We are regularly urged to take 10,000 steps a day. However, it turns out 10,000 isn’t exactly a number anchored in science. Rather, it’s a product of marketing. According to a Harvard medical website, that figure goes back to “1965, when a Japanese company made a device named Manpo-kei, which translates to ’10,000 steps meter.’ ” 10,000 likely sounded better than a more precise number. And so it began.
So this raises the question: what’s the ideal number of steps according to science? Dr. I‑Min Lee, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, focused on that question and determined that mortality rates decline when women increase their steps from lower levels (e.g., 2,000 steps) to 4,400 steps per day, with gains increasing until they reach 7,500 steps. From there, the gains level out. (Read the JAMA study here.) Meanwhile, a European study, which monitored 226,000 participants, found that people who walked more than 2,337 steps daily could start lowering their risk of dying from heart disease. And people who walked more than 3,867 steps daily could start reducing their risk of dying from any cause overall. However, unlike the Harvard study, the European study found that adding more steps continues to lower mortality rates, with gains accruing past 7,500 steps, and perhaps beyond 20,000 steps. What’s the exact sweet spot? We’ll need more research to figure that out. Until then, the existing research suggests that it pays to spend time with your walking shoes.
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“Considering that, in a cartoon, anything can happen that the mind can imagine, the comics have generally depicted pretty mundane worlds,” writes Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson. “Sure, there have been talking animals, a few spaceships and whatnot, but the comics have rarely shown us anything truly bizarre. Little Nemo’s dream imagery, however, is as mind-bending today as ever, and Winsor McCay remains one of the greatest innovators and manipulators of the comic strip medium.” And Little Nemo, which sprawled across entire newspaper pages in the early decades of the twentieth century, pushed artistic boundaries not just as a comic, but also as a film.
When first seen in 1911, the twelve-minute short Little Nemo was titled Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics. A mixture of live action and animation, it dramatizes McCay making a gentleman’s wager with his colleagues that he can draw figures that move — an idea that might have come with a certain plausibility, given that speed-drawing was already a successful part of his vaudeville act. Meeting this challenge entails drawing 4,000 pictures, a task as demanding for McCay the character as it was for McCay the real artist. This labor adds up to the four minutes that end the film, which contains moments of still-impressive fluidity, technique, and humor.
Clearly possessed of a sense of animation’s potential as an art form, McCay went on to make nine more films, and ultimately considered them his proudest work. Like the Little Nemo movie, he used his second such effort, Gertie the Dinosaur, in his vaudeville act, performing alongside the projection to create the effect of his giving the titular prehistoric creature commands. “In some ways, McCay was the forerunner of Walt Disney in terms of American animation,” writes Lucas O. Seastrom at The Walt Disney Family Museum. “In order to create a lovable dinosaur and accomplish these seemingly magical feats, McCay used mathematical precision and groundbreaking techniques, such as the process of inbetweening, which later became a Disney standard.”
More than once, McCay the animator drew inspiration from the work of McCay the newspaper artist: in 1921, he made a couple of motion pictures out of his pre-Little Nemo sleep-themed comic strip Dream of the Rarebit Fiend. But for his most ambitious animated work, he turned toward history — and, at the time, rather recent history — to re-create the sinking of the RMSLusitania, an event that his employer, the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, had insisted on downplaying at the time due to his stance against the U.S.’ joining the Great War. Decades thereafter, Looney Tunes animator Chuck Jones said that “the two most important people in animation are Winsor McCay and Walt Disney, and I’m not sure which should go first.” Watch these and McCay’s other surviving films on this Youtube playlist, and you can decide for yourself.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Charles Darwin’s work on heredity was partly driven by tragic losses in his own family. Darwin had married his first cousin, Emma, and “wondered if his close genetic relation to his wife had had an ill impact on his children’s health, three (of 10) of whom died before the age of 11,” Katherine Harmon writes at Scientific American. (His suspicions, researchers surmise, may have been correct.) He was so concerned about the issue that, in 1870, he pressured the government to include questions about inbreeding on the census (they refused).
