The Digital Transgender Archive Features Books, Magazines & Photos Telling the History of Transgender Culture

in Archives, Gender, History | August 3rd, 2016

draq q combo

Trans­gen­der issues have entered the pub­lic con­ver­sa­tion in a big way. To those with­out much direct con­nec­tion to them, they might all seem to have come up sud­den­ly, with lit­tle prece­dent, with­in the past few years. But most phe­nom­e­na that seem to have achieved instant promi­nence have a rich, if long-hid­den, his­to­ry behind them. In this case, you can now dis­cov­er a great deal of the his­to­ry at the new Dig­i­tal Trans­gen­der Archive, an “inter­na­tion­al col­lab­o­ra­tion among more than twen­ty col­leges, uni­ver­si­ties, non­prof­it orga­ni­za­tions, and pri­vate col­lec­tions” aim­ing to cre­ate “a gen­er­a­tive point of entry into the fas­ci­nat­ing and expan­sive world of trans his­to­ry.”

OC Transgender Archive 2

Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Claire Voon has more on the site’s ori­gins, includ­ing words from the pro­jec­t’s leader, Col­lege of the Holy Cross Eng­lish pro­fes­sor K.J Raw­son. Its impe­tus came from the prob­lem that “a lot of trans-relat­ed mate­ri­als were held in dis­si­pat­ed col­lec­tions, and it wasn’t real­ly clear who had what, why they had it, how it relat­ed to oth­er col­lec­tions, and how it was acces­si­ble to researchers.” The Dig­i­tal Trans­gen­der Archive replaces some of the unnec­es­sary ardu­ous­ness under which those researchers used to labor, pro­vid­ing them with a sim­ple search box or, an abil­i­ty to browse by col­lec­tion, insti­tu­tion, geo­graph­ic loca­tion, genre, or top­ic.

OC Transgender Archive 3

Ranked by the num­ber of the items in the archive, that top­ic list gives a vivid overview of the sorts of social prac­tices and cat­e­gories best rep­re­sent­ed there: cross­dressers and cross­dress­ing rank first and sec­ond, respec­tive­ly, fol­lowed by the rest of a top-twen­ty, includ­ing drag queens, pho­tog­ra­phy, activists, and actors.

OC Transgender Archive 1

Giv­en the impor­tance of the visu­al to trans­gen­der cul­ture, it should come as no sur­prise that the Dig­i­tal Trans­gen­der Archive’s grow­ing col­lec­tion of doc­u­ments, pho­tographs, peri­od­i­cals, and “ephemera,” orga­nized all togeth­er for the first time, offers plen­ty of strik­ing mate­r­i­al to look at — as well as to intro­duce the his­to­ry of a world about which few could open­ly com­mu­ni­cate before now.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Judy!: 1993 Judith But­ler Fanzine Gives Us An Irrev­er­ent Punk-Rock Take on the Post-Struc­tural­ist Gen­der The­o­rist

Down­load 834 Rad­i­cal Zines From a Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Online Archive: Glob­al­iza­tion, Punk Music, the Indus­tri­al Prison Com­plex & More

Allen Gins­berg Talks About Com­ing Out to His Fam­i­ly & Fel­low Poets on 1978 Radio Show (NSFW)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Michio Kaku on Why Immigrants Are America’s Secret Weapon: They Compensate for Our Mediocre STEM Education & Keep Prosperity Going

in Politics, Science | August 3rd, 2016

Amer­i­cans have often found them­selves caught up in pan­ics about immi­gra­tion, like that now dri­ving the cam­paign to build a wall between us and our third largest trad­ing partner—when more Mex­i­cans are leav­ing the U.S. than arriv­ing. Then we have the talk of ban­ning an entire world reli­gion, though, of course, we’ve seen this before, lest we for­get that the Klan resurged in large part as an anti-Catholic group. All of this mis­in­for­ma­tion, mis­trust, and out­right con­tempt comes at a high cost, includ­ing that of any real under­stand­ing of how immi­gra­tion works, and why it works, no mat­ter how vehe­ment­ly cer­tain orga­ni­za­tions fight against it.

