Free Libraries Shaped Like Doctor Who’s Time-Traveling TARDIS Pop Up in Detroit, Saskatoon, Macon & Other Cities

Image cour­tesy of Dan Zemke.

If you live in a major Amer­i­can city — and maybe even if you live in a major non-Amer­i­can one — you may well have come across a Lit­tle Free Library, those box­es of books open to the pub­lic for whomev­er would like to take one or leave one. Most Lit­tle Free Libraries, often put up on pri­vate prop­er­ty by the res­i­dents of that prop­er­ty, tend to look like over­sized bird­hous­es, but none of the pro­gram’s rules requires them to look that way. A Tokyo sub­way sta­tion, for instance, built one to resem­ble a sub­way car. Oth­er indus­tri­ous Lit­tle Free Library mem­bers have used the oppor­tu­ni­ty to pay trib­ute to their obses­sions, and few obses­sions run as deep (deep­er, even, than the obses­sion for trains in Japan) as the one for Doc­tor Who.

The Eng­lish genre-bend­ing spec­u­la­tive-fic­tion show has, since its debut on the BBC back in 1963, fol­lowed the tit­u­lar Doc­tor (just “the Doc­tor,” not “Doc­tor Who,” and cer­tain­ly nev­er “Dr. Who”) through many dra­mat­ic changes of set­tings, and even more notably changes of actors, as he falls into adven­tures with the var­i­ous Earth­lings he encoun­ters. Always on the move, the Doc­tor gets around by means of a machine called a TARDIS, which stands for “Time And Rel­a­tive Dimen­sion In Space.” The­o­ret­i­cal­ly able to change its shape depend­ing on the peri­od of time it lands in, the TARDIS — in a neat demon­stra­tion of the cre­ativ­i­ty that aris­es from con­straints, in this case a severe­ly lim­it­ed pro­duc­tion bud­get — gets per­ma­nent­ly stuck in the shape of a Lon­don police call box, thus repur­pos­ing one of the best-known icons of Eng­lish cities into one of the best-known icons of Eng­lish tele­vi­sion.

The best-known TARDIS-shaped Lit­tle Free Library, which appears at the top of this post, entered ser­vice in a vacant lot in Detroit, a place by now well used to mak­ing urban improve­ments by hand. The father and son behind it “began work last Labor Day, and were aid­ed by an online build­ing com­mu­ni­ty called Tardis Builders,” writes The Verge’s Andrew Lip­tak.

“The final struc­ture stands almost 10 feet tall, weighs almost a ton, and its front shelves holds around 140 books.” These videos show off oth­er book-lend­ing TARDIS­es in North Amer­i­ca, from Bloom­ing­ton, Indi­ana to Macon, Geor­gia to Saska­toon, Saskatchewan — all stand­ing evi­dence of how far Doc­tor Who’s appeal has spread beyond its native cul­ture.

As much as it may seem like noth­ing more than the proud­ly nerdy pur­suit of wor­ship­ful fans, build­ing a Lit­tle Free Library (or in most of these cas­es, a not-so-Lit­tle Free Library) in the form of a TARDIS has a cer­tain con­cep­tu­al valid­i­ty in and of itself. As every Doc­tor Who view­er knows, the TARDIS, not just a device enabling trav­el to any point in time-space, accom­plish­es anoth­er kind of spa­tial feat by hav­ing an inte­ri­or much larg­er than its the exte­ri­or. “We thought it would be cool to fill the TARDIS with items that are large on the inside, like books that hold whole lit­er­ary worlds,” says Dan Zemke, co-builder of the one in Detroit, in Parade arti­cle. Borges, as well as all the oth­er most bril­liant spec­u­la­tive minds before Doc­tor Who and after it, would no doubt approve.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Brit­Box Now Stream­ing Now Stream­ing 550 Episodes of Doc­tor Who and Many Oth­er British TV Shows

30 Hours of Doc­tor Who Audio Dra­mas Now Free to Stream Online

The BBC Cre­ates Step-by-Step Instruc­tions for Knit­ting the Icon­ic Doc­tor Who Scarf: A Doc­u­ment from the Ear­ly 1980s

Vin­cent van Gogh Vis­its a Mod­ern Muse­um & Gets to See His Artis­tic Lega­cy: A Touch­ing Scene from Doc­tor Who

The Fas­ci­nat­ing Sto­ry of How Delia Der­byshire Cre­at­ed the Orig­i­nal Doc­tor Who Theme

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.

