Aldous Huxley to George Orwell: My Hellish Vision of the Future is Better Than Yours (1949)

in Life, Literature | June 25th, 2022

In 1949, George Orwell received a curi­ous let­ter from his for­mer high school French teacher.

Orwell had just pub­lished his ground­break­ing book Nine­teen Eighty-Four, which received glow­ing reviews from just about every cor­ner of the Eng­lish-speak­ing world. His French teacher, as it hap­pens, was none oth­er than Aldous Hux­ley who taught at Eton for a spell before writ­ing Brave New World (1931), the oth­er great 20th cen­tu­ry dystopi­an nov­el.

Hux­ley starts off the let­ter prais­ing the book, describ­ing it as “pro­found­ly impor­tant.” He con­tin­ues, “The phi­los­o­phy of the rul­ing minor­i­ty in Nine­teen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been car­ried to its log­i­cal con­clu­sion by going beyond sex and deny­ing it.”

Then Hux­ley switch­es gears and crit­i­cizes the book, writ­ing, “Whether in actu­al fact the pol­i­cy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indef­i­nite­ly seems doubt­ful. My own belief is that the rul­ing oli­garchy will find less ardu­ous and waste­ful ways of gov­ern­ing and of sat­is­fy­ing its lust for pow­er, and these ways will resem­ble those which I described in Brave New World.” (Lis­ten to him read a dra­ma­tized ver­sion of the book here.)

Basi­cal­ly while prais­ing Nine­teen Eighty-Four, Hux­ley argues that his ver­sion of the future was more like­ly to come to pass.

In Hux­ley’s seem­ing­ly dystopic World State, the elite amuse the mass­es into sub­mis­sion with a mind-numb­ing drug called Soma and an end­less buf­fet of casu­al sex. Orwell’s Ocea­nia, on the oth­er hand, keeps the mass­es in check with fear thanks to an end­less war and a hyper-com­pe­tent sur­veil­lance state. At first blush, they might seem like they are dia­met­ri­cal­ly opposed but, in fact, an Orwellian world and a Hux­leyan one are sim­ply two dif­fer­ent modes of oppres­sion.

Obvi­ous­ly we are nowhere near either dystopic vision but the pow­er of both books is that they tap into our fears of the state. While Hux­ley might make you look askance at The Bach­e­lor or Face­book, Orwell makes you recoil in hor­ror at the gov­ern­ment throw­ing around phras­es like “enhanced inter­ro­ga­tion” and “sur­gi­cal drone strikes.”

You can read Huxley’s full let­ter below.

Wright­wood. Cal.

21 Octo­ber, 1949

Dear Mr. Orwell,

It was very kind of you to tell your pub­lish­ers to send me a copy of your book. It arrived as I was in the midst of a piece of work that required much read­ing and con­sult­ing of ref­er­ences; and since poor sight makes it nec­es­sary for me to ration my read­ing, I had to wait a long time before being able to embark on Nine­teen Eighty-Four.

Agree­ing with all that the crit­ics have writ­ten of it, I need not tell you, yet once more, how fine and how pro­found­ly impor­tant the book is. May I speak instead of the thing with which the book deals — the ulti­mate rev­o­lu­tion? The first hints of a phi­los­o­phy of the ulti­mate rev­o­lu­tion — the rev­o­lu­tion which lies beyond pol­i­tics and eco­nom­ics, and which aims at total sub­ver­sion of the indi­vid­u­al’s psy­chol­o­gy and phys­i­ol­o­gy — are to be found in the Mar­quis de Sade, who regard­ed him­self as the con­tin­u­a­tor, the con­sum­ma­tor, of Robe­spierre and Babeuf. The phi­los­o­phy of the rul­ing minor­i­ty in Nine­teen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been car­ried to its log­i­cal con­clu­sion by going beyond sex and deny­ing it. Whether in actu­al fact the pol­i­cy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indef­i­nite­ly seems doubt­ful. My own belief is that the rul­ing oli­garchy will find less ardu­ous and waste­ful ways of gov­ern­ing and of sat­is­fy­ing its lust for pow­er, and these ways will resem­ble those which I described in Brave New World. I have had occa­sion recent­ly to look into the his­to­ry of ani­mal mag­net­ism and hyp­no­tism, and have been great­ly struck by the way in which, for a hun­dred and fifty years, the world has refused to take seri­ous cog­nizance of the dis­cov­er­ies of Mes­mer, Braid, Esdaile, and the rest.

Part­ly because of the pre­vail­ing mate­ri­al­ism and part­ly because of pre­vail­ing respectabil­i­ty, nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry philoso­phers and men of sci­ence were not will­ing to inves­ti­gate the odd­er facts of psy­chol­o­gy for prac­ti­cal men, such as politi­cians, sol­diers and police­men, to apply in the field of gov­ern­ment. Thanks to the vol­un­tary igno­rance of our fathers, the advent of the ulti­mate rev­o­lu­tion was delayed for five or six gen­er­a­tions. Anoth­er lucky acci­dent was Freud’s inabil­i­ty to hyp­no­tize suc­cess­ful­ly and his con­se­quent dis­par­age­ment of hyp­no­tism. This delayed the gen­er­al appli­ca­tion of hyp­no­tism to psy­chi­a­try for at least forty years. But now psy­cho-analy­sis is being com­bined with hyp­no­sis; and hyp­no­sis has been made easy and indef­i­nite­ly exten­si­ble through the use of bar­bi­tu­rates, which induce a hyp­noid and sug­gestible state in even the most recal­ci­trant sub­jects.

