A Mesmerizing Look at the Making of a Late Medieval Book from Start to Finish

in Books, Design, History | September 4th, 2023

Hand binding a book, using primarily 15-century methods and materials sounds like a major undertaking, rife with pitfalls and frustration.

A far more relaxing activity is watching Four Keys Book Arts’ wordless, 24-minute highlights reel of self-taught bookbinder Dennis tackling that same assignment, above. (Bonus — it’s a guaranteed treat for those prone to autonomous sensory meridian response tingles.)

Dennis, whose other recent forays into bespoke bookbinding include a number of elegant matchbox sized volumes and upcycling three Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks into a tome bound in vegetable tanned goatskin, labored on the late-medieval Gothic reproduction for over 60 hours.

For research on this type of binding, he turned to book designer J.A. Szirmai’s The Archaeology of Medieval Bookbinding, and while the goal was never 100% period accuracy, Dennis notes that the craft of traditional hand-binding has remained virtually unchanged for centuries:

The medieval binder would have found many of the tools and techniques to be very familiar. The single biggest anachronism is my use of synthetic PVA glue rather than period-appropriate animal glue. The second historic anomaly is my use of marbled paper, though it could be argued that the earliest European marbled papers of the mid-17th century do overlap with this binding style. The nonpareil pattern I have chosen for the endpapers, though, dates from the 1820’s, and so is distinctly out of place. But apart from those, virtually all of the other materials in this book would have been available to the medieval bookbinder.

Those craving a more step-by-step explanation should set time aside to view the longer videos, below, in which Dennis shares such time-consuming, detail-oriented tasks as trimming and tidying the edges with a cabinet scraper and bookbinder’s plough, sewing endbands to support and protect the book’s head and the spine, and decorating the leather cover with a hand-tooled floral pattern embellished with gold foil highlights.

Rather than cut corners, he literally cuts corners — the metal clasp and corner guards - from a .8mm thick sheet of brass.

Only the final video is narrated, so be sure to activate closed captioning / subtitles in the YouTube toolbar to read his commentary.

Materials and tools used in this project:

Text Paper: Fabriano Accademia 120 gsm drawing paper, 65 x 50 cm, long grain

Endpapers: Four Keys Book Arts handmade marbled paper, Fabriano Accademia 120 gsm drawing paper, red handmade paper

Thread: Undyed Linen 25/3, unknown brand

Cords: Leather, unknown type, roughly 3 oz/ 1 mm

Wax: Natural Beeswax

Glue: Mix of Acid-Free PVA and Methyl Cellulose, 3:2 ratio.

Paper Knife (made from an old kitchen knife)

Bone Folder (handmade in-house)

Scrap book board, various sizes/thickness

Pressing Boards (1/2″ maple plywood, made in house)

Cast-Iron Book Press (Patrick Ritchie, Edinburgh, circa 1850)

Stainless Steel rulers, various sizes

Small Stanley Knife

Maple Laying Press (handmade in-house)

Small Carpenter’s Square, unknown brand

Pencil (Blackwing)

Steel dividers, unknown brand

Lithography Stone (circa 1925)

Cotton Rag

Agate Burnisher

Piercing Cradle (handmade in-house)

Awl

2″ natural bristle brush, generic

parchment release paper

blotting paper

Acetate barrier sheets, .01 gauge

Dahle Vantage 12e Guillotine (found at a thrift store)

Scissors

Bookbinding Needles

Sewing Frame (handmade in-house)

Brass H‑Keys (handmade in-house)

Linen sewing tapes, 12 mm

Pins

Watch a full playlist of Four Keys Book Arts’ Medieval Gothic Binding videos here. See more of Dennis book binding projects on Four Keys Book Arts’ Instagram.

