David Byrne will always be most widely known as the co-founder and frontman of Talking Heads. That may count among the greatest possible achievements for any artist — to the minds of many an Open Culture reader, at least — but it must occasionally frustrate the man himself. Talking Heads broke up 35 years ago, but Byrne has only grown more and more productive since, recording his own albums, creating musicals, writing books, putting on PowerPoint presentations, and even designing bike racks. By now, his ideas have stretched so far beyond music that he’s considering the nature of ideas themselves, how they succeed or fail in catching on, and why they go in and out of acceptance over time. Hence his new book Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up.

“I first saw the term ‘sleeping beauties’ (outside of the folktale or the Disney movie) when I went down a rabbit hole and stumbled on a paper from 2004 called “Sleeping Beauties in Science” by the scientometrics researcher Anthony van Raan at Leiden University,” Byrne writes in an excerpt of the book published online. (Scientometrics being, he adds, “the study of the impact and communication of science.”) He cites a favorite example of the astronomer Vera Rubin’s discovery, in the nineteen-seventies, of “evidence for dark matter, which is estimated to make up a large percent­age of the universe.” Understanding her own observations required her to “question even her most basic assumptions — that matter must emit light and radiation. She was a visual thinker, and she used her data to create plots and sketches that revealed patterns within the numbers.”

Only decades later was Rubin’s counterintuitive vision of the universe supported by theoretical physicists and radio astrono­mers using ever more technologically advanced tools like “the powerful Hale Telescope, Kent Ford’s new spectrograph, and the Uhuru satellite, which tracked cosmic X‑rays.” In the Science Friday interview at the top of the post, Byrne brings up a much older, longer-sleeping beauty often featured here on Open Culture: ancient Roman concrete, the source of whose extraordinary strength and endurance was only determined a few years ago. Though especially vivid in technology and science, “this forgetting and then remembering, I knew from my own experience, wasn’t limited to academia,” he writes. “It happens in all kinds of fields and endeavors — music, art, literature, every kind of creative profession.”

As Adam Grant writes in the New York Times Book Review, the range of examples covered in Sleeping Beauties includes “how advocates reawakened Bach’s compositions and Vermeer’s paintings after one and two centuries of slumber; how technological advances rekindled theories of continental drift and black holes; how accidents resuscitated hand-washing and genetics; and how war renewed interest in the submarine and The Great Gatsby.” Making an appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers, Byrne was asked if any of his own work has undergone a similar process of disinterest followed by rediscovery. “It’s kind of the opposite,” he replies. “There’s things that I’ve done where I go, ‘That one does not hold up that well at all’ ” — which, if the irony of cultural history continues to operate as usual, will be exactly the records the children of today’s Talking Heads fans put on most enthusiastically a few years down the line.

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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.

Even before the success of the electric car company that now bears his name, Nikola Tesla was a widely respected historical figure. Often, that respect could be based on surprisingly scant knowledge of the man’s life and accomplishments. Didn’t he do something with electricity? Wasn’t he involved in some kind of rivalry with Thomas Edison? Wouldn’t we all be enjoying wirelessly transmitted power, too cheap to meter, if his noble, solitary efforts hadn’t been thwarted by the establishment? Well, perhaps. Whatever dramatic satisfactions we find in Tesla’s story, we can only gauge his genius by surveying his actual inventions, four of which are explained in the new Lost in Time video above.

Tesla lived from 1856 to 1943, a period of such great technological change that, when he demonstrated a radio-controlled boat in an early phase of his career, some of the onlookers “were absolutely convinced that there was a trained monkey inside the boat, reading his hand signals.” The year was 1898, when the very idea of wireless control hadn’t entered anyone’s mind — but Tesla already foresaw a world of “vehicles that drive themselves, machines doing real work from thousands of kilometers away, and aircraft flown from a distance.” He may have been a tad early to that game, but his invention of the alternating current power system and the induction motor happened right on time.

At the end of the nineteenth century, “the race to get electricity to every household in America” was getting into gear. Thomas Edison’s direct current (DC) system technically worked, but would need a very large number of power stations to move power all over the continent. Tesla did his work on AC as a kind of correction to the shortcomings of DC, drawing what history remembers as a merciless negative-publicity campaign from Edison’s side. But none of its often-gruesome stunts meant to associate Tesla’s invention with death were a match for the success of AC’s implementation in the new power plant at Niagara Falls. More than 130 years later, AC has long powered the vast majority of homes. But if history had gone differently, the Tesla enthusiast can’t resist asking, would your house also be equipped with its own death ray?

In 1934, at one of his annual press conferences, the 78-year-old Tesla announced that he’d come up with his most important invention yet, a weapon so powerful that it could “end all wars.” Called ‘teleforce,’ it would fire beams so concentrated and energetic that they could destroy any target instantaneously upon contact. When he died in 1943, Tesla didn’t even leave sufficient documentation to tell whether the thing could have worked. He’d made slightly more progress on Wardenclyffe Tower, meant as a proof of concept for his grander vision of turning the Earth into a giant battery, filling it with electricity into which all humanity could tap at will. Industrialist J. P. Morgan had been footing the project’s bill, but cut off funding when it came out that the ever-ambitious Tesla really intended to build much more than what he’d promised, a wireless communication system — which, at that time, would have seemed like a pretty fantastical notion in itself.

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Nikola Tesla’s Predictions for the 21st Century: The Rise of Smart Phones & Wireless, The Demise of Coffee & More (1926/35)

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.

