700 Years of Persian Manuscripts Now Digitized and Available Online

in Archives, Art, Books, Literature, Poetry, Religion | April 5th, 2019

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.

via Atlas Obscura

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

800 Illuminated Medieval Manuscripts Are Now Online: Browse & Download Them Courtesy of the British Library and Bibliothèque Nationale de France

800+ Treasured Medieval Manuscripts to Be Digitized by Cambridge & Heidelberg Universities

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

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The Fantastical Sketchbook of a Medieval Inventor: See Designs for Flamethrowers, Mechanical Camels & More (Circa 1415)

in History, Technology | April 5th, 2019

History remembers, and will likely never forget, the name of Renaissance Italian inventor Leonardo da Vinci. But what about the name of Renaissance Italian inventor Johannes de Fontana? Though he came along a couple of generations before Leonardo, Johannes de Fontana, also known as Giovanni Fontana, seems to have had no less fertile an imagination. Where Leonardo came up with everything from musical instruments to hydraulic pumps to war machines to self-supporting bridges, Fontana’s inventions include “fire-breathing automatons, pulley-powered angels, and the earliest surviving drawing of a magic lantern device.”

Those words come from Portland State University’s Bennett Gilbert, who takes a dive into Fontana’s notebook of “designs for a variety of fantastic and often impossible inventions” at the Public Domain Review.

Filled some time between the years 1415 and 1420, its 68 drawings meant to entice potential patrons include plans for “mechanical camels for entertaining children, mysterious locks to guard treasure, flame-throwing contraptions to terrorize the defenders of besieged cities, huge fountains, musical instruments, actors’ masks, and many other wonders.”

It would seem that Fontana lacked the sense of practicality possessed by his successor Leonardo — and Leonardo dreamed up not just a variety of flying machines but a mechanical knight. That may have to do with the era in which Fontana lived, “more than two hundred years before the discoveries of Newton,” a time “of transition from medieval knowledge of the world to that of the Renaissance, which many now regard as the origin of early modern science.” And so his designs, many of them liberally decorated with unearthly-looking creatures and bursts of flame, strike us today as at most half plausible and at least half fantastical.

Fontana’s drawing style, too, reflects the state of human knowledge in the early fifteenth century: “The towers and rockets, water and fire, nozzles and pipes, pulleys and ropes, gears and grapples, wheels and beams, and grids and spheres that were an engineer’s occupation at the dawn of the Renaissance fill Fontana’s sketchbook. His way of illustrating his ideas, however, is distinctly medieval, lacking perspective and using a limited array of angles for displaying machine works.” Yet this makes Fontana’s notebook all the more fascinating to 21st-century eyes, and throws into contrast some of his more plausible inventions, such as “a magic lantern device, which transformed the light of fire into emotive display.”

Will some bold scholar of the early Renaissance one day argue that Fontana invented motion pictures? But perhaps the man who designed “an awe-inspiring fire-illuminated spectacle, most likely serving as a propaganda machine, for use in war and in peace” wouldn’t approve of a medium quite so ordinary. We might say that the most valuable legacy of Johannes de Fontana, more so than any of his inventions themselves, is the glimpse his notebook gives us into the the human imagination in his day, when fact and fantasy intermingled as they will never do again. And in the case of some technologies, we should probably feel relieved that they won’t: Fontana’s “life support system for patients undergoing gruesome surgeries” may be fascinating, but I can’t say I’d be eager to make use of it myself.

See his manuscript online here.

via the Public Domain Review

Leonardo da Vinci Draws Designs of Future War Machines: Tanks, Machine Guns & More

Buckminster Fuller Creates Striking Posters of His Own Inventions

Mark Twain’s Patented Inventions for Bra Straps and Other Everyday Items

The 10 Commandments of Chindōgu, the Japanese Art of Creating Unusually Useless Inventions

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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 Faceboo k.

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An Animated History of Dogs, Inspired by Keith Haring

in Animation, Biology, Education, K-12, Nature, Science | April 5th, 2019

That quivering teacup Chihuahua…

The long-suffering Labrador whose child-friendly reputation has led to a lifetime of ear tugging and tail pulling…

The wheezing French bulldog, whose owner has outfitted with a full wardrobe of hoodies, tutus, rain slickers, and pajamas…

All descended from wolves.