Google Creates a Digital Archive of World Fashion: Features 30,000 Images, Covering 3,000 Years of Fashion History

Both the fash­ion and art worlds fos­ter the cre­ation of rar­i­fied arti­facts inac­ces­si­ble to the major­i­ty of peo­ple, often one-of-a-kind pieces that exist in spe­cial­ly-designed spaces and flour­ish in cos­mopoli­tan cities. Does this mean that fash­ion is an art form like, say, paint­ing or pho­tog­ra­phy? Doesn’t fashion’s ephemer­al nature mark it as a very dif­fer­ent activ­i­ty? We might con­sid­er that we can ask many of the same ques­tions of haute cou­ture as we can of fine art. What are the social con­se­quences of tak­ing folk art forms, for exam­ple, out of their cul­tur­al con­text and plac­ing them in gallery spaces? What is the effect of tap­ping street fash­ion as inspi­ra­tion for the run­way, turn­ing it into objects of con­sump­tion for the wealthy?

Such ques­tions should remind us that fash­ion and the arts are embed­ded in human cul­tur­al and eco­nom­ic his­to­ry in some very sim­i­lar ways. But they are also very dif­fer­ent social prac­tices. Much like trends in food (both fine din­ing and cheap con­sum­ables) fash­ion has long been impli­cat­ed in the spread of mar­kets and indus­tries, labor exploita­tion, envi­ron­men­tal degra­da­tion, and even microbes. As Jason Daley points out at Smith­son­ian, “The craze for silk in ancient Rome helped spawn the Silk Road, a fash­ion for feath­ered hats con­tributed to the first Nation­al Wildlife Refuges. Fash­ion has even been wrapped up in pan­demics and infec­tious dis­eases.

So how to tell the sto­ry of a human activ­i­ty so deeply embed­ded in every facet of world his­to­ry? Expan­sive­ly. Google Arts & Cul­ture has attempt­ed to do so with its “We wear cul­ture” project. Promis­ing to tell “the sto­ries behind what we wear,” the project, as you can see in the teas­er video at the top, “trav­elled to over 40 coun­tries, col­lab­o­rat­ing with more than 180 cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions and their world-renowned his­to­ri­ans and cura­tors to bring their tex­tile and fash­ion col­lec­tions to life.” Cov­er­ing 3,000 years of his­to­ry, “We wear cul­ture” uses video, his­tor­i­cal images, short quotes and blurbs, and fash­ion pho­tog­ra­phy to cre­ate a series of online gallery exhibits of, for exam­ple, “The Icons,” pro­files of design­ers like Oscar de la Renta, Coco Chanel, and Issey Miyake.

Anoth­er exhib­it “Fash­ion as Art” includes a fea­ture on Florence’s Museo Sal­va­tore Fer­rag­amo, a gallery ded­i­cat­ed to the famous design­er and con­tain­ing 10,000 mod­els of shoes he cre­at­ed or owned. Ask­ing the ques­tion “is fash­ion art?”, the exhib­it “analy­ses the forms of dia­logue between these two worlds: rec­i­p­ro­cal inspi­ra­tions, over­laps and col­lab­o­ra­tions, from the expe­ri­ences of the Pre-Raphaelites to those of Futur­ism, and from Sur­re­al­ism to Rad­i­cal Fash­ion.” It’s a won­der they don’t men­tion the Bauhaus school, many of whose res­i­dent artists rad­i­cal­ized fash­ion design, though their geo­met­ric odd­i­ties seem to have had lit­tle effect on Fer­rag­amo.

As you might expect, the empha­sis here is on high fash­ion, pri­mar­i­ly. When it comes to telling the sto­ries of how most peo­ple in the world have expe­ri­enced fash­ion, Google adopts a very Euro­pean, sup­ply side, per­spec­tive, one in which “The impact of fash­ion,” as one exhib­it is called, spans cat­e­gories “from the econ­o­my and job cre­ation, to help­ing empow­er com­mu­ni­ties.” Non-Euro­pean cloth­ing mak­ers gen­er­al­ly appear as anony­mous folk arti­sans and crafts­peo­ple who serve the larg­er goal of pro­vid­ing mate­ri­als and inspi­ra­tion for the big names.

