In 1894, archaeologist Édouard Piette discovered the “Venus of Brassempouy,” otherwise known as the “Lady with the Hood.” Unearthed in southwestern France and dating to around 25,000 BCE, this carving represents the earliest realistic depiction of a human face. The figure’s forehead, nose, and brows are carefully carved in relief, as is the hair, arranged in a neat geometric pattern. But what happened to the mouth? Or the eyes? We’re not sure.
The Venus is carved from mammoth ivory, likely using a stone flint, and stands just 3.65 cm tall. For some, it marks a major development in figurative art. Or, as historian Simon Schama has suggested, this figurine may well be the “dawn of the idea of beauty” in human culture.
Juan Pujol García was one of the rare individuals whose participation in World War II made him a Member of the Order of the British Empire and earned him the Iron Cross. He gained that unlikely distinction in perhaps the riskiest of all roles in espionage, that of a double agent. Despite ultimately working for the Allied cause, he created an elaborate fictional persona — complete with an invented spy network operating across Great Britain — who professed loyalty to the Nazi cause. Not only did Pujol get this character plugged into the real German intelligence system, he also got him on its payroll, receiving what came to the equivalent of more than $6 million in today’s U.S. dollars for supplying information — information that ultimately contributed to the Axis’ loss of the war.
The story of how this chicken farmer from Barcelona became the most important double agent of World War II is told in the animated Primal Space video above. Unlike many of the spies history has remembered more clearly, Pujol didn’t begin his espionage career in the employ of any government in particular.
Radicalized, if that be the word, by the experience of having been drafted into the Spanish Civil War, he vowed to dedicate his life to “the good of humanity.” Turned away by the British embassy, to which he’d offered his services because Britain opposed Nazi Germany, he went freelance, re-inventing himself as a Third Reich-loyal Spanish military man seeking an assignment in the U.K. Taken on by Germany, he instead decamped to Lisbon, where he began manufacturing ersatz intelligence reports using newsreel footage and tourist brochures.
However makeshift, Pujol’s craft proved impressive to both Germany and Britain, which launched an international spy hunt for him. He thus accomplished his goal of becoming an official British double agent, in which capacity he arrived at his finest hour: misleading the Germans as to the 1944 “D‑Day” invasion of Normandy in an effort called Operation Fortitude. In Spanish, that would be Fortaleza, which became the title of an RTVE documentary about Pujol’s long-untold story a few years ago. But if any single word reflects Pujol’s contribution to history, that word must be Garbo, the code name assigned him by his first British case officer. After all, what other name — at least in 1942 — could quite so evocatively befit an agent whose skills of crafting and inhabiting invented characters made his handlers regard him as “the best actor in the world”?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
A vast, miserable proletariat squanders its days in meaningless toil. Society is under the control of ultra-wealthy business magnates. In order to pacify the underclass, the ruling class pins its hopes on a technological solution: artificial intelligence. Welcome to the year 2026, as envisioned in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. When the film premiered, not long after 1926 had come to an end, that date would have seemed arbitrarily futuristic. Now, of course, it’s the present, though our world may nowhere look quite as stylish as the Art Deco dystopia crafted at great expense and an unprecedented scale of production by Lang and company. Yet when we watch Metropolis today, the elements that now seem prescient stand out more than the fantastical ones.
The new short documentary from DW above examines the making and legacy of Metropolis, paying special attention to its considerable influence on much of the science-fiction and dystopian cinema since. 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, Blade Runner, Terminator 2, Madonna’s “Express Yourself” video: these are just a few of the productions that take no great pains to hide — and in some cases, even emphasize — their debt to Lang’s vision.
Vertiginous, intensively illuminated, infrastructure-webbed skyscraper canyons and laborers at once manipulating and being manipulated by oversized clockwork are only the most obvious images that have come down through decades of popular culture. For the origin of the wild-haired “mad scientist” surrounded by tubes and coils, look no further than Metropolis’ Rotwang.
