Are We All Getting More Depressed?: A New Study Analyzing 14 Million Books, Written Over 160 Years, Finds the Language of Depression Steadily Rising


The rela­tions between thought, lan­guage, and mood have become sub­jects of study for sev­er­al sci­en­tif­ic fields of late. Some of the con­clu­sions seem to echo reli­gious notions from mil­len­nia ago. “As a man thin­keth, so he is,” for exam­ple, pro­claims a famous verse in Proverbs (one that helped spawn a self-help move­ment in 1903). Pos­i­tive psy­chol­o­gy might agree. “All that we are is the result of what we have thought,” says one trans­la­tion of the Bud­dhist Dhamma­pa­da, a sen­ti­ment that cog­ni­tive behav­ioral ther­a­py might endorse.

But the insights of these tra­di­tions — and of social psy­chol­o­gy — also show that we’re embed­ded in webs of con­nec­tion: we don’t only think alone; we think — and talk and write and read — with oth­ers. Exter­nal cir­cum­stances influ­ence mood as well as inter­nal states of mind. Approach­ing these ques­tions dif­fer­ent­ly, researchers at the Lud­dy School of Infor­mat­ics, Com­put­ing, and Engi­neer­ing at Indi­ana Uni­ver­si­ty asked, “Can entire soci­eties become more or less depressed over time?,” and is it pos­si­ble to read col­lec­tive changes in mood in the writ­ten lan­guages of the past cen­tu­ry or so?

The team of sci­en­tists, led by Johan Bollen, Indi­ana Uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor of infor­mat­ics and com­put­ing, took a nov­el approach that brings togeth­er tools from at least two fields: large-scale data analy­sis and cog­ni­tive-behav­ioral ther­a­py (CBT). Since diag­nos­tic cri­te­ria for mea­sur­ing depres­sion have only been around for the past 40 years, the ques­tion seemed to resist lon­gi­tu­di­nal study. But CBT pro­vid­ed a means of ana­lyz­ing lan­guage for mark­ers of “cog­ni­tive dis­tor­tions” — think­ing that skews in over­ly neg­a­tive ways. “Lan­guage is close­ly inter­twined with this dynam­ic” of thought and mood, the researchers write in their study, “His­tor­i­cal lan­guage records reveal a surge of cog­ni­tive dis­tor­tions in recent decades,” pub­lished just last month in PNAS.

Choos­ing three lan­guages, Eng­lish (US), Ger­man, and Span­ish, the team looked for “short sequences of one to five words (n‑grams), labeled cog­ni­tive dis­tor­tion schema­ta (CDS).” These words and phras­es express neg­a­tive thought process­es like “cat­a­stro­phiz­ing,” “dichoto­mous rea­son­ing,” “dis­qual­i­fy­ing the pos­i­tive,” etc. Then, the researchers iden­ti­fied the preva­lence of such lan­guage in a col­lec­tion of over 14 mil­lion books pub­lished between 1855 and 2019 and uploaded to Google Books. The study con­trolled for lan­guage and syn­tax changes dur­ing that time and account­ed for the increase in tech­ni­cal and non-fic­tion books pub­lished (though it did not dis­tin­guish between lit­er­ary gen­res).

What the sci­en­tists found in all three lan­guages was a dis­tinc­tive “‘hock­ey stick’ pat­tern” — a sharp uptick in the lan­guage of depres­sion after 1980 and into the present time. The only spikes that come close on the time­line occur in Eng­lish lan­guage books dur­ing the Gild­ed Age and books pub­lished in Ger­man dur­ing and imme­di­ate­ly after World War II. (High­ly inter­est­ing, if unsur­pris­ing, find­ings.) Why the sud­den, steep climb in lan­guage sig­ni­fy­ing depres­sive think­ing? Does it actu­al­ly mark a col­lec­tive shift in mood, or show how his­tor­i­cal­ly oppressed groups have had more access to pub­lish­ing in the past forty years, and have expressed less sat­is­fac­tion with the sta­tus quo?

