out a doubt, one of life’s sim­plest and most per­fect joys.” Sony’s music-lov­ing co-founder Masaru Ibu­ka, com­mis­sion­er of the orig­i­nal Walk­man’s design, must have known sim­i­lar joys him­self. But what would he make of pod­casts?

via design­boom

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Good Are Your Head­phones? This 150-Song Playlist, Fea­tur­ing Steely Dan, Pink Floyd & More, Will Test Them Out

Con­serve the Sound, an Online Muse­um Pre­serves the Sounds of Past Technologies–from Type­writ­ers, Elec­tric Shavers and Cas­sette Recorders, to Cam­eras & Clas­sic Nin­ten­do

Lis­ten to Audio Arts: The 1970s Tape Cas­sette Arts Mag­a­zine Fea­tur­ing Andy Warhol, Mar­cel Duchamp & Many Oth­ers

City of Eight Mil­lion Sound­tracks

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.

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How Intellectual Humility Can Boost Our Curiosity & Ability to Learn: Read the Findings of a New Study

in Psychology | July 4th, 2019

Pho­to via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

When I think about the times I def­i­nite­ly knew what I was talk­ing about, ver­sus the times I kin­da, sor­ta, might have, maybe did… well…. Let’s just say that wis­dom doesn’t always come with age, but hind­sight cer­tain­ly does. We may cringe when we remem­ber the moments we were over­con­fi­dent, out of our depth, etcetera, and so forth—when we lacked the crit­i­cal capac­i­ty known as intel­lec­tu­al humil­i­ty. It’s a qual­i­ty that can save us a lot of shame, for sure, if we’re the type of peo­ple capa­ble of feel­ing that emo­tion.

But there’s more to know­ing what you don’t know than avoid­ing regret, as impor­tant a con­sid­er­a­tion as that may be. With­out intel­lec­tu­al humil­i­ty, we can’t acquire new knowl­edge. Still, though we might find “open mind­ed” list­ed on many an online dat­ing pro­file, being flex­i­ble in one’s think­ing and will­ing to say “I don’t know” are also social­ly stig­ma­tized, says Pep­per­dine Uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor of psy­chol­o­gy Eliz­a­beth J. Krum­rei-Man­cu­so:

When it comes to beliefs, peo­ple tend to appre­ci­ate oth­ers being open-mind­ed, yet they may also view peo­ple who are unsure about their beliefs as weak or they may view those who change their view­point as unsta­ble or manip­u­la­tive. These social per­cep­tions might make peo­ple afraid to admit the fal­li­bil­i­ty in their think­ing. They may believe they should be con­fi­dent in their view­points, which can lead peo­ple to be afraid to change their minds.

Fun­da­men­tal­ist reli­gion and polar­ized polit­i­cal bat­tle-royales played out in social media stoke the fires of this ten­den­cy day in and out, cre­at­ing a ver­i­ta­ble con­fla­gra­tion of will­ful igno­rance. Krum­rei-Man­cu­so and her col­leagues set out to inves­ti­gate the oppo­site, “accept­ing one’s intel­lec­tu­al fal­li­bil­i­ty in an open and lev­el-head­ed way,” writes Peter Dock­rill at Sci­ence Alert.

Their find­ings were some­what sim­i­lar to those pop­u­lar­ized by the Dun­ning-Krueger Effect. In one find­ing, for exam­ple, the researchers dis­cov­ered that “intel­lec­tu­al­ly hum­ble peo­ple underesti­mat­ed their cog­ni­tive abil­i­ty,” per­haps not work­ing up to their full poten­tial. The intel­lec­tu­al­ly over­con­fi­dent, as we might expect, over­es­ti­mat­ed their abil­i­ties. On the whole, how­ev­er, the con­clu­sions tend to be quite pos­i­tive.

In a series of five stud­ies, which sur­veyed 1,200 indi­vid­u­als, the authors found that the intel­lec­tu­al­ly hum­ble are far more moti­vat­ed to learn for its own sake, more like­ly to enjoy chal­leng­ing cog­ni­tive tasks, more will­ing to con­sid­er dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives and alter­na­tive evi­dence, and less threat­ened by aware­ness of their own lim­i­ta­tions.

