A Tour of All the Pizza Styles You Can Eat in the United States (and the History Behind Your Favorite Slices)

in Food & Drink, History, Travel | September 21st, 2022

When it comes to chili, Texas, Kansas City and Cincinnati, will cede no quarter, each convinced that their particular regional approach is the only sane option.

Hot dogs? Put New York City and Chicago in a pit and watch them tear each other to ribbons.

But pizza?

There are so many geographic variations, even an impartial judge can’t see their way through to a clear victor.

The playing field’s thick as stuffed pizza, a polarizing Chicago local specialty that’s deeper than the deepest dish.

Weird History Food’s whirlwind video tour of Every Pizza Style We Could Find In the United States, above, savors the ways in which various pizza styles evolved from the Neapolitan pie that Italian immigrant Gennaro Lombardi introduced to New York City in 1905.

Wait, though. We all have an acquaintance who takes perverse pleasure in offbeat topping choices — looking at you, California — but other than that, isn’t pizza just sauce, dough, and cheese?

How much room does that leave for variation?

Plenty as it turns out.

Crusts, thick or thin, fluctuate wildly according to the type of flour used, how long the dough is proofed, the type of oven in which they’re baked, and philosophy of sauce placement.

(In Buffalo, New York, pizzas are sauced right up to their circumference, leaving very little crusty handle for eating on the fly, though perhaps one could fold it down the middle, as we do in the city 372 miles to the south.)

Sauce can also swing pretty wildly — sweet, spicy, prepared in advance, or left to the last minute — but cheese is a much hotter topic.

Detroit’s pizza is distinguished by the inclusion of Wisconsin brick cheese.

St. Louis is loyal to Provel cheese, a homegrown processed mix of cheddar, Swiss, and provolone and liquid smoke.

Miami pizzas cater to the palates of its Cuban population by mixing mozzarella with gouda, a cheese that was both widely available and popular before 1962’s rationing system was put in place.

Rhode Island’s aptly named Red Strips have no cheese at all…which might be preferable to the Altoona, Pennsylvania favorite that arrives topped with American cheese slices or — the horror — Velveeta.

(This may be where we part ways with the old saw equating pizza with sex — even when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good.)

Cut and size also factor in to pizza pride.

Washington DC’s Jumbo slices are pretty much the standard issue New York-style thin crust slice, writ large.

Not only does size matter here, it may be the only thing that matters…to the point where a local business improvement district had to intervene on behalf of sidewalk rubbish bins hard pressed to handle the volume of greasy super-sized slice boxes Washingtonians were tossing away every evening.

In the land of opportunity, where smaller towns are understandably eager to claim their piece of pie, Weird History Food gives the nod to Old Forge, Pennsylvania, optimistically dubbed “the Pizza Capital of the World by Uncovering PA’s Jim Cheney, and Steubenville Ohio, home of the “oversized Lunchable” Atlas Obscura refers to as America’s most misunderstood pizza.

For good measure, watch the PBS Idea Channel’s History of Pizza in 8 slices, below, then rep your favorite local pizzeria in the comments.

We want to try them all!

When Mikhail Gorbachev, the Last Soviet Leader, Starred in a Pizza Hut Commercial (1998)

Pizza Box Becomes a Playable DJ Turntable Through the Magic of Conductive Ink

- Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Getting Dressed Over the Centuries: 35 Videos Show How Women & Men Put on Clothes During Ancient, Medieval & Modern Times

in Fashion, History | September 20th, 2022

Across vast swathes of the world, many of us — arguably too many of us — have grown accustomed to putting on little more than a T‑shirt and jeans every morning, regardless of our status in society. We all know it wasn’t always this way, but we may not fully understand just how much it wasn’t always this way. Throughout most of civilized human history, dressing didn’t just reflect one’s way of life, it practically constituted a way of life in itself. Thanks to Youtube channel Crow’s Eye Productions, we here in the twenty-first century can enjoy detailed, even cinematic re-creations of the dressing process in various eras and places the West, from Roman Britain to Renaissance Florence to 1969 London.