The fact is that the U.S. might be a dynamo for cap­i­tal but not when it comes to what econ­o­mists crude­ly call “human cap­i­tal.” The point applies not only to immi­grant work­ers who do jobs Amer­i­cans won’t, but also those who do jobs Amer­i­cans can’t, because, as physi­cist Michio Kaku argues above, “the Unit­ed States has the worst edu­ca­tion­al sys­tem known to sci­ence.” Were it sole­ly up to U.S. grad­u­ates, the sci­en­tif­ic estab­lish­ment and tech econ­o­my would col­lapse, he says, “for­get about Google, for­get about Sil­i­con Val­ley. There would be no Sil­i­con Val­ley.” Instead, U.S. sci­ence and tech thrive because of immi­grants who come on H‑1B visas, “America’s secret weapon… the genius visa.”

Kaku goes on to press his case with daunt­ing sta­tis­tics about the num­ber of for­eign-born Ph.D. grad­u­ates, though he doesn’t say that all of those grads have H‑1Bs. In fact, his posi­tion is a high­ly con­tro­ver­sial one. Reli­able stud­ies show that many com­pa­nies abuse the spe­cial­ized work visa to out­source jobs Amer­i­cans are ful­ly qual­i­fied to do, and to cre­ate a class of immi­grant work­ers who earn less than their U.S. coun­ter­parts and work under a mod­i­fied form of inden­tured servi­tude. The visa is, after all, “a non-immi­grant visa,” points out one crit­ic, “and so has noth­ing at all to do with stay­ing in the USA, becom­ing a cit­i­zen, or start­ing a busi­ness.” It is, more or less, a guest work­er pro­gram.

Kaku’s tone can also seem grat­ing, a smarmy reminder of what David H. Freed­man calls in The Atlantic “open sea­son on the non­s­mart.” Call­ing Amer­i­can grads “stu­pid” will not like­ly endear many of them to his posi­tion. Nonethe­less, when it comes to sci­ence edu­ca­tion, it’s hard to argue with his assess­ments, and with his case for allow­ing the best minds in the world to come work for Amer­i­can com­pa­nies (under more equi­table con­di­tions). In the Big Think video above, Kaku again press­es his argu­ment for the H‑1B as instru­men­tal to a “brain drain” into the Unit­ed States, feed­ing its sci­ence and tech indus­tries with fresh minds and fresh ideas con­stant­ly. His ideas about mer­i­toc­ra­cy may seem blithe, espe­cial­ly giv­en the mate­r­i­al advan­tages so many guest work­ers already have before arriv­ing in the States. But in pure­ly descrip­tive terms, the best U.S. grad­u­ates just sim­ply can­not com­pete with many of their for­eign-born col­leagues.

Here Kaku’s argu­ment takes a turn in both these videos and shows how the “secret weapon” is one we’ve point­ed at our­selves. We can’t con­tin­ue to depend on “genius­es” from oth­er coun­tries, he says, to prop up our sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy sec­tors, espe­cial­ly since the brain drains back out, with H1‑B visa hold­ers fre­quent­ly leav­ing, giv­en their tem­po­rary sta­tus, and estab­lish­ing com­pa­nies in their home coun­tries. “In real­i­ty,” wrote Moth­er Jones in 2013, “most of today’s H‑1B work­ers don’t stick around to become the next Albert Ein­stein or Sergey Brin.” That year, “the top 10 users of H‑1B visas… were all off­shore out­sourc­ing firms… that hired near­ly half near­ly half of H1‑B work­ers.” As one expert explained, “The H‑1B work­er learns the job and then rotates back to the home coun­try and takes the work with him.”

It’s like­ly large num­bers of those work­ers feel less and less wel­come in the U.S. But it’s also true, as Kaku says, that Amer­i­cans con­tin­ue to fall far behind in math and sci­ence. There may indeed be few Amer­i­cans who can fill many of those jobs or con­tin­ue to push tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tion for­ward in the U.S.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Math Cours­es

Michio Kaku Explains the Physics Behind Absolute­ly Every­thing

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

Por­traits of Ellis Island Immi­grants Arriv­ing on America’s Wel­com­ing Shores Cir­ca 1907

