Fritz Lang First Depicted Artificial Intelligence on Film in Metropolis (1927), and It Frightened People Even Then

in Artificial Intelligence, Film, Technology | May 23rd, 2024

Arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence seems to have become, as Michael Lewis labeled a pre­vi­ous chap­ter in the recent his­to­ry of tech­nol­o­gy, the new new thing. But human anx­i­eties about it are, if not an old old thing, then at least part of a tra­di­tion longer than we may expect. For vivid evi­dence, look no fur­ther than Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis, which brought the very first cin­e­mat­ic depic­tion of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence to the­aters in 1927. It “imag­ines a future cleaved in two, where the afflu­ent from lofty sky­scrap­ers rule over a sub­ter­ranean caste of labor­ers,” writes Synapse Ana­lyt­ics’ Omar Abo Mos­al­lam. “The class ten­sion is so pal­pa­ble that the inven­tion of a Maschi­nen­men­sch (a robot capa­ble of work) upends the social order.”

The sheer tire­less­ness of the Maschi­nen­men­sch “sows hav­oc in the city”; lat­er, after it takes on the form of a young woman called Maria — a trans­for­ma­tion you can watch in the clip above — it “incites work­ers to rise up and destroy the machines that keep the city func­tion­ing. Here, there is a sug­ges­tion to asso­ciate this new inven­tion with an unrav­el­ing of the social order.” This robot, which Guardian film crit­ic Peter Brad­shaw describes as “a bril­liant eroti­ciza­tion and fetishiza­tion of mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy,” has long been Metrop­o­lis’ sig­na­ture fig­ure, more icon­ic than HAL, Data, and WALL‑E put togeth­er.

Still, those char­ac­ters all rate men­tions of their own in the arti­cles review­ing the his­to­ry of AI in the movies recent­ly pub­lished by the BFI, RTÉ, Pic­to­ry, and oth­er out­lets besides. The Day the Earth Stood Still, Alien, Blade Run­ner (and even more so its sequel Blade Run­ner 2049), Ghost in the Shell, The Matrix, and Ex Machi­na. Not all of these pic­tures present their arti­fi­cial­ly intel­li­gent char­ac­ters pri­mar­i­ly as exis­ten­tial threats to the exist­ing order; the BFI’s Georgina Guthrie high­lights video essay­ist-turned-auteur Kog­o­na­da’s After Yang as an exam­ple that treats the role of AI could assume in soci­ety as a much more com­plex — indeed, much more human — mat­ter.

From Metrop­o­lis to After Yang, as RTÉ’s Alan Smeaton points out, “AI is usu­al­ly por­trayed in movies in a robot­ic or humanoid-like fash­ion, pre­sum­ably because we can eas­i­ly relate to humanoid and robot­ic forms.” But as the pub­lic has come to under­stand over the past few years, we can per­ceive a tech­nol­o­gy as poten­tial­ly or actu­al­ly intel­li­gent even it does­n’t resem­ble a human being. Per­haps the age of the fear­some mechan­i­cal Art Deco gynoid will nev­er come to pass, but we now feel more keen­ly than ever both the seduc­tive­ness and the threat of Metrop­o­lis’ Maschi­nen­men­sch — or, as it was named in the orig­i­nal on which the film was based, Futu­ra.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Metrop­o­lis: Watch Fritz Lang’s 1927 Mas­ter­piece

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence, Art & the Future of Cre­ativ­i­ty: Watch the Final Chap­ter of the “Every­thing is a Remix” Series

Hunter S. Thomp­son Chill­ing­ly Pre­dicts the Future, Telling Studs Terkel About the Com­ing Revenge of the Eco­nom­i­cal­ly & Tech­no­log­i­cal­ly “Obso­lete” (1967)

Ama­zon Offers Free AI Cours­es, Aim­ing to Help 2 Mil­lion Peo­ple Build AI Skills by 2025

Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts the Future in 1982: Com­put­ers Will Be “at the Cen­ter of Every­thing;” Robots Will Take Human Jobs

Google Launch­es a New Course Called “AI Essen­tials”: Learn How to Use Gen­er­a­tive AI Tools to Increase Your Pro­duc­tiv­i­ty

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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9‑Year-Old Edward Hopper Draws a Picture on the Back of His 3rd Grade Report Card

in Art | May 22nd, 2024

In a 2017 press release, the Edward Hop­per House announced that it would receive over 1,000 arti­facts and mem­o­ra­bil­ia doc­u­ment­ing Edward Hop­per’s fam­i­ly life and ear­ly years. The col­lec­tion “con­sists of juve­nil­ia and oth­er mate­ri­als from the for­ma­tive years of Hop­per’s life and includes orig­i­nal let­ters, draw­ings from his school years … pho­tographs, orig­i­nal news­pa­per arti­cles, and oth­er items that allow vis­i­tors to expe­ri­ence first­hand how Hop­per’s child­hood and home envi­ron­ment shaped his art.”

