The Big Pond: Stream 50 Audio Stories from the Goethe-Institut, Available Free Online

in Podcasts | March 10th, 2019

 

Who doesn’t love a good pod­cast? Don’t tell me you’ve nev­er binged Ser­i­al or laughed out loud with Marc Maron. Over the last few years, pod­casts have become a cul­tur­al phenomenon–they help us endure our dai­ly com­mutes and then lull us back to sleep at night. Lis­ten­ing cul­ture isn’t new, though–talk radio has been fill­ing the silence with anec­dotes, news, and dra­ma since the ear­ly 1900s. The Goethe-Insti­tut’s new radio and pod­cast series THE BIG POND. A US-Ger­man Lis­ten­ing Series is a per­fect mar­riage of these two audi­ble sto­ry­telling for­mats.

The Goethe-Insti­tut, a Ger­man cul­tur­al cen­ter with its North Amer­i­can head­quar­ters in Wash­ing­ton, has part­nered with the Pub­lic Radio Exchange (PRX), the RIAS Berlin Kom­mis­sion, KCRW Berlin, and oth­er pub­lic radio sta­tions and pro­duc­ers in Ger­many and the US to bring you THE BIG POND, a col­lec­tion of 50 unique audio pieces released on a week­ly basis. From pret­zels and beer to the Berlin Wall, from motor­cy­cles to recy­cling, THE BIG POND offers a fresh per­spec­tive on just how much these two coun­tries share while cel­e­brat­ing pod­cast­ing, broad­cast­ing, and “Wun­der­bar Togeth­er” – the Ger­man-Amer­i­can Year of Friend­ship.

Don’t wor­ry, the radio fea­tures are all in Eng­lish! Episodes are avail­able for free via PRX, iTunes, Spo­ti­fy, and THE BIG POND’s web­site as pod­casts and for broad­cast by pub­lic radio sta­tions in the Unit­ed States. This care­ful­ly curat­ed library of audio pro­duc­tions cov­ers all things Ger­man-Amer­i­can: Ger­man motor­cy­cle tourists in Utah, a young Ger­man journalist’s myth­i­cal day with John Lennon, Ger­man-style appren­tice­ships in the US, an Amer­i­can opera singer’s life in Berlin, New York City beer gar­dens, and much more. THE BIG POND is home to fea­tures from up-and-com­ing pro­duc­ers as well as indus­try greats like Katie Davis, a con­trib­u­tor to NPR’s “All Things Con­sid­ered” and “This Amer­i­can Life”, and the Kitchen Sis­ters (Davia Nel­son and Nik­ki Sil­va), pro­duc­ers of the award-win­ning NPR series “Hid­den Kitchens”.

“When an edi­tor asks me to do a radio sto­ry, it usu­al­ly comes with lots of direc­tions,” said radio pro­duc­er Katie Davis. “When the team at THE BIG POND talked to me about a sto­ry for this series, every­thing was wide open. No rules, require­ments; just a wide open can­vas with space for orig­i­nal sto­ries.”

Pro­vid­ed with the nec­es­sary free­dom to tell their transat­lantic tales, THE BIG POND pro­duc­ers have devel­oped pieces that res­onate with audi­ences of all back­grounds on both sides of the big pond, con­vey­ing a bal­anced and mod­ern image of Ger­many and the US. THE BIG POND isn’t a col­lec­tion of puff pieces about Germany–it’s a well-researched nar­ra­tive of Ger­man and Amer­i­can life and cul­ture. Close coop­er­a­tion with Ger­man and Amer­i­can jour­nal­ists gives an authen­tic voice to Ger­many, the US, and their many sub­cul­tures while build­ing up the transat­lantic radio net­work.

Any­one inter­est­ed in the series can down­load episodes free of charge for indi­vid­ual use or broad­cast­ing at PRX, iTunes, Spo­ti­fy, or by vis­it­ing THE BIG POND’s web­site. Check www.goethe.de/bigpond and the Goethe-Insti­tut Wash­ing­ton’s social media chan­nels for tran­scripts and behind-the-scenes con­tent.