Wonderfully Weird & Ingenious Medieval Books

When Medieval Manuscripts Were Recycled & Used to Make the First Printed Books

The Medieval Masterpiece, the Book of Kells, Has Been Digitized and Put Online

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

The Oldest Restaurant in the World: How Madrid’s Sobrino de Botín Has Kept the Oven Hot Since 1725

in Food & Drink, History | September 4th, 2023

“We lunched up-stairs at Botin’s,” writes Ernest Hemingway near the end of The Sun Also Rises (1926). “It is one of the best restaurants in the world. We had roast suckling pig and drank rioja alta.” You can do the very same thing today, a century after the period of that novel — and indeed, you also could’ve done it two centuries before the period of that novel, for Botin’s was established in 1725, and now stands as the oldest restaurant in continuous operation. Founded as Casa Botín by a Frenchman named Jean Botin, it passed in 1753 into the hands of one of his nephews, who re-christened it Sobrino de Botín. Whatever the place has been called over this whole time, its oven has never once gone cold.

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“It is our jewel, our crown jewel,” Botín’s deputy manager Javier Sanchéz Álvarez says of that oven in the Great Big Story video above. “It needs to keep hot at night and be ready to roast in the morning.” What it has to roast is, of course, the restaurant’s signature cochinillo, or suckling pig, about which you can learn more from the Food Insider video just above.

“It’s exactly the same recipe and tradition,” says Sanchéz Álvarez. “Absolutely everything is done in the exact same way as in the old days,” down to the application of the spices, butter, wine, and salt to the raw pork before it enters the historic oven belly-up. “It’s very important that the skin of the cochinillo is very crunchy,” he adds. “If the skin isn’t crunchy, it’s not good.”

Needless to say, Botín is poorly placed to win the favor of the world’s vegetarians. But it does robust business nevertheless, having pulled through the COVID-19 pandemic (with, at the very least, its oven still lit), and more recently received a visit from superstar food vlogger Mark Wiens. Its enduring success surely owes to its more-than-proven ability to deliver on a simple promise: “We will serve you a hearty suckling pick with some good potatoes and a serving of good Spanish ham,” as Sanchéz Álvarez puts it. Working at the restaurant for more than 40 of its 298 years has made it “like home to me,” he says, employing the common Spanish expression of feeling como un pez en el agua — though, given the nature of Botín’s menu, a more terrestrial metaphor is surely in order.

via Mental Floss

The Incredible Engineering of Antonio Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia, the World’s Oldest Construction Project

The Spanish Earth: Ernest Hemingway’s 1937 Film on The Spanish Civil War

Historic Spain in Time Lapse Film

A Visit to the World’s Oldest Hotel, Japan’s Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan, Established in 705 AD

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 Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

The Stoic Wisdom of Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius: An Introduction in Six Short Videos

in History, Philosophy | August 31st, 2023

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Though it enjoys a particular popularity here in the twenty-first century, the rigorously equanimous Stoic worldview comes to us through the work of three figures from antiquity: Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius. Epictetus was born and raised a slave. Seneca, the son of rhetorician Seneca the Elder, became an advisor to Nero (a position that ultimately forced him to take his own life). Marcus Aurelius, the most exalted of the three, actually did the top job himself, ruling the Roman Empire from 161 to 180 AD. He also left behind a text, the Meditations, that stands alongside Epictetus’ Enchiridion and Seneca’s many essays and letters as a pillar of the canon of Stoicism.

It is from the Meditations that this series of six videos from Youtube channel Einzelgänger draws its wisdom. Each of them introduces different aspects of Marcus Aurelius’ interpretation of Stoicism and applies them to our everyday life here in modernity, presenting strategies for staying calm, not feeling harm, accepting what comes our way, and not being troubled by the actions of others.

Though the importance of these aims can be illustrated any number of ways, their achievement depends on accepting the notion central to all Stoic thought: “the dichotomy of control,” which dictates that “some things are in our control and others aren’t.” When life hurts, “it often means that we care about things we have no control over, and by doing so, we let them control us.”

All the Stoics understood this, but for Marcus Aurelius, “being unperturbed by things outside of his control allowed him to cope with the many responsibilities and challenges he faced as an emperor, and to focus on the task he believed he was given by the gods.” He knew that “it’s not the outside world and the events that take place in it, our bodies included, that hurt us, but our thoughts, memories, and fantasies regarding them.” To indulge those fantasies means to live in perpetual conflict with reality, and thus in perpetual, and futile, grievance against it. The stronger our judgments about what happens, “the more vulnerable we become to the whims of Fortuna, the unpredictable goddess of luck, chance, and fate,” forces that eventually get the better of us all — even if we happen to have the world’s mightiest empire at our command.