While they are care­ful to empha­size that they “make no causal claims” in the study, the researchers have some ideas about what’s hap­pened, observ­ing for exam­ple:

The US surge in CDS preva­lence coin­cides with the late 1970s when wages stopped track­ing increas­ing work pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. This trend was asso­ci­at­ed with ris­es in income inequal­i­ty to recent lev­els not seen since the 1930s. This phe­nom­e­non has been observed for most devel­oped economies, includ­ing Ger­many, Spain and Latin Amer­i­ca.

Oth­er fac­tors cit­ed include the devel­op­ment of the World Wide Web and its facil­i­ta­tion of polit­i­cal polar­iza­tion, “in par­tic­u­lar us-vs.-them think­ing… dichoto­mous rea­son­ing,” and oth­er mal­adap­tive thought pat­terns that accom­pa­ny depres­sion. The scale of these devel­op­ments might be enough to explain a major col­lec­tive rise in depres­sion, but one com­menter offers an addi­tion­al gloss:

The globe is *Lit­er­al­ly* on fire, or his­tor­i­cal­ly flood­ing — Mul­ti­ple eco­nom­ic crash­es bare­ly decades apart — a ghost town of a hous­ing mar­ket — a mul­ti-year glob­al pan­dem­ic — wealth con­cen­tra­tion at the .01% lev­el — ter­ri­ble pay/COL equa­tions — block­ing unionization/workers rights — abu­sive mil­i­ta­rized police, with­out the restraint or train­ing of actu­al mil­i­tary —  You can’t afford X for a month­ly mort­gage pay­ment!  Pay 1.5x for rent instead! — end­less wars for the last… 30…years? 50 if we include stuff like Korea, Cold War, Viet­nam… How far has the IMC been milk­ing the gov for funds to make the rich rich­er? Oh, and a bil­lion­aire 3‑way space race to deter­mine who’s got the biggest “rock­et”

These sound like rea­sons for glob­al depres­sion indeed, but the arrow could also go the oth­er way: maybe cat­a­stroph­ic rea­son­ing pro­duced actu­al cat­a­stro­phes; black and white think­ing led to end­less wars, etc…. More study is need­ed, says Bollen and his col­leagues, yet it seems prob­a­ble, giv­en the data, that “large pop­u­la­tions are increas­ing­ly stressed by per­va­sive cul­tur­al, eco­nom­ic, and social changes” — changes occur­ring more rapid­ly, fre­quent­ly, and with greater impact on our dai­ly lives than ever before. Read the full study at PNAS

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Stanford’s Robert Sapol­sky Demys­ti­fies Depres­sion, Which, Like Dia­betes, Is Root­ed in Biol­o­gy

A Uni­fied The­o­ry of Men­tal Ill­ness: How Every­thing from Addic­tion to Depres­sion Can Be Explained by the Con­cept of “Cap­ture”

Charles Bukows­ki Explains How to Beat Depres­sion: Spend 3–4 Days in Bed and You’ll Get the Juices Flow­ing Again (NSFW)

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

Discover the Stettheimer Dollhouse: The 12-Room Dollhouse Featuring Miniature, Original Modernist Art by Marcel Duchamp

The Stet­theimer Doll­house has been wow­ing young New York­ers since it entered the Muse­um of the City of New York’s col­lec­tion in 1944.

The lux­u­ri­ous­ly appoint­ed, two-sto­ry, twelve-room house fea­tures tiny crys­tal chan­de­liers, trompe l’oeil pan­els, an itty bit­ty mah-jongg set, and a deli­cious-look­ing dessert assort­ment that would have dri­ven Beat­rix Potter’s Two Bad Mice wild.

Its most aston­ish­ing fea­ture, how­ev­er, tends to go over its youngest fans’ heads — an art gallery filled with orig­i­nal mod­ernist paint­ings, draw­ings, and sculp­tures by the likes of Mar­cel DuchampGeorge Bel­lowsGas­ton Lachaise, and Mar­guerite Zorach.

