The Outspoken Ayn Rand Interviewed by Mike Wallace (1959)

in Philosophy, Television | June 6th, 2013

Yes­ter­day we fea­tured Alain de Bot­ton’s tele­vi­sion broad­cast on the phi­los­o­phy of Friedrich Niet­zsche. Today, we fea­ture anoth­er, ear­li­er tele­vi­sion broad­cast on a much more recent­ly active philoso­pher: Mike Wal­lace’s 1959 inter­view of Ayn Rand, writer and founder of the school of thought known as Objec­tivism. But should we real­ly call Rand, who achieved most of her fame with nov­els like The Foun­tain­head and Atlas Shrugged, a philoso­pher? Most of us come to know her through her fic­tion, and many of us form our opin­ions of her based on the divi­sive, cap­i­tal­ism-lov­ing, reli­gion-hat­ing pub­lic per­sona she care­ful­ly craft­ed. Just as Niet­zsche had his ideas about how indi­vid­ual human beings could real­ize their poten­tial by endur­ing hard­ship, Rand has hers, all to do with using applied rea­son to pur­sue one’s own inter­ests.

Main­stream, CBS-watch­ing Amer­i­ca got quite an intro­duc­tion to this and oth­er tenets of Objec­tivism from this install­ment in what Mike Wal­lace calls a “gallery of col­or­ful peo­ple.” The inter­view­er, in the allot­ted half-hour, probes as many Ran­di­an prin­ci­ples as pos­si­ble, espe­cial­ly those against altru­ism and self-sac­ri­fice. “What’s wrong with lov­ing your fel­low man?” Wal­lace asks, and Rand responds with argu­ments the likes of which view­ers may nev­er have heard before: “When you are asked to love every­body indis­crim­i­nate­ly, that is to love peo­ple with­out any stan­dard, to love them regard­less of whether they have any val­ue or virtue, you are asked to love nobody.” Does Ayn Rand still offer the brac­ing cure for a rud­der­less, mealy-mouthed Amer­i­ca which has for­got­ten what’s what? Or does her phi­los­o­phy ulti­mate­ly turn out to be too sim­ple — too sim­ple to engage with, and too sim­ple to improve our soci­ety? The debate con­tin­ues today, with no sign of res­o­lu­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ayn Rand’s Phi­los­o­phy and Her Resur­gence in 2012: A Quick Primer by Stan­ford His­to­ri­an Jen­nifer Burns

Ayn Rand Talks Athe­ism with Phil Don­ahue

The Ayn Rand Guide to Romance

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Bauhaus, Modernism & Other Design Movements Explained by New Animated Video Series

in Architecture, Art, Design | June 5th, 2013

UK’s Open Uni­ver­si­ty has devel­oped a fun way to mar­ket their design cours­es: a series of six short ani­ma­tions called “Design in a Nut­shell” that briefly sur­vey impor­tant move­ments in the arts and architecture—from the late-nine­teenth cen­tu­ry Goth­ic Revival to late-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry Post­mo­d­er­mism. While the for­mer looked far into the past, seek­ing to pre­serve tra­di­tion, the lat­ter looked every­where, glee­ful­ly dis­man­tling, recy­cling, and recom­bin­ing frag­ment­ed and irrecov­er­able his­to­ries.

Between the two extremes, three inter-relat­ed post-WWI move­ments sought to make peace with the indus­tri­al present and design for a har­mo­nious future. The first one fea­tured, the Bauhaus move­ment (above)—founded in Weimar, Ger­many by Wal­ter Gropius in 1919—integrated the fine arts and indus­tri­al design into one school. Famous teach­ers includ­ed artists Paul Klee and Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky. Bauhaus designs per­me­ate the larg­er move­ment known as Mod­ernism.

The ani­ma­tion above gives us the briefest gist of Mod­ernism, a sweep­ing umbrel­la term for a host of rad­i­cal ‑isms in the arts, lit­er­a­ture, design, and architecture—impressionism, cubism, fau­vism, futur­ism, bru­tal­ism, sur­re­al­ism…. Euro­pean and Amer­i­can artists turned their back on the old-world past after the mass slaugh­ter of World War One. Not all Mod­ernists found solace in the break­down of the old order. Writ­ers like T.S. Eliot found much rea­son to despair. But design­ers like Eero Saari­nen and the hus­band and wife team Charles and Ray Eames embraced indus­tri­al tech­niques and mass pro­duc­tion to cre­ate for­ward-look­ing, min­i­mal­ist fur­ni­ture and build­ings that still define the way we live now.