As anthropologist and science educator David Ian Howe explains in the animated TED-Ed lesson, A Brief History of Dogs, above, at first glance, canis lupus seemed an unlikely choice for man’s best friend.

For one thing, the two were in direct competition for elk, reindeer, bison, and other tasty prey wandering Eurasia during the Pleistocene Epoch.

Though both hunted in groups, running their prey to the point of exhaustion, only one roasted their kills, creating tantalizing aromas that drew bolder wolves ever-closer to the human camps.

The ones who willingly dialed down their wolfishness, making themselves useful as companions, security guards and hunting buddies, were rewarded come suppertime. Eventually, this mutually beneficial tail wagging became full on domestication, the first such animal to come under the human yoke.

The intense focus on purebreds didn’t really become a thing until the Victorians began hosting dog shows. The push to identify and promote breed-specific characteristics often came at a cost to the animals’ wellbeing, as Neil Pemberton and Michael Worboys point out in BBC History Magazine:

…the improvement of breeds towards ‘perfection’ was controversial. While there was approval for the greater regularity of type, many fanciers complained that standards were being set on arbitrary, largely aesthetic grounds by enthusiasts in specialist clubs, without concern for utility or the health of the animal. This meant that breeds were changing, and not always for the better. For example, the modern St Bernard was said to be a beautiful animal, but would be useless in Alpine rescue work.

Cat-fanciers, rest assured that the opposition received fair and equal coverage in a feline-centric TED-Ed lesson, published earlier this year.

And while we applaud TED-Ed for sparking our curiosity with its “Brief History of” series, covering topics as far ranging as cheese, numerical systems, goths, video games, and tea, surely we are not the only ones wondering why the late artist Keith Haring isn’t thanked or name checked in the credits?

Every canine-shaped image in this animation is clearly descended from his iconic barking dog.

While we can’t explain the omission, we can direct readers toward Jon Nelson’s great analysis of Haring’s relationship with dogs in Get Leashed:

They’re symbolic of unanswered questions, prevalent in the 80s: “Can I do this?” “Is this right?” “What are you doing?” “What is happening?” Dogs stand by people, barking or dancing along, sometimes in precarious scenarios, even involved in some of Haring’s explicitly sexual work. Dogs are neither approving nor disapproving of what people do in the images; their mouth angle is neutral or even happy. In some cases, human bodies wear a dog’s head, possibly stating that we know only our own enjoyment, unaware, like a dog, of life’s next stage or the consequences of our actions.

Visit Ethnocynology, David Ian Howe’s Instagram page about the ancient relationship between humans and dogs.

Discover David Lynch’s Bizarre & Minimalist Comic Strip, The Angriest Dog in the World (1983–1992)

Photos of Famous Writers (and Rockers) with their Dogs

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Join her in New York City April 15 for the next installment of her book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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Tibetan Musical Notation Is Beautiful

in History, Music, Religion | April 4th, 2019

Religions take the cast and hue of the cultures in which they find root. This was certainly true in Tibet when Buddhism arrived in the 7th century. It transformed and was transformed by the native religion of Bon. Of the many creative practices that arose from this synthesis, Tibetan Buddhist music ranks very highly in importance.

As in sacred music in the West, Tibetan music has complex systems of musical notation and a long history of written religious song. “A vital component of Tibetan Buddhist experience,” explains Google Arts & Cultures Buddhist Digital Resource Center, “musical notation allows for the transference of sacred sound and ceremony across generations. A means to memorize sacred text, express devotion, ward off feral spirts, and invoke deities.”

Some of these features may be alien to secular Western Buddhists focused on mindfulness and silent meditation, but to varying degrees, Tibetan schools place considerable value on the aesthetic experience of extra-human realms. As University of Tulsa musicologist John Powell writes, “the use of sacred sound” in Tibetan Buddhism, a “Mantrayana” tradition, acts “as a formula for the transformation of human consciousness.”

