You’ve had the thought experiment in your head. What would happen if you run a harp through a heavy distortion pedal? Now you can see how it all plays out. Emily Hopkins has been playing the harp for over 20 years and has recently taken to experimenting with harp distortion. Above, you can watch her experiment with the Nepenthes by Electrofoods, the heaviest distortion pedal she could find. Other pedal distortion experiments can be found here.
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Here’s the context to a sobering newly-released video from The New York Times:
In the video above, Alexander Stockton, a producer on the Opinion Video team, explores two of the main reasons the number of Covid cases is soaring once again in the United States: vaccine hesitancy and refusal.
“It’s hard to watch the pandemic drag on as Americans refuse the vaccine in the name of freedom,” he says.
Seeking understanding, Mr. Stockton travels to Mountain Home, Ark., in the Ozarks, a region with galloping contagion and — not unrelated — abysmal vaccination rates.
He finds that a range of feelings and beliefs underpins the low rates — including fear, skepticism and a libertarian strain of defiance.
This doubt even extends to the staff at a regional hospital, where about half of the medical personnel are not vaccinated — even while the intensive care unit is crowded with unvaccinated Covid patients fighting for their lives.
Mountain Home — like the United States as a whole — is caught in a tug of war between private liberty and public health. But Mr. Stockton suggests that unless government upholds its duty to protect Americans, keeping the common good in mind, this may be a battle with no end.
Pity the ghost of Antonio Salieri, “one of history’s all-time losers — a bystander run over by a Mack truck of malicious gossip,” writes Alex Ross at The New Yorker. The rumors began even before his death. “In 1825, a story that he had poisoned Mozart went around Vienna. In 1830, Alexander Pushkin used that rumor as the basis for his play ‘Mozart and Salieri,’ casting the former as the doltish genius and the latter as a jealous schemer.” The stories became further embellished in an opera by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, then again in 1979 by British playwright Peter Shaffer, whose Amadeus, “a sophisticated variation on Pushkin’s concept, …became a mainstay of the modern stage.”
In 1984, these fictions became the basis of Miloš Forman’s Amadeus, written by Shaffer for the screen. The film further solidifies Salieri’s villainy in F. Murray Abraham’s Oscar-winning performance of his envy and despair. Like all great cinematic villains, Salieri is shown to have good reason for his hatred of the hero, played as a manic toddler by Thomas Hulce, who was nominated for the same best-actor award Abraham won. In their first meeting (above), Mozart humiliates Salieri in the presence of the Emperor, insulting him several times and showing that Salieri’s years of toil and devotion are worth little more than what the German prodigy mastered as a small child, and could improve upon immeasurably with hardly any effort at all.
Is there truth to this scene? In general, the history of Amadeus is “laughably wrong,” Alex von Tunzelmann writes at The Guardian, though maybe the joke’s on us if we believe it. As Forman’s film takes pains to show, what we see on screen is not an objective point of view, but that of an aged, embittered, insane man remembering his past with regret. Salieri is a most unreliable narrator, and Forman an unreliable storyteller. The supposed “Welcome March” composed for Mozart in the scene above is not a Salieri composition at all, but a simplification of the aria from Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, which Hulce-as-Mozart then transforms into the actual tune of the aria.
Other inaccuracies abound. The Salieri of history was not “a sexually frustrated, dried-up old bachelor,” von Tunzelmann notes. “He had eight children by his wife, and is reputed have had at least one mistress.” He was also more colleague and friendly competitor than enemy of the newly-arrived Mozart in Vienna. The two even composed a piece together for singer Nancy Storace, who played the first Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro. While Mozart wrote to his father of a shadowy cabal arrayed against him at court, there is no evidence of a plot, and Mozart could be, by all accounts, just as puerile and obnoxious as his portrayal in the film.
Mozart did die a pauper from a mysterious illness at 34. (He did not dictate the final passages of his Requiem to Salieri). And Salieri did later confess to poisoning Mozart while he was aged and in a temporary state of mental illness, then retracted the claim when he later recovered. (“Let’s be honest,” writes von Tunzelmann, “nobody seriously thinks Salieri murdered Mozart.”) These are the barest historical facts upon which Amadeus’s infamous rivalry rests. The Salieri of the film is a fictional construction, created, as actor Simon Callow said of Shaffer’s play, to serve “a vast meditation on the relationship between genius and talent.”
