Harvard’s 1869 Entrance Exam: Could You Answer Tough Questions About Latin, Greek, Ancient History, Plane Geometry & More

in Education, Harvard, History | June 10th, 2026

In 2025, Har­vard once again began ask­ing appli­cants to sub­mit an SAT or ACT score. This was a rever­sal of the no-test-nec­es­sary pol­i­cy that it and quite a few oth­er Amer­i­can col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties adopt­ed dur­ing the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic. To some observers of high­er edu­ca­tion, the dis­ap­pear­ance of the stan­dard­ized-test require­ment came as a shock, though in a sense, it was­n’t with­out prece­dent. Until the mid-nine­teen-tens, Har­vard had appli­cants take its own entrance exam, since no stan­dard­ized test exist­ed. One exam­ple from 1869, which you can see here, eval­u­at­ed stu­dents on their pro­fi­cien­cy in Latin, Greek, his­to­ry and geog­ra­phy, arith­metic, alge­bra, and plane geom­e­try.

The idea was­n’t so much to eval­u­ate the test-tak­er’s rea­son­ing abil­i­ties as to make sure he’d already under­gone the expect­ed edu­ca­tion for his class. Even so, as the New York Times’ Ali­son Leigh Cow­an notes, “col­leges occa­sion­al­ly allowed prospects to cor­rect defi­cien­cies as a con­di­tion of admis­sion.”

This reflects the very dif­fer­ent role high­er edu­ca­tion played in Amer­i­can life a cen­tu­ry and a half ago than it does today: back then, Har­vard admit­ted 185 out of 210 appli­cants; last year, it admit­ted 1,968 out of 57,435. As the coun­try indus­tri­al­ized, col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties changed accord­ing­ly: exist­ing ones grew, many new ones appeared, and a greater and greater per­cent­age of stu­dents sub­mit­ted to a process sur­round­ing ter­tiary edu­ca­tion that even­tu­al­ly came to seem machine-like itself.

To col­lege-apply­ing stu­dents today, the 1869 entrance exam may not look entire­ly unfa­mil­iar, at least to the extent that it asks ques­tions about math­e­mat­ics. Chances are, how­ev­er, that no cur­rent Har­vard hope­ful, no mat­ter how intel­li­gent, could actu­al­ly pass the test, giv­en the weight it places on clas­si­cal lan­guages. Through­out the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry and up until World War I, all young gen­tle­men got an edu­ca­tion in Latin and ancient Greek. But when both start­ed to van­ish from col­lege-admis­sions exams, espe­cial­ly after the SAT grew dom­i­nant in the nine­teen-for­ties, so did the imme­di­ate incen­tive to learn them. Reflect though that does the exi­gen­cies of a rapid­ly chang­ing tech­no­log­i­cal soci­ety, it also makes one won­der how much some­one with no grasp of Latin or Greek real­ly under­stands Eng­lish: a ques­tion to which the col­lege stu­dents of recent decades pro­vide dispir­it­ing answers.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Har­vard Lets You Take 133 Free Online Cours­es: Explore Cours­es on Jus­tice, Amer­i­can Gov­ern­ment, Lit­er­a­ture, Reli­gion, Comp­Sci & More

This Is What an 1869 MIT Entrance Exam Looks Like: Could You Have Passed the Test?

Can You Pass This Test Orig­i­nal­ly Giv­en to 8th Graders Liv­ing in Ken­tucky in 1912?

W.H. Auden’s 1941 Syl­labus Asked Stu­dents to Read 32 Great Lit­er­ary Works, Total­ing 6,000 Pages

Teacher Calls Jacques Derrida’s Col­lege Admis­sion Essay on Shake­speare “Quite Incom­pre­hen­si­ble” (1951)

Carl Sagan’s Syl­labus & Final Exam for His Course on Crit­i­cal Think­ing (Cor­nell, 1986)

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.

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How William S. Burroughs Used the Cut-Up Technique to Shut Down London’s First Espresso Bar (1972)

in Creativity, Film, Literature | June 10th, 2026

As we’ve not­ed before, the Eng­lish cof­fee­house has served as a stag­ing ground for rad­i­cal, some­times rev­o­lu­tion­ary social change. Cer­tain­ly this was the case dur­ing the Enlight­en­ment, as it was with the salons in France. And yet, by the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry it seems, cof­fee shops in Lon­don had grown scarcer and more hum­drum. That is until 1953 when the Moka Bar, the UK’s first Ital­ian espres­so bar, opened in Soho. On his blog The Great Wen, Peter Watts describes its arrival as “a momen­tous event”:

London’s first prop­er cof­fee shop—one equipped with a Gag­gia cof­fee machine—opened at 29 Frith Street. This was a place where teenagers too young for pubs could come and gath­er, and it is said by some that the intro­duc­tion of this cof­fee bar prompt­ed the youth cul­ture explo­sion that soon changed social life in Britain for­ev­er.

“By 1972,” Watts writes, “cof­fee bars were every­where and the teenage rev­o­lu­tion was firm­ly estab­lished.” Places like the Moka Bar might seem like the ide­al place for coun­ter­cul­tur­al maven William S. Bur­roughs—a Lon­don res­i­dent from the late six­ties to ear­ly seventies—to hob­nob with young dis­si­dents and out­siders. Bur­roughs, who so approv­ing­ly refers to the pos­si­bly apoc­ryphal anar­chist pirate colony of Lib­er­ta­tia in his Cities of the Red Night, would, one might think, appre­ci­ate the bud­ding anar­chism of British youth cul­ture, which would flower into punk soon enough.

But rather than join­ing the cof­fee bar scene, the can­tan­ker­ous Bur­roughs had tak­en to fre­quent­ing “plush gentlemen’s shops of the area, not to men­tion the ‘Dil­ly Boys,’ young male pros­ti­tutes who hus­tled for clients out­side the Regent Palace Hotel.”