The Har­vard Busi­ness Review points out the Pep­per­dine stud­ies’ impor­tance in defin­ing the fuzzy con­cept of open-mind­ed­ness, with a four­fold mea­sure to assess indi­vid­u­als’ intel­lec­tu­al humil­i­ty:

  1. Hav­ing respect for oth­er view­points
  2. Not being intel­lec­tu­al­ly over­con­fi­dent
  3. Sep­a­rat­ing one’s ego from one’s intel­lect
  4. Will­ing­ness to revise one’s own view­point

Becom­ing intel­lec­tu­al­ly hum­ble can take us into some uncom­fort­able ter­ri­to­ry, places where we don’t know what to say or do when every­one around us seem so cer­tain. But it can also give us the push we need to actu­al­ly learn the things we might have kin­da, sor­ta pre­tend­ed to under­stand. Read Pep­perdine’s study, “Links between intel­lec­tu­al humil­i­ty and acquir­ing knowl­edge” at The Jour­nal of Pos­i­tive Psy­chol­o­gy.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Why Incom­pe­tent Peo­ple Think They’re Amaz­ing: An Ani­mat­ed Les­son from David Dun­ning (of the Famous “Dun­ning-Kruger Effect”)

Research Finds That Intel­lec­tu­al Humil­i­ty Can Make Us Bet­ter Thinkers & Peo­ple; Good Thing There’s a Free Course on Intel­lec­tu­al Humil­i­ty

How to Argue With Kind­ness and Care: 4 Rules from Philoso­pher Daniel Den­nett

24 Com­mon Cog­ni­tive Bias­es: A Visu­al List of the Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sys­tems Errors That Keep Us From Think­ing Ratio­nal­ly

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

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A Documentary Introduction to Nick Drake, Whose Haunting & Influential Songs Came Into the World 50 Years Ago Today

in Music | July 3rd, 2019

“All smok­ers will recog­nise the mean­ing of the title — it refers to five leaves left near the end of a pack­et of cig­a­rette papers. It sounds poet­ic and so does com­pos­er, singer, and gui­tarist Nick Drake. His debut album for Island is inter­est­ing.” There, in its entire­ty, is Melody Mak­er’s review of Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left, which came out fifty years ago today. Drake now stands in music his­to­ry as some­thing of a doomed roman­tic hero, an artist who craft­ed a few dozen strik­ing­ly beau­ti­ful, haunt­ing songs and deliv­ered them into a world in which he nev­er felt at home. Unable to make that world appre­ci­ate his work, Drake depart­ed from it at the ear­ly age of 26, and only decades lat­er would Five Leaves Left and the oth­er two albums he record­ed in his life­time find their lis­ten­ers.

Sim­pli­fied though it is, that con­cep­tion adheres to the broad con­tours of Drake’s life. Born in Bur­ma to an Eng­lish civ­il engi­neer and the musi­cal­ly inclined daugh­ter of a high­er-up in the Indi­an Civ­il Ser­vice, he played in school orches­tras and cov­er bands grow­ing up and signed to Island Records while still a stu­dent at Cam­bridge.

By that point, hav­ing expe­ri­enced the music of pre­de­ces­sors like Bob Dylan and Van Mor­ri­son, stints in Moroc­co and the south of France, and the mind-alter­ing sub­stances pop­u­lar in the late 1960s, Drake had fash­ioned him­self into an acoustic gui­tar-play­ing singer-song­writer who must have seemed well suit­ed to the transat­lantic folk-music boom then in effect. He cer­tain­ly man­aged to impress Joe Boyd, the young Amer­i­can record pro­duc­er respon­si­ble for bring­ing acts like Fair­port Con­ven­tion, John Mar­tyn, and the Incred­i­ble String Band into the main­stream.