Cul­tur­al his­to­ri­ans may lament the lack of crit­i­cal or schol­ar­ly per­spec­tives on pop­u­lar cul­ture, the dis­tinct lack of oth­er cul­tur­al points of view, and the intense focus on trends and per­son­al­i­ties. But per­haps to do so is to miss the point of a project like this one—or of the fash­ion world as a whole. As with fine art, the sto­ries of fash­ion are often all about trends and per­son­al­i­ties, and about mate­ri­als and mar­ket forces.

To cap­i­tal­ize on that fact, “We wear cul­ture” has a num­ber of inter­ac­tive, 360 degree videos on its YouTube page, as well as short, adver­tis­ing-like videos, like that above on ripped jeans, part of a series called “Trends Decod­ed.” Kate Lauter­bach, the pro­gram man­ag­er at Google Arts & Cul­ture, high­lights the videos below on the Google blog (be aware, the inter­ac­tive fea­ture will not work in Safari).

  • Find out how Chanel’s black dress made it accept­able for women to wear black on any occa­sion (Musée des Arts Déco­rat­ifs, Paris, France — 1925)
  • Step on up—way up—to learn how Mar­i­lyn Monroe’s sparkling red high heels became an expres­sion of empow­er­ment, suc­cess and sex­i­ness for women (Museo Sal­va­tore Fer­rag­amo from Flo­rence, Italy — 1959)
  • See design­er Vivi­enne West­wood’s unique take on the corset, one of the most con­tro­ver­sial gar­ments in his­to­ry (Vic­to­ria and Albert Muse­um, Lon­don, UK — 1990)
  • Dis­cov­er the Comme des Garçons sweater and skirt with which Rei Kawakubo brought the aes­thet­ics and crafts­man­ship of Japan­ese design onto the glob­al fash­ion stage (Kyoto Cos­tume Insti­tute, Kyoto, Japan — 1983)

Does the project yet deliv­er on its promise, to “tell the sto­ries behind what we wear”? That all depends, I sup­pose, on who “we” are. It is a very valu­able resource for stu­dents of high fash­ion, as well as “a pleas­ant way to lose an after­noon,” writes Marc Bain at Quartz, one that “may give you a new under­stand­ing of what’s hang­ing in your own clos­et.”

We wear cul­ture” fea­tures 30,000 fash­ion pieces and more than 450 exhibits. Start brows­ing here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kandin­sky, Klee & Oth­er Bauhaus Artists Designed Inge­nious Cos­tumes Like You’ve Nev­er Seen Before

1930s Fash­ion Design­ers Pre­dict How Peo­ple Would Dress in the Year 2000

Punk Meets High Fash­ion in Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art Exhi­bi­tion PUNK: Chaos to Cou­ture

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

American Archive of Public Broadcasting Lets You Stream 7,000 Hours of Historic Public TV & Radio Programs

An archive worth know­ing about: The Library of Con­gress and Boston’s WGBH have joined forces to cre­ate The Amer­i­can Archive of Pub­lic Broad­cast­ing and “pre­serve for pos­ter­i­ty the most sig­nif­i­cant pub­lic tele­vi­sion and radio pro­grams of the past 60 years.” Right now, they’re over­see­ing the dig­i­ti­za­tion of approx­i­mate­ly 40,000 hours of pro­grams. And already you can start stream­ing “more than 7,000 his­toric pub­lic radio and tele­vi­sion pro­grams.”

The col­lec­tion includes local news and pub­lic affairs pro­grams, and “pro­grams deal­ing with edu­ca­tion, envi­ron­men­tal issues, music, art, lit­er­a­ture, dance, poet­ry, reli­gion, and even film­mak­ing.” You can browse the com­plete col­lec­tion here. Or search the archive here. For more on the archive, read this About page.

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!