And he had grown increas­ing­ly dis­il­lu­sioned with Lon­don, fum­ing, writes Ted Mor­gan in Bur­roughs’ biog­ra­phy Lit­er­ary Out­law, “at what he was pay­ing for his hole-in-the-wall apart­ment with a clos­et for a kitchen” and at the ris­ing price of util­i­ties. “Bur­roughs,” Mor­gan tells us, “began to feel that he was in ene­my ter­ri­to­ry.” And he thought the Moka cof­fee bar should pay the price for his indig­ni­ties.

There, “on sev­er­al occa­sions a snarling coun­ter­man had treat­ed him with out­ra­geous and unpro­voked dis­cour­tesy, and served him poi­so­nous cheese­cake that made him sick.” Bur­roughs “decid­ed to retal­i­ate by putting a curse on the place.” He chose a means of attack that he’d ear­li­er employed against the Church of Sci­en­tol­ogy, “turn­ing up… every day,” writes Watts, “tak­ing pho­tographs and mak­ing sound record­ings.” Then he would play them back a day or so lat­er on the street out­side the Moka. “The idea,” writes Mor­gan, “was to place the Moka Bar out of time. You played back a tape that had tak­en place two days ago and you super­im­posed it on what was hap­pen­ing now, which pulled them out of their time posi­tion.”

Bur­roughs also con­nect­ed the method to the Water­gate record­ings, the Gar­den of Eden, and the the­o­ries of Alfred Korzyb­s­ki. The trig­ger for the mag­i­cal oper­a­tion was, in his words, “play­back.” In a very strange essay called “Feed­back from Water­gate to the Gar­den of Eden,” from his col­lec­tion Elec­tron­ic Rev­o­lu­tion, Bur­roughs described his oper­a­tion in detail, a dis­rup­tion, he wrote, of a “con­trol sys­tem.”

Now to apply the 3 tape recorder anal­o­gy to this sim­ple oper­a­tion. Tape recorder 1 is the Moka Bar itself it is in pris­tine con­di­tion. Tape recorder 2 is my record­ings of the Moka Bar vicin­i­ty. These record­ings are access. Tape recorder 2 in the Gar­den of Eden was Eve made from Adam. So a record­ing made from the Moka Bar is a piece of the Moka Bar. The record­ing once made, this piece becomes autonomous and out of their con­trol. Tape recorder 3 is play­back. Adam expe­ri­ences shame when his dis­c­grace­ful behav­ior is played back to him by tape recorder 3 which is God. By play­ing back my record­ings to the Moka Bar when I want and with any changes I wish to make in the record­ings, I become God for this local. I effect them. They can­not affect me.

The the­o­ry made per­fect sense to Bur­roughs, who believed in a Mag­i­cal Uni­verse ruled by occult forces and who exper­i­ment­ed heav­i­ly with Sci­en­tol­ogy, Crow­ley-an Mag­ick, and the orgone ener­gy of Wil­helm Reich. The attack on the Moka worked, or at least Bur­roughs believed it did. “They are seething in there,” he wrote, “I have them and they know it.” On Octo­ber 30th, 1972  the estab­lish­ment closed its doors—perhaps a con­se­quence of those ris­ing rents that so irked the Beat writer—and the loca­tion became the Queens Snack Bar.

The audio-visu­al cut-up tech­nique Bur­roughs used in his attack against the Moka Bar was a method derived by Bur­roughs and Brion Gysin from their exper­i­ments with writ­ten “cut-ups,” and Bur­roughs applied it to film as well. At the top of the post, see an inter­pre­tive “med­i­ta­tion” based on Bur­roughs’ use of audio/visual “mag­i­cal weapons” and incor­po­rat­ing his record­ings. On YouTube, you can watch “The Cut Ups,” a short film Bur­roughs him­self made in 1966 with cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Antony Balch, a dis­ori­ent­ing illus­tra­tion of the cut up tech­nique.

Not lim­it­ed to attack­ing annoy­ing Lon­don cof­fee­house own­ers, Bur­roughs’ sup­pos­ed­ly mag­i­cal inter­ven­tions in real­i­ty were in fact the fullest expres­sion of his cre­ativ­i­ty. As Ted Mor­gan writes, “the sin­gle most impor­tant thing about Bur­roughs was his belief in the mag­i­cal uni­verse. The same impulse that led him to put out curs­es was, as he saw it, the source of his writ­ing.” Read much more about Bur­roughs’ the­o­ry and prac­tice in Matthew Levi Stevens’ essay “The Mag­i­cal Uni­verse of William S. Bur­roughs,” and hear the author him­self dis­course on the para­nor­mal, tape cut-ups, and much more in the lec­ture below from a writ­ing class he gave in June, 1986.

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How David Bowie, Kurt Cobain & Thom Yorke Write Songs With William Bur­roughs’ Cut-Up Tech­nique

When William S. Bur­roughs Joined Sci­en­tol­ogy (and His 1971 Book Denounc­ing It)

How to Jump­start Your Cre­ative Process with William S. Bur­roughs’ Cut-Up Tech­nique

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

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The Strange History of Lorem Ipsum: How Cicero’s Words Became the World’s Favorite Placeholder Text

in History, Technology | June 9th, 2026

Though sel­dom heard these days, the term “desk­top pub­lish­ing” once opened a great many eyes to the promise of the per­son­al com­put­er. It meant that one could cre­ate a pub­li­ca­tion with­out own­ing a press or con­tract­ing with an out­fit that did. Indeed, the whole process of writ­ing, design, and print­ing could take place on one’s desk, pro­vid­ed one had fur­nished it with the right com­put­er and acces­sories. From the mid-eight­ies through the ear­ly nineties, that meant an Apple Mac­in­tosh equipped with a Laser­Writer print­er and a copy of Aldus Page­Mak­er. For the first time, ordi­nary com­put­er users could cre­ate newslet­ters, brochures, and oth­er doc­u­ments assured that “what you see” onscreen is “what you get,” a fea­ture abbre­vi­at­ed as WYSIWYG.

