What did ancient Egyptians sound like? What did they eat and drink? What ancient Egyptian medicine and tools do we still use in modern times? Why did they practice mummification? Above, Laurel Bestock, a professor from Brown University, discusses everything you ever wanted to know about Ancient Egypt. Not a stranger to popular media productions—Bestock appears in a recent National Geographic production, Egypt’s Lost Wonders—the professor fields every question that comes her way, no matter how big or small. All along, she gives “outstanding and very down-to-earth explanations,” notes a fellow professor in the YouTube comments. For my money, the best part comes at the 10:40 mark when she deciphers and reads hieroglyphs. Enjoy.
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If we want to know the precise geographical location of, say, a particular church in Madrid, video arcade in Tokyo or coffee shop in Addis Ababa, we can figure it out in a matter of seconds. This is, in historical terms, a recent development indeed: many of us remember when the most detailed cartographical information we could get about distant lands (or for that matter, most of our own land) revealed to us only its cities and major roads — assuming we even had a world atlas at hand. Now, younger people take for granted the knowledge of not just where every place in the world is, but what it looks like, what its prices are, and what its visitors have said about it.
We live today, in other words, in the dream of Fra Mauro, the Venetian cartographer-monk of the late Middle Ages who created the most detailed and accurate world map to that point in human history. “As a young man, Fra Mauro had been a soldier and merchant of the famed Venice Merchant Fleet,” says the site of New World Cartographic. “His travels with the fleet around the Mediterranean and the Middle East resulted in his becoming interested in mapping, and he eventually settled in the monastery of San Michelle on the island of Murano, in the Venice Lagoon, where he became a lay brother.” In the early 1450s, “he was commissioned by King Afonso V of Portugal to create a map of the world.”
Portugal’s will to dominate world trade, which required the most detailed maps possible, was matched by Fra Mauro’s will to gather information about every corner of Earth, no matter how far-flung. And he could do that without leaving Venice: as Atlas Obscura’s Adam Kessler writes, “Arab traders and world explorers passed through the port, giving Fra Mauro an incomparable source of gossip and tall tales about the world. The fall of Constantinople, occurring a few years before the map was finished, would also have provided a rich source of well-traveled refugees, presumably willing to swap their stories for some bread or beer.” Not only did the map’s physical creation require a team of collaborators, the gathering of its contents relied upon the fifteenth-century equivalent of crowdsourcing.
This chapter of cartographical history invites such technological analogies: Kessler calls Fra Mauro’s completed mappa mundi “the Google Earth of the 1450s.” Despite his religious affiliation with the monastery of San Michele, Fra Mauro’s efforts produced an unprecedentedly radical rendition of the world. Breaking with religious tradition, he didn’t put Jerusalem in the center; “the Garden of Eden was relegated to a sidebox, not shown in a real geographic location.” His scrupulousness made him the first cartographer “to depict Japan as an island, and the first European to show that you could sail all the way around Africa.” While his map was “the most accurate ever made at the time,” its more than 3,000 annotations do contain plenty of tall tales, often of literal giants. But are they really much less trustworthy than the average twenty-first-century user review?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
Anyone can learn to draw the cast of Peanuts, but few can do it every day for nearly half a century. The latter, as far as we know, amounts to a group of one: Charles Schulz, who not only created that world-famous comic strip but drew it single-handed throughout its entire run. He was, as a nineteen-sixties CBS profile put it, “a one-man production team: writer, humorist, social critic.” That clip opens the video above, which compiles footage of Schulz drawing Peanuts while making observations on the nature of his craft. “When you draw a comic strip, if you’re going to wait for inspiration, you’ll never make it,” he says. “You have to become professional enough at this so that you can almost deliberately set down an idea at will.”
Schulz’s dedication to his work may have been an inborn trait, but he didn’t find his way to that work only through his particular abilities. His particular inabilities also played their part: “I studied art in a correspondence course, because I was afraid to go to art school,” he says in a later BBC segment.
“I couldn’t see myself sitting in a room where everyone else in the room could draw much better than I.” With better writing skills, “perhaps I would have tried to become a novelist, and I might have become a failure.” With better drawing skills, “I might have tried to become an illustrator or an artist. I would’ve failed there. But my entire being seems to be just right for being a cartoonist.”
