Once upon a time, in the middle of World War II, there was a right way to do it. And a wrong way to do it. Are there rules in 2016? And what would they look like? That’s your homework assignment for this Valentine’s Day weekend.
Valentine’s Day draws nigh, and we can only assume our readers are desperately wondering how to declaim love poetry without looking like a total prat.
Released from the potential perils of a too sonorous interpretation, the poet’s lines gambol playfully throughout the proceedings, spelled out in utilitarian alphabet stickers.
It’s pretty puddle-wonderful.
Watch it with your Valentine, and leave the read aloud to the punctuation-averse Cummings, below.
[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart
We hear it so often it’s almost a cliché, one I’m sure I’ve repeated without giving it much thought: You can’t measure love in a laboratory. But we probably can, in fact. Or at least neuroscientists can. Last year, one joint Chinese and American team of neuroscientists did just that, defining the feeling we call love as “a motivational state associated with a desire to enter or maintain a close relationship with a specific other person.” This doesn’t cover the love of pets, food, or sunsets, but it gets at what we celebrate with candy and red tchotchkes every year around this time, as well as the love we have for friends or family.
Using fMRI scans of three groups of 100 men and women, the researchers found that an “in-love group had more increased activity across several brain regions involved in reward, motivation, emotion, and social functioning,” reports Medical Daily. The longer people had been “in love,” the greater the brain activity in these regions. Whether the brain states cause the emotion, or the emotion causes the brain states, or they are one in the same, I can’t say, but the fact remains: love can be quantifiably measured.
Meanwhile, Brent Hoff separately decided to exploit this fact for what he calls a “Love Competition.” With the help of Stanford’s Center for Cognitive Neurobiological Imaging (CNI), Hoff enlisted seven contestants of varying ages—from 10 to 75—and genders to enter an fMRI machine and “love someone as hard as they can” for five minutes. Whoever generates the most activity in regions “producing the neurochemical experience of love” wins. Gives you the warm fuzzies, right?
While “the idea that love can be measured may seem deeply unromantic,” writes Aeon magazine, “the results were anything but.” The contestants were not restricted to romantic love. Ten-year-old Milo gives his love to a new baby cousin, because “she’s very cute.” Dr. Bob Dougherty of CNI predicts early on that an “older guy” like himself might win because experience would better help him control the emotion. But at the beginning, it’s anyone’s game. Watch the competition above and find out who wins.
Given that this is billed as the “1st Annual Love Competition,” might we expect another this year?
From the very beginning of Europe’s incursions into the so-called New World, the ecology, the people, and the civilizations of the Americas became transmuted into legend and fantasy. Early explorers imagined the landscape they encountered as filled with marvels—creatures that arose from their own unconscious and from a literary history of exotic myths dating back to antiquity. And as the native people assumed the character of giants and monsters, savages and demons in travel accounts, their cities became repositories of unimaginable wealth, ripe for the taking.
Foremost among these legends was the city of El Dorado. Sought by the Spanish, Italians, and Portuguese throughout the 15th and 16th centuries and by Walter Raleigh in the 17th, “El Dorado,” says folklorist Jim Griffith, “shifted geographical locations until finally it simply meant a source of untold riches somewhere in the Americas.” A couple hundred years after Raleigh’s last ill-fated expedition, Edgar Allan Poe suggested the location of this city: “Over the Mountains of the Moon, down the Valley of the Shadow, ride, boldly ride… if you seek for El Dorado.”
These colonial encounters, and the feverish accounts they produced, “contained the seeds,” says Gabriel García Márquez in his 1982 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “of our present-day novels.” El Dorado, “our so avidly sought and illusory land,” remained on imaginary maps of explorers well past the age of exploration: “As late as the last century, a German mission appointed to study the construction of an interoceanic railroad… concluded that the project was feasible” only if the rails were made of gold.
As Márquez’s work has often recounted, especially his epic One Hundred Years of Solitude, other commodities sufficed when the gold didn’t materialize, and the struggle between conquerors, adventurers, mercenaries, dictators, and opportunists on the one hand, and people fiercely determined to survive on the other has made “Latin America… a boundless realm of haunted men and historic women, whose unending obstinacy blurs into legend. We have not had a moment’s rest.”