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Library of Con­gress Makes 25 Mil­lion Records From Its Cat­a­log Free to Down­load

Library of Con­gress Releas­es Audio Archive of Inter­views with Rock ‘n’ Roll Icons

Library of Con­gress Launch­es New Online Poet­ry Archive, Fea­tur­ing 75 Years of Clas­sic Poet­ry Read­ings

A Short, Animated Introduction to Emil Cioran, the “Philosopher of Despair”

It is admit­ted­ly a gross over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tion, but if asked to sum­ma­rize a crit­i­cal dif­fer­ence between ana­lyt­i­cal Anglo-Amer­i­can philoso­phers and so-called “Con­ti­nen­tals,” one might broad­ly say that the for­mer approach phi­los­o­phy as think­ing, the lat­ter as writ­ing. Con­trast, for exam­ple, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Bertrand Russell—none of whom are espe­cial­ly known as prose stylists—with Michel de Mon­taigne, Kierkegaard, Niet­zsche, or Albert Camus. While the Eng­lish­men struck out into heady intel­lec­tu­al waters indeed, the Euro­peans brought the full weight of their per­son­al­i­ties to bear on their inves­ti­ga­tions. They invent­ed per­son­ae, wrote lit­er­ary apho­risms, and often wrote fic­tion, dra­ma, and dia­logue in addi­tion to phi­los­o­phy.

Sure­ly there are many excep­tions to this scheme, but on the whole, Con­ti­nen­tal thinkers have been loos­er with the laws of log­ic and more inti­mate with the rules of rhetoric, as well as with their own emo­tion­al lives. But per­haps one of the great­est exam­ples of such a philo­soph­i­cal writer is some­one most of us have nev­er heard of. After watch­ing this short School of Life video intro­duc­tion on Roman­ian-French philoso­pher Emil Cio­ran, we may be per­suad­ed to get to know his work. Cio­ran, says Alain de Bot­ton above, “is very much wor­thy of inclu­sion in the line of the great­est French and Euro­pean moral philoso­phers and writ­ers of max­ims stretch­ing back to Mon­taigne, Cham­fort, Pas­cal, and La Rochefou­cauld.”

Cos­ti­ca Bra­datan describes Cio­ran as a “20th-cen­tu­ry Niet­zsche, only dark­er and with a bet­ter sense of humor.” Called a “philoso­pher of despair” by the New York Times upon his death in 1995, Cioran’s “hair-shirt­ed world view res­onat­ed in the titles” of books like On the Heights of Despair, Syl­lo­gisms of Bit­ter­ness, and The Trou­ble with Being Born. Though his deeply pes­simistic out­look was con­sis­tent through­out his career, he was not a sys­tem­at­ic thinker. “Cio­ran often con­tra­dicts him­self,” writes Bra­datan, “but that’s the least of his wor­ries. With him, self-con­tra­dic­tion is not even a weak­ness, but the sign a mind is alive.”

Like Niet­zsche, Cio­ran pos­sessed a “brood­ing, roman­tic, fatal­is­tic tem­pera­ment” com­bined with an obses­sion with reli­gious themes, inher­it­ed from his father, a Greek Ortho­dox priest. The two also share a pen­chant for pithy apho­risms both shock­ing and dark­ly fun­ny in their bru­tal can­dor. De Bot­ton quotes one exam­ple: “It is not worth the both­er of killing your­self, since you always kill your­self too late.” For Cio­ran, Bra­datan remarks, writ­ing phi­los­o­phy was “not about being con­sis­tent, nor about per­sua­sion or keep­ing a read­er­ship enter­tained.” It was a per­son­al act of sur­vival. “You write not to pro­duce some body of text, but to act upon your­self; to bring your­self togeth­er after a per­son­al dis­as­ter or to pull your­self out of a bad depres­sion.”

Cio­ran put it this way: “Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would nev­er dare con­fide to any­one.” In his the­mat­ic obses­sions, lit­er­ary ele­gance, and per­son­al invest­ment in his work, Cio­ran resem­bles a num­ber of writ­ers we admire because phi­los­o­phy for them was not a mat­ter of ratio­nal abstrac­tion; it was an active engage­ment with the most per­son­al, yet uni­ver­sal, ques­tions of life and death.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Arthur Schopen­hauer and How We Can Achieve Hap­pi­ness Through Art & Phi­los­o­phy

An Ani­mat­ed, Mon­ty Python-Style Intro­duc­tion to the Søren Kierkegaard, the First Exis­ten­tial­ist

Niet­zsche, Wittgen­stein & Sartre Explained with Mon­ty Python-Style Ani­ma­tions by The School of Life

How Did Niet­zsche Become the Most Mis­un­der­stood & Bas­tardized Philoso­pher?: A Video from Slate Explains