With­in the next gen­er­a­tion I believe that the world’s rulers will dis­cov­er that infant con­di­tion­ing and nar­co-hyp­no­sis are more effi­cient, as instru­ments of gov­ern­ment, than clubs and pris­ons, and that the lust for pow­er can be just as com­plete­ly sat­is­fied by sug­gest­ing peo­ple into lov­ing their servi­tude as by flog­ging and kick­ing them into obe­di­ence. In oth­er words, I feel that the night­mare of Nine­teen Eighty-Four is des­tined to mod­u­late into the night­mare of a world hav­ing more resem­blance to that which I imag­ined in Brave New World. The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased effi­cien­cy. Mean­while, of course, there may be a large scale bio­log­i­cal and atom­ic war — in which case we shall have night­mares of oth­er and scarce­ly imag­in­able kinds.

Thank you once again for the book.

Yours sin­cere­ly,

Aldous Hux­ley

via Let­ters of Note

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Com­plete Read­ing of George Orwell’s 1984: Aired on Paci­fi­ca Radio, 1975

George Orwell Iden­ti­fies the Main Ene­my of the Free Press: It’s the “Intel­lec­tu­al Cow­ardice” of the Press Itself

Aldous Hux­ley Tells Mike Wal­lace What Will Destroy Democ­ra­cy: Over­pop­u­la­tion, Drugs & Insid­i­ous Tech­nol­o­gy (1958)

George Orwell Explains in a Reveal­ing 1944 Let­ter Why He’d Write 1984

Hear Aldous Hux­ley Nar­rate His Dystopi­an Mas­ter­piece, Brave New World

Aldous Huxley’s Most Beau­ti­ful, LSD-Assist­ed Death: A Let­ter from His Wid­ow

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of bad­gers and even more pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

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The Only Surviving Manuscript of John Milton’s Paradise Lost Gets Published in Book Form for the First Time

in Books, Literature | June 24th, 2022

In The Mar­riage of Heav­en and Hell, William Blake adds a note to the text that became a famous adage about John Mil­ton’s Par­adise Lost: the 10,000-line, 17th cen­tu­ry blank verse epic about the war between heav­en and hell and the failed test­ing of God’s pre­mi­um prod­uct, human beings. Mil­ton “wrote in fet­ters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at lib­er­ty when he wrote Dev­ils & Hell,” Blake declared, “because he was a true Poet and of the Dev­il’s par­ty with­out know­ing it.” The state­ment inspired “oth­er Roman­tic and Goth­ic writ­ers to view Satan as a hero,” the British Library writes.

Blake him­self illus­trat­ed Par­adise Lost in three sep­a­rate com­mis­sions over the course of his career as an engraver and print­er. His deep admi­ra­tion for the poem helped it become a “Bible of the Roman­tic move­ment,” writes the man­u­script pub­lish­er SP Books in their intro­duc­tion to a rare new book pub­li­ca­tion of the only sur­viv­ing man­u­script of the work.

Only 1,000 num­bered, large for­mat copies of this print­ing are avail­able. (We do hope a sub­se­quent edi­tion will appear, maybe with a tran­scrip­tion and anno­ta­tions. But it will not be as beau­ti­ful as this sky-blue cloth-cov­ered book with Blake’s full-col­or illus­tra­tions.)

The book pre­serves the only part of the poem that sur­vives in man­u­script: 798 lines from Book One of Par­adise Lost. These are not in Mil­ton’s hand — he had been blind since 1652, and the poem was first pub­lished in 1667. He con­ceived the epic in his 50s, his career in gov­ern­ment over after the Eng­lish Civ­il Wars and the brief peri­od of the Cromwells’ Pro­tec­torate end­ed in the Restora­tion of Charles II. “Mil­ton com­posed ‘Par­adise Lost’ aloud, in bed or (per wit­ness­es) ‘lean­ing back­wards oblique­ly in an easy chair,’ ” Lau­ren Chris­tensen writes at The New York Times, “mem­o­riz­ing the stan­zas to be tran­scribed in anoth­er’s hand.”

These first few hun­dred lines show why Satan seems so noble to Mil­ton’s read­ers; speech­es by and about him por­tray his doomed cam­paign as a right­eous assault on heav­en­ly tyran­ny. The Roman­tics’ use of Par­adise Lost reflects their own pre­oc­cu­pa­tions, while also echo­ing con­tem­po­rary sus­pi­cions of the poem. “The author­i­ties were con­cerned,” for exam­ple, Tom Paulin notes at The Lon­don Review of Books, by an image in Book One describ­ing Satan:

as when the sun new ris’n
Looks through the hor­i­zon­tal misty air
Shorn of his beams, or from behind the moon
In dim eclipse dis­as­trous twi­light sheds
On half the nations, and with fear of change

Per­plex­es mon­archs.

“Accord­ing to Mil­ton’s ear­ly biog­ra­ph­er, the Irish repub­li­can John Toland, Charles II’s Licenser for the Press regard­ed these lines as sub­ver­sive,” Paulin points out, “and want­ed to sup­press the whole poem.” It’s sur­pris­ing he was able to pub­lish at all. Mil­ton had vocif­er­ous­ly sup­port­ed the Puri­tan rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies who over­threw the king’s father, Charles I, and removed his head. Mil­ton lat­er pub­lished sev­er­al pam­phlets in defense of regi­cide. In 1660, when Richard Cromwell’s Pro­tec­torate fell apart and Charles II returned, Mil­ton’s works were banned by roy­al decree and the poet went into hid­ing until a gen­er­al par­don.