Every Roman Emperor: A Video Timeline Moving from Augustus to the Byzantine Empire’s Last Ruler, Constantine XI

How to Be a Stoic in Your Everyday Life: Philosophy Professor Massimo Pigliucci Explains

Three Huge Volumes of Stoic Writings by Seneca Now Free Online, Thanks to Tim Ferriss

350 Animated Videos That Will Teach You Philosophy, from Ancient to Post-Modern

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

700 Years of Persian Manuscripts Now Digitized & Free Online

in Art, History | August 30th, 2023

Too often those in power lump thousands of years of Middle Eastern religion and culture into monolithic entities to be feared or persecuted. But at least one government institution is doing exactly the opposite. For Nowruz, the Persian New Year, the Library of Congress has released a digital collection of its rare Persian-language manuscripts, an archive spanning 700 years. This free resource opens windows on diverse religious, national, linguistic, and cultural traditions, most, but not all, Islamic, yet all different from each other in complex and striking ways.

“We nowadays are programmed to think Persia equates with Iran, but when you look at this it is a multiregional collection,” says a Library specialist in its African and Middle Eastern Division, Hirad Dinavari. “Many contributed to it. Some were Indian, some were Turkic, Central Asian.” The “deep, cosmopolitan archive,” as Atlas Obscura’s Jonathan Carey writes, consists of a relatively small number of manuscripts—only 155. That may not seem particularly significant given the enormity of some other online collections.

But its quality and variety mark it as especially valuable, representative of much larger bodies of work in the arts, sciences, religion, and philosophy, dating back to the 13th century and spanning regions from India to Central Asia and the Caucuses, “in addition to the native Persian speaking lands of Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan,” the LoC notes.

Prominently represented are works like the epic poem of pre-Islamic Persia, the Shahnamah, “likened to the Iliad or the Odyssey,” writes Carey, as well as “written accounts of the life of Shah Jahan, the 17th-century Mughal emperor who oversaw construction of the Taj Mahal.”

The Library points out the archive includes the “most beloved poems of the Persian poets Saadi, Hafez, Rumi and Jami, along with the works of the poet Nizami Ganjavi.” Some readers might be surprised at the pictorial opulence of so many Islamic texts, with their colorful, stylized battle scenes and groupings of human figures.

Islamic art is typically thought of as iconoclastic, but as in Christian Europe and North America, certain sects have fought others over this interpretation (including over depictions of the Prophet Mohammad). This is not to say that the iconoclasts deserve less attention. Much medieval and early modern Islamic art uses intricate patterns, designs, and calligraphy while scrupulously avoiding likenesses of humans and animals. It is deeply moving in its own way, rigorously detailed and passionately executed, full of mathematical and aesthetic ideas about shape, proportion, color, and line that have inspired artists around the world for centuries.

The page from a lavishly illuminated Qur’ān, above, circa 1708, offers such an example, written in Arabic with an interlinear Persian translation. There are religious texts from other faiths, like the Psalms in Hebrew with Persian translation, there are scientific texts and maps: the Rare Persian-Language Manuscript Collection covers a lot of historical ground, as has Persian language and culture “from the 10th century to the present,” the Library writes. Such a rich tradition deserves careful study and appreciation. Begin an education in Persian manuscript history here.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2019.

via Atlas Obscura

15,000 Colorful Images of Persian Manuscripts Now Online, Courtesy of the British Library

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

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

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 9 ) |

When the Wind Blows: An Animated Tale of Nuclear Apocalypse With Music by Roger Waters & David Bowie (1986)

in Animation, History | August 28th, 2023

Humanity has few fascinations as enduring as that with apocalypse. We’ve been telling ourselves stories of civilization’s destruction as long as we’ve had civilization to destroy. But those stories haven’t all been the same: each era envisions the end of the world in a way that reflects its own immediate preoccupations. In the mid nineteen-eighties, nothing inspired preoccupations quite so immediate as the prospect of sudden nuclear holocaust. The mounting public anxiety brought large audiences to such major aftermath-dramatizing “television events” as The Day After in the United States and the even more harrowing Threads in the United Kingdom.

