Leo Tolstoy’s Family Recipe for Mac ‘N’ Cheese

in Food & Drink, Literature | October 10th, 2017

In 1874, Stepan Andree­vich Bers pub­lished The Cook­book and gave it as a gift to his sis­ter, count­ess Sophia Andreev­na Tol­staya, the wife of the great Russ­ian nov­el­ist, Leo Tol­stoy. The book con­tained a col­lec­tion of Tol­stoy fam­i­ly recipes, the dish­es they served to their fam­i­ly and friends, those for­tu­nate souls who belonged to the aris­to­crat­ic rul­ing class of late czarist Rus­sia. Almost 150 years lat­er, this cook­book has been trans­lat­ed and repub­lished by Sergei Bel­tyukov.

Avail­able in an inex­pen­sive Kin­dle for­mat ($3.99), Leo Tol­stoy’s fam­i­ly recipe book fea­tures dozens of recipes, every­thing from Tar­tar Sauce and Spiced Mush­rooms (what’s a Russ­ian kitchen with­out mush­rooms?), to Stuffed Dumplings and Green Beans à la Maître d’Hô­tel, to Cof­fee Cake and Vien­nese Pie. The text comes with a trans­la­tion, too, of Russ­ian weights and mea­sures used dur­ing the peri­od. One recipe Mr. Bel­tyukov pro­vid­ed to us (which I did­n’t see in the book) is for the Tol­stoy’s good ole Mac ‘N’ Cheese dish. It goes some­thing like this:

Bring water to a boil, add salt, then add mac­a­roni and leave boil­ing on light fire until half ten­der; drain water through a colan­der, add but­ter and start putting mac­a­roni back into the pot in lay­ers – lay­er of mac­a­roni, some grat­ed Parme­san and some veg­etable sauce, mac­a­roni again and so on until you run out of mac­a­roni. Put the pot on the edge of the stove, cov­er with a lid and let it rest in light fire until the mac­a­roni are soft and ten­der. Shake the pot occa­sion­al­ly to pre­vent them from burn­ing.

We’ll leave you with bon appétit! — an expres­sion almost cer­tain­ly heard in the homes of those French-speak­ing Russ­ian aris­to­crats.

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!

Note: This post first appeared on OC back in 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Leo Tolstoy’s 17 “Rules of Life:” Wake at 5am, Help the Poor, & Only Two Broth­el Vis­its Per Month

Rare Record­ing: Leo Tol­stoy Reads From His Last Major Work in Four Lan­guages, 1909

Vin­tage Footage of Leo Tol­stoy: Video Cap­tures the Great Nov­el­ist Dur­ing His Final Days

An Archive of 3,000 Vin­tage Cook­books Lets You Trav­el Back Through Culi­nary Time

MIT Teach­es You How to Speak Ital­ian & Cook Ital­ian Food All at Once (Free Online Course)

The Futur­ist Cook­book (1930) Tried to Turn Ital­ian Cui­sine into Mod­ern Art

Works by Tol­stoy can be found in our col­lec­tions, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices and 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free

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An Animated Introduction to “the World’s Most Mysterious Book,” the 15th-Century Voynich Manuscript

in Books, History | October 10th, 2017

It has 240 pages filled with writ­ing and illus­tra­tion. Car­bon dat­ing places it around the year 1420. Schol­ars have spent count­less thou­sands of hours scru­ti­niz­ing it. But the so-called Voyn­ich Man­u­script has one qual­i­ty more notable than any oth­er: nobody under­stands a word of it. Last month, Josh Jones wrote about this sin­gu­lar­ly strange tex­tu­al arti­fact here at Open Cul­ture, includ­ing the dig­i­tized ver­sion at the Inter­net Archive that you can flip through and read your­self — or rather “read,” since the tex­t’s lan­guage, if it be a lan­guage at all, remains uniden­ti­fied. But before you do that, you might want to watch TED-Ed’s brief intro­duc­tion to the Voyn­ich Man­u­script above.

