Hear Neil Gaiman Read A Christmas Carol Just Like Charles Dickens Read It

in Audio Books, Literature | December 15th, 2022

In Christ­mases past, we fea­tured Charles Dick­ens’ hand-edit­ed copy of his beloved 1843 novel­la A Christ­mas Car­ol. He did that hand edit­ing for the pur­pos­es of giv­ing pub­lic read­ings, a prac­tice that, in his time, “was con­sid­ered a des­e­cra­tion of one’s art and a low­er­ing of one’s dig­ni­ty.” That time, how­ev­er, has gone, and many of the most pres­ti­gious writ­ers alive today take the read­ing aloud of their own work to the lev­el of art, or at least high enter­tain­ment, that Dick­ens must have sus­pect­ed one could. Some writ­ers even do a bang-up job of read­ing oth­er writ­ers’ work: mod­ern mas­ter sto­ry­teller Neil Gaiman gave us a dose of that when we fea­tured his recita­tion of Lewis Car­rol­l’s “Jab­ber­wocky” from mem­o­ry. Today, how­ev­er, comes the full meal: Gaiman’s telling of A Christ­mas Car­ol straight from that very Dick­ens-edit­ed read­ing copy.

Gaiman read to a full house at the New York Pub­lic Library, an insti­tu­tion known for its stim­u­lat­ing events, hol­i­day-themed or oth­er­wise. But he did­n’t have to hold up the after­noon him­self; tak­ing the stage before him, BBC researcher and The Secret Muse­um author Mol­ly Old­field talked about her two years spent seek­ing out fas­ci­nat­ing cul­tur­al arti­facts the world over, includ­ing but not lim­it­ed to the NYPL’s own col­lec­tion of things Dick­en­sian. You can hear both Old­field and Gaiman in the record­ing below. But per­haps the great­est gift of all came in the form of the lat­ter’s attire for his read­ing: not only did he go ful­ly Vic­to­ri­an, he even went to the length of repli­cat­ing the 19th-cen­tu­ry lit­er­ary super­star’s own severe hair part and long goa­tee. And School Library Jour­nal has pic­tures. The sto­ry real­ly gets start­ed around the 11:00 mark. Gaiman’s read­ing will be added to our list of Free Audio Books. You can find the text of Dick­ens’ clas­sic here.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in Decem­ber 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Oscar-Win­ning Ani­ma­tion of Charles Dick­ens’ Clas­sic Tale, A Christ­mas Car­ol (1971)

Charles Dick­ens’ Hand-Edit­ed Copy of His Clas­sic Hol­i­day Tale, A Christ­mas Car­ol

Hear Charles Dick­ens’ A Christ­mas Car­ol Read by His Great-Grand­daugh­ter, Mon­i­ca

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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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The Museum of Wonky English, a Japanese Exhibition Dedicated to Hilarious Mistranslations

in Language Lessons, Museums, Writing | December 14th, 2022

I got hooked on Duolin­go a few years ago. Since then, I’ve used it dai­ly to prac­tice lan­guages like French, Span­ish, Finnish, Chi­nese, and Japan­ese. But none of those cours­es is quite as pop­u­lar with as many users as the one for Eng­lish, which is wide­ly spo­ken around the world — and, inevitably, almost as wide­ly mis­spo­ken around the world. Even non-Eng­lish-speak­ing coun­tries tend to put up some Eng­lish-lan­guage sig­nage, sparse and strange though it can often be: a hand­writ­ten gro­cer’s sign warn­ing cus­tomers not to “fin­ger the peach­es”; a notice mount­ed just above a uri­nal that urges vis­i­tors to “please uri­nate with pre­ci­sion and ele­gance.”

These exam­ples come, unsur­pris­ing­ly, from Japan, whose awk­ward but vivid­ly mem­o­rable writ­ten Eng­lish has long cir­cu­lat­ed in West­ern media. That made Tokyo the ide­al loca­tion for the Muse­um of Wonky Eng­lish, a pop-up col­lab­o­ra­tion between Duolin­go Japan and cre­ative agency Ultra­Su­perNew that, as the lat­ter’s site describes it, exhibits “six­teen of the best exam­ples of wonky Eng­lish found all over Japan.”

When “vis­i­tors look at the signs, menus, clothes, and oth­er objects exhib­it­ed in the muse­um — objects that can make them chuck­le, gasp, think, and reflect — they will notice there’s more depth to wonky Eng­lish than they ini­tial­ly thought and become more embold­ened to learn a for­eign lan­guage.”