“As a youngster growing up in the nineteen-eighties in a tiny village in the heart of the Cotswolds, I can attest to the fact that no part of the country, however remote and bucolic, was impervious to the threat of the Cold War escalating into a full-blown nuclear conflict,” writes Neil Mitchell at the British Film Institute.

“Popular culture was awash with nuclear war-themed films, comic strips, songs and novels.” This torrent included the artist-writer Raymond Briggs’ When the Wind Blows, a graphic novel about an elderly rural couple who survive a catastrophic strike on England. Jim and Hilda’s optimism and willingness to follow government instructions prove to be no match for nuclear winter, and however inexorable their fate, they manage not to see it right up until the end comes.

In 1986, When the Wind Blows was adapted into a feature film, directed by American animator Jimmy Murakami. Among its distinctive aesthetic choices is the combination of traditional cel animation for the characters with photographed miniatures for the backgrounds, as well as the commissioning of soundtrack music from the likes of Roger Waters, David Bowie, and Genesis — proper English rockers for a proper English production. If the adaptation of When the Wind Blows is less widely known today than other nuclear-apocalypse movies, that may owe to its sheer cultural specificity. It would be difficult to pick the movie’s most English scene, but a particularly strong contender is the one in which Hilda reminisces about how “it was nice in the war, really: the shelters, the blackout, the cups of tea.”

“The couple are fruitlessly nostalgic for the Blitz spirit of the Second World War, convinced the government-issued Protect and Survive pamphlets are worth the paper they’re printed on, and blindly under the assumption that there can be a winner in a nuclear war,” writes Mitchell. “These sweet, unassuming retirees represent an ailing, rose-tinted worldview and way of life that’s woefully unprepared for the magnitude of devastation wrought by the bomb.” You can see further analysis of the film’s art and worldview in the video at the top of the post from animation-focused Youtube channel Steve Reviews. In the event, humanity survived the long showdown of the Cold War, losing none of our penchant for apocalyptic fantasy as a result. However compulsively we imagine the end of the world today, will any of our visions prove as memorable as When the Wind Blows?

The Atomic Café: The Cult Classic Documentary Made Entirely Out of Nuclear Weapons Propaganda from the Cold War (1982)

The Night Ed Sullivan Scared a Nation with the Apocalyptic Animated Short, A Short Vision (1956)

Duck and Cover: The 1950s Film That Taught Millions of Schoolchildren How to Survive a Nuclear Bomb

How a Clean, Tidy Home Can Help You Survive the Atomic Bomb: A Cold War Film from 1954

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

How the Human Population Reached 8 Billion: An Animated Video Covers 300,000 Years of History in Four Minutes

in Data, History | August 24th, 2023

Having come out less than two weeks ago, the American Museum of Natural History video above incorporates up-to-date information on the number of human beings on planet Earth. But what’s interesting here isn’t so much the current global-population figure (eight billion, incidentally) as how we reached it. That story emerges through an animated visualization that compresses a period of 300,000 years — with all its migrations, its growing and declining empires, its major trade routes, its technological developments, its plagues, and its wars — into about four and a half minutes.

“Modern humans evolved in Africa about 300,000 years ago,” says the video’s explanatory text. “Around 100,000 years ago, we began migrating around the globe,” a process that shows no signs of stopping here in the twenty-first century.

The same can’t be said for the way our numbers have increased over the past few hundred years, at least according to the projection that “global population will peak this century” around ten billion, due to “average fertility rates falling in nearly every country.” For some, this is not entirely unwelcome, given that “as our population grows, so has our use of Earth’s resources.”

It’s been a while since the developed world has felt a widespread fear of overpopulation, which had a climate change-like power to inspire apocalyptic visions in the nineteen-seventies. Nowadays, we’re more likely to hear warnings of imminent global population collapse, with low-birthrate countries like South Korea, where I live, held up as cautionary demographic examples. From another perspective, the patterns of humanity’s expansion thus far could also be used to illustrate calls to explore and colonize other planets, not least to secure our species a path to survival should something go seriously wrong here on Earth. However our population graph changes in the future, we can rest assured that we’ll always think of ourselves as living at one kind of decisive moment or another.