Boyd did­n’t need to hear much of Drake’s demo tape before he decid­ed to pro­duce a prop­er album, and in the 2014 event above he remem­bers the expe­ri­ence of bring­ing Drake into the stu­dio and record­ing what would become Five Leaves Left. Accom­pa­ny­ing Drake’s voice and gui­tar with a string sec­tion, the album show­cas­es all the qual­i­ties that set him apart from most singer-song­writ­ers then and still do now, from his unusu­al com­po­si­tion­al struc­tures and gui­tar tun­ings to the unapolo­getic Eng­lish­ness of his pro­nun­ci­a­tion and cadence. And unlike so many of the much big­ger records that came out in 1969, it all sounds like it could have been record­ed yes­ter­day — an achieve­ment whose tech­niques engi­neer John Wood has, for the past half-cen­tu­ry, declined to explain. But Drake’s shy­ness and sen­si­tiv­i­ty made him tem­pera­men­tal­ly unsuit­ed to live per­for­mance; he strug­gled to pro­mote him­self, and died of an anti­de­pres­sant over­dose five years and two albums lat­er.

For some time there­after it looked as if Drake’s music might have died with him. But Five Leaves Left and its fol­low-ups remained in Island’s back cat­a­log and by the ear­ly 1980s had built up a cult fol­low­ing, espe­cial­ly among oth­er musi­cians. (The Cure’s Robert Smith has cred­it­ed his band’s name to a line from Drake’s “Time Has Told Me.”) The 1997 pub­li­ca­tion of Patrick Humphries’ Nick Drake: The Biog­ra­phy opened the peri­od of wide-rang­ing dis­cov­ery of Nick Drake, fur­thered by the BBC Radio 2 doc­u­men­tary Fruit Tree: The Nick Drake Sto­ry, the BBC2 tele­vi­sion doc­u­men­tary Nick Drake: A Stranger Among Us, the Dutch doc­u­men­tary A Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake, and the many oth­er books about him pub­lished since. (Ten years ago, for Five Leaves Left’s 40th anniver­sary, I myself inter­viewed Humphries and two oth­er authors of books about Drake; you can down­load the pro­gram as an MP3 here.)

In 2004 BBC2 pro­duced a sec­ond radio doc­u­men­tary called Lost Boy: In Search Of Nick Drake, and to nar­rate it brought in a fan by the name of Brad Pitt. “I was intro­duced to Nick Drake’s music about five years ago, and am a huge admir­er of his records,” the actor said at the time, and it may not be a coin­ci­dence that the year 1999 saw the high­est-pro­file use of one of Drake’s songs by far — as the sound­track to a Volk­swa­gen com­mer­cial. Two decades after that big break, and near­ly 45 years after his death, Nick Drake is at the height of his pop­u­lar­i­ty, both in terms of how many lis­ten­ers claim his songs as favorites and how many cur­rent singer-song­writ­ers claim him as an influ­ence. Yet to this day, no oth­er per­former sounds quite like him; in all prob­a­bil­i­ty, none ever will. And no mat­ter how many times one has heard it, Five Leaves Left remains more “inter­est­ing” than ever.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ladies and Gen­tle­men… Mr. Leonard Cohen: The Poet-Musi­cian Fea­tured in a 1965 Doc­u­men­tary

Paul McCart­ney Breaks Down His Most Famous Songs and Answers Most-Asked Fan Ques­tions in Two New Videos

James Tay­lor Per­forms Live in 1970, Thanks to a Lit­tle Help from His Friends, The Bea­t­les

89 Essen­tial Songs from The Sum­mer of Love: A 50th Anniver­sary Playlist

Joni Mitchell: Singer, Song­writer, Artist, Smok­ing Grand­ma

Tom Pet­ty Takes You Inside His Song­writ­ing Craft

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.

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Anton Chekhov’s Six Rules For Writing Fiction

in Writing | July 3rd, 2019

Whether due to inse­cu­ri­ty, inex­pe­ri­ence, or just intel­lec­tu­al curios­i­ty, writ­ers of fic­tion can some­times priv­i­lege sound­ing smart over con­nect­ing with their read­ers. The result is the dread­ed “infor­ma­tion dump,” an attempt to include every­thing: every­thing, that is, but that which makes fic­tion com­pelling: minute­ly detailed descrip­tions of char­ac­ters we care about; sharply observed sit­u­a­tions that move us; moral com­plex­i­ty that feels earned and gen­uine…

All qual­i­ties that might fall under the adjec­tive “Chekhov­ian.”