Tibetan musical notations, Google points out, “symbolically represent the melodies, rhythm patterns, and instrumental arrangements. In harmony with chanting, visualizations, and hand gestures, [Tibetan] music crucially guides ritual performance.” It is characterized not only by its integration of ritual dance, but also by a large collection of ritual instruments—including the long, Swiss-like horns suited to a mountain environment—and unique forms of polyphonic overtone singing.

The examples of musical notation you see here came from the appropriately-named Twitter account Musical Notation is Beautiful and typeface designer and researcher Jo De Baerdemaeker. At the top is a 19th century manuscript belonging to the “Yang” tradition, “the most highly involved and regarded chant tradition in Tibetan music,” notes the Schoyen Collection, “and the only one to rely on a system of notation (Yang-Yig).”

The curved lines represent “smoothly effected rises and falls in intonation.” The notation also “frequently contains detailed instructions concerning in what spirit the music should be sung (e.g. flowing like a river, light like bird song) and the smallest modifications to be made to the voice in the utterance of a vowel.” The Yang-Yig goes all the way back to the 6th century, predating Tibetan Buddhism, and “does not record neither the rhythmic pattern nor duration of notes.” Other kinds of music have their own types of notation, such as that in the piece above for voice, drums, trumpets, horns, and cymbals.

Though they articulate and elaborate on religious ideas from India, Tibet’s musical traditions are entirely its own. “It is essential to rethink the entire concept of melody and rhythm” to understand Tibetan Buddhist chant, writes Powell in a detailed overview of Tibetan music’s vocal and instrumental qualities. “Many outside Tibetan culture are accustomed to think of melody as a sequence of rising or falling pitches,” he says. “In Tibetan Tantric chanting, however, the melodic content occurs in terms of vowel modification and the careful contouring of tones.” Hear an example of traditional Tibetan Buddhist chant just above, and learn more about Tibetan musical notation at Google Arts & Culture.

via @NotationIsGreat

Free Online Course: Robert Thurman’s Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism (Recorded at Columbia U)

Leonard Cohen Narrates Film on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Featuring the Dalai Lama (1994)

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

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Alan Lomax’s Massive Music Archive Is Online: Features 17,000 Historic Blues & Folk Recordings

in Music | April 4th, 2019

A huge treasure trove of songs and interviews recorded by the legendary folklorist Alan Lomax from the 1940s into the 1990s have been digitized and made available online for free listening. The Association for Cultural Equity, a nonprofit organization founded by Lomax in the 1980s, has posted some 17,000 recordings.

“For the first time,” Cultural Equity Executive Director Don Fleming told NPR’s Joel Rose, “everything that we’ve digitized of Alan’s field recording trips are online, on our Web site. It’s every take, all the way through. False takes, interviews, music.”

It’s an amazing resource. For a quick taste, here are a few examples from one of the best-known areas of Lomax’s research, his recordings of traditional African American culture:

“John Henry” sung by prisoners at the Mississippi State Penitentiary, Parchman Farm, in 1947.
“Come Up Horsey,” a children’s lullaby sung in 1948 by Vera Hall, whose mother was a slave.
“In a Shanty in Old Shanty Town” performed by Big Bill Broonzy, 1952.
“Story of a slave who asked the devil to take his master,” told by Bessie Jones in 1961.

But that’s just scratching the surface of what’s inside the enormous archive. Lomax’s work extended far beyond the Deep South, into other areas and cultures of America, the Caribbean, Europe and Asia. “He believed that all cultures should be looked at on an even playing field,” his daughter Anna Lomax Wood told NPR. “Not that they’re all alike. But they should be given the same dignity, or they had the same dignity and worth as any other.”

You can listen to Rose’s piece about the archive on the NPR website, as well as a 1990 interview with Lomax by Terry Gross of Fresh Air, which includes sample recordings from Woody Guthrie, Jelly Roll Morton, Lead Belly and Mississippi Fred McDowell. To dive into the Lomax audio archive, you can search the vast collection by artist, date, genre, country and other categories.

Note: An earlier version of this post originally appeared on our site in March 2012.