Darwin’s children would serve as subjects of scientific observation. His notebooks, says Alison Pearn of the Darwin Correspondence Project at Cambridge University Library, show a curious father “prodding and poking his young infant,” Charles Erasmus, his first child, “like he’s another ape.” Comparisons of his children’s development with that of orangutans helped him refine ideas in On the Origin of Species, which he completed as he raised his family at their house in rural Kent, and inspired later ideas in Descent of Man.
But as they grew, the Darwin children became far more than scientific curiosities. They became their father’s assistants and apprentices. “It’s really an enviable family life,” Pearn tells the BBC. “The science was everywhere. Darwin just used anything that came to hand, all the way from his children right through to anything in his household, the plants in the kitchen garden.” Steeped in scientific investigation from birth, it’s little wonder so many of the Darwins became accomplished scientists themselves.
Down House was “by all accounts a boisterous place,” writes McKenna Staynor at The New Yorker, “with a wooden slide on the stairs and a rope swing on the first-floor landing.” Another archive of Darwin’s prodigious writing, Cambridge’s Darwin Manuscripts Project, gives us even more insight into his family life, with graphic evidence of the Darwin brood’s curiosity in the dozens of doodles and drawings they made in their father’s notebooks, including the original manuscript copy of his magnum opus.
The project’s director, David Kohn, “doesn’t know for certain which kids were the artists,” notes Staynor, “but he guesses that at least three were involved: Francis, who became a botanist; George, who became an astronomer and mathematician; and Horace, who became an engineer.” One imagines competition among the Darwin children must have been fierce, but the drawings, “though exacting, are also playful.” One depicts “The Battle of Fruits and Vegetables.” Others show anthropomorphic animals and illustrate military figures.
There are short stories, like “The Fairies of the Mountain,” which “tells the tale of Polytax and Short Shanks, whose wings have been cut off by a ‘naughty fairy.’” Imagination and creativity clearly had a place in the Darwin home. The man himself, Maria Popova notes, felt significant ambivalence about fatherhood. “Children are one’s greatest happiness,” he once wrote, “but often & often a still greater misery. A man of science ought to have none.”
It was an attitude born of grief, but one, it seems, that did not breed aloofness. The Darwin kids “were used as volunteers,” says Kohn, “to collect butterflies, insects, and moths, and to make observations on plants in the fields around town.” Francis followed his father’s path and was the only Darwin to co-author a book with his father. Darwin’s daughter Henrietta became his editor, and he relied on her, he wrote, for “deep criticism” and “corrections of style.”
Despite his early fears for their genetic fitness, Darwin’s professional life became intimately bound to the successes of his children. The Darwin Manuscripts Project, which aims to digitize and make public around 90,000 pages from the Cambridge University Library’s Darwin collection will have a profound effect on how historians of science understand his impact. “The scope of the enterprise, of what we call evolutionary biology,” says Kohn, “is defined in these papers. He’s got his foot in the twentieth century.”
The archive also shows the development of Darwin’s equally important legacy as a parent who inspired a boundless scientific curiosity in his kids. See many more of the digitized Darwin children’s drawings at The Marginalian.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2020.
Saturday Night Live began its 50th season last fall, around the same time as the premiere of Jason Reitman’s film Saturday Night, which dramatizes the program’s 1975 debut. All of this has put fans into something of a retrospective mood, especially if they happen to have been tuning in since the very beginning. For others, SNL is a show they haven’t been watching all that long, used to watch, or watched at one time and have started watching again. With its ever-changing cast, writers, sketch concepts, and overall comedic sensibility, it’s never remained the same for too long at a stretch, and though many viewers have their favorite seasons, few grasp the full sweep of its history as a television institution.
