Granted access to a time machine, few of us would presumably opt first for the experience of skull surgery by the Incas. Yet our chances of survival would be better than if we underwent the same procedure 400 years later, at least if it took place on a Civil War battlefield. In both fifteenth-century Peru and the nineteenth-century United States, surgeons were performing a lot of trepanation, or removal of a portion of the skull. Since the Neolithic period, individuals had been trepanned for a variety of reasons, some of which now sound more medically compelling than others, but the Incan civilization took it to another level of frequency, and indeed sophistication.
Anyone with an interest in the history of technology would do well to study the Incas, who were remarkable in both what they developed and what they didn’t. Though there was no Incan alphabet, there was khipu, (or quipu), previously featured here on Open Culture, a system of record-keeping that used nothing but knotted cords.
The Incas may not have had wheeled vehicles or mechanical devices as we know them today, but they did have precision masonry, an extensive road system, advanced water management for agricultural and other uses, high-quality textiles, and plant-derived antiseptic — something more than a little useful if you also happen to be cutting a lot of holes in people’s skulls.
Studying the history of trepanation, neurologist David Kushner, along with bioarchaeologists John Verano and Anne Titelbaum, examined more than 600 Peruvian skulls dating from between 400 BC and the mid-sixteenth-century, which marked the end of the Incans’ 133-year-long run. As Science’s Lizzie Wade reports, the oldest evidence shows an unenviable 40% survival rate, but the surgical technique evolved over time: by the Inca era, the number rises to between 75% and 83%, as against 46% to 56% in Civil War military hospitals. Some Incan skulls even show signs of having undergone up to seven successful trepanations — or non-fatal ones, at any rate. Though that venerable form of surgery may no longer be practiced, modern neurosurgeons today use techniques based on the same principles. Should we find ourselves in need of their services, we’ll no doubt prefer to keep our distance from the time machine.
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.
If there’s a silver lining to our tumultuous times, it’s that musicians are reviving the protest song, a tradition that has withered since the end of the Vietnam War. Credence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son,” Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant,” Jimi Hendrix’s “Machine Gun”—these songs all took aim at the Johnson and Nixon administrations’ increasingly misguided war effort. But it was Neil Young who wrote the most damning protest song. When the Ohio National Guard shot and killed four studentsat Kent State in 1970, Young disappeared for a few hours and returned with the haunting lyrics of “Ohio.”
Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We’re finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio.
Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?
With his new song released this week, Bruce Springsteen picks up this thread. “Streets Of Minneapolis” documents the murder of civilians in Minnesota’s largest city. On January 7, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot Renee Good repeatedly in the head, leaving the mother of three dead. On January 24, two federal agents fired at least 10 shots at Alex Pretti, killing the ICU nurse instantly. Days later, the identity of these murderers remains hidden—something that news organizations oddly don’t seem troubled by, almost as if we’re quietly accepting that we’re living in a police state. When was the last time American agents could wear masks before killing civilians, and then hide behind a veil of anonymity after? Yeah, that’s normal.
On social media, Springsteen wrote: “I wrote this song on Saturday, recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis. It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.” You can read the lyrics below.
Through the winter’s ice and cold
Down Nicollet Avenue
A city aflame fought fire and ice
‘Neath an occupier’s boots
King Trump’s private army from the DHS
Guns belted to their coats
Came to Minneapolis to enforce the law
Or so their story goes
Against smoke and rubber bullets
By the dawn’s early light
Citizens stood for justice
Their voices ringing through the night
And there were bloody footprints
Where mercy should have stood
And two dead left to die on snow-filled streets
Alex Pretti and Renee Good
Oh our Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Singing through the bloody mist
We’ll take our stand for this land
And the stranger in our midst
Here in our home they killed and roamed
In the winter of ’26
We’ll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis
Trump’s federal thugs beat up on
His face and his chest
Then we heard the gunshots
And Alex Pretti lay in the snow, dead
Their claim was self defense, sir
Just don’t believe your eyes
It’s our blood and bones
And these whistles and phones
Against Miller and Noem’s dirty lies
Oh our Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Crying through the bloody mist
We’ll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis
Now they say they’re here to uphold the law
But they trample on our rights
If your skin is black or brown my friend
You can be questioned or deported on sight
In chants of ICE out now
Our city’s heart and soul persists
Through broken glass and bloody tears
On the streets of Minneapolis
Oh our Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Singing through the bloody mist
Here in our home they killed and roamed
In the winter of ’26
We’ll take our stand for this land
And the stranger in our midst
We’ll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis
We’ll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis
Having previously considered whether comedians are the philosophers of our time, we must now ask whether they, too, build upon the work of other philosophers. Few of today’s most prominent funny men and women live a philosophical life — or have cultivated the temperament necessary to live a philosophical life — more publicly than Jerry Seinfeld. This has been suggested by, among other things, a 2012 New York Times Magazine profile by Jonah Weiner. “Seinfeld will nurse a single joke for years, amending, abridging and reworking it incrementally, to get the thing just so,” writes Weiner. “It’s similar to calligraphy or samurai,” Seinfeld says. “I want to make cricket cages. You know those Japanese cricket cages? Tiny, with the doors? That’s it for me: solitude and precision, refining a tiny thing for the sake of it.”