Above you can find Exhib­it A from the col­lec­tion. A pic­ture that young Hop­per, only 9 years old, drew on the back of his 3rd grade report card in 1891. A sure ear­ly sign of his tal­ents.

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.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Makes Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks a Great Paint­ing?: A Video Essay

How Edward Hop­per “Sto­ry­board­ed” His Icon­ic Paint­ing Nighthawks

Edward Hopper’s Icon­ic Paint­ing Nighthawks Explained in a 7‑Minute Video Intro­duc­tion

How Cin­e­ma Inspired Edward Hopper’s Great Paint­ings, and How Edward Hop­per Inspired Great Film­mak­ers

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The First Professional Footage of Pink Floyd Gets Captured in a 1967 Documentary (and the Band Also Provides the Soundtrack)

in Film, Music | May 22nd, 2024

British film­mak­er and nov­el­ist Peter White­head has been cred­it­ed with invent­ing the music video with his pro­mo films for the Rolling Stones in the mid-60s. Accord­ing to Ali Cat­ter­all and Simon Wells, authors of Your Face Here, a study of “British Cult Film since the Six­ties,” White­head was “a trust­ed con­fi­dant of the Rolling Stones… and a mem­ber of the inner cir­cle.” In addi­tion to the Stones, White­head had access to a sur­pris­ing num­ber of impor­tant fig­ures in the coun­ter­cul­tur­al scene of 60s Lon­don, includ­ing actors Michael Caine and Julie Christie, artist David Hock­ney, and a just-emerg­ing (and then unknown) psy­che­del­ic band called Pink Floyd. All of these char­ac­ters show up in Whitehead’s 1968 doc­u­men­tary Tonite Let’s All Make Love in Lon­don. Cat­ter­all and Wells describe the film thus:

If any one film tru­ly reveals “Swing­ing Lon­don,” it is Peter White­head­’s lit­tle-seen doc­u­men­tary Tonite Let’s All Make Love In Lon­don (1968). Beau­ti­ful­ly shot, with a Syd Bar­rett-led Pink Floyd sup­ply­ing the sound­track, it is per­haps the only true mas­ter­piece of the peri­od, offer­ing a visu­al­ly cap­ti­vat­ing win­dow on the ‘in’ crowd. Reveal­ing, often very per­son­al inter­views with the era’s prime movers — Michael Caine, Julie Christie, David Hock­ney and Mick Jag­ger — are inter­spersed by daz­zling images of the ‘ded­i­cat­ed fol­low­ers of fash­ion’, patro­n­is­ing the clubs and dis­cothe­ques of the day.

Depart­ing from typ­i­cal doc­u­men­tary styles, Tonite eschews neat nar­ra­tive pack­ag­ing and voice-over, and opts instead for a some­times jar­ring mon­tage of scenes from the Lon­don clubs and streets, rare footage of per­for­mances by the Stones, the Floyd (in one of their first-ever gigs at the UFO club), and oth­ers, and polit­i­cal ral­lies (with Vanes­sa Red­grave singing “Guantanamera”)–all inter­cut with the above­men­tioned inter­views. One of the best of the lat­ter is with a very young and charm­ing David Hock­ney (below), who com­pares Lon­don to Cal­i­for­nia and New York, and debunks ideas about the “swing­ing Lon­don” nightlife (“you need too much mon­ey”).

Over­all, Tonite Let’s All Make Love in Lon­don is a unique por­trait of the era and its ris­ing stars, and White­head­’s visu­al style repli­cates an insider’s per­spec­tive of watch­ing (but not par­tic­i­pat­ing) as a new cul­tur­al moment unfolds. White­head, who “nev­er missed a 60s hap­pen­ing,” has a knack for record­ing such moments. His 1965 Whol­ly Com­mu­nion (see here) cap­tures the spir­it­ed Albert Hall Poet­ry Fes­ti­val in 65 (presided over by doyen Allen Gins­berg), and 1969’s The Fall doc­u­ments some of the most incen­di­ary polit­i­cal action of late-60s New York.

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

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Pink Floyd’s Debut on Amer­i­can TV, Restored in Col­or (1967)

Pink Floyd Plays in Venice on a Mas­sive Float­ing Stage in 1989; Forces the May­or & City Coun­cil to Resign

Short Film “Syd Barrett’s First Trip” Reveals the Pink Floyd Founder’s Psy­che­del­ic Exper­i­men­ta­tion (1967)

Pink Floyd’s First Mas­ter­piece: An Audio/Video Explo­ration of the 23-Minute Track, “Echoes” (1971)

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Monty Python’s Michael Palin Presents His Favorite Painting, J. M. W. Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed

in Art, History | May 22nd, 2024

Of all the Eng­lish come­di­ans to have attained world­wide fame over the past half-cen­tu­ry, Sir Michael Palin may be the most Eng­lish of them all. It thus comes as no sur­prise that the Nation­al Gallery would ring him up and invite him to make a video about his favorite paint­ing, nor that his favorite paint­ing would be by Joseph Mal­lord William Turn­er. “Most peo­ple aren’t inter­est­ed in rail­ways and the his­to­ry of rail­ways,” he explains, but Turn­er’s Rain, Steam and Speed has great sig­nif­i­cance to a train-lover such as him­self pre­cise­ly “because it is about the birth of the rail­way.”