The house’s cre­ator, Car­rie Wal­ter Stet­theimer, drew on her family’s close per­son­al ties to the avant-garde art world to secure these con­tri­bu­tions.

The art deal­er Paul Rosen­berg described the affin­i­ty between these artists and the three wealthy Stet­theimer sis­ters, one of whom, Florine, was her­self a mod­ernist painter:

Artists… went there and not at all mere­ly because of the indi­vid­u­al­i­ties of the trio of women and their taste­ful hos­pi­tal­i­ty. They went for the rea­son that they felt them­selves entire­ly at home with the Stetties—so the trio was called—and the Stet­ties seemed to feel them­selves entire­ly at home in their com­pa­ny. Art was an indis­pens­able com­po­nent of the mod­ern, open intel­lec­tu­al life of the place. The sis­ters felt it as a liv­ing issue. Sin­cere­ly they lived it.

Art is def­i­nite­ly part of the dollhouse’s life.

Duchamp recre­at­ed Nude Descend­ing a Stair­case, inscrib­ing the back “Pour la col­lec­tion de la poupée de Car­rie Stet­theimer à l’occasion de sa fête en bon sou­venir. Mar­cel Duchamp 23 juil­let 1918 N.Y.”

Mar­guerite Thomp­son ZorachAlexan­der Archipenko, and Paul Theve­naz also felt no com­punc­tion about fur­nish­ing a doll­house with nudes.

Louis Bouché — the “bad boy of Amer­i­can art” as per the Stet­theimers’ friend, writer and pho­tog­ra­ph­er Carl Van Vecht­en, made a tiny ver­sion of his paint­ing, Mama’s Boy.

Car­rie wrote to Gas­ton Lachaise, to thank him for two minia­ture nude draw­ings and an alabaster Venus:

My dolls and I thank you most sin­cere­ly for the love­ly draw­ings that are to grace their art gallery. I think that the dolls—after they are born, which they are not, yet—ought to be the hap­pi­est and proud­est dolls in the world as own­ers of the draw­ings and the beau­ti­ful stat­ue. I am now hop­ing that they will nev­er be born, so that I can keep them [the art works] for­ev­er in cus­tody, and enjoy them myself, while await­ing their arrival.

Car­rie worked on the doll­house from from 1916 to 1935. Her sis­ter Ettie donat­ed it to the muse­um and took it upon her­self to arrange the art­work. As Johan­na Fate­man writes in 4Columns:

Twen­ty-eight of the artists’ gifts were stored sep­a­rate­ly; Ettie select­ed thir­teen from the col­lec­tion, and her grace­ful arrange­ment became per­ma­nent, though it’s like­ly that the pieces were meant to be shown in rota­tion.

The Muse­um of the City of New York’s cur­rent exhi­bi­tion, The Stet­theimer Doll­house: Up Close, includes pho­tos of the art­works that Ettie did not choose to install.

The works that have always been on view are Mar­cel Duchamp’s Nude Descend­ing a Stair­case, Alexan­der Archipenko’s Nude, Louis Bouche’s Mama’s Boy, Gas­ton Lachaise’s Venus and two nudesCarl Sprinchorn’s Dancers, Albert Gleizes’ Seat­ed Fig­ure and Bermu­da Land­scape, Paul Thevenaz’s L’Ombre and Nude with Flow­ing Hair, Mar­guerite Zorach’s Bather and Bathers, William Zorach’s Moth­er and Child, and a paint­ing of a ship by an unknown artist.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Grue­some Doll­house Death Scenes That Rein­vent­ed Mur­der Inves­ti­ga­tions

A Record Store Designed for Mice in Swe­den, Fea­tur­ing Albums by Mouse Davis, Destiny’s Cheese, Dol­ly Pars­ley & More

An Art Gallery for Ger­bils: Two Quar­an­tined Lon­don­ers Cre­ate a Mini Muse­um Com­plete with Ger­bil-Themed Art

