Adam Savage Takes Us Inside Jack White’s Third Man Records, the First New Record-Pressing Plant in the US in 30 Years

Jack White, best known as the front­man of The White Stripes, launched Third Man Records in 2001, which has since posi­tioned itself as “an inno­va­tor in the world of vinyl records and a bound­ary push­er in the world of record­ed music, aim­ing to bring tan­gi­bil­i­ty and spon­tane­ity back into the record busi­ness.”

After estab­lish­ing a phys­i­cal loca­tion in Nashville in 2009, Third Man Records opened a sec­ond site in Detroit, and now a new vinyl press­ing plant in the Motor City, pro­vid­ing a home to eight Ger­man-made record press­ing machines. Jack White told CBS, “One day, I want this place to be like what I had heard about Hen­ry Ford want­ed for Ford Motor com­pa­ny. Which was you pour in raw mate­ri­als on this side and out the oth­er side of the fac­to­ry pop out cars.”

Above you can get a half hour tour of the new record plant from Myth­buster’s Adam Sav­age. 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:

Hand­made Ani­ma­tion Shows You “How To Make a 1930 Para­mount Record”

How Vinyl Records Are Made: A Primer from 1956

Watch A Sin­gle Life: An Oscar-Nom­i­nat­ed Short About How Vinyl Records Can Take Us Mag­i­cal­ly Through Time

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Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Clem Albers & Francis Stewart’s Censored Photographs of a WWII Japanese Internment Camp


Image by Ansel Adams

In places where atroc­i­ties or wide­spread human rights vio­la­tions occur, we some­times hear ordi­nary cit­i­zens lat­er claim they didn’t know what was going on. In the case of the intern­ment of Japan­ese Amer­i­cans dur­ing World War II, this would be almost impos­si­ble to believe. “120,000 peo­ple,” notes Newsweek, “lost their prop­er­ty and their free­dom,” round­ed up in full view of their neigh­bors. Every major pub­li­ca­tion of the time report­ed on Franklin Roosevelt’s 1941 Exec­u­tive Order. Newsweek wrote “that peo­ple in coastal areas ‘were more anx­ious than ever to get rid of their aliens after rumors that sig­nal lights were seen before sub­ma­rine attacks’ ” off the coast of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia. There were many such rumors, the kind that spread xeno­pho­bic fear and para­noia, and which peo­ple used to vocal­ly sup­port, or tac­it­ly approve of, send­ing their neigh­bors to intern­ment camps because of their ances­try.


Image by Fran­cis Stew­art

Oth­er reac­tions were less than sub­tle. The West Seat­tle Her­ald con­front­ed read­ers with the blunt head­line “GET ‘EM OUT!” Nonethe­less, Newsweek’s Rob Verg­er writes, “the pol­i­cy was by no means greet­ed with unan­i­mous sup­port,” and a vig­or­ous pub­lic debate played out, with oppo­nents point­ing to the bla­tant racism and vio­la­tions of civ­il rights. Two-thirds of the internees were Amer­i­can cit­i­zens. Yet all Japan­ese Amer­i­cans were repeat­ed­ly called “aliens,” lan­guage con­sis­tent with the vir­u­lent­ly anti-Japan­ese pro­pa­gan­da cam­paigns emerg­ing at the same time.

Once the camps were built and the internees impris­oned, how­ev­er, a mas­sive pro­pa­gan­da effort began, not only the sell the camps as a nec­es­sary nation­al secu­ri­ty mea­sure, but to por­tray them as idyl­lic vil­lages where the patri­ot­ic internees patient­ly wait­ed out the war by farm­ing, play­ing base­ball, mak­ing arts and crafts, run­ning gen­er­al stores, attend­ing school, wav­ing flags, and run­ning news­pa­pers.