The video’s nar­ra­tor describes pages of “real and imag­i­nary plants, float­ing cas­tles, bathing women, astrol­o­gy dia­grams, zodi­ac rings, and suns and moons with faces accom­pa­ny the text,” read­ing from a script by Stephen Bax, Voyn­ich Man­u­script researcher and Pro­fes­sor of Mod­ern Lan­guages and Lin­guis­tics at the Open Uni­ver­si­ty.

“Cryp­tol­o­gists say the writ­ing has all the char­ac­ter­is­tics of a real lan­guage — just one that no one’s ever seen before.” High­ly dec­o­rat­ed through­out with “scroll-like embell­ish­ments,” the man­u­script fea­tures the work of what looks like no few­er than three hands: two who did the writ­ing, and one who did the paint­ing.

Intrigued yet? Or per­haps you already feel an inkling of a new the­o­ry to explain this bizarre, seem­ing­ly ency­clo­pe­dia-like vol­ume’s prove­nance to add to the many that have come before: some believe the man­u­scrip­t’s author or authors wrote it in code, some that “the doc­u­ment is a hoax, writ­ten in gib­ber­ish to make mon­ey off a gullible buy­er” by a “medieval con man” or even Voyn­ich him­self, and some that it shows an attempt “to cre­ate an alpha­bet for a lan­guage that was spo­ken, but not yet writ­ten.” Maybe the thir­teenth-cen­tu­ry philoso­pher Roger Bacon wrote it. Or maybe the Eliz­a­bethan mys­tic John Dee. Or maybe Ital­ian witch­es, or space aliens. At just a glance, the Voyn­ich Man­u­script pos­es ques­tions that could take an eter­ni­ty to answer — as any great work of lit­er­a­ture should.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behold the Mys­te­ri­ous Voyn­ich Man­u­script: The 15th-Cen­tu­ry Text That Lin­guists & Code-Break­ers Can’t Under­stand

1,000-Year-Old Illus­trat­ed Guide to the Med­i­c­i­nal Use of Plants Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online

Won­der­ful­ly Weird & Inge­nious Medieval Books

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Kintsugi: The Centuries-Old Japanese Craft of Repairing Pottery with Gold & Finding Beauty in Broken Things

in Art, History, TED Talks | October 9th, 2017

We all grow up believ­ing we should empha­size the inher­ent pos­i­tives about our­selves. But what if we also empha­sized the neg­a­tives, the parts we’ve had to work to fix or improve? If we did it just right, would the neg­a­tives still look so neg­a­tive after all? These kinds of ques­tions come to mind when one pon­ders the tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese craft of kintsu­gi, a means of repair­ing bro­ken pot­tery that aims not for per­fec­tion, a return to “as good as new,” but for a kind of post-break­age rein­ven­tion that dares not to hide the cracks.

“Trans­lat­ed to ‘gold­en join­ery,’ Kintsu­gi (or Kintsukuroi, which means ‘gold­en repair’) is the cen­turies-old Japan­ese art of fix­ing bro­ken pot­tery with a spe­cial lac­quer dust­ed with pow­dered gold, sil­ver, or plat­inum” says My Mod­ern Met.

“Beau­ti­ful seams of gold glint in the cracks of ceram­ic ware, giv­ing a unique appear­ance to the piece. This repair method cel­e­brates each arti­fac­t’s unique his­to­ry by empha­siz­ing its frac­tures and breaks instead of hid­ing or dis­guis­ing them. Kintsu­gi often makes the repaired piece even more beau­ti­ful than the orig­i­nal, revi­tal­iz­ing it with new life.”