Rain, Steam and Speed was paint­ed in 1844, when train trans­port “was still a new thing, and a thing that fright­ened so many peo­ple. They thought it was going to destroy the coun­try­side.” (Bear in mind that this was the time of Dick­ens, who did­n’t set so many of his nov­els before the arrival of the rail­way by acci­dent.) For all of Turn­er’s Roman­ti­cism, “he must’ve been excit­ed by it. Maybe a bit alarmed.” His paint­ing declares that “this is a new world that’s been opened up by the rail­ways, and it’s got enor­mous pos­si­bil­i­ties, and peo­ple are going to have to adapt to it.”

In this video, Palin intro­duces him­self as “a trav­el­er, an actor, and a gen­er­al hack.” His many and var­ied post-Mon­ty Python projects have also includ­ed sev­er­al tele­vi­sion doc­u­men­taries on artists like Anne Red­path, Artemisia, the Scot­tish Colourists, Hen­ri Matisse, Vil­helm Ham­mer­shøi, and Andrew Wyeth. In the video below, he appears at the Nation­al Gallery in 2017 to share a selec­tion of his favorite paint­ings, from Duc­cio’s The Annun­ci­a­tion and Geert­gen tot Sint Jans’ The Nativ­i­ty at Night to Bronzi­no’s An Alle­go­ry with Venus and Cupid (the source of Mon­ty Python’s sig­na­ture ani­mat­ed foot) and Turn­er’s The Fight­ing Temeraire, a repro­duc­tion of which hung in his child­hood home.

“It’s just about that peri­od where steam is begin­ning to come in, and the old sail­ing ship is no longer need­ed,” Palin says of The Fight­ing Temeraire. “On the hori­zon, there is a ship in full sail” — a “pow­er­ful, strong image” in itself — and in the front, the “noisy, belch­ing fumes of the mod­ern steam tug.” Thus Turn­er cap­tures “the changeover from sail to steam,” much as he would cap­ture the changeover from horse to train a few years lat­er. Like any good paint­ing, Palin explains, these images “make you feel dif­fer­ent­ly about the world from the way you did before you saw it” — and make you con­sid­er what eras are end­ing and begin­ning around you even now.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Mon­ty Python’s Michael Palin Is Also an Art Crit­ic: Watch Him Explore His Favorite Paint­ings by Andrew Wyeth & Oth­er Artists

Trains and the Brits Who Love Them: Mon­ty Python’s Michael Palin on Great Rail­way Jour­neys

Free: Read 9 Trav­el Books Online by Mon­ty Python’s Michael Palin

Down­load 35,000 Works of Art from the Nation­al Gallery, Includ­ing Mas­ter­pieces by Van Gogh, Gau­guin, Rem­brandt & More

Mark Twain Skew­ers Great Works of Art: The Mona Lisa (“a Smoked Had­dock!”), The Last Sup­per (“a Mourn­ful Wreck”) & More

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

in History, Life | May 21st, 2024

“The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

–Jean-Bap­tiste Alphonse Karr (1808–90)

When Emir O. Fil­ipovic, a medieval­ist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Sara­je­vo, Bosnia and Herze­gov­ina, vis­it­ed the State Archives of Dubrovnik, he stum­bled upon some­thing that will hard­ly sur­prise any­one who lives with cats today: a 15th-cen­tu­ry man­u­script with inky paw prints casu­al­ly tracked across it.

And here’s anoth­er purrpetra­tor. The His­torisches Archiv in Cologne, Ger­many hous­es a man­u­script with an inter­est­ing his­to­ry. Accord­ing to the blog Medieval­Frag­ments, “a Deven­ter scribe, writ­ing around 1420, found his man­u­script ruined by a urine stain left there by a cat the night before. He was forced to leave the rest of the page emp­ty, drew a pic­ture of a cat, and cursed the crea­ture with the fol­low­ing words:”

Hic non defec­tus est, sed cat­tus minx­it desu­per nocte quadam. Con­fun­datur pes­simus cat­tus qui minx­it super librum istum in nocte Dav­en­trie, et con­similiter omnes alii propter illum. Et caven­dum valde ne per­mit­tan­tur lib­ri aper­ti per noctem ubi cat­tie venire pos­sunt.

Here is noth­ing miss­ing, but a cat uri­nat­ed on this dur­ing a cer­tain night. Cursed be the pesty cat that uri­nat­ed over this book dur­ing the night in Deven­ter and because of it many oth­ers [oth­er cats] too. And beware well not to leave open books at night where cats can come.