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, coun­try doc­tor and mas­ter­ful short sto­ry writer, put him­self through med­ical school by writ­ing fic­tion read­ers could not put down. He has since become a stan­dard for real­ist concision—the short sto­ry ana­logue to Gus­tave Flaubert’s mas­tery of the nov­el form.

And like Flaubert, Chekhov mas­tered his art by plac­ing strict lim­its on him­self. These he out­lined in an 1886 let­ter to his broth­er Alek­san­dr in a con­cise six-point list, which you’ll find below.

  1. Absence of lengthy ver­biage of polit­i­cal-social-eco­nom­ic nature;
  2. Total objec­tiv­i­ty;
  3. Truth­ful descrip­tion of per­sons and objects;
  4. Extreme brevi­ty;
  5. Audac­i­ty and orig­i­nal­i­ty: flee the stereo­type;
  6. Com­pas­sion

Many of these pre­scrip­tions can sound like the CIA-approved rules infor­mal­ly enforced by the 20th-cen­tu­ry Iowa Writer’s Work­shop. One can draw a line from Chekhov to Ray­mond Carv­er, Flan­nery O’Connor, John Updike, and oth­er writ­ers like­ly to have appeared in The New York­er. But many writ­ers besides Chekhov have com­plained of over­ly ver­bose, opin­ion­at­ed fic­tion.

19th cen­tu­ry writer Hen­ry James dis­par­aged what he called the “large loose bag­gy mon­sters” of Fyo­dor Dos­to­evsky and oth­er ser­i­al nov­el­ists, for exam­ple. Anoth­er nov­el­ist, Jay McIn­er­ney takes a phrase from Renais­sance schol­ar Wal­ter Pater to describe the brevi­ty of the short sto­ry: the form, he writes, cre­ates a “hard, gem­like flame.” This seems to be what Chekhov strove for in his mature work.

But three years ear­li­er, he had per­fect­ed a very dif­fer­ent kind of sto­ry, and issued a very dif­fer­ent list of pre­scrip­tions to his broth­er. In 1883, Chekhov advised that if Alek­san­dr wished to get pub­lished in the mag­a­zine Frag­ments, he should observe the fol­low­ing: “1. The short­er, the bet­ter; 2. A bit of ide­ol­o­gy and being up to date is most à pro­pos; 3. Car­i­ca­ture is just fine, but igno­rance of civ­il ser­vice ranks and of the sea­sons is strict­ly pro­hib­it­ed.”

We can see the author’s not­ed con­cern for accu­ra­cy, but not the ulti­mate and most con­cise item on his mature list: Com­pas­sion, a qual­i­ty that eclipses typol­o­gy and ide­ol­o­gy. Chekhov may not always have adhered close­ly to some of his own rules, as ethno­graph­ic writer Kirin Narayan shows. After all, who can achieve “total objec­tiv­i­ty”? But “embed­ded” in this ide­al is “the recog­ni­tion” writes Maria Popo­va at Brain Pick­ings, “that no depic­tion of real­i­ty is real­is­tic unless it includes an empath­ic account of all per­spec­tives.”

via Brain Pick­ings

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Flan­nery O’Connor Explains the Lim­it­ed Val­ue of MFA Pro­grams: “Com­pe­tence By Itself Is Dead­ly”

Kurt Von­negut Offers 8 Tips on How to Write Good Short Sto­ries (and Amus­ing­ly Graphs the Shapes Those Sto­ries Can Take)

Toni Mor­ri­son Dis­pens­es Sound Writ­ing Advice: Tips You Can Apply to Your Own Work

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

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Hear Wade in the Water: An Unprecedented 26-Hour-Long Exploration of the African American Sacred Music Tradition

in History, Music | July 3rd, 2019

Pho­to of Mahalia Jack­son by Dave Brinkman, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

It may well be a tru­ism to say that Amer­i­can music is African Amer­i­can music, but that doesn’t make it any less true. And when we reduce truths down to tru­isms they lose the gran­u­lar detail that makes them inter­est­ing and rel­e­vant. Every­one knows, for exam­ple, that there would be no rock and roll with­out Robert John­son at the cross­roads and Lit­tle Richard in his sequined jack­et and pom­padour. But how many peo­ple know that with­out North Car­oli­na-born Les­ley Rid­dle, A.P. Carter’s one­time musi­cal part­ner, folk and coun­try music as we know it might not exist?