Much could also be written — and indeed, much already has been written — about the legacy of Rotwang’s invention, the robot woman who takes on the likeness of a working-class heroine. Beyond the groundbreaking nature of its design, Metropolis has also retained attention after nearly a century thanks to the folkloric, even mythical resonances of its story. It may be technically implausible, at least from our point of view, to imagine large-scale automation coexisting with large-scale employment, however dire the jobs, but age-old narrative undercurrents allow even modern audiences to suspend disbelief (a phenomenon that hasn’t gone unnoticed by the makers of more recent sci-fi and fantasy blockbusters). We may not live in quite the 2026 that Metropolis puts onscreen, but in some sense, we do inhabit the world it made.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Science and engineering may be conflated to some degree in the public mind, but anyone who’s spent much time in an academic department belonging to one or the other of those branches of endeavor knows how insistently distinctions can be drawn between them. Bill Hammack, a professor of engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who’s been there since he was a master’s student in 1986, surely has his own thoughts on the subject. The video above from his popular YouTube channel Engineerguy explains how cathedrals were designed in the Middle Ages, using the example of Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. Specifically, it gets into how such a building’s arches and supporting walls could have been engineered without the aid of science at all, or even the use of mathematics.
Compared to today, the scope of knowledge humanity commanded back in medieval times may have been impossibly narrow — to say nothing of the knowledge possessed by any given human, especially outside the literate elite. Yet what was then known proved more than sufficient to build structures that still stand, and indeed impress, many centuries (and in some cases, more than a millennium) later.
Hammack explains that, in the place of making calculations, their builders would perform actions. For instance, a medieval mason would have made a life-size chalk drawing of the arch, laid a rope along its form, and cut the rope’s length to match that of the arch. He could then use the rope to determine just how thick the wall would need to be, between a fourth and a fifth of the arch’s span, without a number ever being involved.
Hammack notes that the Romans, too, understood this necessary proportion for arch construction. “The proportional rule doesn’t come from some scientific analysis of stone and its properties,” he says. “It comes from centuries of experience, from trial and error.” Such heuristics, or rules of thumb, constitute “an imprecise method used as a shortcut to find a solution to a problem, often by narrowing the range of possible solutions.” They’re also employed in the engineering method to “cause the best change in a poorly understood situation using available resources.” Its thoroughgoing practicality would seem to have little to do with the different sort of rigors that apply in science, where establishing truth, or at least the absence of falseness, is all. Belief in the engineering approach to problems like this doesn’t require faith in the religious sense, but if you like, you can find proof of its effectiveness in houses of worship from Sainte-Chapelle to the Pantheon to Hagia Sophia — or at least in their arches.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Those are reserved for first-class citizens whose virtuous lives earned them passage to the uppermost heights.
Down below, stringed instruments produce the most hellish sort of cacophony, a fitting accompaniment for the horn whose bell is befouled with the arm of a tortured soul.
Let us hope they stopped shy of shoving flutes up their bums. (Such a placement might produce a sound, but not from the flute’s golden throat).
The Bosch experiment added ten more instruments to the museum’s already impressive, over 1000-strong collection of woodwinds, percussion, and brass, many from the studios of esteemed makers, some dating all the way back to the Renaissance.
Unfortunately, the new additions don’t sound very good. “Horrible” and “painful” are among the adjectives the Bate Collection manager Andrew Lamb uses to describe the aural fruits of his team’s months-long labors.
Might we assume Bosch would have wanted it that way?
Bosch and his contemporaries viewed music as sinful, associating it with other sins of the flesh and spirit. A number of other instruments are also depicted: a harp, a drum, a shawm, a recorder, and the metal triangle being played by the woman (a nun, perhaps) who is apparently imprisoned in the keybox of the instrument. The hurdy-gurdy was also associated with beggars, who were often blind. The man turning the crank is holding a begging bowl in his other hand. Hanging from the bowl is a metal seal on a ribbon, called a “gaberlunzie.” This was a license to beg in a particular town on a particular day, granted by the nobility. Soldiers who were blinded or maimed in their lord’s service might be given a gaberlunzie in recompense.