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

Woody Guthrie Creates a Doodle-Filled List of 33 New Year’s Resolutions (1943): Beat Fascism, Write a Song a Day, and Keep the Hoping Machine Running

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800+ Treasured Medieval Manuscripts to Be Digitized by Cambridge & Heidelberg Universities

in Books, History, Libraries, Philosophy | April 4th, 2019

Western civilization may fast be going digital, but it still retains its roots in Ancient Greece. And so it makes a certain circle-closing sense to digitize the legacy left us by our Ancient Greek forebears and the medieval scholars who preserved it. Cambridge and Heidelberg, two of Europe’s oldest universities, this month announced their joint intention to embark upon just such a project. It will take two years and cost £1.6 million, reports the BBC, but it will digitize “more than 800 volumes featuring the works of Plato and Aristotle, among others.” As the announcement of the project puts it, the texts will then “join the works of Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, Stephen Hawking and Alfred Lord Tennyson on the Cambridge Digital Library.”

These medieval and early modern Greek manuscripts, which date more specifically “from the early Christian period to the early modern era (about 1500 — 1700 AD),” present their digitizers with certain challenges, not least the “fragile state” of their medieval binding.

But as Heidelberg University Library director Dr. Veit Probst says in the announcement, “Numerous discoveries await. We still lack detailed knowledge about the production and provenance of these books, about the identities and activities of their scribes, their artists and their owners – and have yet to uncover how they were studied and used, both during the medieval period and in the centuries beyond.” And from threads including “the annotations and marginalia in the original manuscripts” a “rich tapestry of Greek scholarship will be woven.”

This massive undertaking involves not just Cambridge and Heidelberg but the Vatican as well. Together Heidelberg University and the Vatican possess the entirety of the Bibliotheca Palatina, split between the libraries of the two institutions, and the digitization of the “mother of all medieval libraries” previously featured here on Open Culture, is a part of the project. This collected wealth of texts includes not just the work of Plato, Aristotle, and Homer as they were “copied and recopied throughout the medieval period,” in the words of Cambridge University Library Keeper of Rare Books and Early Manuscripts Dr. Suzanne Paul, but a great many other “multilingual, multicultural, multifarious works, that cross borders, disciplines and the centuries” as well. And with luck, their digital copies will stick around for centuries of Western civilization to come.

Behold 3,000 Digitized Manuscripts from the Bibliotheca Palatina: The Mother of All Medieval Libraries Is Getting Reconstructed Online

Explore 5,300 Rare Manuscripts Digitized by the Vatican: From The Iliad & Aeneid, to Japanese & Aztec Illustrations

How the Mysteries of the Vatican Secret Archives Are Being Revealed by Artificial Intelligence

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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 Faceboo k.

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NASA Captures First Air-to-Air Images of Supersonic Shockwaves Interacting in Flight

in Technology | April 4th, 2019

“We never dreamt that it would be this clear, this beautiful.” That’s how NASA scientist J.T. Heineck responded when he got his first glimpse of images that captured “the first-ever images of the interaction of shockwaves from two supersonic aircraft in flight.”

NASA writes:

The images feature a pair of T‑38s from the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base, flying in formation at supersonic speeds. The T‑38s are flying approximately 30 feet away from each other, with the trailing aircraft flying about 10 feet lower than the leading T‑38. With exceptional clarity, the flow of the shock waves from both aircraft is seen, and for the first time, the interaction of the shocks can be seen in flight.

“We’re looking at a supersonic flow, which is why we’re getting these shockwaves,” said Neal Smith, a research engineer with AerospaceComputing Inc. at NASA Ames’ fluid mechanics laboratory.

“What’s interesting is, if you look at the rear T‑38, you see these shocks kind of interact in a curve,” he said. “This is because the trailing T‑38 is flying in the wake of the leading aircraft, so the shocks are going to be shaped differently. This data is really going to help us advance our understanding of how these shocks interact…”

While NASA has previously used the schlieren photography technique to study shockwaves, the AirBOS 4 flights featured an upgraded version of the previous airborne schlieren systems, allowing researchers to capture three times the amount of data in the same amount of time.

