Imagine, if you will, an evening’s entertainment consisting of an episode of Portlandia, a spin of Nirvana’s In Utero, and a screening of Koyaanisqatsi. Perhaps these works would, at first glance, seem to have little in common. But if you end the night by watching the above episode of Big Think’s series Dispatches from the Well with Kmele Foster, their common spirit may well come into view. In it, Foster travels America in order to visit with Godfrey Reggio, Steve Albini, and Fred Armisen, widely known, respectively, as the director of Koyaanisqatsi, the producer of In Utero, and the co-creator of Portlandia. All of them have also made a great deal of other work, and none of them are about to stop now.
“When you have a mania, you can scream and go nuts, or you can write everything down,” says Reggio. “I write everything down.” The same concept arises in Foster’s conversation with Albini, who believes that “the best music is made in service of the mania of the people doing it at the moment.” As for “the people who are trying to be popular, who are trying to, like, entertain — a lot of that music is trivial.”
Foster credibly describes Albini as “a man with a code,” not least that which dictates his rejection of digital media. “I’m not making an aesthetic case for analog recording,” he says. “Analog recordings are a durable archive of our culture, and in the distant future, I want people to be able to hear what our music sounded like.”
To create as persistently as these three have demands a willingness to play the long game — and to “re-perceive the normal,” as Reggio puts it while articulating the purpose of his unconventional documentary films. To his mind, it’s what we perceive least that affects us most, and if “what we do every day, without question, is who we are,” we can enrich our experience of reality by asking questions in our life and our work like, “Is it the content of your mind that determines your behavior, or is it your behavior that determines the content of your mind?” This line of inquiry will send each of us in different intellectual and aesthetic directions, impossible though it is to arrive at a final answer. And in the face of the fact that we all end up at the same place in the end, Armisen has a creative strategy: “I really celebrate death,” he explains. “I have my funeral all planned out and everything.”
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 1966, the sociologist and critic Philip Rieff published The Triumph of the Therapeutic, which diagnosed how thoroughly the culture of psychotherapy had come to influence ways of life and thought in the modern West. That same year, in the journal Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, the computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum published “ELIZA — A Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man and Machine.” Could it be a coincidence that the program Weizenbaum explained in that paper — the earliest “chatbot,” as we would now call it — is best known for responding to its user’s input in the nonjudgmental manner of a therapist?
ELIZA was still drawing interest in the nineteen-eighties, as evidenced by the television clip above. “The computer’s replies seem very understanding,” says its narrator, “but this program is merely triggered by certain phrases to come out with stock responses.” Yet even though its users knew full well that “ELIZA didn’t understand a single word that was being typed into it,” that didn’t stop some of their interactions with it from becoming emotionally charged. Weizenbaum’s program thus passes a kind of “Turing test,” which was first proposed by pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing to determine whether a computer can generate output indistinguishable from communication with a human being.
In fact, 60 years after Weizenbaum first began developing it, ELIZA — which you can try online here — seems to be holding its own in that arena. “In a preprint research paper titled ‘Does GPT‑4 Pass the Turing Test?,’ two researchers from UC San Diego pitted OpenAI’s GPT‑4 AI language model against human participants, GPT‑3.5, and ELIZA to see which could trick participants into thinking it was human with the greatest success,” reports Ars Technica’s Benj Edwards. This study found that “human participants correctly identified other humans in only 63 percent of the interactions,” and that ELIZA, with its tricks of reflecting users’ input back at them, “surpassed the AI model that powers the free version of ChatGPT.”
This isn’t to imply that ChatGPT’s users might as well go back to Weizenbaum’s simple novelty program. Still, we’d surely do well to revisit his subsequent thinking on the subject of artificial intelligence. Later in his career, writes Ben Tarnoff in the Guardian, Weizenbaum published “articles and books that condemned the worldview of his colleagues and warned of the dangers posed by their work. Artificial intelligence, he came to believe, was an ‘index of the insanity of our world.’ ” Even in 1967, he was arguing that “no computer could ever fully understand a human being. Then he went one step further: no human being could ever fully understand another human being” — a proposition arguably supported by nearly a century and a half of psychotherapy.
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.