That’s not the only strange-look­ing piece of text encoun­tered by ear­ly desk­top pub­lish­ers. Since Page­Mak­er enabled users to cre­ate a lay­out before even hav­ing the words to fill it, it need­ed dum­my text to occu­py the emp­ty spaces in order to pro­vide a rea­son­able approx­i­ma­tion of how the print­ed result would look. “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, con­secte­tur adip­isc­ing elit, sed do eius­mod tem­por inci­didunt ut labore et dolore magna ali­qua,” that dum­my text begins, and it con­tin­ues as long as its defined field allows, repeat­ing itself as nec­es­sary. It may resem­ble Latin, but any­one with a decent under­stand­ing of that lan­guage won’t have to read much before notic­ing how odd­ly man­gled it is. So where did this mys­te­ri­ous text, still famil­iar to all lay­out edi­tors and graph­ic design­ers, actu­al­ly come from?

Pur­su­ing an answer to that ques­tion in her new video above, Rab­bit Hole cre­ator Emi­ly Zhang talks to indi­vid­u­als with rel­e­vant expe­ri­ence includ­ing Lau­ra Per­ry, the for­mer cre­ative direc­tor at Aldus (a com­pa­ny named, inci­den­tal­ly, for the fif­teenth-cen­tu­ry Venet­ian print­er Aldus Manu­tius). It was she who first made Lorem ipsum dig­i­tal, hav­ing pre­vi­ous­ly used it as a whol­ly ana­log graph­ic design­er in the form of rub-off Letraset sheets. She man­u­al­ly entered it straight into Page­Mak­er off one such sheet, mak­ing occa­sion­al typos along the way. That was just anoth­er phase of trans­for­ma­tion Lorem ipsum had been under­go­ing since Cicero’s words were first bor­rowed — and chopped up, and mixed with frag­ments of oth­er lan­guages — to cre­ate what became the indus­try-stan­dard dum­my text.

In the process of fill­ing the gaps in this sto­ry, Zhang also talks to Richard McClin­tock, a pro­fes­sor of Latin long acknowl­edged as the pre­mier expert on Lorem ipsum. Ulti­mate­ly, she unearths a few truths that are new even to him, includ­ing an impor­tant one about the 1966 meet­ing at Letraset in which the idea was first float­ed of a sin­gle piece of dum­my text that could sub­sti­tute for most West­ern lan­guages. It was James Mosley, the high­ly knowl­edge­able head librar­i­an at the St. Bride Print­ing Library, who deliv­ered Letraset the Cicero quo­ta­tion orig­i­nal­ly known as Forum ipsum, “which had become gar­bled by more than one type­set­ter sit­ting at his bench since the mid-fif­teen-hun­dreds.” Like­ly to remain in use as long as human­i­ty puts words on pages — paper, dig­i­tal, or what­ev­er comes next — Lorem ipsum sure­ly has a few more forms to take.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sto­ry of Lorem Ipsum: How Scram­bled Text by Cicero Became Used by Type­set­ters Every­where

Explore a New Dig­i­tal Edi­tion of Print­ing Types, the Author­i­ta­tive His­to­ry of Print­ing & Typog­ra­phy from 1922

How Mag­a­zine Pages Were Cre­at­ed Before Com­put­ers: A Vet­er­an of the Lon­don Review of Books Demon­strates the Metic­u­lous, Man­u­al Process

The End of an Era: A Short Film About The Last Day of Hot Met­al Type­set­ting at The New York Times (1978)

Why Learn Latin?: 5 Videos Make a Com­pelling Case That the “Dead Lan­guage” Is an “Eter­nal Lan­guage”

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.

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How Humans Migrated Across The Globe Over 200,000 Years: An Animated Look

in History, Maps | June 9th, 2026

Cov­er­age of the refugee cri­sis peaked in 2015. By the end of the year, note researchers at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Bergen, “this was one of the hottest top­ics, not only for politi­cians, but for par­tic­i­pants in the pub­lic debate,” includ­ing far-right xeno­phobes giv­en mega­phones. What­ev­er their intent, Daniel Trilling argues at The Guardian, the explo­sion of refugee sto­ries had the effect of fram­ing “these new­ly arrived peo­ple as oth­ers, peo­ple from ‘over there,’ who had lit­tle to do with Europe itself and were strangers.”

Such a char­ac­ter­i­za­tion ignores the cru­cial con­text of Europe’s pres­ence in near­ly every part of the world over the past sev­er­al cen­turies. And it frames mass migra­tion as extra­or­di­nary, not the norm. The cri­sis aspect is real, the result of dan­ger­ous­ly accel­er­at­ed move­ment of cap­i­tal and cli­mate change. But mass move­ments of peo­ple seek­ing bet­ter con­di­tions, safe­ty, oppor­tu­ni­ty, etc. may be the old­est and most com­mon fea­ture of human his­to­ry, as the Sci­ence Insid­er video shows above.

The yel­low arrows that fly across the globe in the dra­mat­ic ani­ma­tion make it seem like ear­ly humans moved by bul­let train. But when con­se­quen­tial shifts in cli­mate occurred at a glacial pace—and economies were built on what peo­ple car­ried on their backs—mass migra­tions hap­pened over the span of thou­sands of years. Yet they hap­pened con­tin­u­ous­ly through­out the last 200,000 to 70,000 years of human his­to­ry, give or take. We may nev­er know what drove so many of our dis­tant ances­tors to spread around the world.

But how can we know what routes they took to get there? “Thanks to the amaz­ing work of anthro­pol­o­gists and pale­on­tol­o­gists like those work­ing on Nation­al Geographic’s Geno­graph­ic Project,” Sci­ence Insid­er explains, “we can begin to piece togeth­er the sto­ry of our ances­tors.” The Geno­graph­ic Project was launched by Nation­al Geo­graph­ic in 2005, “in col­lab­o­ra­tion with sci­en­tists and uni­ver­si­ties around the world.” Since then, it has col­lect­ed the genet­ic data of over 1 mil­lion peo­ple, “with a goal of reveal­ing pat­terns of human migra­tion.”