Or, as Seinfeld puts it in the more recent interview above with podcaster Graham Bensiger, he wants to know what time it is, but he wants even more to take the watch apart in order to learn how it works. This has become his lifelong quest, in his professional arena of comedy and with his other obsessions as well.
Cultivating both his understanding and himself has entailed indulging his taste for difficult situations, or rather, challenges within what he calls the appropriate “bracket of struggle.” At this point in the journey, he’s found what could at first sound like a surprising guide: second-century Roman emperor MarcusAurelius, whose book the Meditations, along with Epictetus’ Enchiridion and the writings of Seneca the Younger, constitute the core texts of Stoicism.
To live Stoically in the Aurelian sense is to bear always in mind that, as Seinfeld puts it, “everything that you’re worried about is going to be gone like that. The people that are criticizing you, they’re going to be gone. You’re going to be gone. All this hand-wringing, worry, and concern over ‘How are people viewing me,’ ‘Someone said something bad about me’ — and you get so upset about it — is wasted time and energy.” In the view of Marcus Aurelius, “your only focus should be on getting better at what you’re doing. Focus on what you’re doing, get better at what you’re doing. Everything else is a complete waste of time.” It’s not hard to understand why such a worldview would appeal to the man Sarah Silverman, in the Times Magazine Profile, calls “the ultimate craftsman” among comedians.
In addition to the Meditations, Seinfeld also relies on the practice of actual meditation, which he credits with providing him both the physical and mental energy necessary to keep pursuing his goals into his seventies. “Meditation is like if I said to you, ‘I’m going to need you to get in the hot tub once a day, and just sit there for five minutes. Could you do that? That’s pretty easy. Meditation is even easier than that.” Exercise is the opposite, since it “takes more effort than anything,” but it’s become just as important a part of his life, the three keys to whose success he enumerates as follows: “Transcendental meditation, lift weights, espresso.” One likes to imagine that, had Marcus Aurelius installed a Marzocco up on Palatine Hill, he’d have enjoyed a few shots throughout the day too.
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.
Gladys Mae West was born in rural Virginia in 1930, grew up working on a tobacco farm, and died earlier this month a celebrated mathematician whose work made possible the GPS technology most of us use each and every day. Hers was a distinctively American life, in more ways than one. Seeking an escape from the agricultural labor she’d already gotten to know all too well, she won a scholarship to Virginia State College by becoming her high school class valedictorian; after earning her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mathematics, she taught for a time and then applied for a job at the naval base up in Dahlgren. She first distinguished herself there by verifying the accuracy of bombing tables with a hand calculator, and from there moved on up to the computer programming team.
This was the early nineteen-sixties, when programming a computer meant not coding, but laboriously feeding punch cards into an enormous mainframe. West and her colleagues used IBM’s first transistorized machine, the 7030 (or “Stretch”), which was for a few years the fastest computer in the world.
It cost an equivalent of $81,860,000 in today’s dollars, but no other computer had the power to handle the project of calculating the precise shape of Earth as affected by gravity and the nature of the oceans. About a decade later, another team of government scientists made use of those very same calculations when putting together the model employed by the World Geodetic System, which GPS satellites still use today. Hence the tendency of celebratory obituaries to underscore the point that without West’s work, GPS wouldn’t be possible.
Nor do any of them neglect to point out the fact that West was black, one of just four such mathematicians working for the Navy at Dahlgren. Stories like hers have drawn much greater public interest since the success of Hidden Figures, the Hollywood adaptation of Margot Lee Shetterly’s book about the black female mathematicians at NASA during the Space Race. When that movie came out, in 2016, even West’s own children didn’t know the importance of the once-classified work she’d done. Only in 2018, when she provided that information on a biographical form she filled out for an event hosted by her college sorority, did it become public. She thus spent the last years of her long life as a celebrity, sought out by academics and journalists eager to understand the contributions of another no-longer-hidden figure. But to their questions about her own GPS use, she reportedly answered that she preferred a good old-fashioned paper map.
