The First American Picture Book, Wanda Gág’s Millions of Cats (1928)

in Art, Books, History, K-12, Literature | April 2nd, 2019

For bet­ter (I’d say), or worse, the inter­net has turned cat peo­ple into what may be the world’s most pow­er­ful ani­mal lob­by. It has brought us fas­ci­nat­ing ani­mat­ed his­to­ries of cats and ani­mat­ed sto­ries about the cats of goth­ic genius and cat-lov­ing author and illus­tra­tor Edward Gorey; cats blithe­ly leav­ing inky paw­prints on medieval man­u­scripts and polite­ly but firm­ly refus­ing to be denied entry into a Japan­ese art muse­um. It has giv­en us no short­age of delight­ful pho­tos of artists with their cat famil­iars…

Cat antics and awe have always been a very online phe­nom­e­non, but the mys­te­ri­ous and ridicu­lous, diminu­tive beasts of prey have also always been insep­a­ra­ble from art and cul­ture. As fur­ther evi­dence, we bring you Mil­lions of Cats, like­ly the “first tru­ly Amer­i­can pic­ture book done by an Amer­i­can author/artist,” explains a site devot­ed to it.

“Pri­or to its pub­li­ca­tion in 1928, there were only Eng­lish pic­ture books for the children’s perusal.” The book “sky rock­et­ed Wan­da Gág into instant fame and set in stone her rep­u­ta­tion as a children’s author and illus­tra­tor.”

It set a stan­dard for Calde­cott-win­ning children’s lit­er­a­ture for close to a hun­dred years since its appear­ance, though the award did not yet exist at the time. The book’s cre­ator was “a fierce ide­al­ist and did not believe in alter­ing her own aes­theti­cism just because she was pro­duc­ing work for chil­dren. She liked to use styl­ized human fig­ures, asym­met­ri­cal com­po­si­tions, strong lines and slight spa­tial dis­tor­tion.” She also loved cats, as befits an artist of her inde­pen­dent tem­pera­ment, one shared by the likes of oth­er cat-lov­ing artists like T.S. Eliot and Charles Dick­ens.

Mil­lions of Cats’ author and illus­tra­tor may not share in the fame of so many oth­er artists who took pic­tures with their cats, but she and her cat Noopy were as pho­to­genic as any oth­er feline/human artis­tic duo, and she was a peer to the best of them. The book’s edi­tor, Ernes­tine Evans, wrote in the Nation that Mil­lions of Cats “is as impor­tant as the librar­i­ans say it is. Not only does it bring to book-mak­ing one of the most tal­ent­ed and orig­i­nal of Amer­i­can lith­o­g­ra­phers… but it is a mar­riage of pic­ture and tale that is per­fect­ly bal­anced.”

Gág (rhymes with “jog”) was “a cel­e­brat­ed artist… in the Green­wich Vil­lage-cen­tic Mod­ernist art scene in the 1920s,” writes Lithub, “a free-think­ing, sex-pos­i­tive left­ist who also designed her own clothes and trans­lat­ed fairy tales.” She adapt­ed the text from “a sto­ry she had made up to enter­tain her friends’ chil­dren,” with the mil­lions of cats mod­eled on Noopy. Gág is the found­ing moth­er of children’s book dynas­ties like The Cat in the Hat and Pete the Cat, an artist whom mil­lions of cat lovers can dis­cov­er again or for the first time in a New­bery-win­ning 2006 collector’s edi­tion.

Read a sum­ma­ry of the charm­ing sto­ry of Mil­lions of Cats at Lithub and learn more about her, the tal­ent­ed Gág fam­i­ly of artists, and her charm­ing, very cat-friend­ly house here.

via LitHub

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Insane­ly Cute Cat Com­mer­cials from Stu­dio Ghi­b­li, Hayao Miyazaki’s Leg­endary Ani­ma­tion Shop

Enter an Archive of 6,000 His­tor­i­cal Children’s Books, All Dig­i­tized and Free to Read Online

A Dig­i­tal Archive of 1,800+ Children’s Books from UCLA

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

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Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Beauty of Brutalist Architecture: An Introduction in Six Videos

in Architecture, History | April 2nd, 2019

Some peo­ple hate the mas­sive con­crete build­ings known as Bru­tal­ist, but they at least approve of the style’s name, res­o­nant as it seem­ing­ly is with asso­ci­a­tions of insen­si­tive, anti-human­ist bul­ly­ing. Those who love Bru­tal­ism also approve of the style’s name, but for a dif­fer­ent rea­son: they know it comes from the French béton brut, refer­ring to raw con­crete, that mate­r­i­al most gen­er­ous­ly used in Bru­tal­ist build­ings’ con­struc­tion. We’ve all seen Bru­tal­ist archi­tec­ture, mas­sive­ly embod­ied by Boston City Hall, Lon­don’s Bar­bi­can Cen­tre, UC Berke­ley’s Wurster Hall, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to’s Robarts Library, FBI Head­quar­ters in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., or any oth­er of the exam­ples that have stood since the style’s 1960s and 70s hey­day. But now, as more get slat­ed for demo­li­tion each year, it has fall­en to Bru­tal­is­m’s enthu­si­asts to defend an archi­tec­ture eas­i­ly seen as inde­fen­si­ble.

The aes­thet­ic of Bru­tal­ism, says host Roman Mars in an episode of the pod­cast 99% Invis­i­ble on the style, “can con­jure up asso­ci­a­tions with bomb shel­ters, Sovi­et-era or ‘third-world’ con­struc­tion, but as harsh as it looks, con­crete is an utter­ly opti­mistic build­ing mate­r­i­al.” In the 1920s “con­crete was seen as being the mate­r­i­al that would change the world. The mate­r­i­al seemed bound­less — read­i­ly avail­able in vast quan­ti­ties, and con­crete sprang up every­where — on bridges, tun­nels, high­ways, side­walks, and of course, mas­sive build­ings.”

It “pre­sent­ed the most effi­cient way to house huge num­bers of peo­ple, and gov­ern­ment pro­grams all over the world loved it — par­tic­u­lar­ly Sovi­et Rus­sia, but also lat­er in Europe and North Amer­i­ca.” Philo­soph­i­cal­ly, “con­crete was seen as hum­ble, capa­ble, and honest—exposed in all its rough glo­ry, not hid­ing behind any paint or lay­ers.”