You can still see some of the Muse­um of Wonky Eng­lish’s prized lin­guis­tic arti­facts in the pro­mo­tion­al video above (which pro­vides the orig­i­nal Japan­ese phras­es from which these odd trans­la­tions sprang), as well as in the pic­tures accom­pa­ny­ing this Japan­ese-lan­guage arti­cle. “Please do not eat chil­dren and elder­ly.” “When cof­fee is gone. It’s over.” “Crap your hands.”

Though uni­d­iomat­ic at best, these phras­es and oth­ers exert a kind of pow­er over the imag­i­na­tion. When close­ly scru­ti­nized, they also illu­mi­nate the mechan­ics of the under­ly­ing Japan­ese lan­guage and its dif­fer­ences with Eng­lish. And though the Muse­um of Wonky Eng­lish was open for only a week, a run that end­ed last week, I can assure you — liv­ing, as I do, in Korea — that wonky Eng­lish itself remains in rude health.

via Spoon and Tam­a­go

Relat­ed con­tent:

Learn 48 Lan­guages Online for Free: Span­ish, Chi­nese, Eng­lish & More

David Fos­ter Wal­lace Breaks Down Five Com­mon Word Usage Mis­takes in Eng­lish

“Weird Al” Yankovic Releas­es “Word Crimes,” a Gram­mar Nerd Par­o­dy of “Blurred Lines”

Steven Pinker Iden­ti­fies 10 Break­able Gram­mat­i­cal Rules: “Who” Vs. “Whom,” Dan­gling Mod­i­fiers & More

What Are the Most Effec­tive Strate­gies for Learn­ing a For­eign Lan­guage?: Six TED Talks Pro­vide the Answers

The Restau­rant of Mis­tak­en Orders: A Tokyo Restau­rant Where All the Servers Are Peo­ple Liv­ing with Demen­tia

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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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How to Get Dressed & Fight in 14th Century Armor: A Reenactment

in History | December 14th, 2022

For a medieval knight, phys­i­cal com­bat in a full suit of armor could hard­ly have been a sim­ple mat­ter — but then, nor could the task of putting it on in the first place. You can see the lat­ter depict­ed in the video above from Nor­we­gian his­to­ry buff Ola Onsrud. He describes the armor as a “detailed recon­struc­tion based on the effi­gy of the Black Prince (1330–1376) in the Can­ter­bury Cathe­dral, oth­er rel­e­vant effi­gies, paint­ings in four­teenth-cen­tu­ry man­u­scripts and late four­teenth-cen­tu­ry armor dis­played in The Roy­al Armories in Leeds.” If you’ve so much as glanced at such imagery, Onsrud’s armor should strike you as look­ing quite like the real deal.

But this is func­tion­al cloth­ing, after all, and as such must be put to the test. Onsrud does so in the video just below, a demon­stra­tion of how the wear­er of such armor would actu­al­ly do hand-to-hand com­bat. “To make com­ments, the visor of my hel­met is open through most of the video,” he notes.

“This will of course make my face an inter­est­ing tar­get for my adver­sary.” In a real medieval bat­tle, of course, the hel­met would be closed, and thus the com­bat­ants would­n’t sim­ply aim for the face. As Onsrud explains, the idea is to use one’s sword “against the weak spots of the armor. After find­ing a weak spot, I can put all my body weight behind it and dri­ve it in.”

Medieval suits of armor turn out not to be as impen­e­tra­ble as they look. Onsrud runs down a few of their major weak points, includ­ing the insides of the gloves, the armpits, and — most wince-induc­ing­ly of all — the groin. The defense capa­bil­i­ty of armor also var­ied depend­ing upon the weapons used; even the best-suit­ed-up had rea­son to fear an ene­my with a poleaxe. “But the absolute best way to take down an armored knight is by using a lance from a horse,” espe­cial­ly a horse “gal­lop­ing up to 40 kilo­me­ters an hour” whose com­bined weight with its rid­er could reach 700 kilo­grams. Sure­ly even the most com­mit­ted reen­ac­tor won’t do that on Youtube.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How to Make and Wear Medieval Armor: An In-Depth Primer

What It’s Like to Actu­al­ly Fight in Medieval Armor

How Well Can You Move in Medieval Armor?: Medieval­ist Daniel Jaquet Gives It a Try in Real Life

