David Lynch Visualizes How Transcendental Meditation Works, Using a Sharpie & Big Pad of Paper

in Science | November 18th, 2019

Sec­ond only to the Bea­t­les, David Lynch has become syn­ony­mous with the prac­tice of Tran­scen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion. And while the results were cer­tain­ly mixed for the Fab Four, Lynch, in all his idio­syn­crasies, has become the face of TM. He didn’t dab­ble with it mid-career. Instead, med­i­ta­tion helped cre­ate his career, as both his prac­tice and the film­ing of Eraser­head start­ed around 1972.

“…[L]ooking back,” he said in a Dai­ly Beast inter­view in 2014, “I was filled with anger and took it out on my first wife and made her life mis­er­able. I had a low-grade depres­sion, and wasn’t real­ly self-assured. If I’d gone for­ward with­out the abil­i­ty to tran­scend every day, I think the pres­sures of the busi­ness could’ve got­ten me.”

His career has been tran­scen­dent for sure, and as head of his epony­mous foun­da­tion, he’s spread­ing the word, bring­ing TM to schools and call­ing in fel­low cre­atives to extol its virtues.

But how does Lynch him­self explain Tran­scen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion? In this video, Lynch, armed with a pad of paper and a Sharpie, takes us on a sci­en­tif­ic jour­ney down past atoms and pro­tons, and down to the uni­fied field the­o­ry of quan­tum physics. A “no-thing” out of which all mat­ter emerges. Sci­en­tists can’t take us into the uni­fied field…but the mind can. Hence, med­i­ta­tion.

“The mantra is the key that opens the door,” he explains. (What is that mantra? It’s a per­son­al one that the Mahar­ishi, or some­one high on the TM chain will give you after training…if you believe the TM pitch. Not every­body believes it needs be so pro­pri­etary, or expen­sive.)

With a mantra the mind can dive deep and then deep­er: “Each deep­er lev­el of mind and each deep­er lev­el of intel­lect has more hap­pi­ness,” he says. Go deep enough and the mind hits the equiv­a­lent of the uni­fied field, and there…transcendence.

“Pure, unbound­ed, infi­nite con­scious­ness…” he promis­es. “Tran­scen­den­tal med­i­ta­tion is just the vehi­cle to get you here.”

This can’t be the first time Lynch has drawn this dia­gram, but it real­ly is one of the best visu­al­iza­tions of how sci­ence and med­i­ta­tion have arrived at the same con­clu­sion. And it’s also why sci­ence is now study­ing the effects of med­i­ta­tion on the brain. For those look­ing for more on Lynch and med­i­ta­tion, we have you cov­ered.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed David Lynch Explains Where He Gets His Ideas

David Lynch Mus­es About the Mag­ic of Cin­e­ma & Med­i­ta­tion in a New Abstract Short Film

David Lynch Talks Med­i­ta­tion with Paul McCart­ney

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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How Art Nouveau Inspired the Psychedelic Designs of the 1960s

in Art, Music | November 18th, 2019

“In the late 1800’s new tech­nol­o­gy was chang­ing the way the world worked, and the way that it looked,” the Vox video above explains. “Some peo­ple, espe­cial­ly artists, liv­ing through the tech­no­log­i­cal rev­o­lu­tion, were not so into all the new indus­try. To be blunt, they thought it was ugly.” They respond­ed with organ­ic forms and intri­cate pat­terns that evoked a pre-indus­tri­al world while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly show­cas­ing, and sell­ing, the most mod­ern ideas and prod­ucts.

Draw­ing on the hand­craft­ed aes­thet­ic of the Arts and Crafts Move­ment, the Goth­ic revival, the florid, ornate paint­ings of the Pre-Raphaelites, a fas­ci­na­tion with Japan­ese wood­block prints, and the strange, beau­ti­ful illus­tra­tions of sea crea­tures by Ernst Haeck­el, artists began to chal­lenge late Vic­to­ri­an ortho­dox­ies. The style we now know as Art Nou­veau emerged.