There may be no more a macabrely misogynistic sentence in English literature than Edgar Allan Poe’s contention that “the death… of a beautiful woman” is “unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.” (His perhaps ironic observation prompted Sylvia Plath to write, over a hundred years later, “The woman is perfected / Her dead / Body wears the smile of accomplishment.”) The sentence comes from Poe’s 1846 essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” and if this work were only known for its literary fetishization of what Elisabeth Bronfen calls “an aesthetically pleasing corpse”—marking deep anxieties about both “female sexuality and decay”—then it would indeed still be of interest to feminists and academics, though not perhaps to the average reader.

But Poe has much more to say that does not involve a romance with dead women. The essay delivers on its title’s promise. It is here that we find Poe’s famous theory of what good literature is and does, achieving what he calls “unity of effect.” This literary “totality” results from a collection of essential elements that the author deems indispensable in “constructing a story,” whether in poetry or prose, that produces a “vivid effect.”

To illustrate what he means, Poe walks us through an analysis of his own work, “The Raven.” We are to take for granted as readers that “The Raven” achieves its desired effect. Poe has no misgivings about that. But how does it do so? Against commonplace ideas that writers “compose by a species of fine frenzy—an ecstatic intuition,” Poe has not “the least difficulty in recalling to mind the progressive steps of any of my compositions”—steps he considers almost “mathematical.” Nor does he consider it a “breach of decorum” to pull aside the curtain and reveal his tricks. Below, in condensed form, we have listed the major points of Poe’s essay, covering the elements he considers most necessary to “effective” literary composition.

1. Know the ending in advance, before you begin writing.

“Nothing is more clear,” writes Poe, “than that every plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its dénouement before any thing be attempted with the pen.” Once writing commences, the author must keep the ending “constantly in view” in order to “give a plot its indispensable air of consequence” and inevitability.

2. Keep it short—the “single sitting” rule.

Poe contends that “if any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression.” Force the reader to take a break, and “the affairs of the world interfere” and break the spell. This “limit of a single sitting” admits of exceptions, of course. It must—or the novel would be disqualified as literature. Poe cites Robinson Crusoe as one example of a work of art “demanding of no unity.” But the single sitting rule applies to all poems, and for this reason, he writes, Milton’s Paradise Lost fails to achieve a sustained effect.

3. Decide on the desired effect.

The author must decide in advance “the choice of impression” he or she wishes to leave on the reader. Poe assumes here a tremendous amount about the ability of authors to manipulate readers’ emotions. He even has the audacity to claim that the design of the “The Raven” rendered the work “universally appreciable.” It may be so, but perhaps it does not universally inspire an appreciation of Beauty that “excites the sensitive soul to tears”—Poe’s desired effect for the poem.

4. Choose the tone of the work.

Poe claims the highest ground for his work, though it is debatable whether he was entirely serious. As “Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem” in general, and “The Raven” in particular, “Melancholy is thus the most legitimate of all poetical tones.” Whatever tone one chooses, however, the technique Poe employs, and recommends, likely applies. It is that of the “refrain”—a repeated “key-note” in word, phrase, or image that sustains the mood. In “The Raven,” the word “Nevermore” performs this function, a word Poe chose for its phonetic as much as for its conceptual qualities.

Poe claims that his choice of the Raven to deliver this refrain arose from a desire to reconcile the unthinking “monotony of the exercise” with the reasoning capabilities of a human character. He at first considered putting the word in the beak of a parrot, then settled on a Raven—“the bird of ill omen”—in keeping with the melancholy tone.

5. Determine the theme and characterization of the work.

Here Poe makes his claim about “the death of a beautiful woman,” and adds, “the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.” He chooses these particulars to represent his theme—“the most melancholy,” Death. Contrary to the methods of many a writer, Poe moves from the abstract to the concrete, choosing characters as mouthpieces of ideas.

6. Establish the climax.

In “The Raven,” Poe says, he “had now to combine the two ideas, of a lover lamenting his deceased mistress and a Raven continuously repeating the word ‘Nevermore.’” In bringing them together, he composed the third-to-last stanza first, allowing it to determine the “rhythm, the metre, and the length and general arrangement” of the remainder of the poem. As in the planning stage, Poe recommends that the writing “have its beginning—at the end.”

7. Determine the setting.

Though this aspect of any work seems the obvious place to start, Poe holds it to the end, after he has already decided why he wants to place certain characters in place, saying certain things. Only when he has clarified his purpose and broadly sketched in advance how he intends to achieve it does he decide “to place the lover in his chamber… richly furnished.” Arriving at these details last does not mean, however, that they are afterthoughts, but that they are suggested—or inevitably follow from—the work that comes before. In the case of “The Raven,” Poe tells us that in order to carry out his literary scheme, “a close circumscription of space is absolutely necessary to the effect of insulated incident.”

Throughout his analysis, Poe continues to stress—with the high degree of repetition he favors in all of his writing—that he keeps “originality always in view.” But originality, for Poe, is not “a matter, as some suppose, of impulse or intuition.” Instead, he writes, it “demands in its attainment less of invention than negation.” In other words, Poe recommends that the writer make full use of familiar conventions and forms, but vary, combine, and adapt them to suit the purpose of the work and make them his or her own.

Though some of Poe’s discussion of technique relates specifically to poetry, as his own prose fiction testifies, these steps can equally apply to the art of the short story. And though he insists that depictions of Beauty and Death—or the melancholy beauty of death—mark the highest of literary aims, one could certainly adapt his formula to less obsessively morbid themes as well.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

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

If you’re trying to understand a city, its map isn’t a bad place to start. Today, of course, we can call up an accurate map of practically any part of any city at any time we like, with detailed point-to-point directions available on command. Turn on the satellite view, street view, or 3D mode with its offer of every imaginable point of view, and you soon feel you’re engaging with less a representation of the city than the city itself. Yet the familiarity this makes us feel we possess is deceptive, a realization that comes afresh whenever our phone runs out of battery, leaving us barely able to find our way through even neighborhoods we’d thought we knew. Sheer habit can get us between the places we frequent, but that’s a far cry indeed from understanding the city as a whole.