Kintsu­gi orig­i­nates, so one the­o­ry has it, in the late 15th cen­tu­ry under the cul­tur­al­ly inclined shogun Ashik­a­ga Yoshi­masa, dur­ing whose reign the sen­si­bil­i­ties of tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese art as we known them emerged. When Ashik­a­ga sent one of his dam­aged Chi­nese tea bowls back to his moth­er­land for repairs, it came back reassem­bled with ungain­ly met­al sta­ples. This prompt­ed his crafts­men to find a bet­ter way: why not use that gild­ed lac­quer to empha­size the cracks instead of hid­ing them? The tech­nique was said to have won the admi­ra­tion of famed (and not eas­i­ly impressed) tea mas­ter Sen no Rikyū, major pro­po­nent of the imper­fec­tion-appre­ci­at­ing aes­thet­ic wabi sabi.

You can hear and see these sto­ries of kintsug­i’s ori­gins in the videos from Nerd­writer and Alain de Bot­ton’s School of Life at the top of the post. The clip just above offers a clos­er look at the painstak­ing tech­niques of mod­ern kintsu­gi, which not only sur­vives but thrives today, hav­ing expand­ed to include oth­er mate­ri­als, repair­ing glass­ware as well as ceram­ics, for exam­ple, or fill­ing the cracks with sil­ver instead of gold. And what could under­score the cur­rent glob­al rel­e­vance of kintsu­gi more than the fact that the craft has inspired not one but two TEDTalks, the first by Audrey Har­ris in Kyoto in 2015 and the sec­ond by Mad­die Kel­ly in Ade­laide last year. We all, it seems, want to repair our cracks; kintsu­gi shows the way to do it not just hon­est­ly but art­ful­ly.

h/t the nugget

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wabi-Sabi: A Short Film on the Beau­ty of Tra­di­tion­al Japan

20 Mes­mer­iz­ing Videos of Japan­ese Arti­sans Cre­at­ing Tra­di­tion­al Hand­i­crafts

The Mak­ing of Japan­ese Hand­made Paper: A Short Film Doc­u­ments an 800-Year-Old Tra­di­tion

Watch a Japan­ese Crafts­man Lov­ing­ly Bring a Tat­tered Old Book Back to Near Mint Con­di­tion

The Art of Col­lo­type: See a Near Extinct Print­ing Tech­nique, as Lov­ing­ly Prac­ticed by a Japan­ese Mas­ter Crafts­man

Watch Japan­ese Wood­work­ing Mas­ters Cre­ate Ele­gant & Elab­o­rate Geo­met­ric Pat­terns with Wood

Japan­ese Crafts­man Spends His Life Try­ing to Recre­ate a Thou­sand-Year-Old Sword

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Your Brain on Art: The Emerging Science of Neuroaesthetics Probes What Art Does to Our Brains

in Art, Science | October 9th, 2017

If you’ve fol­lowed debates in pop­u­lar philo­soph­i­cal cir­cles, you’ve sure­ly heard the cri­tique of “sci­en­tism,” the “view that only sci­en­tif­ic claims are mean­ing­ful.” The term doesn’t apply only in defens­es of reli­gious expla­na­tions, but also of the arts and humanities—long imper­iled by sweep­ing bud­get cuts and now seem­ing­ly upend­ed by neu­ro­science.

We have the neu­ro­science of music, of lit­er­a­ture, of paint­ing, of cre­ativ­i­ty and imag­i­na­tion them­selves…. What need any­more for those pedants and obscu­ran­tists in their ivory tow­er aca­d­e­m­ic cubi­cles? Sweep them all away for bet­ter MRI machines and sta­tis­ti­cal pro­grams! Who, gasp the oppo­nents of sci­en­tism, would hold such a philis­tine view? Maybe only a straw man or two.

For those in the emerg­ing field of “neu­roaes­thet­ics,” the goal is not to vivi­sect the arts, but to observe what art—however defined—does to the brain. Neu­roaes­thet­ics, notes the Wash­ing­ton Post video above, the­o­rizes that “some of the answers to art’s mys­ter­ies can be found in the realm of sci­ence.” As Uni­ver­si­ty of Hous­ton Pro­fes­sor of Elec­tri­cal and Com­put­er Engi­neer­ing Jose Luis Con­tr­eras-Vidal puts it in the video below, “the more we under­stand the way the brain responds to the arts, the bet­ter we can under­stand our­selves.” Such under­stand­ing does not obvi­ate the mys­tery of art as, the Post writes in an accom­pa­ny­ing arti­cle, “the domain of the heart.”