How Humans Migrated Across The Globe Over 200,000 Years: An Animated Look

Buckminster Fuller Creates an Animated Visualization of Human Population Growth from 1000 B.C.E. to 1965

Colorful Animation Visualizes 200 Years of Immigration to the U.S. (1820-Present)

Who Is the World’s Most Typical Person?

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

A Surprising Animation Revisits the Miracle on the Hudson & the Cause of US Airways Flight 1549’s Crash

in Environment, History, Nature | August 23rd, 2023

Nearly 15 years ago, US Airways Flight 1549 took off from New York City’s LaGuardia Airport, bound for Seattle by way of Charlotte, North Carolina.

Shortly after takeoff, the aircraft plowed into a flock of migrating birds, and its engines failed.

In less than four minutes, Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger guided the vessel down to the frigid Hudson River.

Office workers on Manhattan’s west side were riveted by the spectacle of passengers standing on the wings, awaiting rescue by two NY Waterway ferries and other local boats.

Everyone on board survived, and few of their injuries were serious.

The incident was quickly framed as “the Miracle on the Hudson” and Captain Sullenberger was hailed as a hero.

Captain Sullenberger credited his successful maneuver to his 42 years as a pilot:

I’ve been making small, regular deposits in this bank of experience, education and training. And on January 15, the balance was sufficient so that I could make a very large withdrawal.

Such modesty only emphasized his heroism in the eyes of the public.

Such narratives preoccupy animator Bernardo Britto, whose 2020 short Hudson Geese comes at this historic event from another angle:

Narratives become our way of explaining and understanding the world. They are a part of how we build our identities and the stories we tell about ourselves. And stories by definition are exclusionary. Because you can’t fit it all in a story. They’re reductive. They’re simplified, easily digestible versions of a chain of events that’s way too complex for us to wrap our heads around.

(His interest in looking beyond established narrative boundaries carries over to the land acknowledgment in his short’s final credits: ”Before Chesley, before airplanes, before the apartment in which this short was conceived, “New York City” was the home of the Lenape, Canarsie, and Wappinger people.”)

Revisiting the Miracle on the Hudson in the thrall of the Rashomon effect may mute your rageful impulses the next time a flock of Canada geese toilets its way across your favorite green space.

Even though Hudson Geese clocks in at a tight five, we get enough time with its nameless lead to become invested in his travels, his dedication to his life partner, Sharona, his migration history, and his connection to his animal essence:

As we take to the air, I feel a familiar emotion, a deep sense that this is where I really belong, more so than the lake in Shawinigan, much more so than the golf course on the Potomac, I belong here, in the air, flying safely over all the noise, high above the city, that unintelligible mess of spires and skyscrapers, that island that became for reasons unknown to a simple goose like me, the very center of all the world.

Captain Sullenberger and co-pilot Jeff Skiles receive animated cameos in Hudson Geese, as do Tom Hanks and Clint Eastwood, leaving our anti-hero to wonder who will immortalize Sharona and who will remember the day’s “fallen fowl.”

(With regard to the last question, possibly, Tom Haueter, the National Transportation Safety Board’s former head of major accident investigation. The Federal Aviation Administration failed to implement many of his proposed safety measures following the crash.)

The human media’s hot take was that “thankfully no one was hurt.

The goose can only conceive of the Miracle on the Hudson as a “complete and utter massacre.”

Watch more of Bernardo Britto’s animations on his Vimeo channel.

Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree: The Animated Film Narrated by Shel Silverstein Himself (1973)

The Employment: A Prize-Winning Animation About Why We’re So Disenchanted with Work Today

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

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

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 Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

A Mesmerizing Look at the Making of a Late Medieval Book from Start to Finish

The Oldest Restaurant in the World: How Madrid’s Sobrino de Botín Has Kept the Oven Hot Since 1725

The Stoic Wisdom of Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius: An Introduction in Six Short Videos

700 Years of Persian Manuscripts Now Digitized & Free Online

When the Wind Blows: An Animated Tale of Nuclear Apocalypse With Music by Roger Waters & David Bowie (1986)

How the Human Population Reached 8 Billion: An Animated Video Covers 300,000 Years of History in Four Minutes

A Surprising Animation Revisits the Miracle on the Hudson & the Cause of US Airways Flight 1549’s Crash

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

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