It went by many names: Jugend­stil, Mon­dernisme, Tiffany Style, Glas­gow Style, Stile Lib­er­ty, Sezes­sion­stil. Each iden­ti­fied a col­lec­tion of traits with which we are now famil­iar from the many hun­dreds of posters and adver­tise­ments of the time. Grand, flow­ing lines, intri­cate pat­terns, vibrant, often clash­ing col­ors, bold hand-let­ter­ing, fem­i­nine fig­ures and elab­o­rate, exot­ic themes….

The descrip­tions of Art Nouveau’s qual­i­ties also apply to the poster and album cov­er art of the psy­che­del­ic 1960s, and no won­der, giv­en the sig­nif­i­cant influ­ence of the for­mer upon the lat­ter. The artists of the acid rock peri­od rebelled not so much against indus­tri­al­iza­tion as the mil­i­tary-indus­tri­al-com­plex. At the epi­cen­ter of the move­ment was the San Fran­cis­co of Jef­fer­son Air­plane and the Grate­ful Dead.

Venues like the Fil­more and the Aval­on adver­tised the hip­pie rev­o­lu­tion with eye-catch­ing posters inspired by those that once lined the thor­ough­fares of Europe in an age before TV, radio, and neon signs. Art Nou­veau-like designs had already returned with the flower pat­terns pop­u­lar in fab­rics at the time. 60s graph­ic design­ers saw these seduc­tive styles as the key to a new psy­che­del­ic vision.

It’s easy to see why. Flow­ers, curves, pea­cocks, updates of Art Nou­veau images from the past (includ­ing skele­tons and roses)—dialed up to 11 with “eye-vibrat­ing” colors—made the per­fect visu­al accom­pa­ni­ment for the acid-fla­vored Roman­ti­cism that took root dur­ing the Viet­nam era. Even the fonts were poached from turn-of-the-cen­tu­ry graph­ic art. Famous 60s design­ers like Wes Wil­son con­fessed their admi­ra­tion for mod­ernism, “the idea,” Wil­son told Time in 1967, “of real­ly putting it all out there.”

Just as Art Nou­veau flow­ered into an inter­na­tion­al style, with some pre­scient­ly trip­py man­i­fes­ta­tions in Brazil and oth­er places, so too did the 60s psy­che­del­ic poster, spread­ing from San Fran­cis­co to every cor­ner of the globe. And as Art Nou­veau became the house style for the coun­ter­cul­ture of the ear­ly 20th century—celebrating sex­u­al and cul­tur­al exper­i­men­ta­tion and occult interests—it announced the birth of flower pow­er and its recov­ery of mod­ernism’s expres­sive free­doms.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Har­ry Clarke’s 1926 Illus­tra­tions of Goethe’s Faust: Art That Inspired the Psy­che­del­ic 60s

Ernst Haeckel’s Sub­lime Draw­ings of Flo­ra and Fau­na: The Beau­ti­ful Sci­en­tif­ic Draw­ings That Influ­enced Europe’s Art Nou­veau Move­ment (1889)

Down­load 200+ Belle Époque Art Posters: An Archive of Mas­ter­pieces from the “Gold­en Age of the Poster” (1880–1918)

Behold the Beau­ti­ful Designs of Brazil’s 1920s Art Deco Mag­a­zine, Para Todos

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

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What Ancient Chinese Sounded Like — and How We Know It: An Animated Introduction

in History | November 18th, 2019

No stu­dent of Chi­nese has an easy time with pro­nun­ci­a­tion. Even lin­guist Joshua Rud­der, who tells ani­mat­ed sto­ries on his Youtube chan­nel Native­Lang about lan­guages around the world and how they came to be, admits his own strug­gles to get it right. “But late­ly I’ve been bury­ing myself in hun­dreds of pages of Chi­nese lin­guis­tic his­to­ry, and you know what? I’m in good com­pa­ny,” says Rud­der in the intro­duc­tion to the video above, “What ‘Ancient’ Chi­nese Sound­ed Like — and How We Know.” “Chi­nese pro­nun­ci­a­tion puz­zled experts in Chi­na for a long, long time.”