Image by Clem Albers

Much of that infor­ma­tion was con­veyed to the pub­lic visu­al­ly by pho­tog­ra­phers hired by the War Relo­ca­tion Author­i­ty to doc­u­ment the camps. Among them were Clem Albers, Fran­cis Stew­art, and Dorothea Lange—well known for her pho­tographs of the Great Depres­sion. All three vis­it­ed the camp called Man­za­nar in the foothills of the Sier­ra moun­tains. Anoth­er famous pho­tog­ra­ph­er, Ansel Adams, gained access to Man­za­nar by virtue of his friend­ship with its direc­tor, Ralph Mer­ritt.


Image by Dorothea Lange

Their pho­tographs, for the most part, show busi­ly work­ing men and women, smil­ing school­child­ren, and lots of patri­ot­ic leisure activ­i­ties, like Stewart’s pho­to of sixth grade boys play­ing soft­ball, fur­ther up. The pho­tog­ra­phers were strict­ly pro­hib­it­ed from pho­tograph­ing guards, watch­tow­ers, search­lights, or barbed wire, and the heavy mil­i­tary pres­ence at the camp is near­ly always out of frame, with some very rare excep­tions, like Albers’ pho­to­graph above of mil­i­tary police.


Image by Ansel Adams

Adams worked under these pro­hi­bi­tions as well, but his pho­tos cap­tured camp life as hon­est­ly as he could. The stun­ning land­scapes some­times com­pete, even in the back­ground, with the real sub­ject of some of his images (as in the pho­to at the top). But he also con­veyed the harsh bar­ren­ness of the region. He tried to inti­mate the oppres­sive police appa­ra­tus by cap­tur­ing its shad­ow. “The pur­pose of my work,” he wrote to the Library of Con­gress in 1965 upon donat­ing his col­lec­tion, “was to show how these peo­ple, suf­fer­ing under a great injus­tice, and loss of prop­er­ty, busi­ness and pro­fes­sions, had over­come a sense of defeat and despair [sic].” His images often show internees “in hero­ic pos­es,” writes Dini­tia Smith, as above, in order to enno­ble their con­di­tions. Lange’s pho­tographs, on the oth­er hand, like that of a young girl below, “seem­ing­ly unstaged and unlight­ed… bear the hall­marks” of her “dis­tinc­tive­ly doc­u­men­tary style.” Her pic­tures “com­press intense human emo­tion into care­ful­ly com­posed frames.” Some of her pho­tos show smil­ing, relaxed sub­jects. Many oth­ers, like the pho­to­graph of a bar­racks inte­ri­or fur­ther down, show the faces of weary, uncer­tain, and despon­dent civil­ian pris­on­ers of war.


Image by Dorothea Lange

Per­haps because of her refusal to sen­ti­men­tal­ize the camps, or because of her left-wing pol­i­tics and oppo­si­tion to intern­ment (both known before she was hired), Lange’s work was cen­sored, not only through restrict­ed access, but through the impound­ment of over 800 pho­tographs she took at 21 loca­tions. Those pho­tos were recent­ly pub­lished in a book called Impound­ed: Dorothea Lange and the Cen­sored Images of Japan­ese Amer­i­can Intern­ment and hun­dreds of them are free to view online at the Den­sho Dig­i­tal Repository’s Dorothea Lange Col­lec­tion. The Nation­al Park Service’s col­lec­tion fea­tures 16 pic­tures from Lange’s vis­it to Man­za­nar. At the NPS site, you’ll also find col­lec­tions of pho­tographs from that camp by Adams, Albers, and Stew­art. Each, to one degree or anoth­er, faced a form of cen­sor­ship in what they could pho­to­graph or whether their work would be shown at all. What most ordi­nary peo­ple saw at the time did not tell the whole sto­ry. For all prac­ti­cal pur­pos­es, writes Ober­lin Library, “life at a Japan­ese intern­ment camp was com­pa­ra­ble to the life of a pris­on­er behind bars.”


