We’ve long joked about delaying bedtime in order to read the entire internet, but the prospect of actually doing so doesn’t sound as appealing as it used to. An ever-growing proportion of text online, we may sense, hasn’t been written by humans, but generated by artificial intelligence. One solution is to return to reading on paper, and beyond that, spending our time only with books published before the advent — and thus uncorrupted by the output — of large language models. Ironically, that’s what large language models themselves have had to do, and in order to ensure them a steady diet of manmade text, their owners are resorting to controversially destructive methods.

Suspicions first arose when book dealers noticed a spike in their income due to large orders from mysterious buyers for titles they assumed they’d never unload. Books on home oxygen treatment in Italy, marriage litigation in medieval England, Texas civil procedure in the twenty-tens, Swedish comedy in the sixties: these entities bought them all, and for whatever price the seller happened to be asking.

404 Media reporter Emanuel Maiberg tracked the path of one such book, which eventually wound up at a Las Vegas scanning facility run by Amazon. Though undergirded by advanced technology, the work done there is simple: digitize as many books as possible, then destroy them.

“In order to scan them really fast, they cut the spines off the books and fed the pages to the scanner,” Maiberg explained to NPR. Many are technically rare, albeit esoteric obscurities like vanity publications and old instruction manuals rather than first-edition classics. Humans may not value them, but LLMs do: their consumption forestalls “a problem called model collapse, where if an AI trains on AI training data, it gets worse.” Amazon and Anthropic have both been found to use the book-sacrificing method to harvest text, but every company with models to train needs a solution. All this makes for “an unusually on-the-nose example of digital technology devouring literary culture,” as the Wall Street Journal’s Melissa Korn puts it. But when you really have read the entire internet, perhaps extreme measures are inevitable.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

When it was published in the United States in 1998, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was retitled Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. The jokes about the American reading public’s apparent allergy to the very word philosopher write themselves, but the change was also unfortunate for more substantial reasons. A “sorcerer’s stone” had no cultural resonance at all, whereas the philosopher’s stone had been sought after since, at the very latest, the dawn of the fourth century. Some sources claim that human knowledge of it goes all the way back to Adam, who got the word directly from God. In any case, it’s no mystery why the philosopher’s stone has long captured the collective imagination of humanity, given that it’s reputed to turn lead into gold.

Among the rumored possessors of the philosopher’s stone throughout history is Salomon Trismosin, a sixteenth-century Renaissance alchemist who taught the influential physician Paracelsus. He’s also credited, at least in legends, with writing Splendor Solis, a book once no less desirable than the next Harry Potter volume in that series’ heyday.

Nothing so mundane as “a list of instructions for whipping up a little alchemical soup in the hope of finding a nugget of artificial gold in the pot at the end,” writes Jörg Völlnagel at Medievalists.net, it rather “sets forth the philosophy of alchemy, a world view according to which the human being (the alchemist) exists and acts in harmony with nature, respecting divine creation and at the same time intervening in the processes underlying that creation, all the while supporting its growth with the help of alchemy.”

As “a — or rather the – prime example of an illuminated alchemical manuscript,” Splendor Solis has drawn the fascination of even such modern figures as William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, and Umberto Eco. It also became an important work in the symbolic-cultural universe of Carl Jung, who, according to the Association of Jungian Analysts, “recognized the alchemical motifs and symbols as expressions of the individuation process, the transformation and integration of the psyche. Splendor Solis, with its rich symbolism and profound allegories, resonated with Jung’s understanding of the archetypal imagery and the transformative nature of the human psyche, contributing to his theories on analytical psychology.”

None of this is to say that Jung, or many other esteemed intellectuals of the past couple of centuries, believed that base metals really could be transmuted to gold and silver. But they did understand that the phenomenon of alchemy has much to reveal about the irresolvable existential negotiation between man and the world he inhabits. It resonates so deeply that it’s even worked in children’s literature, and to great commercial success at that. You can even feel some of it just by gazing upon Splendor Solis’ 22 gold-highlighted, book-of-hours-style illustrations at the web site of M. Moleiro, publisher of one facsimile edition. And who knows? If, as in the world of Harry Potter, the philosopher’s stone also grants immortality, perhaps Salomon Trismosin still walks somewhere among us.

You can view pages of Splendor Solis on Wikipedia. Enter the image gallery here.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

A number of futurists, philosophers, and technophiles believe we are approaching what they call the “singularity”: a point in time when smart machines become much smarter, stronger, and faster than their creators, and then become self-conscious. Whatever the chance of this occurring, it’s worthwhile to ponder the consequences. But we do already, all the time—in existentially bleak scenarios like Blade Runner, the Terminator series, the rebooted Battlestar Galactica (and its failed prequel Caprica).