Lat­er crit­ics have point­ed to Mil­ton’s polit­i­cal writ­ings as evi­dence that he knew exact­ly whose par­ty he was of. Cal­i­for­nia State Uni­ver­si­ty’s Michael Bryson has gone so far as to argue that Mil­ton was a secret athe­ist. In any case, he was a pas­sion­ate believ­er in the over­throw of kings and the estab­lish­ment of republics (for which he has become a lib­er­tar­i­an hero). Paulin sums up the crit­i­cal case for Par­adise Lost as an alle­go­ry for the “lost cause” of the rev­o­lu­tion:

Mil­ton knew that the poem he was dic­tat­ing to his ama­neuen­sis would be scru­ti­nized by the recent­ly restored monar­ch’s Licenser of the Press, so he cod­ed the Eng­lish peo­ple’s for­ma­tion of a repub­lic as the cre­ation of the “heav­ens and earth.” The idea passed the cen­sor by, just as it has passed by many read­ers, but it was nonethe­less Mil­ton’s found­ing inten­tion in com­pos­ing his epic.

The charge that Mil­ton made Satan a hero is hard to ignore when, read­ing Book One, we find the poet giv­ing the Chief of Fall­en Angels the best lines, as any­one who’s read Par­adise Lost will remem­ber. If you haven’t, just see the clas­sic exam­ple below.

The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
What mat­ter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less than he
Whom Thun­der hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th’Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not dri­ve us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choice
To reign is worth ambi­tion though in Hell:
Bet­ter to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n.

Learn more about this rare man­u­script edi­tion at The New York Times’ review and pur­chase one (if one remains) at SP Books.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

John Milton’s Hand Anno­tat­ed Copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio: A New Dis­cov­ery by a Cam­bridge Schol­ar

The Oth­er­world­ly Art of William Blake: An Intro­duc­tion to the Vision­ary Poet and Painter

Spenser and Mil­ton (Free Course) 

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

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Color Footage of the Liberation of Paris, Shot by Hollywood Director George Stevens (1944)

in Film, History | June 24th, 2022

The above footage of Paris’ lib­er­a­tion in August 1944 looks and feels not dis­sim­i­lar to a Hol­ly­wood movie. Part of its pow­er owes to its being in col­or, a van­ish­ing­ly rare qual­i­ty in real film of World War II. But we must also cred­it its hav­ing been shot by a gen­uine Hol­ly­wood film­mak­er, George Stevens. Hav­ing got his start in pic­tures as a teenag­er in the ear­ly nine­teen-twen­ties (not long before mak­ing the cin­e­mat­ic-his­tor­i­cal accom­plish­ment of fig­ur­ing out how to get Stan Lau­rel’s light-col­ored eyes to show up on film), Stevens became a respect­ed direc­tor in the fol­low­ing decade. Swing Time, Gun­ga Din, The More the Mer­ri­er: with hits like that, he would seem to have had it made.

But it was just then, as F. X. Feeney tells it in the DGA Quar­ter­ly, that the war became unig­nor­able. “The dan­ger­ous artistry of Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 valen­tine to Adolf Hitler, Tri­umph of the Will, moved Stevens to vol­un­teer for front­line ser­vice in World War II despite his being old enough to dodge a uni­form and sit things out.”

In vivid col­or, Stevens and his U.S. Army Sig­nal Corps crew shot “the D‑Day land­ings, where he was one of the first ashore; the lib­er­a­tion of Paris; the snowy ruins of bombed-out vil­lages en route to the Bat­tle of the Bulge; and, most unfor­get­tably, the lib­er­a­tion of the death camp at Dachau.” (Even the cel­e­bra­to­ry events in Paris had their har­row­ing moments, such as the sniper attack cap­tured at 11:54.)

Stevens went to war a film­mak­er and came home a film­mak­er. The long post­war act of his career opened with no less acclaimed a pic­ture than I Remem­ber Mama, and went on to include the likes of A Place in the Sun, Shane, and The Diary of Anne Frank, whose mate­r­i­al no doubt res­onat­ed even more with Stevens giv­en what he’d seen in Europe. Not all of it, of course, was the after­math of death and destruc­tion. These Paris lib­er­a­tion clips alone offer glimpses of such admirable fig­ures as resis­tance fight­er Simone Segouin, Gen­er­als de Gaulle and Leclerc, and even Lieu­tenant Colonel Stevens him­self. He appears pre­sid­ing over the shoot just as he must once have done back in Cal­i­for­nia — and, with the war’s end in sight, as he must have known he would do again.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Albert Camus, Edi­tor of the French Resis­tance News­pa­per Com­bat, Writes Mov­ing­ly About Life, Pol­i­tics & War (1944–47)

How France Hid the Mona Lisa & Oth­er Lou­vre Mas­ter­pieces Dur­ing World War II

See Berlin Before and After World War II in Star­tling Col­or Video

Time Trav­el Back to Tokyo After World War II, and See the City in Remark­ably High-Qual­i­ty 1940s Video

31 Rolls of Film Tak­en by a World War II Sol­dier Get Dis­cov­ered & Devel­oped Before Your Eyes

The Gestapo Points to Guer­ni­ca and Asks Picas­so, “Did You Do This?;” Picas­so Replies “No, You Did!”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Karl Marx & the Flaws of Capitalism: Lex Fridman Talks with Professor Richard Wolff

in Economics | June 24th, 2022

Lex Frid­man, a Russ­ian-Amer­i­can com­put­er sci­en­tist and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence researcher, hosts a pop­u­lar pod­cast where he often inter­views aca­d­e­mics and helps them reach a sur­pris­ing­ly large audi­ence. In recent weeks, he’s had long and wide-rang­ing con­ver­sa­tions with NYU social psy­chol­o­gist Jonathan Haidt, Prince­ton his­to­ri­an Stephen Kotkin (on the his­to­ry of Rus­sia and the Ukraine war), and Stan­ford his­to­ri­an Nor­man Naimark (on geno­cide). Above you can now find his con­ver­sa­tion with Marx­ist econ­o­mist, Richard Wolff.