Image by Dorothea Lange

h/t @Histouroborus

Relat­ed Con­tent:

478 Dorothea Lange Pho­tographs Poignant­ly Doc­u­ment the Intern­ment of the Japan­ese Dur­ing WWII

200 Ansel Adams Pho­tographs Expose the Rig­ors of Life in Japan­ese Intern­ment Camps Dur­ing WW II

Dr. Seuss Draws Anti-Japan­ese Car­toons Dur­ing WWII, Then Atones with Hor­ton Hears a Who!

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

36 Abstract Covers of Vintage Psychology, Philosophy & Science Books Come to Life in a Mesmerizing Animation

Ani­mat­ed ebook cov­ers are the wave of the future.

Graph­ic and motion design­er Hen­ning M. Led­er­er surfs that wave on the most unex­pect­ed of boards—a col­lec­tion of abstract mid-cen­tu­ry cov­ers drawn from the Insta­gram feed of artist Julian Mon­tague, who shares his enthu­si­asm for vin­tage min­i­mal­ism.

Led­er­er first came to our atten­tion in 2015, when we cov­ered the first install­ment of what seems des­tined to become an ongo­ing project.

His lat­est effort, above, con­tin­ues his explo­rations in the sub­jects which most fre­quent­ly trad­ed in these sorts of geo­met­ric covers—science, psy­chother­a­py, phi­los­o­phy and soci­ol­o­gy.

No word on what inspired him to toss in the first cov­er, which fea­tures a cheer­ful, Play­mo­bil-esque mush­room gath­er­er. It’s endear­ing, but—to quote Sesame Street—is not like the oth­ers. Those of us who can’t deci­pher Cyril­lic script get the fun of imag­in­ing what sort of text this is—a mycol­o­gy man­u­al? A children’s tale? A psy­cho­log­i­cal examination—and ulti­mate­ly rejection—of mid­cen­tu­ry pub­lish­ers’ fas­ci­na­tion for spi­rals, diag­o­nal bars, and oth­er non-nar­ra­tive graph­ics?

Whether or not you’d be inclined to pick up any of these titles, you may find your­self want­i­ng to dance to them, com­pli­ments of musi­cian Jörg Stier­le’s trip­py elec­tron­ics.

Or take your cue from yet anoth­er cov­er  con­tained there­in: I. P. Pavlov’s Essays in Psy­chol­o­gy and Psy­chi­a­try with a Spe­cial Sec­tion on Sleep and Hyp­no­sis.

Here’s the one that start­ed it all:

Relat­ed Con­tent:

55 Cov­ers of Vin­tage Phi­los­o­phy, Psy­chol­o­gy & Sci­ence Books Come to Life in a Short Ani­ma­tion

Artist Ani­mates Famous Book Cov­ers in an Ele­gant, Under­stat­ed Way

500+William S. Bur­roughs Book Cov­ers from Across the Globe: 1950s Through the 2010s

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

Video Essayist Kogonada Makes His Own Acclaimed Feature Film: Watch His Tributes to Its Inspirations Like Ozu, Linklater & Malick

We’ve fea­tured the work of many cin­e­ma-lov­ing video essay­ists (myself includ­ed) here on Open Cul­ture, none of it more artis­tic than that of a man who goes by the name of Kog­o­na­da. Whether deal­ing with the films of auteurs like Stan­ley KubrickAndrei Tarkovsky, Alfred Hitch­cock, or Wes Ander­son, he finds new and strik­ing ways — often free of tra­di­tion­al nar­ra­tion, and some­times even free of spo­ken words alto­geth­er — to show us how their cin­e­mat­ic visions work, and in so doing to cre­ate new cin­e­mat­ic visions of his own. But when, we Kog­o­na­da fans have long won­dered, would this mys­te­ri­ous fel­low make a movie of his own?

The answer arrived at this year’s Sun­dance Film Fes­ti­val in the form of Colum­bus, Kog­o­nada’s fea­ture direc­to­r­i­al debut. “Colum­bus gets its title from the city where it’s set — Colum­bus, Indi­ana, home to a remark­able col­lec­tion of renowned works of mod­ern archi­tec­ture,” writes the New York­er’s Richard Brody, one of the many crit­ics to have already lav­ished praise on the new­ly released pic­ture.