You can watch all 35 of these dressing videos in chronological order with this playlist. Many of the dressers, including such august personages as Prince Albert and Queen Victoria (on Christmas Day, no less), occupy elevated social positions.

But the maids and gardeners of the Victorian era had to get dressed too, and though their clothing may be simpler than that worn by the royals — or even by the middle class — it’s no less revealing of history. One could no doubt tell an even richer story of technological, economic, and cultural change over the centuries through the clothing of “the masses” than through the clothing of the elites.

Even war, that most traditional historical subject of all, has its connections with dress. This playlist features three videos on the dressing routines of soldiers, nurses, and young women during the First World War, as well as one on the members of the Women’s Land Army during the Second World War. Established in 1917, the WLA organized “Land Girls” to take over the agricultural work while the men who’d been doing it were out fighting on the front.

This was just the kind of effort necessitated by total war, as well as one that could only have been performed by women. It’s also, therefore, engagingly approachable by a series like this, with its primary focus on women’s dress — which, at least since the Great Male Renunciation, has had a pretty spectacular history of its own.

How Fashionable Dutch Women (Like the Girl with a Pearl Earring) Got Dressed in 1665

Author Imagines in 1893 the Fashions That Would Appear Over the Next 100 Years

Fashion Designers in 1939 Predict How People Would Dress in the Year 2000

Life Magazine Predicts in 1914 How People Would Dress in the 1950s

Google Creates a Digital Archive of World Fashion: Features 30,000 Images, Covering 3,000 Years of Fashion History

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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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

Historian Timothy Snyder Presents 20 Lessons for Defending Democracy Against Tyranny in a New Video Series

in Politics | September 20th, 2022

Yale professor and historian Timothy Snyder has sounded alarm bells about autocracy and fascism for several years now, in both his scholarly and popular books about Russian and German history. Whether you’ve followed his warnings or just started paying attention, it’s not too late to get caught up on the lessons he brings from his rigorous studies of 20th century totalitarianism. To make his relevant points more accessible, Snyder has distilled them over the years, aiming at the widest popular audience.

First, he published On Tyranny in 2017, drawing 20 lessons about unfreedom from the lives of those under the Nazi, Soviet, and other fascist and totalitarian regimes. Without arguing that history repeats, exactly, Snyder noted similarities and differences to past events, and adapted general principles to the geopolitics of the early 21st century. These lessons get reiterated and distilled even further in an edition of the best-selling On Tyranny illustrated by artist Nora Krug.

Published in 2021 and reflecting four years of Trumpism, the illustrated edition continues what we might call Snyder’s Chomskyan commitment to public intellectualism. Trump may be out of power, but the threats to democracy are wired in — in one judicial action after another, and in states like North Carolina, where an illegal, racially-gerrymandered state legislature has held power for years, and now seeks to nullify federal elections at state level, with many other states threatening to follow suit.

This kind of political secessionism imposes the permanent will of a minority on a rapidly changing nation, ensuring that history never catches up with the elites, a category that includes leaders on both sides of the euphemistic “aisle.” For increasing numbers of Americans, political divisions are more aptly characterized by barricades, prison walls, or indivisible codes of silence(ing), repression, and complicity. Snyder meets this time of creeping (loping?) fascism with a YouTube series in which he speaks directly to the camera.

He isn’t giving up on more people paying attention to the bigger picture, and he’s never given up on effective responses to 21st century tyranny. Voting alone has never been enough, and it could be rendered meaningless in the near future. The lessons — “Do not obey in advance”; “Defend institutions”; “Beware the one-party state” — may be familiar to us now, or they may not. But if they bear repeating, it’s worth hearing them from Snyder himself, who closes some of the distance between the intellectual and the public by stepping away from print altogether — a medium perhaps unsuited to the malleable demands of the online present.

How does the media affect, or become, Snyder’s message, especially when it’s effectively one-sidedly televisual, the medium of the 20th century of fascism par excellence? Snyder does not address these theoretical questions, except indirectly by way of a generic book talk aesthetic complete with rumpled shirt, rustling lapel mic, and requisite background shelves of books you’ll find yourself trying to identify as you learn to “be wary of paramilitaries.”