For the project’s press release and oth­er press mate­ri­als, please vis­it:

www.goethe.de/bigpond/press

Savan­nah Beck is the Online Edi­tor at the Goethe-Insti­tut Wash­ing­ton.

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Artificial Intelligence Identifies the Six Main Arcs in Storytelling: Welcome to the Brave New World of Literary Criticism

in Computer Science, Literature, Technology | March 8th, 2019

Is the sin­gu­lar­i­ty upon us? AI seems poised to replace every­one, even artists whose work can seem like an invi­o­lably human indus­try. Or maybe not. Nick Cave’s poignant answer to a fan ques­tion might per­suade you a machine will nev­er write a great song, though it might mas­ter all the moves to write a good one. An AI-writ­ten nov­el did almost win a Japan­ese lit­er­ary award. A suit­ably impres­sive feat, even if much of the author­ship should be attrib­uted to the program’s human design­ers.

But what about lit­er­ary crit­i­cism? Is this an art that a machine can do con­vinc­ing­ly? The answer may depend on whether you con­sid­er it an art at all. For those who do, no arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence will ever prop­er­ly devel­op the the­o­ry of mind need­ed for sub­tle, even mov­ing, inter­pre­ta­tions. On the oth­er hand, one group of researchers has suc­ceed­ed in using “sophis­ti­cat­ed com­put­ing pow­er, nat­ur­al lan­guage pro­cess­ing, and reams of dig­i­tized text,” writes Atlantic edi­tor Adri­enne LaFrance, “to map the nar­ra­tive pat­terns in a huge cor­pus of lit­er­a­ture.” The name of their lit­er­ary crit­i­cism machine? The Hedo­nome­ter.

We can treat this as an exer­cise in com­pil­ing data, but it’s arguable that the results are on par with work from the com­par­a­tive mythol­o­gy school of James Fra­zier and Joseph Camp­bell. A more imme­di­ate com­par­i­son might be to the very deft, if not par­tic­u­lar­ly sub­tle, Kurt Von­negut, who—before he wrote nov­els like Slaugh­ter­house Five and Cat’s Cra­dle—sub­mit­ted a master’s the­sis in anthro­pol­o­gy to the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go. His project did the same thing as the machine, 35 years ear­li­er, though he may not have had the where­with­al to read “1,737 Eng­lish-lan­guage works of fic­tion between 10,000 and 200,000 words long” while strug­gling to fin­ish his grad­u­ate pro­gram. (His the­sis, by the way, was reject­ed.)

Those num­bers describe the dataset from Project Guten­berg fed into the The Hedo­nome­ter by the com­put­er sci­en­tists at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ver­mont and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ade­laide. After the com­put­er fin­ished “read­ing,” it then plot­ted “the emo­tion­al tra­jec­to­ry” of all of the sto­ries using a “sen­ti­ment analy­sis to gen­er­ate an emo­tion­al arc for each work.” What it found were six broad cat­e­gories of sto­ry, list­ed below:

  1. Rags to Rich­es (rise)
  2. Rich­es to Rags (fall)
  3. Man in a Hole (fall then rise)
  4. Icarus (rise then fall)
  5. Cin­derel­la (rise then fall then rise)
  6. Oedi­pus (fall then rise then fall)

How does this endeav­or com­pare with Vonnegut’s project? (See him present the the­o­ry below.) The nov­el­ist used more or less the same method­ol­o­gy, in human form, to come up with eight uni­ver­sal sto­ry arcs or “shapes of sto­ries.” Von­negut him­self left out the Rags to Rich­es cat­e­go­ry; he called it an anom­aly, though he did have a head­ing for the same ris­ing-only sto­ry arc—the Cre­ation Story—which he deemed an uncom­mon shape for West­ern fic­tion. He did include the Cin­derel­la arc, and was pleased by his dis­cov­ery that its shape mir­rored the New Tes­ta­ment arc, which he also includ­ed in his schema, an act the AI sure­ly would have judged redun­dant.