How­ev­er noble the inten­tions behind these works of archi­tec­ture, though, it did­n’t take human­i­ty long to turn on Bru­tal­ism. Part of the prob­lem had to do with the dis­re­pair into which many of the high­est-pro­file Bru­tal­ist build­ings — social hous­ing com­plex­es, tran­sit cen­ters, gov­ern­ment offices — were allowed to fall imme­di­ate­ly after the ide­olo­gies that drove their con­struc­tion passed out of favor. But Bru­tal­ism also fell vic­tim to a pre­dictable cycle of fash­ion: as archi­tec­ture crit­ics often point out, the pub­lic of any era con­sis­tent­ly admires hun­dred-year-old build­ings, but con­demns (often lit­er­al­ly) fifty-year-old build­ings. New York­ers still lament the loss of their grand old Penn Sta­tion, but its ornate Beaux-Arts style no doubt looked as heavy-hand­ed and out-of-touch to as many peo­ple in the ear­ly 1960s, the time of its demo­li­tion, as Bru­tal­ism does today.

What, then, is the case for Bru­tal­ist archi­tec­ture? “It’s a sense of place. It’s a sense of the dra­ma of the space that they sur­round,” says This Bru­tal World author Peter Chad­wick the BBC clip at the top of the post. “It is sculp­ture. It’s gone beyond being just func­tion­al. It’s just beau­ti­ful sculp­ture that mir­rors its envi­ron­ment.” In the DW Euro­maxx video below, Deutsches Architek­tur­mu­se­um cura­tor Oliv­er Elser sees in Bru­tal­ism a valu­able les­son for build­ing today: “Make more from less. I think this way of think­ing, spa­tial gen­eros­i­ty with sim­pler mate­ri­als, is a time­ly stance for archi­tec­ture.” Archi­tec­tur­al his­to­ri­an Elain Har­wood calls Bru­tal­ism “a par­tic­u­lar archi­tec­ture for ambi­tious times gripped by a fer­vor for change. What­ev­er style you call it, the results are unique and have a hero­ic beau­ty than sets them apart from the archi­tec­ture of any oth­er era.” (In fact, some Bru­tal­ism enthu­si­asts who dis­like the label have put up the term “Hero­ic” instead.)

What­ev­er the artic­u­la­cy of Bru­tal­is­m’s defend­ers, the most effec­tive argu­ments for its preser­va­tion have been made with not words but images. Chad­wick first made his mark with his This Bru­tal House accounts on Twit­ter and Insta­gram, and a search on the lat­ter for the hash­tag #bru­tal­ism reveals the aston­ish­ing range and inten­si­ty of the style’s 21st-cen­tu­ry fan­dom. A fair few videos have also tak­en indi­vid­ual works of Bru­tal­ism as their sub­jects, from a reflex­ive­ly loathed sur­vivor like Boston City Hall to the unlike­ly upper-mid­dle-class oasis of the Bar­bi­can Cen­tre to a high-mind­ed projects now under the wreck­ing ball like Robin Hood Gar­dens. Despite how many peo­ple seem hap­py to see Bru­tal­ist build­ings go, some, like Aus­tralian archi­tect Shaun Carter in his TEDx Syd­ney Salon talk below, remind us of the val­ue of keep­ing our his­to­ry con­cretized, as it were, in the built envi­ron­ment around us.

Bunkers, Bru­tal­ism and Blood­y­mind­ed­ness: Con­crete Poet­ry writer Jonathan Meades puts it more force­ful­ly: “The destruc­tion of Bru­tal­ist build­ings is more than the destruc­tion of a par­tic­u­lar mode of archi­tec­ture. It is like burn­ing books. It’s a form of cen­sor­ship of the past, a dis­com­fit­ing past, by the present. It’s the revenge of a mediocre age on an age of epic grandeur.” To his mind, it’s the destruc­tion of evi­dence of “a deter­mined opti­mism that made us more potent than we have become,” of the fact that “we don’t mea­sure up against those who took risks, who flew and plunged to find new ways of doing things, who were not scared to exper­i­ment, who lived lives of per­pet­u­al inquiry.” If Bru­tal­ism has to go, it has to go because it reminds us that “once upon a time, we were not scared to address the Earth in the knowl­edge that the Earth would not respond, could not respond.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A is for Archi­tec­ture: 1960 Doc­u­men­tary on Why We Build, from the Ancient Greeks to Mod­ern Times 

Watch 50+ Doc­u­men­taries on Famous Archi­tects & Build­ings: Bauhaus, Le Cor­busier, Hadid & Many More

Bauhaus, Mod­ernism & Oth­er Design Move­ments Explained by New Ani­mat­ed Video Series

1,300 Pho­tos of Famous Mod­ern Amer­i­can Homes Now Online, Cour­tesy of USC

How Did the Romans Make Con­crete That Lasts Longer Than Mod­ern Con­crete? The Mys­tery Final­ly Solved

An Espres­so Mak­er Made in Le Corbusier’s Bru­tal­ist Archi­tec­tur­al Style: Raw Con­crete on the Out­side, High-End Parts on the Inside

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 Face­book.

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See Classic Performances of Joni Mitchell from the Very Early Years–Before She Was Even Named Joni Mitchell (1965/66)

in Music | April 2nd, 2019

A pho­to­graph of two old friends—Joni Mitchell and David Hockney—holding hands at Hockney’s L.A. solo exhi­bi­tion took over the inter­net for a moment, for sen­ti­men­tal rea­sons Guy Tre­bay laid out in The New York Times. These include the fact that “Ms. Mitchell has sel­dom been seen in pub­lic since she says she was giv­en a diag­no­sis of Morgel­lons dis­ease, and suf­fered a brain aneurysm in 2015,” and “despite the pres­ence of the cane she uses since hav­ing learned again to walk, Ms. Mitchell appears radi­ant and robust.”

Tre­bay does not include anoth­er rea­son that comes to mind: the two elder­ly artists, in their sweaters and adorable match­ing snap-brim hats, look like reg­u­lar old folks on the way to a week­ly chess match in the park. It’s a human­iz­ing por­trait of two giants of the art and music world, two peo­ple who, despite their wealth and fame, seem immi­nent­ly down-to-earth and approach­able; a warm and cheer­ful image, says Irish poet Sean Hewitt, who first shared it on Twit­ter, of “two suc­cess­ful peo­ple enjoy­ing their old age.”

Does­n’t every­one espe­cial­ly want that for Joni Mitchell? Of all the beloved sep­tu­a­ge­nar­i­an stars on the public’s radar these days, Mitchell gar­ners more well-wish­es than anyone—rallying gen­er­a­tions of stars and musi­cians for a 75th birth­day trib­ute con­cert last Novem­ber. The show appeared in the­aters (see a trail­er below) and has been released as a superb album of live cov­ers called Joni 75. So much of the love for Mitchell—her undis­put­ed bril­liance as a song­writer, gui­tarist, and per­former notwithstanding—has to do with the amount of per­son­al pain she over­came to make it as an artist.