What’s It Like to Fight in 15th Cen­tu­ry Armor?: A Sur­pris­ing Demon­stra­tion

How Women Got Dressed in the 14th & 18th Cen­turies: Watch the Very Painstak­ing Process Get Cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly Recre­at­ed

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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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How Will AI Change the World?: A Captivating Animation Explores the Promise & Perils of Artificial Intelligence

in Animation, Artificial Intelligence, Technology | December 13th, 2022

Many of us can remem­ber a time when arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence was wide­ly dis­missed as a sci­ence-fic­tion­al pipe dream unwor­thy of seri­ous research and invest­ment. That time, safe to say, has gone. “With­in a decade,” writes blog­ger Samuel Ham­mond, the devel­op­ment of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence could bring about a world in which “ordi­nary peo­ple will have more capa­bil­i­ties than a CIA agent does today. You’ll be able to lis­ten in on a con­ver­sa­tion in an apart­ment across the street using the sound vibra­tions off a chip bag” (as pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture.) “You’ll be able to replace your face and voice with those of some­one else in real time, allow­ing any­one to social­ly engi­neer their way into any­thing.”

And that’s the benign part. “Death-by-kamikaze drone will sur­pass mass shoot­ings as the best way to enact a lurid revenge. The courts, mean­while, will be flood­ed with law­suits because who needs to pay attor­ney fees when your phone can file an air­tight motion for you?” All this “will be enough to make the sta­blest genius feel schiz­o­phrenic.” But “it doesn’t have to be this way. We can fight AI fire with AI fire and adapt our prac­tices along the way.” You can hear a con­sid­ered take on how we might man­age that in the ani­mat­ed TED-Ed video above, adapt­ed from an inter­view with com­put­er sci­en­tist Stu­art Rus­sell, author of the pop­u­lar text­book Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: A Mod­ern Approach as well as Human Com­pat­i­ble: Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence and the Prob­lem of Con­trol.

“The prob­lem with the way we build AI sys­tems now is we give them a fixed objec­tive,” Rus­sell says. “The algo­rithms require us to spec­i­fy every­thing in the objec­tive.” Thus an AI charged with de-acid­i­fy­ing the oceans could quite plau­si­bly come to the solu­tion of set­ting off “a cat­alyt­ic reac­tion that does that extreme­ly effi­cient­ly, but con­sumes a quar­ter of the oxy­gen in the atmos­phere, which would appar­ent­ly cause us to die fair­ly slow­ly and unpleas­ant­ly over the course of sev­er­al hours.” The key to this prob­lem, Rus­sell argues, is to pro­gram in a cer­tain lack of con­fi­dence: “It’s when you build machines that believe with cer­tain­ty that they have the objec­tive, that’s when you get sort of psy­cho­path­ic behav­ior, and I think we see the same thing in humans.”

A less exis­ten­tial but more com­mon wor­ry has to do with unem­ploy­ment. Full AI automa­tion of the ware­house tasks still per­formed by humans, for exam­ple, “would, at a stroke, elim­i­nate three or four mil­lion jobs.” Rus­sell here turns to E. M. Forster, who in the 1909 sto­ry “The Machine Stops” envi­sions a future in which “every­one is entire­ly machine-depen­dent,” with lives not unlike the e‑mail- and Zoom meet­ing-filled ones we lead today. The nar­ra­tive plays out as a warn­ing that “if you hand over the man­age­ment of your civ­i­liza­tion to machines, you then lose the incen­tive to under­stand it your­self or to teach the next gen­er­a­tion how to under­stand it.” The mind, as the say­ing goes, is a won­der­ful ser­vant but a ter­ri­ble mas­ter. The same is true of machines — and even truer, we may well find, of mechan­i­cal minds.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Dis­cov­er DALL‑E, the Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Artist That Lets You Cre­ate Sur­re­al Art­work

Experts Pre­dict When Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Will Take Our Jobs: From Writ­ing Essays, Books & Songs, to Per­form­ing Surgery and Dri­ving Trucks

Sci-Fi Writer Arthur C. Clarke Pre­dicts the Future in 1964: Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence, Instan­ta­neous Glob­al Com­mu­ni­ca­tion, Remote Work, Sin­gu­lar­i­ty & More

Stephen Fry Voic­es a New Dystopi­an Short Film About Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence & Sim­u­la­tion The­o­ry: Watch Escape

