“Stay Free: The Story of the Clash” Narrated by Public Enemy’s Chuck D: A New 8‑Episode Podcast

in Music, Podcasts | March 7th, 2019

Spotify, in partnership with the BBC, has launched “Stay Free: The Story of the Clash,” an eight-part podcast on the iconic punk band, narrated by Public Enemy front man, Chuck D. It might seem like an unexpected pairing. And yet Spotify explains: “Like The Clash, Public Enemy openly challenged the status quo in a completely original way—this parallel and Chuck D’s personal experiences bring a surprising new dimension to the story of The Clash.” Reviewing the production in The New Yorker, Sarah Larson adds:

In [“Stay Free: The Story of the Clash”], we learn that Chuck D, a radio d.j. at the time, co-founded Public Enemy after a conversation, in 1986, with a friend at Def Jam, who wanted him to become “the hip-hop version of Joe Strummer,” of the Clash—to make music with “intellectual heft” that could also “rock the party.” And reader, he did. His presence as narrator adds appealing perspective and gravitas to the podcast, which begins with the story of the Clash’s origins, in a West London riot in 1976. With a skillfully layered presentation of punk music, seventies-London audio, and interview clips, the podcast so far thrills me the way that “Mogul,” the Spotify-Gimlet podcast about the late hip-hop mogul Chris Lighty, did; I’m eager to hear the rest.

Watch the podcast trailer above. Stream the podcast episodes–all eight–on Spotify here. Also the related playlist of music. And remember folks, The Clash, they’re still the only band that matters…

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Sleep or Die: Neuroscientist Matthew Walker Explains How Sleep Can Restore or Imperil Our Health

in Health, Neuroscience | March 7th, 2019

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could fix the work/life thing by chucking out the difference? At home, you’re in the office, at the office, you’re at home, always on and never off—sleep, optional. Two-four hours per 24-hour cycle should be enough, right? Wrong. We need proper sleep like we need good food, low stress, engaging pursuits, etc.—to thrive and live a long and happy life. If you wait until you’re dead to sleep, you’ll be dead sooner than you think. “Short sleep predicts a shorter life,” explains sleep researcher Matthew Walker in the RSA animation Sleep or Die, above. “Sleep,” he says, “is a non-negotiable biological necessity.“

The National Sleep Foundation recommends that adults sleep an average of eight hours a night. That number may vary from person to person, but fewer than six can be highly detrimental. Walker is something of a “sleep evangelist,” notes Berkeley News. Ask him about “the downside of pulling an all-nighter, and he’ll rattle off a list of ill effects that range from memory loss and a compromised immune system to junk food cravings and wild mood swings.” The neuroscientist tells Terry Gross on Fresh Air, “Every disease that is killing us in developed nations has causal and significant links to a lack of sleep.”

Walker has a lot more to say about sleep in the interview below, including tips for getting there, whether you can make up for lost sleep (you can’t), and why you shouldn’t yank teenagers out of bed on the weekends. Why should we listen to him? Well, he isn’t just any sleep scientist. “To be specific,” writes Rachel Cooke at The Guardian, “he is the director of the Center for Human Sleep Science at the University of California, a research institute whose goal—possibly unachievable—is to understand everything about sleep’s impact on us, from birth to death, in sickness and health.”

The benefits of sound sleep include enhanced creativity and concentration, lower blood pressure, better mood regulation, and higher immunity and fertility. Lack of sleep, however, is “increasing our risk of cancer, heart attack and Alzheimer’s,” notes Cooke. Indeed, “after just one night of only four or five hours’ sleep,” Walker tells The Guardian, “your natural killer cells—the ones that attack the cancer cells that appear in your body every day—drop by 70%.” Sleep deprivation has such serious outcomes that “the World Health Organisation has classed any form of night-time shift work as a probable carcinogen.”

Sleep holds many mysteries, but one thing scientists like Walker seem to know: poor sleep leaves us more in sickness than in health. And we are in the midst of a “catastrophic sleep-loss epidemic.” “No one would look at an infant baby asleep, and say ‘What a lazy baby!” Walker observes. Yet adults have “stigmatized sleep with the label of laziness. We want to seem busy, and one way we express that is by proclaiming how little sleep we’re getting.” It’s a way to broadcast that we aren’t falling behind or missing out. But our bodies’ natural cycles and rhythms don’t speed up along with technology and global markets.

