Why You Have an Accent When You Speak a Foreign Language

in Language | August 21st, 2023

One occa­sion­al­ly hears it insist­ed that, out­side cer­tain cul­tur­al­ly dis­tinct regions of the coun­try, Amer­i­cans “don’t have an accent.” This notion is exposed as non­sense the moment one of those Amer­i­cans starts speak­ing a for­eign lan­guage, some­times at the very first word. “Hold the palm of your hand up in front of your mouth and say ‘Paris’ in Eng­lish,” advis­es the host of the Econ­o­mist video above. “You’ll feel a lit­tle puff of air on your hand. Now, try the same thing again, but try to remove that puff of air, and you’ll get some­thing clos­er to the French sound.” While this test works best for Amer­i­cans, native speak­ers of many lan­guages oth­er than French should feel a dif­fer­ence.

No mat­ter where they’re from, “peo­ple find them­selves sub­con­scious­ly adapt­ing words of a for­eign lan­guage to fit the rules of their own,” com­bin­ing, empha­siz­ing, and drop­ping sounds in the man­ner to which they’ve been accus­tomed since ear­ly child­hood: the native Ara­bic speak­er pro­nounces chil­dren as childiren, the Spaniard says he comes from espain, a French­man calls Texas’ biggest city yoo-STON.

It’s one thing to mas­ter a for­eign lan­guage’s library of sounds, but quite anoth­er to nail its “stress pat­terns” that dic­tate which syl­la­bles are empha­sized. That no syl­la­bles are empha­sized in Japan­ese reveals the native stress pat­terns of its for­eign speak­ers: lis­ten to how clear­ly the dis­tinc­tive Amer­i­can Eng­lish rhythm comes through in, say, the name of the famous nov­el­ist ha-RU-ki mu-ra-KA-mi.

Some lan­guages, like Ital­ian and Can­tonese, are “syl­la­ble timed,” which means that “every syl­la­ble has rough­ly the same dura­tion.” This is quite unlike Eng­lish, whose “stressed syl­la­bles come at rough­ly reg­u­lar inter­vals, and the remain­der are less dis­tinct­ly pro­nounced.” Non-native Eng­lish speak­ers who ignore that aspect of the lan­guage will always sound for­eign, no mat­ter their lev­el of flu­en­cy. Of course, hav­ing an accent isn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly a bad thing, and indeed, we all know indi­vid­u­als who have played it up to great advan­tage in their per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al lives. But as an Amer­i­can liv­ing abroad, I do feel a cer­tain respon­si­bil­i­ty to con­tra­dict our rep­u­ta­tion for blithe inep­ti­tude out­side Eng­lish. Such an effort must begin with tak­ing any lan­guage, what­ev­er its par­tic­u­lar set of tech­ni­cal or cul­tur­al char­ac­ter­is­tics, one sound at a time.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Learn 48 Lan­guages Online for Free: Span­ish, Chi­nese, Eng­lish & More

What Are the Most Effec­tive Strate­gies for Learn­ing a For­eign Lan­guage?: Six TED Talks Pro­vide the Answers

A Tour of U.S. Accents: Boston­ian, Philadelph­ese, Gul­lah Cre­ole & Oth­er Intrigu­ing Dialects

Peter Sell­ers Presents The Com­plete Guide To Accents of The British Isles

The Speech Accent Archive: The Eng­lish Accents of Peo­ple Who Speak 341 Dif­fer­ent Lan­guages

A Map Show­ing How Much Time It Takes to Learn For­eign Lan­guages: From Eas­i­est to Hard­est

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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 10 ) |

Chuck Berry & the Bee Gees Perform Together in 1973: An Unexpected Video from The Midnight Special Archive

in Music | August 21st, 2023

Dur­ing the 1970s, Burt Sug­ar­man pro­duced The Mid­night Spe­cial, a late-night musi­cal vari­ety show that fea­tured great rock and pop music per­for­mances. In recent months, Sug­ar­man has start­ed bring­ing the show’s archive to YouTube, allow­ing you to revis­it vin­tage per­for­mances by David Bowie, Steely Dan, Tina Turn­er, Fleet­wood Mac, Blondie, Richard Pry­or and much more. Above, you can watch one such gem in the archive–that is, Chuck Berry & the Bee Gees per­form­ing Reel­in’ and Rockin’ (a song orig­i­nal­ly released as a B‑side with “Sweet Lit­tle Six­teen” in 1957). As one YouTu­ber put it, “what an odd com­bi­na­tion that absolute­ly works; one of Chuck’s most sat­is­fy­ing per­for­mances of this era; his guitar’s in tune, the band is hot & sup­port­ive (who’s that piano play­er?!), and it’s always cool to hear Mau­rice sing solo.” The per­for­mance took place on Octo­ber 12, 1973. Enjoy.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Watch David Bowie’s Final Per­for­mance as Zig­gy Star­dust, Singing “I Got You Babe” with Mar­i­anne Faith­full, on The Mid­night Spe­cial (1973)