“We’re seeing a level of physical detail here that I don’t think anybody has ever seen before,” said Dan Banks, senior research engineer at NASA Armstrong. “Just looking at the data for the first time, I think things worked out better than we’d imagined. This is a very big step.”

via BoingBoing

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NASA Creates Movie Parody Posters for Its Expedition Flights: Download Parodies of Metropolis, The Matrix, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and More

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A Brief Animated Introduction to the Life and Work of Frida Kahlo

in Art | April 3rd, 2019

Reducing an artist’s work to their biography produces crude understanding. But in very many cases, life and work cannot be teased apart. This applies not only to Sylvia Plath and her contemporary confessional poets but also to James Joyce and Marcel Proust and writers they admired, like Dante and Cervantes.

Such an artist too is Frida Kahlo, a practitioner of narrative self-portraits in a modernizing idiom that at the same time draws extensively on tradition. The literary nature of her art is a subject much neglected in popular discussions of her work. She wrote passionate, eloquent love poems and letters to her husband Diego Rivera and others, full of the same kind of visceral, violent, verdant imagery she deployed in her paintings.

More generally, the “obsession with Kahlo’s biography,” writes Maria Garcia at WBUR, ends up focusing “almost voyeuristically—on the tragic experiences of her life more than her artistry.” Those terribly compounded tragedies include surviving polio and, as you’ll learn in Iseult Gillespie’s short TED-Ed video above, a bus crash that nearly tore her in half. She began painting while recovering in bed. She was never the same and lived her life in chronic pain and frequent hospitalizations.

Perhaps a certain cult of Kahlo does place morbid fascination above real appreciation for her vision. “There’s a compulsion that’s satiated only through consuming Kahlo’s agony,” Garcia writes. But it’s also true that we cannot reasonably separate her story from her work. It’s just that there is so more to the story than suffering, all of it woven into the texts of her paintings. Kahlo’s mythology, or “inspirational personal brand,” ties together her commitments to Marxism and Mexico, indigenous culture, and native spirituality.

Like all self-mythologizers before her, she folded her personal story into that of her nation. And unlike European surrealists, who “used dreamlike images to explore the unconscious mind, Kahlo used them to represent her physical body and life experiences.” The experience of disability was no less a part of her ecology than mortality, symbolic landscapes, floral tapestries, animals, and the physically anguished experiences of love and loss.

Generous approaches to Kahlo’s work, and this short overview is one of them, implicitly recognize that there is no need to separate the life from the work, to the extent that the artist saw no reason to do so. But also, there is no need to isolate one narrative theme, whether intense physical or emotional suffering, from themes of self-transformation and transfiguration or experiments in re-creating personal identity as a political act.

Artists Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera Visit Leon Trotsky in Mexico: Vintage Footage from 1938

Frida Kahlo’s Passionate Love Letters to Diego Rivera

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

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High School Kids Stage Alien: The Play, Get Kudos from Ridley Scott and Sigourney Weaver

in Film, Theatre | April 3rd, 2019

High school drama departments tend to work from a pretty standardized repertoire, which makes sense given the strict limitations they work under: short time frames, school-sized budgets, teenage actors. The elaborate, Hollywood film-like productions staged by Max Fischer in Wes Anderson’s Rushmore speak to frustrated high-school theater directors and their fantasies about what they could put on stage with a bit more in the way of resources. But just this month, a real high-school drama club put on a show that out-Max Fischered Max Fischer, drawing not just the astonishment of the internet but the respect of one of the most eminent filmmakers alive.

“A New Jersey high school has found itself the unexpected recipient of online acclaim and viral attention for its recent stage production of Alien, the 1979 science-fiction thriller,” writes the New York Times’ Dave Itzkoff. “Alien: The Play, presented last weekend by the drama club of North Bergen High School, starred a cast of eight students in the film roles originally played by Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, John Hurt and Ian Holm. Whereas the movie had a budget in the range of about $10 million, Alien: The Play had costumes, props and set designs made mostly from donated and recycled materials.” Or as North Bergen student Justin Pierson put it in NJ.com’s video on the surprise hit: “This is going to sound really funny but (the set crew) used garbage essentially.”

With that “garbage” — “just anything that was lying around, like cardboard and metal” — they built not only a set that convincingly evokes the dark claustrophobia of the space ship Nostromo, but a shockingly accurate-looking alien, the terrifying creature originally born from the mind of Swiss illustrator H.R. Giger.