Like­wise, Negro Spir­i­tu­als and the black gospel tra­di­tion are legendary—birthing such tow­er­ing fig­ures as Aretha Franklin and Sam Cooke. But that his­to­ry has often been turned into stereo­type, an easy ref­er­ence for down-home authen­tic­i­ty. Divorced from their roots, easy evo­ca­tions of African Amer­i­can gospel glide over a com­plex tapes­try of syn­cretism and syn­chronic­i­ty, inno­va­tion and preser­va­tion, and the build­ing of local and nation­al com­mu­ni­ties with a glob­al scope and pres­ence.

Black sacred music touch­es every part of U.S. his­to­ry. To hear this his­to­ry in gran­u­lar detail, you need to hear NPR’s just-re-released audio series Wade in the Water: African Amer­i­can Sacred Music Tra­di­tions. First released in 1994 by NPR and the Smith­son­ian, the 26-part doc­u­men­tary details “the his­to­ry of Amer­i­can gospel music and its impact on soul, jazz and R&B.” The series begins with a con­cep­tu­al overview and car­ries us all the way through to the con­tem­po­rary gospel scene.

Along the way, we learn about region­al scenes, the growth and world­wide pop­u­lar­i­ty of the Jubilee singers who so inspired W.E.B. Du Bois, the lined hymn and shaped-note tra­di­tions, and the use of gospel as a doc­u­men­tary medi­um itself, chron­i­cling the sink­ing of the Titan­ic, the Depres­sion, World Wars I and II, and more. Sacred music sup­port­ed Civ­il Rights strug­gles, and move­ment lead­ers like Fan­nie Lou Hamer sang as they marched and orga­nized, a pow­er­ful sound folk singers like Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan picked up and emu­lat­ed.

Talk­ing about music can only take us so far. Wade in the Water suc­ceed­ed by keep­ing music at the cen­ter, even releas­ing a four-CD set, with exten­sive lin­er notes. This time around, the dig­i­tal release comes with Spo­ti­fy playlists like the one above in which you can hear a sam­pling of songs from the series. Here you’ll find the usu­al crossover gospel greats—Aretha, the Sta­ple Singers, Bil­ly Pre­ston, Mahalia Jack­son, BeBe and Cece Winans. You’ll also hear unknown com­mu­ni­ty groups like a Demopo­lis, Alaba­ma Con­gre­ga­tion singing “Come and Go with Me” and the Gatling Funer­al Home singing “Gatling Devo­tion­al.”

The series was researched, pro­duced, and pre­sent­ed by Ber­nice John­son Reagon, who is both a liv­ing exam­ple and a his­to­ri­an of the African Amer­i­can musi­cal tra­di­tion. A founder of the SNCC Free­dom Singers dur­ing the Civ­il Rights move­ment, she went on to found and direct Sweet Hon­ey in the Rock, who appear in Wade in the Water and the playlist above. Reagon earned her Ph.D. from Howard Uni­ver­si­ty and pub­lished sev­er­al schol­ar­ly books on the his­to­ry she explores in the doc­u­men­tary series. Learn more about her (and hear more of her music) here, and hear all 26 episodes of Wade in the Water at NPR.

via metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

African-Amer­i­can His­to­ry: Mod­ern Free­dom Strug­gle (A Free Course from Stan­ford) 

Hear the First Record­ed Blues Song by an African Amer­i­can Singer: Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” (1920)

Eliz­a­beth Cot­ten Wrote “Freight Train” at 11, Won a Gram­my at 90, and Changed Amer­i­can Music In-Between