Chuck Berry Jams Out “John­ny B. Goode” with Eric Clap­ton, Kei­th Richards, John Lennon & Bruce Spring­steen

Chuck Berry Takes Kei­th Richards to School, Shows Him How to Rock (1987)

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

Revisit “Turn-On,” the Innovative TV Show That Got Canceled Right in the Middle of Its First Episode (1969)

in History, Television | August 18th, 2023

It may give you pause, at least if you’re past a cer­tain age, to con­sid­er the dis­ap­pear­ance of the word com­put­er­ized. Like portable, it has fall­en out of use due to the sheer com­mon­ness of the con­cept to which it refers: in an age when we all car­ry portable com­put­ers in our pock­ets, nei­ther porta­bil­i­ty nor com­put­er­i­za­tion are any longer notable in them­selves. But there was a time when to call some­thing com­put­er­ized lent it a futur­is­tic, even sexy air. Back in 1969, just a few months before the Unit­ed States’ deci­sive vic­to­ry in the Space Race, ABC aired “the First Com­put­er­ized TV Show,” a half-hour sketch-com­e­dy series called Turn-On. Or rather, it would’ve been a series, had it last­ed past its first broad­cast.

Turn-On was cre­at­ed by Ed Friend­ly and George Schlat­ter, the pro­duc­ers of Rowan & Mar­t­in’s Laugh-In on NBC. With that sketch com­e­dy show hav­ing quick­ly become a major cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non, Friend­ly and Schlat­ter used their new project to puri­fy and great­ly inten­si­fy its con­cept: the sketch­es became short­er, some of them last­ing mere sec­onds; the mate­r­i­al became more top­i­cal and risqué; the humor became more absurd, at times verg­ing on non­sen­si­cal.

But Turn-On’s most strik­ing break from con­ven­tion was the elim­i­na­tion of the role of the host, replac­ing them with a for­mi­da­ble-look­ing com­put­er con­sole that was osten­si­bly gen­er­at­ing the show accord­ing to the instruc­tions of its anony­mous pro­gram­mers.

Though its cen­tral com­put­er was a fic­tion, Turn-On real­ly did use tech­nol­o­gy in ways nev­er before seen or heard on tele­vi­sion. Instead of a laugh track, it was sat­u­rat­ed with the nov­el sounds of the Moog syn­the­siz­er (whose capa­bil­i­ties had been pop­u­lar­ly demon­strat­ed the pre­vi­ous year by Wendy Car­los’ Switched-On Bach). Instead of prop­er sets, its troupe per­formed against the kind of white void lat­er asso­ci­at­ed with Gap com­mer­cials; often, that space would sep­a­rate into com­ic-strip pan­els right onscreen. Its dance sequences even made use of an ear­ly motion-cap­ture sys­tem. Alas, none of these inno­va­tions saved the show from being pulled off the air just fif­teen min­utes into its debut by Cleve­land’s WEWS. That deci­sive rejec­tion set off a cas­cade, and sev­er­al sta­tions on the west coast sub­se­quent­ly elect­ed not to broad­cast it at all.

Schlat­ter remains a defend­er of Turn-On, blam­ing its rejec­tion on a vin­dic­tive fan of the show whose time slot it took, the declin­ing prime-time rur­al soap opera Pey­ton Place. Now that both the first and nev­er-aired sec­ond episodes have sur­faced on Youtube, you can watch and judge them for your­self, assum­ing you can han­dle a fren­zied dis­joint­ed­ness that makes Tik­Tok videos feel state­ly by com­par­i­son. The objects of these often-absurd salvos  — cam­pus protests, anti-com­mu­nism, “the new math,” nuclear anni­hi­la­tion, the pill, Richard Nixon — may be dat­ed, but at this his­tor­i­cal dis­tance, we can bet­ter appre­ci­ate what Ernie Smith at Tedi­um calls a “sharp com­men­tary on an increas­ing­ly direct and imper­son­al cul­ture.” And if we also take Turn-On as a state­ment on the nature of enter­tain­ment gen­er­at­ed by arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, we can cred­it it with a cer­tain pre­science as well.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch Sun­spring, the Sci-Fi Film Writ­ten with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence, Star­ring Thomas Mid­dled­itch (Sil­i­con Val­ley)