The prospects are never pleasant. Robotic engineers in these worlds hardly seem to bother teaching their machines the kind of moral code that would keep them from turning and destroying us (that is, when they aren’t explicitly designed to do so).

I wonder about this conceptual gap—convenient as it may be in narrative terms—given that Isaac Asimov, one of the forefathers of robot fiction invented just such a moral code. In the video above, he outlines it (with his odd pronunciation of “robot”). The code consists of three laws; in his fiction these are hardwired into each robot’s “positronic brain,” a fictional computer that gives robots something of a human-like consciousness.

First Law: A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Second Law: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Isaac Asimov devoted a good deal of his writing career to the subject of robots, so it’s safe to say, he’d done quite a bit of thinking about how they would fit into the worlds he invented. In doing so, Asimov had to solve the problem of how robots would interact with humans once they had some degree of free will. But are his three laws sufficient? Many of Asimov’s stories—I, Robot, for example—turn on some failure or confusion between them. And even for their chase scenes, explosions, and melodrama, the three screen explorations of artificial life mentioned above thoughtfully exploit philosophical ambiguities and insufficiencies in Asimov’s simple system.

For one thing, while Asimov’s robots were hunks of metal, taking only vaguely humanoid form, the robots of our current imaginings emerge from an uncanny valley with realistic skin and hair or even a genetic code and circulatory system. They are possible sexual partners, friends and lovers, co-workers and superiors. They can deceive us as to their nature (a fourth law by Bulgarian novelist Lyuben Dilov states that a robot “must establish its identity as a robot in all cases”); they can conceive children or desires their creators never intended. These differences beg important questions: how ethical are these laws? How feasible? When the singularity occurs, will Skynet become aware of itself and destroy us?

Unlike Asimov, we now live in a time where the questions have direct applicability to robots living among us, outside the pages of sci-fi. As Japanese and South Korean roboticists have found, the three laws cannot address what they call “open texture risk”— unpredictable interactions in unstructured environments. Humans rely on nuanced and often preconscious readings of complex social codes and the fine shades of meaning embedded in natural language; despite many advances, machines are still catching up. Whether or not they can successfully develop it is an open question, making humanoid robots with artificial intelligence an “open texture risk.” But as you can see from the video below, we’re perhaps much closer to Blade Runner or, of course, artificial intelligence than to the clunky, interstellar mining machines in Asimov’s fiction.

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2012.

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We’ve featured Egyptologist Ilona Regulski here on Open Culture a few times before. Once, she explained how to read ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs; another time, she told us what the Rosetta Stone actually says. It was, perhaps, inevitable that she would cross paths with Rob Watts, creator of the YouTube channel RobWords, whose videos we often post. When he made the journey to Berlin’s Neues Museum, and specifically to its Egyptian Museum, Regulski was the expert he sought out to tell him — and us — all about how hieroglyphs, literally “sacred carvings,” actually make words.

Faced with a stone chiseled full of hieroglyphs, where do we start? Ancient Egyptian texts are all read from top to bottom, but some go left to right, and others right to left. To know which way, Regulski says, we must first look for symbols with a clear front and back, such as those in human or animal shapes.

Some names are written in blocks, themselves read from top to bottom — unless they contain a sign referring to a god, which, of course, gets customarily elevated to the top. But even if we understand the exact order in which we should read a given string of hieroglyphs, the question remains: how do we actually do that reading?

Though many hieroglyphs do appear to be figurative, with their recognizable forms of birds, bugs, arms, legs, and such, only sometimes are they meant to represent what they look like. Regulski explains that some of these signs are letters, and can be pronounced in much the same way as our own alphabet. What looks like a mouth sounds like an r; a highly abstracted bread loaf, t; a horned viper, ph; an owl, m. There is, of course, more to it. Signs can be combined not just to indicate sound, but also to disambiguate meaning. As you may have noticed, hieroglyphic writing is also what Watts calls a “vowel-free zone.” Exactly which of those sounds go where is, like certain other unresolved aspects of hieroglyphs, a matter of ongoing expert inquiry. But Egyptologists, as seeing Regulski in action reminds us, are a dedicated bunch.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

Note: We were sad to see the news that Dolly Parton passed away. Today we are bringing back one of our favorite Dolly Parton posts. She will be missed.

The Walrus is… Dolly Parton?

Not every record yields gold when played backwards or spun more slowly than recommended, but a 45 of Parton’s 1973 hit “Jolene” played at 33 RPM not only sounds wonderful, it also manages to reframe the narrative.

As Andrea DenHoed notes in The New Yorker, “Slow Ass Jolene,” above, transforms Parton’s “baby-high soprano” into something deep, soulful and seemingly, male.

In its original version, the much-covered “Jolene” is a straight up woman-to-woman chest-baring. Our narrator knows her man is obsessed with the sexy, auburn-haired Jolene, to the point where he talks about her in his sleep.