To the best of our knowledge, no gaberlunzies were granted, nor any sinners eternally damned, in the Bate Collection’s caper. According to manager Lamb, expanding the boundaries of music education was recompense enough, well worth the temporary affront to tender ears.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2019.
The Silk Road’s long period of high activity spanned the second century BC and the fifteenth century AD, but its name wasn’t coined until more than 400 years after that. Scholars have argued it practically ever since, given that the referent wasn’t just one road but a vast and ever-changing network of them, and that silk was hardly the only commodity carried by its traders. Yet the name persists, and not only due to Marco Polo-type romanticism. Silk may not have been the highest-volume item on its eponymous road — more business was surely done in everyday textiles, to say nothing of spices, grains, or dyes — but it was perhaps the most visible, and surely the most glamorous. From the perspective of Chinese civilization, it can also look like the most important.
In the new Primal Space video above, you can hear the story of “the machine that made China rich”: the pattern loom, that is, a model of which was unearthed in 2017 during subway construction in the city of Chengdu. At somewhere between 2,100 and 2,200 years old, they represent the earliest known evidence of pattern loom technology, of which China made highly productive use during the time of its three-millennium monopoly on silk.
As far away as the Roman Empire, those who had the means couldn’t get enough of the stuff, especially when it came in designs never before seen in human history. Hence the high priority China placed on keeping knowledge of its harvesting and weaving proprietary — at least until a couple of Roman monks managed to smuggle silkworm larvae back to Europe in the middle of the sixth century.
Yet even having lost its status as the only land capable of producing silk, China retained a great advantage in the form of its sheer manufacturing capacity. (This story rings somewhat familiar about a millennium and a half later, when none of us can dispute which country holds the title of “the world’s factory.”) Its silk industry could achieve that scale thanks to the relative ease of use of the pattern loom, which required no special skills to operate. The most complex aspect would have been “programming” the patterns to be formed by the strands, which, though an entirely analog process, has its basic similarities with the digital computer programming we know today. China’s trade networks have greatly multiplied since the days of Marco Polo, and the technology it uses has developed to a previously unimaginable degree. Yet somehow, the “Electric Vehicle Road” doesn’t have quite the same ring, does it?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
We seem to be living through yet another major moment for podcasting. Over the past two decades, the medium has gone from niche experiment to mainstream habit, becoming a regular part of how we learn, entertain ourselves, and pass the time. The popularity of podcasts—in an age of ubiquitous screens and perpetual distractions—speaks to something deep within us. Oral storytelling, as old as human speech, never really disappears. The medium evolves, platforms shift, distribution changes—but the basic appeal remains constant.
But the differences between this golden age of podcasting and the golden age of radio are still significant. Where the podcast is often off-the-cuff, and often very intimate and personal—sometimes seen as “too personal”—radio programs were almost always carefully scripted and featured professional talent. Even those programs with man-on-the street features or interviews with ordinary folks were carefully orchestrated and mediated by producers, actors, and presenters. And the business of scoring music and sound effects for radio programs was a very serious one indeed. All of these formalities—in addition to the limited frequency range of old analog recording technology—contribute to what we immediately recognize as the sound of “old time radio.” It is a quaint sound, but also one with a certain gravitas, an echo of a bygone age.
That golden age waned as television came into its own in the mid-fifties, but near its end, some broadcast companies made every effort to put together the highest quality radio programming they could in order to retain their audience. One such program, the CBS Radio Workshop, which ran from January, 1956 to September, 1957, may have been “too little too late”—as radio preservationist site Digital Deli writes—but it nonetheless was “every bit as innovative and cutting edge” as the programs that came before it.