Con­tra Von­negut, the AI found that one-fifth of all the works it ana­lyzed were Rags-to-Rich­es sto­ries. It deter­mined that this arc was far less pop­u­lar with read­ers than “Oedi­pus,” “Man in a Hole,” and “Cin­derel­la.” Its analy­sis does get much more gran­u­lar, and to allay our sus­pi­cions, the researchers promise they did not con­trol the out­come of the exper­i­ment. “We’re not impos­ing a set of shapes,” says lead author Andy Rea­gan, Ph.D. can­di­date in math­e­mat­ics at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ver­mont. “Rather: the math and machine learn­ing have iden­ti­fied them.”

But the authors do pro­vide a lot of their own inter­pre­ta­tion of the data, from choos­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tive texts—like Har­ry Pot­ter and the Death­ly Hal­lows—to illus­trate “nest­ed and com­pli­cat­ed” plot arcs, to pro­vid­ing the guid­ing assump­tions of the exer­cise. One of those assump­tions, unsur­pris­ing­ly giv­en the authors’ fields of inter­est, is that math and lan­guage are inter­change­able. “Sto­ries are encod­ed in art, lan­guage, and even in the math­e­mat­ics of physics,” they write in the intro­duc­tion to their paper, pub­lished on Arxiv.org.

“We use equa­tions,” they go on, “to rep­re­sent both sim­ple and com­pli­cat­ed func­tions that describe our obser­va­tions of the real world.” If we accept the premise that sen­tences and inte­gers and lines of code are telling the same sto­ries, then maybe there isn’t as much dif­fer­ence between humans and machines as we would like to think.

via The Atlantic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Nick Cave Answers the Hot­ly Debat­ed Ques­tion: Will Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Ever Be Able to Write a Great Song?

Kurt Von­negut Dia­grams the Shape of All Sto­ries in a Master’s The­sis Reject­ed by U. Chica­go

Kurt Von­negut Maps Out the Uni­ver­sal Shapes of Our Favorite Sto­ries

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

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Here’s John Steinbeck Asking Marilyn Monroe for Her Autograph (1955)

in Film, Letters, Life, Literature | March 8th, 2019

When ask­ing a celebri­ty for a spe­cial favor, it helps to be a bit of a celebri­ty your­self.

As Kei­th Fer­rell details in his biog­ra­phy, John Stein­beck: The Voice of the Land, the Nobel lau­re­ate had lit­tle patience for auto­graph seek­ers, pushy young writ­ers seek­ing help get­ting pub­lished, and “peo­ple who nev­er read books but enjoyed meet­ing authors.”

The shoe went on the oth­er foot when Mrs. Stein­beck let slip to her nephew that Uncle John had met the boy’s movie star crush, Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe.

Sud­den­ly, an auto­graphed pho­to seemed in order.

And not just some stan­dard issue pub­lic­i­ty shot, but ide­al­ly one show­ing the star of The Sev­en Year Itch and Gen­tle­men Pre­fer Blondes in a “pen­sive girl­ish mood.”

Also, could she please inscribe it by name to nephew Jon, a young man with, his uncle con­fid­ed, “one foot in the door of puber­ty”?

The star-to-star tone Stein­beck adopts for the above let­ter seems designed to ward off sus­pi­cion that this nephew could be a con­ve­nient inven­tion on the part of some­one desir­ing such a prize for him­self.

Six­ty years after a sec­re­tary typed it up, Stein­beck­’s mes­sage fetched $3,520 at Julien’s Auc­tions, one of a wide range of items culled from hard­core Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe col­lec­tor, David Gains­bor­ough-Roberts as well as the estate of Mon­roe’s act­ing teacher, Lee Stras­berg.

In addi­tion to oth­er cor­re­spon­dence, the Mar­i­lyn auc­tion includ­ed anno­tat­ed scripts, an emp­ty pre­scrip­tion bot­tle, a bal­le­ri­na paper­weight, stock­ings and gowns, some pin­up-type mem­o­ra­bil­ia, and a pro­gram from John F Kennedy’s 1962 birth­day cel­e­bra­tion at Madi­son Square Gar­den.

One lot that is con­spic­u­ous for its absence is Steinbeck’s promised “guest key to the ladies’ entrance of Fort Knox.”

Could it be that the boy nev­er got his cus­tomized auto­graph?

We’d like to think that he did. Per­haps he’s still savor­ing it in pri­vate.