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

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A Witty Dictionary of Victorian Slang (1909)

in Books, English Language | July 3rd, 2019

In the intro­duc­tion to his Dic­tio­nary of Con­tem­po­rary Slang, Tony Thorne writes of the dif­fi­cul­ty of defin­ing infor­mal speech: “A sym­po­sium on slang held in France in 1989 broke up after sev­er­al days with­out hav­ing arrived at a def­i­n­i­tion accept­able to even the major­i­ty of par­tic­i­pants.” If you’re think­ing maybe this seems like tak­ing the sub­ject a lit­tle too seri­ous­ly, I’d agree. But if we trav­el back eighty years in time and across the Eng­lish Chan­nel, we’ll meet an eccen­tric lex­i­cog­ra­ph­er who approached the task in the right spir­it.

“Here is a numer­i­cal­ly weak col­lec­tion of ‘Pass­ing Eng­lish.’ ” writes James Red­ding Ware in the Pref­ace to his posthu­mous­ly-pub­lished 1909 Pass­ing Eng­lish of the Vic­to­ri­an Era, A Dic­tio­nary of Het­ero­dox Eng­lish, Slang and Phrase.

 

“It may be hoped that there are errors on every page, and also that no entry is ‘quite too dull.’” He goes on in a more seri­ous tone to sum­ma­rize the rapid lan­guage change occur­ring in Eng­land in the last few decades of the 19th cen­tu­ry:

Thou­sands of words and phras­es in exis­tence in 1870 have drift­ed away, or changed their forms, or been absorbed, while as many have been added or are being added. ‘Pass­ing Eng­lish’ rip­ples from count­less sources, form­ing a riv­er of new lan­guage which has its tide and its ebb, while its cur­rent brings down new ideas and car­ries away those that have drib­bled out of fash­ion. Not only is ‘Pass­ing Eng­lish’ gen­er­al ; it is local ; often very sea­son­ably local. 

Ware—a pen name of British writer Andrew Forrester—goes on to get very local indeed in his descrip­tions, from “Pet­ty Italia behind Hat­ton Gar­den” to “Anglo-Yid­dish.” The Pub­lic Domain Review high­lights the fol­low­ing quirky entries.

Got the Morbs – tem­po­rary melan­choly
Mut­ton Shunter – the police
Bat­ty-Fang – to thrash thor­ough­ly
Doing the Bear – court­ing that involves hug­ging
Maf­fick­ing – get­ting row­dy in the streets
Orf Chump – no appetite
Poked Up – embar­rassed
Nan­ty Nark­ing – great fun

Ware’s atti­tude may be appro­pri­ate­ly infor­mal, but his method­ol­o­gy is suit­ably rig­or­ous, and this com­pre­hen­sive lex­i­con was clear­ly a labor of love. His book is a seri­ous resource for schol­ars of the peri­od, and, hell, it’s also just great fun. Read and down­load the full dic­tio­nary at the Inter­net Archive.

via The Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read A Clas­si­cal Dic­tio­nary of the Vul­gar Tongue, a Hilar­i­ous & Infor­ma­tive Col­lec­tion of Ear­ly Mod­ern Eng­lish Slang (1785)

The Largest His­tor­i­cal Dic­tio­nary of Eng­lish Slang Now Free Online: Cov­ers 500 Years of the “Vul­gar Tongue”

The Very First Writ­ten Use of the F Word in Eng­lish (1528)

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

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

in Health, TED Talks | July 3rd, 2019

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead”: those words have been a mantra to hard-liv­ing types every­where since War­ren Zevon first sang them back in 1976, but as Berke­ley sleep sci­en­tist and Why We Sleep author Matt Walk­er sees it, tak­ing them to heart is a “mor­tal­ly unwise” choice. The exam­ple of Zevon him­self, who died at the age of 53, would seem to val­i­date that judge­ment, but it also comes backed by seri­ous research. In the TED Talk “Sleep Is Your Super­pow­er” above, Walk­er builds on what we all know — that we need to sleep, reg­u­lar­ly and with­out inter­rup­tion — by explain­ing “the won­der­ful­ly good things that hap­pen when you get sleep, but the alarm­ing­ly bad things that hap­pen when you don’t get enough, both for your brain and for your body.”