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

Akira Kurosawa Names His 21 Favorite Art Films in the Criterion Collection

The high­ly auteur-respect­ing Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion has, as you might expect, done quite well by the work of Aki­ra Kuro­sawa, direc­tor of RashomonSev­en Samu­raiIkiru, and Ran — to name just a few out of his many films in their cat­a­log. Giv­en all the time and atten­tion Cri­te­ri­on puts into not just the pic­tures them­selves but the wealth of sup­ple­men­tal mate­r­i­al that goes with them, you could poten­tial­ly become a Kuro­sawa expert from only what you can learn through Cri­te­ri­on releas­es. That includes an under­stand­ing of the 21 Cri­te­ri­on films that Kuro­sawa includ­ed on his list of favorite movies. Find them list­ed right below.

You’ll notice that Kuro­sawa’s Cri­te­ri­on selec­tions, a sub­set of his list of 100 favorite movies we fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture a few years ago, include more than just pic­tures to which he would have thrilled dur­ing his for­ma­tive years in Japan in the 1920s and 30s. In fact, it skews toward much more recent and inter­na­tion­al pro­duc­tions, right up to Paris, Texas (1984) by Ger­man New Wave star Wim Wen­ders, who once inter­viewed Kuro­sawa for a mag­a­zine. The younger film­mak­er asked the elder only tech­ni­cal ques­tions such as “ ‘Mr. Kuro­sawa, you let it rain real­ly beau­ti­ful­ly. How do you shoot it?” “To be hon­est,” Kuro­sawa admit­ted, “for me also such top­ics are more wel­come, and we dis­cussed it fur­ther. But the edi­tors were pret­ty embar­rassed.”

Through­out his long life and career, Kuro­sawa enjoyed oppor­tu­ni­ties to meet more than a few of the oth­er film­mak­ers whose work he admired as well. Last year we fea­tured the sto­ry of his first meet­ing with Andrei Tarkovsky, at a screen­ing of the lat­ter’s Solaris. “We were very good friends. He was like a lit­tle broth­er for me,” Kuro­sawa remem­bered, recall­ing in par­tic­u­lar one inci­dent when the two of them got drunk togeth­er and end­ed up singing the Sev­en Samu­rai theme. His oth­er Cri­te­ri­on selec­tions reveal a love for the work of oth­ers in what we might call the Tarkovsky class of late 20th-cen­tu­ry auteurs as well, from François Truf­faut and Jean-Luc Godard to Ing­mar Bergman and Michelan­ge­lo Anto­nioni.

At the top of the post you can watch the first film on Kuro­sawa’s Cri­te­ri­on list, Char­lie Chap­lin’s 1925 The Gold Rush, free online. (The ver­sion up top, we should note, is not the Cri­te­ri­on release itself. It’s anoth­er ver­sion.) “Chap­lin was very tal­ent­ed as an actor as well,” said Kuro­sawa. “Do you know, come­dies are most dif­fi­cult to make. It’s much eas­i­er to jerk tears from the audi­ence. He, of course, was gift­ed as a direc­tor as well, well-versed in music. I think he was so gift­ed that he him­self did­n’t know what he should do with his own tal­ents.” But Kuro­sawa, gift­ed as he was, could­n’t say the same of him­self, know­ing as he always did exact­ly what movie he want­ed to make next, even in peri­ods when he could­n’t shoot a sin­gle frame, work­ing right up until the end of his days. Even the title of his final film express­es that sen­si­bil­i­ty, one that sure­ly res­onates with every lover or mak­er of film who knows how much of cin­e­ma always remains to explore: Mada­dayo, or “Not yet!”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Aki­ra Kurosawa’s List of His 100 Favorite Movies

When Aki­ra Kuro­sawa Watched Solaris with Andrei Tarkovsky: I Was “Very Hap­py to Find Myself Liv­ing on Earth”

Aki­ra Kuro­sawa to Ing­mar Bergman: “A Human Is Not Real­ly Capa­ble of Cre­at­ing Real­ly Good Works Until He Reach­es 80”

Watch Aki­ra Kuro­sawa & Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la in Japan­ese Whiskey Ads from 1979: The Inspi­ra­tion for Lost in Trans­la­tion

Hayao Miyaza­ki Meets Aki­ra Kuro­sawa: Watch the Titans of Japan­ese Film in Con­ver­sa­tion (1993)

Aki­ra Kurosawa’s Advice to Aspir­ing Film­mak­ers: Write, Write, Write and Read

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.