Now, anyone can get a sense of SNL in its entirety with Everything You NEED to Know About Saturday Night Live, a YouTube series that, true to its title, recounts the show’s most notable performers, characters, innovations, troubles, and moments planned or otherwise (often the latter, given the nature of the broadcast). Each season gets its own episode, starting with the first, whose Not Ready for Prime Time Players included such young up-and-comers as Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, and Gilda Radner.
As that list of names would imply, this “hip comedy variety program for baby boomers that dared to stay up late” soon became a veritable force of era-defining funnymen and funnywomen. Then as now, SNL tends to send its breakout stars to Hollywood, albeit with varying results.
That contributes to the constant churn that has brought onto the show’s roster such household-names-to-be as Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Billy Crystal, Adam Sandler, and Tina Fey, while also featuring non-cast-members like Penn and Teller or guest hosts like Steve Martin, whose appearances greatly raised their own profiles. To watch through these encapsulations, which as of this writing have reached season nineteen (1993–94), is to take a journey through American popular culture itself. Creator Lorne Michaels’ recently declared lack of intent to step down any time soon bolsters SNL’s aura of unstoppabilty, built up over five decades of influential personalities, still-quoted gags, and instantly recognizable characters — if also the occasional uncooperative host, chemistry-free cast, or accidentally uttered bit of profanity. But what’s the fun of doing half a century of live TV if it goes without a hitch?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Here’s a strange home video of Nirvana when they were unknown, playing inside a Radio Shack in the band’s hometown of Aberdeen, Washington. The video was recorded on the evening of January 24, 1988, after the store had closed. In those days the group went by the name of Ted Ed Fred.
Only the day before, the band had recorded its first demo tape at a studio in Seattle. Guitarist and singer Kurt Cobain asked his new friend Eric Harter, who managed the Radio Shack, to videotape the band playing “Paper Cuts,” one of 10 songs from the demo. Along with Cobain, the video features Nirvana co-founder Krist Novoselic on bass and Dale Crover of the Melvins on drums.
The video below includes footage of Harter talking about the Radio Shack video and giving a copy of the tape to Cobain’s grieving widow Courtney Love, who is shown with her friend Kat Bjelland of Babes in Toyland. At one point, Harter mentions a “Ted Ed Fred” concert at the Community World Theater in Tacoma. To see a full video of that show, which was staged the night before the Radio Shack taping (and only hours after the demo session), click here.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2013.
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A new deal to start a new year: Coursera is offering a $200 discount on its annual subscription plan called “Coursera Plus.” Normally priced at $399, Coursera Plus (now available for $199) gives you access to 90% of Coursera’s courses, Guided Projects, Specializations, and Professional Certificates, all of which are taught by top instructors from leading universities and companies (e.g. Yale, Duke, Google, Facebook, and more). The $199 annual fee–which translates roughly to 55 cents per day–could be a good investment for anyone interested in learning new subjects and skills in 2025, or earning certificates that can be added to your resume. Just as Netflix’s streaming service gives you access to unlimited movies, Coursera Plus gives you access to unlimited courses and certificates. It’s basically an all-you-can-eat deal.
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The end of the nineteenth century is still widely referred to as the fin de siècle, a French term that evokes great, looming cultural, social, and technological changes. According to at least one French mind active at the time, among those changes would be a fin deslivres as humanity then knew them. “I do not believe (and the progress of electricity and modern mechanism forbids me to believe) that Gutenberg’s invention can do otherwise than sooner or later fall into desuetude,” says the character at the center of the 1894 story “The End of Books.” “Printing, which since 1436 has reigned despotically over the mind of man, is, in my opinion, threatened with death by the various devices for registering sound which have lately been invented, and which little by little will go on to perfection.”