Frid­man pref­aces the lengthy con­ver­sa­tion by say­ing, “This is a heavy top­ic, in gen­er­al, and for me per­son­al­ly, giv­en my fam­i­ly his­to­ry in the Sovi­et Union, in Rus­sia and Ukraine. Today, the words Marx­ism, Social­ism and Com­mu­nism are used to attack and divide, much more than to under­stand and learn. With this pod­cast, I seek the lat­ter. I believe we need to study the ideas of Karl Marx, as well as their var­i­ous imple­men­ta­tions through­out the 20th and 21st cen­turies.… We need to con­sid­er seri­ous­ly the ideas we demo­nize, and to chal­lenge the ideas we dog­mat­i­cal­ly accept as true, even when doing so is at times unpleas­ant and dan­ger­ous.”

You can lis­ten to their engag­ing con­ver­sa­tion above, or find it on var­i­ous pod­casts plat­forms. Along the way, Wolff under­scores the glar­ing defi­cien­cies of cap­i­tal­ism, and why pop­ulists on the left and right are now look­ing for alter­na­tives. And Frid­man asks whether cap­i­tal­ism, despite its faults, may still be the best option we have. Wolff and Frid­man undoubt­ed­ly have dif­fer­ent world­views, but the con­ver­sa­tion is civ­il and deep, and worth your time.

Relat­ed Con­tent

A Short Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Karl Marx

5 Free Online Cours­es on Marx’s Cap­i­tal from Prof. David Har­vey

Marx­ism by Ray­mond Geuss: A Free Course

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The Oldest House in New York City: Meet the Wyckoff House (1652)

in Architecture, History, Museums, Video - Arts & Culture | June 23rd, 2022

Most 21st-cen­tu­ry Brook­lyn pub­lic ele­men­tary school­ers have tak­en or will take a field trip to the Wyck­off House, a mod­est wood­en cab­in sur­round­ed by tire shops and fast food out­lets.

The old­est build­ing in NYC by a long­shot, it was also the first struc­ture in the five bor­oughs to achieve his­toric land­mark sta­tus.

Pri­ma­ry sources place the orig­i­nal occu­pants, Pieter Clae­sen Wyck­off and his wife, Gri­et­je Van Ness-Wyck­off, in the orig­i­nal part of the house around 1652. A sin­gle room with a packed earth floor, unglazed win­dows, a large open hearth, and doors at either end, it would have been pret­ty tight quar­ters for a fam­i­ly of 13, as host Thi­js Roes of the his­to­ry series New Nether­land Now notes, dur­ing his above tour of the premis­es.

Two par­lors were added in the 18th-cen­tu­ry, and three bed­rooms in the ear­ly 19th. Typ­i­cal Dutch Colo­nial fea­tures include an H frame struc­ture, shin­gled walls, split Dutch doors, and deep, flared “spring” eaves.

Its sur­vival is a mir­a­cle in a metrop­o­lis known for its con­stant flux.

In the ear­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry, descen­dants of Pieter and Gri­et­je part­nered with com­mu­ni­ty activists to save the home from demo­li­tion, even­tu­al­ly donat­ing it to the New York City Parks Depart­ment.

A late 70s fire (pos­si­bly not the first) neces­si­tat­ed major ren­o­va­tions. (And last year, flood­ing from Hur­ri­cane Ida clob­bered its HVAC and elec­tri­cal sys­tem, putting a tem­po­rary kibosh on pub­lic vis­its to the inte­ri­or.)

Back in 2015, Roes’ com­pan­ion, archi­tec­tur­al his­to­ri­an Heleen West­er­hui­js, was invit­ed to inspect the attic, where she dis­cov­ered impres­sive orig­i­nal beams along­side 20th-cen­tu­ry rein­force­ments.

While the direc­tors of the home­stead active­ly rec­og­nize the com­mu­ni­ty that now sur­rounds it with events like an upcom­ing cel­e­bra­tion of Hait­ian cul­ture and Vodou, and hands on activ­i­ties include urban farm­ing and com­post­ing, the orig­i­nal set­tlers of New Nether­land (aka New Ams­ter­dam, aka New York City) remain a major focus.

Any Amer­i­can or Cana­di­an with the sur­name Wyck­off (or one of its more than 50 vari­ants) can and should con­sid­er it their ances­tral home, as they are almost cer­tain­ly descend­ed from Pieter and Gri­et­je. While many thou­sands now bear the name, Pieter was the first. Vol­un­teer geneal­o­gist Lynn Wyck­off explains:

After the Eng­lish assumed con­trol of New Nether­land, res­i­dents prac­tic­ing patronymics (a nam­ing sys­tem that uti­lized one’s father’s name in place of a sur­name) were required to adopt, or freeze, sur­names that could be passed down each gen­er­a­tion. Pieter Clae­sen chose the name Wykhof, which most of his descen­dants have spelled Wyck­off. Despite many unfound­ed claims over the years regard­ing both Pieter’s ances­try and choice of sur­name, there is no record of Pieter’s parent­age; but there is sub­stan­tial evi­dence that he chose the name Wykhof in recog­ni­tion of a farm by the same name out­side of Marien­hafe, Ger­many where his fam­i­ly were like­ly ten­ants.

A hand­ful of Wyck­off fam­i­ly mem­bers left com­ments on the New Nether­land Now video, includ­ing Don­ald, who wrote of his vis­it:

It was an odd  feel­ing to touch the hand-hewn sur­face of a sup­port­ing beam cut and installed by my ances­tor, hun­dreds of years ago.  Since I am a Wyck­off, I was allowed to see some of the “off tour” bits of the house.  I live over 3k miles away, so my feet will prob­a­bly nev­er touch the ground there again.  But I’m glad NY and a lot of won­der­ful peo­ple have main­tained my ances­tral home so well and for so many years.  Hope­ful­ly it has many hun­dreds of years of life remain­ing so that peo­ple can recall a time when Flat­bush was more of a farm than a city.

