The First-Ever Film Version of Lewis Carroll’s Tale, Alice in Wonderland (1903)

in Film | May 10th, 2023

Once lost, this 8‑minute, very dam­aged, but very delight­ful silent ver­sion of Alice in Won­der­land was restored sev­er­al years ago by the British Film Insti­tute. It is the first film adap­ta­tion of the 1865 Lewis Car­roll clas­sic. And, at the time, the orig­i­nal length of 12 min­utes (only 8 min­utes sur­vive today) made it the longest film com­ing out of the nascent British film indus­try.

After about a minute, the eye ignores the dam­age of the film, like the ear ignores a scratched 78 rpm record. View­ers can expect sev­er­al vignettes from the nov­el, not a flow­ing nar­ra­tive. It starts with Alice fol­low­ing the White Rab­bit down the hole, the “eat me” and “drink me” sequence, the squeal­ing baby that turns into a piglet, the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Tea Par­ty, and the Red Queen and her play­ing card min­ions. The col­or­ing of the neg­a­tive is a BFI recon­struc­tion of the orig­i­nal col­ors, by the way.

The film was pro­duced and direct­ed by Cecil Hep­worth and Per­cy Stow out of their Hep­worth Stu­dios in Wal­ton-on-the-Thames, near Lon­don. They show knowl­edge of the cam­era trick­ery pio­neered only a few years ear­li­er by Georges Méliès, like the shrink­ing and grow­ing Alice and the appear­ance of the Cheshire Cat. That cat, by the way, was the Hepworth’s fam­i­ly pet. Hep­worth him­self plays the frog-head­ed foot­man, and his wife played the Red Queen.

May Clark, who played Alice, was 18 at the time, and had already worked on sev­er­al Hep­worth pro­duc­tions, and not just act­ing. Accord­ing to her bio at the Women Film Pio­neers project, she did a bit of every­thing around the stu­dio, “from spe­cial effects and set dec­o­ra­tion to cos­tume design and car­pen­try.” The ear­ly days of film have a real “stu­dent project” feel about them, no pigeon­holed roles, just every­body chip­ping in.

As for Cecil Hep­worth, he appeared des­tined for a career in film, as his father ran mag­ic lantern shows. Cecil worked for sev­er­al com­pa­nies before set­ting up his own and wrote one of the first books on the sub­ject, Ani­mat­ed Pho­tog­ra­phy: The ABC of the Cin­e­mato­graph. His com­pa­ny con­tin­ued to make films in this ear­ly style through 1926, but even­tu­al­ly ran out of mon­ey. To pay off debts, the receiver­ship com­pa­ny melt­ed down his films to get the sil­ver, which was the rea­son most schol­ars thought his films were lost. In 2008, one of his films was dis­cov­ered, and then “Alice.” There may still be oth­ers out there.

You can find Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land list­ed in our oth­er col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lewis Carroll’s Clas­sic Sto­ry, Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land, Told in Sand Ani­ma­tion

Curi­ous Alice — The 1971 Anti-Drug Movie Based on Alice in Won­der­land That Made Drugs Look Like Fun

The Orig­i­nal Alice’s Adven­tures In Won­der­land Man­u­script, Hand­writ­ten & Illus­trat­ed By Lewis Car­roll (1864)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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The Story of the Flatiron Building, “New York’s Strangest Tower”

in Architecture, History | May 10th, 2023

Few out­side New York know the Flat­iron Build­ing by name, but peo­ple every­where asso­ciate it with the city. That owes in part to its ten­den­cy to appear in the vin­tage imagery of New York that adorns the walls of cafés, hotel rooms, and den­tists’ offices across the world. And that, in turn, owes in part — in very large part — to the Flatiron’s unusu­al shape, the result of a design meant to max­i­mize the prof­it of a tri­an­gu­lar plot of land bound­ed by Fifth Avenue, Broad­way, and East 22nd Street. You can hear the sto­ry of the build­ing, “New York’s strangest tow­er,” in the new video from archi­tec­ture-and-engi­neer­ing Youtube chan­nel The B1M just above.

We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured The B1M here on Open Cul­ture for videos on sub­jects like Europe’s lack of sky­scrap­ers — a con­di­tion that cer­tain­ly does­n’t afflict Man­hat­tan, though at the time of the Flat­iron Build­ing’s con­struc­tion in the first years of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, the sky­scraper itself was still a fair­ly nov­el con­cept.