“As bedrooms everywhere glow from the screens of round-the-clock technology consumption,” Berkeley News writes, millions of people suffer physical, emotional, cognitive, and psychological stresses. Or, put more positively, “a growing body of scientific work” shows that “a solid seven to nine hours of sleep a night serves functions beyond our wildest imaginations.” Learn more about not only what’s gone wrong with sleep, but how to start addressing the problem in Walker’s book Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams.

Brian Eno Lists the Benefits of Singing: A Long Life, Increased Intelligence, and a Sound Civilization

10 Longevity Tips from Dr. Shigeaki Hinohara, Japan’s 105-Year-Old Longevity Expert

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

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

in Art | March 7th, 2019

Ask passersby to name a Vincent van Gogh painting off the top of their heads, and most will come up with works like The Starry Night, The Potato Eaters, one of his self-portraits (probably with his ear bandaged), or maybe the one with the smoking skeleton David Sedaris used for a book cover. How many will mention 1888’s The Night Café, an interior, van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo from Arles (the town in the south of France where he had come in search of Japan-like surroundings), “of the café where I have a room, by gas light, in the evening,” the kind of place that never closes, accommodating the kind of “night prowlers” who “have no money to pay for a lodging, or are too drunk to be taken in”?

Promising subject matter for a painter, one might think. When Vincent wrote back to Theo after completing The Night Café, he described the painting “one of the ugliest I’ve done,” but that doesn’t necessarily mean he saw it as a failure, or indeed that we shouldn’t see it as a masterpiece. “At first glance, you can see what he meant,” says Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter, in the explainer above. “This is a jarring image, even for van Gogh, especially when you compare it to his other famous scene of a café in Arles, Café Terrace at Night,” which “captures that romantic sense of European cafés on summer evenings where friends gather to talk and laugh.” And yet The Night Café is “a painting of anxiety,” offering the nightmare to Café Terrace at Night’s “dream of French night life.”

Just as van Gogh used color “to capture his emotional response to natural beauty” in other paintings, here he used color “to convey the uneasiness of a low-class barroom after midnight.” Puschak digs into the artist’s letters and finds clearly stated intent behind all this: “I’ve tried to express the terrible human passions with the red and the green,” wrote van Gogh. “Everywhere it’s a battle and an antithesis of the most different greens and reds.” Puschak goes on to break down all the elements van Gogh used to deliberately make The Night Café unsettling: making the wall of the space “a thick, oppressive ribbon the color of blood,” a color that clashes with the green of the ceiling and creates “a tension that trembles in the eye,” and using on the rest of the interior “a sulfur yellow that gets into everything.”

The mood is set by much more than color: the lack of shadows apart from that cast by the pool table, the hunched posture of the patrons and the scattered positions of the chairs and glasses, the “warped quality” of the perspective itself. “There’s no escape,” Puschak says, “not for the people inside the painting, not for the people outside it” — and not for van Gogh himself, who committed his famous act of ear-slicing mere months after finishing The Night Café. But through this inescapable painting we can see as well as or better than in any other how van Gogh’s artistic mastery really worked, and how mastery in service of something other than beauty remains mastery all the same.

13 Van Gogh’s Paintings Painstakingly Brought to Life with 3D Animation & Visual Mapping

Nearly 1,000 Paintings & Drawings by Vincent van Gogh Now Digitized and Put Online: View/Download the Collection

A Complete Archive of Vincent van Gogh’s Letters: Beautifully Illustrated and Fully Annotated

Download Vincent van Gogh’s Collection of 500 Japanese Prints, Which Inspired Him to Create “the Art of the Future”

Edward Hopper’s Iconic Painting Nighthawks Explained in a 7‑Minute Video Introduction

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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Download the ModulAir, a Free Polyphonic Synthesizer, and Make Your Own Electronic Sounds

in Uncategorized | March 6th, 2019

Over the years, we’ve talked a fair share about electronic music–from the earliest days of the genre, through contemporary times. Now, we give you a chance to make your own electronic sounds.

