There are those of us who, when presented with dueling starships in a movie or television show, always make the same objection: there’s no sound in outer space. In the short film above, this valid if aggravatingly pedantic charge is confirmed by Lori Glaze, Director of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate’s Planetary Science Division. “Sound requires molecules,” she says. “You have to be able to move molecules with the sound waves, and without the molecules, the sound just doesn’t move.” Space has as few as ten atoms per cubic meter; our atmosphere, by contrast, has more ten trillion trillion — that’s “trillion trillion” with two Ts.
No wonder Earth can be such an infernal racket. But as every schoolchild knows, the rest of solar system as a whole is hardly empty. In twenty minutes, the The Sounds of Space takes us on a tour of the planets from Mercury out to Pluto and even Saturn’s moon of Titan, not just visualizing their sights but, if you like, auralizing their sounds.
These include real recordings, like those of Venusian winds captured by the Soviet lander Venera 14 in 1981. Most, however, are scientifically informed constructions of more speculative phenomenon: a “Mercuryquake,” for instance, or a “Methanofall” on Titan.
A collaboration between filmmakerJohn D. Boswell (also known as Melodysheep) and Twenty Thousand Hertz, a podcast about “the stories behind the world’s most recognizable and interesting sounds,” The Sounds of Space was recently featured at Aeon. That site recommends viewing the film “as an exploration of the physics of sound, and the science of how we’ve evolved to receive sound waves right here on Earth.” However you frame it, you’ll hear plenty of sounds the likes of which you’ve never heard before, as well as the voices of Earthlings highly knowledgable in these matters: Glaze’s, but also those of NASA Planetary Astronomer Keith Noll and Research Astrophysicist Scott Guzewich. And as a bonus, you’ll be prepared to critique the sonic realism of the next battle you see staged on the surface of Mars.
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.
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.
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 Duchamp, George Bellows, Gaston 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.
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.”
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 andtwo nudes, Carl 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.
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.
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.
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:
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 Paintingsis 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.
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.
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.
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.
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