Noam Chom­sky Defines What It Means to Be a Tru­ly Edu­cat­ed Per­son

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

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Stream Iggy Pop’s Two-Hour Radio Tribute to David Bowie

in Music | August 2nd, 2016

pop bowie show

Images of Mr. Bowie & Mr. Pop, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Briefly not­ed: Every Fri­day night, Iggy Pop hosts a radio show, “Iggy Con­fi­den­tial,” on BBC 6 Music. And the lat­est episode fea­tured Pop pay­ing a two-hour trib­ute to his friend, David Bowie. Click here, and hear Pop spin his favourite Bowie records and rem­i­nisce about their times togeth­er. The record­ing will be avail­able online for the next 26 days.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Prof. Iggy Pop Deliv­ers the BBC’s 2014 John Peel Lec­ture on “Free Music in a Cap­i­tal­ist Soci­ety”

David Bowie Sings Impres­sions of Bruce Spring­steen, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Tom Waits & More In Stu­dio Out­takes (1985)

Hear a Great Radio Doc­u­men­tary on William S. Bur­roughs Nar­rat­ed by Iggy Pop

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Philosopher Sam Harris Leads You Through a 26-Minute Guided Meditation

in Health, Neuroscience, Psychology, Religion | August 2nd, 2016

We’ve post­ed on med­i­ta­tion research late­ly because it’s so com­pelling, and med­i­ta­tion music and instruc­tions because so many cre­ative peo­ple have found it lib­er­at­ing. But it’s always worth not­ing that a few med­i­ta­tion skep­tics have weighed in with point­ed objec­tions to the large claims med­i­ta­tion teach­ers often make. And yet even after one of the most unspar­ing cri­tiques of med­i­ta­tion research and teach­ing, sci­ence writer John Hor­gan still admits that “it might make you feel bet­ter, nicer, wis­er” and plans to con­tin­ue med­i­tat­ing in the face of his “per­fect con­tempt for it.”

Anoth­er pro­fes­sion­al skep­tic has gone even fur­ther along this road. Once spo­ken of as one of the dread­ed “Four Horse­men” of New Athe­ism, Sam Har­ris has also long called him­self a sec­u­lar Bud­dhist, and has writ­ten “a guide to spir­i­tu­al­i­ty with­out reli­gion.”

Wad­ing into the pol­i­tics of med­i­ta­tion means deal­ing with skep­tics like Har­ris who treat Bud­dhism as quaint and archa­ic fool­ish­ness that just hap­pened to pre­serve the sci­en­tif­ic tech­nol­o­gy of mind­ful­ness, and it means sort­ing through a lot of sci­en­tif­ic stud­ies, many of which—as is always the case—have a num­ber fatal flaws in their method. Har­ris’ sci­en­tif­ic claims about mind­ful­ness have come in for their own cri­tiques, from both mys­tics and sec­u­lar­ists.

All of this said, the fact is that, like yoga and many oth­er prac­tices designed to har­mo­nize mind and body, the ben­e­fits of med­i­ta­tion, place­bo-induced or oth­er­wise, are observ­able, and the risks entire­ly neg­li­gi­ble. Many skep­ti­cal researchers have decid­ed to dive in and try med­i­ta­tion before ful­ly cred­it­ing their doubts. And that, sup­pos­ed­ly, is the very instruc­tion we find in what is often called the Bud­dhist “char­ter for free inquiry,” which tells prac­ti­tion­ers to inves­ti­gate for them­selves and take no one’s word for any­thing, a few hun­dred years in advance of the British Roy­al Soci­ety’s mot­to, nul­lius in ver­ba.

In this spir­it, skep­tics like Har­ris have inves­ti­gat­ed med­i­ta­tion and report­ed their find­ings. Many also, like Har­ris and aca­d­e­m­ic researchers like Oxford psy­chi­a­trist Mark Williams, have record­ed their own guid­ed mind­ful­ness med­i­ta­tions that cor­re­spond in many respects to the orig­i­nal ancient instruc­tions. We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured guid­ed med­i­ta­tions from UCLA and a com­pi­la­tion of record­ed instruc­tions from new agers and sci­en­tists. At the top of the post, you can hear Har­ris’ very straight­for­ward guid­ed med­i­ta­tion, and fur­ther down a short­er ver­sion of the same.

