When Kraftwerk Issued Their Own Pocket Calculator Synthesizer — to Play Their Song “Pocket Calculator” (1981)

in Music, Technology | June 6th, 2019

Kraftwerk put out their eighth studio album in 1981, and they titled it presciently: Computer World was released into what humanity had only just begun to realize would become a world of computers. But back then, most people either had never used a computer at all, or had used no computer more advanced than a pocket calculator. But the boys from Düsseldorf had a song for them too: the album’s first single “Pocket Calculator.” And it wasn’t just a name: the Casio fx-501P programmable calculator appeared on the list of “instruments” used in its recording.

Kraftwerk had become world-famous by the early 1980s, and on the international music scene they parodied the stiff, precision-obsessed German stereotype to perfection. You’d think that they would thus demonstrate allegiance to the formidable Dieter Rams-designed Braun ET55 calculator, but by the time Computer Love came out, Japanese companies like Casio had come to dominate the personal-electronics market. Kraftwerk even recorded a Japanese version of “Pocket Calulator,” “Dentaku,” along with ones in German (“Taschenrechner”), French (“Mini Calculateur”), and Italian (“Mini Calcolatore”).

“I’m the operator with my pocket calculator,” go the song’s English lyrics. “I am adding and subtracting. I’m controlling and composing.” And whichever language you listen to it in, it has a line equivalent to, “By pressing down a special key, it plays a little melody.”

Kraftwerk actually commissioned as a promotional item a special calculator from Casio that could do just that, a version of the company’s VL-80 model that was also a musical synthesizer. You can see and hear the basic, non-Kraftwerk model demonstrated in the video above. Casio, a name that in the music world would become a byword for simple, inexpensive synthesizers, had already brought to market in 1979 the VL‑1, the first commercial digital synthesizer (which itself included a calculator function).

With a Kraftwerk taschenrechner, even those without technical or musical knowledge, let alone a full-fledged synthesizer, could make music. “Kraftwerk was eager for fans to play Kraftwerk hits on their own calculators,” writes Dangerous Minds’ Martin Schneider, “so they issued these special instructions — OK, let’s call it ‘sheet music’ — to play not just the new material but also classics like ‘Trans Europa Express’ and ‘Schaufensterpuppen.’ ” Today, Kraftwerk continues to perform all over the computer world in which we now live. With the 40th anniversary of Computer World approaching, perhaps the time has come to bring the calculators back on stage.

(via Dangerous Minds)

The Psychedelic Animated Video for Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn” from 1979

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Kraftwerk’s “The Robots” Performed by German First Graders in Adorable Cardboard Robot Outfits

The Keaton Music Typewriter: An Ingenious Machine That Prints Musical Notation

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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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See the Very First Solar Eclipse Captured on Film: A Magical Moment in Science and Filmmaking (1900)

in Film, History, Science | June 5th, 2019

The “conquest of space,” so to speak—the human understanding of and travel to the cosmos—has come about through a succession of great scientific minds, as well as some of the most interesting and accomplished people all around. We never seem to tire of learning about their devotion to mathematics, physics, medicine, and scientific discovery writ as large as possible. But sometimes the conquest of space has required the unique talents of magicians. From the ancient mages who excited human imagination about the stars for thousands of years, to alchemists like Isaac Newton and beyond.

Witness the strange career of Marvel Whiteside Parsons, better known as Jack Parsons: sci-fi fanatic, occultist, disciple of Aleister Crowley, and onetime magical partner of L. Ron Hubbard. Parsons is most famous for founding the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the research center that powers NASA. Then we have magician Nevil Maskelyne—son of magician John Nevil Maskelyne, and possible descendent, so he said, of the fifth British Royal Astronomer, “also named Nevil Maskelyne,” writes Jason Daley at Smithsonian. Maskelyne the very much younger documented the first total solar eclipse ever captured on film.

Granted, he was a stage magician, not a follower of “The Great Beast 666.” Maskelyne’s interest in showmanship and spectacle drew him not to sex magic but to filmmaking and astronomy, interests he combined when he made the first film ever of a total solar eclipse. Nowadays, millions of people have the means to make such a film in their pocket, provided they have a good view of the infrequent cosmic event (and do not ever look at it directly). In 1900, when Maskelyne undertook the challenge, filmmaking was just emerging from infancy into toddlerhood.