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 his 1935 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility,” influential German-Jewish critic Walter Benjamin introduced the term “aura” to describe an authentic experience of art. Aura relates to the physical proximity between objects and their viewers. Its loss, Benjamin argued, was a distinctly 20th-century phenomenon caused by mass media’s imposition of distance between object and viewer, though it appears to bring art closer through a simulation of intimacy.
The essay makes for potent reading today. Mass media — which for Benjamin meant radio, photography, and film — turns us all into potential actors, critics, experts, he wrote, and takes art out of the realm of the sacred and into the realm of the spectacle. Yet it retains the pretense of ritual. We make offerings to cults of personality, expanded in our time to include influencers and revered and reviled billionaires and political figures who joust in the headlines like professional wrestlers, led around by the chief of all heels. As Benjamin writes:
The film responds to the shriveling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the “personality” outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the “spell of the personality,” the phony spell of a commodity.
Benjamin’s focus on the medium as not only expressive but constitutive of meaning has made his essay a staple on communications and media theory course syllabi, next to the work of Marshall McLuhan. Many readings tend to leave aside the politics of its epilogue, likely since “his remedy,” writes Martin Jay — “the politicization of art by Communism — was forgotten by all but his most militant Marxist interpreters,” and hardly seemed like much of a remedy during the Cold War, when Benjamin became more widely available in translation.
Benjamin’s own idiosyncratic politics aside, his essay anticipates a crisis of authorship and authority currently surfacing in the use of social media as a dominant form of political spectacle.
With the increasing extension of the press, which kept placing new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local organs before the readers, an increasing number of readers became writers—at first, occasional ones. It began with the daily press opening to its readers space for “letters to the editor.” And today there is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of thing. Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character.
Benjamin’s analysis of conventional film, especially, leads him to conclude that its reception required so little of viewers that they easily become distracted. Everyone’s a critic, but “at the movies this position requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.” Passive consumption and habitual distraction do not make for considered, informed opinion or a healthy sense of proportion.
What Benjamin referred to (in translation) as mechanical reproducibility we might now just call The Internet (and the coteries of “things” it haunts poltergeist-like). Later theorists influenced by Benjamin foresaw our age of digital reproducibility doing away with the need for authentic objects, and real people, altogether. Benjamin himself might characterize a medium that can fully detach from the physical world and the material conditions of its users — a medium in which everyone gets a column, public photo gallery, and video production studio — as ideally suited to the aims of fascism.
Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.
The logical result of turning politics into spectacle for the sake of preserving inequality, writes Benjamin, is the romanticization of war and slaughter, glorified plainly in the Italian Futurist manifesto of Filippo Marinetti and the literary work of Nazi intellectuals like Ernst Jünger. Benjamin ends the essay with a discussion of how fascism aestheticizes politics to one end: the annihilation of aura by more permanent means.
Under the rise of fascism in Europe, Benjamin saw that human “self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic.” Those who participate in this spectacle seek mass violence “to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology.” Distracted and desensitized, they seek, that is, to compensate for profound disembodiment and the loss of meaningful, authentic experience.
If you’ve heard Run‑D.M.C.‘s Raising Hell, Rage Against the Machine’s self-titled debut, Johnny Cash’s American Recordings, or Adele’s 21, you’ve heard the work of Rick Rubin. Yet even if you’ve listened closely to every song on which he’s been credited as a producer over the past 45 years, you may have trouble pinning down what, exactly, the work of Rick Rubin is. Though his résumé includes such professional achievements as co-founding both Def Jam Recordings and American Recordings, as well as sharing the presidency of Columbia Records for a stretch, he’s become best known in recent years as a kind of barefoot sage of creativity.
Rubin has proven ready to dispense sometimes-cryptic wisdom in whatever contexts he finds himself, and in the twenty-twenties, that role naturally involves appearing on a lot of long-form interview podcasts.
For Rubin in particular, the publication of his book The Creative Act: A Way of Being constituted an incentive — or perhaps an excuse — to take a seat across from popular podcasters like Lex Fridman, Jay Shetty, and Andrew Huberman. Naturally, these conversations spend a good deal of time on questions of what it takes to create a work of art, great or otherwise, in music or whichever medium it may be.
One of the most surprising points to which Rubin returns again and again is that the best art is never made to please an audience. Instead of trying to anticipate the tastes of others, you must first satisfy yourself with your work. Think back to your first encounter with your very favorite albums, films, or books, and you’ll realize the truth of Rubin’s words. Even then, it must have felt like the musician, the director, or the author didn’t guess what you wanted, but worked to create something personally resonant that went on to resonate with you — and, perhaps, millions of others as well.
