A Star Wars Film Made in a Wes Anderson Aesthetic

Above, you can watch the Galac­tic Menagerie, “a whim­si­cal and visu­al­ly stun­ning fan-made fake trail­er that reimag­ines the clas­sic Star Wars uni­verse through the eccen­tric lens of Wes Ander­son. This enchant­i­ng mashup brings togeth­er icon­ic Star Wars char­ac­ters with Ander­son­’s trade­mark sym­met­ri­cal com­po­si­tions, pas­tel col­or palettes, and quirky humor.” There are also, of course, “pecu­liar loca­tions rem­i­nis­cent of Ander­son­’s beloved films such as Moon­rise King­dom and The Grand Budapest Hotel.” Enjoy!

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Wes Ander­son Goes Sci-Fi in 1950s Amer­i­ca: Watch the Trail­er for His New Film Aster­oid City

Wes Ander­son Explains How He Writes and Directs Movies, and What Goes Into His Dis­tinc­tive Film­mak­ing Style

How the Aston­ish­ing Sushi Scene in Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs Was Ani­mat­ed: A Time-Lapse of the Month-Long Shoot

A Com­plete Col­lec­tion of Wes Ander­son Video Essays

Watch a Traditional Japanese Carpenter Make 190+ Different Joints, All Without Nails, Screws, or Glue

Before the inter­net, it would have been hard to imag­ine that peo­ple around the world would one day be unable to get enough of tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese car­pen­try, and specif­i­cal­ly tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese join­ery. And before Youtube, who could have pre­dict­ed that videos show­ing each and every step of a wood­work­ing project — with­out nar­ra­tion, or indeed expla­na­tion of any kind — would find an enthu­si­as­tic view­er­ship? At the inter­sec­tion of these two sur­pris­ing phe­nom­e­na stands that chan­nel H Car­pen­ter, whose unadorned, method­i­cal, and detailed por­tray­als of wood­en joint-mak­ing have racked up mil­lions upon mil­lions of views.

In tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese join­ery, which we’ve fea­tured many times before here on Open Cul­ture, the car­pen­ter uses no nails, screws, or adhe­sives. Rather, he carves the ends of the pieces of wood to be joined into inter­lock­ing three-dimen­sion­al shapes that can hold sol­id for decades, or even cen­turies.

The biggest advan­tage of this tech­nique, writes a com­menter on one video, “is that it min­i­mizes the use of rust-prone nails and oth­er mate­ri­als, reduces dam­age to the wood, and damp­ens seis­mic shak­ing with unfas­tened joints” — always a con­sid­er­a­tion in earth­quake-prone Japan. “Fur­ther­more, the entire build­ing can be dis­as­sem­bled like Lego blocks, and only the dam­aged parts can be replaced and rebuilt as before.”

Like many oth­er Japan­ese tra­di­tions, this form of car­pen­try has been around for a long time indeed, and through the cen­turies has built up a for­mi­da­ble library of joints, many of them com­plex enough  not to be com­pre­hen­si­ble at first glance. With 193 videos on the rel­e­vant playlist so far, H car­pen­ter seems to have made a mis­sion of con­struct­ing all of them on Youtube not just to aid our under­stand­ing of their work­ings, but also to pro­vide us with the sen­so­ry plea­sures of the process itself. (A few mil­lion of his views are sure­ly account­ed for by ASMR enthu­si­asts alone.) Just like his fore­bears in the craft, he does it with­out using a sin­gle nail — as well, per­haps as a coun­ter­bal­ance to the chat­ter of the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, with­out speak­ing a sin­gle word.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Art of Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Wood Join­ery: A Kyoto Wood­work­er Shows How Japan­ese Car­pen­ters Cre­at­ed Wood Struc­tures With­out Nails or Glue

Mes­mer­iz­ing GIFs Illus­trate the Art of Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Wood Join­ery — All Done With­out Screws, Nails, or Glue

See How Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Car­pen­ters Can Build a Whole Build­ing Using No Nails or Screws

Japan­ese Car­pen­ters Unearth 100-Year-Old Wood Joiner­ies While Tak­ing Apart a Tra­di­tion­al House

Build­ing With­out Nails: The Genius of Japan­ese Car­pen­try

Free Soft­ware Lets You Cre­ate Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Wood Joints & Fur­ni­ture: Down­load Tsug­ite

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

School Principal, Forced to Resign After Students Learn About Michelangelo’s “David,” Visits the Renaissance Statue in Florence

In March, a Flori­da school prin­ci­pal lost her job when 6th graders encoun­tered Michelangelo’s “David” dur­ing an art his­to­ry lesson–even though the school osten­si­bly spe­cial­izes in offer­ing stu­dents “a con­tent-rich clas­si­cal edu­ca­tion in the lib­er­al arts and sci­ences.” Par­ents appar­ent­ly found the Renais­sance sculp­ture, um, “porno­graph­ic.”