The spec­ta­cle of per­form­ing artists, writ­ers, and musi­cians wear­ing skull­caps cov­ered with wires while in the midst of their cre­ative acts may look ludi­crous to us lay­folk. The Uni­ver­si­ty of Hous­ton takes this research quite seri­ous­ly, how­ev­er, appoint­ing three visu­al artists-in-res­i­dence to work along­side many oth­ers on Pro­fes­sor Contraras-Vidal’s ongo­ing neu­roaes­thet­ic projects, which also include dancers and musi­cians. In addi­tion to study­ing artists’ brains, the NSF-fund­ed project has record­ed “elec­tri­cal sig­nals in the brains of 450 indi­vid­u­als as they engaged with the work of artist Dario Rob­le­to in a pub­lic art instal­la­tion.”

The Post sum­ma­rizes some of the pos­si­ble answers offered by this kind of research: arts such as dance and the­ater stim­u­late our desire to expe­ri­ence intense emo­tions togeth­er in a group as a form of social cohe­sion. See­ing live performances—and sure­ly even films, though that par­tic­u­lar art form is slight­ed in many of these accounts—trig­gers a “neur­al rush…. With our brain’s capac­i­ty for emo­tion and empa­thy, even in the word­less art of dance we can begin to dis­cov­er meaning—and a sto­ry.” This brings us to the impor­tance our brains place on nar­ra­tive, on move­ment, the “log­ic of art” and much more.

For bet­ter or worse, neu­roaes­thet­ics is—at least at an insti­tu­tion­al level—in some com­pe­ti­tion with those branch­es of phi­los­o­phy clas­si­cal­ly con­cerned with aes­thet­ics, though often the two endeav­ors are com­ple­men­tary. But using sci­ence to inter­pret art, or inter­pret the brain on art, should in no way put the arts in jeop­ardy. Seri­ous sci­en­tif­ic curios­i­ty about the old­est and most uni­ver­sal of dis­tinc­tive­ly human activ­i­ties might instead pro­vide justification—or bet­ter yet, fund­ing and pub­lic support—for the gen­er­ous pro­duc­tion of more pub­lic art.

via The Wash­ing­ton Post

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Infor­ma­tion Over­load Robs Us of Our Cre­ativ­i­ty: What the Sci­en­tif­ic Research Shows

The Neu­ro­science of Drum­ming: Researchers Dis­cov­er the Secrets of Drum­ming & The Human Brain

How Bud­dhism & Neu­ro­science Can Help You Change How Your Mind Works: A New Course by Best­selling Author Robert Wright

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

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“Goodnight Moon,” as Read to Neil deGrasse Tyson by LeVar Burton

in Audio Books, K-12 | October 9th, 2017

Metafil­ter sets the stage for the cute, new­ly mint­ed video above:

At 1:00pm on May 17th, 2017, Neil deGrasse Tyson tweet­ed that he occa­sion­al­ly longed for some­one to read Good Night Moon to him as he falls asleep. Six min­utes lat­er, LeVar Bur­ton tweet­ed “I got you… Let’s do this!” And do it they did.

Some back­ground: LeVar Bur­ton host­ed the chil­dren’s TV show Read­ing Rain­bow for two decades, read­ing to chil­dren and encour­ag­ing them to read. His new pod­cast, LeVar Bur­ton Reads, is like Read­ing Rain­bow for adults. Neil deGrasse Tyson is a famous dancer yt /astrophysicist.

You can see Susan Saran­don read her own ver­sion. Find it in the Relat­eds below. Enjoy.