Born Rober­ta Joan Ander­son in Alber­ta, Cana­da, her ear­ly strug­gles gave her musi­cal voice so much poignan­cy and authen­tic­i­ty. As she her­self has said, “I wouldn’t have pur­sued music but for trou­ble.” A bout with polio at age nine, a push against her par­ents’ expec­ta­tions to claim her iden­ti­ty as a visu­al artist and musi­cian… then, at age 20, Mitchell’s boyfriend left her, “three months preg­nant in an attic room with no mon­ey and win­ter com­ing on,” she lat­er wrote. She gave up the baby for adop­tion, and the deci­sion haunt­ed her for years. In 1982’s “Chi­nese Café,” she sang “Your kids are com­ing up straight / My child’s a stranger / I bore her / But I could not raise her.”

The fol­low­ing year, 1966, she mar­ried Amer­i­can folk singer Chuck Mitchell, took the name we know her by, and left Cana­da for the first time to make musi­cal his­to­ry. But first, she appeared on a Cana­di­an tele­vi­sion pro­gram called Let’s Sing Out, host­ed by folk singer Oscar Brand and record­ed on col­lege cam­pus­es across the coun­try between 1963 and 1967. The first ’65 episode at the top cap­tures Mitchell—then Joan Anderson—singing her unre­leased “Born to Take the High­way” at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Man­i­to­ba, a pre­scient song that “imag­ined cars and women dif­fer­ent­ly” than the typ­i­cal road songs of “pow­er­ful mus­cle cars” and “jacked-up mas­culin­i­ty and sex­u­al con­quest,” writes the blog Women in Rock.

“I was born to take the high­way / I was born to chase a dream,” she sings, cer­tain­ties that rever­ber­ate through her music and her life. Brand intro­duces Mitchell as an exam­ple of the move­ment in folk music toward the “self-writ­ten song.” She appears with him lat­er on that same broad­cast to sing “Blow Away the Morn­ing Dew” (a young Dave Van Ronk also appeared on the show). In sub­se­quent broad­casts in the com­pi­la­tion, we see “Joan Ander­son” more con­fi­dent­ly inhab­it the per­sona that would pro­pel her to fame first in Cana­da, then the States, then the world. She per­forms solo and with the Chap­ins, then, final­ly as Joni Mitchell, in two 1966 broad­casts. Find a track­list of each clas­sic per­for­mance below, and, if you haven’t already, take some time out to cel­e­brate Mitchel­l’s 75th by revis­it­ing the begin­nings of her career over fifty years ago.

 

Octo­ber 4, 1965 — With The Chap­ins and Dave Van Ronk

00:00 — Open­ing

01:22 — Born to Take the High­way

04:25 — Blow Away the Morn­ing Dew

 

Octo­ber 4, 1965 — With The Chap­ins and Patrick Sky

07:52 — Open­ing

09:05 — Favorite Col­or

12:00 — Me and My Uncle

 

Octo­ber 24, 1966 — With Bob Jason and Jim­my Drift­wood

15:08 — Open­ing

17:20 — Just Like Me

20:15 — Urge for Going

 

Octo­ber 24, 1966 — With Bob Jason and the Allen-Ward Trio

24:08 — Open­ing

25:05 — Night in the City

27:55 — Blue on Blue

30:30 — Let’s Get Togeth­er (Allen-Ward Trio)

33:37 — Prithee, Pret­ty Maid­en

 

Relat­ed Con­tent:

For Joni Mitchell’s 70th Birth­day, Watch Clas­sic Per­for­mances of “Both Sides Now” & “The Cir­cle Game” (1968)

Stream Joni Mitchell’s Com­plete Discog­ra­phy: A 17-Hour Playlist Mov­ing from Song to a Seag­ull (1968) to Shine (2007)

Joni Mitchell Sings an Aching­ly Pret­ty Ver­sion of “Both Sides Now” on the Mama Cass TV Show (1969)

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

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The Assassination of Jamal Khashoggi: A New Documentary

in Current Affairs | April 1st, 2019

“It’s been six months since agents from Sau­di Ara­bia killed the Wash­ing­ton Post colum­nist. What has been done in the after­math?” In this doc­u­men­tary, The Assas­si­na­tion of Jamal Khashog­gi, The Wash­ing­ton Post exam­ines Khashoggi’s writ­ings, his killing inside the Sau­di Con­sulate in Istan­bul and the Trump administration’s response.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

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Do Ethicists Behave Any Better Than the Rest of Us?: Here’s What the Research Shows

in Philosophy | April 1st, 2019

We’ve heard about the lawyer­ing fool who has him- or her­self for a client. The old proverb does not mean to say that lawyers are espe­cial­ly scrupu­lous, only that the intri­ca­cies of the law are best left to the pro­fes­sion­als, and that a per­son­al inter­est in a case mud­dies the waters. That may go dou­ble or triple for doc­tor­ing, though doc­tors don’t have to bear the lawyer’s social stig­ma.

But can we rea­son­ably expect doc­tors to live health­i­er lives than the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion? What about oth­er pro­fes­sions that seem to entail a rig­or­ous code of con­duct? Many peo­ple have late­ly been dis­abused of the idea that cler­gy or police have any spe­cial claim to moral upstand­ing­ness (on the con­trary)….

What about ethi­cists? Should we have high expec­ta­tions of schol­ars in this sub­set of phi­los­o­phy? There are no clever say­ings, no genre of jokes at their expense, but there are a few aca­d­e­m­ic stud­ies ask­ing some ver­sion of the ques­tion: does study­ing ethics make a per­son more eth­i­cal?

You might sus­pect that it does not, if you’re a cynic—or the answer might sur­prise you!.… Put more pre­cise­ly, in a recent study—“The Moral Behav­ior of Ethics Pro­fes­sors,” pub­lished in Philo­soph­i­cal Psy­chol­o­gy this year—the “open but high­ly rel­e­vant ques­tion” under con­sid­er­a­tion is “the rela­tion between eth­i­cal reflec­tion and moral action.”

The paper’s authors, pro­fes­sor Johannes Wanger of Austria’s Uni­ver­si­ty of Graz and grad­u­ate stu­dent Philipp Schöneg­ger from the Uni­ver­si­ty of St. Andrews in Scot­land, sur­veyed 417 pro­fes­sors in three cat­e­gories, reports Olivia Gold­hill at Quartz: “ethi­cists (philoso­phers focused on ethics), philoso­phers focused on non-eth­i­cal sub­jects, and oth­er pro­fes­sors.” The paper sur­veyed only Ger­man-speak­ing schol­ars, repli­cat­ing the meth­ods of a 2013 study focused on Eng­lish-speak­ing pro­fes­sors.