Fast for­ward two months, and the for­mer prin­ci­pal Hope Car­rasquil­la has now trav­eled to Flo­rence and vis­it­ed Michelangelo’s “David” in per­son. This came at the invi­ta­tion of the may­or of Flo­rence, Dario Nardel­la, and the direc­tor of the Gal­le­ria dell’Accademia, Cecilie Holl­berg. Above you can see Holl­berg on the left, and Car­rasquil­la on the right.

On Insta­gram, Car­rasquil­la com­ment­ed:

I’m very impressed. The thing that strikes me the most, and that I did­n’t know, is that this whole gallery was built for him [Michelangelo’s “David”]. I think it’s beau­ti­ful, it looks like a church. And to me, that just rep­re­sents real­ly the puri­ty of this fig­ure and you see his human­i­ty.  There is noth­ing wrong with the human body. Michelan­ge­lo did noth­ing wrong. He could only sculpt it like this. It could­n’t be oth­er­wise. He’s won­der­ful and I’m real­ly hap­py to be here.

In her own state­ment, Holl­berg said:

I am delight­ed to wel­come her and show her the mag­nif­i­cence of our muse­um, as well as per­son­al­ly intro­duce her to David, a sculp­ture that I reit­er­ate has noth­ing to do with pornog­ra­phy. It is a mas­ter­piece rep­re­sent­ing a reli­gious sym­bol of puri­ty and inno­cence, the tri­umph of good over evil. His nudi­ty is an out­ward man­i­fes­ta­tion of Renais­sance thought, which con­sid­ered man the cen­tre of the uni­verse. Peo­ple from all over the world, includ­ing many Amer­i­cans, make the pil­grim­age to admire him every year. Cur­rent­ly, more than 50% of vis­i­tors are from the Unit­ed States. I am cer­tain that Ms. Car­rasquil­la will receive the wel­come and sol­i­dar­i­ty she deserves here in Flo­rence.

Flori­da may be can­cel­ing clas­si­cal art and thought. Flo­rence is decid­ed­ly not.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

How Michelangelo’s David Still Draws Admi­ra­tion and Con­tro­ver­sy Today

Michelangelo’s Illus­trat­ed Gro­cery List

Take a 3D Vir­tu­al Tour of the Sis­tine Chapel, St. Peter’s Basil­i­ca and Oth­er Art-Adorned Vat­i­can Spaces

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Hand­writ­ten Resume (1482)

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Why Renaissance Masters Added Egg Yolk to Their Paints: A New Study Sheds Light

Today we think of the Renais­sance as one of those peri­ods when every­thing changed, and if the best-known arti­facts of the time are any­thing to go by, noth­ing changed quite so much as art. This is reflect­ed in obvi­ous aes­thet­ic dif­fer­ences between the works of the Renais­sance and those cre­at­ed before, as well as in less obvi­ous tech­ni­cal ones. Egg yolk-based tem­pera paints, for exam­ple, had been in use since the time of the ancient Egyp­tians, but in the fif­teenth cen­tu­ry they were replaced by oil paints. When chem­i­cal analy­sis of the work of cer­tain Renais­sance mas­ters revealed traces of egg, they were assumed to be the result of chance con­t­a­m­i­na­tion.

Now, thanks to a recent study led by chem­i­cal engi­neer Ophélie Ran­quet of the Karl­sruhe Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy, we have rea­son to believe that painters like Bot­ti­cel­li and Leonar­do kept eggs in the mix delib­er­ate­ly. Oil replaced tem­pera because “it cre­ates more vivid col­ors and smoother col­or tran­si­tions,” writes Smithsonian.com’s Tere­sa Nowakows­ki.

“It also dries slow­ly, so it can be used for longer after the ini­tial prepa­ra­tion.” But “the col­ors dark­en more eas­i­ly over time, and the paint is more sus­cep­ti­ble to dam­age from light expo­sure. It also has a ten­den­cy to wrin­kle as it dries,” vis­i­ble in Leonar­do’s Madon­na of the Car­na­tion below.