If you are a Wyck­off (or one of its vari­ants), you’re invit­ed to keep the Wyck­off Association’s fam­i­ly tree up to date by send­ing word of births, deaths, mar­riages, and any per­ti­nent genealog­i­cal details such as edu­ca­tion, mil­i­tary ser­vice, pro­fes­sion, places of res­i­dence and the like.

Explore a col­lec­tion of edu­ca­tion­al activ­i­ties, lessons, and col­or pages relat­ed to the Wyck­off House here.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Immac­u­late­ly Restored Film Lets You Revis­it Life in New York City in 1911

New York City: A Social His­to­ry (A Free Online Course from N.Y.U

Ani­ma­tions Visu­al­ize the Evo­lu­tion of Lon­don and New York: From Their Cre­ation to the Present Day

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Her family’s trips to the Wyck­off House were includ­ed in the lat­est, NYC muse­um-themed issue of her zine, the East Vil­lage Inky. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Rapper Post Malone Performs a 15-Song Set of Nirvana Songs, Paying Tribute to Kurt Cobain

in Music | June 23rd, 2022

Nir­vana’s cul­tur­al stay­ing pow­er is a tes­ta­ment to the cross-gen­er­a­tional mag­ic that hap­pened when Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselić, and Dave Grohl played togeth­er for only a hand­ful of years in the 90s. Their influ­ence goes far deep­er than 90s nos­tal­gia for a grunge trend or the celebri­ty sta­tus of the late Cobain. Now almost 30 years after the front­man’s 1994 sui­cide, we see that influ­ence on a gen­er­a­tion born too late to see him live — one influ­enced more by hip hop than gui­tar rock and far less inter­est­ed in chal­leng­ing the cap­i­tal­ist sta­tus quo.

For artists like rap­per Post Mal­one, born July 4, 1995, Cobain is a major song­writ­ing influ­ence, even if Post Mal­one’s music sounds lit­tle like Nir­vana. “I loved Kurt so much,” says Mal­one, “and he’s been such an inspi­ra­tion to me, musi­cal­ly.” To prove his love, he’s tat­tooed Cobain on “two dif­fer­ent parts of his body,”  Shel­don Pearce writes at The New York­er, though Cobain might not have “rec­i­p­ro­cat­ed the love — the rapper’s stint shilling for Bud Light prob­a­bly wouldn’t fly, and Cobain once said white artists should leave rap to Black artists because ‘the white man ripped off the Black man long enough.’ ”

But that’s the thing about idols: once they’re gone, they no longer get a say in who wor­ships them and how. Last year, Post deliv­ered a Nir­vana trib­ute to ben­e­fit the UN’s COVID-19 Sol­i­dar­i­ty Response Fund for the World Health Orga­ni­za­tion. He did so respect­ful­ly. Backed by Travis Bark­er on drums, Bri­an Lee on bass, and Nic Mack on gui­tar, he hon­ored Cobain by don­ning a flower print dress, and by ask­ing his daugh­ter, Fran­cis Bean Cobain, for per­mis­sion to do the 15-song set. “I could nev­er want to offend any­body,” he told Howard Stern, “by try­ing to show sup­port, so I just want­ed to make sure that every­thing was okay — and it was okay, and we raised mon­ey for a good cause, and we got to play some of the most f*cking epic songs ever.”

Court­ney Love expressed sup­port, writ­ing, “Goose­bumps… Go have a mar­gari­ta Post Mal­one. Noth­ing but love from here.” Grohl and Novoselić also gave Mal­one their full approval. The for­mer Nir­vana bassist wrote that he was “hold­ing emo­tions back the whole show.” In a lat­er inter­view, Grohl com­ment­ed, “Even the die-hard Nir­vana peo­ple that I know were like, ‘dude, he’s kind of killing it right now.’ ” And they were right. Above, see the one-off band play “Fran­cis Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seat­tle,” “Come As You Are,” “About a Girl,” “Heart-Shaped Box,” and more clas­sic Nir­vana songs. The livestream raised $500,000 (includ­ing match­ing funds from Google) to help fight COVID-19 around the world.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Nir­vana Per­form as an Open­ing Band, Two Years Before Their Break­out Album Nev­er­mind (1989)

How Nirvana’s Icon­ic “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” Came to Be: An Ani­mat­ed Video Nar­rat­ed by T‑Bone Bur­nett Tells the True Sto­ry

The Record­ing Secrets of Nirvana’s Nev­er­mind Revealed by Pro­duc­er Butch Vig

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

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Computer Scientist Andrew Ng Presents a New Series of Machine Learning Courses–an Updated Version of the Popular Course Taken by 5 Million Students

in Artificial Intelligence, Online Courses, Technology | June 22nd, 2022

Back in 2017, Cours­era co-founder and for­mer Stan­ford com­put­er sci­ence pro­fes­sor Andrew Ng launched a five-part series of cours­es on “Deep Learn­ing” on the edtech plat­form, a series meant to “help you mas­ter Deep Learn­ing, apply it effec­tive­ly, and build a career in AI.” These cours­es extend­ed his ini­tial Machine Learn­ing course, which has attract­ed almost 5 mil­lion stu­dents since 2012, in an effort, he said, to build “a new AI-pow­ered soci­ety.”