First published in an issue of Scribner’s Magazine (viewable at the Internet Archive or this web page), “The End of Books” relates a conversation among a group of men belonging to various disciplines, all of them fired up to speculate on the future after hearing it proclaimed at London’s Royal Institute that the end of the world was “mathematically certain to occur in precisely ten million years.” The participant foretelling the end of books is, somewhat ironically, called the Bibliophile; but then, the story’s author Octave Uzanne was famous for just such enthusiasms himself. Believing that “the success of everything which will favor and encourage the indolence and selfishness of men,” the Bibliophile asserts that sound recording will put an end to print just as “the elevator has done away with the toilsome climbing of stairs.”
These 130 or so years later, anyone who’s been to Paris knows that the elevator has yet to finish that job, but much of what the Bibliophile predicts has indeed come true in the form of audiobooks. “Certain Narrators will be sought out for their fine address, their contagious sympathy, their thrilling warmth, and the perfect accuracy, the fine punctuation of their voice,” he says. “Authors who are not sensitive to vocal harmonies, or who lack the flexibility of voice necessary to a fine utterance, will avail themselves of the services of hired actors or singers to warehouse their work in the accommodating cylinder.” We may no longer use cylinders, but Uzanne’s description of a “pocket apparatus” that can be “kept in a simple opera-glass case” will surely remind us of the Walkman, the iPod, or any other portable audio device we’ve used.
All this should also bring to mind another twenty-first century phenomenon: podcasts. “At home, walking, sightseeing,” says the Bibliophile, “fortunate hearers will experience the ineffable delight of reconciling hygiene with instruction; of nourishing their minds while exercising their muscles.” This will also transform journalism, for “in all newspaper offices there will be Speaking Halls where the editors will record in a clear voice the news received by telephonic despatch.” But how to satisfy man’s addiction to the image, well in evidence even then? “Upon large white screens in our own homes,” a “kinetograph” (which we today would call a television) will project scenes fictional and factual involving “famous men, criminals, beautiful women. It will not be art, it is true, but at least it will be life.” Yet however striking his prescience in other respects, the Bibliophile didn’t know – though Uzanne may have — that books would persist through it all.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
In 1972, Jerry Lewis made the ill-considered decision to write, direct, and star in a film about a German clown in Auschwitz. The result was so awful that he never allowed its release, and it quickly acquired the reputation—along with disasters like George Lucas’ Star Wars Holiday Special—as one of the biggest mistakes in movie history. Somehow, this cautionary tale did not dissuade the bold Italian comedian Roberto Benigni from making a film with a somewhat similar premise, 1997’s Life Is Beautiful, in which he plays a father in a concentration camp who entertains children with comic stunts and antics to distract them from the horrors all around them.
That film, by contrast, was a commercial and critical success and went on to win the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1998 and three Academy Awards the following year, a testament to Benigni’s sensitivity to his subject, in a screenplay partly based on the memoirs of Rubino Romeo Salmoni. It’s a wonder that another real-life story of a comic genius who used his talents not only to entertain children during WWII, but to save them from the Nazis has somehow never been made into a feature film—and especially surprising given the stature of the man in question: Marcel Marceau, the most famous mime in history.
As we learn in the Great Big Story video above, Marceau was 16 years old in 1940 when German soldiers marched into France. His “childhood ended all at once,” says Shawn Wen, author of a recent book about Marceau. His father died in Auschwitz and both Marceau and his brother “were involved in the war effort against the Nazis.” In one story, Marceau dressed a group of children from an orphanage as campers and walked them into Switzerland, entertaining them all the way, “to the point where they could pretend as if they were going on vacation rather than fleeing for their lives.”
In another story, Marceau somehow convinced a group of German soldiers to surrender to him. “It seems as if this natural knack for acting,” says Wen, “ended up becoming a part of his involvement in the war effort.” During the war, Marceau was “miming for his life,” and the lives of others. Mime has been the butt of many jokes over the years, but Wen sees in Marceau’s silent performances a means of bringing humanity together with an art that transcends language and nationality. Learn more about how Marceau began his mime career during the Nazi occupation at our previous post here.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2018.