Putting in a bit of egg yolk may have been a way of using oil’s advan­tages while min­i­miz­ing its dis­ad­van­tages. Ran­quet and her col­lab­o­ra­tors test­ed this idea by doing it them­selves, re-cre­at­ing two pig­ments used dur­ing the Renais­sance, both with egg and with­out. “In the may­olike blend” pro­duced by the for­mer method, writes Sci­ence­News’ Jude Cole­man, “the yolk cre­at­ed stur­dy links between pig­ment par­ti­cles, result­ing in stiffer paint. Such con­sis­ten­cy would have been ide­al for tech­niques like impas­to, a raised, thick style that adds tex­ture to art. Egg addi­tions also could have reduced wrin­kling by cre­at­ing a firmer paint con­sis­ten­cy,” though the paint itself would take longer to dry.

In prac­tice, Renais­sance painters seem to have exper­i­ment­ed with dif­fer­ent pro­por­tions of oil and egg, and so dis­cov­ered that each had its own strengths for ren­der­ing dif­fer­ent ele­ments of an image. Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Tay­lor Michael writes that in The Lamen­ta­tion Over the Dead Christ, seen up top, “Bot­ti­cel­li paint­ed Christ, Mary Mag­da­lene, and the Vir­gin, among oth­ers, with tem­pera, and the back­ground stone and fore­ground­ing grass with oil.” Thanks to the oxi­diza­tion-slow­ing effects of phos­pho­lipids and antiox­i­dants in the yolk — as sci­en­tif­ic research has since proven — they’ve all come through the past five cen­turies look­ing hard­ly worse for wear.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Car­avag­gio Paint­ed: A Re-Cre­ation of the Great Master’s Process

Dis­cov­er Harvard’s Col­lec­tion of 2,500 Pig­ments: Pre­serv­ing the World’s Rare, Won­der­ful Col­ors

The Largest & Most Detailed Pho­to­graph of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch Is Now Online: Zoom In & See Every Brush Stroke

A 900-Page Pre-Pan­tone Guide to Col­or from 1692: A Com­plete High-Res­o­lu­tion Dig­i­tal Scan

A 3,000-Year-Old Painter’s Palette from Ancient Egypt, with Traces of the Orig­i­nal Col­ors Still In It

The Old­est Known Globe to Depict the New World Was Engraved on an Ostrich Egg, Maybe by Leonar­do da Vin­ci (1504)

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

How the Art of Patrick Nagel, Still Seen in Nail Salons Today, Crystallized the 1980s Aesthetic

To find a visu­al def­i­n­i­tion of the nine­teen-eight­ies, you need look no fur­ther than the win­dows of the near­est run-down hair or nail salon. There, “fad­ed by time and years of sun dam­age,” remain on makeshift dis­play the most wide­ly rec­og­nized works of — or imi­ta­tions of the works of — artist and illus­tra­tor Patrick Nagel, who spe­cial­ized in images of women with “sleek black hair, paper-white skin, bold red lip­stick and a look of mys­tery, pow­er, and cool detach­ment.” So says Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer, in his new video essay above on the sud­den rise and last­ing cul­tur­al lega­cy of the “Nagel women.”

As Puschak tells the sto­ry, the fig­ure respon­si­ble for launch­ing Nagel and his women into the zeit­geist was pub­lish­er Karl Born­stein, who “had been in Europe admir­ing the work of Toulouse-Lautrec and Pierre Bon­nard, Parisian poster artists of the late nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, and came back to Amer­i­ca look­ing for an artist of his own time when Nagel walked into his life.”

Around this same time, “the man­ag­er of the Eng­lish new-wave band Duran Duran saw Nagel’s work in Play­boy, and com­mis­sioned a pic­ture for the cov­er of their 1982 album Rio” — which, apart from all those salon win­dows, gave most of us our first look at a Nagel woman.

These and oth­er pop-cul­tur­al asso­ci­a­tions “helped to cement the Nagel woman as an emblem of the decade.” For years after Nagel’s death in 1984, his “chic, fash­ion­able, inde­pen­dent” women con­tin­ued to serve as “aspi­ra­tional images,” but even­tu­al­ly, amid mar­ket sat­u­ra­tion and chang­ing sen­si­bil­i­ties, their bold look of glam­or and pro­fes­sion­al­ism began to seem tacky. Nev­er­the­less, redis­cov­ery always fol­lows desue­tude, and suf­fi­cient dis­tance from the actu­al eight­ies has allowed us to appre­ci­ate Nagel’s  tech­nique. “Day by day, lit­tle by lit­tle, Nagel removed details until he arrived at the fewest num­ber of lines that would still cap­ture the spir­it of his mod­els,” using rig­or­ous min­i­mal­ism to evoke — and for­ev­er crys­tal­lize — a time of brazen excess.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Who Designed the 1980s Aes­thet­ic?: Meet the Mem­phis Group, the Design­ers Who Cre­at­ed the 80s Icon­ic Look