Laws gov­ern­ing con­struc­tion changed to keep up with devel­op­ments in the tech­nolo­gies of con­struc­tion: “Fol­low­ing a recent change in the city’s fire codes,” says the video’s nar­ra­tor, “this became one of the ear­li­est build­ings in New York to shun load-bear­ing mason­ry and instead take advan­tage of steel for its struc­tur­al frame.”


The Flatiron’s archi­tects were Fred­er­ick P. Dinkel­berg and Daniel Burn­ham, the lat­ter of whom is now remem­bered as the orig­i­nal king of the Amer­i­can sky­scraper. In fact, the very term “sky­scraper” was coined in response to the Mon­tauk Block, a high-rise he designed in Chica­go. But while the Mon­tauk Block stood only between 1883 and 1902, the Flat­iron con­tin­ues to stand proud — if, at 22 sto­ries, no longer rel­a­tive­ly tall — on the three-cor­nered plot where it first arose 120 years ago.  Alas, it has also “sat emp­ty since 2019, when its last ten­ants, Macmil­lan Pub­lish­ers, moved out.” After that began a series of ren­o­va­tions, and after that began “mul­ti­ple dis­agree­ments among the build­ing’s cur­rent own­ers and future ten­ants,” which cul­mi­nat­ed in a court-ordered auc­tion of the build­ing won by a bid­der who sub­se­quent­ly van­ished. But how­ev­er deep the Flat­iron plunges into legal lim­bo, its sta­tus as a New York icon will sure­ly remain intact.

Relat­ed con­tent:

New York’s Lost Sky­scraper: The Rise and Fall of the Singer Tow­er

Watch the Build­ing of the Empire State Build­ing in Col­or: The Cre­ation of the Icon­ic 1930s Sky­scraper From Start to Fin­ish

An Archi­tect Demys­ti­fies the Art Deco Design of the Icon­ic Chrysler Build­ing (1930)

A Trip Through New York City in 1911: Vin­tage Video of NYC Gets Col­orized & Revived with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Why Europe Has So Few Sky­scrap­ers

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.

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What the Great Pyramids of Giza Originally Looked Like

in Architecture, History | May 9th, 2023

Ask any­one who’s trav­eled to the Great Pyra­mids of Giza: no mat­ter how many times you’ve seen them in pho­tographs or on tele­vi­sion, you’re nev­er real­ly pre­pared to come face-to-face with them in real life. But you can get fair­ly close to at least the appear­ance of real life by see­ing the Pyra­mids in 4k res­o­lu­tion, as they’re pre­sent­ed in the video above from trav­el, archi­tec­ture, and his­to­ry Youtu­ber Manuel Bra­vo (pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture for his expla­na­tion of Fil­ip­po Brunelleschi’s dome atop the Flo­rence Cathe­dral). This isn’t just vaca­tion footage: Bra­vo tells the sto­ry of the Pyra­mids, puts them in con­text, and even incor­po­rates vir­tu­al re-cre­ations of what they would have looked like in their hey­day.

We know the Pyra­mids as icon­ic ruins, undoubt­ed­ly mighty but also seri­ous­ly dilap­i­dat­ed. When they were built in the 26th cen­tu­ry BC, they were cov­ered in white lime­stone exte­ri­or shells, giv­ing them the strik­ing­ly smooth if chro­mat­i­cal­ly reversed appear­ance of a 2001-style mono­lith — a char­ac­ter­is­tic that no doubt encour­ages cer­tain the­o­rists who imag­ine the con­struc­tion process as hav­ing been exe­cut­ed by beings from out­er space.

The tech­ni­cal­ly inclined Bra­vo pre­sum­ably has lit­tle time for such notions, fill­ing the video as he does with details about the archi­tec­ture and engi­neer­ing of the Pyra­mids, many of them thor­ough­ly human in nature, such as the delib­er­ate­ly con­fus­ing pas­sage­ways meant to throw off plun­der­ers.

