A 6‑Step Guide to Zen Buddhism, Presented by Psychiatrist-Zen Master Robert Waldinger

Robert Waldinger works as a part-time pro­fes­sor of psy­chi­a­try at Har­vard Med­ical School, but he also describes him­self as a “Zen mas­ter.” This may strike some lis­ten­ers as a pre­sump­tu­ous claim, but he has indeed been offi­cial­ly accept­ed as a rōshi in two dif­fer­ent Zen lin­eages in the West. With one foot in psy­chi­a­try and the oth­er in Bud­dhism, Waldinger (pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture for his work on hap­pi­ness and lone­li­ness) is well-placed to explain the lat­ter in terms amenable to the for­mer. In the Big Think video above, he breaks the ancient reli­gion — or mind­set, or way of being, or what­ev­er one prefers to call it — into six dis­tinct con­cepts: imper­ma­nence, noble truths, mind­ful­ness, attach­ment, lov­ing kind­ness, and begin­ner’s mind.

If you’ve felt any curios­i­ty about Zen Bud­dhism and pur­sued it online in recent years, the term mind­ful­ness will be famil­iar to the point of cliché. Waldinger per­son­al­ly defines it as “pay­ing atten­tion in the present moment with­out judg­ment.” You can work on your mind­ful­ness right now, he explains, “by sim­ply pay­ing atten­tion to what­ev­er stim­uli are reach­ing you. It might be your heart­beat, it might be your breath, it might be the sound of the fan in the room — any­thing — and sim­ply let­ting your­self be open and receive what­ev­er is here right now.” This can help us put into per­spec­tive the next con­cept, attach­ment, or our feel­ing “that the world be a cer­tain way,” which caus­es no amount of our dis­sat­is­fac­tion and even suf­fer­ing.

All of these ideas are much expand­ed on in pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary Bud­dhist texts, which any enthu­si­ast can spend a life­time read­ing. My own inter­est was first piqued by a pop­u­lar 1970 vol­ume called Zen Mind, Begin­ner’s Mind, a com­pi­la­tion of talks by a famous rōshi called Shun­ryū Suzu­ki Waldinger ref­er­ences Suzuk­i’s work in the final sec­tion of this video, and specif­i­cal­ly his obser­va­tion that “in the begin­ner’s mind, there are many pos­si­bil­i­ties. In the expert’s mind, there are few.” In Waldinger’s own expe­ri­ence, “the old­er I get, and the more peo­ple call me an expert, the more aware I am of how lit­tle I know.” True mas­tery lies in the aware­ness not of the knowl­edge we have, but the knowl­edge we don’t.

Relat­ed:

Bud­dhism 101: A Short Intro­duc­to­ry Lec­ture by Jorge Luis Borges

How Lone­li­ness Is Killing Us: A Primer from Har­vard Psy­chi­a­trist & Zen Priest Robert Waldinger

What Is a Zen Koan? An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to East­ern Philo­soph­i­cal Thought Exper­i­ments

The Wis­dom of Alan Watts in Four Thought-Pro­vok­ing Ani­ma­tions

What Are the Keys to Hap­pi­ness? Lessons from a 75-Year-Long Har­vard Study

The Zen of Bill Mur­ray: I Want to Be “Real­ly Here, Real­ly in It, Real­ly Alive in the Moment”

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

Hear the Song Written on a Sinner’s Buttock in Hieronymus Bosch’s Painting The Garden of Earthly Delights

There’s some­thing unusu­al­ly excit­ing about find­ing a hid­den or dis­creet­ly placed ele­ment in a well-known paint­ing. I can only imag­ine the thrill of the physi­cian who first noticed the curi­ous pres­ence of a human brain in Michelangelo’s The Cre­ation of Adam: God, his ret­inue of angels, and their cloak map neat­ly onto some of the main neur­al struc­tures, includ­ing the major sul­ci in the cere­bel­lum, the pitu­itary gland, the frontal lobe, and the optic chi­asm. It’s hard to gauge Michelangelo’s moti­va­tion for doing so, but con­sid­er­ing his doc­u­ment­ed inter­est in dis­sec­tion and phys­i­ol­o­gy, the find is not par­tic­u­lar­ly sur­pris­ing.

adam

And then there’s anoth­er find. Sev­er­al years ago, the Inter­net became excit­ed when an enter­pris­ing blog­ger named Amelia tran­scribed, record­ed, and uploaded a musi­cal score straight out of Hierony­mus Bosch’s The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights, paint­ed between 1490 and 1510. The kick­er? Amelia found the score writ­ten on a suf­fer­ing sinner’s butt.

The poor, musi­cal­ly-brand­ed soul can be seen in the bot­tom left-hand cor­ner of the painting’s third and final pan­el (below), where­in Bosch depicts the var­i­ous tor­ture meth­ods of hell. The unfor­tu­nate hell-dweller lies pros­trate atop an open music book, crushed by a gigan­tic lute, while a toad-like demon stretch­es his tongue towards his tune­ful but­tocks. Anoth­er inhab­i­tant is strung up on a harp above the scene.

bosch-1

The piece, which Amelia tran­scribed and record­ed, can be heard in the video above. It is… unusu­al. Although we can’t ascer­tain why Bosch decid­ed to write out this par­tic­u­lar melody, since scant bio­graph­i­cal infor­ma­tion about the painter sur­vives, it’s pos­si­ble that he decid­ed to include music in his depic­tion of the infer­no because it was viewed as a sign of sin­ful plea­sure. For those who haven’t yet had a chance to hear it, lis­ten to Medieval-era butt music here.

Ilia Blin­d­er­man is a Mon­tre­al-based cul­ture and sci­ence writer. Fol­low him at @iliablinderman or at Google, or read more of his writ­ing at the Huff­in­g­ton Post.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Hierony­mus Bosch’s Bewil­der­ing Mas­ter­piece The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights

The Mean­ing of Hierony­mus Bosch’s The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights Explained

Watch the Spec­tac­u­lar Hierony­mus Bosch Parade, Which Floats Through The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights Painter’s Home­town Every Year

Hierony­mus Bosch’s Medieval Paint­ing, “The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights,” Comes to Life in a Gigan­tic, Mod­ern Ani­ma­tion

 

 

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

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.

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

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.

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:

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)

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

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.

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

“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

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

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.

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

“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.

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

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

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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