This leads into the sto­ry of one par­tic­u­lar expert, a 19th schol­ar named Chen Li who sought to recov­er Chi­nese pro­nun­ci­a­tions that even then seemed to have been lost to his­to­ry. “How do you recov­er the sounds immor­tal­ized in clas­si­cal texts? How do you make the old poems rhyme again?” And how do you do it when “you have no record­ings, no pho­net­ic tran­scrip­tions, not even an alpha­bet — you’re work­ing with char­ac­ters.” Ah yes, char­ac­ters, those thou­sands of logograms, evolved over mil­len­nia, that still today bedev­il any­one try­ing to get a han­dle on the Chi­nese lan­guage, not exclud­ing the Chi­nese them­selves. That goes espe­cial­ly for some­one as lin­guis­ti­cal­ly ambi­tious as Chen Li.

Chen Li’s research on the cor­rect pro­nun­ci­a­tion of ancient Chi­nese brought him to the Qieyun, an even then-1200-year-old dic­tio­nary of fan­qie (反切), or the pro­nun­ci­a­tion of sin­gle char­ac­ters described by using com­bi­na­tions of oth­er char­ac­ters. (On Wikipedia, you can find assem­bled links to scanned frag­ments of the text cur­rent­ly held in places like the British Library and the Bib­lio­thèque nationale de France.) Draw­ing on not just the Qieyun but oth­er sources as well, Chen Li’s painstak­ing work of recon­struct­ing old pro­nun­ci­a­tions over­turned the long-stand­ing teach­ing that the Chi­nese lan­guage had 36 ini­tial con­so­nant sounds. He found that it had 41. But even after that dis­cov­ery, the nature of these “pre­cise sounds” remained unknown, an incom­plete­ness of knowl­edge chipped away at by the Swedish schol­ar Bernard Karl­gren in the 1900s, who took into account “the many liv­ing vari­eties” of the Chi­nese lan­guage.

Oth­er Asian lan­guages with vocab­u­lary descend­ed from Chi­nese also come in to play. Rud­der takes the exam­ple of the word for “coun­try,” pro­nounced guó (國) in mod­ern Man­darin but kuk in Kore­an (국), koku in Japan­ese (国), and kuək in Viet­namese (quốc), all sug­gest­ing a com­mon ancient Chi­nese ances­tor word end­ing in a K‑like con­so­nant sound. But how­ev­er much progress has been made, this research into “ancient” Chi­nese has turned out to be research into a lin­guis­tic peri­od of “mid­dle Chi­nese,” which reveals evi­dence of “an even old­er lan­guage to uncov­er, a thou­sand years old­er still.” The work of a lin­guis­tic his­to­ry, just like the hum­bler work of a Chi­nese lan­guage-learn­er, is nev­er done.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Chi­nese Lessons

What Ancient Latin Sound­ed Like, And How We Know It

What Did Etr­uscan Sound Like? An Ani­mat­ed Video Pro­nounces the Ancient Lan­guage That We Still Don’t Ful­ly Under­stand

What Did Old Eng­lish Sound Like? Hear Recon­struc­tions of Beowulf, The Bible, and Casu­al Con­ver­sa­tions

Hear What the Lan­guage Spo­ken by Our Ances­tors 6,000 Years Ago Might Have Sound­ed Like: A Recon­struc­tion of the Pro­to-Indo-Euro­pean Lan­guage

A Map of How the Word “Tea” Spread Across the World

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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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Salvador Dalí’s Iconic Deck of Tarot Cards Get Re-Issued: It’s Out Today

in Art, Books | November 15th, 2019

Last month, we high­light­ed Sal­vador Dal­i’s deck of Tarot cards. Orig­i­nal­ly cre­at­ed in 1984, the tarot deck is now being re-issued by Taschen in a beau­ti­ful 184-page art book. For those inter­est­ed, the offi­cial release date is today. Read all about the famous deck here. Or pur­chase your own set of Dal­i’s tarot cards here.

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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The Seven Road-Tested Habits of Effective Artists

in Art, Computer Science, How to Learn for Free, Life, Philosophy, Software | November 15th, 2019

Fif­teen years ago, a young con­struc­tion work­er named Andrew Price went in search of free 3d soft­ware to help him achieve his goal of ren­der­ing a 3D car.

