This Is What The Matrix Looks Like Without CGI: A Special Effects Breakdown

in Film, Sci Fi, Technology | May 29th, 2020

Those of us who saw the The Matrix in the the­ater felt we were wit­ness to the begin­ning of a new era of cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly and philo­soph­i­cal­ly ambi­tious action movies. Whether that era deliv­ered on its promise — and indeed, whether The Matrix’s own sequels deliv­ered on the fran­chise’s promise — remains a mat­ter of debate. More than twen­ty years lat­er, the film’s black-leather-and-sun­glass­es aes­thet­ic may date it, but its visu­al effects some­how don’t. The Fame Focus video above takes a close look at two exam­ples of how the cre­ators of The Matrix com­bined tra­di­tion­al, “prac­ti­cal” tech­niques with then-state-of-the-art dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy in a way that kept the result from going as stale as, in the movies, “state-of-the-art dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy” usu­al­ly has a way of guar­an­tee­ing.

By now we’ve all seen revealed the mechan­ics of “bul­let time,” an effect that aston­ished The Matrix’s ear­ly audi­ences by seem­ing near­ly to freeze time for dra­mat­ic cam­era move­ments (and to make vis­i­ble the epony­mous pro­jec­tiles, of which the film includ­ed a great many). They lined up a bunch of still cam­eras along a pre­de­ter­mined path, then had each of the cam­eras take a shot, one-by-one, in the span of a split sec­ond.

But as we see in the video, get­ting con­vinc­ing results out of such a ground­break­ing process — which required smooth­ing out the unsteady “footage” cap­tured by the indi­vid­ual cam­eras and per­fect­ly align­ing it with a com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed back­ground mod­eled on a real-life set­ting, among oth­er tasks — must have been even more dif­fi­cult than invent­ing the process itself. The man­u­al labor that went into The Matrix series’ high-tech veneer comes across even more in the behind-the-scenes video below:

In the third install­ment, 2003’s The Matrix Rev­o­lu­tions, Keanu Reeves’ Neo and Hugo Weav­ing’s Agent Smith duke it out in the pour­ing rain as what seem like hun­dreds of clones of Smith look on. View­ers today may assume Weav­ing was filmed and then copy-past­ed over and over again, but in fact these shots involve no dig­i­tal effects to speak of. The team actu­al­ly built 150 real­is­tic dum­mies of Weav­ing as Smith, all oper­at­ed by 80 human extras them­selves wear­ing intri­cate­ly detailed sil­i­con-rub­ber Smith masks. The logis­tics of such a one-off endeav­or sound painful­ly com­plex, but the phys­i­cal­i­ty of the sequence speaks for itself. With the next Matrix film, the first since Rev­o­lu­tions, due out next year, fans must be hop­ing the ideas of the Pla­ton­i­cal­ly tech­no-dystopi­an sto­ry the Wachowskis start­ed telling in 1999 will be prop­er­ly con­tin­ued, and in a way that makes full use of recent advances in dig­i­tal effects. But those of us who appre­ci­ate the endur­ing pow­er of tra­di­tion­al effects should hope the film’s mak­ers are also get­ting their hands dirty.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Phi­los­o­phy of The Matrix: From Pla­to and Descartes, to East­ern Phi­los­o­phy

The Matrix: What Went Into The Mix

Philip K. Dick The­o­rizes The Matrix in 1977, Declares That We Live in “A Com­put­er-Pro­grammed Real­i­ty”

Daniel Den­nett and Cor­nel West Decode the Phi­los­o­phy of The Matrix

Why 1999 Was the Year of Dystopi­an Office Movies: What The Matrix, Fight Club, Amer­i­can Beau­ty, Office Space & Being John Malkovich Shared in Com­mon

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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50 Songs from a Single Year, Mixed Together Into One 3‑Minute Song (1979–89)

in Music | May 28th, 2020

The con­cept of gen­er­a­tions, as we cur­rent­ly use the term, would have made no sense to peo­ple liv­ing through­out most of human his­to­ry. “Before the 19th cen­tu­ry,” writes Sarah Leskow at The Atlantic, “gen­er­a­tions were thought of as (gen­er­al­ly male) bio­log­i­cal rela­tion­ships with­in families—grandfathers, sons, grand­chil­dren and so forth.” The word did not describe com­mon traits shared by, “as one lex­i­cog­ra­ph­er put it in 1863, ‘all men liv­ing more or less at the same time.’”