What I would sin­cere­ly love to know is whether, almost 600 years lat­er, the urine smell has left the page. Cat own­ers, you’ll know what I mean.

via Medieval­Frag­ments

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Cats in Medieval Man­u­scripts & Paint­ings

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

Cats in Japan­ese Wood­block Prints: How Japan’s Favorite Ani­mals Came to Star in Its Pop­u­lar Art

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Why Medieval Bologna Was Full of Tall Towers, and What Happened to Them

in Architecture, History | May 21st, 2024

Image by Toni Pec­o­raro, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Go to prac­ti­cal­ly any major city today, and you’ll notice that the build­ings in cer­tain areas are much taller than in oth­ers. That may sound triv­ial­ly true, but what’s less obvi­ous is that the height of those build­ings tends to cor­re­spond to the val­ue of the land on which they stand, which itself reflects the poten­tial eco­nom­ic pro­duc­tiv­i­ty to be real­ized by using as much ver­ti­cal space as pos­si­ble. To put it crude­ly, the taller the build­ings in a part of town, the greater the wealth being gen­er­at­ed (or, at times, destroyed). This is a mod­ern phe­nom­e­non, but it also held true, in a dif­fer­ent way, in the Bologna of 800 years ago.

There exists a work of art, much cir­cu­lat­ed online, that depicts what looks like the cap­i­tal of Emil­ia-Romagna in the twelfth or thir­teenth cen­tu­ry. But the city bris­tles with what look like sky­scrap­ers, cre­at­ing an incon­gru­ous but enchant­i­ng medieval Blade Run­ner effect. Bologna real­ly does have tow­ers like that, but only about 22 of them still stand today. Whether it ever had the near­ly 180 depict­ed in this par­tic­u­lar image, and what hap­pened to them if it did, is the ques­tion Jochem Boodt inves­ti­gates in the Present Past video below.

In the era these tow­ers were built, Bologna had become “one of the largest cities in Europe. It’s a time of huge, ambi­tious projects. Cities built cathe­drals, town halls, and pub­lic squares — and some peo­ple built tow­ers.” Those peo­ple includ­ed noble fam­i­lies who held to aris­to­crat­ic tra­di­tions, not least vio­lent feud­ing. Giv­en that “the city is no place to build cas­tles,” they instead inhab­it­ed urban com­plex­es whose town­hous­es sur­round­ed tow­ers, which were “more like pan­ic rooms” than actu­al liv­ing spaces. Ref­er­ences to these promi­nent struc­tures appear in sub­se­quent works of art and lit­er­a­ture: Dante, for instance, wrote of a lean­ing “tow­er called Garisen­da.”

The etch­ing that set Boodt on this jour­ney to Bologna in the first place turns out to be the rel­a­tive­ly recent work of an Ital­ian artist called Toni Pec­o­raro, who height­ened — in every sense — images of a 1917 mod­el of the city by the shoe­mak­er and “strange self-taught artist-sci­en­tist” Ange­lo Finel­li. Finel­li, in turn, drew his inspi­ra­tion from a study by the nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry archae­ol­o­gist Gio­van­ni Goz­za­di­ni, him­self a scion of one of those very fam­i­lies who com­pet­ed to have the tallest tow­er, then got bored and pur­sued oth­er sta­tus sym­bols instead. Per­haps Bologna is no longer the cen­ter of aris­to­crat­ic and mer­can­tile intrigue it used to be, judg­ing by the sparse­ness of its cur­rent sky­line, but then, there’s some­thing to be said for not need­ing a for­ti­fied tow­er in which to hide at a momen­t’s notice.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Why Europe Has So Few Sky­scrap­ers

Why the Lean­ing Tow­er of Pisa Still Hasn’t Fall­en Over, Even After 650 Years

Venice Explained: Its Archi­tec­ture, Its Streets, Its Canals, and How Best to Expe­ri­ence Them All

A Guid­ed Tour of the Largest Hand­made Mod­el of Impe­r­i­al Rome: Dis­cov­er the 20x20 Meter Mod­el Cre­at­ed Dur­ing the 1930s

How the World’s Biggest Dome Was Built: The Sto­ry of Fil­ip­po Brunelleschi and the Duo­mo in Flo­rence

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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Isaac Asimov Predicts the Future of Online Education in 1988–and It’s Now Coming True in the Age of AI & Smartphones

in Artificial Intelligence, Education, Technology | May 20th, 2024

“I have nev­er let my school­ing inter­fere with my edu­ca­tion.” Though that line prob­a­bly orig­i­nat­ed with  a Cana­di­an nov­el­ist called Grant Allen, it’s long been pop­u­lar­ly attrib­uted to his more col­or­ful nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry con­tem­po­rary Mark Twain. It isn’t hard to under­stand why it now has so much trac­tion as a social media-ready quote, though dur­ing much of the peri­od between Allen’s day and our own, many must have found it prac­ti­cal­ly unin­tel­li­gi­ble. The indus­tri­al­ized world of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry attempt­ed to make edu­ca­tion and school­ing syn­ony­mous, an ambi­tion suf­fi­cient­ly wrong­head­ed that, by the nine­teen-eight­ies, no less pow­er­ful a mind than Isaac Asi­mov was lament­ing it on nation­al tele­vi­sion.