The first two episodes, right below, were dramatizations of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, read by the author himself. The series’ remaining 84 programs drew from the work of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, James Thurber, H.L. Mencken, Mark Twain, Robert Heinlein, Eugene O’Neill, Balzac, Carl Sandburg, and so many more. It also featured original comedy, drama, music, and This American Life-style profiles and storytelling.
Huxley returned in program #12, with a story called “Jacob’s Hands,” written in collaboration with and read by Christopher Isherwood. The great Ray Bradbury made an appearance, in program #4, introducing his stories “Season of Disbelief” and “Hail and Farewell,” read by John Dehner and Stacy Harris, and scored by future film and TV composer Jerry Goldsmith. Other programs, like #10, “The Exurbanites,” narrated by famous war correspondent Eric Sevareid, conducted probing investigations of modern life—in this case the growth of suburbia and its relationship to the advertising industry. The above is but a tiny sampling of the wealth of quality programming the CBS Radio Workshop produced, and you can hear all of it—all 86 episodes—courtesy of the Internet Archive.
Sample streaming episodes in the player above, or download individual programs as MP3s and enjoy them at your leisure, almost like, well, a podcast. See Digital Deli for a complete rundown of each program’s content and cast, as well as an extensive history of the series. This is the swan song of golden age radio, which, it seems, maybe never really left, given the incredible number of listening experiences we still have at our disposal. Yes, someday our podcasts will sound quaint and curious to the ears of more advanced listeners, but even then, I’d bet, people will still be telling and recording stories, and the sound of human voices will continue to captivate us as it always has.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.
In ancient Egypt, writing hieroglyphs was a highly specialized skill, one commanded by only a small fraction of the population. The fact that there were more than 1,000 characters to memorize probably had something to do with that, but the variety of surfaces on which hieroglyphs were written couldn’t have made it any easier. Depending on the occasion, ancient Egyptians used papyrus, wood, metal, and pottery shards as writing surfaces. The most monumental or religiously important texts, however, got carved into stone, thus ensuring the words a kind of eternal life — a particular concern in the cases of tomb walls and sarcophagi.
There may be little call to write hieroglyphs today, but the techniques to do so haven’t been lost. In the new video above from the Victoria and Albert Museum, sculptor and stone carver Miriam Johnson demonstrates how to carve into stone the name of Pharaoh Khufu, who built the Great Pyramid (and indeed, was buried in it).
The first step is to write that name, surrounded by its cartouche, on a sheet of carbon paper. This isn’t the brush and ink that the ancient Egyptians would have used, granted, but for the rest of the project, Johnson sticks to the old-fashioned ways. With the image transferred, and using nothing more than a mallet and a chisel, she carves the hieroglyphs into the stone not just once but twice.
The first time, Johnson carves in “sunken relief,” a technique that involves cutting the image out of the surface of the stone. The second time, she renders Pharaoh Khufu’s name in “raised relief,” which requires cutting out everything but the image, creating the effect of the hieroglyphs rising out of the stone. With the former “you see more of the shadows”; with the latter, “you’ve got more opportunity of putting more texture into the characters.” Seen in a state of completion — by a layman, at least — Johnson’s carvings wouldn’t look out of place in a museum exhibit on ancient Egypt. Even if tools manufactured in the twenty-first century produce a few subtle differences from the real thing, give these stones a millennium or two to age, and they’ll surely look even more convincing.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
In Italy, roughly 70% of households have a Bialetti Moka Pot. And chances are you have one too. But are you using it the right way? Probably not, says James Hoffmann, the author of The World Atlas of Coffee. Above, he sets the record straight, demonstrating the best technique for making a great cup of coffee. Enjoy this public service announcement and use it well.