How Art Nou­veau Inspired the Psy­che­del­ic Designs of the 1960s

Down­load 200+ Belle Époque Art Posters: An Archive of Mas­ter­pieces from the “Gold­en Age of the Poster” (1880–1918)

Down­load 2,000 Mag­nif­i­cent Turn-of-the-Cen­tu­ry Art Posters, Cour­tesy of the New York Pub­lic Library

The First Muse­um Ded­i­cat­ed Exclu­sive­ly to Poster Art Opens Its Doors in the U.S.: Enter the Poster House

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

1,800 Hand-Cut Silhouettes of 19th-Century Historical Figures Get Digitized & Put Online by the Smithsonian

With the excep­tion of Kara Walker’s provoca­tive cut paper nar­ra­tives, sil­hou­ettes haven’t struck us as a par­tic­u­lar­ly reveal­ing art form.

Per­haps we would have felt dif­fer­ent­ly in the ear­ly 19th-cen­tu­ry, when sil­hou­ettes offered a quick and afford­able alter­na­tive to oil por­traits, and pho­tog­ra­phy had yet to be invent­ed.

Self-taught sil­hou­ette artist William Bache trav­eled the east­ern seaboard, and lat­er to New Orleans and Cuba, ply­ing his trade with a phys­iog­no­trace, a device that helped him out­line sub­jects’ pro­files on fold­ed sheets of light paper.

Once a pro­file had been cap­tured, Bache care­ful­ly cut inside the trac­ing and affixed the “hol­low-cut” sur­round­ing sheet to black paper, cre­at­ing the appear­ance of a hand-cut black sil­hou­ette on a white back­ground.

Cus­tomers could pur­chase four copies of these shad­ow like­ness­es for 25¢, which, adjust­ed for infla­tion, is about the same amount as a pho­to strip in one of New York City’s vin­tage pho­to­booths these days — $5.

Bache was an ener­getic pro­mot­er of his ser­vices, adver­tis­ing that if cus­tomers found it incon­ve­nient to vis­it one of his pop-up stu­dios, he would “at the short­est notice, wait upon them at their own Dwellings with­out any addi­tion­al expense.”

Nat­u­ral­ly, peo­ple were eager to lay hands on sil­hou­ettes of their chil­dren and sweet­hearts, too.

One of Bache’s com­peti­tors, Raphaelle Peale assumed the per­spec­tive of a sat­is­fied male cus­tomer to tout his own busi­ness:

‘Tis almost her­self, Eliza­’s shade,

Thus by the faith­ful faci­etrace pour­tray’d!

Her placid brow and pout­ing lips, whose swell

My fond impa­tient ardor would repell.

Let me then take that vacant seat, and there

Inhale her breath, scarce min­gled with the air:

And thou blest instru­ment! which o’er her face

Did’st at her lips one moment pause, retrace

My glow­ing form and leave, unequal­l’d bliss!

Bor­row’d from her, a sweet ethe­r­i­al Kiss.

Hot stuff, though hope­ful­ly besot­ted young lovers refrained from press­ing their lips to the sil­hou­ettes they loved best. Con­ser­va­tors in the Smithsonian’s Nation­al Por­trait Gallery, which hous­es Bache’s sam­ple book, a ledger filled with like­ness­es of some 1,800 sit­ters, dis­cov­ered it to be suf­fused with arsenic, pre­sum­ably meant to repel invad­ing rodents and insects.

Most of the heads in Bache’s album arrived uniden­ti­fied, but by comb­ing through dig­i­tized news­pa­pers, his­to­ry books, bap­tismal records, wills, mar­riage cer­tifi­cates and Ancestry.com, lead cura­tor Robyn Asle­son and Get­ty-fund­ed research assis­tant Eliz­a­beth Isaac­son have man­aged to iden­ti­fy over 1000.

There are some whose names — and pro­files — remain well known more than 200 years lat­er. Can you iden­ti­fy George Wash­ing­ton, Martha Wash­ing­ton, and Thomas Jef­fer­son on the album page below?

Some pages con­tain entire fam­i­lies. Pedro Bide­tre­noul­leau coughed up $1.25 for his own like­ness, as well as those of his wife, and chil­dren Félix, Adele, and Zacharine, num­bers 638 through 642, below.

Bache’s trav­els to New Orleans and Cuba make for a racial­ly diverse col­lec­tion, though lit­tle is known about most of the Black sit­ters. Dr. Asle­son sus­pects some of these might be the only exist­ing por­traits of these indi­vid­u­als, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the case of New Orlea­ni­ans in mixed-race rela­tion­ships, whose descen­dants destroyed strate­gic evi­dence in the effort to “pass” as white:

As I was learn­ing more and more about this his­to­ry, I real­ly began to hope that some of the peo­ple who are try­ing to find their her­itage today, who real­ize it might have been delib­er­ate­ly erad­i­cat­ed to pro­tect their ances­tors from oppres­sion, might have the chance to dis­cov­er an image of a great-great-grand­fa­ther or grand­moth­er.