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence, Art & the Future of Cre­ativ­i­ty: Watch the Final Chap­ter of the “Every­thing is a Remix” Series

Watch Steve Mar­tin Make His First TV Appear­ance: The Smoth­ers Broth­ers Com­e­dy Hour (1968)

How Will AI Change the World?: A Cap­ti­vat­ing Ani­ma­tion Explores the Promise & Per­ils of Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Pink Lady and Jeff: Japan’s Biggest Pop Musi­cians Star in One of America’s Worst-Reviewed TV Shows (1980)

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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Death-Cap Mushrooms are Terrifying and Unstoppable: A Wild Animation

in Biology, Food & Drink, Nature, Science | August 18th, 2023

Mush­rooms are just­ly cel­e­brat­ed as vir­tu­ous mul­ti­taskers.

They’re food, teach­ers, movie stars, design inspi­ra­tion…

…and some, as any­one who’s spent time play­ing or watch­ing The Last of Us can read­i­ly attest, are killers.

Hope­ful­ly we’ve got some time before civ­i­liza­tion is con­quered by zom­bie cordy­ceps.

For now, the ones to watch out for are amani­ta phal­loide, aka death cap mush­rooms.

The pow­er­ful ama­tox­in they har­bor is behind 90 per­cent of mush­room-relat­ed fatal­i­ties world­wide. It caus­es severe liv­er dam­age, lead­ing to bleed­ing dis­or­ders, brain swelling, and mul­ti-organ fail­ure in those who sur­vive. 

A death cap took the life of a three-year-old in British Colum­bia who mis­took one for a tasty straw mush­room on a for­ag­ing expe­di­tion with his fam­i­ly near their apart­ment com­plex. 

In Mel­bourne, a pot pie that test­ed pos­i­tive for death caps result­ed in the deaths of three adults, and sent a fourth to the hos­pi­tal in crit­i­cal con­di­tion.

As the ani­ma­tors feast on mush­rooms’ lim­it­less visu­al appeal in the above episode of The Atlantic’s Life Up Close series, author Craig Childs deliv­ers some sober­ing news:

We did it to our­selves. Humans are the ones who’ve enabled death caps to spread so far beyond their native habi­tats in Scan­di­navia and parts of north­ern Europe, where the poi­so­nous fun­gi feed on the root tips of decid­u­ous trees, spring­ing up around their hosts in tidy fairy rings.

When oth­er coun­tries import these trees to beau­ti­fy their city streets, the death caps, whose frag­ile spores are inca­pable of trav­el­ing long dis­tances when left to their own devices, tag along.

They have sprout­ed in the Pacif­ic North­west near import­ed sweet chest­nuts, beech­es, horn­beams, lin­dens, red oaks, and Eng­lish oaks, and oth­er host species.

As bio­chemist Paul Kroeger, cofounder of the Van­cou­ver Myco­log­i­cal Soci­ety, explained in a 2019 arti­cle Childs penned for the Atlantic, the inva­sive death caps aren’t pop­ping up in deeply wood­ed areas. 

Rather, they are set­tling into urban neigh­bor­hoods, fre­quent­ly in the grass strips bor­der­ing side­walks. When Childs accom­pa­nied Krueger on his rounds, the first of two dozen death caps dis­cov­ered that day were found in front of a house fes­tooned with Hal­loween dec­o­ra­tions. 

Now that they have estab­lished them­selves, the death caps can­not be roust­ed. No longer mere tourists, they’ve been seen mak­ing the jump to native oaks in Cal­i­for­nia and West­ern Cana­da.

Childs also notes that death caps are no longer a North Amer­i­can prob­lem:

They have spread world­wide where for­eign trees have been intro­duced into land­scap­ing and forestry prac­tices: North and South Amer­i­ca, New Zealand, Aus­tralia, South and East Africa, and Mada­gas­car. In Can­ber­ra, Aus­tralia, in 2012, an expe­ri­enced Chi­nese-born chef and his assis­tant pre­pared a New Year’s Eve din­ner that includ­ed, unbe­knownst to them, local­ly gath­ered death caps. Both died with­in two days, wait­ing for liv­er trans­plants; a guest at the din­ner also fell ill, but sur­vived after a suc­cess­ful trans­plant.