Introduction to Python, Data Science & Computational Thinking: Free Online Courses from MIT

FYI: MIT has post­ed online the video lec­tures for an essen­tial series of cours­es. In the playlist of 38 lec­tures above, you can get an Intro­duc­tion to Com­put­er Sci­ence and Pro­gram­ming in Python. Record­ed this past fall, and taught by Prof. Eric Grim­son, Prof. John Gut­tag, and Dr. Ana Bell, the course is “intend­ed for stu­dents with lit­tle or no pro­gram­ming expe­ri­ence. It aims to pro­vide stu­dents with an under­stand­ing of the role com­pu­ta­tion can play in solv­ing prob­lems and to help stu­dents, regard­less of their major, feel jus­ti­fi­ably con­fi­dent of their abil­i­ty to write small pro­grams that allow them to accom­plish use­ful goals. The class uses the Python 3.5 pro­gram­ming lan­guage.” Find accom­pa­ny­ing course mate­ri­als, includ­ing syl­labus, here.

The fol­low up course, Intro­duc­tion to Com­pu­ta­tion­al Think­ing and Data Sci­ence, is again intend­ed for stu­dents with lit­tle or no pro­gram­ming expe­ri­ence. “It aims to pro­vide stu­dents with an under­stand­ing of the role com­pu­ta­tion can play in solv­ing prob­lems and to help stu­dents, regard­less of their major, feel jus­ti­fi­ably con­fi­dent of their abil­i­ty to write small pro­grams that allow them to accom­plish use­ful goals. The class uses the Python 3.5 pro­gram­ming lan­guage.” Find relat­ed course mate­ri­als here, and the 15 lec­tures on this playlist.

Both cours­es will be added to our col­lec­tion of Free Com­put­er Sci­ence Cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

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:

Learn Python: A Free Online Course from Google

Learn How to Code for Free: A DIY Guide for Learn­ing HTML, Python, Javascript & More

Down­load 243 Free eBooks on Design, Data, Soft­ware, Web Devel­op­ment & Busi­ness from O’Reilly Media

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Rare Footage Shows US and British Soldiers Getting Dosed with LSD in Government-Sponsored Tests (1958 + 1964)

We’re usu­al­ly right to reserve judge­ment when it comes to con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries. But the rea­son they often sound plau­si­ble is a com­pelling one: What we do know about the secret activ­i­ties of agen­cies like the CIA, FBI, KGB, NSA, etc. often points to a sur­re­al, nefar­i­ous, extra-legal dimen­sion full of plots Kurt Von­negut or Philip K. Dick might have writ­ten. In such a dimen­sion was born Project MK-ULTRA, the mind con­trol pro­gram devel­oped by the CIA in the ear­ly fifties and only offi­cial­ly stopped in 1973.

Most famous for intro­duc­ing a young hos­pi­tal order­ly named Ken Kesey to LSD when he vol­un­teered for an experiment—and thus act­ing as a pri­ma­ry cause of the Acid-fueled Haight-Ash­bury move­ment to come—MK-ULTRA test­ed drugs, hyp­no­sis, sen­so­ry depri­va­tion, and psy­cho­log­i­cal tor­ture as a means of manip­u­lat­ing inter­ro­ga­tion sub­jects. At the same time as the CIA drugged will­ing and unwill­ing par­tic­i­pants, Army intel­li­gence con­duct­ed research into using LSD as a mind con­trol agent.

Raf­fi Khatch­adouri­an tells the sto­ry in The New York­er of Dr. Van Mur­ray Sim, founder of the Army’s Edge­wood Arse­nal pro­gram of clin­i­cal research on psy­cho­chem­i­cals. To his col­leagues, Sim “was like Dr. Strangelove; he was a leader; he was the ‘Men­gele of Edge­wood’… manip­u­la­tive and venge­ful, eth­i­cal­ly short­sight­ed, inco­her­ent­ly ram­bling… and devot­ed to chem­i­cal-war­fare research.” He vol­un­teered him­self as a test sub­ject for VX, a lethal nerve agent, for Red Oil, a “high­ly potent syn­thet­ic ver­sion of mar­i­jua­na,” and for oth­er hal­lu­cino­gens designed for “psy­cho­chem­i­cal war­fare.”