The ques­tions asked touched on “a range of moral top­ics, includ­ing organ dona­tion, char­i­ta­ble giv­ing, and even how often they called their moth­er.” After assess­ing gen­er­al views on the sub­jects, the authors “then asked the pro­fes­sors about their own behav­ior in each cat­e­go­ry.” We must assume a base lev­el of hon­esty among the respon­dents in their self-report­ed answers.

The results: “the researchers found no sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence in moral behav­ior” between those who make it their busi­ness to study ethics and those who study oth­er things. For exam­ple, the major­i­ty of the aca­d­e­mics sur­veyed agreed that you should call your moth­er: at 75% of non-philoso­phers, 70% of non-ethi­cists, and 65% of ethi­cists (whose num­bers might be low­er here because oth­er issues could seem weight­i­er to them by com­par­i­son).

When it comes to pick­ing up the phone to call mom at least twice a month, the num­bers were con­sis­tent­ly high, but ethi­cists did not rate par­tic­u­lar­ly high­er at 87% ver­sus 81% of non-ethi­cist philoso­phers and 89% of oth­ers. The sub­ject of char­i­ta­ble giv­ing may war­rant more scruti­ny. Ethi­cists rec­om­mend­ed donat­ing an aver­age of 6.9% of one’s annu­al salary, where non-ethi­cists said 4.6%  was enough and oth­ers said 5.1%. The num­bers for all three groups, how­ev­er, hov­er around four and half per­cent.

One notable excep­tion to this trend: veg­e­tar­i­an­ism: “Ethi­cists were both more like­ly to say that it was immoral to eat meat, and more like­ly to be veg­e­tar­i­ans them­selves.” But on aver­age, schol­ars of eth­i­cal behav­ior do not seem to behave bet­ter than their peers. Should we be sur­prised at this? Eric Schwitzgebel, a phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor at Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, River­side, and one of the authors of orig­i­nal, 2013 study, finds the results upset­ting.

Using the exam­ple of a hypo­thet­i­cal pro­fes­sor who makes the case for veg­e­tar­i­an­ism, then heads to the cafe­te­ria for a burg­er, Schwitzgebel refers to mod­ern-day philo­soph­i­cal ethics as “cheese­burg­er ethics.” Of his work on the behav­ior of ethi­cists with Stet­son University’s Joshua Rust, he writes, “nev­er once have we found ethi­cists as a whole behav­ing bet­ter than our com­par­i­son groups of oth­er pro­fes­sors…. Nonethe­less, ethi­cists do embrace more strin­gent moral norms on some issues.”

Should philoso­phers who hold such views aspire to be bet­ter? Can they be? Schöneg­ger and Wag­n­er frame the issue upfront in their recent ver­sion of the study (which you can read in full here), with a quote from the Ger­man philoso­pher Max Schel­er: “sign­posts do not walk in the direc­tion they point to.” Ethi­cists draw con­clu­sions about ideals of human behav­ior using the tools of phi­los­o­phy. They show the way but should not per­son­al­ly set them­selves up as exem­plars or role-mod­els. As one high-pro­file case of a very bad­ly-behaved ethi­cist sug­gests, this might not do the pro­fes­sion any favors.

Schwitzgebel is not con­tent with this answer. The prob­lem, he writes at Aeon, may be pro­fes­sion­al­iza­tion itself, impos­ing an unnat­ur­al dis­tance between word and deed. “I’d be sus­pi­cious of any 21st-cen­tu­ry philoso­pher who offered up her- or him­self as a mod­el of wise liv­ing,” he writes, “This is no longer what it is to be a philosopher—and those who regard them­selves as wise are in any case almost always mis­tak­en. Still, I think, the ancient philoso­phers got some­thing right that the cheese­burg­er ethi­cist gets wrong.”

The “some­thing wrong” is a lais­sez-faire com­fort with things as they are. Leav­ing ethics to the realm of the­o­ry takes away a sense of moral urgency. “A full-bod­ied under­stand­ing of ethics requires some liv­ing,” Schwitzgebel writes. It might be eas­i­er for philoso­phers to avoid aim­ing for bet­ter behav­ior, he implies, when they are only required, and pro­fes­sion­al­ly reward­ed, just to think about it.

via Quartz

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Can I Know Right From Wrong? Watch Phi­los­o­phy Ani­ma­tions on Ethics Nar­rat­ed by Har­ry Shear­er

Oxford’s Free Course A Romp Through Ethics for Com­plete Begin­ners Will Teach You Right from Wrong

The Hobo Eth­i­cal Code of 1889: 15 Rules for Liv­ing a Self-Reliant, Hon­est & Com­pas­sion­ate Life

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

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Modern Corporate Logos Reimagined in a Classic Bauhaus Style: Celebrate the 100th Anniversary of the Bauhaus Movement Today

in Art, Design | April 1st, 2019

Image by Vladimir Nikolic

Amer­i­can chil­dren, a study found a few years ago, rec­og­nize over 1,000 cor­po­rate logos but almost no plants. To some it was a damn­ing indict­ment of the mod­ern world; to oth­ers it was noth­ing more than a descrip­tion of the mod­ern world (in the 21st cen­tu­ry, after all, which skill is more help in find­ing food?); and to a few it was an oppor­tu­ni­ty to pro­claim that, for the sake of the chil­dren, the mod­ern world could use some bet­ter cor­po­rate logos.

Image by dell­fi

The artists, archi­tects, and design­ers of the Bauhaus, the mod­ernist art-school-turned-move­ment with its ori­gins in Weimar Ger­many, might well have agreed. Right from the Bauhaus’ foun­da­tion in 1919, its mem­bers worked on shap­ing the aes­thet­ics of the future.

Now, for the school’s 100th anniver­sary (today!), 99designs has com­mis­sioned revi­sions of cur­rent cor­po­rate logos in the Bauhaus style. “It out­last­ed a century’s worth of com­pet­ing styles,” writes 99designs’ Matt Ellis, “sur­vived the ini­tial crit­i­cisms from tra­di­tion­al­ists, and although the Nazis shut down the insti­tu­tion in 1933, the Bauhaus move­ment itself lives on to this day.”

Image by Ars­De­signs

Ellis goes on to quote the still-inspir­ing words of Bauhaus founder Wal­ter Gropius: “The artist is a height­ened man­i­fes­ta­tion of the crafts­man. Let us form… a new guild of crafts­men with­out the class divi­sions that set out to raise an arro­gant bar­ri­er between crafts­men and artists! Let us togeth­er cre­ate the new build­ing of the future which will be all in one: archi­tec­ture and sculp­ture and paint­ing.” This project put up the five pil­lars of the Bauhaus style: “form fol­lows func­tion,” “min­i­mal­ism,” “rev­o­lu­tion­ary typog­ra­phy,” “pas­sion for geom­e­try,” and “pri­ma­ry col­ors.”