The project assures us it is “anony­mous, non­med­ical, and non­prof­it.” Par­tic­i­pants sub­mit­ted their own DNA with Nation­al Geographic’s “Geno” ances­try kits (and may still do so until next month). They can receive a “deep ances­try” report and cus­tomized migra­tion map; and they can learn how close­ly they are relat­ed to “his­tor­i­cal genius­es,” a cat­e­go­ry that, for some rea­son, includes Jesse James.

Do projects like these veer close to recre­at­ing the “race sci­ence” of pre­vi­ous cen­turies? Are they valid ways of recon­struct­ing the “human sto­ry” of ances­try, as Nation­al Geo­graph­ic puts it? Crit­ics like sci­ence jour­nal­ist Angela Sai­ni are skep­ti­cal. “DNA test­ing can­not tell you that,” she says in an inter­view on NPR, but it can “make us believe that iden­ti­ty is bio­log­i­cal, when iden­ti­ty is cul­tur­al.” Nation­al Geo­graph­ic seems to dis­avow asso­ci­a­tions between genet­ics and race, writ­ing, “sci­ence defines you by your DNA, soci­ety defines you by the col­or of your skin.” But it does so at the end of a video about a group of peo­ple bond­ing over their sim­i­lar fea­tures.

Despite the sig­nif­i­cance mod­ern humans have ascribed to vari­a­tions in phe­no­type, race is a cul­tur­al­ly defined cat­e­go­ry and not a sci­en­tif­ic one, argues Joseph L. Graves, pro­fes­sor of bio­log­i­cal sci­ences at the Joint School of Nanoscience and Nano­engi­neer­ing. “Every­thing we know about our genet­ics has proven that we are far more alike than we are dif­fer­ent. If more peo­ple under­stood that, it would be eas­i­er to debunk the myth that peo­ple of a cer­tain race are ‘nat­u­ral­ly’ one way or anoth­er,” or that refugees and asy­lum seek­ers are dan­ger­ous oth­ers instead of just like every oth­er human who has moved around the world over the last 200,000 years.

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Col­or­ful Ani­ma­tion Visu­al­izes 200 Years of Immi­gra­tion to the U.S. (1820-Present)

Where Did Human Beings Come From? 7 Mil­lion Years of Human Evo­lu­tion Visu­al­ized in Six Min­utes

Watch Ani­ma­tions Show­ing How Humans Migrat­ed Across the World Over the Past 60,000 Years

How the Human Pop­u­la­tion Reached 8 Bil­lion: An Ani­mat­ed Video Cov­ers 300,000 Years of His­to­ry in Four Min­utes

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

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The Official Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood YouTube Channel Goes Live: Watch Complete Episodes, Including the Very First

in Television | June 8th, 2026

A great many, and per­haps the major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans now between their late twen­ties and ear­ly six­ties, have spent time in Mis­ter Rogers’ neigh­bor­hood. My own peri­od of reg­u­lar vis­i­ta­tion would have been in the nine­teen-eight­ies, a decade when Fred Rogers intro­duced his preschool-age view­ers to guest stars from Lou Fer­rig­no, in and out of Incred­i­ble Hulk make­up, to a ten-year-old boy with spina bifi­da. He also took on geopo­lit­i­cal issues, up to and includ­ing mutu­al­ly assured nuclear destruc­tion, and social ones, as on the mem­o­rable “divorce week” of 1981. Such top­i­cal broad­casts were mixed in with re-runs pro­duced as far back as 1969, the year Mis­ter Rogers got the coun­try’s atten­tion by invit­ing Offi­cer Clem­mons to share his wad­ing pool.

What those of us then tun­ing in did­n’t see was any­thing from the first, black-and-white sea­son of Mis­ter Rogers’ Neigh­bor­hood, which com­prised an aston­ish­ing 130 episodes that aired in 1968 alone. You can watch the series pre­miere at the top of the post, just recent­ly uploaded onto the show’s new offi­cial chan­nel.

It may come as a shock to see a 39-year-old Mis­ter Rogers, whom most of us remem­ber as the embod­i­ment of avun­cu­lar­i­ty or even grand­fa­ther­li­ness. But what’s even more strik­ing, if unsur­pris­ing, is that his onscreen per­sona, with its dis­in­cli­na­tion to talk down to chil­dren, nev­er real­ly changed. That sure­ly owes to its appar­ent iden­ti­ty with his off­screen per­sona: as he liked to put it, “kids can spot a pho­ny a mile away.”

“Aside from clips and com­pi­la­tions,” writes the New York Times’ Sopan Deb, “the chan­nel will make a selec­tion of full-length episodes avail­able glob­al­ly for the first time as well as some that haven’t aired in sev­er­al decades on PBS sta­tions.” With the show’s 60th anniver­sary com­ing up the year after next, the time does seem right to make as many of its 895 episodes as pos­si­ble avail­able to a new gen­er­a­tion. As of now, the chan­nel also offers the episodes with Offi­cer Clem­mons and the pool, Koko the Goril­la, and the mes­mer­iz­ing look inside the cray­on fac­to­ry. There’s even the crossover between Mis­ter Rogers and Bill Nye the Sci­ence Guy from 1997, by which time the lat­ter had become a tele­vi­sion icon to us mil­len­ni­als. Though we prob­a­bly did­n’t catch his vis­it at the time, we can now keep it book­marked to show our own kids — assum­ing they don’t dis­cov­er it first.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mr. Rogers Takes Break­danc­ing Lessons from a 12-Year-Old (1985)

Mr. Rogers’ Nine Rules for Speak­ing to Chil­dren (1977)

Mis­ter Rogers Cre­ates a Prime Time TV Spe­cial to Help Par­ents Talk to Their Chil­dren About the Assas­si­na­tion of Robert F. Kennedy (1968)

Mr. Rogers Intro­duces Kids to Exper­i­men­tal Elec­tron­ic Music by Bruce Haack & Esther Nel­son (1968)

Mis­ter Rogers Accepts a Life­time Achieve­ment Award, and Helps You Thank Every­one Who Has Made a Dif­fer­ence in Your Life

Watch the First Episode of Sesame Street and 140 Oth­er Free Episodes

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.