The Lumière brothers, often credited as the first filmmakers, had held their first public screening only five years earlier. They called their early productions actualités, essentially “reality films.” Some of these, like the legendary L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, famously shocked and terrified audiences out of their seats. In 1900, film was still a kind of magic, and “like magic,” says Bryony Dixon, curator at the British Film Institute (BFI), film “combines both art and science.” The story of Maskelyne’s achievement is “a story about magic.”

Maskelyne’s love for film inspired in him a passion for astronomy as well, and he eventually became a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society. Unfortunately, his first cinematic contribution to the field disappeared, never to be seen again. Two years before he shot the footage above from the ground in North Carolina on May 28, 1900, on a venture funded by the British Astronomical Association, Maskelyne traveled to India to document a similar event. The film cannister was stolen on his return trip home

But he had learned what he needed to, having designed “a special telescopic adapter for a movie camera,” just as he and his father had earlier improved upon the film projector by building their own. Maskelyne had his spectacle. He showed the film in his theater, and the Royal Astronomical Society ensured that we could see it almost 120 years later by archiving a minute of the footage. Thanks to a partnership between the British Film Institute and the RAS, the film has been restored, digitized in 4K resolution, and made freely available online as part of a trove of Victorian-era films” just released by the BFI.

While thousands, maybe millions, of different moving images of 2017’s solar eclipse exist on social media accounts, of this event 120 years ago there has existed only one. Now that brief moment in time can reach millions of people in an instant, and exist in an infinite number of perfect copies, a phenomenon that might have seemed in 1900 like an advanced form of magic.

via Smithsonian

Last Night’s Solar Eclipse in a 60-Second, 700-Picture Timelapse Video

Solar Eclipse Seen From Outer Space

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

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Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author Jared Diamond Describes How the U.S. Could Become a Dictatorship in 10 Years

in Politics | June 5th, 2019

It can happen here, and it has.

By “it” I mean the enormous concentration of wealth and political power in the hands of a very few, and by “here” I mean the United States of America, a country that advertises itself as a democracy, but should rightly be referred to as an oligarchy, ruled by a wealthy elite.

But the country is not a dictatorship yet. I say “yet” because that too can happen here, given the aforementioned concentration of wealth and power, the increasing tolerance for nationalism, cruelty, xenophobia, and near-constant lying, and the craven acquiescence so many of the country’s legislators—who are supposed to put a check on such things—have shown to the whims of a baldly autocratic executive.

Perhaps it is only a matter of time, given the above. How much time? Maybe ten years, argues Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize-winning anthropologist, geographer, historian, and ecologist, and author of The Third Chimpanzee; Guns, Germs, and Steel; Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed; and The World Until Yesterday.

In the Big Think video interview clip above, Diamond frames the problem as one of an unwillingness to compromise, using the analogy of a happy marriage. “The best you can hope for in a marriage is an agreement on 80%. If you agree on 80%, that’s fantastic.” For any two people, married or otherwise, 80% agreement seems optimistic. For an entire country, it seems almost utopian.

But whatever number you want to set as a realistic goal, the U.S. has fallen far below it—at least when it comes to the way our governmental bodies work, or don’t, together. This is not a problem reducible to “both sides.” One party in particular has consistently refused to work with the other and used every dirty trick—from extreme gerrymandering to refusing to let a sitting President appoint a Supreme Court Justice—to hold power.

Politics is a dirty business, you may say, and yes, it is. But—to return to Diamond’s point—a functioning democracy requires compromise. These days, congress cannot pass legislation; “legislatures are at odds with the judiciary” (Diamond cites the example of the Republican-controlled West Virginia congress impeaching the state’s entire, Democratic-majority, supreme court in 2018); state governments are suing the federal government, and vice-versa.

The failure of compromise, says Diamond, is “the only problem that could precipitate the United States into the end of democracy and into a dictatorship in the next decade.” The usual historical examples can be more or less instructive on this point. But there are other, more recent, dictatorships that do not receive nearly enough attention—perhaps by design, since they have been “friendly” regimes that the U.S. helped create.