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Tony Hawk Breaks Down Skateboarding Into 21 Levels of Difficulty: From Easy to Complex

Thir­ty or so Christ­mases ago, I received my first skate­board. Alas, it was also my last skate­board: not long after I got the hang of bal­anc­ing on the thing, it was run over and snapped in half by a mail truck. There went my last chance at Olympic ath­leti­cism, though I could­n’t have known it at the time: it debuted as an event at the Sum­mer Olympics just this year, and its com­pe­ti­tions are under­way even now in Tokyo. This is, in any case, a bit late for me, giv­en the rel­a­tive… matu­ri­ty of my years as against those of the aver­age Olympic skate­board­er. But then, Tony Hawk is in his fifties, and some­thing tells me he could still show those kids a thing or two.

Hawk, the most famous skate­board­er in the world, shows us 21 things in the Wired video above— specif­i­cal­ly, 21 skate­board­ing moves, each one rep­re­sen­ta­tive of a high­er dif­fi­cul­ty lev­el than the last. At lev­el one, we have the “flat-ground ollie,” which involves “using one foot to snap the tail of the board down­ward, and then you have the board sort of aim­ing up, and then slid­ing your front foot at the right time in order to bring that board up and lev­el it out in the air.”

To the untrained eye, a well-exe­cut­ed ollie projects the image of skater and board are “jump­ing” as a whole. But it can only be mas­tered by those will­ing to keep their feet on the board, rather than obey­ing the instinct to put one foot off to the side. “Peo­ple do that for years,” laments Hawk.

Lev­el ten finds Hawk on the half-pipe doing a “360 aer­i­al.” He describes the action as we watch him per­form it: “I’m going up the ramp, I’m turn­ing in the frontside direc­tion a full 360, and I’m com­ing down back­wards” — but not yet flip­ping the board while in the air, a slight­ly more advanced move. The final lev­els enter “the realm of unre­al­i­ty,” cov­er­ing the NBD (Nev­er Been Done) tricks that skaters nev­er­the­less believe pos­si­ble. For Lev­el 21 he choos­es the “1260 spin” — “three and a half rota­tions” — which he’s nev­er even seen attempt­ed. Or at least he had­n’t at the time of this video’s shoot in 2019; Mitchie Brus­co land­ed one at the X Games just two days lat­er. Even now, giv­en the seem­ing­ly infi­nite poten­tial vari­a­tions of and expan­sions on every trick, skate­board­ing is unlike­ly to have hit its phys­i­cal lim­its. Just imag­ine what the kids who suc­cess­ful­ly dodge their mail­man now will be able to pull off when they grow up.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Tony Hawk & Archi­tec­tur­al His­to­ri­an Iain Bor­den Tell the Sto­ry of How Skate­board­ing Found a New Use for Cities & Archi­tec­ture

Wern­er Her­zog Dis­cov­ers the Ecsta­sy of Skate­board­ing: “That’s Kind of My Peo­ple”

The Tony Alva Sto­ry

Ful­ly Flared

The Piano Played with 16 Increas­ing Lev­els of Com­plex­i­ty: From Easy to Very Com­plex

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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.

The “Conjuring” Film Universe Digested — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #101

With the release of The Con­jur­ing: The Dev­il Made Me Do It, your Pret­ty Much Pop hosts Mark, Eri­ca Spyres and Bri­an Hirt explore the larg­er “Con­jur­ing uni­verse” that start­ed with the crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed 2013 James Wan film depict­ing the fic­tion­al­ized super­nat­ur­al inves­ti­ga­tions of Ed and Lor­raine War­ren (played by Patrick Wil­son and Vera Farmi­ga). Large­ly using the plot-gen­er­at­ing device of the couple’s store­house of haunt­ed objects, this series has extend­ed into eight films to date with more planned.