Not only, for exam­ple, do “you need sleep after learn­ing to essen­tial­ly hit the save but­ton on those new mem­o­ries so that you don’t for­get,” you also “need sleep before learn­ing to actu­al­ly pre­pare your brain, almost like a dry sponge ready to ini­tial­ly soak up new infor­ma­tion.”

As any­one who has tried to pull an all-nighter before a big test has felt, sleep depri­va­tion shuts down your “your mem­o­ry inbox,” and any incom­ing files just get “bounced” with­out being retained. But deep-sleep brain­waves, as Walk­er puts it, act as a “file-trans­fer mech­a­nism at night, shift­ing mem­o­ries from a short-term vul­ner­a­ble reser­voir to a more per­ma­nent long-term stor­age site with­in the brain, and there­fore pro­tect­ing them, mak­ing them safe.”

Improp­er sleep threat­ens not just learn­ing but life itself: com­pro­mised sleep means a com­pro­mised immune sys­tem, hence the “sig­nif­i­cant links between short sleep dura­tion and your risk for the devel­op­ment of numer­ous forms of can­cer” now being dis­cov­ered. “The short­er your sleep, the short­er your life,” as Walk­er stark­ly puts it. As far as how to improve your sleep and, with luck, elon­gate your life, he has two main pieces of advice: “Go to bed at the same time, wake up at the same time, no mat­ter whether it’s the week­day or the week­end,” and “aim for a bed­room tem­per­a­ture of around 65 degrees, or about 18 degrees Cel­sius,” slight­ly cool­er than may feel nor­mal. We’d also do well to remem­ber the impor­tance of break­ing the habit of stay­ing on the inter­net late into the night — or more specif­i­cal­ly, hav­ing stayed up well past mid­night writ­ing this very post, I’d do well to remem­ber it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

How a Good Night’s Sleep — and a Bad Night’s Sleep — Can Enhance Your Cre­ativ­i­ty

Dr. Weil’s 60-Sec­ond Tech­nique for Falling Asleep

240 Hours of Relax­ing, Sleep-Induc­ing Sounds from Sci-Fi Video Games: From Blade Run­ner to Star Wars

Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Dymax­ion Sleep Plan: He Slept Two Hours a Day for Two Years & Felt “Vig­or­ous” and “Alert”

The Pow­er of Pow­er Naps: Sal­vador Dali Teach­es You How Micro-Naps Can Give You Cre­ative Inspi­ra­tion

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.

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How to Read Many More Books in a Year: Watch a Short Documentary Featuring Some of the World’s Most Beautiful Bookstores

in Books, Travel | July 2nd, 2019

You don’t have enough time in life to read all the books you want to. But if you change your habits just a bit, you’ll be able to read many more books in the time you do have left than you oth­er­wise could have. Film­mak­er Max Joseph learns these and oth­er lessons about read­ing in this short doc­u­men­tary, Book­store: How to Read More. In it he trav­els in search of not just the advice of some of the world’s most expert read­ers (or at least some of the most expert read­ers in Amer­i­ca), but also in search of the expe­ri­ence of the most beau­ti­ful book­stores in the world (or at least in west­ern Europe and South Amer­i­ca).

Wait But Why blog­ger Tim Urban tells Joseph he would need to read for only half an hour per day to have read more than a thou­sand books by the end of his time on Earth, ver­sus the sin­gle shelf he might read through with his cur­rent habits.

Eric Bark­er of Bark­ing Up the Wrong Tree sug­gests that Joseph redi­rect his social media-view­ing instincts toward whichev­er book he feels most excit­ed about read­ing in the moment, and that he begin by set­ting his dai­ly read­ing goal so low at first — say, just one page — that it’s prac­ti­cal­ly eas­i­er to meet it than not. (To quote from Moby-Dick, “What can­not habit accom­plish?”) Then Howard Berg, who holds the Guin­ness World Record declar­ing him the fastest read­er alive, breaks down the tech­niques that can the­o­ret­i­cal­ly make each page go by in sec­onds.