Image by dnk

The reimag­ined cor­po­rate logos made for the cen­te­nary of the Bauhaus stand on all those pil­lars, turn­ing the emblems of prod­ucts and ser­vices that many of us con­sume and use every day — or per­haps, as we scroll through Insta­gram on our iPhones or Android devices at Star­bucks in our Adi­das­es, all at the same time — into designs that merge the cut­ting-edge aes­thet­ics of inter­war Europe with those of the thor­ough­ly glob­al­ized 2010s.

Image by Pono­marevD­mit­ry

Whether a pure Bauhaus revival will result in the actu­al adop­tion of logos like these remains to be seen, but in a way, the exer­cise sim­ply dou­bles down on an influ­ence that already runs deep. As Art­sy’s Kelsey Ables puts it, “It is a tes­ta­ment to the long­stand­ing influ­ence of Bauhau­sian min­i­mal­ist ideals that the select­ed logos were already stream­lined to begin with; many of the design­ers who reimag­ined ‘Bauhaus style’ logos had to add visu­al ele­ments. Per­haps Google and its brethren are more Bauhaus than the Bauhaus itself.”

Image by Ars­De­signs

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Bauhaus World, a Free Doc­u­men­tary That Cel­e­brates the 100th Anniver­sary of Germany’s Leg­endary Art, Archi­tec­ture & Design School

Down­load Orig­i­nal Bauhaus Books & Jour­nals for Free: A Dig­i­tal Cel­e­bra­tion of the Found­ing of the Bauhaus School 100 Years Ago

How the Rad­i­cal Build­ings of the Bauhaus Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Archi­tec­ture: A Short Intro­duc­tion

An Oral His­to­ry of the Bauhaus: Hear Rare Inter­views (in Eng­lish) with Wal­ter Gropius, Lud­wig Mies van der Rohe & More

32,000+ Bauhaus Art Objects Made Avail­able Online by Har­vard Muse­um Web­site

The Female Pio­neers of the Bauhaus Art Move­ment: Dis­cov­er Gertrud Arndt, Mar­i­anne Brandt, Anni Albers & Oth­er For­got­ten Inno­va­tors

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 Face­book.

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Behold an Anatomically Correct Replica of the Human Brain, Knitted by a Psychiatrist

in Art, Creativity, Design, Neuroscience, Science | March 29th, 2019

Our brains dic­tate our every move.

They’re the ones who spur us to study hard, so we can make some­thing of our­selves, in order to bet­ter our com­mu­ni­ties.

They name our babies, choose our clothes, decide what we’re hun­gry for.

They make and break laws, orga­nize protests, frit­ter away hours on social media, and give us the green light to binge watch a bunch of dumb shows when we could be read­ing War and Peace.

They also plant the seeds for Fitz­car­ral­do-like cre­ative endeav­ors that take over our lives and gen­er­ate lit­tle to no income.

We may describe such endeav­ors as a labor of love, into which we’ve poured our entire heart and soul, but think for a sec­ond.

Who’s real­ly respon­si­ble here?

The heart, that mus­cu­lar fist-sized Valen­tine, con­tent to just pump-pump-pump its way through life, lub-dub, lub-dub, from cra­dle to grave?

Or the brain, a crafty Iago of an organ, pos­ses­sor of bil­lions of neu­rons, com­plex, con­tra­dic­to­ry, a mys­tery we’re far from unrav­el­ing?

Psy­chi­a­trist Dr. Karen Nor­berg’s brain has steered her to study such heavy duty sub­jects as the day­care effect, the rise in youth sui­cide, and the risk of pre­scrib­ing selec­tive sero­tonin reup­take inhibitors as a treat­ment for depres­sion.

On a lighter note, it also told her to devote nine months to knit­ting an anatom­i­cal­ly cor­rect repli­ca of the human brain.

(Twelve, if you count three months of research before cast­ing on.)

How did her brain con­vince her to embark on this mad­cap assign­ment?

Easy. It arranged for her to be in the mid­dle of a more pro­sa­ic knit­ting project, then goosed her into notic­ing how the ruf­fles of that project resem­bled the wrin­kles of the cere­bral cor­tex.

Coin­ci­dence?

Not like­ly. Espe­cial­ly when one of the cere­bral cor­tex’s most impor­tant duties is deci­sion mak­ing.

As she explained in an inter­view with The Tele­graph, brain devel­op­ment is not unlike the growth of a knit­ted piece:

You can see very nat­u­ral­ly how the ‘rip­pling’ effect of the cere­bral cor­tex emerges from prop­er­ties that prob­a­bly have to do with nerve cell growth. In the case of knit­ting, the effect is cre­at­ed by increas­ing the num­ber of stitch­es in each row.

Dr. Norberg—who, yes, has on occa­sion referred to her project as a labor of love—told Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can that such a mas­sive crafty under­tak­ing appealed to her sense of humor because “it seemed so ridicu­lous and would be an enor­mous­ly com­pli­cat­ed, absurd­ly ambi­tious thing to do.”

That’s the point at which many people’s brains would give them per­mis­sion to stop, but Dr. Nor­berg and her brain per­sist­ed, push­ing past the hypo­thet­i­cal, cre­at­ing col­or­ful indi­vid­ual struc­tures that were even­tu­al­ly sewn into two cud­dly hemi­spheres that can be joined with a zip­per.

(She also let slip that her brain—by which she means the knit­ted one, though the obser­va­tion cer­tain­ly holds true for the one in her head—is female, due to its robust cor­pus cal­lo­sum, the “tough body” whose mil­lions of fibers pro­mote com­mu­ni­ca­tion and con­nec­tion.)

via The Tele­graph

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Mas­sive, Knit­ted Tapes­try of the Galaxy: Soft­ware Engi­neer Hacks a Knit­ting Machine & Cre­ates a Star Map Fea­tur­ing 88 Con­stel­la­tions

Jazz Musi­cian Plays Acoustic Gui­tar While Under­go­ing Brain Surgery, Help­ing Doc­tors Mon­i­tor Their Progress

How Med­i­ta­tion Can Change Your Brain: The Neu­ro­science of Bud­dhist Prac­tice

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

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Does Democracy Demand the Tolerance of the Intolerant? Karl Popper’s Paradox

in Philosophy, Politics | March 29th, 2019

Pho­to via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

In the past few years, when far-right nation­al­ists are banned from social media, vio­lent extrem­ists face boy­cotts, or insti­tu­tions refuse to give a plat­form to racists, a faux-out­raged moan has gone up: “So much for the tol­er­ant left!” “So much for lib­er­al tol­er­ance!” The com­plaint became so hack­neyed it turned into an already-hack­neyed meme. It’s a won­der any­one thinks this line has any rhetor­i­cal force. The equa­tion of tol­er­ance with acqui­es­cence, pas­siv­i­ty, or a total lack of bound­aries is a reduc­tio ad absur­dum that denudes the word of mean­ing. One can only laugh at unse­ri­ous char­ac­ter­i­za­tions that do such vio­lence to rea­son.