The the­o­ry was thor­ough­ly ingest­ed into mass cul­ture, as any­one can tell from social media wars and the fix­a­tions of news­pa­per colum­nists. One such cor­re­spon­dent weighed in a few years ago with a con­trar­i­an take: “Your gen­er­a­tional iden­ti­ty is a lie,” wrote Philip Bump at The Wash­ing­ton Post in 2015. (He makes an excep­tion for Baby Boomers, for rea­sons you’ll have to read in his col­umn.)

All this debunk­ing is to the good. While schol­ars rou­tine­ly inves­ti­gate the ori­gins of con­tem­po­rary ideas, too often the rest of us take for grant­ed that our present ways of see­ing the world are time­less and eter­nal.

Yet, whether gen­er­a­tions are a real phe­nom­e­non or a cul­tur­al con­struc­tion, glob­al­ized mass media of the past sev­er­al decades ensures that no mat­ter where we come from, most peo­ple born around the same time will share some set of near-iden­ti­cal experiences—of lis­ten­ing to the same music, watch­ing the same films, TV shows, etc. Giv­en the way our think­ing can be shaped by for­ma­tive moments in pop cul­ture, we’re bound to have a few things in com­mon if we had access to Hol­ly­wood film and MTV. Maybe what most defines gen­er­a­tions as we know them now is cul­ture as com­mod­i­ty.

Take the video series fea­tured here. Each one cuts togeth­er 50 songs released in a sin­gle year, begin­ning in 1979, along with video mon­tages of some of the year’s most pop­u­lar artists. Cre­at­ed by The Hood Inter­net, “a DJ and pro­duc­tion duo from Chica­go, known for their exper­tise in mashups and remix­es,” the series could serve as a lab exper­i­ment to test the emo­tion­al reac­tions of peo­ple born at dif­fer­ent times. We may have all heard these songs by now. But only those who heard them in their youth will have the nos­tal­gic reac­tions we asso­ciate with gen­er­a­tional mem­o­ry, since music, as David Toop  writes at The Qui­etus, is “a mem­o­ry machine.”

Every­one else could stand to learn some­thing about what the 80s looked and sound­ed like. As a his­tor­i­cal peri­od, it tends to get cast in a fair­ly nar­row mold, with syn­th­pop and hair met­al defin­ing the extent of 80s music. The pop music of the decade was fab­u­lous­ly diverse, with gen­res cross-pol­li­nat­ing in what turn out to be sur­pris­ing­ly har­mo­nious ways in these mashup videos. The cre­ators of the series worked their way up to 1987, and we get to see some dra­mat­ic shifts along the way that fur­ther com­pli­cate the idea of 80s music, even for those who heard these songs when they came out, and who have nine years of for­ma­tive moments to go with them. See all of the videos on The Hood Inter­net’s YouTube chan­nel.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1980s Met­al­head Kids Are Alright: Sci­en­tif­ic Study Shows That They Became Well-Adjust­ed Adults

A Soul Train-Style Detroit Dance Show Gets Down to Kraftwerk’s “Num­bers” in the Late 80s

How a Record­ing Stu­dio Mishap Cre­at­ed the Famous Drum Sound That Defined 80s Music & Beyond

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

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How Humphrey Bogart Became an Icon: A Video Essay

in Film | May 28th, 2020

Accord­ing to film the­o­rist David Bor­d­well, there was a major change in act­ing styles in the 1940s. Gone was the “behav­ioral act­ing” style of the 1930s (the first full decade of sound film), where men­tal states were demon­strat­ed not just through the face, but through body move­ment, and how actors just held them­selves. Instead, in the 1940s there is a “new inte­ri­or­i­ty, a kind of neu­tral­iza­tion, of the act­ing per­for­mance, that’s intense, almost silent film-style.”

Part of this is due to increas­ing­ly con­vo­lut­ed, psy­cho­log­i­cal nar­ra­tives, includ­ing lots of voice-overs. Some of it was also due to stu­dios hop­ing to achieve the psy­cho­log­i­cal depth of nov­el writ­ing.