In drawing, he also found a medium of thought. “The really practical way of getting an idea, when you have nothing really to draw, is just taking a blank piece of paper and maybe drawing one of the characters in a familiar pose, like Snoopy sleeping on top of the doghouse,” he says. Then, you might naturally “imagine what would happen if, say, it began to snow. And so you’d doodle in a few snowflakes, something like that. Perhaps you would be led to wonder what would happen if it snowed very hard, and the snow covered him up completely.” If you continue on to draw, say, Snoopy’s loyal friend Woodstock being similarly snowed in, you’re well on your way to a complete strip. Now do it 17,897 times, and maybe you’ll qualify for Schulz’s league.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
This past week, the influential psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman passed away at age 90. The winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, Kahneman wrote the bestselling book Thinking, Fast and Slow where he explained the two systems of thinking that shape human decisions. These include “System 1,” which relies on fast, automatic and unconscious thinking, and then “System 2,” which requires attention and concentration and works more slowly. And it’s the interplay of these two systems that profoundly shapes the quality of our decisions in different parts of our lives, including investing.
In the interview above, Steve Forbes asks why individual investors persist in believing that they can pick stocks successfully over time, despite ample evidence to the contrary. Drawing on his research, Kahneman describes the “illusion of skill,” where investors “get the immediate feeling that [they] understand something,” which is much “more compelling than the knowledge of statistics that tells you that you don’t know anything.” Here, System 1 creates the “illusion of skill,” and it overwhelms the slower analytical thinking found in System 2—the System that could use data to determine that stock picking is a fool’s errand. When Forbes asks if investors should ultimately opt for index funds instead of individual stocks, Kahneman replies “I am a believer in index funds,” that is, unless you have very rare information that allows you to pick stocks successfully.
Later in the interview, Kahneman touches on another important subject. In his mind, the first question every investor should ask is not how much money should I plan to make, but rather, “How much can I afford to lose.” Every investor should assess their risk tolerance, in part so that you can handle turbulence in the market and stick with your initial investment plan. If you are not aware of your risk tolerance, “when things go bad, you will want to change what you are doing, and that’s the disaster in investing… Loss aversion can kill you.” He continues, “Emotions are indeed your enemy. The worst thing that could happen to you … is to make a decision and not stick with it, so that you bail out when things go badly, so that you sell low and buy high. That is not a recipe for doing well in the stock market, or anywhere.” Ideally, you should figure out upfront how much you want to put in the stock market, and how much you want to keep out, so that you can psychologically manage the ups and downs of investing.
From here, Kahneman comes to his most important piece of advice for investors: Know yourself in terms of what you could regret. If you are prone to regret, if investing makes you feel insecure and lose sleep at night, then you should adopt a “regret minimization strategy” and create a more conservative portfolio to match it. Read more about that here. Also see Chapters 31 (Risk Policies) and 32 (Keep Score) in Thinking, Fast and Slow where Kahneman talks more about investing.
This post originally appeared on our sister/side-project site, Open Personal Finance.
If you suspect that your brain isn’t quite suited for modern life, you’re not alone. In fact, that state of mind has probably been closer to the rule than the exception throughout modernity itself. It’s just that the mix of things we have to think about keeps changing: “The school run. Work calls. Inflation. Remember your lines,” says BBC science reporter Melissa Hogenboom in the video above. “Our brain never evolved for any of this, and yet here we are, getting on with it as best we can, and it’s all thanks to our brain’s incredible capacity to adapt, to learn, to grow” — the very subject she investigates in this series, Brain Hacks.
In search of neuroscientifically sound “hacks to help strengthen crucial connections and keep our minds younger in the process,” Hogenboom put herself through a “a six-week brain-altering course.” The first segment of the series finds her entering into a meditation program she describes in this article: “For 30 minutes a day, either as one single session or two 15-minute sessions, I practiced a guided mindfulness meditation by listening to a recording.” In addition, she had a weekly session with University of Surrey professor of clinical psychology Thorsten Barnhofer, who also appears in the video.