According to Synthopia, a portal devoted to electronic music, “Full Bucket Music has released ModulAir 1.0 – a free polyphonic modular synthesizer for Mac & Windows.” (For the uninitiated, a polyphonic synthesizer–versus a monophonic one–can play multiple notes at once.) The ModulAir “is a modular polyphonic software synthesizer for Microsoft Windows (VST) and Apple macOS (VST/AU), written in native C++ code for high performance and low CPU consumption.” Watch a demo above, and download it here.

via Synthopia

Leonard Bernstein Introduces the Moog Synthesizer to the World in 1969, Playing an Electrified Version of Bach’s “Little Fugue in G”

The Mastermind of Devo, Mark Mothersbaugh, Presents His Personal Synthesizer Collection

Free, Open Source Modular Synth Software Lets You Create 70s & 80s Electronic Music—Without Having to Pay Thousands for a Real-World Synthesizer

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

100-Year-Old Holocaust Survivor Helen Fagin Reads Her Letter About How Books Save Lives

in Books, History | March 6th, 2019

“Could you imagine a world without access to reading, to learning, to books?” Helen Fagin, who poses that question, doesn’t have to imagine it: she experienced that grim reality, and worse besides. “At twenty-one,” she continues, “I was forced into Poland’s World War II ghetto, where being caught reading anything forbidden by the Nazis meant, at best, hard labor; at worst, death.” There she operated a school in secret where she taught Jewish children Latin and mathematics, soon realizing that “what they needed wasn’t dry information but hope, the kind that comes from being transported into a dream-world of possibility.”

That hope, in Fagin’s wartime experience, came from books. “I had spent the previous night reading Gone with the Wind — one of a few smuggled books circulated among trustworthy people via an underground channel, on their word of honor to read only at night, in secret.”

The next day she retold the story of Margaret Mitchell’s novel in her clandestine classroom, where the students had expressed their desire for her to “tell us a book,” and one young girl expressed a special gratitude, thanking Fagin “for this journey into another world.” To hear how her story, and Fagin’s, turned out, you can listen to the 100-year-old Fagin herself read the letter that tells the tale in the video above, and you can follow along with the text at Brain Pickings.

Brain Pickings founder Maria Popova has included Fagin’s letter in the new collection A Velocity of Being: Illustrated Letters to Children about Why We Read by 121 of the Most Inspiring Humans in Our World. The book contains “original illustrated letters about the transformative and transcendent power of reading from some immensely inspiring humans,” Popova writes, from Jane Goodall and Marina Abramović to Yo-Yo Ma and David Byrne to Judy Blume and Neil Gaiman — the last of whom, as Fagin’s cousin, offered Popova the connection to this centenarian living testament to the power of reading. There are times when dreams sustain us more than facts,” writes Fagin, one suspects as much to the adult readers of the world as to the children. “To read a book and surrender to a story is to keep our very humanity alive.”

via Brain Pickings

96-Year-Old Holocaust Survivor Fronts a Death Metal Band

Helen Keller Writes a Letter to Nazi Students Before They Burn Her Book: “History Has Taught You Nothing If You Think You Can Kill Ideas” (1933)

Brian Eno Lists 20 Books for Rebuilding Civilization & 59 Books For Building Your Intellectual World

Stewart Brand’s List of 76 Books for Rebuilding Civilization

Ray Bradbury Explains Why Literature is the Safety Valve of Civilization (in Which Case We Need More Literature!)

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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

John Cleese Revisits His 20 Years as an Ivy League Professor in His New Book, Professor at Large: The Cornell Years

in Books, Comedy | March 6th, 2019

Creative Commons image by Paul Boxley

It takes real intelligence to successfully make dumb comedy. John Cleese and his Monty Python colleagues are a premium example. You can call sketches like the “Ministry of Silly Walks” and “Dead Parrot” surrealist, and they are comparable to the absurdist stunts favored by certain early 20th century modern artists. But you can also call them very smart kinds of stupid, a description of some of the highest forms of comedy, I’d say, and one that applies to so much of Cleese’s best work, from the Pythons, to Fawlty Towers, to A Fish Called Wanda. We are moved by stupidity, Cleese believes, and silliness is the engine of good comedy. “Sometimes very, very silly things,” he says in the interview with Cornell University Press director Dean Smith below, “have the power to touch us deeply.” Then he tells the old joke about a grasshopper named Norman.