The episode above, “Amer­i­can Indus­tri­al Design,” describes how indus­tri­al design­ers made inno­v­a­tive use of new mate­ri­als and pro­duc­tion meth­ods to cre­ate sleek, stream­lined prod­ucts that rein­vig­o­rat­ed the Amer­i­can mar­ket in the midst of the Great Depres­sion. Design­ers like Nor­man Bel Ged­des cre­at­ed a futur­is­tic land­scape that inspired faith in tech­no­log­i­cal progress, even as much of the coun­try still lived on strug­gling farms.

Bel Ged­des’ most notable achieve­ment was his design of the “Futu­ra­ma” ride (which gave the ani­mat­ed show its name) at the 1939–40 World’s Fair. Part of the Gen­er­al Motors exhib­it, “Futu­ra­ma” whisked rid­ers past detailed minia­tures of “the world of tomor­row.” The opti­mism of some Mod­ernist design­ers would be shat­tered by the tech­no­log­i­cal hor­rors of World War Two. But for a few brief decades, the future looked entire­ly man­age­able with the right designs, tech­niques, mate­ri­als, and savvy mar­ket­ing.

You can find all six videos appear­ing in the Design in a Nut­shell series on YouTube.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The ABC of Archi­tects: An Ani­mat­ed Flip­book of Famous Archi­tects and Their Best-Known Build­ings

Charles & Ray Eames’ Icon­ic Film Pow­ers of Ten (1977) and the Less­er-Known Pro­to­type from 1968

Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky Caught in the Act of Cre­ation, 1926

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Philip Roth Reads “In Memory of a Friend, Teacher & Mentor” (A Free Download Benefiting a Public Library)

in Audio Books, Life, Literature | June 5th, 2013

roth reading

Philip Roth announced his retire­ment from the writ­ing life last fall, a few months shy of his 80th birth­day. Now, on a com­put­er in his New York City apart­ment, hangs a Post-It note that reads, “The strug­gle with writ­ing is over.” There won’t be anoth­er nov­el. There won’t be a 29th.

Admir­ers of Philip Roth may have to set­tle for the occa­sion­al odd pub­li­ca­tion, like the eulo­gy Roth pub­lished in the New York Times in April, when his high school teacher and long-time friend passed away. His name was Bob Lowen­stein. He taught at Wee­quahic High School in Newark, New Jer­sey, and Roth came to know him like this:

Bob was my home­room teacher. This meant that I saw him first thing in the morn­ing, every sin­gle day of the school year. I was nev­er to take a lan­guage course with him — I had Made­moi­selle Glucks­man for French and Señori­ta Baleroso for Span­ish — but I didn’t for­get him. Who at Wee­quahic did? Con­se­quent­ly, when it came his turn to be mauled in Congress’s anti-Com­mu­nist cru­sade of the 1940s and 1950s, I fol­lowed his fate as best I could in the sto­ries that I had my par­ents clip from the Newark news­pa­pers and mail to me.

I don’t remem­ber how we came togeth­er again around 1990, about 40 years after I’d grad­u­at­ed Wee­quahic High. I was back in Amer­i­ca from hav­ing lived large­ly abroad for some 12 years, and either I wrote to him about some­thing or he wrote to me about some­thing and we met for lunch at Zel­da and his house in West Orange. In the spir­it of Bob Lowen­stein, I will put the mat­ter in plain lan­guage, direct­ly as I can: I believe we fell in love with each oth­er.

In recent weeks, Roth vis­it­ed the head­quar­ters of Audible.com — also based in Newark, New Jer­sey — and record­ed an audio ver­sion of his trib­ute. You can down­load it for free at Audi­ble (or hear an excerpt below), and, for every down­load, Audi­ble will donate $1 to the Newark Pub­lic Library, cap­ping at $25,000. The down­load requires reg­is­ter­ing with Audi­ble.