Sim dosed him­self sev­er­al times with LSD and in 1957 pro­posed a series of “prac­ti­cal exper­i­ments” with the drug at Edge­wood. “It was deemed impor­tant,” writes Khatch­adodouri­an, “to con­duct LSD tests on peo­ple who were pro­vid­ed no infor­ma­tion about what the drug would do.” You can see film of one of those tests above, con­duct­ed in 1958 on Army vol­un­teers who, the nar­ra­tor tells us, “respond­ed like well-trained sol­diers to the request: imme­di­ate­ly and with­out ques­tion.”

The sol­diers are put through a series of drills. Then they are dosed and drilled again. There is much laugh­ter among the squad, but one man suc­cumbed to such severe depres­sion that five min­utes after they begin, the med­ical offi­cers “end his par­tic­i­pa­tion.” After a few more min­utes, “the men found it dif­fi­cult to obey orders. And soon the results were chaos,” the nar­ra­tor says. In real­i­ty, as we can see, the sol­diers seemed hap­py and relaxed, not in a “chaot­ic” state, though their unwill­ing­ness to obey would cer­tain­ly seem so to the brass.

British intel­li­gence also test­ed LSD on its troops. In the film above from 1964, sev­er­al armed British Marines are giv­en a dose and sent out into the field exer­cis­es. The results are strik­ing­ly sim­i­lar. Imme­di­ate­ly after tak­ing the field the drugged marines begin to gig­gle, laugh, and relax. But one man “is more severe­ly affect­ed than the oth­ers, los­ing all con­tact with real­i­ty, drop­ping his rifle, and becom­ing unable to take part in the oper­a­tion. In fact, he has to be with­drawn from the exer­cise a few min­utes lat­er.” The remain­der of the test sub­jects col­lapse in fits of hilar­i­ty.

“In the end,” writes Rich Rems­berg at NPR, the U.S. Army decid­ed that LSD “was too expen­sive” and “unsta­ble once air­borne,” though it did lead to some­thing called Agent BZ, “which was weaponized but nev­er used in com­bat.” But at the peak of its test­ing pro­grams, Army intel­li­gence, the CIA, and even Oper­a­tion Paperclip—the secre­tive pro­gram that recruit­ed for­mer Nazi sci­en­tists into its ranks—showed an obses­sion with the drug, amass­ing huge sup­plies of it, and test­ing it on wit­ting and unwit­ting sub­jects alike.

In one oper­a­tion, called “Mid­night Cli­max,” unsus­pect­ing clients “at CIA broth­els in New York and San Fran­cis­co were slipped LSD and then mon­i­tored through one-way mir­rors to see how they react­ed,” writes David Ham­bling at Wired. “Col­leagues were also con­sid­ered fair game for secret test­ing, to the point where a memo was issued instruct­ing that the punch bowls at office Christ­mas par­ties were not to be spiked” with acid.

While the CIA pulled pranks—and inspired Kesey’s Mer­ry Pranksters—the Army took its pro­gram over­seas to Europe under the aegis of “Oper­a­tion Spe­cial Pur­pose.” Even today, Khatch­adouri­an writes, “the non-Amer­i­cans who were test­ed have still not been iden­ti­fied.” Oper­a­tion Spe­cial Purpose’s exper­i­ments “were dis­as­trous, offer­ing lit­tle or no use­ful intel­li­gence, and risk­ing untold psy­cho­log­i­cal dam­age to the sub­jects.” The Cold War­riors in charge thought of the drug as a weapon, and threw ethics and sci­en­tif­ic cau­tion to the wind. In cer­tain tests, inter­roga­tors intend­ed “to cause max­i­mum anx­i­ety and fear.” They degrad­ed and threat­ened sub­jects “as long as the drug was effec­tive: eight hours, or pos­si­bly more.”

In recent years, LSD research has made a promis­ing return, and has shown that, when used for pur­pos­es oth­er than mind con­trol, tor­ture, and manip­u­la­tion, the hal­lu­cino­genic com­pound might actu­al­ly have ben­e­fi­cial effects on men­tal health and well-being. Today’s research builds on exper­i­ments con­duct­ed by psy­chi­a­trists at the same time as MK-ULTRA and Oper­a­tion Spe­cial Pur­pose. “From the 1950s through the ear­ly 1970s,” writes the Mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary Asso­ci­a­tion for Psy­che­del­ic Stud­ies (MAPS), “psy­chi­a­trists, ther­a­pists, and researchers admin­is­tered LSD to thou­sands of peo­ple for alco­holism, as well as for anx­i­ety and depres­sion” in ter­mi­nal patients.