He stum­bled onto Blender, a just-the-tick­et open source soft­ware that helps users with every aspect of 3D creation—modeling, rig­ging, ani­ma­tion, sim­u­la­tion, ren­der­ing, com­posit­ing, and motion track­ing.

Price describes his ear­ly learn­ing style as “play­ing it by ear,” sam­pling tuto­ri­als, some of which he couldn’t be both­ered to com­plete.

Desire for free­lance gigs led him to forge a new iden­ti­ty, that of a Blender Guru, whose tuto­ri­als, pod­casts, and arti­cles would help oth­er new users get the hang of the soft­ware.

But it wasn’t declar­ing him­self an expert that ulti­mate­ly improved his artis­tic skills. It was hold­ing his own feet over the fire by plac­ing a bet with his younger cousin, who stood to gain $1000 if Price failed to rack up 1,000 “likes” by post­ing 2D draw­ings to Art­Sta­tion with­in a 6‑month peri­od.

(If he succeeded—which he did, 3 days before his self-imposed deadline—his cousin owed him noth­ing. Loss aver­sion proved to be a more pow­er­ful moti­va­tor than any car­rot on a stick…)

In order to snag the req­ui­site likes, Price found that he need­ed to revise some habits and com­mit to a more robust dai­ly prac­tice, a jour­ney he detailed in a pre­sen­ta­tion at the 2016 Blender Con­fer­ence.

Price con­fess­es that the chal­lenge taught him much about draw­ing and paint­ing, but even more about hav­ing an effec­tive artis­tic prac­tice. His sev­en rules apply to any num­ber of cre­ative forms:

 

Andrew Price’s Rules for an Effec­tive Artist Prac­tice:

  1. Prac­tice Dai­ly

A num­ber of pro­lif­ic artists have sub­scribed to this belief over the years, includ­ing nov­el­ist (and moth­er!) JK Rowl­ing, come­di­an Jer­ry Sein­feld, auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal per­former Mike Bir­bli­gia, and mem­oirist David Sedaris.

If you feel too fried to uphold your end of the bar­gain, pre­tend to go easy on your­self with a lit­tle trick Price picked up from music pro­duc­er Rick Rubin: Do the absolute min­i­mum. You’ll like­ly find that per­form­ing the min­i­mum posi­tions you to do much more than that. Your resis­tance is not so much to the doing as it is to the embark­ing.

  1. Quan­ti­ty over Per­fec­tion­ism Mas­querad­ing as Qual­i­ty

This harkens back to Rule Num­ber One. Who are we to say which of our works will be judged wor­thy. Just keep putting it out there—remember it’s all prac­tice, and law of aver­ages favors those whose out­put is, like Picasso’s, prodi­gious. Don’t stand in the way of progress by split­ting a sin­gle work’s end­less hairs.

  1. Steal With­out Rip­ping Off

Immerse your­self in the cre­ative bril­liance of those you admire. Then prof­it off your own improved efforts, a prac­tice advo­cat­ed by the likes of musi­cian David Bowie, com­put­er vision­ary Steve Jobs, and artist/social com­men­ta­tor Banksy.

  1. Edu­cate Your­self

As a stand-alone, that old chest­nut about prac­tice mak­ing per­fect is not suf­fi­cient to the task. Whether you seek out online tuto­ri­als, as Price did, enroll in a class, or des­ig­nate a men­tor, a con­sci­en­tious com­mit­ment to study your craft will help you to bet­ter mas­ter it.

  1. Give your­self a break

Bang­ing your head against the wall is not good for your brain. Price cel­e­brates author Stephen King’s prac­tice of giv­ing the first draft of a new nov­el six weeks to mar­i­nate. Your break may be short­er. Three days may be ample to juice you up cre­ative­ly. Just make sure it’s in your cal­en­dar to get back to it.

  1. Seek Feed­back

Film­mak­er Tai­ka Wait­i­ti, rap­per Kanye West, and the big goril­las at Pixar are not threat­ened by oth­ers’ opin­ions. Seek them out. You may learn some­thing.