Sep­a­rate­ly, if you want to down­load a nov­el by Philip Roth, you can always head over to Audible.com and reg­is­ter for a 30-day free tri­al. You can down­load any audio­book for free. Then, when the tri­al is over, you can con­tin­ue your Audi­ble sub­scrip­tion (as I do — I love the ser­vice), or can­cel it, and still keep the audio book. And, by the way, when­ev­er some­one signs up for a free tri­al, it helps sup­port Open Cul­ture. Also find more great reads in our col­lec­tion of Free Audio Books.

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Does Math Objectively Exist, or Is It a Human Creation? A New PBS Video Explores a Timeless Question

in Math, Philosophy | June 5th, 2013

In a famous scene from Boswell’s Life of Samuel John­son, the biog­ra­ph­er and his sub­ject come to dis­cuss the bizarre the­o­ries of Bish­op Berke­ley, who posit­ed that every­thing is immaterial—nothing has any real exis­tence; it’s all just ide­al con­cepts held togeth­er by the mind of God. If God should lose his mind or fall asleep or die, every­thing would fall to pieces or cease to exist. Boswell insists there’s no way to refute the idea. John­son, kick­ing a large stone with such force that his foot rebounds, cries, “I refute it thus.”

Johnson’s lit­tle demon­stra­tion doesn’t actu­al­ly refute Berkeley’s rad­i­cal ide­al­ism. It’s a conun­drum still with us, like Plato’s Euthy­phro stumper, which asks whether the rules gov­ern­ing human behav­ior exist inde­pen­dent­ly of the gods, who sim­ply enforce them, or whether the gods make the rules accord­ing to their whims. In oth­er words, is moral­i­ty objec­tive or sub­jec­tive?

A sim­i­lar prob­lem occurs when we con­sid­er the exis­tence of the rules that gov­ern phys­i­cal laws—the rules of math­e­mat­ics. Where does math come from? Does it exist inde­pen­dent­ly of human (or oth­er) minds, or is it a human cre­ation? Do we dis­cov­er math­e­mat­i­cal prob­lems or do we invent them?

The ques­tion has engen­dered two posi­tions: math­e­mat­i­cal real­ism, which states that math exists whether we do or not, and that there is math out there we don’t know yet, and maybe nev­er can. This posi­tion may require a degree of faith, since, “unlike all of the oth­er sci­ences, math lacks an empir­i­cal com­po­nent.” You can’t phys­i­cal­ly observe it hap­pen­ing. Anti-real­ists, on the oth­er hand, argue that math is a lan­guage, a fic­tion, a “rig­or­ous aes­thet­ic” that allows us to mod­el reg­u­lar­i­ties in the uni­verse that don’t objec­tive­ly exist. This seems like the kind of rel­a­tivism that tends to piss off sci­en­tists. But no one can refute either idea… yet. The video above, from PBS’s Idea Chan­nel, asks us to con­sid­er the var­i­ous dimen­sions of this fas­ci­nat­ing and irre­solv­able ques­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Math in Good Will Hunt­ing is Easy: How Do You Like Them Apples?

Incred­i­ble Men­tal Math Gym­nas­tics on “Count­down”

Math Doo­dling

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The Philosophy of Nietzsche: An Introduction by Alain de Botton

in Philosophy | June 5th, 2013

“To those human beings who are of any con­cern to me, I wish suf­fer­ing, des­o­la­tion, sick­ness, ill treat­ment, indig­ni­ties, pro­found self-con­tempt, the tor­ture of self-mis­trust, and the wretched­ness of the van­quished.” Thus wrote for­bid­ding­ly mus­ta­chioed Ger­man philoso­pher Friedrich Niet­zsche, artic­u­lat­ing his coun­ter­in­tu­itive view of suf­fer­ing as some­thing desir­able. But sure­ly the Niet­zschean way could nev­er lead to an enjoy­able life? On the con­trary, explains the tele­vi­sion series Phi­los­o­phy: A Guide to Hap­pi­ness. “Friedrich Niet­zsche believed that all vari­eties of suf­fer­ing and fail­ure were to be wel­comed by any­one seek­ing hap­pi­ness. We should regard them as tough chal­lenges to be over­come in the same way as a climber might tack­le a moun­tain.” Thus speaks the show’s host, pop­u­lar­iz­er of philoso­phers from Socrates to Seneca, Epi­cu­rus to Schopen­hauer, Alain de Bot­ton.