In the video above, Har­ris employs just a lit­tle hyper­bole in com­par­ing mind­ful­ness to the Large Hadron Col­lid­er. His claim that only through this prac­tice can we dis­cov­er “the self is an illu­sion” rings false when we think of the many oth­er philoso­phers who have inde­pen­dent­ly come to the same con­clu­sion, whether as Taoists or Empiri­cists. But Har­ris isn’t only mak­ing the case for mind­ful­ness meditation’s true cor­re­spon­dence to some fun­da­men­tal nature of real­i­ty, but for its prag­mat­ic use­ful­ness in help­ing us move through the world with greater skill and peace of mind—reliable out­comes from reg­u­lar med­i­ta­tion that no one has yet cred­i­bly denied.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lena Dun­ham Shows Why It’s So Damn Hard to Med­i­tate: A Four-Minute Com­e­dy

Allen Gins­berg Teach­es You How to Med­i­tate with a Rock Song Fea­tur­ing Bob Dylan on Bass

Free Guid­ed Med­i­ta­tions From UCLA: Boost Your Aware­ness & Ease Your Stress

Stream 18 Hours of Free Guid­ed Med­i­ta­tions

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

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Simone de Beauvoir Defends Existentialism & Her Feminist Masterpiece, The Second Sex, in Rare 1959 TV Interview

in Gender, Philosophy | August 2nd, 2016

Giv­en how many aca­d­e­m­ic phi­los­o­phy depart­ments have ban­ished Exis­ten­tial­ism into some prim­i­tive wilder­ness, it seems strik­ing to hear peo­ple talk about it as a cur­rent phe­nom­e­non with a seri­ous, liv­ing pedi­gree and a hip youth van­guard dis­till­ing its ideas into pop cul­ture. By the time I’d heard of Albert Camus—by way of The Cure’s ear­ly sin­gle “Killing an Arab”—the ref­er­ences to the French philoso­pher and his nov­el The Stranger were already exot­ic, and as kitschy as the faux-Mid­dle East­ern gui­tar line in the song. But in 1959, the hip­ster exis­ten­tial­ist was a phe­nom­e­non so wide­spread that Nor­man Mail­er wrote a scathing essay about the char­ac­ter.

And a Cana­di­an jour­nal­ist, sit­ting down to inter­view Exis­ten­tial­ist philoso­pher Simone de Beau­voir, began by ask­ing her to com­ment on the “group of noisy, row­dy jazz-lov­ing young peo­ple, in the imme­di­ate post-war peri­od.” This first wave of 50s Parisian hip­sters embraced Sartre, Camus, and Beau­voir right along with Coltrane and Char­lie Park­er.

Beau­voir dis­miss­es any con­nec­tion between her kind of Exis­ten­tial­ism and that of the row­dy mass­es except that of phys­i­cal prox­im­i­ty. Nonethe­less, like 90s fem­i­nist punk rock­ers who spread the ideas of third wave fem­i­nism, the French and Amer­i­can Beats made Exis­ten­tial­ist phi­los­o­phy cool.

Beau­voir prefers to draw a clear bound­ary between her work and the next generation’s appro­pri­a­tion. By this time, both Sartre and Camus had dis­avowed the term Exis­ten­tial­ist and had a falling-out over Com­mu­nism. But Beau­voir uses the term and refers to a “We,” who “think—and it’s one of the most impor­tant points in existentialism—that man is the pur­pose of man, his own future, and the pur­pose of all his activ­i­ties.” She draws on stark bina­ry oppo­si­tions of “good” and “evil” to explain the “fun­da­men­tal basis of what you could call our ethics,” and yet, she says, “we don’t ask meta­phys­i­cal ques­tions.”

If it sounds like Beau­voir is sum­ma­riz­ing Sartre, that’s part of what’s going on. The inter­view­er keeps press­ing to under­stand the “exis­ten­tial­ist man’s con­cep­tion of the world.” She oblig­es, dis­cussing “Sartre­an Exis­ten­tial­ism” and his major work Being and Noth­ing­ness and enter­tain­ing vague ques­tions about athe­ism and pol­i­tics. Final­ly, around 12:15, they begin to talk about the book for which de Beau­voir is best known, The Sec­ond Sex, which would go on to inspire 60s fem­i­nists like Bet­ty Friedan, Glo­ria Steinem, and UK col­lec­tivist mag­a­zine Spare Rib.