Pliny the Younger may be best remembered for writing the only eye-witness account of the destruction of Pompeii in 79 AD. It’s a memorable letter still found in modern collections of Pliny the Younger’s correspondence. There, you can also find a simple letter authored by Pliny, one that reflects not on a shattering historical event, but rather something we can all relate to: the anger the author felt upon getting ghosted by a friend. To set the scene, Pliny had invited Septicius Clarus to join him for some food, wine, and conversation. But his friend never showed up, and so Pliny fired off a snub letter, which actor and comedian Rob Delaney reads above at a Letters Live event. You can follow along with the text below:
Shame on you! You promised to come to dinner, and you never came!
I’ll take you to court, and you will pay to the last penny for my losses, and quite a sum! Ready for each of us were a lettuce, three snails, and two eggs, barley water with honey wine cooled with snow (you must add the cost of snow as well, in fact the snow in particular, as it melts in the dish). There were olives, beetroot, gourds, onions, and countless other delicacies no less elegant. You would have heard performers of comedy, or a reader, or a lyre-player, or even all three, such is my generosity!
But you preferred to dine at some nobody’s house, enjoying oysters, sow’s tripe, sea urchins, and performing-girls from Cadiz. You’ll be punished for this, I won’t say how. What boorishness was this! You begrudged perhaps yourself, and certainly me – but yes, yourself as well. What joking and laughter and learning we would have enjoyed!
You can dine in many houses on more elaborate fare, but nowhere more genially, innocently, and unguardedly. Farewell!
In the end, Pliny forgave his friend. For Pliny dedicated the first of his letter to Septicius, stating: “You have constantly urged me to collect and publish the more highly finished of the letters that I may have written. I have made such a collection… I can only hope that you will not have cause to regret the advice you gave, and that I shall not repent having followed it.” You can read the collection online here.
The Grateful Dead’s groundbreaking fusion of music, counterculture, and community engagement forged an enduring legacy that transcends generations while shaping the evolution of music and cultural expression. Fresh off the farewell performance of Dead & Company in San Francisco in July, this course invites students to delve into the phenomenon that is the Grateful Dead through a captivating exploration of the band’s history, music, and cultural impact.
The course will start by tracing the band’s evolution, from its humble beginnings to its legendary status as one of the most influential bands in music history. We will explore the band’s formation, the early San Francisco music scene, its unique approach to touring, and the various eras of its existence. We’ll next embark on a sonic journey through the band’s diverse and ever-evolving musical catalog. Students will dissect the distinctive blend of rock, folk, blues, and improvisation that defined the Grateful Dead’s sound.
Finally, we’ll examine the band’s cultural impact on society, diving into the band’s connection to art, literature, and social change, as well as its unique fan culture and the phenomenon of the “Deadhead.” By the end of the course, students will have a well-rounded appreciation for the roots, struggles, and milestones that shaped the Grateful Dead’s trajectory, an understanding of its profound impact on music and culture, and insight into a legacy that still resonates deeply today.
Guest speakers for this course will include Steve Silberman, who was featured in the documentary Long Strange Trip and is a regular voice on the Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast. He is also a co-author of Skeleton Key: A Dictionary for Deadheads.
Again, the course starts on Monday, January 22. Tuition is $405. You can enroll here.
Stanford Continuing Studies also offers many other courses online, across many disciplines, at a reasonable price. Check out the catalogue here.
In 1966, Paul McCartney famously sang of “all the lonely people,” wondering aloud where they come from. Nearly six decades later, their numbers seem only to have increased; as for their origin, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and Zen priest Robert Waldinger has made it a longtime professional concern. “Starting in the nineteen fifties, and going all the way through to today, we know that people have been less and less invested in other people,” he says in the Big Think video above. “In some studies, as many as 60 percent of people will say that they feel lonely much of the time,” a feeling “pervasive across the world, across all age groups, all income groups, all demographics.”
“Having an extensive network of friends is no guarantee against loneliness,” writes the late sociologist Ray Oldenburg in The Great Good Place. “Nor does membership in voluntary associations, the ‘instant communities’ of our mobile society, ensure against social isolation and attendant feelings of boredom and alienation. The network of friends has no unity and no home base.” He names as a key factor the disappearance, especially in American life since World War II, of “convenient and open-ended socializing — places where individuals can go without aim or arrangement and be greeted by people who know them and know how to enjoy a little time off.”