Apparently she also knows better than to raise the subject with him. Instead, she appeals to Jolene’s sense of mercy:

You could have your choice of men

But I could never love again

He’s the only one for me, Jolene

The song is somewhat autobiographical, though the situation was nowhere near as dire as listeners might assume. In an interview with NPR, Parton recalled a red-haired bank teller who developed a big crush on her husband when she was a young bride:

And he just loved going to the bank because she paid him so much attention. It was kinda like a running joke between us — when I was saying, ‘Hell, you’re spending a lot of time at the bank. I don’t believe we’ve got that kind of money.’ So it’s really an innocent song all around, but sounds like a dreadful one. 

For the record, the teller’s name wasn’t Jolene.

Jolene was a pretty little girl who attended an early Parton concert. Parton was so taken with the child, and her unusual name, that she resolved to write a song about her.

Yes, the kid had red hair and green eyes.

Wouldn’t it be wild if she grew up to be a bank teller?

I digress…

In the original version, the irresistible chorus wherein the soon-to-be-spurned party invokes Jolene’s name again and again is plaintive and fierce.

In the slow ass version, it’s plaintive and sad.

The pain is the same, but the situation is much less straightforward, thanks to blurrier gender lines.

Parton told NPR that women are “always threatened by other women, period.”

Jolene’s prodigious feminine assets could also prove worrisome to a gay man whose bisexual lover’s eye is prone to wander.

Or maybe the singer and his man live in a place where same-sex unions are frowned on. Perhaps the singer’s man craves the comfort of a more socially acceptable domestic situation.

Or perhaps Jolene is one hot female-identified tomato, and as far as the singer’s man’s concerned, his pastor and his granny can go to hell! Jolene’s the only one for him.

Or, as one waggish Youtube commenter succinctly put it, “Jolene better stay the hell away from Roy Orbison’s man!”

Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene

I’m begging of you please don’t take my man

Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene

Please don’t take him just because you can

Your beauty is beyond compare

With flaming locks of auburn hair

With ivory skin and eyes of emerald green

Your smile is like a breath of spring

Your voice is soft like summer rain

And I cannot compete with you, Jolene

He talks about you in his sleep

There’s nothing I can do to keep

From crying when he calls your name, Jolene

And I can easily understand

How you could easily take my man

But you don’t know what he means to me, Jolene

Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene

I’m begging of you please don’t take my man

Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene

Please don’t take him just because you can

You could have your choice of men

But I could never love again

He’s the only one for me, Jolene

I had to have this talk with you

My happiness depends on you

And whatever you decide to do, Jolene

Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene

I’m begging of you please don’t take my man

Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene

Please don’t take him even though you can

Jolene, Jolene

via @WFMU

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2018.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and theater maker in NYC.

It doesn’t quite ring true to call David Bowie a rock star. Ziggy Stardust, the neon synthetic-clad alien alter ego he both created and retired in the early seventies, was, of course, rock stardom outlandishly personified. But then, that was the concept of what turned out to be just one of many personae he deliberately crafted throughout the course of his career. That career was in music, primarily, but looking back on it today, more than a decade after Bowie’s death, it looks more like his medium was culture itself. That’s underscored by his interviews, clips from a variety of which appear in the new video above from YouTube channel T&H Inspiration.

Most of T&H’s most popular videos add visuals to speeches by the popularizer of Eastern philosophy Alan Watts, who’s been featured here on Open Culture before. He and Bowie had more in common than it may seem at first, beginning with an Englishness that remained thoroughgoing no matter how far out they ventured into the world.

Though Watts’ interest in Buddhism hardly needs stating, it’s worth remembering that he chose to be ordained as an Episcopalian priest rather than as a Buddhist monk. The young Bowie, for his part, very nearly took the latter path, studying under the late Lama Chime Rinpoche, who eventually told him he’d be better off going into the music business.

Bowie did so, of course, but with a new “sense of transience and change, which actually became fundamental to my life and my approach to it,” as he put it decades later. That sense manifests even in his early work, but embracing and even pursuing impermanence — the impermanence of sounds, of fashions, of hit records, of life itself — also kept him from getting mired in the irrelevance or auto-kitsch that threatens every superstar. Given the belief that nothing lasts forever, “looking for the source of one’s own being becomes much more important,” as does attempting artistic or intellectual challenges at the very edge of one’s abilities. Alan Watts would probably have agreed. The bigger question is, did he ever hear “Changes”?

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

The story of humans creating monstrous beings in their image may have perennial relevance, even if it seems specific to our contemporary cultural moment. What, after all, is Oscar Isaac’s AI inventor in Ex Machina but a 21st-century update of Victor Frankenstein? (Before Isaac went on to portray Victor himself in Guillermo del Toro’s 2025 film adaptation.) And what is Frankenstein’s monster but a Gothic recreation of the Golem, or any number of folkloric automatons in cultures far and wide? It’s an age-old archetypal story that seems to get an update every year.