But how fast do we real­ly want to read? For coun­sel on the what and the why, Joseph vis­its the office of Ruth J. Sim­mons, pres­i­dent of Prairie View A&M Uni­ver­si­ty and for­mer pres­i­dent of Brown Uni­ver­si­ty. She empha­sizes the impor­tance of read­ing not just fre­quent­ly but wide­ly, a con­di­tion that should­n’t be ter­ri­bly hard to ful­fill giv­en Joseph’s trav­el and shop­ping habits: in the video we see him vis­it a vari­ety of high­ly Insta­gram­ma­ble (and drone-filmable) book­stores every­where from Brus­sels and Maas­tricht to São Paulo and Buenos Aires. One of them, Lis­bon’s Ler Deva­gar, tells him to “read slow­ly” with its very name, echo­ing Sim­mons’ descrip­tion of read­ing as “forced med­i­ta­tion.” That fram­ing is apt, but just like vis­it­ing a new book­store, med­i­ta­tion makes the true bib­lio­phile think of only one thing first: all the vol­umes out there still to be read.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

7 Tips for Read­ing More Books in a Year

The Last Book­store: A Short Doc­u­men­tary on Per­se­ver­ance & the Love of Books

A Secret Book­store in a New York City Apart­ment: The Last of a Dying Breed

What Are the Most Stolen Books? Book­store Lists Fea­ture Works by Muraka­mi, Bukows­ki, Bur­roughs, Von­negut, Ker­ouac & Palah­niuk

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.

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Segregated By Design: An Animated Look at How African-American Enclaves in U.S. Cities Is Hardly an Accident

in Animation, History | July 2nd, 2019

From his­to­ri­an Richard Roth­stein comes a sober­ing ani­mat­ed video called “Seg­re­gat­ed by Design.”  Author of the 2017 book The Col­or of Law: A For­got­ten His­to­ry of How Our Gov­ern­ment Seg­re­gat­ed Amer­i­ca, Roth­stein has cre­at­ed a video that’s as infor­ma­tive as it is visu­al­ly cap­ti­vat­ing. Here’s what ground it cov­ers:

Exam­ine the for­got­ten his­to­ry of how our fed­er­al, state and local gov­ern­ments uncon­sti­tu­tion­al­ly seg­re­gat­ed every major met­ro­pol­i­tan area in Amer­i­ca through law and pol­i­cy.

‘Seg­re­gat­ed By Design’ exam­ines the for­got­ten his­to­ry of how our fed­er­al, state and local gov­ern­ments uncon­sti­tu­tion­al­ly seg­re­gat­ed every major met­ro­pol­i­tan area in Amer­i­ca through law and pol­i­cy.

Prej­u­dice can be birthed from a lack of under­stand­ing the his­tor­i­cal­ly accu­rate details of the past. With­out being aware of the uncon­sti­tu­tion­al res­i­den­tial poli­cies the Unit­ed States gov­ern­ment enact­ed dur­ing the mid­dle of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, one might have a neg­a­tive view today of neigh­bor­hoods where African Amer­i­cans live or even of African Amer­i­cans them­selves.

We can com­pen­sate for this unlaw­ful seg­re­ga­tion through a nation­al polit­i­cal con­sen­sus that leads to leg­is­la­tion. And this will only hap­pen if the major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans under­stand how we got here. Like Jay‑Z said in a recent New York Times inter­view, “you can’t have a solu­tion until you start deal­ing with the prob­lem: What you reveal, you heal.” This is the major chal­lenge at hand: to edu­cate fel­low cit­i­zens of the uncon­sti­tu­tion­al inequal­i­ty that we’ve woven and, on behalf of our gov­ern­ment, accept respon­si­bil­i­ty to fix it.

Learn more about the film at the web­site, Seg­re­gat­ed by Design. And find it added to our list of Free Ani­ma­tions, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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!

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Mar­tin Luther King, Jr. Used Niet­zsche, Hegel & Kant to Over­turn Seg­re­ga­tion in Amer­i­ca 

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

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

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