Can meditation, and the oft-discussed “mindfulness” it emphasizes, keep our minds from wandering away from what we really need to think about? “Mind-wandering is something that, of course, might be helpful in many ways,” says Barnhofer, “but it’s also something that can go awry. This is where repetitive thinking comes in, where ruminative thinking comes in, where worry comes in. Those are the factors which increase stress,” increasing the presence of hormones like cortisol. And “if levels of cortisol remain high, that can actually become toxic for your brain, for regions of your brain which are very plastic.” Stress, as Hogenboom sums it up, “is a direct inhibitor of neuroplasticity.”
“Research has found that after only a few months of mindfulness training, certain depression and anxiety symptoms can ease,” Hogenboom writes, and her own experience seems also to point in that direction. A brain scan performed after her meditation course found that “one half of my amygdala – an almond-shaped structure important for emotional processing – had reduced in volume,” possibly because the practice “buffers stress seen in the amygdala.” It also revealed growth in her cingulate cortex, “part of the limbic system that is involved in our behavioral and emotional responses,” which indicates “increased control of that area.” Hogenboom acknowledges that these changes “could also be random,” since “the brain is constantly changing anyway”; the trick, however and whenever possible, is to nudge it toward change for the better.
Bonus: Below, science journalist Daniel Goleman talks about mindfulness and how you can change your brain in 10 minutes with daily meditation.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
What could our future world look like if we continue to do nothing about climate change? That’s the question posed by a new TED ED video, written by Shannon Odell and directed by Sofia Pashaei. We are already seeing the effects of climate change. If you’re paying even a little attention, you’re feeling the hotter summers (which is reflected in the data). You’re noticing the increasing number of droughts. You’re seeing the growing number of forest fires, etc. So, “what will our world look like in the next 30 to 80 years, if we continue on the current path?” With the video above, get a glimpse of the possible world to come.
David Lynch has a variety of notions about what it takes to make art, but suffering is not among them. “This is part of the myth, I think,” he said in one interview. “Van Gogh did suffer. He suffered a lot. But I think he didn’t suffer while he was painting.” That is, “he didn’t need to be suffering to do those great paintings.” As Lynch sees it, “the more you suffer, the less you want to create. If you’re truly depressed, they say, you can’t even get out of bed, let alone create.” This relationship between mental state and creativity is a subject he’s addressed over and over again, and the video above assembles several of those instances from over the decades. It may come as a surprise that the auteur of Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, and Mulholland Drive, recommends meditation as the solution.
In the video below, he lays out how his favorite kind of meditation, the Transcendental variety, has the potential to drive out not just depression, but also negativity, tension, stress, anxiety, sorrow, anger, hate, and fear. These are grand promises, but not without interest to the non-meditating Lynch fan curious about the mind behind his work, both of which were once widely assumed to be deeply troubled indeed.
“Do you think you’re a genius, or a really sick person?” CBC correspondent Valerie Pringle asks him in a Blue Velvet-era interview included in the compilation at the top of the post. “Well, Valerie,” he responds, “I don’t know.” He did not, at that time, speak publicly about his meditation practice, but by the late nineties he’d begun to discuss personal matters much more freely. In one Charlie Rose interview, a clip from which appears in the video, he even tells of the time he went to therapy. The beginning of this story makes it in, but not the end: Lynch asked his new therapist “straight out, right up front, ‘Could this process that we’re going to go through affect creativity?’ And he said, ‘David, I have to be honest with you, it could” — whereupon Lynch shook the man’s hand and walked right back out the door.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
For some time now it has been fashionable to diagnose dead famous people with mental illnesses we never knew they had when they were alive. These postmortem clinical interventions can seem accurate or far-fetched, and mostly harmless—unless we let them color our appreciation of an artist’s work, or negatively influence the way we treat eccentric living personalities. Overall, I tend to think the state of a creative individual’s mental health is a topic best left between patient and doctor.
In the case of one Herman Poole Blount, aka Sun Ra—composer, bandleader of free jazz ensemble the Arkestra, and “embodiment of Afrofuturism”—one finds it tempting to speculate about possible diagnoses, of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, for example. Plenty of people have done so. This makes sense, given Blount’s claims to have visited other planets through astral projection and to himself be an alien from another dimension. But ascribing Sun Ra’s enlightening, enlivening mytho-theo-philosophy to illness or dysfunction truly does his brilliant mind a disservice, and clouds our appreciation for his completely original body of work.