Márquez’s speech, “The Solitude of Latin America,” weaves together the region’s founding history, its literature, and its bloody civil wars, military coups, and “the first Latin American ethnocide of our time” into an accumulating account of “immeasurable violence and pain,” the result of “age-old inequities and untold bitterness… oppression, plundering and abandonment.” To this catalogue, “we respond with life,” says Márquez, while “the most prosperous countries have succeeded in accumulating powers of destruction such as to annihilate, a hundred times over… the totality of all living beings that have ever drawn breath on this planet of misfortune.”
From the utopian dream of cities of gold and endless wealth, we arrive at a dystopian world bent on destroying itself. And yet,“faced with this awesome reality,” Márquez refuses to despair. He quotes from his literary hero William Faulkner’s Nobel speech—“I decline to accept the end of man”—then articulates another vision:
We, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of the opposite utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth.
You can hear all of Márquez’s extraordinary speech read in English at the top of the post, and in Spanish by Márquez himself below that. The latter was made available by Maria Popova, and you can read a full transcript of the speech in English at Brain Pickings.
Everybody knows Neil Gaiman, but they all know him best for different work: writing comic books like Sandman, novels like American Gods, television series like Neverwhere, movies like MirrorMask, an early biography of Duran Duran. What does all that — and everything else in the man’s prolific career — have in common? Stories. Every piece of work Gaiman does involves him telling a story of one kind or another, and so his profile in the culture has risen to great heights as, simply, a storyteller. That made him just the right man for the job when the Long Now Foundation, with its mission of thinking far back into the past and far forward into the future, needed someone to talk about how certain stories survive through both those time frames and beyond.
“Do stories grow?” Gaiman asks his years-in-the-making Long Now lecture, listenable on Soundcloud right below or viewable as a video here. “Pretty obviously — anybody who has ever heard a joke being passed on from one person to another knows that they can grow, they can change. Can stories reproduce? Well, yes. Not spontaneously, obviously — they tend to need people as vectors. We are the media in which they reproduce; we are their petri dishes.” He goes on to bring out examples from cave paintings, to secret retellings of Gone with the Wind in a Nazi concentration camp, to a warning to future generations not to dig into nuclear waste sites — designed for passage into the minds of posterity as a robustly crafted story.
Stories, writes the Long Now Foundation founder Stewart Brand, “outcompete other stories by hanging over time. They make it from medium to medium — from oral to written to film and beyond. They lose uninteresting elements but hold on to the most compelling bits or even add some.” He knows that, Gaiman knows that, and I think that all of us who have told stories sense its truth on an instinctive level: “The most popular version of the Cinderella story (which may have originated long ago in China) has kept the gloriously unlikely glass slipper introduced by a careless French telling.”
Another beloved British teller of tales, Douglas Adams, also had thoughts on the almost biological nature of literature. “We were talking about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” Gaiman recalled elsewhere, “which was something which resembled an iPad, long before it appeared. And I said when something like that happens, it’s going to be the death of the book. Douglas said no. Books are sharks.” And what did he mean by that? “Sharks have been around for a very long time. There were sharks before there were dinosaurs, and the reason sharks are still in the ocean is that nothing is better at being a shark than a shark.” So not only do the best stories evolve to last the longest, so do the forms they take.
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As a callow young art student in high school, I dearly wanted, and tried, to see the world with the same furious intensity as Vincent van Gogh, and to capture that kind of vision on paper and canvas. I later realized with chagrin as I stood in a line several blocks long for a wildly popular exhibit (Van Gogh’s Van Goghs at the National Gallery of Art) that I was but one of millions who wanted to see the world through Van Gogh’s eyes.
After waiting for what seemed like forever, not only could I barely get a glimpse of any of the paintings through the scrum of tourists and gawkers, but I felt—in my protective bubble of Van Gogh veneration—that these people couldn’t possibly get Van Gogh the way I got Van Gogh.