As in the tests in the films above, they found that—with notable exceptions—the drug made peo­ple hap­pi­er, more relaxed, and less afraid of death. “When used by peo­ple with­out a fam­i­ly his­to­ry or risk of psy­cho­log­i­cal prob­lems,” report­ed The Wash­ing­ton Post in a sto­ry last year on new research, “psy­che­delics can make us kinder, calmer and bet­ter at our jobs. They can help us solve prob­lems more cre­ative­ly and make us more open-mind­ed and gen­er­ous.” Per­haps part of the gov­ern­ment con­spir­a­cy to use hal­lu­cino­genic drugs for ill involved sup­press­ing all of the ways they could be used for good.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hofmann’s Potion: 2002 Doc­u­men­tary Revis­its His­to­ry of LSD

Ken Kesey’s First LSD Trip Ani­mat­ed

Ken Kesey Talks About the Mean­ing of the Acid Tests

Aldous Huxley’s Most Beau­ti­ful, LSD-Assist­ed Death: A Let­ter from His Wid­ow

A Short Anti-LSD Hor­ror Film Made by the Lock­heed Cor­po­ra­tion (1969)

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

Batman Goes Surfing: Remembering Adam West (RIP) with Perhaps the Campiest Batman Episode Ever

In the var­i­ous obits I read this week­end for Adam West, one word repeat­ed­ly came up–“campy.”

Reuters start­ed its obit: “Adam West, who earned a place in Amer­i­can pop cul­ture his­to­ry with his campy por­tray­al of the title char­ac­ter in the clas­sic 1960s TV series “Bat­man,” has died at age 88, his fam­i­ly said on Sat­ur­day.”

The New York Times added: “His straight-faced por­tray­al of Bat­man in the campy 1960s TV series lift­ed the tight-clad Caped Cru­sad­er into the nation­al con­scious­ness, and inspired future wear­ers of the super­hero’s cape and cowl. The TV show was among the most pop­u­lar in 1966, the year of its debut, and some of the era’s top actors signed on to play vil­lains.”

And The Hol­ly­wood Reporter capped things with off:  Yes, the Bat­man series was campy. But it was also iron­ic — in that, all winks aside, there was some­thing tru­ly right­eous and excit­ing about this pur­ple-clad goof­ball.” Indeed!

If you want Exhib­it 1 of the won­der­ful campi­ness, check out the clip above, an out­take from the Novem­ber 1967 episode, “Surf’s Up, Joker’s Under,” which turns on this plot:

The Jok­er plans to become the king of surf­ing, hop­ing the fame will give him con­trol over the hearts and minds of Gotham City. He cap­tures top surfer Skip Park­er, then uses his “Surf­ing Expe­ri­ence & Abil­i­ty Trans­fer­om­e­ter” to trans­fer the need­ed skills and sta­mi­na from Skip to him­self. When all the oth­er con­tes­tants drop out of the upcom­ing surf­ing match, Bat­man steps up to chal­lenge the Jok­er’s suprema­cy.

Just so you know. The Jok­er fin­ish­es first, but Bat­man wins on points.

The full episode (along with 119 oth­er ones) can be viewed on Bat­man: The Com­plete Series, a remas­tered box set released just a few years ago. I loved watch­ing the series in syn­di­ca­tion as a kid. Do they play as well decades lat­er? We’ll find out.

Note: If you want to see where Adam West fig­ured into the long line of Bat­man actors, see this video from our archive: The Evo­lu­tion of Bat­man in Cin­e­ma: From 1939 to Present

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1950s Bat­man Car­toon Tells Kids: “Don’t Believe Those Crack­pot Lies About Peo­ple Who Wor­ship Dif­fer­ent­ly”

1950 Super­man Poster Urged Kids to Defend All Amer­i­cans, Regard­less of Their Race, Reli­gion or Nation­al Ori­gin

Bat­man Stars in an Unusu­al Car­toon Adap­ta­tion of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Pun­ish­ment

The Evo­lu­tion of Bat­man in Cin­e­ma: From 1939 to Present

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