In short, what­ev­er the rea­sons in the 1940s, we got to watch char­ac­ters think.

In Nerdwriter’s lat­est video essay, Evan Puschak exam­ines the icon of 1940s male act­ing: Humphrey Bog­a­rt, whose skill and oppor­tu­ni­ty placed him at the right place and the right time for such a shift in styles. Think of Bog­a­rt and you think of his eyes and yes, the many moments where the cam­era lingers on his face and…we watch him think.

In hind­sight it feels like he was wait­ing for this moment. Puschak picks up the tale with 1939’s The Return of Dr. X, which fea­tures a bad­ly mis­cast Bog­a­rt as a mad sci­en­tist. But the actor had spent most of the 1930s play­ing a selec­tion of bad guys, most­ly gang­sters. He was good at it. He was also a bit tired of the type­cast­ing.

Also tired of of play­ing gang­sters was George Raft, and that turned out to be good thing, because Raft turned down the lead role in the John Hus­ton-writ­ten, Raoul Walsh-direct­ed High Sier­ra. Hus­ton and Bog­a­rt were friends and drink­ing bud­dies, and it was their friend­ship, plus Bog­a­rt con­vinc­ing both Raft to turn down the role and Walsh to hire him instead, that led to a career break­through.

As Puschak points out, though Bog­a­rt was play­ing a gang­ster again, he brought to the char­ac­ter of Mad Dog Roy Earl a world-weari­ness and a vul­ner­a­ble inte­ri­or, and we see it in his eyes more than through his dia­log.

In the same year Bog­a­rt played pri­vate detec­tive Sam Spade in The Mal­tese Fal­con, also a role that George Raft turned down. Bog­a­rt brought over to the char­ac­ter the cyn­i­cism and cool­ness of his gang­ster roles; it feels repet­i­tive to say it was an icon­ic role, but it’s true—it’s a per­for­mance that rip­ples across time to every actor play­ing a pri­vate detec­tive, who are either bor­row­ing from it or riff­ing on it or turn­ing it on its head. You wouldn’t have Colum­bo. You wouldn’t have Breath­less either.

Did George Raft ever real­ize he was a sort of guardian angel for Bog­a­rt? Because for a third time, a role he turned down became a Bog­a­rt clas­sic: Rick Blain in Casablan­ca (1942). As Puschak points out, it’s a dif­fi­cult role as Rick is decid­ed­ly pas­sive and casu­al­ly mean for the first half, leav­ing peo­ple to their fate. It only works because we can see every deci­sion Rick makes roil­ing behind Bogart’s eyes, and we know that even­tu­al­ly he will break and do the right thing.

As he got old­er and the 40’s turned into the ‘50s, Bog­a­rt began to play with these kind of char­ac­ters. His prospec­tor in The Trea­sure of the Sier­ra Madre turns wild-eyed with greed and mad­ness; his writer in In a Lone­ly Place is sus­pect­ed of mur­der, and Bog­a­rt plays him ever so slight­ly mad that we won­der if he might even be a killer. It is one of Bogart’s most uncom­fort­able per­for­mances, tak­ing what had become famil­iar and friend­ly in his screen per­sona and twist­ing it.

He died in 1957, age 57, from the can­cer­ous effects of a life­time of smok­ing. What kind of roles might he have done if he had made it through the 60s and the 70s? Would the French New Wave direc­tors have hired him? Would Scors­ese or Alt­man or Cop­po­la? Again, we can only won­der.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Beat the Dev­il: Watch John Huston’s Campy Noir Film with Humphrey Bog­a­rt (1953)

Lau­ren Bacall (1924–2014) and Humphrey Bog­a­rt Pal Around Dur­ing a 1956 Screen Test

Jean-Paul Sartre Writes a Script for John Huston’s Film on Freud (1958)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

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Albert Einstein Explains Why We Need to Read the Classics

in Education | May 28th, 2020

Two pieces of read­ing advice I’ve car­ried through­out my life came from two ear­ly favorite writ­ers, Her­man Melville and C.S. Lewis. In one of the myr­i­ad pearls he toss­es out as asides in his prose, Melville asks in Moby Dick, “why read wide­ly when you can read deeply?” Why spread our minds thin? Rather than ago­nize over what we don’t know, we can dig into the rel­a­tive­ly few things we do until we’ve mas­tered them, then move on to the next thing.