That last is just what YouTuber Daniel Steiner attempts to do in his series of map explainers, which draws connections between the large-scale, abstracted view of the map and the concrete experience down on the street. He not only uses maps both current and historical to illuminate why the street network and neighborhood boundaries of a given city have taken the shape they have, but actually travels to that city and meets with experts equipped to point out physical traces of that process of urban evolution that escape the attention of most locals.

Those could be the infrastructural remnants of Roman London (or rather Londinium); the unloved Tokyo overpass where the major roads of old Japan once converged; the surveyor’s rod from the original gridding of Manhattan sticking out of what’s now Central Park; or the contours of Amsterdam even before its famous canals went in.

One visit to a city, of course, can hardly an understanding make. Steiner has so far returned to New York to create additional videos focusing on Broadway, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Staten Island, and his examination of Los Angeles ends with a call for requests for more subjects to cover within the vast oddity of the southern California metropolis. His map explainers on other American cities from Chicago to Seattle to Savannah, Georgia also show great potential for follow-ups, to say nothing of how deep he could get into Mexico City after having told the story of how it used to be a lake. Part of these cities’ appeal lies in the fact that, no matter how long you spend in them, you can never get to know them completely, irresistible though it is to try. To the question of whether that attempt is best made top-down or bottom-up, Steiner’s videos respond implicitly — and convincingly — why not both?

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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 will the world end?

We can find serious scientific answers to this question, depending on what we mean by “world” and “end.” If we mean the end of civilization as we currently know it, climate scientists’ worst-case scenario points toward somewhere around 2100 as the beginning of the end. (New York magazine points out that it “probably won’t kill all of us”). It’s possible, but not inevitable.

If we mean the end of all life on earth, the forecast looks quite a bit rosier: we’ve probably got about a billion years, writes astrophysicist Jillian Scudder, before the sun becomes “hot enough to boil our oceans.” Still not a cheerful thought, but perhaps many more creatures will take after the tardigrade by then. That’s not even to mention nuclear war or the epidemics, zombie and otherwise, that could take us out.

But of course, for a not inconsiderable number of people, the question of the world’s end has nothing to do with science at all but with eschatology, that branch of theological thought concerned with the Apocalypse.

Theological thinkers have written about the Apocalypse for hundreds of years, and the world’s end was frequently perceived as just around the corner for many of the same reasons modern secular people feel apocalyptic dread: disease, natural disasters, wars, rumors of wars, imperial power struggles, uncomfortably shifting demographics….

Take 15th-century Europe, when “the Apocalypse weighed heavily on the minds of the people,” as Betsy Mason and Greg Miller write at the National Geographic blog All Over the Map: “Plagues were rampant. The once-great capital of the Roman empire, Constantinople, had fallen to the Turks. Surely, the end was nigh.”

While a niche publishing market in the nascent print era produced “dozens of printed works” describing the “coming reckoning in gory detail… one long-forgotten manuscript depicts the Apocalypse in a very different way—through maps.” As you can see here, these maps convey the unfolding of worse-to-worser scenarios in a number of visual registers: temporal, symbolic, geographic, thematic, etc.

At the top, the nested triangles depict the rise of the Antichrist between the years 1570 and 1600. The central concern for this author was the supposed global threat of Islam. Thus, the next map, its “T” shape a common Medieval world map device, shows the world before the Apocalypse, the text around it explaining that “Islam is on the rise from 639 to 1514.”

Then, we have a circular map with five swords pointing at the edges of the known world, illustrating the author’s contention that Islamic armies would reach the edges of the earth. The other maps depict the “four horns of the Antichrist,” above, Judgement Day, below, (the black eye at the bottom is the “black abyss that leads to hell”), and, further down, a diagram describing “the relative diameters of Earth and Hell.”

Made in Lübeck, Germany sometime between 1486 and 1488, the manuscript is written in Latin, “but it’s not as scholarly as other contemporary manuscripts,” write Mason and Miller, “and the penmanship is fairly poor.” Historian of cartography Chet Van Duzer explains that “it’s aimed at the cultural elite, but not the pinnacle of the cultural elite.”

Pointing out the obvious, Van Duzer says, “there’s no way to escape it, this work is very anti-Islamic,” a widespread sentiment in medieval Europe, when the “clash of civilizations” narrative spread its roots deep in certain strains of Western thinking. This particular text also “includes a section on astrological medicine and a treatise on geography that’s remarkably ahead of its time.”

Van Duzer and Ilya Dines have studied the rare manuscript for its insightful passages on geography and cartography and published their research in a book titled Apocalyptic Cartography. For all its theological alarmism, the manuscript is surprisingly thoughtful when it comes to analyzing its own formal properties and perspectives.

Mason and Miller note that “the author outlines an essentially modern understanding of thematic maps as a means to illustrate characteristics of the people or political organization of different regions.” As Van Duzer puts it, “this is one of the most amazing passages, to have someone from the 15th century telling you their ideas about what maps can do.” This marks the work, he claims in the introduction to Apocalyptic Cartography, as that “of one of the most original cartographers of the period.”

The Apocalypse Map now resides at the Huntington Library in Los Angeles.

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

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

High culture and new technology have never been a natural pairing. As our digital era has often underscored, media innovations tend to be adopted earliest to deliver the most puerile, sensation-driven content, with the more respectable stuff benefiting only later. When the BBC was introducing color broadcasting in the mid-nineteen-sixties, for instance, it was used for the likes of Thunderbirds, The Avengers, and The Benny Hill Show, respectable though those programs may now seem compared to what mainstream television would become in later decades. No color production of that period aimed quite as low as the anthology series Late Night Horror — or has since been raised so high in the minds of those who remember it.