“Those build­ings pro­vide an extra­or­di­nary premise for the dra­ma, which is a vision­ary trans­for­ma­tion of a famil­iar genre: a young adult’s com­ing-of-age sto­ry. For once, that trope doesn’t involve a sex­u­al awak­en­ing or a fam­i­ly rev­e­la­tion; it’s the tale of an intel­lec­tu­al blos­som­ing, thanks to a new friend­ship that aris­es amid trou­bled cir­cum­stances.”

Those trou­bled cir­cum­stances have to do with the par­ents of the two main char­ac­ters: Casey, a recent high-school grad­u­ate who’s stayed in town to care for a moth­er try­ing to kick a metham­phet­a­mine habit, and Jin, a fortysome­thing trans­la­tor who’s flown in from his home in Korea (birth­place of both the Mid­west-raised Kog­o­na­da and the film’s Los Ange­les-raised star John Cho) to watch over his father, an archi­tec­tur­al the­o­rist plunged into a coma by a stroke. “These par­al­lel lines meet when Casey offers to show the stranger her town,” writes Rolling Stone’s Peter Tra­vers in his review. “ ‘Meth and mod­ernism are real­ly big here,’ she tells Jin, as he becomes increas­ing­ly intrigued by this girl who sees the art and the human­i­ty in build­ings.”

Soon Jin and Casey take “baby steps toward a rela­tion­ship, in a man­ner that recalls Richard Lin­klater’s Before Sun­rise.” That film, and its suc­ces­sors Before Sun­set and Before Mid­night, fig­ure heav­i­ly into Kog­o­nada’s video essay on Lin­klater, “On Cin­e­ma & Time.” Oth­er influ­ences, cit­ed by crit­ics as well as Kog­o­na­da him­self, include Ter­ence Mal­ick, whose way with the ele­men­tal he exam­ined in “Fire & Water,” and Yasu­jiro Ozu, whose films got him think­ing about cin­e­ma in the first place. As he put it to Indiewire, he start­ed by think­ing he would “try to fig­ure out what it is about his films that ini­tial­ly felt very unim­pres­sive, but kept haunt­ing me,” to under­stand why Ozu “isn’t easy to just reduce to some­thing — he cer­tain­ly is not this sort of tra­di­tion­al­ist, he’s cer­tain­ly not a west­ern mod­ernist, he is some­thing else and what­ev­er he was explor­ing and offer­ing felt so rel­e­vant, even today.”

Kog­o­nada’s video essays “Way of Ozu” and “Pas­sage­ways” reveal not just the Japan­ese mas­ter’s use of archi­tec­tur­al spaces, but Kog­o­nada’s inter­est in such spaces. Colum­bus brings the depth of that inter­est to the fore: “The direc­tor pro­vokes aware­ness of the Mod­ernist Colum­bus by treat­ing it as one of the film’s char­ac­ters,” writes Archi­tec­tur­al Record’s Dante A. Ciampaglia. “It’s both pro­tag­o­nist and neme­sis for Casey and Jin as they wan­der the city, explore its archi­tec­tur­al boun­ty, and find it both reflect­ing inner strug­gles and inspir­ing epipha­nies.” As Kog­o­na­da him­self puts it, “I think that’s the thing that inter­ests me, the rela­tion­ship between emp­ty spaces and life itself.” May he find many more oppor­tu­ni­ties to explore it onscreen.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Per­fect Sym­me­try of Wes Anderson’s Movies

“Auteur in Space”: A Video Essay on How Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris Tran­scends Sci­ence Fic­tion

The Eyes of Hitch­cock: A Mes­mer­iz­ing Video Essay on the Expres­sive Pow­er of Eyes in Hitchcock’s Films

Cin­e­mat­ic Exper­i­ment: What Hap­pens When The Bicy­cle Thief’s Direc­tor and Gone With the Wind’s Pro­duc­er Edit the Same Film

How Richard Lin­klater (Slack­er, Dazed and Con­fused, Boy­hood) Tells Sto­ries with Time: Six Video Essays

Sig­na­ture Shots from the Films of Stan­ley Kubrick: One-Point Per­spec­tive

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, 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.