Are these films actu­al­ly scary? Inso­far as these demons and ghosts do fright­en us, can we (emo­tion­al­ly) buy into the pow­er of Catholic sym­bols to keep them at bay? Is it OK to val­orize these real-life peo­ple who were very like­ly huck­sters?

Is group­ing these films togeth­er mere­ly a mar­ket­ing gim­mick, or is there real nar­ra­tive jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for the con­ti­nu­ity? Even with­out a com­mon film­mak­er, stars, or plot through-line, there is some val­ue in a brand or fran­chise, just so you know more or less what you’re get­ting, but does that actu­al­ly hold in this case, or have War­ren-free stinkers like The Nun (2018) and The Curse of La Llorona (2019) already failed to meet the franchise’s stan­dards?

Some of the arti­cles we reflect­ed on for this episode includ­ed:

This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion you can access 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.

Frida Kahlo: The Complete Paintings Collects the Painter’s Entire Body of Work in a 600-Page, Large-Format Book

Most of us who know Fri­da Kahlo’s work know her self-por­traits. But, in her brief 47 years, she cre­at­ed a more var­i­ous body of work: por­traits of oth­ers, still lifes, and dif­fi­cult-to-cat­e­go­rize visions that still, 67 years after her death, feel drawn straight from the wild cur­rents of her imag­i­na­tion. (Not to men­tion her elab­o­rate­ly illus­trat­ed diary, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture.) Some­how, Kahlo’s work has nev­er all been gath­ered in one place. That, along with her endur­ing appeal as both an artist and a his­tor­i­cal fig­ure, sure­ly made her an appeal­ing propo­si­tion for art-book pub­lish­er Taschen, an oper­a­tion as invest­ed in visu­al rich­ness as it is in com­plete­ness.

There’s also the mat­ter of size. Though not con­ceived at the same scale as the murals of Diego Rivera, with whom Kahlo lived in not one but two less-than-con­ven­tion­al mar­riages, Kahlo’s paint­ings look best when seen at their biggest. Hence Taschen’s “large-for­mat XXL” pro­duc­tion of Fri­da Kahlo: The Com­plete Paint­ings, which “allows read­ers to admire Fri­da Kahlo’s paint­ings like nev­er before, includ­ing unprece­dent­ed detail shots and famous pho­tographs.” Pre­sent­ed along with a bio­graph­i­cal essay, those pho­tos cap­ture, among oth­er sub­jects, “Fri­da, Diego, and the Casa Azul, Frida’s home and the cen­ter of her uni­verse.”

In cre­at­ing his vol­ume, edi­tor-author Luis-Martín Lozano and con­trib­u­tors Andrea Ket­ten­mann and Mari­na Vázquez Ramos focused not on the artist’s life, but her work. “Most peo­ple at exhi­bi­tions, they’re inter­est­ed in her per­son­al­i­ty — who she is, how she dressed, who does she go to bed with, her lovers, her sto­ry,” says Lozano in an inter­view with BBC Cul­ture. Putting togeth­er a run-of-the-mill Kahlo book, “you repeat the same things, and it will sell – because every­thing about Kahlo sells. It’s unfor­tu­nate to say, but she’s become a mer­chan­dise.” Fri­da Kahlo: The Com­plete Paint­ings is also, of course, a prod­uct, and one painstak­ing­ly designed to com­pel the Fri­da Kahlo enthu­si­ast. Its ide­al read­er, how­ev­er, desires to live in not Kahlo’s world, but the world she cre­at­ed.

via Colos­sal

Note: Taschen is a part­ner of ours. So if you pur­chase a book, it helps sup­port Open Cul­ture.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Fri­da Kahlo: The Life of an Artist

The Inti­ma­cy of Fri­da Kahlo’s Self-Por­traits: A Video Essay

Vis­it the Largest Col­lec­tion of Fri­da Kahlo’s Work Ever Assem­bled: 800 Arti­facts from 33 Muse­ums, All Free Online

Dis­cov­er Fri­da Kahlo’s Wild­ly-Illus­trat­ed Diary: It Chron­i­cled the Last 10 Years of Her Life, and Then Got Locked Away for Decades

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Fri­da Kahlo’s Blue House Free Online

A Brief Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Life and Work of Fri­da Kahlo

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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.