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Imagine you could talk to Hieronymus Bosch, the authors of the Book of Revelation, or of the Voynich Manuscript—a bizarre 15th century text written in an uncrackable code; that you could solve centuries-old mysteries by asking them, “what were you thinking?” You might be disappointed to hear them say, as does Luigi Serafini, author and illustrator of the Codex Seraphinianus, “At the end of the day [it’s] similar to the Rorschach inkblot test. You see what you want to see. You might think it’s speaking to you, but it’s just your imagination.”
If you were a longtime devotee of an intensely symbolic, mythic text, you might refuse to believe this. It must mean something, fans of the Codex have insisted since the book’s appearance in 1981.
It shares many similarities with the Voynich Manuscript, save its relatively recent vintage and living author: both the Seraphinianus and the Voynich seem to be compendiums of an otherworldly natural science and art, and both are written in a wholly invented language.
Serafini tells Wired he thinks Voynich is a fake. “The Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II loved ancient manuscripts; somebody swindled him and spread the rumor that it was original. The idea of made-up languages is not new at all.” As for his own made-up language in the Codex, he avers, “I always said that there is no meaning behind the script; it’s just a game.” But it is not a hoax. Though he hasn’t minded the money from the book’s cult popularity, he created the book, he says, “trying to reach out to my fellow people, just like bloggers do.” It is, he says, “the product of a generation that chose to connect and create a network, rather than kill each other in wars like their fathers did.”
The Codex, writes Abe Books, who made the short video review above, is “essentially an encyclopedia about an alien world that clearly reflects our own, each chapter appears to deal with key facets of this surreal place, including flora, fauna, science, machines, games and architecture.” That’s only a guess given the unintelligible language.
The illustrations seem to draw from Bosch, Leonardo da Vinci, and the medieval travelogue as much as from the surrealism of contemporary European artists like Fantastic Planet animator René Laloux.
Serafini has been delighted to see an extensive internet community coalesce around the book, and has had his fun with it. He “now states,” writes Dangerous Minds, “that a stray white cat that joined him while he created the Codex in Rome in the 1970s was actually the real author, telepathically guiding Serafini as he drew and ‘wrote.’” You can now, thanks to a recent, relatively affordable edition published by Rizzoli, purchase your copy of the Codex. Buy now, I’d say. First editions of the book now fetch upwards of $6000, and its popularity shows no sign of slowing.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.
Here’s another thing you can credit Thomas Jefferson with: being the first known American to record an ice cream recipe. It’s one of 10 surviving recipes written by the founding father.
According to Monticello.org, ice cream began appearing “in French cookbooks starting in the late 17th century, and in English-language cookbooks in the early 18th century.” And there “are accounts of ice cream being served in the American colonies as early as 1744.” Jefferson likely tasted his fair share of the dessert while living in France (1784–1789), and it continued to be served at Monticello upon his return to Virginia. By the first decade of the 19th century, ice cream became increasingly common in cookbooks published throughout the U.S.
2. bottles of good cream.
6. yolks of eggs.
1/2 lb. sugar
mix the yolks & sugar
put the cream on a fire in a casserole, first putting in a stick of Vanilla.
when near boiling take it off & pour it gently into the mixture of eggs & sugar.
stir it well.
put it on the fire again stirring it thoroughly with a spoon to prevent it’s sticking to the casserole.
when near boiling take it off and strain it thro’ a towel.
put it in the Sabottiere[12]
then set it in ice an hour before it is to be served. put into the ice a handful of salt.
put salt on the coverlid of the Sabotiere & cover the whole with ice.
leave it still half a quarter of an hour.
then turn the Sabottiere in the ice 10 minutes
open it to loosen with a spatula the ice from the inner sides of the Sabotiere.
shut it & replace it in the ice
open it from time to time to detach the ice from the sides
when well taken (prise) stir it well with the Spatula.
put it in moulds, justling it well down on the knee.
then put the mould into the same bucket of ice.
leave it there to the moment of serving it.
to withdraw it, immerse the mould in warm water, turning it well till it will come out & turn it into a plate
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.
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