Hear Debussy Play Debussy: A Vintage Recording from 1913

A cen­tu­ry ago, the great French com­pos­er Claude Debussy sat down at a con­trap­tion called a Welte-Mignon repro­duc­ing piano and record­ed a series of per­for­mances for pos­ter­i­ty.  The machine was designed to encode the nuances of a pianist’s play­ing, includ­ing ped­al­ing and dynam­ics, onto piano rolls for lat­er repro­duc­tion, like the one above.

Debussy record­ed 14 pieces onto six rolls in Paris on or before Novem­ber 1, 1913. Accord­ing to Debussy enthu­si­ast Steve Bryson’s Web site, the com­pos­er was delight­ed with the repro­duc­tion qual­i­ty, say­ing in a let­ter to Edwin Welte: “It is impos­si­ble to attain a greater per­fec­tion of repro­duc­tion than that of the Welte appa­ra­tus. I am hap­py to assure you in these lines of my aston­ish­ment and admi­ra­tion of what I heard. I am, Dear Sir, Yours Faith­ful­ly, Claude Debussy.”

The selec­tion above is “La soirée dans Grenade” (“Grena­da in the evening”), from Debussy’s 1903 trio of com­po­si­tions titled Estam­pes, or “Prints.” Debussy was inspired by the Sym­bol­ist poets and Impres­sion­ist painters who strove to go beyond the sur­face of a sub­ject to evoke the feel­ing it gave off. “La soirée dans Grenade” is described by Chris­tine Steven­son at Notes From a Pianist as a “sound pic­ture” of Moor­ish Spain:

Debussy’s first-hand expe­ri­ence of Spain was neg­li­gi­ble at that time, but he imme­di­ate­ly con­jures up the coun­try by using the per­sua­sive Haben­era dance rhythm to open the piece–softly and sub­tly. It insin­u­ates itself into our con­scious­ness with its qui­et insis­tence on a repeat­ed C sharp in dif­fer­ent reg­is­ters; around it cir­cles a lan­guid, Moor­ish arabesque, with nasal aug­ment­ed 2nds, and a nag­ging semi­tone pulling against the tonal cen­tre, occa­sion­al­ly inter­rupt­ed by mut­ter­ing semi­qua­vers [16th notes] and a whole-tone based pas­sage. Debussy writes Com­mencer lente­ment dans un rythme non­cha­la­m­ment gra­cieux [Begin slow­ly in a casu­al­ly grace­ful rhythm] at the begin­ning, but lat­er Tres ryth­mé [Very ryth­mic] in a bright­ly lit A major as the dance comes out of the shad­ows, ff [Fortissimo–loudly], with the click of cas­tanets and the stamp­ing of feet.

Debussy was 52-years-old and suf­fer­ing from can­cer when he made his piano roll record­ings. He died less than five years lat­er, on March 25, 1918. Since then his beau­ti­ful and evoca­tive music has secured a place for him as one of the most influ­en­tial and pop­u­lar com­posers of the 20th cen­tu­ry. As Roger Hecht writes at Clas­si­cal Net, “Debussy was a dream­er whose music dreamed with him.”

Note: This post orig­i­nal­ly appeared on our site in Jan­u­ary 2013.