Is Cleese still funny? Depends. Many listeners of a recent BBC Radio 4 show found his act a little stale. He has also come off lately as a “classic old man yelling at a cloud,” writes Fiona Sturges at The Guardian. (He called, surely in jest, for the hanging of EU president Jean Claude Juncker, for example, during the Brexit campaign).

In curmudgeonly interviews, he complains about hypersensitivity with examples of jokes contemporary audiences simply don’t find amusing, or at least not coming from him. Cleese has railed about the evils of political correctness, especially on college campuses, while spending the past 20 years as a “professor-at-large” on the prestigious campus of Cornell University, where he has delivered “incredibly popular events and classes—including talks, workshops, and an analysis of A Fish Called Wanda and The Life of Brian.”

These appearances draw hundreds of people, and their enormous popularity should offer Cleese some reassurance that he may not need to fear censorship, and that his wit—while it might not be as well appreciated in today’s mass entertainment—still has plenty of currency in places where smart people gather. From seminars on script writing to lectures on psychology and human development, Cleese’s appearances at Cornell lead to riveting, sometimes hilarious, and often controversial conversations.

In the episodes here from the Cornell University Press podcast, you can hear Cleese’s full conversation with Smith, part of the promotion of his 2018 book Professor at Large: The Cornell Years, in which he includes an interview with Princess Bride screenwriter William Goldman, a lecture about creativity called “Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind,” a discussion of facial recognition technology, and a talk on group dynamics with business students and faculty. Like Cleese’s mind, these lectures and discussions range far and wide, demonstrating, once again in his long career, that it takes real smarts to not only speak with ease on several academic subjects, but to understand the mechanics of stupidity. You can pick up a copy of Professor at Large: The Cornell Years here.

John Cleese Explains the Brain — and the Pleasures of DirecTV

John Cleese’s Philosophy of Creativity: Creating Oases for Childlike Play

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

97-Year-Old Philosopher Ponders the Meaning of Life: “What Is the Point of It All?”

in Film, Life, Philosophy | March 5th, 2019

If you’ve sat by the bedside of a dying friend or relative, or recovered from a terminal illness yourself, you may know too well: the concerns of yesterday—career anxieties, political high stakes, personal grudges—can slip away into the rear view, becoming smaller and more meaningless as hours pass into final days. What takes their place? Maybe a savoring of the moment, maybe regrets over moments not savored, maybe a growing acknowledgment that gratitude matters more than being right. Maybe a willingness to let go of prior ideas—not to adopt new ones, but to open to the questions again.

Sometimes, this experience is bewildering and frightening, especially when coupled with the pains of illness and old age. Whatever insights one might have at the threshold of death, they cannot easily overcome “lifelong habits,” says Herbert Fingarette in the candid short film Being 97, a documentary made in the last months of the contrarian American philosopher’s life. By the time of his death,” notes Aeon, “Fingarette (1921–2018) had lived what most would consider a full and meaningful life. His marriage to his wife, Leslie, was long and happy. His career as a professor of philosophy at the University of California was both accomplished and controversial.”

By this time, his wife of seventy years had been gone for seven. And at 97, physically frail and his career long over, Fingarette was coming to terms with “loneliness and absence” as well as with his need for help from other people to do simple tasks. After 42 years of teaching—and writing on subjects like self-deception, Confucianism, ethical responsibility, and addiction—he was also grappling with the fact he had been wrong about one particularly pressing matter, at least.

Fingarette became infamous when, without undertaking any scientific research himself, he claimed in the 1988 book Heavy Drinking that alcoholism was a problem of self control, not a disease. But he does not speak of the political furor in this minor controversy. Eleven years later, he took on an even heavier subject in Death: Philosophical Soundings. “What I said was in a nutshell,” he recalls, “is there’s no reason to be afraid or concerned or anything about death because when you die, there’s nothing. You’re not going to suffer, you’re not going to be unhappy… you’re not going to be…. It’s not rational to be afraid of death.”

He admits, “I now think that is not a good statement, because I think it’s important to figure out why it is then that people are afraid of death. Why am I concerned about it?” His best thinking aside, “my sense of realism tells me, well, no good reason or not, it is something that haunts me. I walk around the house and I ask myself, ‘What is the point of it all? There must be something I’m missing in this argument.’” He asks, he says, knowing “that there isn’t any good answer.” But that doesn’t stop him from looking for one. We see Fingarette’s lifelong habits as a thinker push him forward in pursuit of what he calls a “foolish question,” although he intuits that “the answer might be… the silent answer.”