Being wary is one thing, but to what does Snyder’s hyper vigilance add up without the power to make change where we are? Ah, but in asking such a question, maybe we find we are already in the trap, obeying in advance by assuming powerlessness and freely giving up control. It’s our job as individuals to apply the relevant lessons where we can in our own lives, and to read (or watch) Snyder critically, in relation to other trustworthy voices within, and far outside of, Ivy League academic departments.

We do not lack the information we need to understand our moment through a historical lens. But we often lack the knowledge to make sense of things at world-historical scale. Historians like Snyder can bridge the gap, and it’s good to take advantage of the freely-offered professional experience of skilled readers, researchers, and educators. In this instance, Snyder’s approach seems well-tailored to counter innumerable presentations that trivialize WWII history into overfamiliarity and perverse spectacle… or what another anti-fascist public intellectual, Walter Benjamin, identified as the aestheticization of politics — fascism-by-passive-consumerism that leads us down the path to horrors we’d never contemplate outright.…

Watch all 20 lessons above, or find them here.

20 Lessons from the 20th Century About How to Defend Democracy from Authoritarianism, According to Yale Historian Timothy Snyder

A Beautifully Illustrated Edition of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, the Bestselling Book by Historian Timothy Snyder

The Making of Modern Ukraine: A Free Online Course from Yale Professor Timothy Snyder

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

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

5 Ways to Build an Alzheimer’s-Resistant Brain: Neuroscientist Lisa Genova Explains

in Life, Neuroscience | September 19th, 2022

Though not easily dealt with in mainstream entertainment, Alzheimer’s disease has inspired popular works of fiction. Take the 2007 novel Still Alice by Lisa Genova, later adapted into a feature film starring Julianne More. As a neuroscientist, Genova brought an understanding of the subject by no means common among novelists in general. Since her debut she has published four more novels, all of them built around characters suffering from neurological impairments of one kind or another. But her latest book, last year’s Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting, is a work of nonfiction, and in the video above she discusses a few of its points about how to build an “Alzheimer’s-resistant brain.”

After briefly explaining the biological processes behind Alzheimer’s (and assuring her older viewers that their day-to-day forgetfulness is probably nothing to worry about), Genova offers five ways to ward off their effects. The first is sleeping, which gives glial cells, “the janitors of your brain,” time to clear away the amyloid plaque that sets the disease in motion if left to accumulate.

Keeping a Mediterranean diet — full of “green leafy vegetables, the brightly colored fruits and berries, fatty fishes, nuts, beans, olive oils” — has similarly salutary effects. So does engaging in regular exercise, which also comes with the benefit of reducing chronic stress, a condition that inhibits the formation of neurons involved in making new memories.

Genova names yoga, meditation, mindfulness, and “being with people” as other elements of an Alzheimer’s-resistant life. But she saves for last the strategy perhaps most relevant to Open Culture readers. “If you’ve lived a life where you’re cognitively active, you’re regularly learning new things. You are building what we call a ‘cognitive reserve.’ Every time you learn something new, you’re building new synapses.” All the neural connections thus established will help you “dance around those roadblocks” put up by the early effects of Alzheimer’s or other deleterious mental conditions. This means that no matter how young you are, you’ll benefit later from forming the habit of learning new things on a daily basis. As for which new things you learn — 1,700 free courses worth of which we’ve gathered here — that’s entirely up to you.

How Music Can Awaken Patients with Alzheimer’s and Dementia

Former Ballerina with Dementia Gracefully Comes Alive to Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake

The French Village Designed to Promote the Well-Being of Alzheimer’s Patients: A Visual Introduction to the Pioneering Experiment

The Restaurant of Mistaken Orders: A Tokyo Restaurant Where All the Servers Are People Living with Dementia

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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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

Sally Schmitt, the Creator of the French Laundry & Unsung Hero of California Cuisine, Gets Her Due in a Poignant, Short Documentary

in Food & Drink, Life | September 19th, 2022

One of the New York Times’ most compelling regular features is Overlooked, which gives remarkable individuals whose deaths passed unremarked by the Times obit column a rousing, overdue sendoff.