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How Nick Drake’s “River Man” Has Captivated Generation after Generation of Listeners

in Music | June 8th, 2026

In 1999, Volk­swa­gen aired a tele­vi­sion com­mer­cial for the Golf Mk3 Cabrio. Deal­er­ships were soon inun­dat­ed with calls, as pop­u­lar cul­ture his­to­ry remem­bers it, but not from peo­ple inquir­ing about the car. Rather, they were des­per­ate to know the name of the song sound­track­ing the ad’s footage of a top-down night dri­ve to a house par­ty. For all they knew, it was a new sin­gle from an up-and-com­ing young man with an acoustic gui­tar and sen­si­tiv­i­ty exquis­ite enough to cut through the sound and fury of turn-of-the-mil­len­ni­um pop. In fact, the song had come out 27 years before, and the artist had been dead for 25 of them. Thus began the obscure Eng­lish singer-song­writer Nick Drake’s belat­ed ascent to star­dom.

“Pink Moon,” the song from the VW Spot (a late replace­ment for The Church’s eight­ies hit “Under the Milky Way”), was the title cut from Drake’s third and final album, which closed a record­ing career not even three years long. It had begun in 1969, with the debut Five Leaves Left. If lis­ten­ers of the late nineties curi­ous enough to pick it up — or, as had just become pos­si­ble, down­load it from file-shar­ing net­works — could hard­ly have been dis­ap­point­ed, they still would­n’t have been pre­pared for its sec­ond track, “Riv­er Man.”

Described by Ian Mac­Don­ald as “one of the sky-high clas­sics of post-war Eng­lish pop­u­lar music,” the song com­bines Drake’s haunt­ing­ly evoca­tive lyri­cism and uncon­ven­tion­al gui­tar tun­ing with a rich lay­er of orches­trat­ed strings that stops just short of cloy­ing, all in jazzy 5/4 time.

As music YouTu­ber Charles Cor­nell points out in the video at the top of the post, you’ll no doubt rec­og­nize that time sig­na­ture from Dave Brubeck­’s “Take Five,” which makes that high­ly unusu­al rhythm feel nat­ur­al. So does “Riv­er Man,” though the more close­ly you lis­ten to it, the more musi­cal­ly dar­ing it sounds, even if you don’t have the the­o­ret­i­cal lan­guage to explain it as Cor­nell does. There is, for exam­ple, no cho­rus, which could­n’t have helped its chances of radio air­play at the time, nor could the song’s somber and reflec­tive mood. “The coun­ter­cul­ture was car­ni­va­lesque, its opti­mism com­pul­so­ry,” Mac­Don­ald writes. “Drake saw deep­er.” It’s hard­ly implau­si­ble, in fact, to read the song as a Blakean and Bud­dhis­tic alle­go­ry of an indi­vid­ual faced with a choice between the con­crete, cycli­cal real­i­ty of human affairs and the unknown realms beyond.

Drake com­posed “Riv­er Man” dur­ing his brief time at Cam­bridge, and the books writ­ten about him quote acquain­tances from that peri­od describ­ing it as a remark­able step for­ward in his artis­tic evo­lu­tion. Dur­ing the Five Leaves Left ses­sions, he sang and played gui­tar live with the orches­tra, whose arrange­ments (by the band­leader Har­ry Robin­son, then known on British TV for his nov­el­ty band Lord Rock­ing­ham’s XI) filled space Drake had delib­er­ate­ly left in the com­po­si­tion. The strings, in oth­er words, weren’t an incon­gru­ous attempt at sweet­en­ing, as Phil Spec­tor would per­form on the Bea­t­les’ “The Long and Wind­ing Road” the fol­low­ing year, but an inte­gral part of the song. Drake’s solo per­for­mance of it on BBC Radio 2’s Night Ride (a broad­cast host­ed by none oth­er than John Peel) sounds cap­ti­vat­ing, but incom­plete. On the Five Leaves Left ver­sion, every ele­ment works togeth­er to make “Riv­er Man” endur­ing — and, in every sense, tran­scen­dent.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Doc­u­men­tary Intro­duc­tion to Nick Drake, Whose Haunt­ing & Influ­en­tial Songs Came Into the World 50 Years Ago Today

How John Lennon Wrote the Bea­t­les’ Best Song, “A Day in the Life”

How Joni Mitchell Wrote “Wood­stock,” the Song that Defined the Leg­endary Music Fes­ti­val, Even Though She Wasn’t There (1969)

How Grace Slick Wrote “White Rab­bit”: The 1960s Clas­sic Inspired by LSD, Lewis Car­roll, Miles Davis’ Sketch­es of Spain, and Hyp­o­crit­i­cal Par­ents

Paul Simon Tells the Sto­ry of How He Wrote “Bridge Over Trou­bled Water” (1970)

How a Fake Car­toon Band Made “Sug­ar Sug­ar” the Biggest Sell­ing Hit Sin­gle of 1969

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.

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What Happens When the Author Directs the Movie: How Robert Rodriguez Recruited Frank Miller to Co-Direct Sin City

in Comics/Cartoons, Film | June 5th, 2026

In the nine­teen-nineties, Quentin Taran­ti­no and Robert Rodriguez first col­lab­o­rat­ed on a movie. No, it was­n’t From Dusk Till Dawn, the Rodriguez-direct­ed crime-pic­ture-turned-hor­ror-com­e­dy in which Taran­ti­no plays George Clooney’s psy­chot­ic broth­er. It was an anthol­o­gy pic­ture called Four Rooms, whose sep­a­rate but inter­con­nect­ed sto­ries, all set in the same hotel on New Year’s Eve, were direct­ed by an all-star line­up of the “Indiewood” auteurs of 1995: Taran­ti­no, Rodriguez, Alli­son Anders, and Alexan­dre Rock­well. Rodriguez jumped at the chance to do short-form work and col­lab­o­rate with friends, but alas, the con­cept inspired much more enthu­si­asm from movie­go­ers than the result, to say noth­ing of the crit­ics’ judg­ment.