People have imagined making artificial people, perhaps for as long as people have told stories. But each iteration of that story emerges from a historical matrix of particular technological, philosophical, and metaphysical anxieties. In the case of Ex Machina, we have not only a thinking, feeling humanoid, but one created out of mass data collection and designed to serve the prurient interests of a Nietzschean venture capitalist engineer.

In the original Frankenstein, a novel written by a woman, Mary Shelley, we have a very different kind of monster, born out of a Romantic convergence of interest in alchemy and the occult—the original domains of early modern scientists like Isaac Newton—and more modern, industrial scientific methods (hence the novel’s subtitle, The Modern Prometheus). Many critics have called the novel the first work of science fiction, and many, like Maurice Hindle in the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, have described its main theme as “the aspiration of modern masculinist scientists to be technically creative divinities.”

And yet, writes Ruth Franklin at the New Republic—drawing convincingly on Shelley’s own traumatic experiences with birth—Frankenstein might “also be a story about pregnancy.” Intriguing as this possibility may be, most interpretations of the novel have seen it as “a fable of masculine reproduction, in which a man creates life asexually.” That tradition continues in the movies with the first film adaptation of Frankenstein, made by Edison studios just over 100 years after the novel’s 1818 publication.

The 1910 short silent film, which you can watch above, bills itself as “a liberal adaptation from Mrs. Shelley’s famous story,” and opens in its first scene with Victor Frankenstein leaving home for college. Two years later, the Faustian mad scientist discovers the mystery of life, uses the knowledge to make his “creature”—a surprisingly grotesque scene—and, appalled at the sight of it, rejects the thing in horror. The rest of the story proceeds along the usual lines, as the monster, in rags and fright wig, seeks recognition from his creator/parent and wreaks havoc when he does not receive it.

This first Frankenstein film, directed by J. Searle Dawley, arrived two years after Edison’s Bronx, New York studios began full and very lucrative operations, and, by this time, writes Rich Drees, motion pictures had begun to receive unwelcome attention from “moral crusaders and reform groups, who decried the new medium as being dangerous and encouraging of immorality.” Edison responded quickly, fearing “a serious threat to his bottom line,” and ordered that his films’ production quality and “moral tone” be improved.

Frankenstein, writes Drees, “was the perfect choice to kick off production under this new moral banner. It’s a story that deals with the extremes of the human condition, life and death, and the dangers of tampering in God’s realm.” Edison released the film with the following disclaimer:

To those familiar with Mrs. Shelley’s story it will be evident that we have carefully omitted anything which might be any possibility shock any portion of the audience. In making the film the Edison Co. has carefully tried to eliminate all actual repulsive situations and to concentrate its endeavors upon the mystic and psychological problems that are to be found in this weird tale. Wherever, therefore, the film differs from the original story it is purely with the idea of eliminating what would be repulsive to a moving picture audience. 

Five years after the Edison studio’s short, another silent adaptation, Life Without Soul, appeared. Made by the Ocean Film Corporation, this film is now lost to history, but it qualifies as the first feature-length adaptation at 70 minutes. A review of the film, writes the blog Frankensteinia, “reveals a story that hews fairly close to Mary Shelley’s novel,” making a “bold attempt at capturing the world-spanning sweep of the tale.”

Several dozen film adaptations in the ensuing years have tracked more or less closely to Shelley’s narrative—giving Frankenstein’s monster a bride and having Victor Frankenstein reanimate his dead lover with the mind of a wrongly executed man. But none of these films, so far as I know, has drawn out the subtext of Frankenstein as a novel about pregnancy and childbirth. Such an adaptation remains to be made—although Maggie Gyllenhaal’s 2026 film The Bride! has become the first adaptation by a woman.

You can find Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in our collections of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books.

The film above will be added to our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.

Marcus Aurelius did not have a smartphone. In fact, he didn’t have a phone of any kind, owing to the fact that he lived in the second century, though we can be reasonably certain that he commanded more than enough messengers to keep himself informed around the clock. That’s because he was the Roman emperor at a time when the Roman Empire was at its height. And so, none of us will ever know Marcus’ freedom from digital distraction, nor will we know the intense responsibility he must have felt, no matter how grand a title we attain in our own careers. Still, even here in the twenty-first century, we would all do well to live by the example he left.

So believes Ryan Holiday, a popularizer of Stoicism, the school of thought primarily defined by Marcus’ writings, as well as those of statesman-dramatist Seneca the Younger and former slave Epictetus. In his Meditations, Marcus included enough detail about his own life that Holiday could make the video above for his YouTube channel Daily Stoic, which breaks down the emperor’s daily routine.