How ABBA Won Eurovision and Became International Pop Stars (1974)

Euro­vi­sion, the flashy orig­i­nal song con­test that cap­ti­vates Euro­peans, tends to get round­ly mocked in the U.S., where we choose our stars by hav­ing them sing oth­er people’s songs on TV in ridicu­lous cos­tumes. Nonethe­less, Amer­i­cans have fall­en in love with many a con­test win­ner, and that’s no more true than in the case of ABBA, the Swedish pop-dis­co jug­ger­naut who broke through to inter­na­tion­al star­dom when they won in 1974 with “Water­loo,” cho­sen twice as the great­est song in the competition’s his­to­ry.

The two cou­ples — Agnetha Fält­skog and Björn Ulvaus; Ben­ny Ander­s­son and Anni-Frid Lyn­gstad — first formed as Fes­t­folket (“Par­ty Peo­ple”) in 1970, and Ulvaus and Ander­s­son began sub­mit­ting songs to Swedish nation­al con­test Melod­ifes­ti­valen. In 1973, they sub­mit­ted “Ring Ring,” final­ly placed third, then released an album called Ring Ring as Björn & Ben­ny, Agnetha & Fri­da. They had tak­en on a new glam rock look and sound, and the album was a hit in parts of Europe and South Africa, but didn’t break the UK and US charts.

It was time for anoth­er name change, an ana­gram formed from the first let­ters of their first names. (They were oblig­ed to ask per­mis­sion from a local fish can­nery called Abba, who agreed on con­di­tion the band didn’t make the can­ners “feel ashamed for what you’re doing.”) The name, pro­duc­er Stig Ander­son thought, would trans­late inter­na­tion­al­ly, and the band would sing in Eng­lish for their next sin­gle, the song that would launch their rapid ascent into seem­ing­ly eter­nal rel­e­vance.

How did “Water­loo” not only break ABBA into star­dom but also “rein­vent pop music” as we know it? As the Poly­phon­ic video at the top explains, it did far more than raise the bar for every Euro­vi­sion per­for­mance since. ABBA brought glam, glit­ter, and the­atri­cal bom­bast into pop, using Phil Spector’s “wall of sound” stu­dio tech­niques to coax an enor­mous, envelop­ing sound from their vocal har­monies, gui­tars, pianos, horns, drums, etc., and tak­ing heavy inspi­ra­tion from Eng­lish band Wizzard’s song “See My Baby Jive,” while “pulling back on the rock” and lean­ing into clean­er, more dance-floor-friend­ly pro­duc­tion.

ABBA wise­ly put Agnetha and Anni-Frid’s vocal har­monies in the cen­ter, and they took a decid­ed­ly quirky turn from glam rock’s love of sleazy come-ons and songs about aliens. Orig­i­nal­ly called “Hon­ey Pie,” the band’s break­out hit became “Water­loo” when Stig Ander­son turned it into an odd ref­er­ence to Napoleon’s sur­ren­der, “such a nov­el con­ceit for a song that it’s hard to for­get.” ABBA con­tin­ued this tra­di­tion in short sto­ry-songs like “Fer­nan­do,” first writ­ten with dif­fer­ent lyrics in Swedish for Lyn­gstad, then rewrit­ten in Eng­lish by Ulvaeus as a tale about two old cam­paign­ers from the Mex­i­can-Amer­i­can War.