Along with high-res­o­lu­tion footage and ren­der­ings of what the Pyra­mids looked like then and look like now, Bra­vo also includes his own on-foot explo­rations, show­ing us cor­ners of the com­plex (and one espe­cial­ly claus­tro­phobe-unfriend­ly tun­nel) that we don’t nor­mal­ly see unless we take a tour our­selves. This close-up per­spec­tive gives him the oppor­tu­ni­ty to con­nect the mod­ern human expe­ri­ence of these ancient mon­u­ments to their vast scale and his­tor­i­cal­ly dis­tant con­cep­tion. To be awed and even over­whelmed is per­haps the most nat­ur­al response to the Pyra­mids, and for some, it’s worth the trip to expe­ri­ence that feel­ing alone. For oth­ers, answer­ing the ques­tion of exact­ly how and why they awe and over­whelm becomes the work of a life­time.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Walk­ing Tour Around the Pyra­mids of Giza: 2 Hours in Hi Def

Take a 360° Inter­ac­tive Tour Inside the Great Pyra­mid of Giza

Take a 3D Tour Through Ancient Giza, Includ­ing the Great Pyra­mids, the Sphinx & More

What the Great Pyra­mid of Giza Would’ve Looked Like When First Built: It Was Gleam­ing, Reflec­tive White

Who Built the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids & How Did They Do It?: New Arche­o­log­i­cal Evi­dence Busts Ancient Myths

The Grate­ful Dead Play at the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids, in the Shad­ow of the Sphinx (1978)

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.

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Cats Migrated to Europe 7,000 Years Earlier Than Once Thought

in Biology, History, Life, Science, Travel | May 9th, 2023

The ani­mals were imper­fect,

long-tailed,

unfor­tu­nate in their heads.

Lit­tle by lit­tle they

put them­selves togeth­er,

mak­ing them­selves a land­scape,

acquir­ing spots, grace, flight.

The cat,

only the cat

appeared com­plete and proud:

he was born com­plete­ly fin­ished,

walk­ing alone and know­ing what he want­ed.

- Pablo Neru­da, excerpt from Ode to the Cat

We find our­selves in agree­ment with Nobel Prize-win­ning poet, and cat lover, Pablo Neru­da:

Those of us who pro­vide for felines choose to believe we are “the own­er, pro­pri­etor, uncle of a cat, com­pan­ion, col­league, dis­ci­ple or friend of (our) cat”, when in fact they are mys­te­ri­ous beasts, far more self-con­tained than the com­pan­ion­able, inquis­i­tive canine Neru­da immor­tal­ized in Ode to the Dog.

We can bestow names and social media accounts on cats of our acquain­tance, chan­nel them on the steps of the Met Gala, attach GPS track­ers to their col­lars, give them pride of place­ment in books for chil­dren and adults, and try our best to get inside their heads, but what do we know about them, real­ly?

We even got their his­to­ry wrong.

Com­mon knowl­edge once held that cats made their way to north­ern Europe from the Mediter­ranean aboard Roman — and even­tu­al­ly Viking — ships some­time between the 3rd to 7th cen­tu­ry CE, but it turns out we were off by mil­len­nia.

In 2016, a team of researchers col­lab­o­rat­ing on the Five Thou­sand Years of His­to­ry of Domes­tic Cats in Cen­tral Europe project con­firmed the pres­ence of domes­tic cats dur­ing the Roman peri­od in the area that is now north­ern Poland, using a com­bi­na­tion of zooar­chae­ol­o­gy, genet­ics and absolute dat­ing.

More recent­ly, the team turned their atten­tion to Felis bones found in south­ern Poland and Ser­bia, deter­min­ing the ones found in the Jas­na Strze­gows­ka Cave to be Pre-Neolith­ic (5990–5760 BC), while the Ser­bian kit­ties hail from the Mesolith­ic-Neolitic era (6220–5730 BC).

In addi­tion to clar­i­fy­ing our under­stand­ing of how our pet cats’ ances­tors arrived in Cen­tral Europe from Egypt and the Fer­tile Cres­cent, the project seeks to “iden­ti­fy phe­no­typ­ic fea­tures relat­ed to domes­ti­ca­tion, such as phys­i­cal appear­ance, includ­ing body size and coat col­or; behav­ior, for exam­ple, reduced aggres­sion; and pos­si­ble phys­i­o­log­i­cal adap­ta­tions to digest anthro­pogenic food.”