“We must do everything we can from the very beginning to stimulate suspense, tension, atmosphere, potential horror and HORROR!” the show’s producer Harry Moore wrote in a memo to his staff in 1967. “If there is blood, let’s see the blood.” Just a few years before chocolate syrup circled the drain in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, whose faintly anachronistic black-and-white cinematography only intensified its scariness, Late Night Horror had a mandate to paint the small screen red. As cultural legend has it, only six episodes were broadcast before complaints about its power to shock and disturb, or perhaps concerns about its increasing extremity, got it the axe from BBC management.

The idea that Late Night Horror was simply too scary for television — or British public television of the late sixties, in any case — has become more compelling over the decades in part because so little of the series itself has survived to receive the judgment of later generations of viewers. Only in 2016 did archivists discover a film copy of “The Corpse Can’t Play,” a story set at a children’s party that takes a deadly turn. Written by the prolific English novelist John Burke, the episode’s slow burn leads up to a grotesque finish that contrasts almost cheekily with the mundane domesticity of its setting. Alas, the recovered print was in black-and-white, so we don’t get to see the colors, sanguineous and otherwise, that would have made such an impact on viewers of nearly six decades ago.

Just this year, another episode was rediscovered: “No Such Thing as a Vampire” by Richard Matheson, author of I Am Legend and no fewer than sixteen Twilight Zone episodes. As of now, the other four episodes remain missing, and presumably erased under the perpetually cash-strapped BBC’s policy of erasing tapes for re-use in the mid-twentieth century. One of them, “William and Mary,” was based on a Roald Dahl story that had been previously adapted in 1961 for the series Way Out, and would be adapted again in 1979 for Tales of the Unexpected. At this point, even if a complete set of Late Night Horror tapes were to turn up in someone’s shed, the reality of the show could hardly be expected to compete with what its scattered fragments — especially its still-chilling opening sequence — inspire us to imagine. As every serious horror fan knows, it’s what we don’t see that scares us most.

via Mental Floss

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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.

We have become quite used to pronouncements of doom, from scientists predicting the sixth mass extinction due to the measurable effects of climate change, and from religionists declaring the apocalypse due to a surfeit of sin. It’s almost impossible to imagine these two groups of people agreeing on anything other than the ominous portent of their respective messages. But in the early days of the scientific revolution—the days of Shakespeare’s contemporary Francis Bacon, and later 17th century Descartes—it was not at all unusual to find both kinds of reasoning, or unreasoning, in the same person, along with beliefs in magic, divination, astrology, etc.

Yet even in this maelstrom of heterodox thought and practices, Sir Isaac Newton stood out as a particularly odd co-existence of esoteric biblical prophecy, occult beliefs, and a rigid, formal mathematics that not only adhered to the inductive scientific method, but also expanded its potential by applying general axioms to specific cases.

Yet many of Newton’s general principles would seem totally inimical to the naturalism of most physicists today. As he was formulating the principles of gravity and three laws of motion, for example, Newton also sought the legendary Philosopher’s Stone and attempted to turn metal to gold. Moreover, the devoutly religious Newton wrote theological treatises interpreting Biblical prophecies and predicting the end of the world. The date he arrived at? 2060.

Newton seems, writes science blog Another Pale Blue Dot, “as confident of his predictions in this realm as he was in the rational world of science.” In a 1704 letter exhibited at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, above, Newton describes his “recconing”:

So then the time times & half a time are 42 months or 1260 days or three years & an half, recconing twelve months to a yeare & 30 days to a month as was done in the Calendar of the primitive year. And the days of short lived Beasts being put for the years of lived [sic] kingdoms, the period of 1260 days, if dated from the complete conquest of the three kings A.C. 800, will end A.C. 2060. It may end later, but I see no reason for its ending sooner.

Newton further demonstrates his confidence in the next sentence, writing that his intent, “though not to assert” an answer, should in any event “put a stop the rash conjectures of fancifull men who are frequently predicting the time of the end.” Indeed. So how did he arrive at this number? Newton applied a rigorous method, that is to be sure.

If you have the patience for an exhaustive description of how he worked out his prediction using the Book of Daniel, you may read one here by historian of science Stephen Snobelen, who also points out how widespread the interest in Newton’s odd beliefs has become, reaching across every continent, though scholars have known about this side of the Enlightenment giant for a long time.

For a sense of the exacting, yet completely bizarre flavor of Newton’s prophetic calculations, see another Newton letter at the top of the post, transcribed below.

Prop. 1. The 2300 prophetick days did not commence before the rise of the little horn of the He Goat.

2 Those day [sic] did not commence a[f]ter the destruction of Jerusalem & ye Temple by the Romans A.[D.] 70.

3 The time times & half a time did not commence before the year 800 in wch the Popes supremacy commenced

4 They did not commence after the re[ig]ne of Gregory the 7th. 1084

5 The 1290 days did not commence b[e]fore the year 842.

6 They did not commence after the reigne of Pope Greg. 7th. 1084

7 The diffence [sic] between the 1290 & 1335 days are a parts of the seven weeks.

Therefore the 2300 years do not end before ye year 2132 nor after 2370.