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:

Susan Saran­don Reads an Ani­mat­ed Ver­sion of Good Night Moon … With­out Cry­ing

A Ter­ri­fy­ing Read­ing of the Sweet Children’s Sto­ry Good­night Moon

Good­night Kei­th Moon: “The Most Inap­pro­pri­ate Bed­time Sto­ry Ever”

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Alan Watts Explains the Meaning of the Tao, with the Help of the Greatest Nancy Panel Ever Drawn

in Comics/Cartoons, Life, Philosophy | October 9th, 2017

A Nan­cy pan­el is an irre­ducible con­cept, an atom, and the com­ic strip is a mol­e­cule. — comics the­o­rist Scott McCloud

A lit­tle over ten years ago, car­toon­ist Jim Woodring iso­lat­ed a sin­gle image from Ernie Bushmiller’s long-run­ning and deeply polar­iz­ing Nan­cy com­ic strip, cel­e­brat­ing it on his blog, the Woodring Mon­i­tor, as “the great­est Nan­cy pan­el ever drawn.”

What makes this pan­el the great­est? Woodring declined to elab­o­rate, though his read­ers eager­ly shared the­o­ries—and some befuddlement—in the com­ments sec­tion:

Slug­go has reached the per­fect state of no-effort, the satori-like denial of the “small mind” and all of the suf­fer­ing that comes with it.

… it’s the com­ic equiv­a­lent of a koan—something designed to tie our ratio­nal mind in knots so that we can glimpse enlight­en­ment.

Slug­go smiles because he knows a secret. He says no because he rejects con­sen­sus real­i­ty. He floats along because he doesn’t fight life—he sees the main­te­nance of the har­mo­ny and is one with that har­mo­ny. He knows all paths lead away from home. Instead he goes with­in and knows free­dom.

“I am con­tent. I need noth­ing, I will do noth­ing, I am fine as I am.”

Anoth­er fan, Glyph Jock­ey’s Lex 10, took it one step fur­ther, remov­ing the speech bub­ble before tak­ing Slug­go on an ani­mat­ed trip through the cos­mos, nar­rat­ed by philoso­pher Alan Watts:

In the state of being in accor­dance with the Tao, there is a cer­tain feel­ing of weight­less­ness, par­al­lel to the weight­less­ness that peo­ple feel when they get into out­er space or when they go deep into the ocean.

Gab­by Pahinui’s “Pu’uanahulu” and Ramayana imagery bestow added hyp­not­ic appeal.

Revis­it this strange lit­tle ani­mat­ed gem the next time your head­’s about to explode from stress. Don’t ques­tion or get too hung up on mean­ings, just go with the flow, like Slug­go and Watts.

Could oth­er Nan­cy pan­els serve as vehi­cles for Taoist enlight­en­ment? May­haps:

Bushmiller’s strong point was nev­er the con­tent of his com­ic strip’s jokey plots—a friend once described him as ‘a moron on an acid trip.’ In fact, the gags were even sim­pler than was nec­es­sary for a ‘chil­dren’s’ strip. That’s because they were just a vehi­cle for the con­trolled and bril­liant manip­u­la­tion of rep­e­ti­tion and vari­ety that gave the strip its unique visu­al rhythm and com­po­si­tion. Bush­miller chore­o­graphed his famil­iar for­mal ele­ments inside the tight­est frame of any major strip, and that helped make it the most beau­ti­ful, as a whole, of any in the papers.” — Tom Smuck­er, The Vil­lage Voice, 1982

Recent­ly, Bushmiller’s Nan­cy has been enjoy­ing a renais­sance. The strip that many casu­al read­ers of the fun­ny pages dis­missed as bor­ing or dumb is revered by many cel­e­brat­ed car­toon­ists, includ­ing Bill Grif­fith, Daniel Clowes, and Art Spiegel­man.