  1. Cre­ate What You Want To

Pas­sion projects are the key to cre­ative longevi­ty and plea­sur­able process. Don’t cater to a fick­le pub­lic, or the shift­ing sands of fash­ion. Pur­sue the sorts of things that inter­est you.

Implic­it in Price’s sev­en com­mand­ments is the notion that some­thing may have to budge—your night­ly cock­tails, the num­ber of hours spent on social media, that extra half hour in bed after the alarm goes off… Don’t neglect your famil­ial or civic oblig­a­tions, but nei­ther should you short­change your art. Life’s too short.

Read the tran­script of Andrew Price’s Blender Con­fer­ence pre­sen­ta­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Dai­ly Habits of Famous Writ­ers: Franz Kaf­ka, Haru­ki Muraka­mi, Stephen King & More

The Dai­ly Habits of High­ly Pro­duc­tive Philoso­phers: Niet­zsche, Marx & Immanuel Kant

How to Read Many More Books in a Year: Watch a Short Doc­u­men­tary Fea­tur­ing Some of the World’s Most Beau­ti­ful Book­stores

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Decem­ber 9 when her month­ly book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain cel­e­brates Dennison’s Christ­mas Book (1921). Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Download Hellvetica, a Font that Makes the Elegant Spacing of Helvetica Look as Ugly as Possible

in Design | November 15th, 2019

Among typog­ra­phy enthu­si­asts, all non-con­trar­i­ans love Hel­veti­ca. Some, like film­mak­er Gary Hus­twit and New York sub­way map cre­ator Mas­si­mo Vignel­li, even made a doc­u­men­tary about it. Cre­at­ed by Swiss graph­ic design­er Max Miedinger with Haas Type Foundry pres­i­dent Eduard Hoff­mann and first intro­duced in 1957, Hel­veti­ca still stands as a visu­al def­i­n­i­tion of not just mod­ernism but moder­ni­ty itself. That owes in part to its clean, unam­bigu­ous lines, and also to its use of space: as all the afore­men­tioned typog­ra­phy enthu­si­asts will have noticed, Hel­veti­ca leaves lit­tle room between its let­ters, which imbues text writ­ten in the font with a cer­tain solid­i­ty. No won­der it so often appears, more than half a cen­tu­ry after its debut, on the sig­nage of pub­lic insti­tu­tions as well as on the pro­mo­tion of prod­ucts that live or die by the osten­si­ble time­less­ness of their designs.

But as times change, so must even near-per­fect fonts: hence Hel­veti­ca Now. “Four years ago, our Ger­man office [was] kick­ing around the idea of cre­at­ing a new ver­sion of Hel­veti­ca,” Charles Nix, type direc­tor at Hel­veti­ca-rights-hold­er Mono­type tells The Verge. “They had iden­ti­fied a short laun­dry list of things that would be bet­ter.” What short­com­ings they found arose from the fact that the font had been designed for an ana­log age of opti­cal print­ing, and “when we went dig­i­tal, a lot of that nuance of opti­cal siz­ing sort of washed away.” Ulti­mate­ly, the project was less about updat­ing Hel­veti­ca than restor­ing char­ac­ters lost in its adap­ta­tion to dig­i­tal, includ­ing “the straight-legged cap­i­tal ‘R,’ sin­gle-sto­ry low­er­case ‘a,’ low­er­case ‘u’ with­out a trail­ing serif, a low­er­case ‘t’ with­out a tail­ing stroke on the bot­tom right, a beard­less ‘g,’ some round­ed punc­tu­a­tion.”

The devel­op­ment of Hel­veti­ca Now also neces­si­tat­ed a close look at all the ver­sions of Hel­veti­ca so far devel­oped (the most notable major revi­sion being Neue Hel­veti­ca, released in 1983) and adapt­ing their best char­ac­ter­is­tics for an age of screens. Few of those char­ac­ter­is­tics demand­ed more atten­tion than the spac­ing — or to use the typo­graph­i­cal term, the kern­ing. But how­ev­er aston­ish­ing a show­case it may be, Hel­veti­ca Now does­n’t dri­ve home the impor­tance of the art of kern­ing in as vis­cer­al a man­ner as anoth­er new type­face: Hel­l­veti­ca, designed by New York cre­ative direc­tors Zack Roif and Matthew Wood­ward. Much painstak­ing labor has also gone into Hel­l­veti­ca’s kern­ing, but not to make it as beau­ti­ful as pos­si­ble: on the con­trary, Roif and Woodard have tak­en Hel­veti­ca and kerned it for max­i­mum ugli­ness.