Niet­zsche per­haps put more com­pelling­ly than any writer before or since the notion of “no pain, no gain.” De Bot­ton, a phi­los­o­phy enthu­si­ast eager to look for the­o­ry in prac­tice, vis­its a ded­i­cat­ed, sac­ri­fice-mak­ing dancer from the Eng­lish Nation­al Bal­let, the com­bi­na­tion of whose acquired phys­i­cal grace and painful his­to­ry of toe­nail bruis­es make the argu­ment in a vis­cer­al way.

He then chats with a drinks dis­trib­u­tor fresh off the fail­ure of his first busi­ness ven­ture and already work­ing hard on his sec­ond. Accord­ing to our host, Niet­zsche “did­n’t think that hav­ing failed was, in itself, enough. All lives have fail­ures in them. What makes some lives ful­filled as well is the man­ner in which fail­ure has been met.” Or, in the sim­pler words of the dis­trib­u­tor him­self, “How would you be able to judge your suc­cess if you haven’t failed?”

Although this broad­cast works as an intro­duc­tion, we don’t rec­om­mend you lim­it your learn­ing about a philoso­pher with a volu­mi­nous body of writ­ten work to videos alone. In our col­lec­tion of free eBooks, you can down­load eight of Niet­zsche’s vol­umes in a vari­ety of for­mats: Beyond Good and Evil, Ecce Homo, Homer and Clas­si­cal Philol­o­gy, Human, All Too Human, The Anti Christ, The Case Against Wag­n­er, The Gay Sci­ence, and Thus Spake Zarathus­tra.

You can watch more episodes in Alain de Bot­ton’s series, A Guide to Hap­pi­ness here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Wal­ter Kaufmann’s Lec­tures on Niet­zsche, Kierkegaard and Sartre (1960)

Sartre, Hei­deg­ger, Niet­zsche: Three Philoso­phers in Three Hours

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Listen to Freddie Mercury and David Bowie on the Isolated Vocal Track for the Queen Hit ‘Under Pressure,’ 1981

in Music | June 4th, 2013

In the sum­mer of 1981, the British band Queen was record­ing tracks for their tenth stu­dio album, Hot Space, at Moun­tain Stu­dios in Mon­treux, Switzer­land. As it hap­pened, David Bowie had sched­uled time at the same stu­dio to record the title song for the movie Cat Peo­ple. Before long, Bowie stopped by the Queen ses­sions and joined in. The orig­i­nal idea was that he would add back­up vocals on the song “Cool Cat.” “David came in one night and we were play­ing oth­er peo­ple’s songs for fun, just jam­ming,” says Queen drum­mer Roger Tay­lor in Mark Blake’s book Is This the Real Life?: The Untold Sto­ry of Fred­die Mer­cury and Queen. “In the end, David said, ‘This is stu­pid, why don’t we just write one?’ ”

And so began a marathon ses­sion of near­ly 24-hours–fueled, accord­ing to Blake, by wine and cocaine. Built around John Dea­con’s dis­tinc­tive bass line, the song was most­ly writ­ten by Mer­cury and Bowie. Blake describes the scene, begin­ning with the rec­ol­lec­tions of Queen’s gui­tarist:

‘We felt our way through a back­ing track all togeth­er as an ensem­ble,’ recalled Bri­an May. ‘When the back­ing track was done, David said, “Okay, let’s each of us go in the vocal booth and sing how we think the melody should go–just off the top of our heads–and we’ll com­pile a vocal out of that.” And that’s what we did.’ Some of these impro­vi­sa­tions, includ­ing Mer­cury’s mem­o­rable intro­duc­to­ry scat­ting vocal, would endure on the fin­ished track. Bowie also insist­ed that he and Mer­cury should­n’t hear what the oth­er had sung, swap­ping vers­es blind, which helped give the song its cut-and-paste feel.