Well, everybody has their own version of Van Gogh, perhaps, but one I’ve outgrown is the mad, magical genius whose mental illness acted as a tragic but necessary condition for his transcendently passionate work. Maybe it’s age and some familiarity with life’s hardship, but I no longer romanticize Van Gogh’s suffering. And perhaps a more realistic view of what was likely debilitating bipolar disorder has given me an even greater appreciation for his accomplishments. During the brief 10-year period that Van Gogh pursued his art, he was as dedicated as it’s possible to be—producing nearly 900 canvases and over 1,100 works on paper, and altering the way we see the world, all while experiencing severely crippling bouts of depression, anxiety, and self doubt; having his neighbors ostracize and evict him from his home; and spending most of his final year in an institution.
Sadly, he felt himself a mediocrity at best, a failure at worst. As the Metropolitan Museum of Art writes, “in 1890,” the final year of his life, “he modestly assessed his artistic legacy as of ‘very secondary’ importance.” (This despite the appreciation he’d begun to receive from several gallery showings.) The posthumous reception of his work—ubiquitously reproduced and admired by countless throngs in exhibit after exhibit—can do nothing now to lift his spirits, but surely vindicates his prodigious effort. Van Gogh’s fame has had the unfortunate side effect of crowding out many students of his art from gallery exhibitions. Yet this difficulty need not now prevent them from surveying and seeing up close his huge body of work in digital archives like that of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the largest Van Gogh collection in the world.
By entering the collection, you can see, for example, Self Portrait with Straw Hat, at the top, from 1887, or the strikingly similar portrait of his brother and staunch supporter Theo from the same year, just below it. Further down is the darkly humorous Head of a Skeleton With a Burning Cigarette from 1886, and just above, see an 1882 letter to Theo, with a beautiful sketch of a Pollard Willow, an image he committed to canvas that year. Just below, see an interesting example of the very beginnings of Van Gogh’s posthumous canonization—an 1891 cover sketch and short tribute article in the French satirical magazine Les hommes D’Aujourd’hui.
You can search or browse the collection, and download and view these images, and many hundreds more paintings, sketches, drawings, letters, and much more, in resolution high enough to zoom in to every individual brushstroke and ink pen flourish. Missing from the experience is the three-dimensionality of Van Gogh’s heavily textural painting, but nowhere else will you have this level of accessibility to so much of his work and life.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.
Though the burials of ancient Egyptian rulers offer at least one notable exception, nearly all the world’s religions have agreed on one thing—if one thing only: you can’t take your stuff with you. You can leave it to the local church, mosque, or synagogue, your heirs, a charity of your choice, your dog; but your material possessions will not go wherever you might when it’s over.
However, should consciousness somehow survive the body, or get uploaded to a new one in some sci-fi future, perhaps you can take with you the experiences, memories, sensations, and ideas you’ve accumulated over a lifetime. And if that’s the case, we should all be greedy for knowledge and experience rather than property and consumer goods. And the “1,000… Before You Die” series of books, might be considered guides to curating your afterlife.
The series has recommended 1,000 places to see, 1,000 foods to eat, and, in 2012, 1,000 recordings to hear before you dent the bucket. Musician and critic Tom Moon, author of 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die, has created a list that ranges far and wide, leaving seemingly no genre, region, or period out: from gangster rap, to opera, to krautrock, to country, to metal, to blues, to Zimbabwean folk, to… well, you name it, it’s probably in there somewhere.
For all the songs, artists, and albums I might have added to my own version of such a list, I was pleasantly surprised to find on Moon’s such indie classics as Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s haunting I See a Darkness, hardcore masterpieces as Bad Brains’ i against i, and seminal electronica as Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works. These less well-known recordings sit next to those of John Coltrane (see A Love Supreme featured above), Marian Anderson, Son House, Patsy Cline, The Beatles, Bach, Brahms, and virtually anyone else you might think of, and dozens more you wouldn’t.
One would have a very hard time making a case that Moon has any particular bias against one form of music or another. (See the complete list here, and browse by genre, title, or artist at the 1,000 Recordings website, where you can read Moon’s commentary on each selection.) When it came to selecting songs or albums from artists with embarrassingly rich catalogs, Moon told NPR that he went with his gut. “I didn’t want to have a standard criteria,” he said, “Within any given artist, you could go 10 different directions.” Agree or disagree with his choices, but marvel at his breadth and inclusiveness.