Stephen Hawk­ing Won­ders Whether Cap­i­tal­ism or Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Will Doom the Human Race

Hunter S. Thomp­son Chill­ing­ly Pre­dicts the Future, Telling Studs Terkel About the Com­ing Revenge of the Eco­nom­i­cal­ly & Tech­no­log­i­cal­ly “Obso­lete” (1967)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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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The Disturbing Paintings of Hieronymus Bosch: A Short Introduction

in Art, History, Psychology | December 13th, 2022

Most casu­al view­ers of Hierony­mus Bosch’s paint­ings must acknowl­edge his artis­tic skill, and many must also won­der whether he was com­plete­ly out of his mind. But insan­i­ty, how­ev­er vivid­ly sug­gest­ed by his imagery, isn’t an espe­cial­ly com­pelling expla­na­tion for that imagery. Bosch paint­ed in a par­tic­u­lar place and time — the Nether­lands of the late fif­teenth and ear­ly six­teenth cen­tu­ry, to be spe­cif­ic — but he also paint­ed with­in a dom­i­nant worldview.“He grew up in a time of deep reli­gious anx­i­ety,” says Youtu­ber Hochela­ga in the video essay above. “Ideas about sin, death, and the dev­il were becom­ing more sophis­ti­cat­ed,” and “there was a gen­uine fear that demon­ic forces lived amongst the pop­u­la­tion.”

Hence the analy­ses like that of Great Art Explained, which frames Bosch’s best-known paint­ing The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights as an expres­sion of “hard­core Chris­tian­i­ty.” But some­thing about the trip­ty­ch’s sheer elab­o­rate­ness and grotes­querie demands fur­ther inquiry. Hochela­ga explores the pos­si­bil­i­ty that Bosch worked in a con­di­tion of not just fear­ful piety, but psy­cho­log­i­cal afflic­tion.

“There is a dis­ease called St. Antho­ny’s fire,” he says, con­tract­ed “by eat­ing a poi­so­nous black fun­gus called ergots that grow on rye crops. Symp­toms include sores, con­vul­sions, and a fierce burn­ing sen­sa­tion in limbs and extrem­i­ties,” as well as “fright­en­ing and over­pow­er­ing hal­lu­ci­na­tions that can last for hours at a time.”

This psy­choac­tive pow­er is now “believed to be behind the many Danc­ing Plagues record­ed through­out the Mid­dle Ages.” This expla­na­tion came togeth­er when, “in the mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, it was dis­cov­ered that when ergots are baked in an oven, they trans­form into a form of lyser­gic acid diethy­lamide, also known as LSD.” Did Bosch him­self receive the bizarre visions he paint­ed from inad­ver­tent­ly con­sum­ing that now well-known hal­lu­cino­genic sub­stance? The many paint­ings he made of St. Antho­ny “may have been a form of devo­tion­al prayer, done so in the hopes that the saint would rid him of his debil­i­tat­ing ill­ness.” Look at The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights even today, and you’ll feel that if you saw these mur­der­ous bird-human hybrids around you, you’d try what­ev­er you could to get rid of them, too.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Hierony­mus Bosch’s Bewil­der­ing Mas­ter­piece The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights

A Dig­i­tal Archive of Hierony­mus Bosch’s Com­plete Works: Zoom In & Explore His Sur­re­al Art

The Mean­ing of Hierony­mus Bosch’s The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights Explained

Hierony­mus Bosch’s Medieval Paint­ing The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights Comes to Life in a Gigan­tic, Mod­ern Ani­ma­tion

New App Lets You Explore Hierony­mus Bosch’s The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights in Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty

The Musi­cal Instru­ments in Hierony­mus Bosch’s The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights Get Brought to Life, and It Turns Out That They Sound “Painful” and “Hor­ri­ble”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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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Behold a 15th-Century Italian Manuscript Featuring Medicinal Plants with Fantastical Human Faces

in Art, Books, Health, History | December 12th, 2022

No mat­ter where you may stand on herbal med­i­cine as a viable 21st-cen­tu­ry option, it’s not hard to imag­ine we’d have all been true believ­ers back in the 15th-cen­tu­ry.