Read­ers, if you are the care­tak­er of passed down fam­i­ly sil­hou­ettes, per­haps you can help the cura­tors get clos­er to putting a name to some­one who cur­rent­ly exists as lit­tle more than a shad­ow in inter­est­ing head­gear.

Even if you’re not in pos­ses­sion of a sil­hou­ette, you may well be one of the tens of thou­sands liv­ing in the Unit­ed States today con­nect­ed to the album by blood.

Explore an arsenic-free, inter­ac­tive copy of William Bache’s sil­hou­ette ledger book here.

via NYTimes

Relat­ed Con­tent 

The Ground­break­ing Sil­hou­ette Ani­ma­tions of Lotte Reiniger: Cin­derel­la, Hansel and Gre­tel, and More

Behold 900+ Mag­nif­i­cent Botan­i­cal Col­lages Cre­at­ed by a 72-Year-Old Wid­ow, Start­ing in 1772

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Parrots Taught to FaceTime Each Other Become Less Lonely, a New Study Shows

It’s telling that the avian par­tic­i­pants in a recent study where­in pet par­rots, assist­ed by their own­ers, learned to make video calls to oth­ers of their kind were recruit­ed from the online edu­ca­tion­al forum Par­rot Kinder­garten.

In the above footage, the humans’ hope­ful, high-pitched cajol­ing, as they encour­age their birds to inter­act with a new “friend”, car­ries a strong whiff of those Mom­my and Me class­es where a dozen or so adults sit cross­legged in a cir­cle, shak­ing tam­bourines and bright­ly war­bling “Twin­kle, Twin­kle, Lit­tle Star,” while an equal num­ber of tod­dlers wan­der around, marked­ly less invest­ed in the pro­ceed­ings.

Though, real­ly, who am I to judge? I don’t have a par­rot, and it’s been over two decades since my youngest child required parental inter­fer­ence to foment social inter­ac­tion…

Eigh­teen pet par­rots enrolled in the study, hang­ing out with one anoth­er dur­ing self-ini­ti­at­ed video chats, to see how and if such inter­ac­tions might improve their qual­i­ty of life.

No one was forced to make a call if they weren’t feel­ing it, or to remain on the line after their inter­est flagged.

I’m hunch­ing the aver­age parrot’s pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy clocks in far south of the aver­age Amer­i­can toddler’s, which may explain why they com­plet­ed a mere 147 calls over the course of two months (and 1000 hours of com­bined footage.)

That said, I can eas­i­ly imag­ine a sce­nario in which the aver­age human tod­dler, hav­ing suc­cess­ful­ly got­ten their beak, excuse me, hands on a touch­screen tablet, los­es all inter­est in Face­Tim­ing with a peer, pre­fer­ring the soli­tary plea­sures of Bal­loon Pop or Peek-a-Zoo.

Typ­i­cal­ly, human tod­dlers have more oppor­tu­ni­ties for “inter­species eth­i­cal enrich­ment” than crea­tures whose lives are pri­mar­i­ly spent in a cage. As the authors of the study note, “over 20 mil­lion par­rots are kept as pets in the US, often lack­ing appro­pri­ate stim­uli to meet their high social, cog­ni­tive, and emo­tion­al needs.”

The par­rot par­tic­i­pants may not have thrown them­selves into the pro­ceed­ings with the vig­or of Bye Bye Birdie’s teenaged tele­phone cho­rus, but all placed calls, the major­i­ty exhib­it­ed “high moti­va­tion and inten­tion­al­i­ty”, and their humans indi­cat­ed that they would glad­ly con­tin­ue to facil­i­tate this social exper­i­ment.

The human con­tri­bu­tion is not incon­sid­er­able here. It took vast amounts of time and patience to ori­ent the birds to the sys­tem, and care­ful mon­i­tor­ing to make sure calls didn’t run off the rails. Noth­ing like hav­ing your iPad screen smashed by a par­rot who’s got beef in an online forum…

Sev­er­al legit friend­ships formed over the course of the exper­i­ment — a Goffin’s cock­a­too and an African grey who made each other’s vir­tu­al acquain­tance dur­ing the pilot study were still chat­ting, a year after they met.

Data col­lect­ed in the field shows that the num­ber and dura­tion of out­go­ing calls were close­ly tied to the num­ber and dura­tion of incom­ing calls. The most pop­u­lar birdies did not take their con­nec­tions for grant­ed.