Regard­ing non-anthro­pogenic food, a spike in the Late Neolith­ic East­ern Euro­pean house mouse pop­u­la­tion exhibits some nifty over­lap with these ancient cat bones’ new­ly attached dates, though Dr. Dani­jela Popović, who super­vised the pro­jec­t’s pale­o­ge­neti­cians, reports that the cats’ arrival in Europe pre­ced­ed that of the first farm­ers:

These cats prob­a­bly were still wild ani­mals that nat­u­ral­ly col­o­nized Cen­tral Europe.

We’re will­ing to believe they estab­lished a bulk­head, then hung around, wait­ing until the humans showed up before imple­ment­ing the next phase of their plan — self-domes­ti­ca­tion.

Read the research team’s “his­to­ry of the domes­tic cat in Cen­tral Europe” here.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry of Cats: How Over 10,000 Years the Cat Went from Wild Preda­tor to Sofa Side­kick

A 110-Year-Old Book Illus­trat­ed with Pho­tos of Kit­tens & Cats Taught Kids How to Read

Cats in Medieval Man­u­scripts & Paint­ings

via Big Think

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day, human ser­vant of two feline Mail­room Böyz, 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.

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Behold Shakespeare’s First Folio, the First Published Collection of Shakespeare’s Plays, Published 400 Year Ago (1623)

in Books, History, Museums, Theatre | May 8th, 2023

Sum­mer’s lease may have all too short a date, but every year, it’s time enough for dozens, nay, hun­dreds of free Shake­speare pro­duc­tions to pop up in the parks and park­ing lots.

We owe these plea­sures in part to the First Folio, a fat col­lec­tion of Shakespeare’s plays, com­piled in 1623, sev­en years after his death.

As Eliz­a­beth James, senior librar­i­an at the Nation­al Art Library in Lon­don, and Har­ri­et Reed, con­tem­po­rary per­for­mance cura­tor at the Vic­to­ria and Albert Muse­um point out in the show-and-tell above, 18 pre­vi­ous­ly-unpub­lished plays would have sunk into obliv­ion had they not been truf­fled up and pre­served here by John Heminge and Hen­ry Con­dell, list­ed in the Folio as among the ‘Prin­ci­pall Actors’ of his work.

You may be able to imag­ine a world with­out Cym­be­line or Tim­on of Athens, but what about Mac­beth or The Tem­pest?

Hem­ings and Con­del­l’s desire to cre­ate an accu­rate com­pendi­um of Shakespeare’s work for pos­ter­i­ty led them to scour prompt books, autho­r­i­al fair copy, and work­ing drafts referred to as “foul papers” —  a term rife for revival, in our opin­ion — for the texts of the unpub­lished works.

Their labors yield­ed some 750 copies of a lux­u­ri­ous, high-priced vol­ume, which posi­tioned Shake­speare as some­one of such con­se­quence, his words were to be accord­ed the same rev­er­ence as that of clas­si­cal authors’.

They cat­e­go­rized the plays as come­dies, tragedies, or his­to­ries, for­ev­er cement­ing our con­cep­tions of the indi­vid­ual works.

The now famil­iar por­trait of the author also con­tributed to the per­ceived weight­i­ness of the tome.

Of the 230-some First Folios that sur­vive, the bulk are in library or uni­ver­si­ty col­lec­tions — with the Fol­ger Shake­speare Library, Toky­o’s Mei­sei Uni­ver­si­ty, the New York Pub­lic Library, the British Library the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Oxford, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas at Austin and Prince­ton among those hold­ing mul­ti­ple copies.

Some retain the hand­writ­ten anno­ta­tions of their orig­i­nal own­ers, a metic­u­lous record of plays seen or read. How many would you be able to check off as some­thing read or seen?


All’s Well That Ends Well, 

Antony and Cleopa­tra

As You Like It

The Com­e­dy of Errors

Cori­olanus

Cym­be­line

Hen­ry VI, Part 1

Hen­ry VII

Julius Cae­sar

King John,

Mac­beth

Mea­sure for Mea­sure

The Tam­ing of the Shrew

 The Tem­pest

Tim­on of Athens

Twelfth Night

The Two Gen­tle­men of Verona

The Winter’s Tale.