“Antholo­gies nev­er work,” Rodriguez said last year dur­ing an inter­view with Lex Frid­man. Even with the best film­mak­ers par­tic­i­pat­ing, “they bomb because peo­ple can’t quite wrap their head around it”: they feel like the movie keeps start­ing over and over again. Yet in the full­ness of time, Four Rooms took his career up a lev­el, not down.

“I real­ly want this anthol­o­gy thing to work,” he says, explain­ing his mind­set about a decade after that film’s fail­ure. “What if it’s three sto­ries, like a three-act struc­ture, not four, same direc­tor, not four dif­fer­ent direc­tors?” After all, “I had already done one and fig­ured out how I could do it bet­ter.” The result was Sin City, from 2005, his adap­ta­tion of Frank Miller’s acclaimed noir com­ic-book series co-direct­ed with Miller him­self.

By now, com­ic-book movies, or at least movies that make use of intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty drawn from com­ic books, have long been com­mon­place. What Rodriguez and Miller made two decades ago was some­thing dif­fer­ent: a film that looked and felt just like its source mate­r­i­al. As Dan­ny Boyd explains in the Cin­e­maS­tix video at the top of the post, Sin City was “not an adap­ta­tion, but a trans­la­tion,” which Rodriguez thought of less as bring­ing the page to the screen than “tak­ing cin­e­ma and turn­ing it into a book.” Iron­i­cal­ly, Miller had meant to avoid the whole Hol­ly­wood devel­op­ment process by delib­er­ate­ly mak­ing the orig­i­nal comics as un-filmable as pos­si­ble — he just had­n’t reck­oned on what tech­nol­o­gy and Rodriguez’s D.I.Y. ethos would even­tu­al­ly make pos­si­ble.

Hav­ing famous­ly bro­ken into Hol­ly­wood with his debut fea­ture El Mari­achi, the “$7,000 movie” on which he per­formed all tech­ni­cal duties, Rodriguez under­stood how dig­i­tal film­mak­ing could empow­er indi­vid­ual cre­ators. The green screen, which enables the place­ment of real actors into any set­ting imag­in­able, promised him a way to re-cre­ate the “lay­ers of unre­al­i­ty” that con­sti­tute a flam­boy­ant­ly styl­ized work of ultra-noir like Sin City. In the video just above, Boyd shows us how green-screen shoot­ing made it pos­si­ble to real­ize the comic’s elab­o­rate aes­thet­ic in motion, cre­at­ing not a cheap sub­sti­tute for real sets and loca­tions, as has since become dispir­it­ing­ly com­mon in Hol­ly­wood, but anoth­er real­i­ty alto­geth­er. And if you can bring Quentin Taran­ti­no in to guest-direct a sequence, as Rodriguez did, so much the bet­ter.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Direc­tor Robert Rodriguez Teach­es The Basics of Film­mak­ing in Under 10 Min­utes

How the “Mar­veliza­tion” of Cin­e­ma Accel­er­ates the Decline of Film­mak­ing

When a Mod­ern Direc­tor Makes a Fake Old Movie: A Video Essay on David Fincher’s Mank

The Essen­tial Ele­ments of Film Noir Explained in One Grand Info­graph­ic

Every Spi­der-Man Movie and TV Show Explained By Kevin Smith

Niger­ian Teenagers Are Mak­ing Slick Sci Fi Films With Their Smart­phones

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.

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Hear the First Book of Homer’s Iliad Read Aloud in the Original Greek

in History, Language, Literature | June 4th, 2026

You can, of course, learn the Greek lan­guage as it’s spo­ken today. You can also learn Greek as it was spo­ken in antiq­ui­ty — and as it was, until fair­ly recent­ly in his­tor­i­cal time, taught to stu­dents in the mod­ern West. But it’s a fair­ly dif­fer­ent endeav­or again to learn Greek as Homer spoke it. The fact of the mat­ter is that no human being ever real­ly spoke like Achilles, Agamem­non, Odysseus, Pene­lope, or any of the oth­er char­ac­ters in the Ili­ad and Odyssey. Home­r’s many lit­er­ary achieve­ments through these works include the cre­ation and com­mand of a kind of syn­the­sized poet­ic Greek, com­bin­ing qual­i­ties of region­al Ion­ic and Aeolic dialects with var­i­ous forms and expres­sions that were out­dat­ed even in the eighth cen­tu­ry BC. If it served the meter, Homer used it.

Need­less to say, when most of us attempt to read Homer aloud in the orig­i­nal, we get it all or most­ly wrong, even if we’re famil­iar with mod­ern Greek. We’d have to spend a long time indeed in the world of clas­si­cists before hear­ing a more accu­rate record­ing than the one above, deliv­ered by a YouTu­ber called Thomas Whichel­lo.

On his chan­nel, Whichel­lo spe­cial­izes in per­form­ing ven­er­a­ble lit­er­ary texts with a pro­nun­ci­a­tion and cadence as close to peri­od-accu­rate as pos­si­ble, often in the orig­i­nal lan­guage, some­times with his own musi­cal accom­pa­ni­ment. He’s done read­ings of the Bible, Shake­speare, Keats, and Wilde, but none so far has been so pop­u­lar as his ren­di­tion of the first book of the Ili­ad, accom­pa­nied by sub­ti­tles of Home­r’s text and an Eng­lish trans­la­tion.