Melville’s coun­sel may not suit every tem­pera­ment, depend­ing on whether one is a fox or a hedge­hog (or an Ahab). But Lewis’ advice might just be indis­pens­able for devel­op­ing an out­look as broad-mind­ed as it is deep. “It is a good rule,” he wrote, “after read­ing a new book, nev­er to allow your­self anoth­er new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.”

Many oth­er famous read­ers have left behind sim­i­lar pieces of read­ing advice, like Edward Bul­w­er-Lyt­ton, author of noto­ri­ous open­er “It was a dark and stormy night.” As though refin­ing Lewis’ sug­ges­tion, he pro­posed, “In sci­ence, read, by pref­er­ence, the newest works; in lit­er­a­ture, the old­est. The clas­sic lit­er­a­ture is always mod­ern. New books revive and redec­o­rate old ideas; old books sug­gest and invig­o­rate new ideas.”

Albert Ein­stein shared nei­ther Lewis’ reli­gion nor Bulwar-Lytton’s love of semi­colons, but he did share both their out­look on read­ing the ancients. Ein­stein approached the sub­ject in terms of mod­ern arro­gance and igno­rance and the bias of pre­sen­tism, writ­ing in a 1952 jour­nal arti­cle:

Some­body who only reads news­pa­pers and at best books of con­tem­po­rary authors looks to me like an extreme­ly near-sight­ed per­son who scorns eye­glass­es. He is com­plete­ly depen­dent on the prej­u­dices and fash­ions of his times, since he nev­er gets to see or hear any­thing else. And what a per­son thinks on his own with­out being stim­u­lat­ed by the thoughts and expe­ri­ences of oth­er peo­ple is even in the best case rather pal­try and monot­o­nous.

There are only a few enlight­ened peo­ple with a lucid mind and style and with good taste with­in a cen­tu­ry. What has been pre­served of their work belongs among the most pre­cious pos­ses­sions of mankind. We owe it to a few writ­ers of antiq­ui­ty (Pla­to, Aris­to­tle, etc.) that the peo­ple in the Mid­dle Ages could slow­ly extri­cate them­selves from the super­sti­tions and igno­rance that had dark­ened life for more than half a mil­len­ni­um.

Noth­ing is more need­ed to over­come the mod­ernist’s snob­bish­ness.

Ein­stein him­self read both wide­ly and deeply, so much so that he “became a lit­er­ary motif for some writ­ers,” as Dr. Anto­nia Moreno González notes, not only because of his par­a­digm-shat­ter­ing the­o­ries but because of his gen­er­al­ly well-round­ed pub­lic genius. He was fre­quent­ly asked, and hap­py to vol­un­teer, his “ideas and opinions”—as the title of a col­lec­tion of his writ­ing calls his non-sci­en­tif­ic work, becom­ing a pub­lic philoso­pher as well as a sci­en­tist.

We might cred­it Ein­stein’s lib­er­al atti­tude toward read­ing and education—in the clas­si­cal sense of the word “lib­er­al”— as a dri­ving force behind his end­less intel­lec­tu­al curios­i­ty, humil­i­ty, and lack of prej­u­dice. His diag­no­sis of the prob­lem of mod­ern igno­rance may strike us as gross­ly under­stat­ed in our cur­rent polit­i­cal cir­cum­stances. As for what con­sti­tutes a “clas­sic,” I like Ita­lo Calvi­no’s expan­sive def­i­n­i­tion: “A clas­sic is a book that has nev­er fin­ished say­ing what it has to say.”

via Men­tal Floss

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ita­lo Calvi­no Offers 14 Rea­sons We Should Read the Clas­sics

Vir­ginia Woolf Offers Gen­tle Advice on “How One Should Read a Book”

The New York Pub­lic Library Cre­ates a List of 125 Books That They Love

100 Nov­els All Kids Should Read Before Leav­ing High School

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

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Is It Rude to Talk Over a Film? MST3K’s Mary Jo Pehl on Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #45

in Comedy, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Television | May 28th, 2020

We live in a com­men­tary cul­ture with much appre­ci­a­tion for camp and snark, but some­thing spe­cial hap­pened in the ear­ly ’90s when Mys­tery Sci­ence The­ater 3000 pop­u­lar­ized this addi­tive form of com­e­dy, where jokes are made dur­ing a full-length or short film. Mary Jo Pehl was a writer and per­former on MST3K and has since riffed with fel­low MST3K alums for Riff­trax and Cin­e­mat­ic Titan­ic.