It’s a find­ing humans would do well to absorb if we are to com­bat feel­ings of iso­la­tion from with­in our own species.

Read Birds of a Feath­er Video-Flock Togeth­er: Design and Eval­u­a­tion of an Agency-Based Par­rot-to-Par­rot Video-Call­ing Sys­tem for Inter­species Eth­i­cal Enrich­ment here.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

What Kind of Bird Is That?: A Free App From Cor­nell Will Give You the Answer

Explore an Inter­ac­tive Ver­sion of The Wall of Birds, a 2,500 Square-Foot Mur­al That Doc­u­ments the Evo­lu­tion of Birds Over 375 Mil­lion Years

Cor­nell Launch­es Archive of 150,000 Bird Calls and Ani­mal Sounds, with Record­ings Going Back to 1929

Par­rot Sings AC/DCs “Whole Lot­ta Rosie”

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

 

Plan Your Trip Across the Roads of the Roman Empire, Using Modern Web Mapping Technology

At the moment, I hap­pen to be plan­ning some time in France, with a side trip to Bel­gium includ­ed. Mod­ern intra-Euro­pean train trav­el makes arrang­ing the lat­ter quite con­ve­nient: Thalys, the high-speed rail ser­vice con­nect­ing those two coun­tries, can get you from Paris to Brus­sels in about an hour and half. This stands in con­trast to the time of the Roman Empire, which despite its polit­i­cal pow­er lacked high-speed rail, and indeed lacked rail of any kind. But it did have an expan­sive net­work of roads, some of which you can still walk today, imag­in­ing what it would have been like to trav­el Europe two mil­len­nia ago. And now, using the web­site OmnesVi­ae, you can get his­tor­i­cal­ly accu­rate direc­tions as well.

Big Think’s Frank Jacobs describes OmnesVi­ae as “the online route plan­ner the Romans nev­er knew they need­ed.” It “leans heav­i­ly on the Tab­u­la Peutin­ge­ri­ana” — also known as the Peutinger Map, and pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture — “the clos­est thing we have to a gen­uine itin­er­ar­i­um (‘road map’) of the Roman Empire.”

Though not quite geo­graph­i­cal­ly accu­rate, it does offer a detailed view of which cities in the empire were con­nect­ed and how. “Geolo­cat­ing thou­sands of points from Peutinger, OmnesVi­ae refor­mats the roads and des­ti­na­tions on the scroll onto a more famil­iar­ly land­scaped map. The short­est route between two (ancient) points is cal­cu­lat­ed using the dis­tances trav­eled over Roman rather than mod­ern roads, also tak­ing into account the rivers and moun­tains the net­work must cross.”

You can use OmnesVi­ae just like any oth­er way-find­ing appli­ca­tion, except you enter your ori­gin and des­ti­na­tion into fields labeled “ab” and “ad” rather than “from” and “to.” And though “for some cities cur­rent day names are under­stood,” as the instruc­tions note, it works bet­ter — and feels so much more authen­tic — if you type in cities like “Roma” and “Lon­dinio.” The result­ing jour­ney between those two great cap­i­tals looks ardu­ous indeed, pass­ing at least three moun­tain­ous areas, thir­teen rivers, and count­less small­er set­tle­ments. And accord­ing to OmnesVi­ae, no roads led to Brus­sels: the clos­est an ancient trav­el­er could get to the loca­tion of the mod­ern-day seat of the Euro­pean Union was the Wal­loon vil­lage of Liber­chies — which, as the birth­place of Djan­go Rein­hardt, remains an impor­tant stop for the jazz-lov­ing trav­el­er of Europe today.

via Big Think

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Roads of Ancient Rome Visu­al­ized in the Style of Mod­ern Sub­way Maps

How the Ancient Romans Built Their Roads, the Life­lines of Their Vast Empire

The Roman Roads and Bridges You Can Still Trav­el Today

How to Make Roman Con­crete, One of Human Civilization’s Longest-Last­ing Build­ing Mate­ri­als

The First Tran­sit Map: a Close Look at the Sub­way-Style Tab­u­la Peutin­ge­ri­ana of the 5th-Cen­tu­ry Roman Empire

How Did Roman Aque­ducts Work?: The Most Impres­sive Achieve­ment of Ancient Rome’s Infra­struc­ture, Explained

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

A Culinary Videos Series Shows Every Conceivable Way to Cook Eggs, Potatoes, Pizza, Bacon & More

So you think you know your way around a pota­to, eh?