A Greek here in 2026 with no par­tic­u­lar knowl­edge of the clas­si­cal lan­guage may under­stand a quar­ter of the indi­vid­ual words Whichel­lo uses, and maybe half of them in cer­tain pas­sages. Actu­al­ly being able to fol­low the sto­ry, how­ev­er, is anoth­er mat­ter. Still, you can get a sur­pris­ing amount out of the video even if you under­stand noth­ing at all, since Whichel­lo is aim­ing not just for lin­guis­tic accu­ra­cy, but also emo­tion­al res­o­nance in his deliv­ery. Ignore his glass­es, but­ton-down shirt, micro­phone, and win­dow frame, and you could almost be sit­ting around a camp­fire with him near­ly 30 cen­turies ago. Note, also, that the com­menters include gen­uine clas­si­cists who call his the best read­ing they’ve ever heard — as well as view­ers, cre­den­tialed or oth­er­wise, eager to hear him name all those mighty Achaean ships in Book 2.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch All 18,225 Lines of the Ili­ad Read by 66 Actors in a Marathon Event For an Audi­ence of 50,000

Hear What Homer’s Odyssey Sound­ed Like When Sung in the Orig­i­nal Ancient Greek

Learn Ancient Greek in 118 Free Lessons: A Free Online Course from Bran­deis & Har­vard

The Ancient Greeks: A Free Online Course from Wes­leyan Uni­ver­si­ty

Lis­ten to The Epic of Gil­gamesh Being Read in its Orig­i­nal Ancient Lan­guage, Akka­di­an

Hear Beowulf and Gawain and the Green Knight Read in Their Orig­i­nal Old and Mid­dle Eng­lish by an MIT Medieval­ist

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.

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How Conflict Helped Create Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” and Its Legendary Guitar Solos

in Music | June 3rd, 2026

Even among the most acclaimed albums ever record­ed, not a sin­gle one is per­fect. That goes more so for the releas­es of what I call the “hero­ic age of the album,” which enjoyed its zenith around the late sev­en­ties. Not coin­ci­den­tal­ly, 1979 was the year that Pink Floyd put out The Wall, a rock opera whose sprawl across two discs deals with themes rang­ing from the bomb­ings of the Sec­ond World War to drug depen­den­cy to fas­cist impuls­es to the iso­la­tion of super­star­dom. This ambi­tion was repaid: The Wall soon became the best-sell­ing dou­ble album of all time, despite hav­ing been received with at least a mea­sure of ambiva­lence over the grand­ness, or per­haps grandios­i­ty, of the scale of its pro­duc­tion and the tone of its nar­ra­tive.

Yet those few pre­pared to call The Wall an artis­tic fail­ure must nev­er­the­less acknowl­edge how much impres­sive work it real­ly does con­tain. Of its pop­u­lar­ly appre­ci­at­ed achieve­ments, per­haps the most mem­o­rable is David Gilmour’s gui­tar solo, or rather the gui­tar solos, on “Com­fort­ably Numb,” a song about being med­ical­ly revived from a sub­stance-induced stu­por moments before giv­ing a con­cert.

They cer­tain­ly stuck in my own head in sev­enth grade, when my music teacher assigned our class term paper ana­lyz­ing the album, and kept pop­ping back into it over the sub­se­quent decades. “His play­ing is so lyri­cal,” says YouTu­ber David Hart­ley in his new video about the mak­ing of “Com­fort­ably Numb.” “The way he plays each note is in a way that you can almost sing it, and the way he uses phras­es is so sim­ple, and so beau­ti­ful.”

These solos were record­ed in a con­text of less-than-smooth sail­ing for the Floyd: as we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, “Com­fort­ably Numb” was the prod­uct of anoth­er argu­ment punc­tu­at­ing the long-fray­ing part­ner­ship between Gilmour and lead singer Roger Waters, for whom The Wall was a way of ren­der­ing his own life expe­ri­ences and per­cep­tions in musi­cal form. But as some­times hap­pens, con­flict — in this case, between two com­pet­ing and stark­ly dif­fer­ent con­cepts of the song, whose evo­lu­tion Hart­ley explains with demo record­ings and inter­view clips — pro­duced a greater result than any one artist’s vision. It all arrives at what Hart­ley calls “pos­si­bly the great­est gui­tar solo of all time,” which clos­es out side three, and indeed the most fruit­ful era of Gilmour and Waters’ col­lab­o­ra­tion. Even those who can’t take The Wall too seri­ous­ly have to admit that life isn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly easy for a rock star, much less for two of them in the same stu­dio.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Pink Floyd’s “Com­fort­ably Numb” Was Born From an Argu­ment Between Roger Waters & David Gilmour

The His­to­ry of the Elec­tric Gui­tar Solo: A Sev­en-Part Series

Pink Floyd Songs Played Splen­did­ly on a Harp Gui­tar: “Com­fort­ably Numb,” “Wish You Were Here” & More

Oxford Sci­en­tist Explains the Physics of Play­ing Elec­tric Gui­tar Solos

David Gilmour & David Bowie Sing “Com­fort­ably Numb” Live (2006)

The Evo­lu­tion of the Rock Gui­tar Solo: 28 Solos, Span­ning 50 Years, Played in 6 Fun Min­utes

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.

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Kurt Vonnegut Diagrams the Shape of All Stories in a Master’s Thesis Rejected by U. Chicago

in Design, Literature, Writing | June 3rd, 2026

“What has been my pret­ti­est con­tri­bu­tion to the cul­ture?” asked Kurt Von­negut in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy Palm Sun­day. His answer? His master’s the­sis in anthro­pol­o­gy for the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go, “which was reject­ed because it was so sim­ple and looked like too much fun.” The ele­gant sim­plic­i­ty and play­ful­ness of Vonnegut’s idea is exact­ly its endur­ing appeal. The idea is so sim­ple, in fact, that Von­negut sums the whole thing up in one ele­gant sen­tence: “The fun­da­men­tal idea is that sto­ries have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper, and that the shape of a giv­en society’s sto­ries is at least as inter­est­ing as the shape of its pots or spear­heads.” In 2011, we fea­tured the video below of Von­negut explain­ing his the­o­ry, “The Shapes of Sto­ries.” We can add to the dry wit of his les­son the pic­to-info­graph­ic by graph­ic design­er Maya Eil­am above, which strik­ing­ly illus­trates, with exam­ples, the var­i­ous sto­ry shapes Von­negut described in his the­sis. (Read a con­densed ver­sion here.)