“It was very hard,” said May in 2008, “because you already had four pre­co­cious boys and David, who was pre­co­cious enough for all of us. Pas­sions ran very high. I found it very hard because I got so lit­tle of my own way. But David had a real vision and he took over the song lyri­cal­ly.” The song was orig­i­nal­ly titled “Peo­ple on Streets,” but Bowie want­ed it changed to “Under Pres­sure.” When the time came to mix the song at Pow­er Sta­tion stu­dios in New York, Bowie insist­ed on being there. “It did­n’t go too well,” Blake quotes Queen’s engi­neer Rein­hold Mack as say­ing. “We spent all day and Bowie was like, ‘Do this, do that.’ In the end, I called Fred­die and said, ‘I need help here,’ so Fred came in as a medi­a­tor.” Mer­cury and Bowie argued fierce­ly over the final mix.

At one point Bowie threat­ened to block the release of the song, but it was issued to the pub­lic on Octo­ber 26, 1981 and even­tu­al­ly rose to num­ber one on the British charts. It was lat­er named the num­ber 31 song on VH1’s list of the 100 great­est songs of the 1980s. “ ‘Under Pres­sure’ is a sig­nif­i­cant song for us,” May said in 2008, “and that is because of David and its lyri­cal con­tent. I would have found that hard to admit in the old days, but I can admit it now.… But one day, I would love to sit down qui­et­ly on my own and re-mix it.”

After lis­ten­ing to the iso­lat­ed vocal track above, you can hear the offi­cial­ly released 1981 mix below:

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Queen Doc­u­men­tary, Days of Our Lives, Pays Trib­ute to the Rock Band That Con­quered the World

David Bowie Releas­es Vin­tage Videos of His Great­est Hits from the 1970s and 1980s

Fred­die Mer­cury Steals the Show at Live Aid (1985)

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Watch Idem Paris, David Lynch’s Short Film on the Art of Making Lithographs

in Art, Film | June 4th, 2013

Locat­ed in the Mont­par­nasse sec­tion of Paris, the Idem stu­dio was orig­i­nal­ly built by the print­er Emile Dufrenoy in 1880, as a space to house his lith­o­graph­ic press­es. Mov­ing into the next cen­tu­ry, var­i­ous own­ers pre­served the art of lith­o­g­ra­phy, pro­duc­ing lith­o­graphs by the likes of Matisse, Picas­so, Miro, Braque, Cha­gall, Léger, Cocteau, and oth­ers. Today, the tra­di­tion con­tin­ues. And, amaz­ing­ly, the ate­lier still uses 19th cen­tu­ry flatbed machines, pow­ered by a gas steam boil­er, to keep the tra­di­tion of lith­o­g­ra­phy alive. While on a recent trip to Paris, the sur­re­al­ist film­mak­er David Lynch paid a vis­it to Idem and fell in love with what he saw, so much so that he pro­duced a short doc­u­men­tary high­light­ing Idem’s artis­tic process. As a pref­ace to the film, Lynch wrote on the Idem web site:

Hervé Chandès from the Fon­da­tion Carti­er brought me over to Idem and intro­duced me to Patrice For­est. I see this incred­i­ble place, and I get the oppor­tu­ni­ty to work there. And this was like a dream! It just opened up this brand-new world of the lith­o­g­ra­phy and the mag­ic of lith­o­g­ra­phy, the mag­ic of the stones. And it was a great, great thing! This thing of lith­o­g­ra­phy, this chan­nel of lith­o­g­ra­phy opened up and a bunch of ideas came flow­ing out and it led to about a hun­dred lith­o­graphs. I will say that Idem print­ing stu­dio has a unique, very spe­cial mood, and it is so con­ducive to cre­at­ing. Patrice has the great­est atti­tude for all the artists and he cre­ates this space of free­dom and this joy of cre­at­ing. It’s so beau­ti­ful! And I think the place is very important—in oth­er wors, the same stone could be moved to anoth­er place, and I think that the work that comes out would be dif­fer­ent. It’s a com­bi­na­tion of the stone, the place, the peo­ple, this mood, and out comes these cer­tain ideas.