“In the old days you used to have tutors for chil­dren,” Asi­mov tells Bill Moy­ers in a 1988 World of Ideas inter­view. “But how many peo­ple could afford to hire a ped­a­gogue? Most chil­dren went une­d­u­cat­ed. Then we reached the point where it was absolute­ly nec­es­sary to edu­cate every­body. The only way we could do it is to have one teacher for a great many stu­dents and, in order to orga­nize the sit­u­a­tion prop­er­ly, we gave them a cur­ricu­lum to teach from.” And yet “the num­ber of teach­ers is far greater than the num­ber of good teach­ers.” The ide­al solu­tion, per­son­al tutors for all, would be made pos­si­ble by per­son­al com­put­ers, “each of them hooked up to enor­mous libraries where any­one can ask any ques­tion and be giv­en answers.”

At the time, this was­n’t an obvi­ous future for non-sci­ence-fic­tion-vision­ar­ies to imag­ine. “Well, what if I want to learn only about base­ball?” asks a faint­ly skep­ti­cal Moy­ers. “You learn all you want about base­ball,” Asi­mov replies, “because the more you learn about base­ball the more you might grow inter­est­ed in math­e­mat­ics to try to fig­ure out what they mean by those earned run aver­ages and the bat­ting aver­ages and so on. You might, in the end, become more inter­est­ed in math than base­ball if you fol­low your own bent.” And indeed, sim­i­lar­ly equipped with a per­son­al-com­put­er-as-tutor, “some­one who is inter­est­ed in math­e­mat­ics may sud­den­ly find him­self very enticed by the prob­lem of how you throw a curve ball.”

The trou­ble was how to get every house­hold a com­put­er, which was still seen by many in 1988 as an extrav­a­gant, not nec­es­sar­i­ly use­ful pur­chase. Three and a half decades lat­er, you see a com­put­er in the hand of near­ly every man, woman, and child in the devel­oped coun­tries (and many devel­op­ing ones as well). This is the tech­no­log­i­cal real­i­ty that gave rise to Khan Acad­e­my, which offers free online edu­ca­tion in math, sci­ences, lit­er­a­ture, his­to­ry, and much else besides. In the inter­view clip above, its founder Sal Khan remem­bers how, when his inter­net-tutor­ing project was first gain­ing momen­tum, it occurred to him that “maybe we’re in the right moment in his­to­ry that some­thing like this could become what Isaac Asi­mov envi­sioned.”

More recent­ly, Khan has been pro­mot­ing the edu­ca­tion­al use of a tech­nol­o­gy at the edge of even Asi­mov’s vision. Just days ago, he pub­lished the book Brave New Words: How AI Will Rev­o­lu­tion­ize Edu­ca­tion (and Why That’s a Good Thing) and made a video with his teenage son demon­strat­ing how the lat­est ver­sion of Ope­nAI’s Chat­G­PT — sound­ing, it must be said, uncan­ni­ly like Scar­lett Johans­son in the now-prophet­ic-seem­ing Her — can act as a geom­e­try tutor. Not that it works only, or even pri­mar­i­ly, for kids in school: “That’s anoth­er trou­ble with edu­ca­tion as we now have it,” as Asi­mov says. “It is for the young, and peo­ple think of edu­ca­tion as some­thing that they can fin­ish.” We may be as relieved as gen­er­a­tions past when our school­ing ends, but now we have no excuse ever to fin­ish our edu­ca­tion.

Find a tran­script of Asi­mov and Moy­ers’ con­ver­sa­tion here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts the Future in 1982: Com­put­ers Will Be “at the Cen­ter of Every­thing;” Robots Will Take Human Jobs

Arthur C. Clarke Pre­dicts the Future in 1964 … And Kind of Nails It

Noam Chom­sky Spells Out the Pur­pose of Edu­ca­tion

The Pres­i­dent of North­west­ern Uni­ver­si­ty Pre­dicts Online Learn­ing … in 1934!

Salman Khan Returns to MIT, Gives Com­mence­ment Speech, Likens School to Hog­warts

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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Hear Leo Tolstoy Read From His Last Major Work in Four Languages, 1909

in Books, Language | May 20th, 2024

In years past, we’ve brought you rare record­ings of Sig­mund Freud and Jorge Luis Borges speak­ing in Eng­lish. Today we present a remark­able series of record­ings of the great Russ­ian nov­el­ist Leo Tol­stoy read­ing a pas­sage from his book, Wise Thoughts for Every Day, in four lan­guages: Eng­lish, Ger­man, French and Russ­ian.