The pre­sen­ter who intro­duces Von­negut’s short lec­ture tells us that “his sin­gu­lar view of the world applies not just to his sto­ries and char­ac­ters but to some of his the­o­ries as well.” This I would affirm. When it comes to puz­zling out the import of a sto­ry I’ve just read, the last per­son I usu­al­ly turn to is the author. But when it comes to what fic­tion is and does in gen­er­al, I want to hear it from writ­ers of fic­tion. Some of the most endur­ing lit­er­ary fig­ures are expert writ­ers on writ­ing. Von­negut, a mas­ter com­mu­ni­ca­tor, ranks very high­ly among them. Does it do him a dis­ser­vice to con­dense his ideas into what look like high-res, low-read­abil­i­ty work­place safe­ty graph­ics? On the con­trary, I think.

Though the design may be a lit­tle slick for Von­negut’s unapolo­get­i­cal­ly indus­tri­al approach, he’d have appre­ci­at­ed the slight­ly corny, slight­ly macabre boil­er­plate iconog­ra­phy. His work turns a sus­pi­cious eye on over­com­pli­cat­ed pos­tur­ing and cham­pi­ons unsen­ti­men­tal, Mid­west­ern direct­ness. Vonnegut’s short, trade pub­li­ca­tion essay, “How to Write With Style,” is as suc­cinct and prac­ti­cal a state­ment on the sub­ject in exis­tence. One will encounter no more ruth­less­ly effi­cient list than his “Eight Rules for Writ­ing Fic­tion.” But it’s in his “Shapes of Sto­ries” the­o­ry that I find the most insight into what fic­tion does, in bril­liant­ly sim­ple and fun­ny ways that any­one can appre­ci­ate.

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

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Kurt Von­negut Explains “How to Write With Style”

The Shape of A Sto­ry: Writ­ing Tips from Kurt Von­negut

Kurt Von­negut Offers 8 Tips on How to Write Good Short Sto­ries

Kurt Von­negut: Where Do I Get My Ideas From? My Dis­gust with Civ­i­liza­tion

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

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An Introduction to the Islamic World: 1,000 Years of History in 19 Minutes

in History, Religion | June 2nd, 2026

Ref­er­ences to Islam in major media can make it sound mono­lith­ic and eter­nal. But it’s actu­al­ly a much younger and less uni­fied phe­nom­e­non than many of us imag­ine, espe­cial­ly if we hap­pen to live out­side the Mid­dle East. As a reli­gion, it dates back “only” to the sev­enth cen­tu­ry, when it was found­ed by the Prophet Muham­mad. As an engine of large-scale civ­i­liza­tion, Islam took a bit longer to come into its own, and it has­n’t stopped under­go­ing divi­sions, trans­for­ma­tions, declines, and rebirths since. Here on Open Cul­ture, we recent­ly fea­tured a video from YouTube chan­nel How So cov­er­ing 1,000 years of medieval Euro­pean his­to­ry in 20 min­utes. The one above does the same thing for the Islam­ic world’s first mil­len­ni­um, end­ing with the rise of the Ottoman Empire.

After he unit­ed the for­mer­ly poly­the­is­tic Arab tribes under his new faith, Muham­mad lived for a decade longer. His death in the year 632 marked the last time that every believ­er in Islam would have been on the same page. It was at that point that the title caliph, or suc­ces­sor, was defined, and the first four caliphs after Muham­mad held pow­er for thir­ty years, the peri­od in which the first Mus­lim state emerged.

The caliphate, as their ter­ri­to­ry was called, expand­ed wide­ly across and out of the Ara­bi­an Penin­su­la, into the ter­ri­to­ries of the Byzan­tine and Sas­san­ian empires. Sup­port­ers of the ear­ly caliph Ali ibn Abi Tal­ib argued that he was the true heir to Islam, and detrac­tors that he was­n’t. Even­tu­al­ly, the for­mer group became known as the Shias, and the lat­ter as the Sun­nis, the two sides of a schism of which prac­ti­cal­ly every­one today has heard.

Less­er known to the gen­er­al pub­lic are the Umayyads, Abbasids, Buyids, and Fatimids, all of them major play­ers in the con­tin­u­ing expan­sion of Islam well into the Mid­dle Ages. But the still-famil­iar place names of Dam­as­cus, Jerusalem, Bagh­dad, and Con­stan­tino­ple (or, as we know it, Istan­bul) are just as impor­tant in these chap­ters of the sto­ry of Islam, and with­out under­stand­ing that reli­gion, it’s impos­si­ble to under­stand the diverse forms that civ­i­liza­tion has tak­en in those places and oth­ers in the wider region of the world around them. The cri­sis of author­i­ty that began set­ting in after Muham­mad’s death has, in some sense, per­sist­ed for near­ly four­teen cen­turies now, more than long enough to have become a defin­ing char­ac­ter­is­tic of the Islam­ic world. What shape its soci­eties will take over the next mil­len­ni­um, it would sure­ly take a prophet to know.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Birth and Rapid Rise of Islam, Ani­mat­ed (622‑1453)

500+ Beau­ti­ful Man­u­scripts from the Islam­ic World Now Dig­i­tized & Free to Down­load

How Medieval Islam­ic Engi­neer­ing Brought Water to the Alham­braThe Com­plex Geom­e­try of Islam­ic Art & Design: A Short Intro­duc­tion

The World Map That Intro­duced Sci­en­tif­ic Map­mak­ing to the Medieval Islam­ic World (1154 AD)

Learn Islam­ic & Indi­an Phi­los­o­phy with 107 Episodes of the His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps Pod­cast

1,000 Years of Medieval Euro­pean His­to­ry in 20 Min­utes

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.

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