In fact, Sun Ra himself discovered—fairly early in his career when he went by the name “Sonny”—that his music could perhaps alleviate the suffering of mental illness and help bring patients back in touch with reality. In the late 50’s, the pianist and composer’s manager, Alton Abraham, booked his client at a Chicago psychiatric hospital. Sun Ra biographer John Szwed tells the story:
Abraham had an early interest in alternative medicine, having read about scalpel-free surgery in the Philippines and Brazil. The group of patients assembled for this early experiment in musical therapy included catatonics and severe schizophrenics, but Sonny approached the job like any other, making no concessions in his music.
Sun Ra had his faith in this endeavor rewarded by the response of some of the patients. “While he was playing,” Szwed writes, “a woman who it was said had not moved or spoken for years got up from the floor, walked directly to his piano, and cried out ‘Do you call that music?’” Blount—just coming into his own as an original artist—was “delighted with her response, and told the story for years afterward as evidence of the healing powers of music.” He also composed the song above, “Advice for Medics,” which commemorates the psychiatric hospital gig.
It is surely an event worth remembering for how it encapsulates so many of the responses to Sun Ra’s music, which can—yes—confuse, irritate, and bewilder unsuspecting listeners. Likely still inspired by the experience, Sun Ra recorded an album in the early sixties titled Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy, a collection of songs, writes Allmusic, that “outraged those in the jazz community who thought Eric Dolphy and John Coltrane had already taken things too far.” (Hear the track “And Otherness” above.) But those willing to listen to what Sun Ra was laying down often found themselves roused from a debilitating complacency about what music can be and do.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.
Depending on how you reckon it, the “American century” has already ended, is now drawing to its close, or has some life left in it yet. But whatever its boundaries, that ambiguous period has been culturally defined by one medium above all: film, or more broadly speaking, motion pictures. These very words might start a series of clips rolling in your mind, a highlight reel of industrial developments, political speeches, protest marches, sports victories, NASA missions, and foreign wars. But that represents just a tiny fraction of America on film, much more of which you can easily discover with a visit to the Prelinger Archives.
Rick Prelinger founded the Prelinger Archives in 1982 with the mission of preserving “ephemeral films.” According to the program of a 2002 series he introduced at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive a couple of decades later, these are “typically educational, industrial, or amateur films,” often made to serve a “pragmatic and narrow purpose. It is only by chance that many of them survive.”
These pieces of “throwaway media” — of which the Prelinger Archives now has some 30,000 — include newsreel-type documentaries, works of political propaganda, instructional productions for use in schools and workplaces, and a great many home movies that offer candid glimpses into everyday American lives.
If you really want to see the United States, as we’ve previously said here on Open Culture, you’ve got to drive across the country. What holds true in life also holds true in film, and the Prelinger Archives’ digitization and uploading have made it possible to experience the history of the great American road trip through the eyes — or the eight-millimeter cameras — of travelers who took it in the forties, fifties, and sixties, rolling through sites of interest from the Grand Canyon and Mount Rushmore to the Corn Palace. If a culture is preserved most clearly through its ephemera, then there’s a whole lot more America awaiting us in the Prelinger Archives.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
Pursued to any depth, the question of whether the United States of America counts as an empire becomes difficult to address with clarity. On one hand, the country has exerted a strong cultural influence on most of the world for the better part of a century, a phenomenon not unrelated to the military presence that extends far beyond its borders. (In Korea, where I live, I once met a former KATUSA, the branch of the Korean Army seconded to the US Army, who told me he’d joined because he “wanted to see what it was like to be a modern Roman soldier.”) On the other hand, we can’t quite say that it rules the known world — at least, not in the way that the Roman Empire did twenty centuries ago.
Yet the temptation to draw parallels between America and Rome remains irresistible, not least when it comes to the subject of imperial decline. In this video from Told in Stone, historian Garrett Ryan evaluates “the idea that modern America is destined to decline and fall like ancient Rome.” The arguments for this motion tend to involve “an increasingly unsettled international landscape” and “domestic division,” leading to the dissolution of Pax Americana — the successor of Pax Britannica, which itself succeeded Pax Romana. Americans, Ryan explains, “have a sense that Rome is in their political DNA. The constitution, after all, represents an attempt to create a new and perfected Roman Republic. Anxieties about Roman-style decline have been present since the beginning.”