For­agers should pro­ceed with extreme cau­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

The Beau­ti­ful­ly Illus­trat­ed Atlas of Mush­rooms: Edi­ble, Sus­pect and Poi­so­nous (1827)

A Stun­ning, Hand-Illus­trat­ed Book of Mush­rooms Drawn by an Over­looked 19th Cen­tu­ry Female Sci­en­tist

Alger­ian Cave Paint­ings Sug­gest Humans Did Mag­ic Mush­rooms 9,000 Years Ago

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Robert Reich’s UC Berkeley Course on Wealth & Poverty Is Free Online

in Economics, Online Courses | August 17th, 2023

Once the Sec­re­tary of Labor under the Clin­ton Admin­is­tra­tion, Robert Reich spent 17 years teach­ing at UC Berke­ley. This past spring, he taught his final course there, and it’s now avail­able online. Above, you can stream 14 lec­tures from “Wealth and Pover­ty,” a course “designed to pro­vide stu­dents with a deep­er under­stand­ing of both the orga­ni­za­tion of the polit­i­cal econ­o­my in the Unit­ed States and of oth­er advanced economies, and why the dis­tri­b­u­tion of earn­ings, wealth, and oppor­tu­ni­ty have been diverg­ing in the Unit­ed States and in oth­er nations.” Usu­al­ly attend­ed by 750 Berke­ley under­grad­u­ates, the course is also “intend­ed to pro­vide insights into the polit­i­cal and pub­lic-pol­i­cy debates that have arisen in light of this diver­gence, as well as pos­si­ble means of revers­ing it.”

“Wealth and Pover­ty” will be added to our list of free Eco­nom­ics cours­es, a sub­set of our larg­er col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Robert Reich Debunks Three Eco­nom­ic Myths by Draw­ing Car­toons

Kurt Von­negut Pon­ders Why “Poor Amer­i­cans Are Taught to Hate Them­selves” in a Time­ly Pas­sage from Slaugh­ter­house-Five

Hand-Col­ored Maps of Wealth & Pover­ty in Vic­to­ri­an Lon­don: Explore a New Inter­ac­tive Edi­tion of Charles Booth’s His­toric Work of Social Car­tog­ra­phy (1889)

 

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

Neuroscientists Reconstruct a Pink Floyd Song from Listeners’ Brain Activity, with a Little Help from AI

in Music, Neuroscience | August 17th, 2023

Any­one who’s worked in an oper­at­ing room knows that many sur­geons like to put on music while they do their job, and that their work­ing sound­tracks often include sur­pris­ing artists. It hard­ly requires a leap of imag­i­na­tion to assume that there are more than a few scalpel-wield­ing Pink Floyd fans out there — scalpel-wield­ing Pink Floyd fans who will sure­ly feel their musi­cal taste vin­di­cat­ed by a study that involved play­ing “Anoth­er Brick in the Wall (Part 1)” to patients under­go­ing epilep­sy-relat­ed neu­ro­surgery. After­ward, with help from arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, the researchers were able to recon­struct the song from those patients’ record­ed brain­waves.

That this turns out to be pos­si­ble offers “a first step toward cre­at­ing more expres­sive devices to assist peo­ple who can’t speak,” writes the New York Times’ Hana Kiros. “Over the past few years, sci­en­tists have made major break­throughs in extract­ing words from the elec­tri­cal sig­nals pro­duced by the brains of peo­ple with mus­cle paral­y­sis when they attempt to speak. But a sig­nif­i­cant amount of the infor­ma­tion con­veyed through speech comes from what lin­guists call ‘prosod­ic’ ele­ments, like tone.”

It is the musi­cal ele­ments of speech, one might say, that have so far elud­ed repro­duc­tion by exist­ing brain-machine inter­faces, whose sen­tences “have a robot­ic qual­i­ty akin to how the late Stephen Hawk­ing sound­ed when he used a speech-gen­er­at­ing device,” as Robert Sanders writes in Berke­ley News.