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:

Rare 1946 Film: Sergei Prokofiev Plays the Piano and Dis­cuss­es His Music

Hear a 1930 Record­ing of Boléro, Con­duct­ed by Rav­el Him­self

Watch 82-Year-Old Igor Stravin­sky Con­duct The Fire­bird, the Bal­let Mas­ter­piece That First Made Him Famous (1965)

Watch 82-Year-Old Igor Stravin­sky Con­duct The Fire­bird, the Bal­let Mas­ter­piece That First Made Him Famous (1965)

Leonard Bern­stein Intro­duces 7‑Year-Old Yo-Yo Ma: Watch the Young­ster Per­form for John F. Kennedy (1962)

Ray Bradbury Reveals the True Meaning of Fahrenheit 451: It’s Not About Censorship, But People “Being Turned Into Morons by TV”

Even those of us who’ve nev­er read Ray Brad­bury’s Fahren­heit 451 know it as a sear­ing indict­ment of gov­ern­ment cen­sor­ship. Or at least we think we know it, and besides, what else could the sto­ry of a dystopi­an future where Amer­i­ca has out­lawed books whose main char­ac­ter burns the few remain­ing, secret­ed-away vol­umes to earn his liv­ing be about? It turns out that Brad­bury him­self had oth­er ideas about the mean­ing of his best-known nov­el, and in the last years of his life he tried pub­licly to cor­rect the pre­vail­ing inter­pre­ta­tion — and to his mind, the incor­rect one.

Fahren­heit 451 is not, he says firm­ly, a sto­ry about gov­ern­ment cen­sor­ship,” wrote the Los Ange­les Week­ly’s Amy E. Boyle John­son in 2007. “Nor was it a response to Sen­a­tor Joseph McCarthy, whose inves­ti­ga­tions had already instilled fear and sti­fled the cre­ativ­i­ty of thou­sands.” Rather, he meant his 1953 nov­el as “a sto­ry about how tele­vi­sion destroys inter­est in read­ing lit­er­a­ture.” It’s about, as he puts it above, peo­ple “being turned into morons by TV.” John­son quotes Brad­bury describ­ing tele­vi­sion as a medi­um that “gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was,” spread­ing “fac­toids” instead of knowl­edge. “They stuff you with so much use­less infor­ma­tion, you feel full.”

He did­n’t much like radio either: just two years before Fahren­heit 451, Brad­bury wrote to his sci-fi col­league Richard Math­e­son bemoan­ing its con­tri­bu­tion to “our grow­ing lack of atten­tion,” and its cre­ation of a “hop­scotch­ing exis­tence” that “makes it almost impos­si­ble for peo­ple, myself includ­ed, to sit down and get into a nov­el again.” For the aban­don­ment of read­ing he saw in soci­ety, and from which he extrap­o­lat­ed in his book, he blamed not the state but the peo­ple, an enter­tai­ment-as-opi­ate-addict­ed “demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­ety whose diverse pop­u­la­tion turns against books: Whites reject Uncle Tom’s Cab­in and blacks dis­ap­prove of Lit­tle Black Sam­bo,” lead­ing to wide­spread cen­sor­ship and even­tu­al­ly the burn­ing of all read­ing mate­r­i­al.

But books still do face chal­lenges (and the FBI even had its eye on Brad­bury and his genre), chal­lenges only an intel­li­gent, non-numbed pub­lic can beat back. “I get let­ters from teach­ers all the time say­ing my books have been banned tem­porar­i­ly,” says Brad­bury in the clip above. “I say, don’t wor­ry about it, put ’em back on the shelves. You keep putting them back and they keep tak­ing them off, and you final­ly win.” The authors, even Brad­bury, can’t help, but he would always tell these lit­er­ar­i­ly-mind­ed peo­ple who wrote to him in dis­tress the same thing: “You do the job. You’re the librar­i­an. You’re the teacher. Stand firm and you’ll win. And they always do.”

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:

Father Writes a Great Let­ter About Cen­sor­ship When Son Brings Home Per­mis­sion Slip to Read Ray Bradbury’s Cen­sored Book, Fahren­heit 451

Who Was Afraid of Ray Brad­bury & Sci­ence Fic­tion? The FBI, It Turns Out (1959)

Ray Brad­bury: “I Am Not Afraid of Robots. I Am Afraid of Peo­ple” (1974)

Ray Brad­bury: Lit­er­a­ture is the Safe­ty Valve of Civ­i­liza­tion

Hear Ray Bradbury’s Clas­sic Sci-Fi Sto­ry Fahren­heit 451 as a Radio Dra­ma

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, 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.