The time times & half time do n[o]t end before 2060 nor after [2344]

The 1290 days do not begin [this should read: end] before 2090 [Newton might mean: 2132] nor after 1374 [sic; Newton probably means 2374]

The editorial insertions are Professor Snobelen’s, who thinks the letter dates “from after 1705,” and that “the shaky handwriting suggests a date of composition late in Newton’s life.” Whatever the exact date, we see him much less certain here; Newton pushes around some other dates—2344, 2090 (or 2132), 2374. All of them seem arbitrary, but “given the nice roundness of the number,” writes Motherboard, “and the fact that it appears in more than one letter,” 2060 has become his most memorable dating for the apocalypse.

It’s important to note that Newton didn’t believe the world would “end” in the sense of cease to exist or burn up in holy flames. His end times philosophy resembles that of a surprising number of current day evangelicals: Christ would return and reign for a millennium, the Jewish diaspora would return to Israel and would, he wrote, set up “a flourishing and everlasting Kingdom.” We hear such statements often from televangelists, school boards, governors, and presidential candidates.

As many people have argued, despite Newton’s conception of his scientific work as a bulwark against other theologies, it ultimately became a foundation for Deism and Naturalism, and has allowed scientists to make accurate predictions for hundreds of years. 20th century physics may have shown us a much more radically unstable universe than Newton ever imagined, but his theories are, as Isaac Asimov would put it, “not so much wrong as incomplete,” and still essential to our understanding of certain fundamental phenomena. But as fascinating and curious as Newton’s other interests may be, there’s no more reason to credit his prophetic calculations than those of the Millerites, Harold Camping, or any other apocalyptic doomsday sect.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

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

The printing press was invented in the middle of the fifteenth century, and it’s been downhill for the written word ever since. Even before then, arguments that the volume of writing being done far outstripped the value of that writing surely weren’t unheard of. Whatever the era, the most incisive remarks on the apparent victory of verbal quantity over verbal quality tend to have come from writers themselves. No less a satirist than Jonathan Swift made it one of his many targets in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), imagining an elaborate machine of wood and wire called “the Engine” (see illustration above) that automatically generates text, though few remember it — or rather, few remembered it until the rise of large language models in the real world.

Gulliver encounters that technological marvel, the Engine, at an institution called the Academy of Projectors in the city of Lagado. Swift’s protagonist records its creator’s explanation as follows: “Every one knew how laborious the usual method is of attaining to arts and sciences; whereas, by his contrivance, the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labor, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study.” The Engine’s operation, with its unwieldy, clacking components and a scrambling staff of young crankers, readers, and scribes, may strike us as bizarre, just as it did audiences in the eighteenth century. But in our time, when students can write their papers literally without giving it a thought (to say nothing of what their professors may be getting up to), its concept now sounds all too plausible.

“This is one of the earliest known mentions of a machine that could be considered as a computer in literature, more than a hundred years prior to the first calculating engine designs by Charles Babbage,” writes Chris Garcia at the web site of the Computer History Museum. “The Engine might be seen as a computer, but perhaps it’s better thought of as a sort of random-number generator,” spouting out whichever words of the local language that correspond with the digits. That post dates from ten years, nearly to the day, before the launch of ChatGPT, which changed the general public’s ideas about what computers can and can’t do. We may disagree about whether a machine can truly generate “a complete body of all arts and sciences,” as the Engine’s inventor intends, but it no longer sounds like sheerest fantasy.

Swift had in mind not engineers of artificial intelligence but the Royal Society, whose enthusiasm for scientific knowledge and experimentation he saw as insufficiently tethered to reality, or at least practicality. In addition to the Engine, writes literature professor Robin Bates, “Swift imagines scientists attempting to extract sunbeams from cucumbers, soften marble into pillows and pincushions, replace silkworms with spiders (and having them eat brightly colored flies so the threads will be pre-dyed), mix paint by smell, reassemble original food stuffs from excrement, and build houses from the top down (in imitation of the bee and the spider).” His satire holds up today thanks to his understanding that, “for all the promises of the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, and the Scientific and Technological Revolutions,” our attempts to change the world “founder the moment we start ignoring human nature.” But who needs human nature, the Projectors of today might argue, when you’ve got enough compute?

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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.

Here’s some rare footage of the great Mexican painters Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo paying a visit to exiled Soviet revolutionary Leon Trotsky and his wife, Natalia Sedova, in Coyoacán, Mexico, in 1938.

The Trotskys had arrived the year before, after Rivera petitioned the government of President Lázaro Cárdenas to grant the controversial Marxist leader and theorist sanctuary in Mexico. When the Trotskys arrived on a Norwegian oil tanker at the port city of Tampico in January of 1937, Rivera was not well, but Kahlo boarded the ship to welcome the Trotskys and accompanied them on an armored train to Mexico City. She invited the Trotskys to stay at her family home, La Casa Azul (the Blue House) in Coyoacán, now a section of Mexico City. By the time this footage was taken by a visiting American named Ivan Heisler, Trotsky and Kahlo had either had, or were about to have, a brief affair, and the friendship between the two couples would soon fall apart. In early 1939 Trotsky moved to another house in the same neighborhood, where he was assassinated in August of 1940.

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!

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2013.

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This post was originally written in 2013.

Image via Buckminster Fuller Estate

The novels of John Brunner have become a niche taste, even within his genre of science fiction. A more sociologically minded version of Philip K. Dick at his best, he could write with what now looks like a simultaneous prescience about the civilization to come and an apocalyptically anxious concern with the issues of his day. His undisputed masterpiece Stand on Zanzibar came out in 1968, the same year as the late Paul R. Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb. Both books deal with the dire consequences of what, at the time, looked like the runaway multiplication of humanity, though elements of the dystopian sci-fi writer’s vision now look rather more credible than the predictions of the Stanford biologist — apart from the giant geodesic dome covering Manhattan, anyway.