An online ver­sion of the First Folio can be viewed here.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent 

3,000 Illus­tra­tions of Shakespeare’s Com­plete Works from Vic­to­ri­an Eng­land, Neat­ly Pre­sent­ed in a New Dig­i­tal Archive

The Only Sur­viv­ing Script Writ­ten by Shake­speare Is Now Online

Ian McK­ellen Reads a Pas­sion­ate Speech by William Shake­speare, Writ­ten in Defense of Immi­grants

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Shakespeare’s Globe The­atre in Lon­don

– 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.

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Take Virtual Tours of Every Star Trek Enterprise Bridge: A New Interactive Web Portal Created by The Roddenberry Archive

in Sci Fi, Television | May 8th, 2023

It’s a rare young Star Trek fan indeed who does­n’t fan­ta­size about sit­ting on the bridge of the star­ship Enter­prise. That has gone for every gen­er­a­tion of fan, every Star Trek series, and every Enter­prise, whose bridges you can see in the new video above from the Rod­den­ber­ry Archive. It begins, nat­u­ral­ly, with the orig­i­nal Star Trek, the show with which cre­ator Gene Rod­den­ber­ry start­ed it all — and for which art direc­tor Matt Jef­feries designed a bridge that would become a mod­el not just for all sub­se­quent Enter­pris­es, but real-life com­mand cen­ters as well. As the nar­ra­tor says, “Jef­feries’ bridge made such an impres­sion that engi­neers from NASA, the U.S. Navy, and pri­vate indus­try have stud­ied it as a mod­el for an advanced, effi­cient con­trol room.”

That nar­ra­tor hap­pens to be John de Lan­cie, whom view­ers of Star Trek: The Next Gen­er­a­tion and sub­se­quent series will know as the all-pow­er­ful extra-dimen­sion­al being Q. He’s not the only famil­iar per­former to par­tic­i­pate in this ret­ro­spec­tive project: in the video above appears a cer­tain William Shat­ner, who as James Tiberius Kirk occu­pied the cap­tain’s chair of the very first Enter­prise.

Even those who pre­fer the lat­er, more com­plex Star Treks have sure­ly won­dered what that posi­tion would feel like, and now they can get a vir­tu­al sense of it at the Rod­den­bery Archive’s web site, which is now offer­ing vir­tu­al tours of the bridge of every series’ cen­tral ship.

“The site fea­tures 360-degree, 3D mod­els of the var­i­ous ver­sions of the Enter­prise, as well as a time­line of the ship’s evo­lu­tion through­out the franchise’s his­to­ry,” writes Smithsonian.com’s Sarah Kuta. “Fans of the show can also read detailed infor­ma­tion about each ver­sion of the ship’s design, its sig­nif­i­cance to the Star Trek sto­ry­line and its pro­duc­tion back­sto­ry.” All this comes online to mark the end of Star Trek: Picard, the recent series built around Patrick Stew­art’s Enter­prise cap­tain from The Next Gen­er­a­tion, whose final episode went up last month on the stream­ing ser­vice Para­mount+. For that grand finale, pro­duc­tion design­er Dave Blass “recre­at­ed the bridge of the Enter­prise D,” and “Picard’s tri­umphant return to his beloved ship brought nos­tal­gic tears to the eyes of more than a few fans,” no doubt regard­less of gen­er­a­tion. Take the vir­tu­al tours here.

via Smith­son­ian

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch Star Trek Con­tin­ues: The Crit­i­cal­ly-Acclaimed, Fan-Made Sequel to the Orig­i­nal TV Series

Watch Star Trek: New Voy­ages: The Orig­i­nal Fan-Made Sequel to the 1960s TV Series

How Isaac Asi­mov Went from Star Trek Crit­ic to Star Trek Fan & Advi­sor

William Shat­ner Nar­rates Space Shut­tle Doc­u­men­tary

The Ency­clo­pe­dia of Sci­ence Fic­tion: 17,500 Entries on All Things Sci-Fi Are Now Free Online

Star Trek: World-Build­ing Over Gen­er­a­tions — Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast #42

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.