The con­cept of tol­er­a­tion has a long and com­pli­cat­ed his­to­ry in moral and polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy pre­cise­ly because of the many prob­lems that arise when the word is used with­out crit­i­cal con­text. In some absurd, 21st cen­tu­ry usages, tol­er­ance is even con­flat­ed with accep­tance, approval, and love. But it has his­tor­i­cal­ly meant the opposite—noninterference with some­thing one dis­likes or despis­es. Such non­in­ter­fer­ence must have lim­its. As Goethe wrote in 1829, “tol­er­ance should be a tem­po­rary atti­tude only; it must lead to recog­ni­tion. To tol­er­ate means to insult.” Tol­er­ance by nature exists in a state of social ten­sion.

Accord­ing to vir­tu­al­ly every con­cep­tion of lib­er­al democ­ra­cy, a free and open soci­ety requires tense debate and ver­bal con­flict. Soci­ety, the argu­ment goes, is only strength­ened by the oft-con­tentious inter­play of dif­fer­ing, even intol­er­ant, points of view. So, when do such views approach the lim­its of tol­er­a­tion? One of the most well-known para­dox­es of tol­er­ance was out­lined by Aus­tri­an philoso­pher Karl Pop­per in his 1945 book The Open Soci­ety and Its Ene­mies.

Pop­per was a non-reli­gious Jew who wit­nessed the rise of Nazism in the 20s in his home­town of Vien­na and fled to Eng­land, then in 1937, to Christchurch, New Zealand, where he was appoint­ed lec­tur­er at Can­ter­bury Col­lege (now the Uni­ver­si­ty of Can­ter­bury). There, he wrote The Open Soci­ety, where the famous pas­sage appears in a foot­note:

Unlim­it­ed tol­er­ance must lead to the dis­ap­pear­ance of tol­er­ance. If we extend unlim­it­ed tol­er­ance even to those who are intol­er­ant, if we are not pre­pared to defend a tol­er­ant soci­ety against the onslaught of the intol­er­ant, then the tol­er­ant will be destroyed, and tol­er­ance with them. — In this for­mu­la­tion, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always sup­press the utter­ance of intol­er­ant philoso­phies; as long as we can counter them by ratio­nal argu­ment and keep them in check by pub­lic opin­ion, sup­pres­sion would cer­tain­ly be unwise. But we should claim the right to sup­press them if nec­es­sary even by force; for it may eas­i­ly turn out that they are not pre­pared to meet us on the lev­el of ratio­nal argu­ment, but begin by denounc­ing all argu­ment; they may for­bid their fol­low­ers to lis­ten to ratio­nal argu­ment, because it is decep­tive, and teach them to answer argu­ments by the use of their fists or pis­tols. We should there­fore claim, in the name of tol­er­ance, the right not to tol­er­ate the intol­er­ant.

This last sen­tence has “been print­ed on thou­sands of bumper stick­ers and fridge mag­nets,” writes Will Harvie at Stuff. The quote might become almost as ubiq­ui­tous as Voltaire’s line about “defend­ing to the death” the right of free speech (words actu­al­ly penned by Eng­lish writer Beat­rice Eve­lyn Hall). Pop­per saw how fas­cism cyn­i­cal­ly exploit­ed lib­er­al tol­er­a­tion to gain a foothold and incite per­se­cu­tion, vio­lent attacks, and even­tu­al­ly geno­cide. As he writes in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, he had seen how “com­pet­ing par­ties of the Right were out­bid­ding each oth­er in their hos­til­i­ty towards the Jews.”

Popper’s for­mu­la­tion has been been used across the polit­i­cal spec­trum, and some­times applied in argu­ments against civ­il pro­tec­tions for some reli­gious sects who hold intol­er­ant views—a cat­e­go­ry that includes prac­ti­tion­ers of near­ly every major faith. But this is mis­lead­ing. The line for Pop­per is not the mere exis­tence of exclu­sion­ary or intol­er­ant beliefs or philoso­phies, how­ev­er reac­tionary or con­temptible, but the open incite­ment to per­se­cu­tion and vio­lence against oth­ers, which should be treat­ed as crim­i­nal, he argued, and sup­pressed, “if nec­es­sary,” he con­tin­ues in the foot­note, “even by force” if pub­lic dis­ap­proval is not enough.

By this line of rea­son­ing, vig­or­ous resis­tance to those who call for and enact racial vio­lence and eth­nic cleans­ing is a nec­es­sary defense of a tol­er­ant soci­ety. Ignor­ing or allow­ing such acts to con­tin­ue in the name of tol­er­ance leads to the night­mare events Pop­per escaped in Europe, or to the hor­rif­ic mass killings at two mosques in Christchurch this month that delib­er­ate­ly echoed Nazi atroc­i­ties. There are too many such echoes, from mass mur­ders at syn­a­gogues to con­cen­tra­tion camps for kid­napped chil­dren, all sur­round­ed by an echo cham­ber of wild­ly unchecked incite­ment by state and non-state actors alike.

Pop­per rec­og­nized the inevitabil­i­ty and healthy neces­si­ty of social con­flict, but he also affirmed the val­ues of coop­er­a­tion and mutu­al recog­ni­tion, with­out which a lib­er­al democ­ra­cy can­not sur­vive. Since the pub­li­ca­tion of The Open Soci­ety and its Ene­mies, his para­dox of tol­er­ance has weath­ered decades of crit­i­cism and revi­sion. As John Hor­gan wrote in an intro­duc­tion to a 1992 inter­view with the thinker, two years before his death, “an old joke about Pop­per” reti­tles the book “The Open Soci­ety by One of its Ene­mies.”