You can hear a clip of “Anoth­er Brick in the Wall (Part 1)” as gen­er­at­ed from the researchers’ AI work with brain­wave data in the Euronews video above. Indis­tinct though it may sound, the song will come through rec­og­niz­ably even to the ears of casu­al Pink Floyd fans (irked though they’ll be by the video’s accom­pa­ny­ing it with the cov­er image from The Dark Side of the Moon). They may also feel the urge to con­tin­ue lis­ten­ing to the rest of The Wall, espe­cial­ly “Anoth­er Brick in the Wall (Part 2),” with its school-choir deliv­ered dec­la­ra­tion that we don’t need no mind con­trol. But as for just-dawn­ing tech­nolo­gies that allow us to con­trol things with our minds — well, that would­n’t be so bad, would it?

Relat­ed con­tent:

Neu­rosym­pho­ny: A High-Res­o­lu­tion Look into the Brain, Set to the Music of Brain Waves

Music in the Brain: Sci­en­tists Final­ly Reveal the Parts of Our Brain That Are Ded­i­cat­ed to Music

Hear a Neu­ro­sci­en­tist-Curat­ed 712-Track Playlist of Music that Caus­es Fris­son, or Musi­cal Chills

The Neu­ro­science of Bass: New Study Explains Why Bass Instru­ments Are Fun­da­men­tal to Music

How Pink Floyd Built The Wall: The Album, Tour & Film

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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Paul Simon Plays a Partially-Finished Version of “Still Crazy After All These Years” for Dick Cavett, Then Tries to Figure Out How to Finish It (1974)

in Music, Television | August 16th, 2023

It’s hard to imag­ine one of today’s nation­al­ly known singer-song­writ­ers vol­un­tar­i­ly shar­ing an unfin­ished com­po­si­tion on late night TV, then ask­ing for advice on how to wrap things up.

That’s exact­ly what Paul Simon did on The Dick Cavett Show on Sep­tem­ber 5, 1974, when he shared the first two vers­es of “Still Crazy After All These Years,” accom­pa­ny­ing him­self on acoustic gui­tar:

I met my old lover

On the street last night

She seemed so glad to see me

I just smiled

And we talked about some old times

And we drank our­selves some beers

Still crazy after all these years

Still crazy after all these years

I’m not the kind of man

Who tends to social­ize

I seem to lean on

Old famil­iar ways

And I ain’t no fool for love songs

That whis­per in my ears

Still crazy after all these years

Still crazy after all these years


Next, he pre­sent­ed Cavett and the stu­dio audi­ence with options, warn­ing that they would be musi­cal choic­es, “because lyri­cal­ly, I real­ly don’t know what I have to say.”

Simon quick­ly demon­strat­ed what a fol­low up might sound like in G major or G sharp minor, explain­ing that the wis­est move from a music the­o­ry stand­point, would be an as yet unused C nat­ur­al or C sharp, to sub­lim­i­nal­ly refresh listener’s ears, a tac­tic he likened to the comedic Rule of Threes.

When the song was released the fol­low­ing year, the key had gone up to G and the gui­tar had mor­phed into piano backed by the Mus­cle Shoals Rhythm Sec­tion, with a jazzy sax solo after the bridge.

All in all, a slick­er, less intro­spec­tive sound.

In an inter­view with Amer­i­can Song­writer, Simon not only delves fur­ther into Still Crazy’s chord pro­gres­sions, he pegs its famous­ly enig­mat­ic lyrics as an unhap­py assess­ment of his per­son­al life at the time of their writ­ing:

That was a long time ago. I’ve long since stopped feel­ing that way. I prob­a­bly wouldn’t describe myself that way. I prob­a­bly wouldn’t think that way at all.

The words are per­son­al. It sounds like I was talk­ing about where I was then. I have the same instinct as all writ­ers: if some­thing from my life works, I use it. If I have to change it and exag­ger­ate it because that works, I’ll change it and exag­ger­ate it. 

I’m not com­mit­ted to telling the truth. I’m com­mit­ted to find­ing what the truth is in the song. But that’s not a com­mit­ment to telling every­one what’s going on with you. That’s very com­mon.

True. But would he still agree to per­form the song in a turkey suit if threat­ened with the sobri­quet “Mr. Alien­ation”?

Here are the lyrics that stuck, from the album that shares the song’s title:

I met my old lover

On the street last night

She seemed so glad to see me

I just smiled

And we talked about some old times

And we drank our­selves some beers

Still crazy after all these years

Still crazy after all these years

I’m not the kind of man

Who tends to social­ize

I seem to lean on

Old famil­iar ways

And I ain’t no fool for love songs

That whis­per in my ears

Still crazy after all these years

Still crazy after all these years

Four in the morn­ing

Crapped out

Yawn­ing

Long­ing my life away

I’ll nev­er wor­ry

Why should I?