In Forman’s film, the theme becomes the relationship between genius and mediocrity. But to call Salieri a mediocrity — or the “patron saint of mediocrities,” as Shaffer does in his play — “sets the bar for mediocrity too high,” Ross argues. “His music is worth hearing. Mozart was a greater composer, but not immeasurably greater.” Furthermore, “amid the procession of megalomaniacs, misanthropes, and basket cases who make up the classical pantheon, [Salieri] seems to have been one of the more likable fellows.”
At the time of his death in 2018, Anthony Bourdain was quite possibly the most famous cook in the world. Without question he held the title of the most famous cook-traveler, a status resting primarily on No Reservations and Parts Unknown, the television shows he hosted on the Travel Chanel and CNN, respectively. But it all began with A Cook’s Tour, which the Food Network originally broadcast in 2002 and 2003. That series, Bourdain’s very first, took him from Japan to Morocco to Mexico to Australia to Thailand — and through many points in between — in search of the world’s most stimulating eating experiences.
During the launch phase of his rise to fame (after decades of restaurant work and years of writing, an effort that first produced a couple of food-themed murder-mystery novels), Bourdain managed to tap into a new wave of gastronomic interest then rising in America. He did so with a street-smart sense of humor that appealed even to viewers with no particular investment in the world of cooking and dining, as long as they had an interest in the world itself. With A Cook’s Tour, he took food television out of the kitchen — way out of the kitchen — and over the eighteen years since its conclusion, the series’ influence has become so pervasive as almost to be invisible. Anthony Bourdain may be gone, but parts of his personality live on in every high-profile traveler out there cooking, eating, and getting lost today.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
According to the current research, caffeine, “contributes much more to your health than it takes away.” These words come from a thinker no less vigilant about the state of food-and-drink science than Michael Pollan, and perhaps they’re all you feel you need to know on the subject. In fact, you’re probably taking in some form of caffeine even while reading this now. I know I’m doing so while writing it, and this, according to the Pollan-starring Wired video above, gives us something in common with the central figures of the Enlightenment. “Isaac Newton was a big coffee fan,” says Pollan, and Voltaire “apparently had 72 cups a day. I don’t know quite how you do that.”
The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, and the Industrial Revolution also owe much to the intellectual and commercial churn of the coffee house, an institution that emerged in 17th-century London. “There were coffee houses dedicated to literature, and writers and poets would congregate there,” says Pollan.
“There was a coffee house dedicated to selling stock, and that turned into the London Stock Exchange eventually. There was another one dedicated to science, tied to the Royal Institution, where great scientists of the period would get together.” Consumed in dedicated houses or elsewhere, the “new, sober, more civil drink was changing the way people thought and the way they worked.”
The relevant contrast is with alcohol, once an element of practically all beverages in Europe. Before caffeine got there, “people were drunk or buzzed most of the day. People would have alcohol with breakfast” — children included, since it was still healthier than contaminated water. This custom hardly encouraged clear, linear thought; Diderot, Pollan tells us, wrote the Encyclopédie while drinking coffee, but imagine the result, if any, had he been drinking wine. More than a quarter-millennium later, we have solid evidence that caffeine “does improve focus and memory, and the ability to learn,” if at the cost of a decent night’s sleep. Not that this seems to have bothered coffee-pounding Enlightenment thinkers: what’s a little tossing and turning, after all, when there’s a worldview to be revolutionized?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
However, interactive conversations about texts you probably haven’t read can be difficult to follow no matter how much we try to make them accessible, and a decade of history means that many names that might be dropped that those newly checking in may or may not be familiar with.
I’m one of the hosts of that podcast, and while I’m very happy with the format and thrilled to have reached so many people with it, I also appreciate the dynamic of a one-on-one tutoring interchange, and I stand firmly behind one of the original rules of The Partially Examined Life: No name-dropping.
As we read more complicated texts, our interest becomes figuring out what the philosopher meant, and only secondarily whether that meaning actually relates to something in people’s actual lives. Yes, we are critical (some say too critical) of the subject-matter, but we’re also big fans; we could bask in the literary glow of Hegel or Plato or Simone de Beauvoir or Hannah Arendt all day, and have often done so.
My newest podcast, Philosophy vs. Improv, is reciprocal tutoring realized as comedy (or at least performance art?). As someone who studied philosophy for many years in school and has then been hosting The Partially Examined Life for so long, I’m in a good position to come up with particular philosophical points worth teaching to a new learner.