Wise Thoughts For Every Day was Tol­stoy’s last major work. It first appeared in 1903 as The Thoughts of Wise Men, and was revised and renamed sev­er­al times before the author’s death in 1910. Even­tu­al­ly banned by the Sovi­et regime, the book reap­peared in 1995 as a best­seller in Rus­sia. Then, in 1997, the text was trans­lat­ed into Eng­lish by Peter Sekirin and pub­lished as A Cal­en­dar of Wis­dom. The book is a col­lec­tion of pas­sages from a diverse group of thinkers, rang­ing from Laozi to Ralph Wal­do Emer­son. “I felt that I have been ele­vat­ed to great spir­i­tu­al and moral heights by com­mu­ni­ca­tion with the best and wis­est peo­ple whose books I read and whose thoughts I select­ed for my Cir­cle of Read­ing,” wrote Tol­stoy in his diary.

As an old man (watch video of him short­ly before he died) Tol­stoy reject­ed his great works of fic­tion, believ­ing that it was more impor­tant to give moral and spir­i­tu­al guid­ance to the com­mon peo­ple. “To cre­ate a book for the mass­es, for mil­lions of peo­ple,” wrote Tol­stoy, “is incom­pa­ra­bly more impor­tant and fruit­ful than to com­pose a nov­el of the kind which diverts some mem­bers of the wealthy class­es for a short time, and then is for­ev­er for­got­ten.”

Tol­stoy arranged his book for the mass­es as a cal­en­dar, with a series of read­ings for each day of the year. For exam­ple under the date, May 9, Tol­stoy selects brief pas­sages from Immanuel Kant, Solon, and the Koran. Under­neath he writes, “We can­not stop on the way to self-per­fec­tion. As soon as you notice that you have a big­ger inter­est in the out­er world than in your­self, then you should know that the world moves behind you.”

The audio record­ings above were made at the writer’s home in Yas­naya Polyana on Octo­ber 31, 1909, when he was 81 years old. He died just over a year lat­er. Tol­stoy appar­ent­ly trans­lat­ed the pas­sage him­self. The Eng­lish ver­sion sounds a bit like the King James Bible. The words are hard to make out in the record­ing, but he says:

That the object of life is self-per­fec­tion, the per­fec­tion of all immor­tal souls, that this is the only object of my life, is seen to be cor­rect by the fact alone that every oth­er object is essen­tial­ly a new object. There­fore, the ques­tion whether thou hast done what thou shoudst have done is of immense impor­tance, for the only mean­ing of thy life is in doing in this short term allowed thee, that which is desired of thee by He or That which has sent thee into life. Art thou doing the right thing?

Tol­stoy is known to have made sev­er­al voice record­ings in his life, dat­ing back to 1895 when he made two wax cylin­der record­ings for Julius Block. Russ­ian lit­er­ary schol­ar Andrew D. Kauf­man has col­lect­ed three more vin­tage record­ings (all in Russ­ian) includ­ing Tol­stoy’s les­son to peas­ant chil­dren on his estate, a read­ing of his fairy tale “The Wolf,” and an excerpt from his essay “I Can­not be Silent.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Last Days of Leo Tol­stoy Cap­tured on Video

Leo Tol­stoy Cre­ates a List of the 50+ Books That Influ­enced Him Most (1891)

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Leo Tol­stoy, and How His Great Nov­els Can Increase Your Emo­tion­al Intel­li­gence

Leo Tolstoy’s 17 “Rules of Life:” Wake at 5am, Help the Poor, & Only Two Broth­el Vis­its Per Month

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“The Virtues of Coffee” Explained in 1690 Ad: The Cure for Lethargy, Scurvy, Dropsy, Gout & More

in Food & Drink, History | May 17th, 2024

Accord­ing to many his­to­ri­ans, the Eng­lish Enlight­en­ment may nev­er have hap­pened were it not for cof­fee­hous­es, the pub­lic sphere where poets, crit­ics, philoso­phers, legal minds, and oth­er intel­lec­tu­al gad­flies reg­u­lar­ly met to chat­ter about the press­ing con­cerns of the day. And yet, writes schol­ar Bon­nie Cal­houn, “it was not for the taste of cof­fee that peo­ple flocked to these estab­lish­ments.”

Indeed, one irate pam­phle­teer defined cof­fee, which was at this time with­out cream or sug­ar and usu­al­ly watered down, as “pud­dle-water, and so ugly in colour and taste [sic].”

No syrupy, high-dol­lar Mac­chi­atos or smooth, creamy lattes kept them com­ing back. Rather than the bev­er­age, “it was the nature of the insti­tu­tion that caused its pop­u­lar­i­ty to sky­rock­et dur­ing the sev­en­teenth and eigh­teenth cen­turies.”

How, then, were pro­pri­etors to achieve eco­nom­ic growth? Like the own­er of the first Eng­lish cof­fee-shop did in 1652, Lon­don mer­chant Samuel Price deployed the time-hon­ored tac­tics of the moun­te­bank, using adver­tis­ing to make all sorts of claims for coffee’s many “virtues” in order to con­vince con­sumers to drink the stuff at home. In the 1690 broad­side above, writes Rebec­ca Onion at Slate, Price made a “litany of claims for coffee’s health ben­e­fits,” some of which “we’d rec­og­nize today and oth­ers that seem far-fetched.” In the lat­ter cat­e­go­ry are asser­tions that “cof­fee-drink­ing pop­u­la­tions didn’t get com­mon dis­eases” like kid­ney stones or “Scur­vey, Gout, Drop­sie.” Cof­fee could also, Price claimed, improve hear­ing and “swoon­ing” and was “exper­i­men­tal­ly good to pre­vent Mis­car­riage.”