Mark, Eri­ca, and Bri­an briefly debate the ethics of talk­ing over some­one else’s art and then inter­view Mary Jo about how riffs get writ­ten, devel­op­ing a riff­ing style and a char­ac­ter that the audi­ence can con­nect with (do you need to include skits to estab­lish a premise for why riff­ing is hap­pen­ing?), riff­ing films you love vs. old garbage, the degree to which riff­ing has gone beyond just MST3K-asso­ci­at­ed come­di­ans, VH-1’s Pop-Up Video, and more.

Fol­low Mary Jo @MaryJoPehl.

Here are a some links to get you watch­ing riff­ing:

Dif­fer­ent teams have dif­fer­ent styles of riff­ing, so if you hate MST3K, you might want to see if you just hate those guys or hate the art form as a whole. The alums them­selves cur­rent­ly work as:

Here are a few rel­e­vant arti­cles:

Also, PROJECT: RIFF is the website/database we talk about where a guy named Andrew fig­ured out how many riffs per minute are in each MST3K episode, which char­ac­ter made the joke, and oth­er stuff.

Learn more at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can only hear by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts or start with the first episode.

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The Expansive Vocal Range of Joni Mitchell: From the Early to Later Years

in Music | May 27th, 2020

It’s quite a tes­ta­ment to Joni Mitchell’s musi­cian­ship that her “voice is arguably the most under­rat­ed aspect of her music.” So writes a con­trib­u­tor to The Range Place, an online project that ana­lyzes the vocal ranges of pop­u­lar singers. This is not to say that Mitchell’s voice is underrated—far from it—but her adven­tur­ous, deeply per­son­al lyri­cism and exper­i­men­tal song­writ­ing are how she is most often dis­tin­guished from the cohort of 60s singer-song­writ­ers who emerged from the folk scene. (She first became known as the writer of Judy Collins’ hit, “Both Sides, Now.”)

That said, there’s no mis­tak­ing her for any oth­er singer. “With very wide vibra­to, she would fre­quent­ly reach into her upper reg­is­ter com­fort­ably with a bliss­ful falset­to while still being able to reach some smooth low­er notes with ease.” You can hear exam­ples of her vocal range above, in excerpts from dozens of songs, both stu­dio and live ver­sions, record­ed through­out her career. “She was a mez­zo-sopra­no through the late six­ties and sev­en­ties, with her voice stand­ing out among oth­er singer-song­writ­ers due to its unusu­al com­fort in the fifth octave.”

There are many oth­er qual­i­ties that set Mitchell’s voice apart, includ­ing her incred­i­ble sense of pitch and rhythm. As ses­sion singer and vocal coach Jaime Bab­bitt writes, “singers who study singing and play instru­ments that make chords are bet­ter than all the rest. Joni Mitchell played many: dul­cimer, gui­tar, piano, and flute, even ukulele as a child.” Mitchell’s instru­men­tal skill gave her pre­cise vocal tim­ing, “a crit­i­cal and often over­looked singer-skill,” and one that con­tributes huge­ly to a vocal per­for­mance.

Her love of jazz infus­es even her folki­est songs with rhyth­mic vocal pat­terns that run up and down the scale. (Hear an exam­ple in the iso­lat­ed vocals from 1971’s “Riv­er,” just above.) Just as every singer’s voice will do, Mitchell’s range nar­rowed with age. “Her voice nowa­days,” writes The Range Place (though she no longer per­forms), “is clos­er to that of a con­tral­to than to that of a mez­zo-sopra­no, hav­ing low­ered sub­stan­tial­ly more than oth­er singers from the seventies”—a like­ly out­come of her life­long smok­ing habit.