In a sense, Brunner was actually behind the times, since Buckminster Fuller himself had suggested doming Manhattan nearly a decade earlier. In their ambitious proposal for a “two-mile-wide Dome Over Manhattan” from the turn of the nineteen-sixties, Fuller and longtime collaborator Shoji Sadao “imagined a massive architectural surface that would regulate the city’s ecosystems,” write Next City’s Janette Kim and Erik Carver. “They delivered this design along with a series of surprising calculations: the Dome would reduce heat loss by scaling the city to one eighty-fifth of its surface area; the elimination of snowplowing alone would pay for heat; buildings inside the Dome could be built lighter and cheaper without need for weatherproofing; and interior air could be heated by remote plants.”

Fuller and Sadao did bring some numbers to back up their claims, but even more importantly, they made assurances that the dome’s glass would be one-way, a defense against prying non-Manhattanite eyes, and would keep residents’ cars and lawns in prime condition. However outlandishly forward-thinking Fuller could be, he never forgot that he needed to appeal to the worries and aspirations of mid-century America. As a personality, he also fit in well with the era’s enthusiasm for sweeping infrastructural fixes. “It was a time when people really believed in the power of technology,” says Never Built New York co-author Sam Lubell. “We’re building spaceships that go to the moon. Why can’t we build a dome over Manhattan to get rid of all this pollution, get rid of all the problems of weather?”

Still, as eccentric as he was, Fuller wasn’t delusional. “It’d be very worthwhile to have cities under geodesic domes, but New York City, if you think about all the different owners of different lands, the controversy about ‘this is my air rights, I don’t want a thing over my thing here,’ I just don’t think it’s going to happen,” he admitted. But “it can happen where you start out in places where energy is a really fantastic problem.” At the time, the ever-increasing demand for resources of all kinds by a rapidly growing population appeared to be not just a but the fantastic problem. Today, once-unforeseeable developments like rising energy efficiency and an apparently inexorable decline in global birthrates have directed our nervous gazes elsewhere. Yet dated visions of technological utopia and dystopia still strike us as oddly familiar — and indeed, as strangely similar to one another.

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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 work on the Sagrada Família first began in 1882, the original architect could hardly have imagined that, 144 years later, the ambitious undertaking would still be underway. Yet here we are. Famously, the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926) spent the last four decades of his life designing and building the Gothic-inspired basilica in Barcelona. Then came the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), which destroyed many of his architectural plans, leaving successive generations of architects to piece together Gaudí’s vision and move the project forward. At long last, earlier this year, builders completed the central Tower of Jesus Christ, which stands 566 feet high, making the Sagrada Família the tallest church in the world.

Although work on the Glory façade still remains, the basilica has reached a near-complete state—complete enough for Lego to roll out the official Sagrada Família Lego set. At 12,060 pieces, it’s the largest Lego set ever made, and it lets you build the Sagrada Família section by section, following the same order as the original architects. “Your building journey begins with the Apse with Crypt, the Nativity façade and the Passion façade. It then moves on to the naves and the Western Sacristy. Complete the 6 towers and finish the basilica with the Eastern Sacristy and the Glory façade.” With the video above, you can watch the building of the Lego basilica, compressing hours of work into 10 minutes. The Lego set will be available on November 1, 2026.

via Kottke

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The word wireless is going the way of computerized and portable, and for much the same reasons. We no longer regard wireless devices that require no physical connections to anything else as marvels, but as something close to necessities. But our age, with its increasingly common assumptions that information just travels through the air, owes its existence to wires — and, in a historical sense, to one set of wires in particular, whose story is told in the Primal Space video above. Woven into a mighty 2,000-mile-long cable, it was laid across the Atlantic Ocean 168 years ago, enabling the first direct communication link between North America and Europe. Not that intercontinental video sharing was just around the corner.

No, the height of communication technology at the time was the telegraph: the Victorian Internet, if you like, to borrow the title of the book by Economist editor Tom Standage that inspired the video. As a technology, telegraphy itself is quite a bit older than the aforementioned transatlantic cable. One possible starting point is 1746, when scientist Jean-Antoine Nollet managed to send a jolt of static electricity all the way down a line of 200 monks.

Another is 1792, when inventor Claude Chappe’s system of semaphoric towers was first implemented. Though described as a telegraph, it used no electricity: if a human operator up in one of the towers spotted a change in the signal of the previous one, he’d rearrange his own semaphores to match it, and so on down the line. In 1800, Alessandro Volta’s chemical battery helped make the electric telegraph viable, but nobody was sure how best to transmit intelligible messages in the form of electrical pulses.

Nobody was sure, that is, until the eighteen-thirties, when a painter named Samuel Morse came up with the dot-and-dash code that now bears his name, as well as the devices used to encode and decode communications made with it. At the same time, English inventors William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone had come up with their own telegraph system that didn’t require a codebook, though its five wires made it more expensive and technologically complex. Within a few years, the U.S. and the U.K. had independently built thousands of miles of telegraph lines, making the next step of linking them together obvious, if easier said than done. Though the cable laid in 1858 failed within months, its basic concept has proven unusually robust. Without the roughly 600 undersea cables through which global internet traffic now flows, after all, you wouldn’t be reading this post — to say nothing of watching the video.

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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 history of the printed word is full of bibliographic twists and turns, major historical moments, and the significant printing of books now so obscure no one has read them since their publication. Most of us have only the sketchiest notion of how mass-produced printed books came into being—a few scattered dates and names. But every schoolchild can tell you the first book ever printed, and everyone knows the first words of that book: “In the beginning….”