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The Amazing Engineering of Gauntlets (Armored Gloves) from the 16th Century

in History | May 5th, 2023

The phrase “to throw down the gaunt­let” means to issue a chal­lenge, and this is under­stood all over the Eng­lish-speak­ing world — even by those who have no idea what, exact­ly, a gaunt­let is. “The word itself comes from the French word gan­telet, and referred to the heavy, armored gloves worn by medieval knights,” writes History.com’s Eliz­a­beth Har­ri­son. “In an age when chival­ry and per­son­al hon­or were para­mount, throw­ing a gaunt­let at the feet of an ene­my or oppo­nent was con­sid­ered a grave insult that could only be answered with per­son­al com­bat, and the offend­ed par­ty was expect­ed to ‘take up the gaunt­let’ to acknowl­edge and accept the chal­lenge.”

How many of us, here in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, have ever lit­er­al­ly tak­en up a gaunt­let? Adam Sav­age nev­er has, which may come as a sur­prise to fans of the for­mer Myth­Busters co-host and enthu­si­ast of com­bat tech­nolo­gies past, present, and future.

Or at least he had­n’t until mak­ing the new video above, which finds him in the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art’s Arms and Armor con­ser­va­tion lab. There, armor­er Ted Hunter has opened up the muse­um’s “gaunt­let draw­er” and laid out an array of gen­uine exam­ples for Sav­age to take up, all of them made in Ger­many or Italy in the six­teenth cen­tu­ry.

Each of these gauntlets was made in a dif­fer­ent style, with details like a fine-meshed chain mail under­side (to make it eas­i­er to keep a grip on your sword) or even a lock­ing spring catch (to make it impos­si­ble to let go of your sword at all). Sav­age mar­vels at these fea­tures, but also the vis­i­bly painstak­ing crafts­man­ship that went into every aspect of these gauntlets’ con­struc­tion, which he has more than enough expe­ri­ence to under­stand. His enthu­si­asm and knowl­edge are evi­denced by the wealth of armor-relat­ed videos on his Youtube chan­nel, includ­ing a series about build­ing his own full suit of armor, a chal­lenge that it was inevitable he would set him­self against — a gaunt­let, in oth­er words, he both threw down and took up.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How to Make and Wear Medieval Armor: An In-Depth Primer

How Well Can You Move in Medieval Armor?: Medieval­ist Daniel Jaquet Gives It a Try in Real Life

How to Get Dressed & Fight in 14th Cen­tu­ry Armor: A Reen­act­ment

What It’s Like to Actu­al­ly Fight in Medieval Armor

What’s It Like to Fight in 15th Cen­tu­ry Armor?: A Sur­pris­ing Demon­stra­tion

Watch Adam Sav­age Build Barbarella’s Space Rifle in One Day

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.

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The Seattle Public Library Gives Students Free Digital Access to Books Getting Banned Across the United States

in Books, Current Affairs | May 4th, 2023

Accord­ing to a new report pub­lished by PEN Amer­i­ca, the “2022–23 school year has been marked to date by an esca­la­tion of book bans and cen­sor­ship in class­rooms and school libraries across the Unit­ed States.” PEN Amer­i­ca has tracked “1,477 instances of indi­vid­ual books banned, affect­ing 874 unique titles,” dur­ing the first half of this aca­d­e­m­ic year. That marks an increase of 28 per­cent com­pared to the pri­or six months, Jan­u­ary – June 2022.” The book ban­nings are tak­ing place in con­ser­v­a­tive-lean­ing states (main­ly, Texas, Flori­da, Mis­souri, Utah, and South Car­oli­na), and over­whelm­ing­ly, they’re tar­get­ing “sto­ries by and about peo­ple of col­or and LGBTQ+ indi­vid­u­als.”

For­tu­nate­ly, Amer­i­can pub­lic libraries are push­ing back. As men­tioned last sum­mer, the Brook­lyn Pub­lic Library launched Books Unbanned. This ini­tia­tive pro­vides Amer­i­can stu­dents, no mat­ter where they live in the U.S., free access to 500,000 dig­i­tal books, includ­ing books banned by stu­dents’ local libraries. And now the Seat­tle Pub­lic Library has joined the effort, rolling out its own ver­sion of Books Unbanned. “We believe in your right to read what you want, dis­cov­er your­self and form your own opin­ions,” writes the library. “Teens and young adults ages 13 to 26 liv­ing any­where in the U.S. can access our entire col­lec­tion of e‑books and audio­books.” To get start­ed, stu­dents can fill out the form at the bot­tom of this page (click here), and then explore these curat­ed lists of banned non-fic­tion books and banned fic­tion books.