The Verge’s Jon Porter describes Hel­l­veti­ca as “a self-aware Com­ic Sans with kern­ing that’s some­how much much worse.” If that most hat­ed Win­dows font has­n’t been enough to inflict psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­tur­bance on the design­ers in your life, you can head to Hel­l­veti­ca’s offi­cial site and “expe­ri­ence it in all its uneven, gap­py glo­ry.” Roif and Woodard have made Hel­l­veti­ca free to use, some­thing that cer­tain­ly can’t be said of any gen­uine ver­sion of Hel­veti­ca. In fact, the sheer cost of licens­ing that most mod­ern of all fonts has, in recent years, pushed even the for­mer­ly Hel­veti­ca-using likes of Apple, Google, and IBM to come up with their own type­faces instead — all of which, telling­ly, resem­ble Hel­veti­ca. We can con­sid­er them all weapons in the life of a design­er, which, as Vignel­li put it, “is a life of fight. Fight against the ugli­ness.” Hap­py down­load­ing…

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Com­ic Sans Turns 25: Graph­ic Design­er Vin­cent Connare Explains Why He Cre­at­ed the Most Hat­ed Font in the World

The His­to­ry of Typog­ra­phy Told in Five Ani­mat­ed Min­utes

Design­er Mas­si­mo Vignel­li Revis­its and Defends His Icon­ic 1972 New York City Sub­way Map

Van Gogh’s Ugli­est Mas­ter­piece: A Break Down of His Late, Great Paint­ing, The Night Café (1888)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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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How Humans Migrated Across The Globe Over 200,000 Years: An Animated Look

in History, Maps | November 14th, 2019

Cov­er­age of the refugee cri­sis peaked in 2015. By the end of the year, note researchers at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Bergen, “this was one of the hottest top­ics, not only for politi­cians, but for par­tic­i­pants in the pub­lic debate,” includ­ing far-right xeno­phobes giv­en mega­phones. What­ev­er their intent, Daniel Trilling argues at The Guardian, the explo­sion of refugee sto­ries had the effect of fram­ing “these new­ly arrived peo­ple as oth­ers, peo­ple from ‘over there,’ who had lit­tle to do with Europe itself and were strangers.”

Such a char­ac­ter­i­za­tion ignores the cru­cial con­text of Europe’s pres­ence in near­ly every part of the world over the past sev­er­al cen­turies. And it frames mass migra­tion as extra­or­di­nary, not the norm. The cri­sis aspect is real, the result of dan­ger­ous­ly accel­er­at­ed move­ment of cap­i­tal and cli­mate change. But mass move­ments of peo­ple seek­ing bet­ter con­di­tions, safe­ty, oppor­tu­ni­ty, etc. may be the old­est and most com­mon fea­ture of human his­to­ry, as the Sci­ence Insid­er video shows above.

The yel­low arrows that fly across the globe in the dra­mat­ic ani­ma­tion make it seem like ear­ly humans moved by bul­let train. But when con­se­quen­tial shifts in cli­mate occurred at a glacial pace—and economies were built on what peo­ple car­ried on their backs—mass migra­tions hap­pened over the span of thou­sands of years. Yet they hap­pened con­tin­u­ous­ly through­out last 200,000 to 70,000 years of human his­to­ry, give or take. We may nev­er know what drove so many of our dis­tant ances­tors to spread around the world.

But how can we know what routes they took to get there? “Thanks to the amaz­ing work of anthro­pol­o­gists and pale­on­tol­o­gists like those work­ing on Nation­al Geographic’s Geno­graph­ic Project,” Sci­ence Insid­er explains, “we can begin to piece togeth­er the sto­ry of our ances­tors.” The Geno­graph­ic Project was launched by Nation­al Geo­graph­ic in 2005, “in col­lab­o­ra­tion with sci­en­tists and uni­ver­si­ties around the world.” Since then, it has col­lect­ed the genet­ic data of over 1 mil­lion peo­ple, “with a goal of reveal­ing pat­terns of human migra­tion.”