You can find the short film, Idem Paris, list­ed in our col­lec­tion of 525 Free Movies Online. You can also find a primer explain­ing the basics of lith­o­g­ra­phy here.

via Bib­liok­lept

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Free: The Guggen­heim Puts 65 Mod­ern Art Books Online

Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky Caught in the Act of Cre­ation, 1926

How the CIA Secret­ly Fund­ed Abstract Expres­sion­ism Dur­ing the Cold War

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Watch Animations of Oscar Wilde’s Children’s Stories “The Happy Prince” and “The Selfish Giant”

in Animation, Film, Literature | June 4th, 2013

Long before Oscar Wilde became a lit­er­ary celebri­ty for his most famous work—The Pic­ture of Dori­an Gray and plays like Salome and The Impor­tance of Being Earnest—he was a bit of a real­i­ty star. Wilde trav­eled the UK and the Unit­ed States (as por­trayed by Stephen Fry here) as a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the pop­u­lar phi­los­o­phy of “aes­theti­cism,” an urbane nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry move­ment against Vic­to­ri­an prud­ery and the dry moral cal­cu­lus of util­i­tar­i­an­ism and its asso­ci­a­tions with indus­tri­al cul­ture. Aes­thetes such as Wilde sought to ele­vate good taste and the pur­suit of beau­ty alone as a guid­ing prin­ci­ple of art and life. Wilde expressed the ideas in sev­er­al well-known epi­grams, such as the wry­ly redun­dant, “In all unim­por­tant mat­ters, style, not sin­cer­i­ty, is the essen­tial. In all impor­tant mat­ters, style, not sin­cer­i­ty, is the essen­tial.”

Wilde was ridiculed for the many of the same rea­sons he was feted—his flam­boy­ant pub­lic per­sona and devo­tion to aes­theti­cism, which satirists car­i­ca­tured as a kind of deca­dent navel-gaz­ing. But care­ful read­ers of Wilde’s diverse canon of poet­ry, prose, and dra­ma will know of his crit­i­cal looks at solip­sism and super­fi­cial­i­ty. Some of his best works as a moral­ist are his children’s sto­ries, such as the 1888 book of fairy sto­ries The Hap­py Prince and Oth­er Tales. In the title sto­ry, a prince is trans­formed into a glit­ter­ing stat­ue on a pedestal high above a city, where res­i­dents look up to him as an exam­ple of human per­fec­tion. But the prince, we learn, spends his time weep­ing in com­pas­sion for the pover­ty and suf­fer­ing he sees below him. Made in 1974 by Cana­di­an com­pa­ny Pot­ter­ton Pro­duc­tions, and fea­tur­ing the voic­es of Christo­pher Plum­mer and Gly­nis Johns, the ani­mat­ed short film above is a faith­ful ren­der­ing of Wilde’s sto­ry. You can find it added to our col­lec­tion of Free Movies Online, under Ani­ma­tion.

In 1971, Pot­ter­ton pro­duced an ear­li­er ani­mat­ed short film based on anoth­er sto­ry from the Hap­py Prince col­lec­tion. A Chris­t­ian alle­go­ry, The Self­ish Giant (above) tells the tale of a cranky giant who walls off his gar­den to keep chil­dren out. The plight of one lit­tle boy changes the giant’s dis­po­si­tion. The film was nom­i­nat­ed for an Oscar for best ani­mat­ed short in 1972. Pot­ter­ton also pro­duced a short film of Hans Chris­t­ian Andersen’s “The Lit­tle Mer­maid,” and stu­dio head Ger­ald Pot­ter­ton would go on in 1981 to direct the cult ston­er film Heavy Met­al. An inter­est­ing irony of the Wilde ani­ma­tions above: both films, and a third called The Remark­able Rock­et, were co-pro­duced with Reader’s Digest, the mag­a­zine that rep­re­sents the hard-head­ed prac­ti­cal­i­ty and sen­ti­men­tal, sex­u­al­ly repres­sive Vic­to­ri­an val­ues (in Amer­i­can dress) that Wilde dis­dained.

If you can’t get enough of Wilde’s mov­ing fairy tales, you won’t want to miss Stephen Fry read­ing “The Hap­py Prince” below.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Oscar Wilde Offers Prac­ti­cal Advice on the Writ­ing Life in a New­ly-Dis­cov­ered Let­ter from 1890

Hear Oscar Wilde Recite a Sec­tion of The Bal­lad of Read­ing Gaol (1897)

“Jer­sey Shore” in the Style of Oscar Wilde

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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