With less than good humor, crit­ics have derid­ed Popper’s lib­er­al­ism as dog­mat­ic and itself a fas­cist ide­ol­o­gy that inevitably tends to intol­er­ance against minori­ties. Ques­tion about who gets to decide which views should be sup­pressed and how are not easy to answer. Pop­per liked to say he wel­comed the crit­i­cism, but he refused to tol­er­ate views that reject rea­son, fact, and argu­ment in order to incite and per­pe­trate vio­lence and per­se­cu­tion. It’s dif­fi­cult to imag­ine any demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­ety sur­viv­ing for long if it decides that, while maybe objec­tion­able, such tol­er­ance is tol­er­a­ble. The ques­tion, “these days,” writes Harvie, is “can a tol­er­ant soci­ety sur­vive the inter­net?”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

20,000 Amer­i­cans Hold a Pro-Nazi Ral­ly in Madi­son Square Gar­den in 1939: Chill­ing Video Re-Cap­tures a Lost Chap­ter in US His­to­ry

How Did Hitler Rise to Pow­er? : New TED-ED Ani­ma­tion Pro­vides a Case Study in How Fas­cists Get Demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly Elect­ed

Rare 1940 Audio: Thomas Mann Explains the Nazis’ Ulte­ri­or Motive for Spread­ing Anti-Semi­tism

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

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Killer Rabbits in Medieval Manuscripts: Why So Many Drawings in the Margins Depict Bunnies Going Bad

in Art, Books, Comedy, History | March 29th, 2019

In all the king­dom of nature, does any crea­ture threat­en us less than the gen­tle rab­bit? Though the ques­tion may sound entire­ly rhetor­i­cal today, our medieval ances­tors took it more seri­ous­ly — espe­cial­ly if they could read illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­scripts, and even more so if they drew in the mar­gins of those man­u­scripts them­selves. “Often, in medieval man­u­scripts’ mar­gin­a­lia we find odd images with all sorts of mon­sters, half man-beasts, mon­keys, and more,” writes Sexy Cod­i­col­o­gy’s Mar­jolein de Vos. “Even in reli­gious books the mar­gins some­times have draw­ings that sim­ply are mak­ing fun of monks, nuns and bish­ops.” And then there are the killer bun­nies.

Hunt­ing scenes, de Vos adds, also com­mon­ly appear in medieval mar­gin­a­lia, and “this usu­al­ly means that the bun­ny is the hunt­ed; how­ev­er, as we dis­cov­ered, often the illu­mi­na­tors decid­ed to change the roles around.”

Jon Kaneko-James explains fur­ther: “The usu­al imagery of the rab­bit in Medieval art is that of puri­ty and help­less­ness – that’s why some Medieval por­tray­als of Christ have mar­gin­al art por­tray­ing a ver­i­ta­ble pet­ting zoo of inno­cent, non­vi­o­lent, lit­tle white and brown bun­nies going about their busi­ness in a field.” But the cre­ators of this par­tic­u­lar type of humor­ous mar­gin­a­lia, known as drollery, saw things dif­fer­ent­ly.

“Drol­leries some­times also depict­ed comedic scenes, like a bar­ber with a wood­en leg (which, for rea­sons that escape me, was the height of medieval com­e­dy) or a man saw­ing a branch out from under him­self,” writes Kaneko-James.

This enjoy­ment of the “world turned upside down” pro­duced the drollery genre of “the rab­bit’s revenge,” one “often used to show the cow­ardice or stu­pid­i­ty of the per­son illus­trat­ed. We see this in the Mid­dle Eng­lish nick­name Stick­hare, a name for cow­ards” — and in all the draw­ings of “tough hunters cow­er­ing in the face of rab­bits with big sticks.”

Then, of course, we have the bun­nies mak­ing their attacks while mount­ed on snails, snail com­bats being “anoth­er pop­u­lar sta­ple of Drol­leries, with groups of peas­ants seen fight­ing snails with sticks, or sad­dling them and attempt­ing to ride them.”

Giv­en how often we denizens of the 21st cen­tu­ry have trou­ble get­ting humor from less than a cen­tu­ry ago, it feels sat­is­fy­ing indeed to laugh just as hard at these drol­leries as our medieval fore­bears must have — though many more of us sure­ly get to see them today, cir­cu­lat­ing as rapid­ly on social media as they did­n’t when con­fined to the pages of illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­scripts owned only by wealthy indi­vid­u­als and insti­tu­tions.

You can see more mar­gin­al scenes of the rab­bit’s revenge at Sexy Cod­i­col­o­gy, Colos­sal, and Kaneko-James’ blog. But one his­tor­i­cal ques­tion remains unan­swered: to what extent did they influ­ence that pil­lar of mod­ern cin­e­mat­ic com­e­dy, Mon­ty Python and the Holy Grail?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

The Aberdeen Bes­tiary, One of the Great Medieval Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­scripts, Now Dig­i­tized in High Res­o­lu­tion & Made Avail­able Online

Medieval Cats Behav­ing Bad­ly: Kit­ties That Left Paw Prints … and Peed … on 15th Cen­tu­ry Man­u­scripts

Explo­sive Cats Imag­ined in a Strange, 16th Cen­tu­ry Mil­i­tary Man­u­al

David Lynch Made a Dis­turb­ing Web Sit­com Called “Rab­bits”: It’s Now Used by Psy­chol­o­gists to Induce a Sense of Exis­ten­tial Cri­sis in Research Sub­jects

Mon­ty Python and the Holy Grail Cen­sor­ship Let­ter: We Want to Retain “Fart in Your Gen­er­al Direc­tion”

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 Face­book.

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140 Courses Starting at Stanford Continuing Studies Next Week: Explore the Catalogue of Campus and Online Courses

in Stanford | March 28th, 2019

Quick fyi: I spend my days at Stan­ford Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies, where we’ve devel­oped a rich line­up of online cours­es for life­long learn­ers, many of which will get start­ed next week. The cours­es aren’t free. But they’re first rate, giv­ing adult students–no mat­ter where they live–the chance to work with ded­i­cat­ed teach­ers and stu­dents.

The cat­a­logue includes a large num­ber of online Cre­ative Writ­ing cours­es, cov­er­ing the Nov­el, the Mem­oir, Cre­ative Non­fic­tion, Trav­el Writ­ing, Poet­ry and more. For the pro­fes­sion­al, the pro­gram offers online busi­ness cours­es in sub­jects like Entre­pre­neur­ship: From Ideas to Fund­ing, An Intro­duc­tion to Project Man­age­ment: The Basics for Suc­cess and Find­ing Product/Market Fit: Using Design Research for New Prod­uct Suc­cess.

And there’s a grow­ing num­ber of online Lib­er­al Arts cours­es too. Take for exam­ple Con­sti­tu­tion­al Law, An Intro­duc­tion to Jane Austen and Diet and Gene Expres­sion: You Are What You Eat.