Oldenburg’s elegy for and defense of “cafés, coffee shops, community centers, general stores, bars,” and other engines of community life, was published in 1989, well before the rise of social media — which Waldinger frames as the latest stage in a process that began with television. As more American homes acquired sets of their own, “there was a decline in investing in our communities. People went out less, they joined clubs less often. They went to houses of worship less often. They invited people over less often.” Then, “the digital revolution gave us more and more screens to look at, and software that was designed specifically to grab our attention, hold our attention, and therefore keep it away from the people we care about.”
We also know, he continues, that “people with strong social bonds are much less likely to die in any given year than people without strong social bonds.” This is a credible claim, given that he happens to direct the now 85-year-long Harvard Study of Adult Development. In 2016, we featured Waldinger’s TED Talk on some of its findings here on Open Culture. Before that, we posted a PBS BrainCraft video that considers the Harvard Study of Adult Development along with other research on the contributing factors to happiness, a body of work that, taken together, points to the importance of love — which, even if it isn’t all you need, is certainly something you need. And thus one more Beatles lyric continues to resonate.
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.
From the guy who brought you 51 Propaganda Techniques Explained in 11 Minutes comes this: Every Political Ideology Explained in 8 Minutes. You get the usual suspects–conservatism, liberalism, socialism, communism and fascism. And then some less frequently encountered ideologies: transhumanism, syndicalism, and communitarianism. By the end, he covers 23 different belief systems that organize our political and economic lives. The video is brief, necessarily superficial. But it’s a place to start. To take a deeper dive, you can explore Andrew Heywood’s book, Political Ideologies: An Introduction.
Your hosts Mark, Lawrence, Sarahlyn, and Al explore the characteristics of Jewish comedy with stand-up/graphic novelist Daniel, whose film Reconquistador explores his ancestors being kicked out of Spain. What’s the connection of Jewish humor to anti-semitism?
We talk about relating as a creator to your identity, Jewish people seeing themselves in film and TV, the experience of literally seeing yourself in a film, Jewish comedy as philosophy or social commentary, and “Jewish humor” vs. humor by people who happen to be Jewish.
We touch on Mel Brooks, Larry David, Adam Sandler, Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, and feminist Jewish comedy shows such as Broad City, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and Inside Amy Schumer.
FYI this was recorded back in early November when the Gaza war and its accompanying flurry of anti-Semitism was a bit more raw.
Hear more Pretty Much Pop, including many recent episodes that you haven’t seen on this site. Support the show and hear bonus talking for this and nearly every other episode at patreon.com/prettymuchpop or by choosing a paid subscription through Apple Podcasts. This week our supporter-exclusive Aftertalk includes our stories of seeing elderly performers; should you run out and see so-and-so before they’re dead?
“When I first encountered Wright’s work as an eight-year-old boy, it was the space and the light that got me all excited,” says Stuart Graff in the Architectural Digest video above. “I now understand why that gives us the feeling that it does, why we feel different in a Frank Lloyd Wright house. That’s because he uses space and light to create this sense of intimacy with the world around us.” As luck would have it, Graff has grown up to become president and CEO of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, and it is in that capacity that he leads us through one of the renowned American architect’s last projects, a 1955 house along the Noroton River in New Canaan, Connecticut called Tirranna.
“While Tirranna was being built, Wright was in New York City working on his largest commission, the Guggenheim Museum,” says Graff. Also known as the Rayward–Shepherd House, Tirranna is certainly less widely known than the Guggenheim, and indeed, less widely known than some of Wright’s other residential work.
But as his private houses go, Tiranna’s “setting rivals even perhaps Wright’s most famous work, Fallingwater, in the way that house engages nature.” Built along a curve that “follows the movement of the sun through the day” and textured with contrasting concrete block and Philippine mahogany — not to mention plenty of glass through which to take in the landscape outside — it stands as a rich example of late Wright.
And rich is what you’d better be if you want to live it: according to a notice published in Architectural Digest, Tirranna went on the market last year for an asking price of $8 million. Its 7,000 square feet make it one of Wright’s “largest and most expansive residential projects”; the “low-slung main home is designed in a hemicycle style — a uniquely Wright shape — and features seven bedrooms, eight bathrooms, a rooftop observatory, and a wine cellar that has been converted into a bomb shelter.” It even boasts the distinction of Wright himself having stayed there, during the time he was still working on the Guggenheim. For a deep-pocketed enthusiast of twentieth-century American architecture, there could hardly be a more intriguing prospect in New Canaan — as least since the Glass House isn’t for sale.