Calm and mea­sured through­out the con­ver­sa­tion, Beau­voir defends her ideas, includ­ing the most provoca­tive, that, as the inter­view­er para­phras­es, “You don’t believe in the exis­tence of a fem­i­nine nature. You believe peo­ple are first human, before being male or female.” She makes it clear right away that her anti-gen­der essen­tial­ism has roots in an even more fun­da­men­tal, and very Exis­ten­tial­ist, skep­ti­cism: “I don’t believe in the exis­tence of a human nature.” All of us, what­ev­er gen­der we’re taught to iden­ti­fy with, become prod­ucts of our “place, time, civil­i­sa­tion, and tech­nique etc.” through cul­tur­al con­di­tion­ing, not inner neces­si­ty.

The Sec­ond Sex, she says, is not a revolt or a protest, but a descrip­tion of an oppres­sive set of rela­tions that “cur­rent­ly nei­ther men nor women can just trans­form… with a mag­ic wand.” Nev­er­the­less, de Beau­voir became increas­ing­ly activist as she aged, giv­ing the elo­quent inter­view on “Why I’m a Fem­i­nist” in 1975. And above all, the younger gen­er­a­tion who picked up piece­meal Sartre also picked up enough of Beauvoir’s work to begin forc­ing changes in the mate­r­i­al con­di­tions she iden­ti­fied as cre­at­ing gen­der-based forms of social oppres­sion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Simone de Beau­voir Tells Studs Terkel How She Became an Intel­lec­tu­al and Fem­i­nist (1960)

Down­load All 239 Issues of Land­mark UK Fem­i­nist Mag­a­zine Spare Rib Free Online

11 Essen­tial Fem­i­nist Books: A New Read­ing List by The New York Pub­lic Library

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

 

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Watch Hannah Arendt’s Diagnosis of the Banality of Evil as an 8‑Bit Video Game

in History, Philosophy | August 2nd, 2016

Per­mit us a cou­ple of great over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tions: Han­nah Arendt became well-known by writ­ing about evil. Video games, espe­cial­ly clas­sic ones, usu­al­ly chal­lenge the play­er to fight some kind of evil. And so we have a suit­able, if at first seem­ing­ly incon­gru­ous, meet­ing of form and sub­stance in this video, “What is Evil?,” from the 8‑Bit Phi­los­o­phy series. It casts the 20th-cen­tu­ry polit­i­cal the­o­rist as the hero this time around, ren­der­ing in vin­tage video-game aes­thet­ics her quest not sim­ply to fight evil, but to iden­ti­fy evil — a much more trou­bling enter­prise.

“Tra­di­tion­al con­cep­tions of evil focus on the utter mon­stros­i­ty of evil actions — the com­plete awe and unthink­a­bil­i­ty of hor­ror,” says the nar­ra­tor. “Called pure or rad­i­cal evil, this is the sort of evil asso­ci­at­ed with antag­o­nists or vil­lains — is is the antithe­sis of good.”

It also hap­pens to be just the sort of obvi­ous straight-up evil video games tend to put their play­ers up against: ene­my ships you can only shoot down before they shoot you down, mad doc­tors you can only blow up before they blow the world up, mon­sters you can can only jump on before they eat you.

Arendt start­ed see­ing things dif­fer­ent­ly from this black-and-white (or in the case of eight-bit video games, 64-col­or) con­cep­tion after she saw the tri­al of Adolf Eich­mann. “Put on tri­al for numer­ous hor­rors, Eich­mann was found guilty of crimes against human­i­ty — espe­cial­ly against the Jew­ish peo­ple, for over­see­ing the trains that trans­port­ed peo­ple to Nazi death camps.” Sound like a mean piece of work though the guy may, Arendt beheld in the court­room “an alto­geth­er innocu­ous and seem­ing­ly nor­mal lit­tle man,” a “stereo­typ­i­cal bureau­crat” who “nev­er stopped to put him­self in any­one else’s shoes,” dri­ven by an “unques­tion­ing sense of oblig­a­tion to author­i­ty.”