Diamond describes the situation in Chile, for example, where he lived in the late 60s. When he first moved there, it had been “the most democratic country in Latin America,” a country that prided itself on its ability to compromise. But this quality was in decline, he says, and its loss led to the country’s military coup in 1973, which brought the brutal dictator Augusto Pinochet to power (with the help of the CIA and certain American economists).

The new Chilean government “smashed world records for sadism and torture,” says Diamond, shocking those Chileans who believed their country was immune to the excesses of other Latin American nations that had succumbed to repressive authoritarianism. If that happens here, he argues, it will not come through a military coup, but rather through “what we see going on now”—namely restrictions on the right to vote and voter apathy.

Voting is the primary solution, Diamond claims, but voting alone may not address the problem of oligarchy. When a handful of the wealthy control mass media, fund local and national political campaigns, and otherwise exert undue influence, through mass surveillance, manipulation, and the use of foreign agents, the possibility of free and fair elections may disappear, if it hasn’t already.

Nonetheless, Diamond’s point deserves some serious consideration. If we want to avert dictatorship in the U.S., how can we encourage compromise—without, that is, relinquishing our most fundamental values? It’s a point to ponder.

Umberto Eco Makes a List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism

Hannah Arendt on “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship:” Better to Suffer Than Collaborate

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 13 ) |

136 Maps Reveal Where Tourists & Locals Take Photos in Major Cities Across the Globe

in Maps | June 5th, 2019

How to tell the tourists in a city from the locals? Potentially reliable indicators include the language they speak, the terms they use, the way they dress, the way they walk, and whether they’re standing in the middle of the sidewalk squinting at a map. But few factors draw the line between tourist and local more starkly than where they go and don’t go: no matter the city, one will sooner or later hear talk of places locals know that tourists don’t, places locals don’t go because tourists do know about them, places tourists go when they want to act like locals, places locals go when they want to act like tourists, and so on.

In his project “Tourists and Locals,” Eric Fischer has found one way of quantifying this great divide: where do the members of each group take the photos they upload to the internet? You can view the results in 136 different city maps or explore a whole world map, both of which use the same color coding: “The red bits indicate photos taken by tourists,” says Brilliant Maps, “while the blue bits indicate photos taken by locals and the yellow bits might be either.”

Using “MapBox and Twitter data from Gnip to create the maps,” Fischer defined locals as “those who tweeted from the same location for at least a month” and tourists as “those who were considered local in another city but were tweeting in a different location.”

Here, from the top of the post down, we have Fischer’s maps of Paris, Tokyo, Dublin, and San Francisco, all cities with varying degrees of overlap between the realm of the local and that of the tourist. Parisian attractions like the Parc de Belleville and the Bassin de la Villette show a relatively healthy tourist-local balance, whereas outsiders dominate in places like La Défense with its highly photographable skyscrapers, and of course the Louvre (to say nothing of the red-saturated Versailles, not pictured in this segment of the map). Compare that with Tokyo, which of course has world-famous spots — the quaintly historic Asakusa, the sublimely urban Shibuya Crossing — but whose form doesn’t encourage quite as strict a physical separation of tourist and local.

The path a tourist takes through Dublin might overlap a great deal with the one Leopold Bloom took on June 16, 1904, but less so with the paths an average Dubliner takes in the 2010s. The Irish capital also offers a host of must-sees apart from the Ulysses tour — the Guinness Storehouse, Trinity College’s Old Library, home of The Book of Kells— but visitors would do well to follow the example of Dublin’s locals and get a bit more distance from the city center. They could do the same in San Francisco, a city of iconic tourist attractions on which, before the tech boom, its very survival seemed to depend. But do true travelers, as opposed to tourists, need this kind of data processing and information design to know their time would be better spent somewhere other than Fisherman’s Wharf?