A Century of Global Warming Visualized in a 35 Second Video

Antti Lip­po­nen, a researcher at the Finnish Mete­o­ro­log­i­cal Insti­tute, gath­ered his­tor­i­cal data from NASA and pro­duced a short video effec­tive­ly show­ing that, from 1900 through 2016, the tem­per­a­ture has steadi­ly got­ten warmer world­wide. Each spoke of the wheel rep­re­sents one of 191 dif­fer­ent coun­tries. And the hot­ter the col­or (e.g. oranges and reds), the warmer the tem­per­a­ture. You can get a clos­er look at the his­tor­i­cal pro­gres­sion here. The mate­ri­als have been released under a Cre­ative Com­mons license on Flickr.

Note: If you want to bet­ter under­stand the sci­ence of Glob­al Warm­ing, we’d rec­om­mend watch­ing the lec­tures from this free Glob­al Warm­ing course from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go:

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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via Yale Envi­ron­ment 360

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Glob­al Warm­ing: A Free Course from UChica­go Explains Cli­mate Change

Ani­ma­tions Show the Melt­ing Arc­tic Sea Ice, and What the Earth Would Look Like When All of the Ice Melts

Huge Hands Rise Out of Venice’s Waters to Sup­port the City Threat­ened by Cli­mate Change: A Poignant New Sculp­ture

132 Years of Glob­al Warm­ing Visu­al­ized in 26 Dra­mat­i­cal­ly Ani­mat­ed Sec­onds

Music for a String Quar­tet Made from Glob­al Warm­ing Data: Hear “Plan­e­tary Bands, Warm­ing World”

A Song of Our Warm­ing Plan­et: Cel­list Turns 130 Years of Cli­mate Change Data into Music

Frank Capra’s Sci­ence Film The Unchained God­dess Warns of Cli­mate Change in 1958

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Rebecca Solnit Picks 13 Songs That Will Remind Us of Our Power to Change the World, Even in Seemingly Dark Times

Image by Shawn, via Flickr Com­mons

Apoc­a­lypses have always been pop­u­lar as mass belief and enter­tain­ment. Maybe it’s a col­lec­tive desire for ret­ri­bu­tion or redemp­tion, or a kind of ver­ti­go humans expe­ri­ence when star­ing into the abyss of the unknown. Bet­ter to end it all than live in neu­rot­ic uncer­tain­ty. Maybe we find it impos­si­ble to think of a future world exist­ing hun­dreds, thou­sands, mil­lions of years after our deaths. As Rebec­ca Sol­nit observes in Hope in the Dark: Untold His­to­ries, Wild Pos­si­bil­i­ties, “peo­ple have always been good at imag­in­ing the end of the world, which is much eas­i­er to pic­ture than the strange side­long paths of change in a world with­out end.” What if the world nev­er ends, but goes on for­ev­er, chang­ing and evolv­ing in unimag­in­able ways?

This is the baili­wick of sci­ence fic­tion, but also the domain of his­to­ry, a hind­sight view of cen­turies past when wars, tyran­ni­cal con­quests, famines, and dis­eases near­ly wiped out entire populations—when it seemed to them a near cer­tain­ty that noth­ing would or could sur­vive the present hor­ror. And yet it did.

This may be no con­so­la­tion to the vic­tims of vio­lence and plague, but the world has gone on for the liv­ing, peo­ple have adapt­ed and sur­vived, even under the cur­rent, very real threats of nuclear war and cat­a­stroph­ic cli­mate change. And through­out his­to­ry, both small and large groups of peo­ple have changed the world for the bet­ter, though it hard­ly seemed pos­si­ble at the time. Sol­nit’s book chron­i­cles these his­to­ries, and last year, she released a playlist as a com­pan­ion for the book.

