Over the past five years, Ray Dalio, one of America’s most successful investors, has published a series of books, each meant to impart wisdom to a younger generation. The first book, Principles: Life and Work, shared the unconventional principles that have guided his life and career. It became a bestseller, selling well over one million copies. Next came Big Debt Crises, a study of financial crises and how nations navigate them. Finally, he has just published his latest bestseller, Principles for Dealing with the Changing World: Why Nations Succeed and Fail. A history of the rise and fall of empires over the last 500 years, the book uses the past to contemplate the future, particularly the fate of the United States and China. As was the case with Principles, Dalio has produced an animated video that explains key ideas in the book. Released in early March, the video has already been viewed 8.6 million times. Watch it above, and consider pairing it with his other animated video, How the Economic Machine Works.
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Since its launch last month, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has sent observers around the world scrambling for context. It is a fact, for example, that Russia and Ukraine were once “together” in the communist mega-state that was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. But it is also a fact that such Soviet togetherness hardly ensured warm feelings between the two lands. An especially relevant chapter of their history is known in Ukraine as the Holodomor, or “death by starvation.” Spanning the years 1932 and 1933, this period of famine resulted in three to six million lives lost — and that according to the lower accepted estimates.
“It was genocide,” says the narrator of the Vox “Missing Chapter’ video above, “carried out by a dictator who wanted to keep Ukraine under his control, and would do everything in his power to cover it up for decades. That dictator was, of course, Joseph Stalin, who accompanied brutal methods of rule with tight control of information. “In 1917, after the fall of the Russian Empire, Ukraine briefly gained freedom,” the video explains. “But by 1922, it was forcibly integrated into the newly formed Soviet Union.” A rural and highly fertile land, Ukraine was known as “the breadbasket of the Soviet Union” — hence Stalin’s desire to nip any potential revolution there in the bud.
First came a “widespread, violent purge of Ukrainian intellectuals along with priests and religious structures.” At the same time as they advanced this attempted dismantling of Ukrainian culture, Soviet higher-ups were also implementing Stalin’s five-year plan of industrialization, consolidation, and collectivization, including that of all agriculture. This was the time of the kulak, or “wealthy peasant,” the label invented to disgrace anyone resistant to this process. Any kulaks known to Stalin faced a terrible fate indeed, including exile, imprisonment, and even execution; those farmers who remained then fell victim to the dictator’s engineered famine.
Under the pretext of enforcing deliberately unrealistic grain-production quotas, Stalin’s enforcers seized farms across Ukraine in order to sell their products to the West. Before long, “Soviet police began seizing not just grain, but anything edible.” Farmers were stopped from leaving their homeland, where Stalin intended them to starve, “but even in this unimaginable suffering, Ukrainians fought for their lives and each other.” This video incorporates interviews with a grandson and granddaughter of two such Ukrainians who left behind personal records of the Holodomor. A story of endurance and survival under the very worst circumstances, and ultimately a return to national independence, it goes some way to explaining how and why Ukraine continues to put up such a valiant fight against the forces that have descended upon it.
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.
For a couple of months in 2010, Marina Abramović spent her days wordlessly and motionlessly sitting at a table in the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art. Any visitor could sit in the chair opposite her, for as long as they liked. In response, Abramović said nothing and did almost nothing (even during visits from Lou Reed, Bjork, or her long-ago lover and collaborator, the late Ulay). The whole experience constituted a piece of performance art, titled The Artist Is Present. As with many works of that form, to ask why Abramović did it is to miss the point. Nothing like it had been done before, and it thus promised to enter uncharted artistic, social, and emotional territory.
A dozen years later, the artist will be present again, but this time with a highly specific motive in mind: to raise money for the besieged nation of Ukraine. “Abramović has partnered with New York’s Sean Kelly Gallery and Artsy to offer a performance art meet-and-greet… or at least meet-and-silently-stare,” writes Hyperallergic’s Sarah Rose Sharp.
“Through March 25, interested parties can bid on one of two opportunities for a limited restaging of Abramović’s epic performance The Artist Is Present.” These meet-and-silently-stares “will be captured by photographer Marco Anelli, who documented almost all of the 1,500 participants in the original performance.”