It’s all gonna fade

Now I sit by my win­dow

And I watch the cars

I fear I’ll do some dam­age

One fine day

But I would not be con­vict­ed

By a jury of my peers

Still crazy

Still crazy

Still crazy after all these years

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Paul Simon Tells the Sto­ry of How He Wrote “Bridge Over Trou­bled Water” (1970)

Jazz Vir­tu­oso Oscar Peter­son Gives Dick Cavett a Daz­zling Piano Les­son (1979)

Paul Simon Decon­structs “Mrs. Robin­son” (1970)

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Birth and Rapid Rise of Islam, Animated (622‑1453)

in History, Religion | August 16th, 2023

To any­one unfa­mil­iar with the his­to­ry of Islam, it comes as some­thing of a shock that it got start­ed less than a mil­len­ni­um and a half ago. In that rel­a­tive­ly short span of time, Islam has become the world’s sec­ond-largest reli­gion, a fact that becomes more under­stand­able when you see the run­ning start to which it got off visu­al­ized in the video above. Cre­at­ed by Ollie Bye — pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture for his car­to­graph­i­cal ani­ma­tions of the rise and fall of the British Empire, the spread of writ­ing, and the his­to­ry of the world — it depicts the spread of Islam, which began in earnest after the death of its founder, the prophet Muham­mad, in the year 632, and whose lega­cy is the “Mus­lim world” as we know it today.

“By con­quest and con­ver­sion, the new reli­gion spread quick­ly west­wards through the ter­ri­to­ries of the Byzan­tine empire,” says the Vic­to­ria and Albert Muse­um’s page on lux­u­ry objects of the peri­od. “By the 640s, Mus­lim forces were advanc­ing across North Africa, con­quer­ing Sici­ly in 652 and the Iber­ian Penin­su­la in 711.”

Let’s pause to give that achieve­ment due con­sid­er­a­tion: Islam over­took Spain just a cen­tu­ry after its foun­da­tion, a con­quer­ing speed that puts the Roman Empire in the shade. (The Mus­lims also man­aged to get the upper hand of the Per­sians, who’d pre­sent­ed such a stiff chal­lenge to not just the Romans but the Greeks before them.) “By the ear­ly 8th cen­tu­ry, Islam­ic ter­ri­to­ries had almost encir­cled the Mediter­ranean.“ ‘

“Dur­ing this time Mus­lim rulers, sol­diers, traders, Sufis, schol­ars, poets and archi­tects all con­tributed to the shap­ing of dis­tinc­tive Islam­ic cul­tures,” says the site of Har­vard’s Plu­ral­ism Project. “Across the wide-reach­ing Islam­ic world, tran­sre­gion­al Islam­ic cul­ture mixed with local tra­di­tions to pro­duce dis­tinc­tive forms of state­craft, the­ol­o­gy, art, archi­tec­ture, and sci­ence.” (Nor should we neglect the delights of Moor­ish cui­sine.) This Islam­ic Gold­en Age, like all gold­en ages, even­tu­al­ly came to an end. The cen­ter of civ­i­liza­tion had shift­ed unde­ni­ably by the time of the Euro­pean Renais­sance — which, accord­ing to the Plu­ral­ism Project, may nev­er have tak­en place “with­out the cre­ativ­i­ty and myr­i­ad achieve­ments of Mus­lim schol­ars, thinkers, and civ­i­liza­tions.” And giv­en that Islam remains the world’s fastest-grow­ing major reli­gion by births, it sure­ly has­n’t exert­ed the last of its glob­al influ­ence just yet.

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the World’s Five Major Reli­gions: Hin­duism, Judaism, Bud­dhism, Chris­tian­i­ty & Islam

Ani­mat­ed Map Shows How the Five Major Reli­gions Spread Across the World (3000 BC – 2000 AD)

The Com­plex Geom­e­try of Islam­ic Art & Design: A Short Intro­duc­tion

How Ara­bic Trans­la­tors Helped Pre­serve Greek Phi­los­o­phy … and the Clas­si­cal Tra­di­tion

A Visu­al Map of the World’s Major Reli­gions (and Non-Reli­gions)

The His­to­ry of the World in One Video: Every Year from 200,000 BCE to Today

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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

« Go Back — More in this category... »
Quantcast
Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.