In an arti­cle for Heart Views, car­di­ol­o­gist Rachel Hajar lists some com­mon herbal treat­ments of the Mid­dle Ages:

Headache and aching joints were treat­ed with sweet-smelling herbs such as rose, laven­der, sage, and hay. A mix­ture of hen­bane and hem­lock was applied to aching joints. Corian­der was used to reduce fever. Stom­ach pains and sick­ness were treat­ed with worm­wood, mint, and balm. Lung prob­lems were treat­ed with a med­i­cine made of liquorice and com­frey. Cough syrups and drinks were pre­scribed for chest and head-colds and coughs.

If noth­ing else, such approach­es sound rather more pleas­ant than blood­let­ting.

Monks were respon­si­ble for the study and cul­ti­va­tion of med­i­c­i­nal herbs.

You may recall how one of Fri­ar Lawrence’s dai­ly tasks in Romeo and Juli­et involved ven­tur­ing into the monastery gar­den, to fill his bas­ket full “bale­ful weeds and pre­cious-juicèd flow­ers.”

(The pow­er­ful sleep­ing potion he con­coct­ed for the young lovers may have had dis­as­trous con­se­quences, but no one can claim it wasn’t effec­tive.)

Monks pre­served their herbal knowl­edge in illus­trat­ed books and man­u­scripts, many of which cleaved close­ly to works of clas­si­cal antiq­ui­ty such as Pliny the Elder’s Nat­u­ralis His­to­ria and Dioscordes’ De Mate­ria Med­ica.

These ear­ly med­ical texts can still be appre­ci­at­ed as art, par­tic­u­lar­ly when they con­tain fan­tas­ti­cal embell­ish­ments such as can be seen in Erbario, above, a hand­made 15th-cen­tu­ry herbal from north­ern Italy that was recent­ly added to the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia Library’s col­lec­tion of rare books and man­u­scripts.

In addi­tion to straight­for­ward botan­i­cal illus­tra­tions, there are some roots, leaves, flow­ers and fruit (par­don the pro­noun) of a decid­ed­ly anthro­po­mor­phic bent.

Fan­cy­ing up draw­ings of plants with human faces and or drag­on-shaped roots was a medieval con­ven­tion.

Man­drake roots —  pre­scribed as an anes­thet­ic, an aphro­disi­ac, a fer­til­i­ty boost­er, and a sleep aid — were fre­quent­ly ren­dered as humans.

Wired’s Matt Simon writes that man­drake roots “can look bizarrely like a human body and leg­end holds that it can even come in male and female form:”

It’s said to spring from the drip­ping fat and blood and semen of a hanged man. Dare pull it the from the earth and it lets out a mon­strous scream, bestow­ing agony and death to all those with­in earshot.

Yikes! Can we get a spoon­ful of sug­ar to help that go down?

No won­der Juli­et, prepar­ing to quaff Fri­ar Lawrence’s sleep­ing potion in the fam­i­ly tomb, fret­ted that it might wear off pre­ma­ture­ly, leav­ing her sub­ject to “loath­some smells” and “shrieks like man­drakes torn out of the earth.”

Methinks some chamomile might have calmed those nerves…

View a dig­i­tized copy of Erbario here, or at the Pub­lic Domain Review.

 

via the Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent 

1,000-Year-Old Illus­trat­ed Guide to the Med­i­c­i­nal Use of Plants Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online

A Beau­ti­ful 1897 Illus­trat­ed Book Shows How Flow­ers Become Art Nou­veau Designs

The New Herbal: A Mas­ter­piece of Renais­sance Botan­i­cal Illus­tra­tions Gets Repub­lished in a Beau­ti­ful 900-Page Book by Taschen

A Curi­ous Herbal: 500 Beau­ti­ful Illus­tra­tions of Med­i­c­i­nal Plants Drawn by Eliz­a­beth Black­well in 1737 (to Save Her Fam­i­ly from Finan­cial Ruin)

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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How to Make Coffee in the Bialetti Moka Pot: The “Ultimate Techique”

in Food & Drink | December 12th, 2022

In Italy, rough­ly 70% of house­holds have a Bialet­ti Moka Pot. And chances are you have one too. But are you using it the right way? Prob­a­bly not, says James Hoff­mann, the author of The World Atlas of Cof­fee. Above, he sets the record straight, demon­strat­ing the best tech­nique for mak­ing a great cup of cof­fee. Enjoy this pub­lic ser­vice announce­ment and use it well.