See 136 different city maps here.

via Brilliant Maps

The Shifting Power of the World’s Largest Cities Visualized Over 4,000 Years (2050 BC-2050 AD)

How Leonardo da Vinci Drew an Accurate Satellite Map of an Italian City (1502)

James Joyce’s Dublin Captured in Vintage Photos from 1897 to 1904

An Online Gallery of Over 900,000 Breathtaking Photos of Historic New York City

A Wonderful Archive of Historic Transit Maps: Expressive Art Meets Precise Graphic Design

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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Marie Curie Became the First Woman to Win a Nobel Prize, the First Person to Win Twice, and the Only Person in History to Win in Two Different Sciences

in Gender, History, Science | June 4th, 2019

For most of scientific history, women who made contributions to various fields have been sidelined or ignored in favor of male colleagues, who reaped fame, professional recognition, and cash rewards that come with prestigious prizes like the Nobel. Cornell historian of science Margaret Rossiter coined the term “The Matilda Effect” to describe sexist bias in the sciences. Rossiter’s work and popular reappraisals like book-turned-film Hidden Figures have inspired other women in academia to search for forgotten female scientists, and to find them, literally, in footnotes.

When systematic discrimination limits opportunities for any group, those who do receive recognition, the exceptions to the rule, must often be truly exceptional to succeed. There has been little doubt, both in her lifetime and in the many decades afterward, that Marie Curie was such a person. Although forced to study science in secret at a clandestine “Floating University” in her native Poland—since the universities refused to admit women—Curie (born Marie Salomea Sklodowska in 1867) would achieve such renown in her field that she was awarded not one, but two Nobel Prizes.

Curie and her husband Pierre shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Antoine Henri Becquerel, discoverer of radioactivity, in 1903. The second prize, in Chemistry, was hers alone in 1911, “in recognition of her services to the advancement of chemistry by the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element.” Curie was not only the first woman to win a Nobel, but she was also the first person to win twice, and the only person to win in two different sciences.

These are but a handful of achievements in a string of firsts for Curie: denied positions in Poland, she earned a Ph.D. in France, awarded the degree in 1903 by the Sorbonne, the same year she won her first Nobel. “Her examiners,” notes the site Famous Scientists, “were of the view that she had made the greatest contribution to science ever found in a Ph.D. thesis.” Three years later, after Pierre was killed in an accident, Marie was offered his professorship and became the first female professor at the University of Paris.

Curie succeeded not in the absence of, but in spite of the sexist obstacles placed in her path at nearly every stage in her career. After she received her doctorate, the Curies were invited to the Royal Institution in London. Only Pierre was permitted to speak. That same year, the Nobel Committee decided to honor only her husband and Becquerel. The Academy relented when Pierre protested. Curie fell victim to a wave of xenophobia and anti-Semitism (though she was not Jewish) that swept through France in the 1900s, most famously in the so-called “Dreyfus Affair.”

In 1911, the year of her second Nobel, Curie was passed over for membership in the French Academy of Sciences. It would take another 51 years before the first woman, Marguerite Perey, a former doctoral student of Curie, would be elected to that body. That same year, Curie was persecuted relentlessly by the French press, the public, and her scientific rivals after it was revealed that she had had a brief affair with physicist Paul Langevin, one of Pierre Curie’s former students.

But no matter how many men in positions of power wanted to deter Curie, there always seemed to be more influential scientists and politicians who recognized the supreme value of her work and the need to help her continue it. After her second Nobel Prize, her native country finally recognized her with the offer to direct her own laboratory in Warsaw. Curie turned it down to focus on directing the Curie Laboratory in the Radium Institute of the University of Paris, which she founded in 1914, a major achievement and, again, only a small part of her legacy.

Curie is known, of course, foremost for her exceptional scientific work, but also for opening doors for women in science all over the world, though much of that door-opening may only have happened decades after her death in 1934, and much of it hasn’t happened at all yet. Incidentally, in the following year, the Curies’ daughter Irène Joliot-Curie and her husband Frédéric Joliot-Curie were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Since then, only two other women have claimed that honor, and only two women, including Marie Curie, have won the Prize in physics, out of 203 winners total.