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.
From the time that a nameless genius in either Ethiopia or Yemen decided to dry, crush and strain water through a berry known for making goats nervous and jumpy, coffee has been loved and worshiped like few other beverages. Early Arab doctors proclaimed the stuff to be a miracle drug. Thoroughly caffeinated thinkers from Voltaire to Jonathan Swift to Jack Kerouac debated literature, philosophy and everything in between at coffee houses. Author Honoré Balzac even reportedly died because of excessive coffee drinking (it was either that or the syphilis.)
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) was also apparently a coffee enthusiast. So much so that he wrote a composition about the beverage. Although known mostly for his liturgical music, his Coffee Cantata (AKA Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht, BWV 211) is a rare example of a secular work by the composer. The short comic opera was written (circa 1735) for a musical ensemble called The Collegium Musicum based in a storied Zimmerman’s coffee house in Leipzig, Germany. The whole cantata seems very much to have been written with the local audience in mind.
Coffee Cantata is about a young vivacious woman named Aria who loves coffee. Her killjoy father is, of course, dead set against his daughter having any kind of caffeinated fun. So he tries to ban her from the drink. Aria bitterly complains:
Father sir, but do not be so harsh!
If I couldn’t, three times a day,
be allowed to drink my little cup of coffee,
in my anguish I will turn into
a shriveled-up roast goat.
Ah! How sweet coffee tastes,
more delicious than a thousand kisses,
milder than muscatel wine.
Coffee, I have to have coffee,
and, if someone wants to pamper me,
ah, then bring me coffee as a gift!
The copywriters at Starbucks marketing department couldn’t have written it any better. Eventually, daughter and father reconcile when he agrees to have a guaranteed three cups of coffee a day written into her marriage contract. You can watch it in its entirety below, or get a quick taste above. The lyrics in German and English can be read here.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.
Artist Jim Sanborn’s massive sculpture Kryptos may inspire various reactions in its viewers, but there’s definitely a single correct interpretation.
But 78-year-old Sanborn isn’t saying what…
He wants someone else to identify it.
Kryptos’ main mystery — more like “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” to quote Winston Churchill — was hand cut into an S‑shaped copper screen using jigsaws.
Image courtesy of the CIA
Professional cryptanalysts, hobbyists, and students have been attempting to crack the code of its 865 letters and 4 question marks since 1990, when it was installed on the grounds of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
The hands-on part fell well within Sanborn’s purview. But a Masters in sculpture from Pratt Institute does not automatically confer cryptography bonafides, so Sanborn enlisted Edward Scheidt, the retired chairman of the CIA’s Cryptographic Center, for a crash course in late 20th-century coding systems.
Sanborn sampled various coding methods for the finished piece, wanting the act of deciphering to feel like “peeling layers off an onion.”
Gillogly arrived at his solution in 1999, using a Pentium II.
Stein reached the same conclusion a year earlier, after chipping away at it for some 400 hours with pencil and paper, though the CIA kept his achievement on the down low until Gillogly went public with his.
The following year the National Security Agency claimed that four of their employees, working collaboratively, had reached an identical solution in 1992, a fact corroborated by documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
This still leaves the 97-character phrase from the final panel up for grabs. Cracking it will be the penultimate step in solving Kryptos’ puzzle. As Sanborn told NPR in 2020, “that phrase is in itself a riddle:”
It’s mysterious. It’s going to lead to something else. It’s not going to be finished when it’s decoded.
The public is welcome to continue making educated guesses.
Sanborn has leaked three clues over the years, all words that can be found in the final passage of decrypted text.
BERLIN, at positions 64 — 69 (2010)
CLOCK, at positions 70 — 74 (2014)
NORTHEAST, at position 26 — 34
Have you solved it, yet?
No?
Don’t feel bad…
Sanborn has been fielding incorrect answers daily for decades, though a rising tide of aggressive and racist messages led him to charge 50 bucks per submission, to which he responds via e‑mail, with absolutely no hope of hints.
Kryptos’ most dedicated fans, like game developer /cryptologist Elonka Dunin, seen plying Sanborn with copious quantities of sushi above in Great Big Story’s video, find value in working together and, sometimes, in person.