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent

The Bialet­ti Moka Express: The His­to­ry of Italy’s Icon­ic Cof­fee Mak­er, and How to Use It the Right Way

Deep Fried Cof­fee: A Very Dis­turb­ing Dis­cov­ery

Life and Death of an Espres­so Shot in Super Slow Motion

The Birth of Espres­so: How the Cof­fee Shots The Fuel Our Mod­ern Life Were Invent­ed

An Espres­so Mak­er Made in Le Corbusier’s Bru­tal­ist Archi­tec­tur­al Style: Raw Con­crete on the Out­side, High-End Parts on the Inside

Philoso­phers Drink­ing Cof­fee: The Exces­sive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard

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Beethoven’s Ode to Joy Played With 167 Theremins Placed Inside Matryoshka Dolls in Japan

in Music | December 9th, 2022

A decade ago, in Tokyo, 167 musi­cians per­formed a Beethoven clas­sic with the “Matry­omin,” a new-fan­gled instru­ment that lodges a theremin inside a matryosh­ka. A matryosh­ka, of course, is one of those Russ­ian nest­ed dolls where you find wood­en dolls of decreas­ing size placed one inside the oth­er. As for the theremin, it’s a cen­tu­ry-old elec­tron­ic musi­cal instru­ment that requires no phys­i­cal con­tact from the play­er. You can watch its inven­tor, Leon Theremin, give it a demo in the vin­tage video below. And via this link you can see the Matry­omin Ensem­ble per­form­ing a mes­mer­iz­ing ver­sion of Amaz­ing Grace. Enjoy.

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent 

See Japan­ese Musi­cians Play “Amaz­ing Grace” with 273 Theremins Placed Inside Matryosh­ka Dolls–Then Learn How They Per­form Their Mag­ic

Sovi­et Inven­tor Léon Theremin Shows Off the Theremin, the Ear­ly Elec­tron­ic Instru­ment That Could Be Played With­out Being Touched (1954)

Leon Theremin Adver­tis­es the First Com­mer­cial Pro­duc­tion Run of His Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Elec­tron­ic Instru­ment (1930)

Learn How to Play the Theremin: A Free Short Video Course

“Some­where Over the Rain­bow” Played on a 1929

Meet Clara Rock­more, the Pio­neer­ing Elec­tron­ic Musi­cian Who First Rocked the Theremin in the Ear­ly 1920s

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480 Filmmakers Reveal the 100 Greatest Movies in the World

in Film | December 8th, 2022

Nobody knows more about cin­e­ma than crit­ics. But in an entire­ly dif­fer­ent way, nobody knows more about cin­e­ma than direc­tors. That, per­haps, is one of the rea­sons that Sight and Sound mag­a­zine has, for the past thir­ty years, con­duct­ed two sep­a­rate once-in-a-decade polls to deter­mine the great­est films of all time. Last week we fea­tured the results of Sight and Sound’s lat­est crit­ics poll here on Open Cul­ture, but the out­come of the direc­tors’ vote — whose elec­torate of 480 “spans exper­i­men­tal, art­house, main­stream and genre film­mak­ers from around the world” — mer­its its own con­sid­er­a­tion.

As all the cinephile world knows by now, Chan­tal Aker­man’s Jeanne Diel­man, 23, quai du Com­merce, 1080 Brux­elles came out on top of Sight and Sound’s crit­ics poll this year. That tem­po­ral­ly expan­sive mas­ter­work of pota­toes, veal cut­lets, pros­ti­tu­tion, and mur­der did­n’t place quite so high­ly in the direc­tors poll. It ranks at num­ber four, below Ozu Yasu­jirō’s Tokyo Sto­ry, Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la’s The God­fa­ther, Orson Welles’ Cit­i­zen Kane, and — at num­ber one — Stan­ley Kubrick­’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which, for those who make movies, evi­dent­ly remains the “ulti­mate trip” that its late-six­ties mar­ket­ing cam­paign promised.

The roundup of indi­vid­ual bal­lots at World of Reel reveals that 2001’s sup­port­ers include a wide range of auteurs — Olivi­er Assayas, Bi Gan, Don Hertzfeldt, Gas­par Noé, Joan­na Hogg, Edgar Wright, Mar­tin Scors­ese — not all of whose own work shows clear evi­dence of hav­ing been influ­enced by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s at once lav­ish and stark vision of mankind’s des­tiny in the realms beyond Earth. But 2001’s real achieve­ment was less to tell its par­tic­u­lar sto­ry, no mat­ter how mind-blow­ing, than to expand the pos­si­bil­i­ties of cin­e­ma itself: to exe­cute, as exam­ined in the video essay above, a kind of cin­e­mat­ic hyp­no­tism.