The first Gutenberg Bible, printed in 1454 by Johannes Gutenberg, introduced the world to movable type, history tells us. It is “universally acknowledged as the most important of all printed books,” writes Margaret Leslie Davis, author of the 2019 book, The Lost Gutenberg: The Astounding Story of One Book’s Five-Hundred-Year Odyssey. In 1900, Mark Twain expressed the sentiment in a letter “commenting on the opening of the Gutenberg Museum,” writes M. Sophia Newman at Lithub. “What the world is to-day,” he declared, “good and bad, it owes to Gutenberg. Everything can be traced to this source.”

There is kind of an oversimplified truth in the statement. The printed word (and the printed Bible, at that) did, in large part, determine the course of European history, which, through empire, determined the course of global events after the “Gutenberg revolution.” But there is another story of print entirely independent of book history in Europe, one that also determined world history with the preservation of Buddhist, Chinese dynastic, and Islamic texts. And one that begins “before Johannes Gutenberg was even born,” Newman points out.

The oldest extant text ever printed with movable type predates Gutenberg himself (born in 1400) by 23 years, and predates the printing of his Bible by 77 years. It is the Jikji, printed in Korea, a collection of Buddhist teachings by Seon master Baegun and printed in movable type by his students Seok-chan and Daijam in 1377. (Seon is a Korean form of Chan or Zen Buddhism.) Only the second volume of the printing has survived, and you can see several images from it here.

Impressive as this may be, the Jikji does not have the honor of being the first book printed with movable type, only the oldest surviving example. The technology could go back two centuries earlier. Margaret Davis nods to this history, Newman concedes, writing that “movable type was an 11th century Chinese invention, refined in Korea in 1230, before meeting conditions in Europe that would allow it to flourish.” This is more than most popular accounts of the printed word say on the matter, but it’s still an inaccurate and highly cursory summary of the evidence.

Newman herself says quite a lot more. In essays at Lithub and Tricycle, she describes how printing techniques developed in Asia and were taken up in Korea in the 1200s by the Goryeo dynasty, who commissioned a printer named Choe Yun-ui to reconstruct a woodblock print of the massive collection of ancient Buddhist texts called the Tipitaka after the Mongols burned the only Korean copy. By casting “individual characters in metal” and arranging them in a frame—the same process Gutenberg used—he was able to complete the project by 1250, 200 years before Gutenberg’s press.

This text, however, did not survive, nor did the countless number of others printed when the technology spread across the Mongol empire on the Silk Road and took root with the Muslim Uyghurs. It is possible, though “no clear historical evidence” yet supports the contention, that movable type spread to Europe from Asia along trade routes. “If there was any connection,” wrote Joseph Needham in Science and Civilization in China, “in the spread of printing between Asia and the West, the Uyghurs, who used both block printing and movable type, had good opportunities to play an important role in this introduction.”

Without surviving documentation, this early history of printing in Asia relies on secondary sources. But “the entire history of the printing press” in Europe” is likewise “riddled with gaps,” Newman writes. What we do know is that Jikji, a collection of Korean Zen Buddhist teachings, is the world’s oldest extant book printed with movable type. The myth of Johannes Gutenberg as “a lone genius who transformed human culture,” as Davis writes, “endures because the sweep of what followed is so vast that it feels almost mythic and needs an origin story to match.” But this is one inventive individual in the history of printing, not the original, godlike source of movable type.

Gutenberg makes sense as a convenient starting point for the growth and worldwide spread of capitalism and European Christianity. His innovation worked much faster than earlier systems, and others that developed around the same time, in which frames were pressed by hand against the paper. Flows of new capital enabled the rapid spread of his machine across Europe. The achievement of the Gutenberg Bible is not diminished by a fuller history. But “what gets left out” of the usual story, as Newman tells us in great detail, “is startlingly rich.”

“Only very recently” has the long history of printing in Asia been “acknowledged at all” in popular culture, though scholars in both the East and West have long known it. Korea has regarded Jikji “and other ancient volumes as national points of pride that rank among the most important of books.” Yet UNESCO only certified Jikji as the “oldest movable metal type printing evidence” in 2001. The recognition may be late in coming, but it matters a great deal, nonetheless. Learn much more about the history, content, and provenance of Jikji at this site created by “cyber diplomats” in Korea after UNESCO bestowed World Heritage status on the book. And see a fully digitized copy of the book here.

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

via Lithub

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

You may remember a time when it was difficult to make it through the day without hearing someone cite a TED Talk. A major technological reason for that was streaming video’s new accessibility on practically everyone’s computer (especially those of people bored at work). A major cultural reason was there was a considerable demographic overlap between those who knew their way around the new video-sharing realms of the internet and those likely to want to hear a “thought leader” speak for eighteen minutes or less. Whether schools kill creativity, the mechanics of procrastination, what happens when you reply to spam e‑mail: these are just a few of the subjects that most aggressively captivated the minds of the suddenly large and chatty TED Talk audience of the late two-thousands and early twenty-tens.

Since those days, some of the most popular TED Talks ever given have undergone reputational re-evaluation. The robustness of the science undergirding Amy Cuddy’s “Your Body Language May Shape Who You Are” has been called into question, while Bill Gates’ “The Next Outbreak? We’re Not Ready,” from 2015, started to look a whole lot more prescient four or five years after it was uploaded.

But what makes a lecture people enjoy — and desire to get others watching — has less to do with its content than with its form and delivery. That’s one lesson we can take from the new animated video above, “How to Explain Something Complicated,” the eighth and most recent in TED-Ed’s series “Public Speaking 101”: something most of us, even if we’ve never dreamed of stepping onto TED’s (or merely TEDx’s) stage, have to face doing sooner or later.