To put it in video-game terms, Arendt expect­ed the sort of grotesque, cack­ling big boss that appears in the last stage, and she got the kind of drone who sim­ply stands around wait­ing to be slain with one hit in the first. This led her to coin her immor­tal phrase “the banal­i­ty of evil,” which, she explains in Eich­mann in Jerusalem, describes it “only on the strict­ly fac­tu­al lev­el. He was not stu­pid. It was thought­less­ness, some­thing by no means iden­ti­cal to stu­pid­i­ty. Such remote­ness from real­i­ty can wreak more hav­oc than all the instincts tak­en togeth­er.” And what kind of sword, laser, or pow­er-up could defeat that?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Look Inside Han­nah Arendt’s Per­son­al Library: Down­load Mar­gin­a­lia from 90 Books (Hei­deg­ger, Kant, Marx & More)

Enter the Han­nah Arendt Archives & Dis­cov­er Rare Audio Lec­tures, Man­u­scripts, Mar­gin­a­lia, Let­ters, Post­cards & More

Han­nah Arendt Dis­cuss­es Phi­los­o­phy, Pol­i­tics & Eich­mann in Rare 1964 TV Inter­view

Han­nah Arendt’s Orig­i­nal Arti­cles on “the Banal­i­ty of Evil” in the New York­er Archive

8‑Bit Phi­los­o­phy: Pla­to, Sartre, Der­ri­da & Oth­er Thinkers Explained With Vin­tage Video Games

Exis­ten­tial Phi­los­o­phy of Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus Explained with 8‑Bit Video Games

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Get a Free Pocket Edition of the U.S. Constitution (Now #2 on the Amazon Bestseller List)

in Books, Current Affairs | August 2nd, 2016

we the people

Going into the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Con­ven­tion, who would have thought that the speech we’d all remem­ber this week would belong to Khazir Khan, the father of a Mus­lim-Amer­i­can sol­dier who died fight­ing for the Unit­ed States in Iraq? Khan’s rebuke of Don­ald Trump’s divi­sive pres­i­den­tial cam­paign was sting­ing, and it came capped with these lines:

Don­ald Trump, you are ask­ing Amer­i­cans to trust you with our future. Let me ask you: Have you even read the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion? I will glad­ly lend you my copy. In this doc­u­ment, look for the words “lib­er­ty” and “equal pro­tec­tion of law.”

Have you ever been to Arling­ton Ceme­tery? Go look at the graves of the brave patri­ots who died defend­ing Amer­i­ca — you will see all faiths, gen­ders, and eth­nic­i­ties.

You have sac­ri­ficed noth­ing and no one.

This pri­vate cit­i­zen suc­ceed­ed in doing what Hillary Clin­ton, Bill Clin­ton, Pres­i­dent Oba­ma, Joe Biden and maybe even Michael Bloomberg could not. In his own mod­est, under­stat­ed way, he put Trump on the defen­sive. And when Trump lashed out, you could final­ly hear the whis­pers: Have you no sense of decen­cy, Don­ald, at long last?

Khizr Khan may be to Don­ald Trump what Joseph Welch was to Joe McCarthy. That would be one pos­i­tive out­come of Khan’s speech. The oth­er is that sales of the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion (as Elec­tric Lit­er­a­ture not­ed) have gone through the roof. The U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion is cur­rent­ly #2 on Ama­zon’s list of best­selling books, right behind the new Har­ry Pot­ter book. Fath­om that.

You, too, can buy a pock­et edi­tion of the Con­sti­tu­tion. But why not get it for free? Through Novem­ber 8, the ACLU is run­ning a pro­mo­tion which will let you snag a free pock­et-sized Constitution–one that can fit in your back­pack, glove com­part­ment, or back pock­et. It mea­sures 3/12” x 5.5” and fea­tures “the full text of the Con­sti­tu­tion, the Amend­ments, includ­ing the Bill of Rights, as well as a Know Your Rights series: What to do if you’re stopped by the police.”