Of course, Kubrick is huge­ly admired by view­ers and mak­ers of movies alike. Bar­ry Lyn­don appears on both top-100 lists, though it seems as if crit­ics favor The Shin­ing more than film­mak­ers. The lat­ter group cast more votes for Kubrick­’s Cold-War com­e­dy Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Wor­ry­ing and Love the Bomb. Also among the dozens of titles only in the film­mak­ers’ top 100 include Abbas Kiarosta­mi’s Where Is the Friend’s House? and Taste of Cher­ry, Kuro­sawa Aki­ra’s Throne of Blood and Ikiru, Sergei Para­janov’s The Col­or of Pome­gran­ates, and even Steven Spiel­berg’s Jaws — which, no less than 2001, sure­ly appeals to any film­mak­er’s innate sense of spec­ta­cle.

See the direc­tors top 100 films here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Aki­ra Kurosawa’s List of His 100 Favorite Movies

David Lynch Lists His Favorite Films & Direc­tors, Includ­ing Felli­ni, Wilder, Tati & Hitch­cock

Andrei Tarkovsky Cre­ates a List of His 10 Favorite Films (1972)

Mar­tin Scors­ese Reveals His 12 Favorite Movies

Stan­ley Kubrick’s List of Top 10 Films: The First and Only List He Ever Cre­at­ed

The Ten Great­est Films of All Time Accord­ing to 358 Film­mak­ers

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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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How Qatar Built Stadiums with Forced Labor

in Current Affairs, Sports | December 8th, 2022

I will let Vox pref­ace the video above:

Ever since Qatar won the rights to host the FIFA World Cup in 2010, its treat­ment of migrant work­ers has made inter­na­tion­al head­lines. News sto­ries and human rights orga­ni­za­tions revealed migrant work­ers who built the sta­di­ums, hotels, and all the new infra­struc­ture required for the World Cup were being forced to work, not get­ting paid, unable to leave, and in some cas­es, dying.

At the heart of the abuse faced by migrant work­ers is the kafala sys­tem. A sys­tem preva­lent in Gulf states that ties work­ers to their spon­sors, it often gives spon­sors almost total con­trol of migrant work­ers’ employ­ment and immi­gra­tion sta­tus.

Due to all the scruti­ny Qatar has been under, some reforms have been put in place, but the kafala sys­tem is more than a law — it’s a prac­tice. And while these reforms exist on paper, human rights orga­ni­za­tions say there’s still a long way to go.

To under­stand how hun­dreds of thou­sands of migrant work­ers were stuck in an exploita­tive sys­tem while build­ing the sta­di­ums for the World Cup, watch our 10-minute video above.

To delve deep­er, it’s also worth lis­ten­ing to the New York Times’ recent pod­cast, Qatar’s Big Bet on the World Cup and read The Guardian arti­cle, 6,500 migrant work­ers have died in Qatar since World Cup award­ed.

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!

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What Are “Creatives”? Pretty Much Pop #138 on the Role of the Artist in Modern Society

in Art, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop | December 8th, 2022

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Is there real­ly a divi­sion in today’s cul­ture between those who cre­ate and the mere­ly recep­tive mass­es? Your Pret­ty Much Pop host gath­ers three artists in dif­fer­ent media about the place of the artist in soci­ety: sci-fi author Bri­an Hirt, art pho­tog­ra­ph­er and aca­d­e­m­ic Amir Zaki, and musi­cian/nov­el­ist/ex-Eng­lish prof John Andrew Fredrick, who leads a band called The Black Watch.

We touch on art edu­ca­tion, the self-under­stand­ing of artists, the rela­tion between artist and con­sumer, art vs. com­merce, bad art vs. non-art, and much more.

Lis­ten to Amir talk­ing about pho­tog­ra­phy on a past PMP episode. Lis­ten to John talk about his music with Mark on Naked­ly Exam­ined Music. Lis­ten to John’s new EP. Bri­an brings up the Decoder Ring pod­cast episode “The Sto­ry­telling Craze.” Lis­ten to Mark’s tunes.

Fol­low us @blackwatchmusic, @amir_zaki_, and @MarkLinsenmayer.

Hear more Pret­ty Much Pop. 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 pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

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