He rose at dawn, but not out of natural inclination. He did his reflection, including a realistic adjustment of his expectations for the day, before the siege of duties and requests began. He defined time for what Cal Newport, Holiday’s colleague in the smarter regions of digital-era self-help, would call deep work.

As with any popularization, Holiday conveys Marcus’ life and thought in terms the man himself wouldn’t recognize, even if they were translated into Latin. One fashionable expression he doesn’t use but could have is “work-life balance.” “Marcus was not all about business,” Holiday says. “We know that he was active in physical exercise. We know that he enjoyed boxing and wrestling and hunting and horseback riding. We know that he would take walks.” He would also go to the Colosseum, though without hiding his lack of interest in gladiatorial combat. If he spent more time reading and thinking in his prime seat than getting into the spirit of the games, why attend at all? Perhaps he thought in the manner of Martial, a poet of an earlier generation whose sentiments would nevertheless ring true with Stoics ancient or modern: “These are my times, and I must know them.”

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

Take a look at photos of Bush Tetras — a three-girl-one-guy No Wave/Post-Punk band from the early 1980s downtown Manhattan scene. Now, look at the photograph above, “Marcel Breuer and His Harem,” by Bauhaus photographer Erich Consemüller, taken sometime around 1927. Except for the fact that Breuer looks more like Ron Mael of Sparks sans mustache than drummer Dee Pop, one might mistake this for a photo of the punk band. This raises a few questions: did art students Bush Tetras look to the women of the Bauhaus for their style? Or did the women of the Bauhaus look to the future and see punk? The second scenario seems more likely since the women of the Bauhaus have not, until recently, been terribly well-known.

I personally feel cheated after studying art and art history in college many years ago and only now getting introduced to several significant artists of the radical German art school founded by Walter Gropius. All of its famous exponents and art stars are men, but it seems the gender ratio of the Bauhaus was closer to that of the general population (as was, in many cases, that of the early punk and post-punk scenes).

But we don’t tend to learn the names or see the work of these artists, and, in some cases, their work has been posthumously attributed to their male colleagues. Nor are we familiar with their progressive personal style, essential in the Bauhaus’s total approach to revolutionizing the arts, including fashion, as a way to liberate humanity from the dogmas of the past.

How unfortunate that the memory of the Bauhaus, like the memory of punk, replicated the same old rules its artists broke. The school’s gender equality was radical, hence the photograph’s satirical title, which “expresses the precise opposite of what the photo itself shows,” notes the site Bauhaus Kooperation: “the modernity, emancipation, equality, or even superiority, of the women in it.” The “junior master” of the carpentry workshop, Breuer looks at the three artists to his left “skeptically, with his arms crossed,” as if to say, “ ‘These are ‘my’ women?!’ ” The artists of the “harem,” from left to right, are Breuer’s wife Martha Erps, Katt Both, and the photographer’s wife, Ruth Hollós, who “seems to be suppressing laughter as she looks towards the photographer (her husband).”

Erich Consemüller, who taught architecture at the Bauhaus, had been tasked by Gropius with documenting the school and its life. Gropius partnered him with photographer Lucia Moholy, wife of László Moholy-Nagy (see a photo of her above, taken by her husband sometime between 1924 and 28). Moholy took mostly exterior shots like the photograph by her further up of Erps and Hollós on the roof of the Atelierhaus in Dessau in the mid-1920s. Consemüller mainly focused on interiors in his work, with experimental exceptions like the “Mechanical Fantasy” series seen here, which uses clothing, poses, and double exposures to visually emphasize a kind of uniformity of purpose, placing and joining male and female Bauhaus artists in almost typological arrangements.

Indeed, nearly all of the artists of the Bauhaus — as was the school’s practice — tried their hand at photography, and many used the medium to document, in ways both casual and deliberate, the Bauhaus’s commitment to gender equity and the full inclusion of women artists in its programs, a statement painter and photographer T. Lux Feininger seems to underline in the group photograph below of the school’s weavers on the steps of the new Bauhaus building in 1927. (Artists in the shot: Léna Bergner, Gunta Stölzl, Ljuba Monastirsky, Otti Berger, Lis Beyer, Elisabeth Mueller, Rosa Berger, Ruth Hollós, and Lisbeth Oestreicher.)

Bauhaus artists, both men and women, were very much like early punks in some ways, inventing new ways to shake up the establishment and break out of prescribed roles. But instead of a downtown alternative to the status quo, they offered a recipe for its full transformation through art. Who can say how far that movement would have progressed had it not been splintered by the Nazis? “Together,” as Gropius wrote, “let us call for, devise, and create the construction of the future, comprising everything in one form, architecture, sculpture and painting,” and most everything else in the built and visual environments, he might have added.

via Barbara Hershey

An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2022.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.