Hope in the Dark makes good on its title through a col­lec­tion of essays about “every­thing,” writes Alice Gre­go­ry at The New York Times, “from the Zap­atis­tas to weath­er fore­cast­ing to the fall of the Berlin Wall.” The book is “part his­to­ry of pro­gres­sive suc­cess sto­ries, part extend­ed argu­ment for hope as a cat­a­lyst for action.” Sol­nit wrote the book in 2004, dur­ing the reelec­tion of George W. Bush—a time when pro­gres­sives despaired of ever see­ing the end of chick­en­hawk sabre-rat­tling, wars for prof­it, pri­va­ti­za­tion of the pub­lic sphere, envi­ron­men­tal degra­da­tion, theo­crat­ic polit­i­cal projects, cur­tail­ing of civ­il rights, or the dis­as­ter cap­i­tal­ism the admin­is­tra­tion whole­heart­ed­ly embraced (as Nao­mi Klein’s The Shock Doc­trine detailed). Plus ça change.…

In March of last year, Hay­mar­ket Books reis­sued Hope in the Dark, and on Novem­ber 10th, Sol­nit post­ed a link to a free down­load of the book on Face­book. It was down­loaded over 30,000 times in one week. Along with oth­er pro­gres­sive intel­lec­tu­als like Klein and Richard Rorty, Solnit—who became inter­na­tion­al­ly known for the term “mansplain­ing” in her essay, then book, Men Explain Things to Me—has now been cast as a “Cas­san­dra fig­ure of the left,” Gre­go­ry writes. But she rejects the dis­as­trous futil­i­ty inher­ent in that anal­o­gy:

If you think of a kind of ecol­o­gy of ideas, there are more than enough peo­ple telling us how hor­rif­ic and ter­ri­ble and bad every­thing is, and I don’t real­ly need to join that project. There’s a whole oth­er project of try­ing to coun­ter­bal­ance that — some­times we do win and this is how it worked in the past. Change is often unpre­dictable and indi­rect. We don’t know the future. We’ve changed the world many times, and remem­ber­ing that, that his­to­ry, is real­ly a source of pow­er to con­tin­ue and it doesn’t get talked about near­ly enough.

If we don’t hear enough talk about hope, maybe we need to hear more hope­ful music, Sol­nit sug­gests in her Hope in the Dark playlist. Thir­teen songs long, it moves between Bey­on­cé and The Clash, Iggy Pop and Ste­vie Nicks, Black Flag and Big Free­dia.

While the selec­tions speak for them­selves, she offers brief com­men­tary on each of her choic­es in a post at Powell’s. Beyoncé’s “For­ma­tion,” Sol­nit writes, “refor­mu­lates, dig­ging deep into the past of sor­row and suf­fer­ing and injus­tice and pulling us all with her into a future that could be dif­fer­ent.” Pat­ti Smith’s anthem “Peo­ple Have the Pow­er” feels like hope, Sol­nit says: “it’s right about the pow­er we have, which oblig­es us to act, and which many duck by pre­tend­ing we’re help­less.” Maybe that’s what apoc­a­lypses are all about—making us feel small and pow­er­less in the face of impend­ing doom. But there are oth­er kinds of reli­gion, like that of Lee Williams’ “Steal My Joy.” It’s a “gor­geous gospel song,” writes Sol­nit. “Joys­teal­ers are every­where. Nev­er sur­ren­der to them.” That sounds like an ide­al exhor­ta­tion to imag­ine and fight for a bet­ter future.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear a 4 Hour Playlist of Great Protest Songs: Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, Bob Mar­ley, Pub­lic Ene­my, Bil­ly Bragg & More

89 Essen­tial Songs from The Sum­mer of Love: A 50th Anniver­sary Playlist

The His­to­ry of Punk Rock in 200 Tracks: An 11-Hour Playlist Takes You From 1965 to 2016

Langston Hugh­es Cre­ates a List of His 100 Favorite Jazz Record­ings: Hear 80+ of Them in a Big Playlist

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

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