It’s com­mon to say of an old­er singer that “she can’t hit the high notes any­more,” but this judg­ment miss­es out on the rich­ness of a mature voice. Mitchell’s “indomitable tech­nique” nev­er wavered in her lat­er years, Paul Tay­lor argues at The Inde­pen­dent. Her lat­er voice was “stun­ning (bereft, bewil­dered, sto­ical),” trans­formed from the ambi­tious, pierc­ing falset­to to “radiant/rueful” and wise.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Joni Mitchell Sing an Immac­u­late Ver­sion of Her Song “Coy­ote,” with Bob Dylan, Roger McGuinn & Gor­don Light­foot (1975)

See Clas­sic Per­for­mances of Joni Mitchell from the Very Ear­ly Years–Before She Was Even Named Joni Mitchell (1965/66)

How Joni Mitchell Wrote “Wood­stock,” the Song that Defined the Leg­endary Music Fes­ti­val, Even Though She Wasn’t There (1969)

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

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J.K. Rowling Is Publishing Her New Children’s Novel Free Online, One Chapter Per Day

in Books | May 27th, 2020

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

J.K. Rowl­ing may be the queen of chil­dren’s lit­er­a­ture, but how many of her fans have noticed she has­n’t pub­lished a book for chil­dren in near­ly thir­teen years? Today’s twen­tysome­things will recall fond­ly the sum­mer of 2007, when they descend­ed upon book­stores for their copy, or copies, of the con­clud­ing vol­ume of the Har­ry Pot­ter series. There­after Rowl­ing, no doubt eager to write for an audi­ence clos­er to her own age, put out the bleak social com­e­dy The Casu­al Vacan­cy and a series of crime thrillers under the pseu­do­nym Robert Gal­braith. Rowl­ing’s lat­est Gal­braith nov­el Trou­bled Blood is sched­uled for pub­li­ca­tion in the fall of this year, but the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion of young read­ers can enjoy her new fairy tale The Ick­abog online now as she seri­al­izes it for free over the next two months.

“The idea for The Ick­abog came to me while I was still writ­ing Har­ry Pot­ter,” says Rowl­ing in an intro­duc­to­ry post on her own web site. Hav­ing writ­ten “most of a first draft in fits and starts between Pot­ter books,” she end­ed up shelv­ing it for near­ly a decade. “Over time I came to think of it as a sto­ry that belonged to my two younger chil­dren, because I’d read it to them in the evenings when they were lit­tle, which has always been a hap­py fam­i­ly mem­o­ry.”

The unfin­ished man­u­script came back to mind more recent­ly as a pos­si­ble enter­tain­ment for chil­dren in coro­n­avirus lock­down all over the world. “As I worked to fin­ish the book, I start­ed read­ing chap­ters night­ly to the fam­i­ly again. This was one of the most extra­or­di­nary expe­ri­ences of my writ­ing life.”

With the work now com­plete, Rowl­ing will “be post­ing a chap­ter (or two, or three) every week­day between 26th May and 10th July on The Ick­abog web­site.” The first chap­ter, which is avail­able now, begins as fol­lows:

Once upon a time, there was a tiny coun­try called Cor­nu­copia, which had been ruled for cen­turies by a long line of fair-haired kings. The king at the time of which I write was called King Fred the Fear­less. He’d announced the ‘Fear­less’ bit him­self, on the morn­ing of his coro­na­tion, part­ly because it sound­ed nice with ‘Fred’, but also because he’d once man­aged to catch and kill a wasp all by him­self, if you didn’t count five foot­men and the boot boy.

This prose will feel famil­iar to par­ents who grew up read­ing Har­ry Pot­ter them­selves, and who will sure­ly be pleased to see Rowl­ing’s sig­na­ture sense of humo(u)r still in effect. These par­ents can read The Ick­abog’s week­ly install­ments to their own chil­dren, as well as encour­age those artis­ti­cal­ly inclined to con­tribute their own visu­als to the sto­ry by par­tic­i­pat­ing in the Ick­abog illus­tra­tion com­pe­ti­tion. “Cre­ativ­i­ty, inven­tive­ness and effort are the most impor­tant things,” Rowl­ing notes. “We aren’t nec­es­sar­i­ly look­ing for the most tech­ni­cal skill!” She also empha­sizes, as regards the sto­ry itself, that though its themes include “truth and the abuse of pow­er,” it “isn’t intend­ed to be read as a response to any­thing that’s hap­pen­ing in the world right now.” Many fac­tors have con­tributed to Rowl­ing’s great suc­cess, but her pref­er­ence for the time­less over the top­i­cal sure­ly isn’t a minor one. Read her sto­ry here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How J.K. Rowl­ing Plot­ted Har­ry Pot­ter with a Hand-Drawn Spread­sheet