Sally Schmitt — “one of the great unsung heroes of California Cuisine” as per Michael Bauer, the San Francisco Chronicle’s fearsome former food critic — is not one of those.

When Schmitt died earlier this spring at the age of 90, a few weeks shy of the release of her book, Six California Kitchens: A Collection of Recipes, Stories, and Cooking Lessons From a Pioneer of California Cuisine, the Times took note.

Schmitt received a grand obituary that delved into her personal history, philosophy, and her connection to Napa Valley’s The French Laundry, a three star Michelin restaurant which Anthony Bourdain hailed as the best in the world.

The French Laundry’s renown is such that one needn’t run in foodie circles to be aware of it, and its award-winning chef/owner, Thomas Keller.

Keller, however, did not found the restaurant that brought him fame.

Schmitt did, with the help of her husband, Don and their five children, who pitched in in both the kitchen and the front of the house.

Family was important to Schmitt, and having deferred her dreams for the many years it took to raise hers, she was determined to maintain balance between home and work lives.

In Ben Proudfoot’s New York Times op-doc, above, Schmitt recalls growing up outside of Sacramento, where her mother taught her how to cook using in-season local produce.

Meanwhile, her father helped California produce make it all the way to the East Coast by supplying ice to the Southern Pacific Railroad, an innovation that Schmitt identifies as “the beginning of the whole supermarket situation” and a distressing geographic disconnect between Americans and food.

The Schmitts launched The French Laundry in 1978, with a shockingly affordable menu.

Julia Child, a fan, once “burst into the kitchen,” demanding, “My dear, what was in that dessert sauce?”

(Answer: sugar, butter and cream)

Sixteen years after its founding, The French Laundry was for sale.

Schmitt’s facial expressions are remarkably poignant describing the transfer of power. There’s a lot at play — pride, nostalgia, fondness for Keller, a “really charming young chef, who’d made a name for himself in New York…and was down on his luck.”

Schmitt is gracious, but there’s no question she feels a bit of a twinge at how Keller took her dream and ran with it.

“In high school, I was always the vice president…vice president of everything,” Schmitt says, before sharing a telling anecdote about her best friend beating her out for the highest academic honor:

I went home and cried. Yeah, I thought that I should have it, you know. And my mother said, “Let her have her moment of glory. Don’t worry. There will be moments of glory for you.”

This documentary is one, however posthumous.

Accompanying it is a brief essay in which Proudfoot contrasts the lives of his workaholic late father and Schmitt, with her “delightfully coy candor a message about the rewards of balance and the trap of ambition:”

I made this film for all of us who struggle “to stir and taste the soup” that already sits in front of us.

Another moment of glory:

In Keller’s landmark The French Laundry Cookbook, the final recipe is Sally Schmitt’s Cranberry and Apple Kuchen (with the hot Cream Sauce that so captivated Julia Child.)

Sally Schmitt’s Cranberry and Apple Kuchen with hot Cream Sauce

Serves 8

KUCHEN:

6 tablespoons (3/4 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature, plus more for the pan

3/4 cup sugar

1 large egg

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/4 teaspoon kosher salt

1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

1/2 cup milk or light cream

3 to 4 Gravenstein or Golden Delicious apples

1 cup cranberries or firm blueberries

Cinnamon sugar: 1 tablespoon sugar mixed with 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

HOT CREAM SAUCE:

2 cups heavy cream

1/2 cup sugar

8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter a 9‑inch round cake pan.

2. For the kuchen: Using an electric mixer, beat butter, sugar and egg together until the mixture is fluffy and lightened in texture.

3. Combine the flour, baking powder, salt and nutmeg. Add dry ingredients and the milk alternately to the butter mixture; mix just until combined.

4. Peel and core apples. Slice them into 1/4‑inch wedges

5. Spoon batter into the pan. Press apple slices, about 1/4‑inch apart and core side down, into the batter, working in a circular pattern around the outside edge (like the spokes of a wheel. Arrange most of the cranberries in a ring inside the apples and sprinkle remainder around the edges of the kuchen. Sprinkle kuchen with the cinnamon sugar.