There may be nothing yet like gender parity in the sciences, but those who know where to look can find the names of dozens of women scientists running women-owned companies, women-founded research institutes and academic departments, and, like the famous Curies, making major contributions to chemistry. Perhaps not long from now, many of those exceptional scientists will be as well-known and widely celebrated as Marie Curie.

via Fantastic Facts

Read the Uplifting Letter That Albert Einstein Sent to Marie Curie During a Time of Personal Crisis (1911)

How American Women “Kickstarted” a Campaign to Give Marie Curie a Gram of Radium, Raising $120,000 in 1921

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

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Watch the First Trailer for Martin Scorsese’s New Film, Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story

in Film, Music | June 4th, 2019

Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story “captures the troubled spirit of America in 1975, and the joyous music that Bob Dylan performed that fall [during the Rolling Thunder Revue tour]. Master filmmaker Martin Scorsese creates a one-of-a-kind movie experience: part documentary, part concert film, part fever dream. Featuring Joan Baez, Rubin Hurricane Carter, Sam Shepard, Allen Ginsberg, and Bob Dylan giving his first on-camera interview in over a decade. The film goes beyond mere reclamation of Dylan’s extraordinary music—it’s a roadmap into the wild country of artistic self-reinvention.”

Watch the brand new trailer above, and mark June 12th on your calendar when the film arrives on Netflix.

Relatedly, June 7th is when Dylan will release The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1975 Live Recordings, a 14CD box set that features all five sets from the Rolling Thunder Revue tour that were professionally recorded.

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

Exercise May Prove an Effective Natural Treatment for Depression & Anxiety, New Study Shows

in Health, Psychology, Science | June 4th, 2019

Image by cuegalos, via Flickr Commons

Maybe it seems intuitive that exercise would be prescribed to treat anxiety and depression, lower stress levels, and make people happier. After all, exercise and nutritional interventions are regularly discussed in the context of the U.S.’s other major killers: heart disease, diabetes, various cancers, even Alzheimer’s. How often have we heard about the dangers of a sedentary lifestyle or over-processed foods? Or read about remedies from walking, yoga, and spin cycling to the Mediterranean diet?

But mental health is seemingly different—the disease model that guided depression research for so long has faltered. “We do not have a biology for mental illness,” writes Derek Beres at Big Think. Researchers lack a medical pathology for mood disorders that affect overall health, careers, relationships, and quality of life for millions. The antidepressants once sold as a cure-all and prescribed to dizzying degrees proved to have limited efficacy and unfortunate side effects. No one seems to know exactly how or why or if they work. “Mental health scripts are guesswork,” Beres writes, “more of an art than science.”

Where does this leave the state of mental health research these days? One team of scientists at the University of Vermont found evidence that exercise significantly improved mood in patients with severe and chronic mental illnesses. As Newsweek reports, “a total of 100 patients signed up to participate in the study,” whose results were published recently in the journal Global Advances in Health and Medicine. The study volunteers came from “wards that dealt with conditions such as bipolar disorder, depression, borderline personality disorder, generalized anxiety disorder and schizophrenia.”

After a workout schedule that included cardio, resistance, and flexibility training, four times a week for sixty minutes at a time, as well as nutritional programs “tailored” for each patient, 95 percent of the participants “said their mood has improved… and 63 percent said they were ‘happy’ or ‘very happy,’ rather than ‘neutral,’ ‘sad,’ or ‘very sad.’” 97.6 said they were motivated to continue working out and eating better. “The research yielded positive outcomes in all areas investigated,” write authors David Tomasi, Sheri Gates, and Emily Reyns of the study’s results. They conclude that physical exercise may contribute to “a more balanced and integrated sense of self.”

The researchers also recommend exercise as a treatment before the prescription of psychiatric drugs. There may not yet be a clear medical explanation for why it works. But that may be because modern medicine has only recently begun to see the mind and the body as one, at a time when our cultural evolution sends us hurtling toward a greater artificial divide between the two. “We’ve constructed a world in which most of the population survives by performing minimal physical activity.” A world soon to be engulfed in VR, AR, self-driving cars, and an “internet of things” that promises to eliminate the few physical tasks we have left.