H/T Alan Gold­wass­er/Let­ters of Note/Flash­bak

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“Noth­ing Good Gets Away”: John Stein­beck Offers Love Advice in a Let­ter to His Son (1958)

The 430 Books in Mar­i­lyn Monroe’s Library: How Many Have You Read?

Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe & Elvis Pres­ley Star in an Action-Packed Pop Art Japan­ese Mon­ster Movie

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in New York City for the next install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain, this Mon­day, March 11. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The Cringe-Inducing Humor of The Office Explained with Philosophical Theories of Mind

in Comedy, Neuroscience, Photography, Television | March 8th, 2019

“I’m a friend first and a boss sec­ond,” says David Brent, mid­dle man­ag­er at the Slough branch of paper com­pa­ny Wern­ham-Hogg. “Prob­a­bly an enter­tain­er third.” Those of us who’ve watched the orig­i­nal British run of The Office — and espe­cial­ly those of us who still watch it reg­u­lar­ly — will remem­ber that and many oth­er of Bren­t’s pitiable dec­la­ra­tions besides. As por­trayed by the show’s co-cre­ator Ricky Ger­vais, Brent con­sti­tutes both The Office’s comedic and emo­tion­al core, at once a ful­ly real­ized char­ac­ter and some­one we’ve all known in real life. His dis­tinc­tive com­bi­na­tion of social incom­pe­tence and an aggres­sive des­per­a­tion to be liked pro­vokes in us not just laugh­ter but a more com­plex set of emo­tions as well, result­ing in one expres­sion above all oth­ers: the cringe.

“In David Brent, we have a char­ac­ter so invest­ed in the per­for­mance of him­self that he’s blocked his own access to oth­ers’ feel­ings.” So goes the analy­sis of Evan Puschak, a.k.a. the Nerd­writer, in his video inter­pret­ing the humor of The Office through philo­soph­i­cal the­o­ries of mind.

The elab­o­rate friend-boss-enter­tain­er song-and-dance Brent con­stant­ly puts on for his co-work­ers so occu­pies him that he lacks the abil­i­ty or even the incli­na­tion to have any sense of what they’re think­ing. “The irony is that Brent can’t see that a weak the­o­ry of mind always makes for a weak self-per­for­mance. You can’t brute force your pre­ferred per­son­al­i­ty onto anoth­er’s con­scious­ness: it takes two to build an iden­ti­ty.”

Cen­tral though Brent is to The Office, we laugh not just at what he says and does, but how the oth­er char­ac­ters (which Puschak places across a spec­trum of abil­i­ty to under­stand the minds of oth­ers) react — or fail to react — to what he says and does, how he reacts to their reac­tions, and so on. Mas­tery of the comedic effects of all this has kept the orig­i­nal Office effec­tive more than fif­teen years lat­er, though its effect may not be entire­ly plea­sur­able: “A lot of peo­ple say that cringe humor like this is hard to watch,” says Puschak, “but in the same way that under our con­fi­dence, in the­o­ry of mind, lies an anx­i­ety, I think that under our cring­ing there’s actu­al­ly a deep feel­ing of relief.” When Brent and oth­ers fail to con­nect, their “body lan­guage speaks in a way that is total­ly trans­par­ent: in that moment the embar­rass­ment is not only pal­pa­ble, it’s pal­pa­bly hon­est.” And it reminds us that — if we’re being hon­est — none of us are exact­ly mind-read­ers our­selves.

You can get the com­plete British run of The Office on Ama­zon here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ricky Ger­vais Presents “Learn Gui­tar with David Brent”

The Phi­los­o­phy of Bill Mur­ray: The Intel­lec­tu­al Foun­da­tions of His Comedic Per­sona

A Romp Through the Phi­los­o­phy of Mind: A Free Online Course from Oxford

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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Hear Patti Smith’s New Work With The Soundwalk Collective, a Tribute to the Avant-Garde Poet Antonin Artaud

in Music | March 7th, 2019

The Sound­walk Col­lec­tive has made music art out of found sounds since 2004. They record­ed 2012’s Medea while tra­vers­ing the Black Sea and fish­ing for sounds using a scan­ner and high pow­ered aer­i­al anten­nas; 2014’s Last Beat used con­tact micro­phones on the archi­tec­ture of a music club to col­lect vibra­tions instead of music; 2017’s Before Music There Is Blood col­laged deep echo­ing record­ings of clas­si­cal music played in var­i­ous halls. This time, in their upcom­ing The Pey­ote Dance, they have brought in poet and rock god­dess Pat­ti Smith for a trip into Mex­i­co.