Ng’s goals are ambi­tious, to “teach mil­lions of peo­ple to use these AI tools so they can go and invent the things that no large com­pa­ny, or com­pa­ny I could build, could do.” His new Machine Learn­ing Spe­cial­iza­tion at Cours­era takes him sev­er­al steps fur­ther in that direc­tion with an “updat­ed ver­sion of [his] pio­neer­ing Machine Learn­ing course,” notes Cours­er­a’s descrip­tion, pro­vid­ing “a broad intro­duc­tion to mod­ern machine learn­ing.” The spe­cial­iza­tion’s three cours­es include 1) Super­vised Machine Learn­ing: Regres­sion and Clas­si­fi­ca­tion, 2) Advanced Learn­ing Algo­rithms, and 3) Unsu­per­vised Learn­ing, Rec­om­menders, Rein­force­ment Learn­ing. Col­lec­tive­ly, the cours­es in the spe­cial­iza­tion will teach you to:

  • Build machine learn­ing mod­els in Python using pop­u­lar machine learn­ing libraries NumPy and scik­it-learn.
  • Build and train super­vised machine learn­ing mod­els for pre­dic­tion and bina­ry clas­si­fi­ca­tion tasks, includ­ing lin­ear regres­sion and logis­tic regres­sion.
  • Build and train a neur­al net­work with Ten­sor­Flow to per­form mul­ti-class clas­si­fi­ca­tion.
  • Apply best prac­tices for machine learn­ing devel­op­ment so that your mod­els gen­er­al­ize to data and tasks in the real world.
  • Build and use deci­sion trees and tree ensem­ble meth­ods, includ­ing ran­dom forests and boost­ed trees.
  • Use unsu­per­vised learn­ing tech­niques for unsu­per­vised learn­ing: includ­ing clus­ter­ing and anom­aly detec­tion.
  • Build rec­om­mender sys­tems with a col­lab­o­ra­tive fil­ter­ing approach and a con­tent-based deep learn­ing method.
  • Build a deep rein­force­ment learn­ing mod­el.

The skills stu­dents learn in Ng’s spe­cial­iza­tion will bring them clos­er to careers in big data, machine learn­ing, and AI engi­neer­ing. Enroll in Ng’s Spe­cial­iza­tion here free for 7 days and explore the mate­ri­als in all three cours­es. If you’re con­vinced the spe­cial­iza­tion is for you, you’ll pay $49 per month until you com­plete the three-course spe­cial­iza­tion, and you’ll earn a cer­tifi­cate upon com­ple­tion of a hands-on project using all of your new machine learn­ing skills. You can sign up for the Machine Learn­ing Spe­cial­iza­tion here.

Note: Open Cul­ture has a part­ner­ship with Cours­era. If read­ers enroll in cer­tain Cours­era cours­es and pro­grams, it helps sup­port Open Cul­ture.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

New Deep Learn­ing Cours­es Released on Cours­era, with Hope of Teach­ing Mil­lions the Basics of Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Cours­era Makes Cours­es & Cer­tifi­cates Free Dur­ing Coro­n­avirus Quar­an­tine: Take Cours­es in Psy­chol­o­gy, Music, Well­ness, Pro­fes­sion­al Devel­op­ment & More Online

Google & Cours­era Launch Career Cer­tifi­cates That Pre­pare Stu­dents for Jobs in 6 Months: Data Ana­lyt­ics, Project Man­age­ment and UX Design

Google Unveils a Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing & E‑Commerce Cer­tifi­cate: 7 Cours­es Will Help Pre­pare Stu­dents for an Entry-Lev­el Job in 6 Months       

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

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The Otherworldly Art of William Blake: An Introduction to the Visionary Poet and Painter

in Art, History, Poetry, Religion | June 22nd, 2022

Giv­en his achieve­ments in the realms of both poet­ry and paint­ing, to say noth­ing of his com­pul­sions to reli­gious and philo­soph­i­cal inquiry, it’s tempt­ing to call William Blake a “Renais­sance man.” But he lived in the Eng­land of the mid-eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry to the near mid-nine­teenth, mak­ing him a Roman­tic Age man — and in fact, accord­ing to the cur­rent his­tor­i­cal view, one of that era’s defin­ing fig­ures. “Today he is rec­og­nized as the most spir­i­tu­al of artists,” say the nar­ra­tor of the video intro­duc­tion above, “and an impor­tant poet in Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture.” And whether real­ized on can­vas or in verse, his visions have retained their pow­er over the cen­turies.

That pow­er, how­ev­er, went prac­ti­cal­ly unac­knowl­edged in Blake’s life­time. Most who knew him regard­ed him as some­thing between an eccen­tric and a mad­man, a per­cep­tion his grand­ly mys­ti­cal ideas and vig­or­ous rejec­tion of both insti­tu­tions and con­ven­tions did lit­tle to dis­pel.

Blake did­n’t believe that the world is as we see it. Rather, he sought to access much stranger under­ly­ing truths using his for­mi­da­ble imag­i­na­tion, exer­cised both in his art and in his dreams. Cul­ti­vat­ing this capac­i­ty allows us to “see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heav­en in a Wild Flower / Hold Infin­i­ty in the palm of your hand / And Eter­ni­ty in an hour.”

Those words come from one of Blake’s “Auguries of Inno­cence.” Despite being one of his best-known poems, it mere­ly hints at the depth and breadth of his world­view — indeed, his view of all exis­tence. His entire cor­pus, writ­ten, paint­ed, and print­ed, con­sti­tutes a kind of atlas of this rich­ly imag­ined ter­ri­to­ry to which “The Oth­er­world­ly Art of William Blake” pro­vides an overview. Though very much a prod­uct of the time and place in which he lived, Blake clear­ly drew less inspi­ra­tion from the world around him than from the world inside him. Real­i­ty, for him, was to be cul­ti­vat­ed — and rich­ly — with­in his own being. Still today, the chimeri­cal con­vic­tion of his work dares us to cul­ti­vate the real­i­ty with­in our­selves.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Enter an Archive of William Blake’s Fan­tas­ti­cal “Illu­mi­nat­ed Books”: The Images Are Sub­lime, and in High Res­o­lu­tion

William Blake’s Paint­ings Come to Life in Two Ani­ma­tions

William Blake’s Mas­ter­piece Illus­tra­tions of the Book of Job (1793–1827)