We’ve often featured the work of the Public Domain Review here on Open Culture, and also various searchable copyright-free image databases that have arisen over the years. It makes sense that those two worlds would collide, and now they’ve done so in the form of the just-launched Public Domain Image Archive (PDIA). The Public Domain Review invites us to use the site to “explore our hand-picked collection of 10,046 out-of-copyright works, free for all to browse, download, and reuse” — and note that the number will grow, given that “this is a living database with new images added every week.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
What’s that, you ask? Did Miles Davis open for the Grateful Dead at the Fillmore West? In what world could such a thing happen? In the world of the late sixties/early seventies, when jazz fused with acid rock, acid rock with country, and pop culture took a long strange trip. The “inspired pairing” of the Dead with Davis’ electric band on April 9–12, 1970, “represented one of [promoter] Bill Graham’s most legendary bookings,” writes the blog Cryptical Developments. I’ll say. Davis had just released the groundbreaking double-LP Bitches Brew and was “at somewhat of an artistic and commercial crossroads,” experimenting with new, more fluid compositions.
Aggressive and dominated by rock rhythms and electric instruments, the album became Davis’ best seller and brought him before young, white audiences in a way his earlier work had not. The band that Davis brought into the Fillmore West, comprising [Chick] Corea, [Dave] Holland, soprano sax player Steve Grossman, drummer Jack Dejohnette, and percussionist Airto Moreira, was fully versed in this new music, and stood the Fillmore West audiences on their ears.
I can only imagine what it would have been like to see that performance live. But we don’t have to imagine what it sounded like. You can hear Davis’s set below.
In his autobiography, Davis described it as “an eye-opening concert for me.” “The place was packed with these real spacy, high white people,” he wrote, “and when we first started playing, people were walking around and talking.” Once the band got into the Bitches Brew material, though, “that really blew them out. After that concert, every time I would play out there in San Francisco, a lot of young white people showed up at the gigs.”
Did the Dead become a crossover hit with jazz fans? Not exactly, but Davis really hit it off with them, especially with Jerry Garcia. “I think we all learned something,” Davis wrote: “Jerry Garcia loved jazz, and I found out that he loved my music and had been listening to it for a long time.” In his autobiography, the Dead’s Phil Lesh remembered having his mind blown by Davis and band: “As I listened, leaning over the amps with my jaw hanging agape, trying to comprehend the forces that Miles was unleashing onstage, I was thinking What’s the use. How can we possibly play after this? […] With this band, Miles literally invented fusion music. In some ways it was similar to what we were trying to do in our free jamming, but ever so much more dense with ideas – and seemingly controlled with an iron fist, even at its most alarmingly intense moments.” You can stream the Dead’s full performance from that night below. Think what must have been running through their minds as they took the stage after watching Miles Davis invent a new form of music right before their eyes.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.
A CompleteUnknown, the new movie about Bob Dylan’s rise in the folk-music scene of the early nineteen-sixties and subsequent electrified break with it, has been praised for not taking excessive liberties, at least by the standards of popular music biopics. Its conversion of a real chapter of cultural history has entailed various conflations, compressions, and rearrangements, but you’d expect that from a Hollywood director like James Mangold. What many viewers’ judgment will come down to is less historical veracity than whether they believe Timothée Chalamet as the young Bob Dylan — or rather, as the young Bob Dylan they’ve always imagined.
Still, much depends on the rest of the cast, who portray a host of major folk- and folk-adjacent figures including Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Johnny Cash, Alan Lomax, and the late Peter Yarrow. No performance apart from Chalamet’s has received as much attention as Monica Barbaro’s Joan Baez. In those characters’ key scene together they take the stage at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival and sing “It Ain’t Me Babe,” a Dylan song that Baez also recorded. Their rendition conveys the depth of their romantic and artistic connection not just to the audience, but also to Dylan’s girlfriend, played by Elle Fanning, watching just offstage.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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