Proceeds “will go to Direct Relief, which is working with Ukraine’s Ministry of Health to provide urgent medical assistance as well as long-term aid to the many lives devastated by the war.” Last month, when Russia launched its invasion, Abramović released the video statement above. In it she explains having done some work in Ukraine last year, which afforded her an opportunity to get to know some of its people. “They’re proud, they’re strong, and they’re dignified,” she says, and an attack on their country “is an attack to all of us,” an “attack to humanity.” If you feel the same way, have some money to spend, and missed out on the first The Artist Is Present — and if you think you can hold your own across from the formidable presence glimpsed in the video — consider making a bid of your own.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
According to The Guardian, the surviving members of The Clash have given their blessing to the Ukrainian punk band, Beton, to record a new version of their 1979 classic London Calling. Recorded near the frontline of the battle in Ukraine, Kyiv Calling (above) “has lyrics that call upon the rest of the world to support the defence of the country from Russian invaders. All proceeds of what is now billed as a ‘war anthem’ will go to the Free Ukraine Resistance Movement (FURM) to help fund a shared communications system that will alert the population to threats and lobby for international support.”
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On social media channels, Arnold Schwarzenegger delivered a message (with love) to the Russian people, telling them what’s really happening with Putin’s war in Ukraine, and exposing a truth that the Russian government has tried to censor at home. You can find his video on Telegram, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. And as he says: “Please watch and share,” especially with any friends in Russia.
Having by now seen Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) more times than I can remember, it surprises me to meet someone who’s never seen it at all. When I do, my first impulse is always to suggest a screening right then and there. This would seem to put me in company with Oliver Stone, who in recent years has been documented engaging in at least one instance of high-profile Strangelove evangelism. As for the new inductee into the Strangelove viewership, he went more than 60 years without having seen the film, but for the last couple of decades had the credible excuse of busyness: it isn’t just a part-time gig, after all, being the president of Russia.
The viewing of Dr. Strangelove comes at the series’ very end, which is presumably an effort on Stone’s part to save the “best” for last — and as Cold War American cinema goes, one could hardly hope for a better selection. Based on Peter George’s Red Alert, a straightforward thriller novel about American and Soviet protocols of nuclear-defense management gone disastrously wrong, the film only took shape when Kubrick realized it had to be a comedy. As he later recalled, “I found that in trying to put meat on the bones and to imagine the scenes fully, one had to keep leaving out of it things which were either absurd or paradoxical, in order to keep it from being funny; and these things seemed to be close to the heart of the scenes in question.”
As Joseph Heller realized while writing Catch-22, certain ridiculous truths about war simply can’t be portrayed non-comedically. As realized through the painstakingly exact filmmaking of Kubrick and his collaborators, Dr. Strangelove is the blackest of black comedies. “There are certain things in this film that indeed make us think,” Putin says to Stone after the closing montage of mushroom clouds. He even credits Kubrick with technical foresight: “Modern weapon systems have become more sophisticated, more complex. But this idea of a retaliatory weapon and the inability to control such weapon systems still hold true today.” Not much has changed since the days of Dr. Strangelove, he admits, and now that he’s undergone his own bout of geopolitical brazenness, let’s hope that he remembers how the movie ends.
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.
Last year, the fates handed the New York Times’ Maria Cramer an enviably striking lede: “Humanity is 100 seconds away from total annihilation. Again.” That we all know immediately what she was writing about speaks to the power of graphic design. Specifically, it speaks to the power of graphic design as practiced by Martyl Langsdorf, who happened to be married to ex-Manhattan Project physicist Alexander Langsdorf. This connection got her the gig of creating a cover for the June 1947 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. She came up with a simpleimage: the upper-left corner of a clock, its hands at seven minutes to midnight.
Asked later why she set the clock to that time in particular, Langsdorf explained that “it looked good to my eye.” That quote appears in a post at the Bulletin addressing frequently asked questions about what’s now known as the Doomsday Clock, “a design that warns the public about how close we are to destroying our world with dangerous technologies of our own making. It is a metaphor, a reminder of the perils we must address if we are to survive on the planet.” In the 75 years since its introduction, its minute hand has been moved backward eight times and forward sixteen times; currently it still stands where Cramer reported it as having remained last January, at 100 seconds to midnight.