6. Bake for 40 to 50 minutes, or until a cake tester inserted into the center of the kuchen comes out clean. Set on a rack to cool.

7. Combine the cream sauce ingredients in a medium saucepan. Bring to a boil, lower heat and simmer for 5 to 8 minutes, to reduce and thicken it slightly.

8. Serve the cake warm or at room temperature, drizzled with the hot cream sauce

Watch 26 Free Episodes of Jacques Pépin’s TV Show, More Fast Food My Way

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- Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing In The Name” Performed By the North Korean Military Chorus : A Clever Fake

in Random | September 17th, 2022

Want to see North Korea’s Military Chorus perform Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing In The Name”? You really do? This may be the closest you’ll ever get. Watch it, and thank YouTuber Lars von Retriever for the clever edit…

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Architect Breaks Down Five of the Most Iconic New York City Apartments

in Architecture, History, Travel | September 16th, 2022

Real estate is a perennially hot topic in New York City, as is gentrification.

Above, architect Michael Wyetzner, breaks down the defining features of several typical NYC apartments.

You’re on your own to truffle up the sort of rent a 340 square feet studio commands in an East Village tenement these days.

The ancestors would be shocked, for sure. My late mother-in-law never tired of causing young jaws to drop by revealing how she once paid $27/month for a 1 bedroom on Sheridan Square…and her mother, who immigrated at the turn of the century, couldn’t wait to put the Lower East Side behind her.

He may not truck in final sales figures, but Wyetzner drops in a wealth of interesting factual tidbits as he sketches layouts with a black Pentel Sign Pen. His tone is more Lower East Side Tenement Museum tour guide than the comments section of a real estate blog where salty New Yorkers flaunt their street cred.

For instance, those enfilade tenement apartments–to employ the grand architectural term Wyetzner just taught us–were not only dark, but dangerously under-ventilated until 1901, when reforms stipulated that air shafts must be opened up between side by side buildings.

This public health initiative changed the shape of tenement buildings, but did little to stop the poverty and overcrowding that activist/photographer Jacob Riis famously documented in How the Other Half Lives.

(Another measure decreed that building owners must supply one indoor toilet …per 20 people!)

While we’re on the topic of toilets, did you know that there was a time when every brownstone backyard boasted its own privy?

Homeowners who’ve spent millions on what many conceive of as the most romantic of New York City buildings (then millions more on gut renovations) proudly display old bottles and other refuse excavated from the site where privys once stood. The former residents turn their outhouses into garbage chutes upon achieving indoor plumbing.

Laying aside its distinctive color, a brownstone’s most iconic feature is surely its stoop.

Stoops grabbed hold of the American public’s imagination thanks to Sesame Street, the Harlem photographs of Gordon Parks and the films of Spike Lee, who learned of Martin Luther King’s assassination as an 11-year-old, sitting on his.

“Not porch!,” he emphasized during a Tonight Show appearance. ”In Brooklyn, it’s stoops. Stoops!”

(Forgive me if I delve into NYC real estate prices for a sec: the Bed-Stuy brownstone from Lee‘s semi-autobiographical Crooklyn, above, just went on the market for $4.5 million.)

There’s no question that brownstone stoops make excellent hang out spots, but that’s not the reason they rose to prominence.

As Esther Crain writes in Ephemeral New York, the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 which led to the city’s gridlike layout negated the possibility of alleys:

Without a back door to a rowhouse accessed through an alley, servants and workers would enter and exit a residence using the same front stoop the owners used—which wasn’t too popular, at least with the owners.

But a tall stoop set back from the sidewalk allowed for a side door that led to the lower level of the house. While the owners continued to go up and down the stoop to get to the parlor floor (and see and be seen by their neighbors), everyone else was relegated to the side…And of course, as New York entered the Gilded Age of busy streets filled with dust, ash, refuse, and enormous piles of horse manure, a very high stoop helped keep all the filth from getting into the house.

Flash forward a hundred and fifty some years, and, as Wyetzner notes, a stoop’s top step offers a highly scenic view of the Hefty bags the neighbors haul to the curb the night before New York’s Strongest roll through.