We are in danger of forgetting that our mental and emotional health are directly tied to the needs of our physical bodies, and that our bodies need to move, stretch, and bend in order to stay alive and thrive. Read more summary of the study at Newsweek and see the full results from Global Advances in Health and Medicine here.

via Big Think/Newsweek

This Is Your Brain on Exercise: Why Physical Exercise (Not Mental Games) Might Be the Best Way to Keep Your Mind Sharp

How Stress Can Change Your Brain: An Animated Introduction

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Giger Bar: Discover the 1980s Tokyo Bar Designed by H. R. Giger, the Same Artist Who Created the Nightmarish Monster in Ridley Scott’s Alien

in Art, Food & Drink | June 4th, 2019

In 1980s Tokyo, everything was possible — or at least everything was tried out. Having developed feverishly since the end of the Second World War, Japan had by that point inflated an asset bubble so enormous that, so the story goes, the land on which the Imperial Palace stands was worth more than all of California. Many Japanese felt rich, and upwardly mobile young Tokyoites felt much more so; in the capital sprung up countless establishments aiming to cash in on their willingness and ability to spend their new money on experiences, especially experiences slick, expensive, and exotic.

And for the highest-rolling young Tokyoites of the 1980s, consumers for whom pieces of America and Europe wouldn’t be exotic enough, there was the Giger Bar. Writer on Japanese culture W. David Marx recently tweeted out a few magazine clippings to do with one of what he calls the “hot yuppie date spots in Tokyo, 1989: GIGER BAR Bring your date to the Tokyo bar designed by Swiss artist H. R. Giger of Alien fame, where ‘the atmosphere differs from the usual.’ ‘alien eggs’ on the menu at ¥1200, and something called ‘sexual communion’ for ¥1500.”

“The Giger Bar in Tokyo was actually created against my will,” Giger himself wrote in 1997. “While I was in Tokyo, I was asked to make a wish, on stage, during a press conference. Spontaneously, I wished for a bar, which was then brought into being even more spontaneously!”

For that bar, Giger designed “tables-for-two in open elevator cars in the manner of gliding elevators that would travel up and down the four-story establishment, perpetually in motion.” But he hadn’t taken into consideration the rigidity of Japanese fire marshals, and already “driven to the brink of madness” by the country’s complex earthquake-related building codes, Giger ultimately stepped back from his design role.

Giger also hadn’t foreseen the fact that his namesake Japanese bar “was tailor-made for the underworld.” Five years after the bar opened, a friend visited and told Giger that “it had fallen into the hands of the Yakuza. He went on to report that he was alone in the bar until 11 o’clock, when it began to fill with the type of unsavory characters who might have installed a roulette table in the atrium.” By the time Giger wrote this reflection, the Tokyo Giger Bar had closed its doors entirely: “Insiders know that a bar in Tokyo rarely survives more than five years!”

But two other Giger Bars live on, not in Japan but in Giger’s native Switzerland, one in his hometown of Chur (originally planned for New York City, a location that proved too expensive for the elaborate design) and the other in Gruyères (adjacent to the H.R. Giger Museum). Those Swiss branches, a couple pictures of which appear above, carry on the Giger Bar’s aesthetic in a manner seemingly more faithful to the artist’s grotesque biomechanical visions than did the Tokyo branch. Whether this could ever prove a sustainable nightlife concept elsewhere in the world remains to be seen, but as Giger’s hardcore fans — the kind who wouldn’t hesitate to make the Giger Bar pilgrimage to Switzerland — might well ask, who wouldn’t want to have a drink in the womb of the alien queen?

via W. David Marx

A Photographic Tour of Haruki Murakami’s Tokyo, Where Dream, Memory, and Reality Meet

High School Kids Stage Alien: The Play and You Can Now Watch It Online

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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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

When Kraftwerk Issued Their Own Pocket Calculator Synthesizer — to Play Their Song “Pocket Calculator” (1981)

See the Very First Solar Eclipse Captured on Film: A Magical Moment in Science and Filmmaking (1900)

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author Jared Diamond Describes How the U.S. Could Become a Dictatorship in 10 Years

136 Maps Reveal Where Tourists & Locals Take Photos in Major Cities Across the Globe

Marie Curie Became the First Woman to Win a Nobel Prize, the First Person to Win Twice, and the Only Person in History to Win in Two Different Sciences

Watch the First Trailer for Martin Scorsese’s New Film, Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story

Exercise May Prove an Effective Natural Treatment for Depression & Anxiety, New Study Shows

The Giger Bar: Discover the 1980s Tokyo Bar Designed by H. R. Giger, the Same Artist Who Created the Nightmarish Monster in Ridley Scott’s Alien

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