The project assures us it is “anony­mous, non­med­ical, and non­prof­it.” Par­tic­i­pants sub­mit­ted their own DNA with Nation­al Geographic’s “Geno” ances­try kits (and may still do so until next month). They can receive a “deep ances­try” report and cus­tomized migra­tion map; and they can learn how close­ly they are relat­ed to “his­tor­i­cal genius­es,” a cat­e­go­ry that, for some rea­son, includes Jesse James.

Do projects like these veer close to recre­at­ing the “race sci­ence” of pre­vi­ous cen­turies? Are they valid ways of recon­struct­ing the “human sto­ry” of ances­try, as Nation­al Geo­graph­ic puts it? Crit­ics like sci­ence jour­nal­ist Angela Sai­ni are skep­ti­cal. “DNA test­ing can­not tell you that,” she says in an inter­view on NPR, but it can “make us believe that iden­ti­ty is bio­log­i­cal, when iden­ti­ty is cul­tur­al.” Nation­al Geo­graph­ic seems to dis­avow asso­ci­a­tions between genet­ics and race, writ­ing, “sci­ence defines you by your DNA, soci­ety defines you by the col­or of your skin.” But it does so at the end of a video about a group of peo­ple bond­ing over their sim­i­lar fea­tures.

Despite the sig­nif­i­cance mod­ern humans have ascribed to vari­a­tions in phe­no­type, race is a cul­tur­al­ly defined cat­e­go­ry and not a sci­en­tif­ic one. argues Joseph L. Graves, pro­fes­sor of bio­log­i­cal sci­ences at the Joint School of Nanoscience and Nano­engi­neer­ing.. “Every­thing we know about our genet­ics has proven that we are far more alike than we are dif­fer­ent. If more peo­ple under­stood that, it would be eas­i­er to debunk the myth that peo­ple of a cer­tain race are ‘nat­u­ral­ly’ one way or anoth­er,” or that refugees and asy­lum seek­ers are dan­ger­ous oth­ers instead of just like every oth­er human who has moved around the world over the last 200,000 years.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Where Did Human Beings Come From? 7 Mil­lion Years of Human Evo­lu­tion Visu­al­ized in Six Min­utes

Ian McK­ellen Reads a Pas­sion­ate Speech by William Shake­speare, Writ­ten in Defense of Immi­grants

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

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The Velvet Underground as Peanuts Characters: Snoopy Morphs Into Lou Reed, Charlie Brown Into Andy Warhol

in Comics/Cartoons, Music | November 14th, 2019

peanut underground

The fun car­toon above was appar­ent­ly found in a “Guide to the Vel­vet Under­ground and Andy Warhol’s Fac­to­ry” pub­lished by the French mag­a­zine, Les Inrock­upt­ibles in 1990. It came around the same time the Fon­da­tion Carti­er pour l’art con­tem­po­rain (locat­ed in Paris) held an exhi­bi­tion ded­i­cat­ed to Andy Warhol. Of course, Warhol famous­ly took a break from paint­ing in the mid-1960s and, among oth­er things, threw his influ­ence behind the up-and-com­ing NYC band, The Vel­vet Under­ground. Serv­ing as the band’s man­ag­er, he “pro­duced” VU’s first album, which meant design­ing the album cov­er and giv­ing the band mem­bers — Lou Reed, John Cale, Ster­ling Mor­ri­son, Mau­reen Tuck­er and Nico — the free­dom to make what­ev­er album they pleased, up to a cer­tain point. Above, you can see these same musi­cians reimag­ined as Peanuts char­ac­ters.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Vel­vet Under­ground Cap­tured in Col­or Con­cert Footage by Andy Warhol (1967)

Andy Warhol Explains Why He Decid­ed to Give Up Paint­ing & Man­age the Vel­vet Under­ground Instead (1966)

A Sym­pho­ny of Sound (1966): Vel­vet Under­ground Impro­vis­es, Warhol Films It, Until the Cops Turn Up

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