Head to this page, and use the coupon code POCKETRIGHTS.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

R Crumb, the Father of Under­ground Comix, Takes Down Don­ald Trump in a NSFW 1989 Car­toon

J.K. Rowl­ing Defends Don­ald Trump’s Right to Be “Offen­sive and Big­ot­ed”

Noam Chom­sky on Whether the Rise of Trump Resem­bles the Rise of Fas­cism in 1930s Ger­many

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Hear Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Sung as a One-Woman Opera

in Music, Philosophy | August 1st, 2016

wittgenstein opera2

Image by Aus­tri­an Nation­al Library, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

What is it about Aus­tri­an philo­soph­i­cal prodi­gy Lud­wig Wittgen­stein’s Trac­ta­tus Logi­co-Philo­soph­i­cus that so inspires artists? Jasper Johns, the Coen Broth­ers, Derek Jar­man…. Per­haps it’s easy to see his appeal to writ­ers. His suc­cinct phi­los­o­phy of lan­guage con­tains a ground­break­ing claim, for its time, wrote Bertrand Rus­sell in his 1922 intro­duc­tion: “In order that a cer­tain sen­tence should assert a cer­tain fact there must… be some­thing in com­mon between the struc­ture of the sen­tence and the struc­ture of the fact.”

There may be no high­er praise for care­ful, pre­cise lan­guage. Recall­ing the stock advice to “show, don’t tell,” Wittgen­stein assert­ed that what­ev­er bonds togeth­er the struc­ture of sen­tences and the struc­ture of the world, it is only some­thing we can show, not some­thing we can say. In this regard, Wittgen­stein also ele­vat­ed images, and he him­self had a keen eye for pho­tog­ra­phy and archi­tec­ture. Of course, the imag­i­na­tive, mys­ti­cal aspect of Wittgenstein’s lit­tle book of apho­risms and sym­bols appeals to musi­cians and com­posers as well.

John Cage drew heav­i­ly on Wittgenstein’s work and the Trac­ta­tus has been adapt­ed by oth­ers in musi­cal pieces rang­ing from the under­stat­ed and med­i­ta­tive to the com­i­cal­ly ridicu­lous. The adap­ta­tion above takes a stark oper­at­ic approach. Com­posed by Bal­duin Sulz­er, the “one woman opera,” as the singer Anna Maria Pammer’s site describes it (in Google trans­la­tion from Ger­man), “dri­ves the metic­u­lous­ness and insis­tence of the text on the top.” Draw­ing on the work of the Sec­ond Vien­nese School, “the basic musi­cal idea comes from the music of the time of ori­gin of the Trac­ta­tus, i.e. the time of World War I.”

Wittgen­stein has long been asso­ci­at­ed with Arnold Schoen­berg and the Trac­ta­tus has been called a “tone poem.” The chill­i­ness, alter­nat­ing with rapid crescen­dos, with which Pam­mer deliv­ers the philo­soph­i­cal libret­to recalls the book’s tenor, as well as Wittgenstein’s tem­pera­ment more gen­er­al­ly. Giv­en to vio­lent out­bursts and fits of deri­sion, Wittgen­stein spent the first part of his life attempt­ing to cre­ate per­fect sys­tems— “a log­i­cal­ly per­fect lan­guage,” wrote Rus­sell. In between this aus­tere pur­suit, he lived just as aus­tere­ly and some­times vio­lent­ly. John Cage’s enact­ment of Wittgenstein’s the­o­ries comes clos­er to the intent of “show don’t tell,” but Sulzer’s adap­ta­tion per­haps best dra­ma­tizes the mys­ti­cal ellipses of Wittgenstein’s first major work. If you need Spo­ti­fy’s free soft­ware, down­load it here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wittgenstein’s Mas­ter­piece, the Trac­ta­tus Logi­co-Philo­soph­i­cus, Gets Turned into Beau­ti­ful, Med­i­ta­tive Music

Lud­wig Wittgenstein’s Trac­ta­tus Gets Adapt­ed Into an Avant-Garde Com­ic Opera

In Search of Lud­wig Wittgenstein’s Seclud­ed Hut in Nor­way: A Short Trav­el Film

The Pho­tog­ra­phy of Lud­wig Wittgen­stein

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Down­load 135 Free Phi­los­o­phy eBooks: From Aris­to­tle to Niet­zsche & Wittgen­stein

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

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