No doubt you excel at boil­ing, mash­ing, roast­ing, bak­ing and twice bak­ing …

You may make a mean pota­to chip or pomme frite

Per­haps you’ve per­fect­ed some tricks with a microwave or air fry­er.

But before you’re puffed too full of brag­ging rights, have you ever thought to sub­ject this hum­ble root veg­etable to a blow torch, an iron, a dish­wash­er, a juicer or a gaso­line pow­ered gen­er­a­tor plugged into a giant dim­mer switch?

No?

Con­grat­u­la­tions on hav­ing avoid­ed some tru­ly dread­ful meth­ods for prepar­ing a pota­to, judg­ing by the results of some of Bon Appétit Con­tribut­ing Edi­tor Amiel Stanek’s more out­ré, tongue-in-cheek exper­i­ments, above.

Wait, maybe there aren’t real­ly 63 ways to cook pota­toes?

The prepa­ra­tion we’re legit­i­mate­ly eager to try is pick­ling, for spuds Stanek declares “very sweet, salty, acidic”, a wel­come addi­tion to a cheese board or a cru­dité plate.

And there’s an argu­ment to be made for turn­ing a waf­fle iron into a dual pur­pose device by mak­ing hash browns in it.

Stanek fares less well, pip­ing pre-mashed pota­toes into a Rol­lie ® Eggmas­ter, “a weird, made-for-TV device that is made express­ly for cook­ing eggs:”

Ewww, no, why is it like that? This is dis­gust­ing!!!

If you’re won­der­ing how that Rol­lie ® does with its intend­ed ingre­di­ent, Stanek’s got an answer for you:

Oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, oh my god, it looks like it’s in a con­dom. This is the most dis­gust­ing egg thing we have made all day…it tastes like bad seafood. I don’t know why, it tastes plastic‑y. This is hor­ri­ble!

Mean­while, those in long term rela­tion­ships with part­ners hold­ing dif­fer­ent views on the best way to scram­ble, fry or poach an egg may find them­selves feel­ing vin­di­cat­ed by this episode.

Either that or hor­ri­bly betrayed.

Oth­er than pota­toes and eggs, the only episode of the 10 in the Almost Every series not exclu­sive­ly geared toward cook­ing flesh is the one devot­ed to piz­za, which at 32 meth­ods, ties with chick­en breast. (Only whole chick­en, at 24 meth­ods, has few­er options.)

Veg­ans will like­ly feel unim­pressed, in addi­tion to left out, giv­en that there’s near­ly that many sug­gest­ed hacks for melt­ing plant-based cheese.

Per­haps a vis­it to Moon­burg­er, a meat­less Hud­son Val­ley chain where Stanek is Culi­nary Con­sul­tant and the shakes are dairy free is in order?

Those crav­ing ever more off­beat attacks, how­ev­er, will find them­selves enter­tained by Stanek’s efforts involv­ing an Easy-Bake Oven (yeah, nope, not good at all),  a Teenage Mutant Nin­ja Tur­tle Piz­za Machine (the whole cheese sitch looks a lit­tle bit demented…bummer, dude), and a crust that’s baked around a sil­i­cone cone, then filled with a “molten, dan­ger­ous slur­ry” of sauce and cheese (this thing looks demon­ic to me, like an ani­mal horn meant for a Satan­ic rit­u­al…)

If that’s not our cue to seek out a restau­rant with a wood burn­ing oven, per­haps it’s a sig­nal we should order out.

Watch a com­plete playlist of Bon Appétit’s Almost Every here.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

10,000 Vin­tage Recipe Books Are Now Dig­i­tized in The Inter­net Archive’s Cook­book & Home Eco­nom­ics Col­lec­tion

The New York Times Makes 17,000 Tasty Recipes Avail­able Online: Japan­ese, Ital­ian, Thai & Much More

The Recipes of Famous Artists: Din­ners & Cock­tails From Tol­stoy, Miles Davis, Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe, David Lynch & Many More

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

The Five Graphs That Changed the World: See Groundbreaking Data Visualizations by Florence Nightingale, W. E. B. DuBois & Beyond

Almost two and a half cen­turies after its first pub­li­ca­tion, Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Caus­es of the Wealth of Nations is much bet­ter known as sim­ply The Wealth of Nations. Had he writ­ten it today, the text itself, which runs between a for­mi­da­ble 500–700 pages in most edi­tions, would also be con­sid­er­ably short­er. It’s not just that writ­ers in Smith’s day went in for length per se (though many now read as if they did), but that graphs had­n’t been invent­ed yet. Much of what he’d dis­cov­ered about the nature of eco­nom­ics could have been expressed more con­cise­ly — and much more clear­ly — in pic­tures rather than words.