The above track “The New Rev­e­la­tions of Being” is a pre­view of what’s to come. The album title comes from a book by Antonin Artaud, the avant-garde the­ater direc­tor and author, who trav­eled to Mex­i­co to explore rev­e­la­to­ry visions with the Rará­muri peo­ple in 1936. Artaud was hop­ing that pey­ote would shake his opi­oid addic­tion. When he lat­er returned to France, Artaud stayed and remained in an insane asy­lum, receiv­ing elec­tric shock ther­a­py. His time with the Rará­muri stayed a touch­stone of hap­pi­ness dur­ing his dark­est days.

With a shared belief that trav­el expands the mind, the Sound­walk Col­lec­tive trav­eled to the same Sier­ra Tarahu­marar region of Mex­i­co as Artaud, vis­it­ed the same places he stayed, and indeed also took pey­ote. They record­ed instru­ments and sound­scapes, and then back in the States, Pat­ti Smith wrote and record­ed poems based on Artaud’s book, his oth­er works, and her own respons­es to the sound fields.

“The poets enter the blood­stream, they enter the cells. For a moment, one is Artaud,” Smith said about the record­ing. “You can’t ask for it, you can’t buy it, you can’t take drugs for it to be authen­tic. It just has to hap­pen, you have to be cho­sen as well as choose.”

The album is the first in a tril­o­gy with Smith about poets and trav­el. The oth­er two albums will be based on works and jour­neys by Arthur Rim­baud and René Dau­mal, and fea­ture sounds record­ed at the Abyssin­ian val­ley of Ethiopia and the Himalayan Sum­mit of India respec­tive­ly.

This not the first time the group has col­lab­o­rat­ed with Pat­ti Smith. In 2016, they released Killer Road a trib­ute to Nico and her final days on the island of Ibiza, where the singer plunged to her death on a bicy­cle ride. The album also fea­tured vocals by Smith’s daugh­ter Jessie Paris Smith.

Sound­walk Col­lec­tive mem­ber Stephan Cras­nean­sc­ki first met Pat­ti Smith, fit­ting­ly, at an air­port in Paris, as the two were return­ing from sep­a­rate artis­tic trav­els: Cras­nean­sc­ki from East­ern Europe and Rus­sia, Smith from French Guiana and Tang­iers.

The Pey­ote Dance will be released May 31 on Bel­la Union.

via Lithub

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pat­ti Smith’s List of Favorite Books: From Rim­baud to Susan Son­tag

Pat­ti Smith’s Award-Win­ning Mem­oir, Just Kids, Now Avail­able in a New Illus­trat­ed Edi­tion
Hear Antonin Artaud’s Cen­sored, Nev­er-Aired Radio Play: To Have Done With The Judg­ment of God (1947)

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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“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…

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:

The Beast­ie Boys Release a New Free­wheel­ing Mem­oir, and a Star-Stud­ded 13-Hour Audio­book Fea­tur­ing Snoop Dogg, Elvis Costel­lo, Bette Midler, John Stew­art & Dozens More

The Clash Live in Tokyo, 1982: Watch the Com­plete Con­cert

Mick Jones Plays Three Favorite Clash Songs at the Library

Doc­u­men­tary Viva Joe Strum­mer: The Sto­ry of the Clash Sur­veys the Career of Rock’s Beloved Front­man

The Clash Star in 1980’s Gang­ster Par­o­dy Hell W10, a Film Direct­ed by Joe Strum­mer

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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.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bertrand Russell’s Advice For How (Not) to Grow Old: “Make Your Inter­ests Grad­u­al­ly Wider and More Imper­son­al”

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

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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.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Van Gogh’s 1888 Paint­ing, “The Night Cafe,” Ani­mat­ed with Ocu­lus Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Soft­ware

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 Face­book.

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