William Blake’s Hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry Illus­tra­tions of John Milton’s Par­adise Lost

William Blake Illus­trates Mary Wollstonecraft’s Work of Children’s Lit­er­a­ture, Orig­i­nal Sto­ries from Real Life (1791)

William Blake: The Remark­able Print­ing Process of the Eng­lish Poet, Artist & Vision­ary

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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What Is the House of the Rising Sun?: An Introduction to the Origins of the Classic Song

in Music | June 22nd, 2022

Every­one knows the song, a warn­ing from a man or woman return­ing to the place that will destroy them. Yet they can­not turn back. The tragedy of “House of the Ris­ing Sun” lies in its inevitabil­i­ty. “The nar­ra­tor seems to have lost his free will,” writes Jim Beviglia, caught, per­haps, in the grip of an unbeat­able addic­tion. As soon as we hear those first few notes, we know the sto­ry will end in ruin. But what kind of ruin takes place there? Is the House of the Ris­ing Sun a broth­el or a gam­bling den, or both? Was it a real place in New Orleans? Maybe a pub in Eng­land? Or a place in the anony­mous songwriter’s imag­i­na­tion?

Eric Bur­don and the Ani­mals, who pop­u­lar­ized the song world­wide when they record­ed and released it in 1964, did­n’t know. Even Alan Lomax could­n’t suss out the song’s ori­gin, though he tried, and sus­pect­ed it may have orig­i­nat­ed with an Eng­lish farm work­er named Har­ry Cox who sang a song called “She Was a Rum One” with a sim­i­lar open­ing line.

Dave Van Ronk and Bob Dylan played “House of the Ris­ing Sun” in cof­fee­hous­es. Bur­don him­self picked the song up from the Eng­lish folk scene, and the Ani­mals first cov­ered the slow, sin­is­ter tune when they opened for Chuck Berry because they knew they “could­n’t out­rock” the gui­tar great.

“House of the Ris­ing Sun” has been record­ed by Lead Bel­ly, Woody Guthrie, Nina Simone, Dol­ly Par­ton, and vir­tu­al­ly every oth­er artist con­cerned with Amer­i­can roots music. “It’s so deep in the heart of this cul­ture,” says New Orleans gui­tarist Reid Net­ter­ville, who finds that peo­ple from all over the world know the lyrics when he plays the song on street cor­ners. Since the Ani­mals’ record­ing, it has become “one of the sin­gle most per­formed songs in music his­to­ry,” notes Poly­phon­ic in the video at the top, “with ren­di­tions in every genre you can think of, from met­al to reg­gae to dis­co.”

Maybe audi­ences around the world con­nect with this tale of ruin and despair because its set­ting is so mys­te­ri­ous and yet so per­fect­ly placed. Bur­don him­self, who vis­its New Orleans often, gets invit­ed to all sorts of strange places in the city, he says, pur­port­ing to be the tit­u­lar “House”: “I’d go to wom­en’s pris­ons, coke deal­ers’ hous­es, insane asy­lums, mens’ pris­ons, pri­vate par­ties. They just want­ed to get me there.” The ambi­gu­i­ty between the real and the sym­bol­ic makes the song adapt­able to any num­ber of dif­fer­ent kinds of voic­es. “It’s been described as an abstract metaphor but also a ref­er­ence to real his­tor­i­cal places,” notes Poly­phon­ic, and it’s gone from the lament of a “ruined” female nar­ra­tor to a dis­solute male voice with only a change in pro­nouns.

While there may be a hand­ful of spu­ri­ous claimants to the title of real House of the Ris­ing Sun, the ori­gin of the song remains unknown. But its allure is not a mys­tery. The house is “a place of vice, a place of dark­ness and fore­bod­ing” — a place that we both can’t seem to resist and that we’d do best to stay clear of. We’ll always have curios­i­ty about the dark cor­ners of the world; the warn­ing of “House of the Ris­ing Sun” will always be per­ti­nent, and moth­ers, often trag­i­cal­ly to no avail, will always tell their chil­dren about it, wher­ev­er and what­ev­er that den of sin may be.…

Relat­ed Con­tent:

B.B. King Explains in an Ani­mat­ed Video Whether You Need to Endure Hard­ship to Play the Blues

Stream 35 Hours of Clas­sic Blues, Folk, & Blue­grass Record­ings from Smith­son­ian Folk­ways: 837 Tracks Fea­tur­ing Lead Bel­ly, Woody Guthrie & More

Aretha Franklin’s Pitch-Per­fect Per­for­mance in The Blues Broth­ers, the Film That Rein­vig­o­rat­ed Her Career (1980)

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

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The Biology of Bonsai Trees: The Science Behind the Traditional Japanese Art Form

in Art, Biology | June 21st, 2022

The art of bon­sai orig­i­nat­ed in Chi­na. As sub­se­quent­ly refined in Japan, its tech­niques pro­duce minia­ture trees that give aes­thet­ic plea­sure to peo­ple all around Asia and the wider world beyond. This appre­ci­a­tion is reflect­ed in the cou­ple-on-the-street inter­view footage incor­po­rat­ed into “The Biol­o­gy Behind Bon­sai Trees,” the video above from Youtu­ber Jon­ny Lim, bet­ter known as The Back­pack­ing Biol­o­gist. Not only does Lim gath­er pos­i­tive views on bon­sai around Los Ange­les, he also finds in that same city a bon­sai nurs­ery run by Bob Pressler, who has spent more than half a cen­tu­ry mas­ter­ing the art.

Even Pressler admits that he does­n’t ful­ly under­stand the biol­o­gy of bon­sai. Lim’s search for sci­en­tif­ic answers sends him to “some­thing called the api­cal meris­tem.” That’s the part of the tree made of “stem cells found at the tips of the shoots and roots.” Stem cells, as you may remem­ber from their long moment in the news a few years ago, have the poten­tial to turn into any kind of cell.

