Ask around for what everyone knows about Istanbul (other than that it used to be called Constantinople), and you’ll find that the presence of Hagia Sophia there comes right to many a mind. Less likely to be mentioned is its proneness to earthquakes, though it tends to rank just below Tokyo on lists of cities under the greatest threat from fault lines below. These two characteristics turn out to have a connection, manifest in the ongoing seismic retrofitting of Istanbul’s symbolic cathedral-turned-mosque-turned-museum turned-mosque-again. Hagia Sophia is one of the most celebrated religious buildings standing; keeping it that way requires a serious engineering effort, as explained in the new B1M video above.
Since it was first built in the fourth century, Hagia Sophia has actually sustained severe earthquake damage quite a few times, including a complete collapse of its cupola in the year 558 and partial collapses in the tenth and fourteenth centuries. The construction of its famous central dome, along with the smaller sub-domes that support it, gets a section of its own in the video.
Host Fred Mills also gives due mention to the eight green marble columns that support the upper floors of the cathedral, thought to have been recycled from the ruins of the Temple of Artemis (one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World), and the red stone set into the floor on which emperors were once crowned that would have been brought in from the Egyptian desert.
In these and other respects, Hagia Sophia isn’t just a site of pilgrimage and worship, but also a veritable built record of centuries upon centuries of Roman, Greek, Christian, and Islamic civilization. As evidenced by the scaffolding currently up to facilitate the project of readying it for the inevitable coming of the big one — or rather, the bigger one — the structure continues to change with time, though our era has an especially strong concern for preserving what have by now become historical features. Hence the efforts now being put into restoration: of the dome, naturally, but also of the floors, columns, and mosaics. If all goes well, Hagia Sophia will continue to stand as the most striking structure in Istanbul’s already dramatic urban and geographical setting for another millennium and a half, incorporating history all the while.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks 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.
Admit it, your list of favorite Bowie songs is full of the big hits. Hell, maybe it’s all hits; there’s no shame in that. Digging deep into the crates will yield many an overlooked surprise, many a subtle sleeper, cut-up classic, and electronic experiment. But if all you’ve got is Changesbowie—the 1990 compilation that became, for some generations, a definitive statement of his career—you’ve still got a collection of songs the likes of which have never been heard before or since in modern pop.
Completists may grouch, but even resident Bowie scholars/local record store clerks have an “Ashes to Ashes,” “’Heroes’,” “Changes,” or “Modern Love” in their top ten. Whether ardent or casual fans, we connect with Bowie’s music through milestones, both in his career and in our own lives. This truth has been exploited. In 2008, Mike Schiller at PopMatters bemoaned the fact that almost 20 Bowie compilation albums had been released, a few of which “don’t really seem to court any greater purpose whatsoever.”
Given this surfeit of Bowie compilations on the market, Schiller’s initial groaning reaction to news of yet another (“Oh, good Lord. Another David Bowie collection?”) seems apposite. Except this collection, iSELECT: BOWIE, released in 2008 to readers of the U.K.’s Mail on Sunday, then later in an official CDand digital edition, “is actually something special.” Bowie “picked the tracklist himself. Even more than that, the tracklist actually looks like something he’d have picked himself, rather than having a manager or publicist pick it for him.”
iSELECT: BOWIE
1. “Life On Mars?” (from the album Hunky Dory)
2. “Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing” (from the album Diamond Dogs)
3. “The Bewlay Brothers” (from the album Hunky Dory)
4. “Lady Grinning Soul” (from the album Aladdin Sane)
5. “Win” (from the album Young Americans)
6. “Some Are” (currently exclusive to this compilation)
7. “Teenage Wildlife” (from the album Scary Monsters)
8. “Repetition” (from the album Lodger)
9. “Fantastic Voyage” (from the album Lodger)
10. “Loving The Alien” (from the album Tonight)
11. “Time Will Crawl (MM Remix)” (new remix by David Bowie)
12. “Hang On To Yourself [live]” (from the album Live Santa Monica ’72)
See the full tracklist above and hear a playlist of his picks at the top. If we put all our lists of favorites together, we might see a very high percentage of “Life on Mars?” picks. We’re in excellent company; it’s Bowie’s number one favorite song of his. But how many of his other picks might we choose? The eight-and-a-half minute “Sweet Thing”/”Candidate”/”Sweet Thing (Reprise)” from Diamond Dogs? “Win” from Young Americans or “The Bewlay Brothers” from Hunky Dory?
Aside from “Life on Mars?” and the far lesser-collected “Loving the Alien” and “Time Will Crawl,” none of his twelve selections were released as singles. There are no songs from two of the most acclaimed Bowie albums, Low and ’Heroes’, unless we count “Some Are” a bonus track included on the Low 1991 rerelease. There are two tracks from Lodger, the third and least accessible of his vaunted Berlin trilogy, and only one selection from Ziggy Stardust, and it ain’t “Ziggy Stardust.”
If anyone else handed you this list of favorite Bowie tracks, you’d be skeptical. Who puts “Hang On To Yourself” (Live Santa Monica ’72) above any of the studio tracks on that classic 1972 breakout album? David Bowie, that’s who. And who knows, if you’d asked him the day before or after, he might have picked twelve different songs. There’s no telling how seriously he took the exercise, but in the newspaper release, he did “casually [pen] his inspirations for the songs and the recording processes behind them,” notes Allmusic’s Jason Lymangrover.
On his choice of “Teenage Wildlife,” for example, Bowie commented: “So it’s late morning and I’m thinking, ‘New song and a fresh approach. I know. I’m going to do a Ronnie Spector. Oh yes I am. Ersatz just for one day.’ And I did and here it is. Bless. I’m still very enamoured of this song and would give you two ‘Modern Love’s for it anytime…” Bowie got to experience his own music in a way no one else could. iSELECT: BOWIEgets behind the greatest hits collections for a glimpse at the way he heard and remembered his catalogue.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2019.
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.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks 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.
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.
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.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks 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.
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.
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.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks 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 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.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks 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 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.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks 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.
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.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks 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 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 Wallsoon 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.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks 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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