Among these spu­ri­ous med­ical ben­e­fits is list­ed a gen­uine effect of coffee—its relief of “lethar­gy.” Price’s oth­er beverages—“Chocolette, and Thee or Tea”—receive much less empha­sis since they didn’t require a hard sell. No one needs to be con­vinced of the ben­e­fits of cof­fee these days—indeed many of us can’t func­tion with­out it. But as we sit in cor­po­rate chain cafes, glued to smart­phones and lap­top screens and most­ly ignor­ing each oth­er, our cof­fee­hous­es have become some­what pale imi­ta­tions of those vibrant Enlight­en­ment-era estab­lish­ments where, writes Cal­houn, “men [though rarely women] were encour­aged to engage in both ver­bal and writ­ten dis­course with regard for wit over rank.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“The Vertue of the COFFEE Drink”: An Ad for London’s First Cafe Print­ed Cir­ca 1652

How Caf­feine Fueled the Enlight­en­ment, Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion & the Mod­ern World: An Intro­duc­tion by Michael Pol­lan

Philoso­phers Drink­ing Cof­fee: The Exces­sive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard

How Human­i­ty Got Hooked on Cof­fee: An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry

The Birth of Espres­so: The Sto­ry Behind the Cof­fee Shots That Fuel Mod­ern Life

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.“The Virtues of Cof­fee” Explained in 1690 Ad: The Cure for Lethar­gy, Scurvy, Drop­sy, Gout & More

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RIP David Sanborn: See Him Play Alongside Miles Davis, Randy Newman, Sun Ra, Leonard Cohen and Others on His TV Show Night Music

in Music, Television | May 17th, 2024

It’s late in the evening of Sat­ur­day, Octo­ber 28th, 1989. You flip on the tele­vi­sion and the sax­o­phon­ist David San­born appears onscreen, instru­ment in hand, intro­duc­ing the eclec­tic blues icon Taj Mahal, who in turn declares his intent to play a num­ber with “rur­al humor” and “world pro­por­tions.” And so he does, which leads into per­for­mances by Todd Rund­gren, Nan­ci Grif­fith, the Pat Methe­ny Group, and pro­to-turntab­list Chris­t­ian Mar­clay (best known today for his 24-hour mon­tage The Clock). At the end of the show — after a vin­tage clip of Count Basie from 1956 — every­one gets back onstage for an all-togeth­er-now ren­di­tion of “Nev­er Mind the Why and Where­fore” from H.M.S. Pinafore.

This was a more or less typ­i­cal episode of Night Music, which aired on NBC from 1988 to 1990, and in that time offered “some of the strangest musi­cal line-ups ever broad­cast on net­work tele­vi­sion.” So writes E. Lit­tle at In Sheep­’s Cloth­ing Hi-Fi, who names just a few of its per­form­ers: “Son­ic Youth, Miles Davis, the Res­i­dents, Char­lie Haden and His Lib­er­a­tion Orches­tra, Kro­nos Quar­tet, Pharoah Sanders, Karen Mantler, Dia­man­da Galas, John Lurie, and Nana Vas­con­ce­los.”

One espe­cial­ly mem­o­rable broad­cast fea­tured “a 15-minute inter­view-per­for­mance by Sun Ra’s Arkestra that finds the com­pos­er-pianist-Afro­fu­tur­ist at the peak of his exper­i­men­tal pow­ers, mov­ing from piano to Yama­ha DX‑7 and back again while the Arkestra flex­es its cos­mic mus­cles.”

“San­born host­ed the emi­nent­ly hip TV show,” writes jazz jour­nal­ist Bill Milkows­ki in his remem­brance of the late sax­man, who died last week­end, “not only pro­vid­ing infor­ma­tive intro­duc­tions but also sit­ting in with the bands.” One night might see him play­ing with Al Jar­reau, Paul Simon, Mar­i­anne Faith­full, Boot­sy Collins, the Red Hot Chili Pep­pers, Dizzy Gille­spie, — or indeed, some unlike­ly com­bi­na­tion of such artists. “The idea of that show was that gen­res are sec­ondary, an arti­fi­cial divi­sion of music that real­ly isn’t nec­es­sary; that musi­cians have more in com­mon than peo­ple expect,” San­born told Down­Beat in 2018. “We want­ed to rep­re­sent that by hav­ing a show where Leonard Cohen could sing a song, Son­ny Rollins could play a song, and then they could do some­thing togeth­er.”