J.K. Rowl­ing Pub­lish­es New Har­ry Pot­ter Sto­ry About the Malev­o­lent Dolores Umbridge

J.K. Rowl­ing Defends Don­ald Trump’s Right to Be “Offen­sive and Big­ot­ed”

J.K. Rowl­ing Tells Har­vard Grads Why Suc­cess Begins with Fail­ure

Clas­sic Children’s Books Now Dig­i­tized and Put Online: Revis­it Vin­tage Works from the 19th & 20th Cen­turies

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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This Is What an 1869 MIT Entrance Exam Looks Like: Could You Have Passed the Test?

in Education, Math, MIT | May 27th, 2020

The late 19th Cen­tu­ry was the time of Charles Dar­win and James Clerk Maxwell, of Thomas Edi­son and Alexan­der Gra­ham Bell. It was a gold­en age of sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy. So you might won­der how hard it was to get into one of the top tech­ni­cal uni­ver­si­ties in that era.

The answer, accord­ing to this video? Not very hard.

At least that was the case in 1869 at the Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy, or MIT,  as the young Aus­tralian sci­ence and math teacher Toby Hendy explains on her excel­lent YouTube chan­nel, Tibees. MIT was brand new and des­per­ate for tuition rev­enue in 1869, so the object of the test was­n’t to whit­tle a mas­sive field of appli­cants down to a man­age­able size. It was sim­ply to make sure that incom­ing stu­dents could han­dle the work.

MIT opened in 1865, just after the end of the Civ­il War. The idea was to cre­ate a Euro­pean-style poly­tech­nic uni­ver­si­ty to meet the demands of an increas­ing­ly indus­tri­al econ­o­my. The orig­i­nal cam­pus was in Boston, across the Charles Riv­er from its cur­rent loca­tion in Cam­bridge. Only 15 stu­dents signed up in 1865. Tuition was $100 for the whole year. There was no for­mal entrance test. Accord­ing to an arti­cle from the school’s Archives and Spe­cial Col­lec­tions,

The “con­di­tions for admis­sion” sec­tion of MIT’s cat­a­logue for 1865–66 indi­cates that can­di­dates for admis­sion as first year stu­dents must be at least six­teen years old and must give sat­is­fac­to­ry evi­dence “by exam­i­na­tion or oth­er­wise” of a com­pe­tent train­ing in arith­metic, geom­e­try, Eng­lish gram­mar, geog­ra­phy, and the “rudi­ments of French.” Rapid and leg­i­ble hand­writ­ing was also stressed as being “par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant.” By 1869 the hand­writ­ing require­ment and French had been dropped, but alge­bra had been added and stu­dents need­ed to pass a qual­i­fy­ing exam in the required sub­ject areas. An ancil­lary effect was to pro­tect unqual­i­fied stu­dents from dis­ap­point­ment and pro­fes­sors from wast­ing their time.

A cou­ple of years ear­li­er, in 1867, the MIT Exec­u­tive Com­mit­tee report­ed that fac­ul­ty mem­bers had felt it nec­es­sary to ask par­ents of “some incom­pe­tent and inat­ten­tive stu­dents to with­draw them from the school, wish­ing to spare them the mor­ti­fi­ca­tion of an exam­i­na­tion which it was cer­tain they could not pass.”

Nowa­days, the stu­dents who make it into MIT have aver­age SAT and ACT scores in the 99th per­centile. Of 21,312 first-year appli­cants hop­ing to join the Class of 2023, only 1,427 made it. That’s an admis­sion rate of 6.7 per­cent. What a dif­fer­ence 150 years can make!

To take the 1869 entrance exam­i­na­tion in Eng­lish, Alge­bra, Geom­e­try and Arith­metic, and to see the cor­rect answers, vis­it this cached arti­cle from the MIT web­site.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Math Cours­es

Albert Ein­stein’s Grades: A Fas­ci­nat­ing Look at His Report Cards

Teacher Calls Jacques Der­ri­da’s Col­lege Admis­sion Essay on Shake­speare “Quite Incom­pre­hen­si­ble” (1951)

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