It’s a painful existential realization for a man so devoted to logical argument and pronouncements of certainty. This film of Fingarette in his last months is both a personally moving portrait and a drama in miniature of a universal human dilemma: why is it so hard to accept the inevitable? Why do we have minds that struggle against it? The multitude of possible answers may be far less meaningful than the experience of the question itself, painful and transcendent as it is, whether we are grieving the loss of others, facing our own mortality, or, as in Fingarette’s case, both at once.

Being 97 will be added to our list of Free Online Documentaries, a subset of our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

via Aeon

Alan Watts Explains Why Death is an Art, Adventure and Creative Act

When Aldous Huxley, Dying of Cancer, Left This World Tripping on LSD, Experiencing “the Most Serene, the Most Beautiful Death” (1963)

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 11 ) |

A Visualization of the United States’ Exploding Population Growth Over 200 Years (1790 – 2010)

in Data, History, Maps | March 5th, 2019

The U.S. is barely even an adolescent compared to many other countries around the world. Yet it ranks third, behind China and India, in population. How did the country go, in a little over 200 years, from 6.1 people per square mile in 1800 to 93 per square mile today? We’ve previously featured maps of how the real estate came on the market. And we’ve brought you a map that tells the locations and stories of the peoples who used to live there. The map above takes a different approach, showing population density growth from 1790 to 2010, in numbers based on Census records.

Originally appearing on Vivid Maps, the animated timeline contains no information about the how, who, or why of things. But we know that since it only accounts for those who were counted, the numbers of people actually living within the borders is often much higher. “Not only did the population boom as a result of births and immigrants,” writes Jeff Desjardins at the site Visual Capitalist, “but the borders of the country kept changing as well.” This change, and the fact that indigenous people were not recorded, leads to an interesting visualization of westward expansion from the point of view of the settlers.

As Desjardins notes, the state of Oklahoma appears as an “empty gap” on the map in the late-1800s, lightly shaded while its borders are surrounded by dark brown. This is because “the area was originally designated as Indian Territory…. However, in 1889, the land was opened up to a massive land rush, and approximately 50,000 pioneers lined up to grab a piece of the two million acres opened for settlement.” Thousands of the people living there had already, of course, been pushed off their land during the decades-long “Trail of Tears.” The question of who “exactly is counted as a whole person?” comes up in the comments on Visual Capitalist post, another key consideration for understanding this data in its proper context.

The ways people have been categorized are products of contemporary biases, political attitudes, and legal and social discriminations. These attitudes are not incidental to the populating of the country, but materially integral. As we see the massive, yet hugely uneven, spread of people across the expanding country, we might be given the impression that it constitutes a unified surge of expansion and development, when the historical reality, of course, is anything but. Of the many questions we can ask of this data, “who fully counted as an American during each of these periods and why or why not?” might be one of the most relevant, in 1790 and today. Or, if you’d rather just watch the map fill up with sepia and burnt umber pixels, to the tune of some martial-sounding drum & bass, watch the video above.

via Visual Capitalist

Interactive Map Shows the Seizure of Over 1.5 Billion Acres of Native American Land Between 1776 and 1887

A Radical Map Puts the Oceans–Not Land–at the Center of Planet Earth (1942)

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

“Stay Free: The Story of the Clash” Narrated by Public Enemy’s Chuck D: A New 8‑Episode Podcast

Sleep or Die: Neuroscientist Matthew Walker Explains How Sleep Can Restore or Imperil Our Health

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

Download the ModulAir, a Free Polyphonic Synthesizer, and Make Your Own Electronic Sounds

100-Year-Old Holocaust Survivor Helen Fagin Reads Her Letter About How Books Save Lives

John Cleese Revisits His 20 Years as an Ivy League Professor in His New Book, Professor at Large: The Cornell Years

97-Year-Old Philosopher Ponders the Meaning of Life: “What Is the Point of It All?”

A Visualization of the United States’ Exploding Population Growth Over 200 Years (1790 – 2010)

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