The kids can’t read. Such has been the implication, even the declaration, made by a wave of articles in recent years. But the statement needs some qualification: the kids in question are American; what they can’t read is entire books, especially literary fiction; and it isn’t just the kids in the first place. It would be the rare reader, especially of a site like Open Culture, who could resist feeling any despair when confronted with, say, a study finding that only five percent of college English majors tested could understand the opening of Bleak House. But the real problem is broader, as reflected by the framing of the Jared Henderson video above, “Why Everyone Stopped Reading.”

Henderson points to several explanatory factors. The first is the way many American schools teach reading: for a time, they abandoned the method of phonics, which starts with basic individual sounds and builds from there, and went all in on something called “whole language learning,” which was based on teaching students to “infer the meanings of words from context.” The idea was that, rather than relying on rote drilling, the new system could cultivate a natural love for reading in young students. “The only problem is that whole language learning didn’t work,” and the resulting drop in literacy rates surely has something to do with the dramatic falloff of reading in general.

Other U.S. educational reforms, such as the nationwide push toward short informational texts and standardized testing, which prioritized information extraction over textual engagement, must also share the blame. This has produced an abundance of, to borrow the headline of Rose Horowitch’s much-circulated Atlantic piece from 2024, “Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” Those same students, of course, have all come of age in the time of the smartphone, which does provide us with an “endless stream of text,” albeit of low-to-nonexistent literary merit — to say nothing of the infinite scroll of hyper-stimulating short-form videos absorbing ever-greater proportions of daily life, and not just that of the young.

“Americans, once members of a proudly literate society, read much less than they used to,” writes Horowitch in a new, in-depth piece on the country’s “post-literacy.” “Fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38 percent read a novel or short story.” At the same time, “gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet.” The now-mainstream notion that America (and, in time, the world) is reverting from a textual to an oral culture was first foreseen by the likes of Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, and Walter J. Ong. But many here in the twenty-first century might hear their condition described in a more relatable fashion by David Bowie, in his Tin Machine period, nearly forty years ago.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

Pitch to friends or family the idea of a trip to Mons, Belgium to visit the Mundaneum, and you may be met with a less-than-enthusiastic reception. That’s unfortunate, since such an experience could fundamentally change the way they regard technology they use every day. Though its name may seem to promise unrelieved dullness today, the Mundaneum arose out of enormous high-tech ambitions. The idea behind it, as conceived by Belgian lawyers Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine, was to gather, classify, centralize, and make universally available all human knowledge. This may sound familiar to anyone who’s used the internet, but it was a rather bolder proposition at the turn of the twentieth century.

Otlet and La Fontaine’s “city of knowledge” may not have been fully realizable at that time, but technology had made it imaginable. The Dewey Decimal System, with its standardized card catalogs, had been around since 1876. Starting in 1895, Otlet adapted that basic tool to a far larger project: the Mundaneum took shape as a vast paper archive. Millions of index cards, each recording bibliographic details about a single book, article, or document, were filed away in row upon row of catalog drawers. (See image below.)

“Otlet made this card central to his system,” writes Sidney Perkowitz at JSTOR. “Aiming to capture every book ever published, the Mundaneum stored bibliographic data for books under the UDC [Universal Decimal Classification], along with magazine articles, images, and more on over 15 million cards crammed into catalog drawers.” Originally housed in Brussels’ Cinquantenaire Palace, the Mundaneum was meant to get its own building designed by the forward-thinking Le Corbusier by the end of the nineteen-twenties. Alas, it was never built, and after the Nazi invasion of 1940, the Mundaneum was scrapped for a Third Reich art exhibition.

Discussions of the Mundaneum in our time often highlight what Otlet (1868–1944), despite the project’s many tribulations, eventually envisioned as “a global ‘réseau’ or network of ‘electric telescopes.’ These early workstations were to be linked to the Mundaneum by telephone and the new technology of television. A user would phone in a query, and the answer in a book or other source would appear displayed on a personal screen, which could be split to show multiple results.” Convinced that all homes would eventually have access to the network, he considered even the possibility of “data sharing and social interactions among its users.” This dream of the internet avant la technologie is now enshrined at the Mundaneum museum, which is open five days a week. Alternatively, you can point your electric telescope to its online catalog any time.

Image by Zinneke, via Wikimedia Commons

via JSTOR

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

Harlem’s undergoing another Renaissance, and has been for years now. Crime’s down, real estate prices are up, and throngs of pale-faced hipsters are descending to check the area out.

Sure, something’s gained, but something’s lost, too.

For today’s holiday in Harlem, we’re going to climb in the Wayback Machine. Set the dial for 1932. Don’t forget your map. (Click the image above to view a larger version.)