When explaining any complex matter, from your startup’s mission to just how your brother met his bride, it helps to draw on familiar examples. This lesson does that using, naturally, a TED Talk, identifying and breaking down the ways in which social psychologist Daniel Gilbert’s “The Surprising Science of Happiness” exemplifies a suite of techniques in the public speaker’s arsenal. These include sparking your listener’s curiosity right away; introducing them to the first concept you’ll be discussing while doing so, as the base of a “tower” to be built one by one with subsequent concepts; and leading the audience to a “knowledge gap” that you later fill in with the “big idea” at the center of your talk. Surprise is important, and so are metaphors, the more vivid the better. In our age consumed with visions of smartphone addiction, global pandemics, and the AI apocalypse, TED Talks may seem a quaint artifact of a more naïvely techno-optimistic time. But the day will never come when we need no longer explain things — least of all ourselves.

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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.

In the fall of 1969 the Rolling Stones were in a Los Angeles recording studio, putting the final touches on their album Let It Bleed. It was a tumultuous time for the Stones. They had been struggling with the album for the better part of a year as they dealt with the personal disintegration of their founder and multi-instrumentalist Brian Jones, whose drug addiction and personality problems had reached a critical stage. Jones was fired from the band in June of that year. He died less than a month later. And although the Stones couldn’t have known it at the time, the year would end on another catastrophic note, as violence broke out at the notorious Altamont Free Concert just a day after Let It Bleed was released.

It was also a grim time around the world. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, the Tet Offensive, the brutal suppression of the Prague Spring—all of these were recent memories. Not surprisingly, Let It Bleed was not the most cheerful of albums. As Stephen Davis writes in his book Old Gods Almost Dead: The 40-Year Odyssey of the Rolling Stones, “No rock record, before or since, has ever so completely captured the sense of palpable dread that hung over its era.”

And no song on Let It Bleed articulates this dread with greater force than the apocalyptic “Gimme Shelter,” in which Mick Jagger sings of a fire “sweepin’ our very street today,” like a “Mad bull lost his way.”

Rape, murder!
It’s just a shot away
It’s just a shot away

In an interview with Melissa Block for the NPR program All Things Considered, Jagger talked about those lyrics, and the making of the song:

One of the most striking moments in the interview is when Jagger describes the circumstances surrounding soul singer Merry Clayton’s powerful background vocals. “When we got to Los Angeles and we were mixing it, we thought, ‘Well, it’d be great to have a woman come and do the rape/murder verse,’ or chorus or whatever you want to call it,” said Jagger. “We randomly phoned up this poor lady in the middle of the night, and she arrived in her curlers and proceeded to do that in one or two takes, which is pretty amazing. She came in and knocked off this rather odd lyric. It’s not the sort of lyric you give anyone–‘Rape, murder/It’s just a shot away’–but she really got into it, as you can hear on the record.”

The daughter of a Baptist minister, Merry Clayton grew up singing in her father’s church in New Orleans. She made her professional debut at age 14, recording a duet with Bobby Darin. She went on to work with The Supremes, Elvis Presley and many others, and was a member of Ray Charles’s group of backing singers, The Raelettes. She is one of the singers featured in the documentary film, 20 Feet From Stardom. In an interview with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air, Clayton talked about the night she was asked to sing on “Gimme Shelter”:

Well, I’m at home at about 12–I’d say about 11:30, almost 12 o’clock at night. And I’m hunkered down in my bed with my husband, very pregnant, and we got a call from a dear friend of mine and producer named Jack Nitzsche. Jack Nitzsche called and said you know, Merry, are you busy? I said No, I’m in bed. he says, well, you know, There are some guys in town from England. And they need someone to come and sing a duet with them, but I can’t get anybody to do it. Could you come? He said I really think this would be something good for you.

At that point, Clayton recalled, her husband took the phone out of her hand and said, “Man, what is going on? This time of night you’re calling Merry to do a session? You know she’s pregnant.” Nitzsche explained the situation, and just as Clayton was drifting back to sleep her husband nudged her and said, “Honey, you know, you really should go and do this date.” Clayton had no idea who the Rolling Stones were. When she arrived at the studio, Keith Richards was there and explained what he wanted her to do.

I said, Well, play the track. It’s late. I’d love to get back home. So they play the track and tell me that I’m going to sing–this is what you’re going to sing: Oh, children, it’s just a shot away. It had the lyrics for me. I said, Well, that’s cool. So  I did the first part, and we got down to the rape, murder part. And I said, Why am I singing rape, murder? …So they told me the gist of what the lyrics were, and I said Oh, okay, that’s cool. So then I had to sit on a stool because I was a little heavy in my belly. I mean, it was a sight to behold. And we got through it. And then we went in the booth to listen, and I saw them hooting and hollering while I was singing, but I didn’t know what they were hooting and hollering about. And when I got back in the booth and listened, I said, Ooh, that’s really nice. They said, well, You want to do another?  I said, well, I’ll do one more, I said and then I’m going to have to say thank you and good night. I did one more, and then I did one more. So it was three times I did it, and then I was gone. The next thing I know, that’s history.

Clayton sang with such emotional force that her voice cracked. (“I was just grateful that the crack was in tune,” she told Gross.) In the isolated vocal track above, you can hear the others in the studio shouting in amazement. Despite giving what would become the most famous performance of her career, it turned out to be a tragic night for Clayton. Shortly after leaving the studio, she lost her baby in a miscarriage. It has generally been assumed that the stress from the emotional intensity of her performance and the lateness of the hour caused the miscarriage. For many years Clayton found the song too painful to hear, let alone sing. “That was a dark, dark period for me,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1986, “but God gave me the strength to overcome it. I turned it around. I took it as life, love and energy and directed it in another direction, so it doesn’t really bother me to sing ‘Gimme Shelter’ now. Life is short as it is and I can’t live on yesterday.”

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2013.

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