If you live in the San Fran­cis­co Bay Area, check out the larg­er cat­a­logue. Stan­ford Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies has 140 cours­es get­ting start­ed this Spring quar­ter (next week), most tak­ing place in Stan­ford’s class­rooms. The two flag­ship cours­es of the quar­ter include: The Genius of Leonar­do da Vin­ci: A 500th Anniver­sary Cel­e­bra­tion and 20th-Cen­tu­ry Amer­i­can Lit­er­a­ture: An Intel­lec­tu­al Bus Tour with Michael Kras­ny, the host of KQED’s Forum.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free: A Crash Course in Design Think­ing from Stanford’s Design School

How Walk­ing Fos­ters Cre­ativ­i­ty: Stan­ford Researchers Con­firm What Philoso­phers and Writ­ers Have Always Known

How to Start a Start-Up: A Free Course from Y Com­bi­na­tor Taught at Stan­ford

130,000 Pho­tographs by Andy Warhol Are Now Avail­able Online, Cour­tesy of Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty

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Isaac Asimov’s Guide to the Bible: A Witty, Erudite Atheist’s Guide to the World’s Most Famous Book

in Books, Literature, Religion | March 28th, 2019

Paint­ing of Asi­mov on his throne by Rowe­na Morill, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Every­one should read the Bible, and—I’d argue—should read it with a sharply crit­i­cal eye and the guid­ance of rep­utable crit­ics and his­to­ri­ans, though this may be too much to ask for those steeped in lit­er­al belief. Yet few­er and few­er peo­ple do read it, includ­ing those who pro­fess faith in a sect of Chris­tian­i­ty. Even famous athe­ists like Christo­pher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Melvyn Bragg have argued for teach­ing the Bible in schools—not in a faith-based con­text, obvi­ous­ly, but as an essen­tial his­tor­i­cal doc­u­ment, much of whose lan­guage, in the King James, at least, has made major con­tri­bu­tions to lit­er­ary cul­ture. (Curiously—or not—atheists and agnos­tics tend to score far high­er than believ­ers on sur­veys of reli­gious knowl­edge.)

There is a prac­ti­cal prob­lem of sep­a­rat­ing teach­ing from preach­ing in sec­u­lar schools, but the fact remains that so-called “bib­li­cal illit­er­a­cy” is a seri­ous prob­lem edu­ca­tors have sought to rem­e­dy for decades. Promi­nent Shake­speare schol­ar G.B. Har­ri­son lament­ed it in the intro­duc­tion to his 1964 edit­ed edi­tion, The Bible for Stu­dents of Lit­er­a­ture and Art. “Today most stu­dents of lit­er­a­ture lack this kind of edu­ca­tion,” he wrote, “and have only the hazi­est knowl­edge of the book or of its con­tents, with the result that they inevitably miss much of the mean­ing and sig­nif­i­cance of many works of past gen­er­a­tions. Sim­i­lar­ly, stu­dents of art will miss some of the mean­ing of the pic­tures and sculp­tures of the past.”

Though a devout Catholic him­self, Harrison’s aim was not to pros­e­ly­tize but to do right by his stu­dents. His edit­ed Bible is an excel­lent resource, but it’s not the only book of its kind out there. In fact, no less a lumi­nary, and no less a crit­ic of reli­gion, than sci­en­tist and sci-fi giant Isaac Asi­mov pub­lished his own guide to the Bible, writ­ing in his intro­duc­tion:

The most influ­en­tial, the most pub­lished, the most wide­ly read book in the his­to­ry of the world is the Bible. No oth­er book has been so stud­ied and so ana­lyzed and it is a trib­ute to the com­plex­i­ty of the Bible and eager­ness of its stu­dents that after thou­sands of years of study there are still end­less books that can be writ­ten about it.

Of those books, the vast major­i­ty are devo­tion­al or the­o­log­i­cal in nature. “Most peo­ple who read the Bible,” Asi­mov writes, “do so in order to get the ben­e­fit of its eth­i­cal and spir­i­tu­al teach­ings.” But the ancient col­lec­tion of texts “has a sec­u­lar side, too,” he says. It is a “his­to­ry book,” though not in the sense that we think of the term, since his­to­ry as an evi­dence-based aca­d­e­m­ic dis­ci­pline did not exist until rel­a­tive­ly mod­ern times. Ancient his­to­ry includ­ed all sorts of myths, won­ders, and mar­vels, side-by-side with leg­endary and apoc­ryphal events as well as the mun­dane and ver­i­fi­able.

Asimov’s Guide to the Bible, orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in two vol­umes in 1968–69, then reprint­ed as one in 1981, seeks to demys­ti­fy the text. It also assumes a lev­el of famil­iar­i­ty that Har­ri­son did not expect from his read­ers (and did not find among his stu­dents). The Bible may not be as wide­ly-read as Asi­mov thought, even if sales sug­gest oth­er­wise. Yet he does not expect that his read­ers will know “ancient his­to­ry out­side the Bible,” the sort of crit­i­cal con­text nec­es­sary for under­stand­ing what its writ­ings meant to con­tem­po­rary read­ers, for whom the “places and peo­ple” men­tioned “were well known.”

“I am try­ing,” Asi­mov writes in his intro­duc­tion, “to bring in the out­side world, illu­mi­nate it in terms of the Bib­li­cal sto­ry and, in return, illu­mi­nate the events of the Bible by adding to it the non-Bib­li­cal aspects of his­to­ry, biog­ra­phy, and geog­ra­phy.” This describes the gen­er­al method­ol­o­gy of crit­i­cal Bib­li­cal schol­ars. Yet Asimov’s book has a dis­tinct advan­tage over most of those writ­ten by, and for, aca­d­e­mics. Its tone, as one read­er com­ments, is “quick and fun, chat­ty, non-aca­d­e­m­ic.” It’s approach­able and high­ly read­able, that is, yet still seri­ous and eru­dite.

Asimov’s approach in his guide is not hos­tile or “anti-reli­gious,” as anoth­er read­er observes, but he was not him­self friend­ly to reli­gious beliefs, or super­sti­tions, or irra­tional what-have-yous. In the inter­view above from 1988, he explains that while humans are inher­ent­ly irra­tional crea­tures, he nonethe­less felt a duty “to be a skep­tic, to insist on evi­dence, to want things to make sense.” It is, he says, akin to the call­ing believ­ers feel to “spread God’s word.” Part of that duty, for Asi­mov, includ­ed mak­ing the Bible make sense for those who appre­ci­ate how deeply embed­ded it is in world cul­ture and his­to­ry, but who may not be inter­est­ed in just tak­ing it on faith. Find an old copy of Asimov’s Guide to the Bible at Ama­zon.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts in 1983 What the World Will Look Like in 2019: Com­put­er­i­za­tion, Glob­al Co-oper­a­tion, Leisure Time & Moon Min­ing

Intro­duc­tion to the Old Tes­ta­ment: A Free Yale Course 

Chris­tian­i­ty Through Its Scrip­tures: A Free Course from Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty 

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

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