This delirious artifact comes courtesy of Elmer Simms Campbell (1906–1971), an artist whose race proved an impediment to career advancement in his native Midwest. Not long after relocating to New York City, he had the good fortune to be befriended by the great Cab Calloway, star of the Cotton Club. Hi-de-hi-de-hi-de-ho! Check the lower left corner of your map.

You may notice that the compass rose deviates rather drastically from established norms. As you’ve no doubt heard, the Bronx is up, and the Battery’s down, but not in this case. Were you to choose those trees in the upper left corner as your starting point, you’d be at the top of Central Park, basically equidistant from the east and west sides. (Take the 2 or the 3 to 110th Street…)

But keep in mind that this map is not drawn to scale. I know it looks like the joints are jumping from the second you step off the curb, but in reality, you’ll need to hoof it 21 blocks from the top of Central Park to 131st Street for things to start cookin’. Hopefully, this geographical liberty won’t get you too hot under the collar. And if it does, well, it may be Prohibition, but stress-relieving beverages await you in every location listed, as well as in some 500 speakeasies Campbell allowed to remain on the down low.

If that doesn’t do it for you, there’s a guy selling reefer across the street from Earl “Snakehips” Tucker.

As you stagger back and forth between Seventh Avenue and Lenox (now referred to as Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard and Malcolm X Boulevard), bear in mind that Campbell was the first African-American cartoonist to be nationally published in the New Yorker, Playboy, and Esquire, whose bug-eyed, now retired mascot, Esky, was a Campbell creation.

In the end, he was an extremely successful illustrator, though few of his creations are reflective of his race.

The map above, which did double duty as endpapers for Calloway’s autobiography, Of Minnie the Moocher and Me, is far closer to home.

Right above, see Cab Calloway perform “Hotcha Razz Ma Tazz” at the famous Cotton Club, in Harlem, 1935.

via Big Think

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

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and theater maker in NYC.

The world ended in the nineteen-sixties. Or rather, one world ended in the nineteen-sixties and gave way to another, a transition personified by no human beings more clearly than the Beatles. “They are lightning rods for so much that makes the sixties a revolutionary decade,” says The Rest Is History podcast co-host Tom Holland in the video above. “In all kinds of ways, in the twenty-first century, we’re living in the aftermath of what happened in the sixties, rather like people in the sixteenth century were living in the aftermath of what happened in the fifteen-twenties.” Many of the show’s regular listeners will grasp that analogy immediately, though perhaps fewer of those who’ve tuned in to this especially popular episode, in which Holland recounts the complete history of the Beatles with Conan O’Brien.

O’Brien has never made a secret of his Beatles obsession, but here he demonstrates it definitively by supplying most of the details of the band’s story himself. (That goes even for relatively obscure ones: he mentions, for example, the score Paul McCartney composed for the film The Family Way, featured earlier this year on Open Culture.) He also manages to win the trivia contest against Holland at Abbey Road Studios in the video just above, but then, he’d been studying in one sense or another for quite some time. A decade ago, he held his own in conversation with Mark Lewisohn, the first volume of whose painstaking three-part Beatles biography comes to nearly a thousand pages in the abridged edition. That was on his YouTube interview series Serious Jibber-Jabber, the predecessor to his current podcast Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend.

Holland and his co-host Dominic Sandbrook appeared on Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend last fall. They may have seemed an odd choice in a guest roster consisting mostly of comedians, actors, and musicians, but O’Brien himself has declared The Rest Is History “the best podcast in the world,” and their shows’ fan bases turn out not to be mutually exclusive. That wide-ranging conversation went stimulatingly enough to inspire a completion of the crossover just a few months thereafter, when Holland brought O’Brien to Abbey Road for an hour and a half of nothing but talk about the historical significance of the Beatles, whom O’Brien declares “a complete break from what happened before.” (Sandbrook, the rare non-appreciator of the Fab Four, absented himself from the discussion.)

O’Brien praises books like Lewisohn’s, as well as Ian Leslie’s more recent John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, but his understanding of the group as a historical phenomenon suggests that he’s also read the work of critic Ian MacDonald. After Revolver, “it seemed to Western youth that The Beatles knew — that they had the key to current events and were somehow orchestrating them through their records.” So MacDonald writes in his book Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties, whose title refers to “the true revolution of the Sixties”: an unconscious mental adaptation to the passage from a local reality of “consensus, hierarchy, and fixed values” to a global one of individualism, sensationalism, and “jealously leveled standards.” The Beatles didn’t cause those changes, as they themselves well understood. But they accepted the roles of its avatars, and more than 60 years after the rise of Beatlemania, we still live in the world they represented.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

It’s hard to imagine that the space-crazed general public needed any help getting worked up about astronauts and NASA in the early ’60s.

Perhaps the wild popularity of space-related imagery was in part what motivated NASA administrator James Webb to create the NASA Art Program in 1962.