Smart song­writ­ing, catchy hooks, impec­ca­ble vocal har­monies, and flashy beau­ty — once the world saw and heard ABBA, few could resist them. But it took their unique­ly the­atri­cal (at the time) Euro­vi­sion per­for­mance to break them out, as Ulvaeus says. “We knew that the Euro­vi­sion Song Con­test was the only route for a Swedish group to make it out­side Swe­den.” The win was huge, but the con­test was a means to an end. True val­i­da­tion came with hit after hit, as ABBA proved them­selves indis­pens­able to wed­ding dance floors every­where and “com­plete­ly trans­formed what it meant to be a pop star.” See their orig­i­nal Euro­vi­sion per­for­mance of “Water­loo” just above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lis­ten to ABBA’s “Danc­ing Queen” Played on a 1914 Fair­ground Organ

When ABBA Wrote Music for the Cold War-Themed Musi­cal, Chess: “One of the Best Rock Scores Ever Pro­duced for the The­atre” (1984)

This Man Flew to Japan to Sing ABBA’s “Mam­ma Mia” in a Big Cold Riv­er

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

The Making of a Violin from Start to Finish: Watch a French Luthier Practice a Time-Honored Craft

Two fam­i­lies have been cred­it­ed with mak­ing the great­est vio­lins of the clas­si­cal peri­od: the Stradi­vari and the Guarneri. The first luthiers with those names were trained in the work­shops of the Amati fam­i­ly, whose patri­arch, Andrea, found­ed a lega­cy in Cre­mona in the mid 1500s when he gave the vio­lin the form we know today, invent­ing f‑holes and per­fect­ing the gen­er­al shape and size of the instru­ment and oth­ers in its fam­i­ly.

But there’s far more to the sto­ry of the vio­lin than its famous Ital­ian mak­er names sug­gest, though these still stand for the height of qual­i­ty and pres­tige. Vio­lin-mak­ing cen­ters arose else­where in Europe soon after the Stradi­vari and Guarneri set up shop. In France, the town of Mire­court became “syn­ony­mous with French vio­lins and the craft,” notes Corilon vio­lins.

From 1732 on, French Mire­court crafts­men fol­lowed the strict rules of their guild to uphold their high stan­dards, and appren­tices trained there were in demand far beyond the con­fines of the town. They fre­quent­ly went on to found their own stu­dios in oth­er cities, espe­cial­ly Paris. Some­times they lat­er returned to Mire­court after sev­er­al years of suc­cess else­where. As a result the local art of mak­ing French vio­lins had a strong effect on the out­side world, whilst at the same time incor­po­rat­ing oth­er influ­ences. 

Famous Mire­court mak­ers includ­ed Nico­las Lupot, called “the French Stradi­var­ius.” The pri­ma­ry influ­ence came from Cre­mona, but “impor­tant tech­ni­cal insights were adapt­ed from Ger­man vio­lin mak­ing.”

The city entered a new phase when Didi­er Nico­las became the first to man­u­fac­ture vio­lins seri­al­ly in Mire­court at the turn of the 19th cen­tu­ry. His fac­to­ry “employed some 600 peo­ple, mak­ing his busi­ness the first large-scale oper­a­tion of its kind in the tra­di­tion-rich town in north­ern Frances Vos­ges moun­tains,” and inau­gu­rat­ing an indus­tri­al peri­od that would last until the late 1960s.

The post-indus­tri­al late-20th cen­tu­ry saw the col­lapse of Mire­court’s great vio­lin-mak­ing com­pa­nies, but not the end of the city’s fame as France’s vio­lin-mak­ing cen­ter, thanks in great part to Nico­las’ found­ing of L’É­cole Nationale de Lutherie, “where excel­lent mas­ters and vio­lin mak­ers keep the time-hon­ored art alive and dynam­ic.” The city’s “guild her­itage” lives on in the work of con­tem­po­rary mak­ers like Dominique Nicosia.