Their dream is that Sanborn might inadvertently let slip a valuable tidbit in their presence, though that seems like a long shot.
The artist claims to have gotten very skilled at maintaining a poker face.
(Wait, does that suggest his interlocutors have been getting warmer?)
Dunin has relinquished all fantasies of solving Kryptos solo, and now works to help someone — anyone — solve it.
Sanford has put a contingency plan in place in case no one ever manages to get to the bottom of the Kryptos (ancient Greek for “hidden”) conundrum.
He, or representatives of his estate, will auction off the solution. He is content with letting the winning bidder decide whether or not to share what’s been revealed to them.
“I do realize that the value of Kryptos is unknown and that perhaps this concept will bear little fruit,” he told the New York Times, though if one takes the masses of people desperate to learn the solution and factors in Sanford’s intention to donate all proceeds to climate research, it may well bear quite a healthy amount of fruit.
Join Elonka Dunin’s online community of Kryptos enthusiasts here.
To give you a taste of what you’re in for, here are the first two panels, followed by their solutions, with the artist’s intentional misspellings intact.
1. Encrypted Text
EMUFPHZLRFAXYUSDJKZLDKRNSHGNFIVJ
YQTQUXQBQVYUVLLTREVJYQTMKYRDMFD
Decrypted Text
Between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of iqlusion.
Decrypted Text
It was totally invisible Hows that possible? They used the Earths magnetic field X
The information was gathered and transmitted undergruund to an unknown location X
Does Langley know about this? They should Its buried out there somewhere X
Who knows the exact location? Only WW This was his last message X
Thirty eight degrees fifty seven minutes six point five seconds north
Seventy seven degrees eight minutes forty four seconds west ID by rows
View step by step solutions for the first three of Kryptos’ encrypted panels here.
After serving two terms as the first President of the United States of America, George Washington refused to continue on to a third. We now see this action as beginning the tradition of peaceful relinquishment of power that has continued more or less ever since (interrupted, as in recent years, by the occasional troubled transition). At the time, not everyone expected Washington to step down, history having mostly offered examples of rulers who hung on until the bitter end. But the new republic’s creation of not just rules but customs resulted in a variety of unusual political events; even Washington’s election was “weirder than you think.”
So declares history Youtuber Premodernist in the video above, an explanation of the very first United States presidential election in 1789. “There were no official candidates. There was no campaigning for the office. There were no political parties, no nominating conventions, no primary elections. The entire election season was very short, and the major issue of this election was the Constitution itself.” It also took place after thirteen president-free years, the U.S. having been not a single country but “a collection of thirteen separate colonies,” each tied more closely to Britain than to the others; there hadn’t even been a federal government per se.
The U.S. Constitution changed that. Drafted in 1787, it proposed the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government, whose names every American who’s taken a citizenship exam (and every immigrant who’s taken the citizen test) remembers. Setting up those branches in reality would prove no easy task: how, to name just one practical question, would the executive — the president — actually be chosen? Congress, the legislative branch, could theoretically do it, but that would violate the now practically sacred principle of the separation of powers. The voters could also elect the president directly, but the framers rejected that option as both impractical and unwise.
Enter “the famous electoral college,” a body of specialized voters chosen by the individual states in any manner they please. Having rejected the Constitution itself, North Carolina and Rhode Island didn’t participate in the 1789 election. Each of the other states chose their electors in its own way (exemplifying the political laboratory of American federalism as originally conceived), though it didn’t go smoothly in every case: the widespread division between federalists and anti-federalists was pronounced enough in New York to create a deadlock that prevented the state from choosing any electors at all. The electors that did make it cast two votes each, with the first-place candidate becoming President and the second-place candidate becoming Vice President.
That last proved to be a “bad system,” whose mechanics encouraged a great deal of scheming, intrigue, and strategic voting (even by the subsequently established standards of American politics). Only with the ratification of the twelfth amendment, in 1804, could electors separately designate their choice of President and Vice President. In 1789, of course, “Washington easily got all 69 electoral votes,” and went on reluctantly to prevail again in the next presidential election, which more recently became the subject of its own Premodernist video. Both of them merit a watch in this particular moment, as the run-up to the U.S. contest of 2024 gets into full swing. This election cycle certainly won’t be as short as 1789, but it may well be as weird.
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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