This month sees the pub­li­ca­tion of Paul Karasik and Mark New­gar­den’s How to Read Nan­cy, a book length analy­sis of one sin­gle strip, which also func­tions as a how-to and his­to­ry of the com­ic medi­um. This hot­ly antic­i­pat­ed vol­ume has in turn giv­en rise to a live­ly online How To Read Nan­cy Read­ing Group, a hotbed of fan art, altered pan­els, and Nan­cy strips from around the world.

Invite your pals over to play com­ic the­o­rist Scott McCloud’s Dadaist game Five Card Nan­cy or take the online ver­sion for a solo spin.

And for those who require con­text, here is the orig­i­nal strip from which the float­ing Slug­go pan­el is drawn.

Appar­ent­ly the key to the Tao is a plas­tic ham­mock…

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Wis­dom of Alan Watts in Four Thought-Pro­vok­ing Ani­ma­tions

Three Charles Bukows­ki Books Illus­trat­ed by Robert Crumb: Under­ground Com­ic Art Meets Out­sider Lit­er­a­ture

Fol­low Car­toon­ist Lyn­da Barry’s 2017 “Mak­ing Comics” Class Online, Pre­sent­ed at UW-Wis­con­sin

Down­load Over 22,000 Gold­en & Sil­ver Age Com­ic Books from the Com­ic Book Plus Archive

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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How Stress Can Change Your Brain: An Animated Introduction

in Health, Science, TED Talks | October 8th, 2017

We hear the mantra of “self-care” in ever-widen­ing cir­cles, a con­cept both derid­ed and cel­e­brat­ed as a “mil­len­ni­al obses­sion,” with the acknowledgment—at least in this NPR think piece— that self-care was cen­tral to the philoso­phies of antiq­ui­ty, from Aris­to­tle to the Sto­ics.

In phi­los­o­phy, self-care exists as a set of ethics. The rea­sons for this may often be couched in high-mind­ed dis­cus­sions of civics, sex­u­al pol­i­tics, and exis­ten­tial self-actu­al­iza­tion. These days, doc­tors and researchers are mak­ing urgent appeals for our men­tal and phys­i­cal health, and the sci­ence of stress is an unsur­pris­ing­ly rich field of inves­ti­ga­tion at the moment.

It’s hard to over­state the neg­a­tive effects of stress on the body over time. Increased stress hor­mones have been linked in study after study to overeat­ing and obe­si­ty, low­ered immune response, drug use and addic­tion, mem­o­ry impair­ment, heart dis­ease, and many oth­er debil­i­tat­ing and life-threat­en­ing con­di­tions. “The long-term acti­va­tion of the stress-response sys­tem,” writes the Mayo Clin­ic, “and the sub­se­quent over­ex­po­sure to cor­ti­sol and oth­er stress hormones—can dis­rupt almost all your body’s process­es.” (The video below makes this har­row­ing point with some help­ful, ani­mat­ed com­ic relief.)

When we expe­ri­ence chron­ic stress, it rais­es our blood pres­sure and affects our car­dio­vas­cu­lar sys­tem, increas­ing the chances of heart attack or stroke. The even worse news—reports the TED-Ed video at the top of the post—is that chron­ic stress weak­ens our abil­i­ty to make sound deci­sions about our well-being, by chang­ing the size, struc­ture, and func­tion of our brain.

We’re famil­iar with the symp­toms of chron­ic stress: “sleep­ing rest­less­ly,” becom­ing “irri­ta­ble or moody,” “for­get­ting lit­tle things,” and “feel­ing over­whelmed and iso­lat­ed.” Con­tin­u­ous stress, from our work lives, home lives, social and polit­i­cal lives, can cause shrink­ing in parts of the brain respon­si­ble for mem­o­ry, spa­tial recog­ni­tion… and stress reg­u­la­tion.