Wyetzner also provides the historical context behind such architecturally distinctive digs as SoHo’s astronomically priced light-filled lofts, the always desirable Classic Six residences on the Upper East and Upper West Sides, one-room studios both modern and original flavor, and our blighted public housing projects.

If you’re itching to play along from home, check out the New York Times’ regular feature The Hunt, which invites readers to trail a single, family, or couple deliberating between three properties in New York City.

A sample: “After a mouse infestation at her West Village rental, a single mother needed a better spot for her family, including a son with autism.”

Review the layouts and click here to see whether she chose a brand-new 127-unit building with a rooftop pool, a Harlem brownstone duplex with a backyard rights, or an updated one bedroom in a downtown co-op from 1910.

Behold the New York City Street Tree Map: An Interactive Map That Catalogues the 700,000 Trees Shading the Streets of New York City

New York Public Library Puts 20,000 Hi-Res Maps Online & Makes Them Free to Download and Use

The New York Public Library Lets You Download 180,000 Images in High Resolution: Historic Photographs, Maps, Letters & More

- Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. She has lived in all manner of New York City apartments, but hopes to never move again. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Evolution of the Electric Guitar: An Introduction to Every Major Variety of the Instrument That Made Rock-and-Roll

in History, Music, Technology | September 16th, 2022

The past century has seen many stylistic changes in popular culture, none more dramatic than in music. We need only hear a few measures of a song to place it in the right decade. The sound of an era’s music reflects the state of its technology: whenever engineering can make possible tools like multitrack recorders, tape loops, samplers, and synthesizers — to say nothing of listening media like cylinders, vinyl records, and online streaming — the soundtrack of the zeitgeist has been transformed. But in living memory, surely no development has made quite so powerful an impact on popular music as the electric guitar.

“Almost all guitars currently on the market are either a direct descendant of, or very similar to, a handful of instruments that came to life during the span of one decade: the fifties.” With these words, Dutch Youtuber Paul Davids launches into a video journey through the evolution of the electric guitar as we know it, beginning in 1950 with the Fender Telecaster.

Davids doesn’t just explain the components and construction of that venerable instrument, he plays it — just as he does a variety of other electric guitars, each with a sound representative of its era. Even if you don’t know them by name, they’ll all sound familiar from a variety of musical contexts.

The invention of the electric guitar made possible the birth of rock and roll, which shows no few signs of frailty even here in the twenty-first century. The earliest models produced are ever more highly valued for their sound, their feel, and their apparent simplicity, a quality many rockers hold in the utmost regard. But despite long adhering to the same basic form, the electric guitar has incorporated a great variety of innovations — in its pickups, its vibrato systems, and much else besides — whose combinations and permutations have given rise to entire subgenres like surf, heavy metal, rockabilly, and grunge. Like rock itself, the electric guitar arrived having already attained a kind of perfection, but possessed too much vitality to stand still.

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The Story of the Guitar: The Complete Three-Part Documentary

Oxford Scientist Explains the Physics of Playing Electric Guitar Solos

All of the Different Kinds of Acoustic Guitars, and the Different Woods They’re Made Of: The Ultimate Acoustic Guitar Guide

Learn to Play Guitar for Free: Intro Courses Take You From The Very Basics to Playing Songs In No Time

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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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

A Tour of All the Pizza Styles You Can Eat in the United States (and the History Behind Your Favorite Slices)

Getting Dressed Over the Centuries: 35 Videos Show How Women & Men Put on Clothes During Ancient, Medieval & Modern Times

Historian Timothy Snyder Presents 20 Lessons for Defending Democracy Against Tyranny in a New Video Series

5 Ways to Build an Alzheimer’s-Resistant Brain: Neuroscientist Lisa Genova Explains

Sally Schmitt, the Creator of the French Laundry & Unsung Hero of California Cuisine, Gets Her Due in a Poignant, Short Documentary

Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing In The Name” Performed By the North Korean Military Chorus : A Clever Fake

Architect Breaks Down Five of the Most Iconic New York City Apartments

The Evolution of the Electric Guitar: An Introduction to Every Major Variety of the Instrument That Made Rock-and-Roll

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