Although the program’s handpicked artists weren’t edited or censored in any way, they were briefed on how NASA hoped to be represented, and which emotions their creations were meant to capture—the excitement and uncertainty of exploring these frontiers.

NASA was also careful to collect everything the artists produced while participating in the program, from sketches to finished work.

In turn, the artists received unprecedented access to launch sites, key personnel, and major events such as Project Mercury and the Apollo 11 Mission.

Hundreds of artists, including Andy Warhol, Norman Rockwell, and Laurie Anderson, have brought their unique sensibilities to the project. (Find NASA-inspired art by Warhol and Rockwell above.)

(And hey, no shame if you mistakenly assumed Warhol’s 1987 Moonwalk 1 was created as a promo for MTV…)

Jamie Wyeth’s 1964 watercolor Gemini Launch Pad includes a humble bicycle, the means by which technicians traveled back and forth between the launch pad and the reinforced-concrete blockhouse where they worked.

Photographer Annie Leibovitz offers two views of NASA’s first female pilot and commander, Eileen Collins—with and without helmet.

Postage stamp designer, Paul Calle, one of the inaugural group of participating artists, produced a stamp commemorating the Gemini 4 space capsule in celebration of NASA’s 9th anniversary. When the Apollo 11 astronauts suited up prior to blastoff on July 16, 1969, Calle was the only artist present. His quickly rendered felt-tip marker sketches lend a backstage element to the heroic iconography surrounding astronauts Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins. One of the items they carried with them on their journey was the engraved printing plate of Calle’s 1967 commemorative stamp. They hand-canceled a proof aboard the flight, on the assumption that post offices might be hard to come by on the moon.

In 2016, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory enlisted a team of nine artists, designers, and illustrators to collaborate on 14 posters, a visual throwback to the ones the WPA created between 1938 and 1941 to spark public interest in the National Parks. You can see the results at the Exoplanet Travel Bureau.

More recently, in 2024, NASA and the artist team Geraluz and WERC relaunched the program with space-themed murals in Manhattan.

View an album of 25 historic works from NASA’s Art Program here.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2019.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and theater maker in NYC.

PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel has spoken publicly on a variety of issues from contrarian entrepreneurship to technical stagnation to geopolitical struggle. Lately, he’s drawn more attention with extended remarks on what would seem an unexpected subject: the Antichrist, a seemingly enlightened but deceptively malevolent figure or movement bent on putting the world under innovation-stifling unified control. The term itself may sound familiar, though many of us haven’t seen it referenced much in popular culture since the heyday of the Left Behind novel series that sold so well around the turn of the millennium. Whether or not it’s to your literary taste, that apocalypse narrative’s villain does adhere to the Antichrist archetype laid out in the Bible.

In the new Hochelaga video above, Tommie Trelawny goes back to the biblical texts to determine the origins of the Antichrist, whom humanity has portrayed as “a great deceiver who charms the world through false miracles, and with it, demands to be worshiped as god himself.” However large he looms in modern Christian storytelling, he’s referenced in only four passages of the Bible. The word Antichrist appears nowhere but in one of John’s epistles, which also warns that “even now many antichrists have come,” indicating, as Trelawny puts it, those who reject “that Jesus is the Christ, or Messiah.” As John saw it, some such individuals — including members of new sects like Gnosticism — were also dangerously charismatic, which aided the spread of their false doctrines.

The apostle Paul or one of his disciples, in a letter to the Thessalonians, foresees the rise of “a mysterious figure known only as ‘the lawless one,’ who will gain power by deceiving people through false miracles, and once in power, he will commit his greatest crime of all: ‘He will oppose and exalt himself over everything that is called God or worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.” For its part, the Book of Revelation adds “the arrival of a monstrous seven-headed beast,” and later, a companion with “the horns of a lamb but the voice of a dragon.” Thereafter comes the “mark of the beast,” 666 — or perhaps 616, Trelawny adds, given that either could be seen as code for Neron Kaisar in Greek or Nero Caesar in Latin, better known as the ancient Roman Emperor Nero. Some suspected him of being the Antichrist, especially if he orchestrated Rome’s great fire in order to consolidate his power and scapegoat the Christians.

Trelawny also gets into detail about the twice-excommunicated Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, whom Pope Gregory IX saw as the prophesied “lawless one,” and even into the accusations of being the Antichrist flung back and forth during the Protestant Reformation and the flurry of printed pamphlets that drove its surrounding controversy. The latter story “shows a subtle change taking place in how people could understand the Antichrist. It was no longer just a single person; it could be an entire system or institution.” Throughout history, as underscored today by anonymous online debates as well as lectures delivered by Peter Thiel in Rome, “it seems that whatever people fear the most, from communism to globalism to regulation, the Antichrist can become.” If so, we’ll keep hearing about his imminent (or already accomplished) rise until humanity can get over its fears — and what a miracle that would be.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.