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 

The Brook­lyn Pub­lic Library Gives Every Teenag­er in the U.S. Free Access to Books Get­ting Cen­sored by Amer­i­can Schools

The New York Pub­lic Library Pro­vides Free Online Access to Banned Books: Catch­er in the Rye, Stamped & More

The 850 Books a Texas Law­mak­er Wants to Ban Because They Could Make Stu­dents Feel Uncom­fort­able

 

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The Pioneering Data Visualizations of William Playfair, Who Invented the Line, Bar, and Pie Charts (Circa 1786)

in Data, History | May 4th, 2023

“If you see a pie chart pro­ject­ed twelve feet high in front of you, you know you’re in the hands of an idiot.” These words have stuck with me since I heard them spo­ken by Edward Tufte, one of the most respect­ed liv­ing author­i­ties on data visu­al­iza­tion. The lat­ter-day sins of pie-chart-mak­ers (espe­cial­ly those who make them in Pow­er­Point) are many and var­ied, but the orig­i­nal sin of the pie chart itself is that of fun­da­men­tal­ly mis­rep­re­sent­ing one-dimen­sion­al infor­ma­tion — a com­pa­ny bud­get, a city’s pop­u­la­tion demo­graph­ics — in two-dimen­sion­al form.

Yet the pie chart was cre­at­ed by a mas­ter, indeed the first mas­ter, of infor­ma­tion design, the late-eigh­teenth- and ear­ly-nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry Scot­tish econ­o­mist William Play­fair. Tufte includes Play­fair’s first pie chart, an illus­tra­tion of the land hold­ings of var­i­ous nations and empires cir­ca 1800, in his book The Visu­al Dis­play of Quan­ti­ta­tive Infor­ma­tion.

“The cir­cle rep­re­sents the area of each coun­try,” Tufte explains. “The line on the left, the pop­u­la­tion in mil­lions read on the ver­ti­cal scales; the line on the right, the rev­enue (tax­es) col­lect­ed in mil­lions of pounds ster­ling read also on the ver­ti­cal scale.” The dot­ted lines between them show, in Play­fair’s words, whether “the coun­try is bur­dened with heavy tax­es or oth­er­wise” in pro­por­tion to its pop­u­la­tion.

Play­fair was exper­i­ment­ing with data visu­al­iza­tion long before his inven­tion of the pie chart. He also came up with the more truth­ful bar chart, his­to­ry’s first exam­ple of which appeared in his Com­mer­cial and Polit­i­cal Atlas of 1786. That same book also con­tains the strik­ing graph above, of Eng­land’s “exports and imports to and from Den­mark and Nor­way from 1700 to 1780,” whose lines cre­ate fields that make the bal­ance of trade leg­i­ble at a glance. A much lat­er exam­ple of the line graph, anoth­er form Play­fair is cred­it­ed with invent­ing, appears just below, “exhibit­ing the rev­enues, expen­di­ture, debt, price of stocks and bread from 1770 to 1824,” a peri­od span­ning the Amer­i­can and French Rev­o­lu­tions as well as the Napoleon­ic Wars.

It’s safe to say that Play­fair lived in inter­est­ing times, and even with­in that con­text lived an unusu­al­ly inter­est­ing life. Dur­ing Great Britain’s wars with France, he served his coun­try as a secret agent, even com­ing up with a plan to coun­ter­feit assig­nats, a French cur­ren­cy at the time, in order to desta­bi­lize the ene­my’s econ­o­my. “Their assig­nats are their mon­ey,” he wrote in 1793, “and it is bet­ter to destroy this paper found­ed upon an iniq­ui­tous extor­tion and a vil­lain­ous decep­tion than to shed the blood of men.” Two years after the plan went into effect, the assig­nat was worth­less and France’s ship of state had more or less run aground. Play­fair’s mea­sures may seem extreme, but then, you don’t win a war with pie charts.

Relat­ed con­tent:

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

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”

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

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.

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A Star Wars Film Made in a Wes Anderson Aesthetic

in Film, Random | May 4th, 2023

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

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

in Architecture, Art | May 3rd, 2023

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.

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