As it hap­pens, the kind of infor­ma­tion­al graphs we know best today would be invent­ed by Smith’s fel­low Scot William Play­fair in 1786, just a decade after The Wealth of Nations came out. “Data visu­al­iza­tion is every­where today, but when Play­fair first cre­at­ed them over 200 years ago, using shapes to rep­re­sent num­bers was large­ly sneered at,” says Adam Ruther­ford in the Roy­al Soci­ety video above.

“How could draw­ings tru­ly rep­re­sent sol­id sci­en­tif­ic data? But now, data visu­al­iza­tion has become an art form of its own.” There fol­low “five graphs that changed the world,” begin­ning with the map of water pumps that physi­cian John Snow used to deter­mine the cause of a cholera epi­dem­ic in 1850s Lon­don, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture.

We’ve also post­ed W. E. B. Du Bois’ “hand­made charts show­cas­ing the edu­ca­tion­al, social, and busi­ness accom­plish­ments of black Amer­i­cans in the 35 years since slav­ery had been offi­cial­ly abol­ished.” The oth­er world-chang­ing graphs here include Flo­rence Nightin­gale’s “cox­comb” that showed how unsan­i­tary hos­pi­tal con­di­tions killed more sol­diers dur­ing the Crimean War than did actu­al fight­ing; the so-called Kallikak Fam­i­ly Tree, a fraud­u­lent visu­al case for remov­ing the “fee­ble-mind­ed” from soci­ety; and Ed Hawkins’ more recent red-and-blue “warm­ing stripes” designed to present the effects of cli­mate change to a non-sci­en­tif­ic audi­ence. Using just blocks of col­or, with nei­ther num­bers nor text, Hawkins’ bold graph harks back to an ear­li­er gold­en era of data visu­al­iza­tion: after Play­fair, but before Pow­er­Point.

via Aeon

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Art of Data Visu­al­iza­tion: How to Tell Com­plex Sto­ries Through Smart Design

Flo­rence Nightin­gale Saved Lives by Cre­at­ing Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Visu­al­iza­tions of Sta­tis­tics (1855)

Kurt Von­negut Dia­grams the Shape of All Sto­ries: From Kafka’s “Meta­mor­pho­sis” to “Cin­derel­la”

A Pro­por­tion­al Visu­al­iza­tion of the World’s Most Pop­u­lar Lan­guages

The 1855 Map That Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Dis­ease Pre­ven­tion & Data Visu­al­iza­tion: Dis­cov­er John Snow’s Broad Street Pump Map

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy Visu­al­ized

W. E. B. Du Bois Cre­ates Rev­o­lu­tion­ary, Artis­tic Data Visu­al­iza­tions Show­ing the Eco­nom­ic Plight of African-Amer­i­cans (1900)

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

Pussy Riot Sends a Powerful Message to Vladimir Putin: “You Have Already Lost. You Know It.”

Speak­ing at TED, Nadya Tolokon­niko­va, found­ing mem­ber of Pussy Riot, has a pow­er­ful mes­sage for Rus­sians today: Resist­ing the author­i­ty of Vladimir Putin is an option. It’s a choice. Of that, Tolokon­niko­va has already pro­vid­ed ample proof. For more than a decade, the mem­bers of Pussy Riot have staged high-pro­file protests in Rus­sia … and paid the price, with time served in prison. As she puts it, “Courage is an abil­i­ty to act in the face of fear. And some of us have cho­sen to live coura­geous­ly.” That exam­ple is what makes her a threat:

The rea­son why I became a threat to the sys­tem, not because of any actu­al phys­i­cal pow­er that I have, but because courage is con­ta­gious. And any act of speak­ing the truth can cause incal­cu­la­ble trans­for­ma­tions in social con­scious­ness. And we all have this pow­er. It’s a moral act to use this pow­er. You may or may not achieve the results that you want­ed, but there is eter­nal beau­ty in try­ing to find truth, in risk­ing every­thing you’ve got for what’s right…

As always, she saves choice words for Putin: “Vladimir Vladimirovich, the Krem­lin walls became your prison walls. You have already lost. You know it. That’s why you’re so afraid. You lost in spir­it.” Now we just need Rus­sians at home, and Ukraini­ans on the bat­tle­field, to make the implic­it explic­it.

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent 

A His­to­ry of Pussy Riot: Watch the Band’s Ear­ly Performances/Protests Against the Putin Regime

Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokon­niko­va Tells Pro­tes­tors What to Do–and Not Do–If Arrest­ed by Author­i­tar­i­an Police

Slavoj Žižek & Pussy Riot’s Nadezh­da Tolokon­niko­va Exchange An Extra­or­di­nary Series of Let­ters

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