The cells of bon­sai are the same size as those of reg­u­lar trees, research has revealed, but thanks to the delib­er­ate cut­ting of roots and resul­tant restric­tion of nutri­ents to the api­cal meris­tem, their leaves are made up of few­er cells in total. Lim draws an anal­o­gy with bak­ing cook­ies of dif­fer­ent sizes: “The com­po­nents are exact­ly the same. The only dif­fer­ence is that bon­sais have less start­ing mate­r­i­al.”

Hav­ing gained his own appre­ci­a­tion for bon­sai, Lim also wax­es poet­ic on how these minia­ture trees “still grow on the face of adver­si­ty, and they do so per­fect­ly.” But as one com­menter replies, “Why recre­ate adver­si­ty?” Claim­ing that the process is “crip­pling trees for just aes­thet­ics,” this indi­vid­ual presents one of the known cas­es against bon­sai. But that case, accord­ing to the experts Lim con­sults, is based on cer­tain com­mon mis­con­cep­tions about the process­es involved: that the wires used to posi­tion limbs “tor­ture” the trees, for exam­ple. But as oth­ers point out, do those who make these anti-bon­sai argu­ments feel just as pained about the many lawns that get mown down each and every week?

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Art & Phi­los­o­phy of Bon­sai

This 392-Year-Old Bon­sai Tree Sur­vived the Hiroshi­ma Atom­ic Blast & Still Flour­ish­es Today: The Pow­er of Resilience

What Makes the Art of Bon­sai So Expen­sive?: $1 Mil­lion for a Bon­sai Tree, and $32,000 for Bon­sai Scis­sors

The Art of Cre­at­ing a Bon­sai: One Year Con­densed Con­densed Into 22 Mes­mer­iz­ing Min­utes

Daisu­gi, the 600-Year-Old Japan­ese Tech­nique of Grow­ing Trees Out of Oth­er Trees, Cre­at­ing Per­fect­ly Straight Lum­ber

A Dig­i­tal Ani­ma­tion Com­pares the Size of Trees: From the 3‑Inch Bon­sai, to the 300-Foot Sequoia

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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

in Music, Neuroscience | June 21st, 2022

Image by Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

This Spo­ti­fy playlist (play below) con­tains music by Prince and the Grate­ful Dead, Weez­er and Bil­lie Hol­l­i­day, Kanye West and Johannes Brahms, Hans Zim­mer and David Bowie, Wolf­gang Amadeus Mozart and Radio­head. Per­haps you’d expect such a range from a 712-track playlist that runs near­ly 66 hours. Yet what you’ll hear if you lis­ten to it isn’t just the col­lec­tion of a mod­ern-day “eclec­tic” music-lover, but a neu­ro­sci­en­tist-curat­ed arrange­ment of pieces that all cause us to expe­ri­ence the same sen­sa­tion: fris­son.

As usu­al, it takes a French word to evoke a con­di­tion or expe­ri­ence that oth­er terms sim­ply don’t encom­pass. Quot­ing one def­i­n­i­tion that calls fris­son “a sud­den feel­ing or sen­sa­tion of excite­ment, emo­tion or thrill,” Big Think’s Sam Gilbert also cites a recent study sug­gest­ing that “one can expe­ri­ence fris­son when star­ing at a bril­liant sun­set or a beau­ti­ful paint­ing; when real­iz­ing a deep insight or truth; when read­ing a par­tic­u­lar­ly res­o­nant line of poet­ry; or when watch­ing the cli­max of a film.”

Gilbert notes that fris­son has also been described as a “pilo­erec­tion” or “skin orgasm,” about which researchers have not­ed sim­i­lar “bio­log­i­cal and psy­cho­log­i­cal com­po­nents to sex­u­al orgasm.” As for what trig­gers it, he points to an argu­ment made by musi­col­o­gist David Huron: “If we ini­tial­ly feel bad, and then we feel good, the good feel­ing tends to be stronger than if the good expe­ri­ence occurred with­out the pre­ced­ing bad feel­ing.” When music induces two suf­fi­cient­ly dif­fer­ent kinds of emo­tions, each is height­ened by the con­trast between them.

Con­trast plays a part in artis­tic pow­er across media: not just music but film, lit­er­a­ture, dra­ma, paint­ing, and much else besides. But to achieve max­i­mum effect, the artist must make use of it in a way that, as Gilbert finds argued in a Fron­tiers in Psy­chol­o­gy arti­cle, caus­es “vio­lat­ed expec­ta­tion.” A fris­son-rich song primes us to expect one thing and then deliv­ers anoth­er, ide­al­ly in a way that pro­duces a strong emo­tion­al con­trast. No mat­ter your degree of musi­cophil­ia, some of the 712 tracks on this playlist will be new to you, allow­ing you to expe­ri­ence their ver­sion of this phe­nom­e­non for the first time. Oth­ers will be deeply famil­iar — yet some­how, after all these years or even decades of lis­ten­ing, still able to bring the fris­son.

via Big Think

Relat­ed con­tent:

Music That Helps You Write: A Free Spo­ti­fy Playlist of Your Selec­tions

How Good Are Your Head­phones? This 150-Song Playlist, Fea­tur­ing Steely Dan, Pink Floyd & More, Will Test Them Out

Eve­lyn Glen­nie (a Musi­cian Who Hap­pens to Be Deaf) Shows How We Can Lis­ten to Music with Our Entire Bod­ies

Why Do Sad Peo­ple Like to Lis­ten to Sad Music? Psy­chol­o­gists Answer the Ques­tion in Two Stud­ies

The Dis­tor­tion of Sound: A Short Film on How We’ve Cre­at­ed “a McDonald’s Gen­er­a­tion of Music Con­sumers”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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