A mas­ter luthi­er and instruc­tor at the school in Mire­court, Nicosia shows us in the video at the top the time-hon­ored tech­niques employed in the mak­ing of vio­lins in France for hun­dreds of years, using met­al tools he also makes him­self. Watch the tra­di­tion come alive, learn more about the famous vio­lin-mak­ing city, which remains the bow-mak­ing cap­i­tal of the world here, and see Nicosia pass his skills and knowl­edge to a new gen­er­a­tion in the video above from L’É­cole Nationale de Lutherie.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Why Vio­lins Have F‑Holes: The Sci­ence & His­to­ry of a Remark­able Renais­sance Design

Watch the World’s Old­est Vio­lin in Action: Mar­co Rizzi Per­forms Schumann’s Sonata No. 2 on a 1566 Amati Vio­lin

Behold the “3Dvarius,” the World’s First 3‑D Print­ed Vio­lin

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

What Makes Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks a Great Painting?: A Video Essay

“Even though you may live in one of the most crowd­ed and busy cities on Earth, it is still pos­si­ble to feel entire­ly alone.” Though hard­ly a nov­el sen­ti­ment, this nev­er­the­less makes for a high­ly suit­able entrée into a video essay on Edward Hop­per’s Nighthawks. Its cre­ator is gal­lerist and Youtu­ber James Payne, whose chan­nel Great Art Explained has already tak­en on the likes of Leonar­do’s Mona Lisa, Michelan­gelo’s David, Andy Warhol’s Mar­i­lyn Dip­tych, and Hierony­mus Bosch’s The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights. Nighthawks, safe to say, makes a more imme­di­ate impres­sion on us 21st-cen­tu­ry urban­ites than any of those works, what­ev­er our indi­vid­ual degrees of alien­ation. But why?

Hop­per paint­ed what he knew, and espe­cial­ly so in the case of his sin­gle best-known work. Though the din­er Nighthawks takes as its set­ting exists nowhere in New York, the artist had spent his entire adult life in the city, an immer­sion that allowed him to cre­ate a street-cor­ner scene that feels real­er than real.

But the emo­tion exud­ed by that din­er’s patrons must run deep­er than the stan­dard urban malaise. Eigh­teen years into a bit­ter and dys­func­tion­al mar­riage, the inspi­ra­tion for all the “dis­con­nect­ed and unhap­py cou­ples he por­trays time and again in his paint­ings,” Hop­per knew inti­mate­ly more than one kind of human lone­li­ness. He him­self act­ed as mod­el for all three of Nighthawks’ male fig­ures, in fact, and his wife Josephine posed for the female one.

“It was down to Jo that Edward became a suc­cess,” says Payne, “a fact he nev­er thanked her for.” An artist in her own right, she got Hop­per his first solo show in 1924, when he was 42. Up to then he’d worked as a mag­a­zine illus­tra­tor, but even by the time of Nighthawks in 1942, he clear­ly had­n’t for­got­ten the mis­ery of his day job. Nor had he dis­card­ed what it gave him: “along with the prepa­ra­tion skills he picked up, it also helped to hone his sto­ry­telling abil­i­ties.” An avid movie­go­er, he “planned Nighthawks like a film­mak­er, sto­ry­board­ing the paint­ing ahead of its cre­ation.” Film­mak­ers have respond­ed to Hop­per’s cin­e­mat­ic paint­ing with trib­utes of their own: Her­bert Ross re-cre­at­ed the din­er in Pen­nies from Heav­en, as did Wim Wen­ders in The End of Vio­lence, evok­ing Hop­per’s “world of lone­li­ness, anguish, and qui­et iso­la­tion.” Iron­ic, then, that so many in Nighthawks gen­er­a­tions of appre­ci­a­tors have felt less alone while regard­ing it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sev­en Videos Explain How Edward Hopper’s Paint­ings Expressed Amer­i­can Lone­li­ness and Alien­ation

How Edward Hop­per “Sto­ry­board­ed” His Icon­ic Paint­ing Nighthawks

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

10 Paint­ings by Edward Hop­per, the Most Cin­e­mat­ic Amer­i­can Painter of All, Turned into Ani­mat­ed GIFs

How Edward Hopper’s Paint­ings Inspired the Creepy Sus­pense of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Win­dow

Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks: The 2020 Edi­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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.

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