To the public of 1947, “midnight” signified above all the prospect of humanity’s self-destruction through the use of nuclear weapons. But as technology itself has advanced and proliferated, the means of auto-annihilation have grown more diverse. This year’s Doomsday Clock statement cites not just nukes but carbon emissions, infectious diseases, and “internet-enabled misinformation and disinformation.” Earlier this month, the Bulletin reminded us that even as 2022 began, “we called out Ukraine as a potential flashpoint in an increasingly tense international security landscape. For many years, we and others have warned that the most likely way nuclear weapons might be used is through an unwanted or unintended escalation from a conventional conflict.”
Now that “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has brought this nightmare scenario to life,” many have found themselves glancing nervously at the Doomsday Clock once again. This also happened after the election of Donald Trump, which prompted the Vox video above on the Clock’s history and purpose. Its iconic status, as celebrated in the new book The Doomsday Clock at 75, has long outlasted the Cold War, but the device itself isn’t without its critics. Bulletin co-founder Eugene Rabinowitch once articulated the latter as meant “to preserve civilization by scaring men into rationality,” a somewhat controversial intention. One could also raise objections to using an inherently linear and unidirectional concept like time to represent a probability resulting from human action. Yet somehow more technically suitable images — “100 centimeters from the edge,” say — don’t have quite the same ring.
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.
Before becoming a filmmaker, Jean-Pierre Grumbach participated in the French Resistance during World War II. It was then that he took the nom de guerre of Jean-Pierre Melville, under which he would later inspire the French New Wave. Just as he never made a film under another name, his work never quite abandoned the themes provided by his wartime experience in Nazi-occupied France, which comes through most clearly in his feature debut Le Silence de la mer. Released just four years after V‑E Day, it tells the story of a German lieutenant billeted in a French household, an admirer of French culture who holds forth nightly of his anticipation of the “marriage” of the German and French civilizations.
The day comes for the German to make a much-anticipated trip to Paris. After worshipfully taking in the sights of the capital — the Arc de Triomphe, Notre-Dame de Paris, the Monument à Jeanne d’Arc — he meets with his Nazi superiors. And so he discovers, to his great shock, that what the occupiers have planned is not a marriage but a demolition. “Do you think we’re so stupid as to allow France ever to rise again?” asks one of the other officers. “We have the opportunity to destroy France and we will do so,” says another. “Not only its might, but also its spirit,” which requires the complete extirpation of all “works of culture” — for “to conquer, violence is sufficient, but not to rule.”
81 years later, the events of Le Silence de la mer have returned to mind. “Russia’s war on Ukraine has been an all-round disaster,” writes the Guardian’s Luke Harding and Harriet Sherwood. “Its army has shelled densely populated cities, killing hundreds. More than 2 million refugees have fled abroad in Europe’s biggest exodus since the second world war.” Ukrainian cities have set about hiding what pieces they can of their cultural heritage: in Lviv, for example, these included “a precious wooden alter-piece showing Jesus, Mary and Mary Magdalene. It was removed from Lviv’s 14th century Armenian church and transported to a bunker. The sculpture was last removed from its courtyard spot shortly before the Nazis swept into the city in 1941.”
Such efforts are taking place in not just the physical realm, but the digital one as well. Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO) describe themselves as “a group of cultural heritage professionals – librarians, archivists, researchers, programmers – working together to identify and archive at-risk sites, digital content, and data in Ukrainian cultural heritage institutions while the country is under attack.” This project involves “a combination of technologies to crawl and archive sites and content, including the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, the Browsertrix crawler and the ArchiveWeb.page browser extension and app of the Webrecorder project,” and now has the help of more than a thousand volunteers.
If you’re reading this, you may possess the skill SUCHO needs. Though “we are currently at capacity for people to help with Wayback Machine / Internet Archive tasks or manual Webrecorder tasks,” says their site, “you can still help by submitting URLs” of sites containing Ukrainian cultural content. “If you can read Ukrainian or Russian, or if you can run the Browsertrix crawler (check out our Browsertrix documentation to see if it’s something you’d be up for trying), fill out the volunteer form.” (Even if not, have a look at their documentation of their workflow and orientation for new volunteers.) At some point, the violence of the invasion of Ukraine will come to an end. When it does, the more of the country’s culture survives, the less its invaders can rule.
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.
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