The young cast and crew get into detail about how they did it on Syfy’s Fandom File podcast: “Much of the attention has highlighted and embraced their DIY approach,” writes host Jordan Zakarin, and “they were endlessly creative in building the sets, with hand-puppet aliens, egg crate walls, a stuffed cat (the stand-in for Jones was a particularly ingenious idea), and other sweded props.”

Responses to the video clips of Alien: The Play that have circulated on the internet include a personal congratulatory message from the original film’s star Sigourney Weaver as well as a letter from its director Ridley Scott, which Alien: The Play’s director, North Bergen English-teacher-by-day Perfecto Cuervo, posted on Twitter. “Limitations often produce the best results because imagination and determination can surpass any shortfalls and determine the way forward — ALWAYS,” writes Scott, who has built his reputation in the film industry on taking firm and decisive action in the face of any and all production difficulties. He also offers both the funds for an encore production as well as a suggestion: “How about your next TEAM production being Gladiator.” No doubt Cuervo and his enterprising players are feeling pretty vindicated in their decision not to do Our Town right about now.

Ridley Scott Walks You Through His Favorite Scene from Blade Runner

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Orson Welles Presents Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, the Most Popular High School Play of All Time (1939)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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 Faceboo k.

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It’s Official: The “Nones”– People Who Profess No Religion–Are Now as Big as Catholics & Evangelicals in the United States

in Politics, Religion | April 3rd, 2019

The usual irregularities and shenanigans notwithstanding, the voting patterns of the U.S. electorate may undergo a sea change in the coming decades as the numbers of people who identify as non-religious continue to rise. One of the biggest demographic stories of the last few decades, the rise of the “nones” has been interpreted as a threat and as an inevitable reckoning for corrupt and scandal-ridden institutions driving millions of people out of churches across the country.

Politics and social issues are hardly the only reasons, though they poll second in list from a 2017 Pew survey. At number one is “I question a lot of religious teachings,” at number three, the slightly more vague “I don’t like religious organizations.” It’s maybe a surprise that nonbelief in God appears all the way at number four. Which speaks to an important point.

Not all of those exiting the pews have renounced their faith or converted to another, but huge numbers have joined the ranks of those who claim “no religion” in survey and polling data. Their numbers are now equivalent to Catholics and evangelicals, the two religious groups most in decline behind mainline Protestant churches. Political scientist Ryan P. Burge of Eastern Illinois University is not surprised. “It’s been a constant steady increase for 20 years now,” he says, pointing to data from a General Social Survey visualized in the graph above.

The last decade has seen the sharpest upturn yet, with “nones” now estimated at 23.1 percent of the population. If this rise—and subsequent plateaus and declines in the major religious groups surveyed (and the batch of non-Judeo-Christian “Other Faith”s dismissively lumped together)—continues, the shift could be dramatic. In 2014, 78% of the unaffiliated, according to Pew polling, were raised in and walked away from a religion. The shift in identity among young people tends to correlate with a shift in politics.

The “rising tide of religiously unaffiliated voters,” writes Jack Jenkins at Religion News Service, is “a group that a 2016 PRRI analysis found skews young and liberal.” It’s one that might offset the oversized influence of white evangelicals, who now make up 26% of the electorate and 22.5% of the population.

Any such conclusions should be drawn with several caveats. “Evangelicals punch way above their weight,” says Burge. “They turn out a bunch at the ballot box. That’s largely a function of the fact that they’re white and they’re old.” And, he might have added, many are in less economically precarious straits than their children and grandchildren, more susceptible to mass media messaging, and less prone, by design, to finding their vote suppressed. A 2016 PRRI report noted that “religiously unaffiliated Americans do not vote in the same percentages as evangelicals, and are often underrepresented at the polls.”

Additionally, and most importantly to point out any time these numbers come up: “the nones” is an entirely overdetermined category full of people who agree on little, but they’re not signing up for any church committees any time soon for a handful of loosely-related reasons. If herding atheists, only one part of this group, is like herding cats, trying to corral 23% of the population without any shared creed or specific ideology is corralling an even less predictable menagerie. We need to know far more about what people affirm, as well as what they deny, if we want a clearer picture of where the country’s politics—if not its government or policies—might be headed.

via Kottke

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

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