Research shows that high lev­els of cor­ti­sol and oth­er stress hor­mones can cause shrink­ing of the pre­frontal cor­tex, the part of the brain respon­si­ble for rea­son­ing and deci­sion-mak­ing. Stress can inhib­it neuroplasticity—the abil­i­ty of the brain to adapt to new circumstances—and neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis: the abil­i­ty to pro­duce new brain cells.

Con­verse­ly, stress increas­es the size of the amyg­dala, which acti­vates fight-or-flight respons­es, which in turn increase the strain on our heart and blood ves­sels.

All of these effects can set the stage in lat­er life for major depres­sion, forms of cog­ni­tive decline and demen­tia, and Alzheimer’s dis­ease.

Most unset­tling­ly, as the video notes, these effects can be passed down to the next gen­er­a­tion, fur­ther­ing the cycle of chron­ic stress in our chil­dren and theirs. Per­sis­tent stress “fil­ters down” to DNA, mak­ing it genet­i­cal­ly inher­i­ta­ble.

Giv­en the incred­i­ble amount of stress most peo­ple seem to be under, this sci­ence can seem like a diag­no­sis of doom. We all know that chron­ic stres­sors assail us all day long, with­out ask­ing whether we want them in our lives or not. An increas­ing amount of our dai­ly stress, I’d hypoth­e­size, may indeed come from the grow­ing real­iza­tion of how lit­tle con­trol we have over many stress­ful sit­u­a­tions.

But the TED explain­er ends with good news, and it’s been there all along—we can find it in the ancient Greeks, in Bud­dhist prac­tices, and many oth­er tra­di­tions, both active and con­tem­pla­tive. We can con­trol our respons­es to stress, and thus reverse and mod­u­late the effects of cor­ti­sol on our sys­tem. The best, proven, ways to do so are through exer­cise and med­i­ta­tion (and, I’d add, good nutri­tion).

These activ­i­ties will not erad­i­cate the con­di­tions of inequal­i­ty, injus­tice, or insta­bil­i­ty that stress us all out—a great many of us more than oth­ers. But prac­tic­ing “self-care” inas­much as we are able with stress-reliev­ing dis­ci­plines and prac­tices will bet­ter equip us to respond to the state of the world and the state of our lives by inter­rupt­ing the bio­log­i­cal mech­a­nisms that, over time, make things much worse. Find some help­ful resources below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stream 18 Hours of Free Guid­ed Med­i­ta­tions

Med­i­ta­tion 101: A Short, Ani­mat­ed Beginner’s Guide

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

How to Get Start­ed with Yoga: Free Yoga Lessons on YouTube

Do Your­self a Favor and Watch Stress: Por­trait of a Killer (with Stan­ford Biol­o­gist Robert Sapol­sky)

How Mind­ful­ness Makes Us Hap­pi­er & Bet­ter Able to Meet Life’s Chal­lenges: Two Ani­mat­ed Primers Explain

How Bak­ing, Cook­ing & Oth­er Dai­ly Activ­i­ties Help Pro­mote Hap­pi­ness and Alle­vi­ate Depres­sion and Anx­i­ety

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

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

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Jason Aldean Performs “I Won’t Back Down” on SNL–A Moving Tribute the Victims of the Las Vegas Shooting & Tom Petty

in Life, Music | October 7th, 2017

Just days ago, Jason Aldean was per­form­ing on stage in Las Vegas when bul­lets start­ed reign­ing down, killing 58 con­cert­go­ers and wound­ing hun­dreds. Tonight, he opened Sat­ur­day Night Live with a poignant tribute–both to the vic­tims of the mas­sacre and rock­er Tom Pet­ty, who passed away ear­li­er this week.

Above, watch Aldean sing Pet­ty’s defi­ant 1989 anthem, “I Won’t Back Down.” Remem­ber the lives lost to sense­less vio­lence. Pray that we’ll even­tu­al­ly care enough, as a nation, to do some­thing about it. Think about music’s abil­i­ty to restore the soul. And thank SNL for ris­ing to yet anoth­er impor­tant occa­sion. 

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!

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