Rome and America: each “was the greatest power of its time,” each “had a strong legal system and a society that left room for social advancement,” and each “professed to be guided by Christian principles.” Their political, economic, technological conditions could hardly be more different, of course, but when observers “say that America is falling like Rome, the underlying assumption is not that America is specifically like Rome; it’s that all empires, ancient and modern, follow a similar course from greatness to grave.” The Roman Empire fell because “Germanic tribes overcame its frontier defenses,” because “a series of ruinous civil wars sapped its strength,” because “it had lost the loyalty of provincial elites,” and for many other reasons besides — few of which are likely to play major parts in a notional American collapse.
But the fact that “the decline of Rome has no precise parallels in the twenty-first century does not mean that it has no lessons to offer modern America.” To learn those lessons, we could do worse than to turn to eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon, whose The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is the subject of the School of Life video above. “The immense story that Gibbon tells us moves from one disaster to another, century after century,” says narrator Alain de Botton: failed reforms, institutional corruption, breakdowns in civil-military relations, plagues, poor harvests, economic collapse. And yet the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the arrival of modernity, as we know it, all lay ahead. “You aren’t going to like what comes after America,” Leonard Cohen once wrote, but maybe our descendants will like what comes a millennium or so after America.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
I doubt I need to list for you the many titles of the 18th century German savant and polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, but allow me to add one or two that were new to me, at least: color theorist (or phenomenologist of color) and progenitor of abstract expressionism. As a fascinating Booktryst post informs us, Goethe’s book on color, Zur Farbenlehre (Theory of Colors), written in 1810, disputed the Newtonian view of the subject and formulated a psychological and philosophical account of the way we actually experience color as a phenomenon. In his account, Goethe describes how he came by his views:
Along with the rest of the world, I was convinced that all the colors are contained in the light; no one had ever told me anything different, and I had never found the least cause to doubt it, because I had no further interest in the subject.
But how I was astonished, as I looked at a white wall through the prism, that it stayed white! That only where it came upon some darkened area, it showed some color, then at last, around the window sill all the colors shone… It didn’t take long before I knew here was something significant about color to be brought forth, and I spoke as through an instinct out loud, that the Newtonian teachings were false.
Schopenhauer would later write that “[Goethe] delivered in full measure what was promised by the title of his excellent work: data toward a theory of colour. They are important, complete, and significant data, rich material for a future theory of colour.” It was a theory, Schopenhauer admits, that does not “[furnish] us with a real explanation of the essential nature of colour, but really postulates it as a phenomenon, and merely tells us how it originates, not what it is.”
Another later philosophical interpreter of Goethe, Ludwig Wittgenstein—a thinker greatly interested in visual perception—also saw Goethe’s work as operating very differently than Newton’s optics—not as a scientific theory but rather as an intuitive schema. Wittgenstein remarked that Goethe’s work “is really not a theory at all. Nothing can be predicted by means of it. It is, rather, a vague schematic outline, of the sort we find in [William] James’s psychology. There is no experimentum crucis for Goethe’s theory of colour.”
Yet a third later German genius, Werner Heisenberg, commented on the influence of Zur Farbenlehre, writing that “Goethe’s colour theory has in many ways borne fruit in art, physiology and aesthetics. But victory, and hence influence on the research of the following century, has been Newton’s.”
I’m not fit to evaluate the relative merits of Goethe’s theory, or lack thereof, versus Newton’s rigorous work on optics. Whole books have been written on the subject. But whatever his intentions, Goethe’s work has been well-received as a psychologically accurate account that has also, through his text and many illustrations you see here, had significant influence on twentieth century painters also greatly concerned with the psychology of color, most notably Wassily Kandinsky, who produced his own “schematic outline” of the psychological effects of color titled Concerning the Spiritual in Art, a classic of modernist aesthetic theory. As is usually the case with Goethe, the influence of this single work is wider and deeper than he probably ever foresaw.
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