In the past, it would have taken you a lifetime just to track down all of these recordings, much less find time to listen to all of them. Now, you can hear 793 tracks from Moon’s 1,000 picks in the Spotify playlist above. (Brought to us by Ulysses Classical; download Spotify here if you need it). Spend the rest of your life not only mulling them over, but discovering 1,000s more. Despite the title’s reference to mortality, and my somewhat facetious introduction, Moon really means his “Listener’s Life List,” as he calls it, to be a guide for living—and for becoming immersed in music in a profoundly expansive way. (For this same purpose, I also thoroughly endorse The Guardian’s series “1,000 Albums to Hear Before You Die,” and its reader-sourced addenda. If anyone cares to turn the Guardian list into a Spotify playlist, we’ll feature it here too.)
As Moon summarizes his intent, “the more you love music, the more music you love.”
The first complete draft of the Princeton Bitcoin textbook is now freely available. We’re very happy with how the book turned out: it’s comprehensive, at over 300 pages, but has a conversational style that keeps it readable.
If you’re looking to truly understand how Bitcoin works at a technical level and have a basic familiarity with computer science and programming, this book is for you. Researchers and advanced students will find the book useful as well — starting around Chapter 5, most chapters have novel intellectual contributions.
Princeton University Press is publishing the official, peer-reviewed, polished, and professionally done version of this book. It will be out this summer. If you’d like to be notified when it comes out, you should sign up here.
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Where do superheroes come from? The concept didn’t just emerge fully formed into the world when, say, Superman showed up on the cover of Action Comics in 1938. Humanity has enjoyed stories of superhuman hero figures since time immemorial; you can find precedents for the superhero deep in the mythologies of a variety of cultures. When the Russian illustrator Roman Papsuev looked deep into the mythology of his own culture, he found plenty of material he could carry right over into a modern visual idiom. And what with the current Game of Thrones-driven wave of swords and sorcery in the global pop-culture zeitgeist, he picked the right time indeed to publish his elaborate drawings of Russian folklore heroes in the style of today’s high-fantasy comic books, movies, TV shows, and video games.
“The first characters were based on the author’s feelings and fantasies,” writes Daria Donina at Russia Beyond the Headlines. “He began, of course, with Ilya Muromets — the main Russian epic hero and the strongest bogatyr or warrior.” Then, “the more the author got immersed in the subject, the more accurate his pictures became.
He began to reread the tales and study the works of famous folklorists.” Donina quotes Papsuev himself: “ ‘What I like most is when people look at my pictures and then begin to read the tales and understand why, for instance, Vasilisa the Beautiful has a doll in her bag or why Vodyanoy rides a giant catfish. This grassroots revival of ancient folklore through my humble project gives me great pleasure.’ ”
You can browse all of these illustrations and more at Papsuev’s Instagram page, which includes not just finished pieces but works in progress as well, so you can get an idea of just what sort of process it takes to render a Russian hero for the 21st century. To a non-Russian, this all may seem like simply a neat art project, but any Russian will recognize these characters as central to a set of stories themselves central to the culture. “The tales are stamped in the subconscious from childhood,” Papsuev says in the Russia Beyond the Headline article, and as with any material with which people grew up, any reinterpreter takes them into his own hands at his peril.
“This project has no relation to real history or real life,” says the artist. “These are just tales, trapped in a world of games. It’s a fun project. Don’t take it too seriously.” But which enterprising Russian developer, I wonder, will take it seriously enough to go ahead and make an actual video game based on Papsuev’s too-heroic-to-waste folkloric characters?
Today, we discovered that there’s also an app (designed for iPhone, iPad and Android) that lets you take a virtual reality trip through the very same painting. Created as part of the 500th anniversary celebration of Bosch’s life, the app–previewed in the trailer above–lets you “ride on a flying fish into a Garden of Eden, be tempted by strange fruit and even stranger rituals in the Garden of Earthly Delights. And visit hell and hear the devil’s music.”
The app is free. And you can explore parts of Bosch’s famous triptych at no cost. It will cost you a small fee–$3.99–to unlock the remaining part.
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