Hav­ing want­ed to pur­sue that idea fur­ther since the show’s can­cel­la­tion — not the eas­i­est task, giv­en his ever-busy sched­ule of live per­for­mances and record­ing ses­sions across the musi­cal spec­trum — he cre­at­ed the YouTube chan­nel San­born Ses­sions a few years ago, some of whose videos have been re-uploaded in recent weeks. But much also remains to be dis­cov­ered in the archives of the orig­i­nal Night Music for broad-mind­ed music lovers under the age of about 60 — or indeed, for those over that age who nev­er tuned in back in the late eight­ies, a time peri­od that’s late­ly come in for a cul­tur­al re-eval­u­a­tion. Thanks to this YouTube playlist, you can watch more than 40 broad­casts of Night Music (which was at first titled Sun­day Night) and lis­ten like it’s 1989.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch David Bowie Per­form “Star­man” on Top of the Pops: Vot­ed the Great­est Music Per­for­mance Ever on the BBC (1972)

Chuck Berry & the Bee Gees Per­form Togeth­er in 1973: An Unex­pect­ed Video from The Mid­night Spe­cial Archive

How Amer­i­can Band­stand Changed Amer­i­can Cul­ture: Revis­it Scenes from the Icon­ic Music Show

All the Music Played on MTV’s 120 Min­utes: A 2,500-Video Youtube Playlist

When Glenn O’Brien’s TV Par­ty Brought Klaus Nomi, Blondie & Basquiat to Pub­lic Access TV (1978–82)

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 Playlist of the 3,300 Best Films & Documentaries on Youtube, Including Works by Hitchcock, Kubrick, Errol Morris & Other Auteurs

in Film, YouTube | May 16th, 2024

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Once upon a time, the most con­ve­nient means of dis­cov­er­ing movies was cable tele­vi­sion. This held espe­cial­ly true for those of us who hap­pened to be ado­les­cents on a break from school, ready and will­ing morn­ing, mid­day, or night to sit through the com­mer­cial-laden likes of Corvette Sum­mer, Tran­syl­va­nia 6–5000, BMX Ban­dits, or Free­jack. Click on any of those links, and you can watch the rel­e­vant pic­ture free on Youtube; click on the link to this playlist, and you’ll find 3,000 of the best films now avail­able on that plat­form (the exact num­ber may vary depend­ing on your region of the world), as curat­ed by Learnoutloud.com.

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Not all these movies belong in the cheap-thrills bin. You’ll also find the work of cel­e­brat­ed auteurs like Alfred Hitch­cock (The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps), Stan­ley Kubrick (Fear and Desire, Bar­ry Lyn­don), Aki­ra Kuro­sawa (Der­su Uza­la, Dreams), and Woody Allen (Mighty Aphrodite, Cas­san­dra’s Dream).

Then here are the doc­u­men­taries, gath­ered here on their own playlist, includ­ing Errol Mor­ris’ Gates of Heav­en and The Thin Blue Line and Wern­er Her­zog’s The Great Ecsta­sy of Wood­carv­er Stein­er and Lessons of Dark­ness. You can even find relat­ed pic­tures across gen­res: con­sid­er fol­low­ing Lost in La Man­cha, which doc­u­ments Ter­ry Gilliam’s thwart­ed efforts to make The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, with The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.

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“Almost all of these movies are free with ads,” writes Learnoutloud.com’s David Bis­chke, though YouTube Pre­mi­um sub­scribers will be able to watch ad-free. “Like any stream­ing ser­vice, the rights to these movies change fre­quent­ly, espe­cial­ly on YouTube’s offi­cial Movies and TV chan­nel. So if you see a movie you real­ly want to watch, then check it out soon!” If you’ve been mean­ing to get into Raise the Red Lantern and To Live by direc­tor Zhang Yimou, to learn about artists and musi­cians like Jack­son Pol­lock and Glenn Gould, or to behold a young Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger’s ear­ly appear­ances in Pump­ing Iron and Her­cules in New York, now’s the time. And with Vice Ver­sa and Dream a Lit­tle Dream cur­rent­ly avail­able, why not revis­it the sub­genre of the eight­ies body-switch com­e­dy while you’re at it?

P.S. In case you’re won­der­ing about the legal­i­ty of the films, the Learnout­loud site notes:  To make the playlist, “the movies had to be legal­ly free on YouTube either from YouTube’s offi­cial Movies and TV chan­nel, from a YouTube chan­nel legal­ly dis­trib­ut­ing the movie, or from a movie on YouTube that is in the pub­lic domain.” Just thought you might want to know…

Relat­ed con­tent:

4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More

Kino Lor­ber Lets You Stream 146 Films on YouTube: Til­da Swin­ton, Samuel L. Jack­son, Steve Busce­mi, Buster Keaton & More

Watch Free Cult Films by Stan­ley Kubrick, Fritz Lang, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi & More on the New Kino Cult Stream­ing Ser­vice

Watch More Than 400 Clas­sic Kore­an Films Free Online Thanks to the Kore­an Film Archive

Down­load 6600 Free Films from The Prelinger Archives and Use Them How­ev­er You Like

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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