My Philosophy vs. Improv co-host is Bill Arnett, founder of the Chicago Improv Studio, author of The Complete Improviser, and the former training director at Chicago’s famed iO Theater. He has appeared repeatedly on the Hello From the Magic Tavern improv comedy podcast as a character named Metamore who leads the show’s hosts (who are all fantasy characters a la Tolkein or Narnia) in a table-top role-playing game called Offices and Bosses. This and other shows ignited in me an urge to learn the fundamentals of improv comedy, and so each Philosophy vs. Improv episode, Bill comes up with some trick of the trade to try to teach me.
There are two rules of engagement: First, we can’t just state up front what the lesson is. We can ask each other questions, go through exercises, and otherwise discuss the material, but the lesson should emerge naturally. Second, we don’t take turns in trying to teach each other. As he’s making me act out scenes, I’m trying to set up those scenes or have my character react in such a way to exemplify my philosophical point. As we’re discussing philosophy, Bill is relating it to comparable points about improv. Of course, we’re both interested in learning as well as teaching, so the “vs.” in the show’s title is not so much competition between us as between which lesson ends up more nearly producing its intended effect in the other person.
It is surprising how smoothly these dueling lessons often fit together, as lessens about ethics in particular, about the art of living, are very much relevant to the improvisational skills of being present, presenting yourself, discovering the reality of a situation, and exploring truths of character. Fiction is often a very effective vehicle for addressing philosophy, whether the characters themselves are talking philosophically (even if they’re animals, cave men, or otherwise in a non-typical situation for discussion), or perhaps we’re embodying some political situation or thought experiment that we’re subjecting to philosophical analysis.
Likewise, back to the days of Plato, a dose of irony in discussing philosophy can be useful, and this format allows us to not just be ourselves on a podcast discussing philosophy, but at any point to launch into some comedy bit, and in this way show the absurdity of views we’re arguing against or just play with the ideas in a manner that I think enhances mental flexibility, which is essential both for improvisation and for philosophical creativity.
Listen to the latest episode (#7), entitled “Meritocracy Now!”
Mark Linsenmayer is the host of four podcasts: Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast, Nakedly Examined Music, The Partially Examined Life, and Philosophy vs. Improv.
Last year, when Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced that Hagia Sophia would be reconverted into a mosque, he assured a concerned UNESCO that changes to the 1,500-year-old former cathedral-turned-mosque would have “no negative impact” on its status as World Heritage Site. “A state must make sure that no modification undermines the outstanding universal value of a site listed on its territory,” the world body has said. Claims to the contrary notwithstanding, the “universal value” of the site does seem to have been undermined.
Designated a museum by the secular Turkish Republic in 1934, the site contains hundreds of years of history for both the Christian and Islamic worlds, and the shared heritage between them in the shifting mix of peoples who conquered, settled, and moved through the city first called Byzantium, then Constantinople, then Istanbul.
“The World Heritage site was at the centre of both the Christian Byzantine and Muslim Ottoman empires and is today one of Turkey’s most visited monuments,” Reuters noted last year.
The mosque is open to the public for prayers, and anyone can visit. What they’ll find — as you can see in this recent tour video — is ugly green carpeting covering the floor, and screens, panels, and plywood obscuring the Byzantine Christian art. (The same thing was done in the smaller Hagia Sophia in the city of Trabzon.) These changes are not only distressing for UNESCO, but also for lovers of art and history around the world, myself included, who had hoped to one day see the millennia-and-a-half of blended religious and aesthetic traditions for themselves.
It’s possible Turkish politics will allow Hagia Sophia to return to its status as a museum in the future, restoring its “universal value” for world history and culture. If not, we can still visit the space virtually — as it was until last year — in the 360 degree video views above, both of which allow you to look around in any direction as they play. You can also swivel around a spherical panoramic image at 360 cities.
The BBC video at the top narrates some of the significant features of the incredible building, once the largest church in the world, including its “colored marble from around the Roman Empire” and “10,000 square meters of gold mosaic.” Learn much more about Hagia Sophia history in the video above from Khan Academy’s executive directors (and former deans of art and history), Dr. Steven Zucker and Dr. Beth Harris.
Project Initiation: Starting a Successful Project
Project Planning: Putting It All Together
Project Execution: Running the Project
Agile Project Management
Capstone: Applying Project Management in the Real World
Above, a Program Manager talks about “her path from dropping out of high school and earning a GED, joining the military, and working as a coder, to learning about program management and switching into that career track.” An introduction to the Project Management certificate appears below.
The Project Management program takes about six months to complete, and should cost about $250 in total. Students get charged $39 per month until they complete the program.
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