The factors involved in such an artistic connection are many and inscrutable, in Rubin’s telling, and attempts at their explanation tend to verge on the mystical. But they can’t be reduced to a formula that applies always and everywhere, which means that creators of all kinds have to go through experience after long experience of trial and error throughout their careers. For many, this can necessitate getting a day job, Rubin’s advocacy of which puts him at odds with another of the most famous music producer/gurus of all time. But then, there’s more than one way to get creative in this 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.
During her lifetime, the medieval abbess Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179) composed roughly 77 songs and hymns. She remains the earliest known woman composer in Western classical music and one of the most important composers of the High Middle Ages.
In her honor, a YouTuber who goes by Hildegard von Blingin’ has developed a penchant for making Bardcore music, “a pastiche genre that takes modern songs and makes them ‘old-timey’ with Medieval and Renaissance inspired instrumentation.” Most of the instrumentals feature a mix of virtual and real instruments, including the Celtic harp, Irish whistle, and recorder.
I thought that I heard thee laughing
I thought that I heard thee sing
I think I thought I saw thee try
That was but a dream
That was but a dream
That’s me in the corner
‘Tis I in the corner
‘Tis I in the firelight, losing my religion
If you need a short escape from reality, this will serve you well. Enjoy!
Above, Scott Galloway and Kara Swisher explain how everyday Americans can push back against government overreach—by focusing on the economic decisions they make each day. “Trump does not respond to outrage. He responds to markets,” says Galloway. Ergo, it’s time for an “economic strike,” a “short-term coordinated withdrawal from spending.” He continues: “if wealthy households took their spending down 10% and middle class and lower income households … took it down 5%, you would take GDP negative almost overnight.”
But he also gets more specific than that: “If you wanted the fastest blue line path … I believe if you could convince America, the entire economy now is built on AI… if you could convince a bunch of Americans to cancel their ChatGPT or OpenAI accounts and all of a sudden OpenAI had to announce that their subscriptions had fallen off a cliff, that would ripple into Nvidia. That would ripple into Microsoft. And these are the people that Trump cares about.”
He goes on to add: “If you could figure out a way to basically kick a small number of companies related to the tech economy that account for 40% of the S&P right now … if all of a sudden, if you took all of your money out of any JP Morgan–affiliated bank and transferred it to a local regional bank, if you cancelled all of your streaming media platforms, if you cancelled OpenAI and Anthropic and you said “I am not upgrading my Apple phone,” and there was a real movement that registered and they had to disclose it in their earnings calls — this would come to an end pronto.” CEOs would stop bending their knees and suddenly find their voice.
Every dollar we spend—or withhold—sends a signal to the market and to Trump. When enough people hold back, the power of the purse can do what courts and elected officials cannot. Trump reversed many tariffs after markets freaked out on ‘Liberation Day.’ What’s to say it wouldn’t work again?
Over the centuries, a variety of places have laid credible claim to being the world’s art center: Constantinople, Florence, Paris, New York. But on the scale of, say, ten millennia, the hot spots become rather less recognizable. Up until about 20,000 years ago, it seems that creators and viewers of art alike spent a good deal in one particular cave: Liang Metanduno, located on Muna Island in Indonesia’s Southeast Sulawesi province. The many paintings on its walls of recognizable humans, animals, and boats have brought it fame in our times as a kind of ancient art gallery. But in recent years, a much older piece of work has been discovered there, one whose creation occurred at least 67,800 years ago.
The creation in question is a handprint, faint but detectable, probably made by blowing a mixture of ochre and water over an actual human hand. To determine its age, researchers performed what’s called uranium-series analysis on the deposits of calcium carbonate that had built up on and around it.
The number of 67,800 years is, of course, not exact, but it’s also just a minimum: in fact, the handprint could well be much older. In a paper published last week in Nature, the researchers point out that its age exceeds both that of the oldest similar rock art found elsewhere in Indonesia and that of a hand stencil in Spain attributed to Neanderthals, “which until now represented the oldest demonstrated minimum-age constraint for cave art worldwide.”
It isn’t impossible that this at least 67,800-year-old handprint could also have been made by Neanderthals. The obvious modification of the hand’s shape, however, an extension and tapering of the fingers that brings to mind animal claws (or the clutches of Nosferatu), suggests to certain scientific eyes the kind of cognition attributable specifically to Homo sapiens. This discovery has great potential relevance not just to art history, but even more so to other fields concerned with the development of our species. While it had previously been thought, for instance, that the first human settlers of Australia made their way there through Indonesia (in a time of much lower sea levels) between 50,000 and 65,000 years ago, the handprint’s existence in Liang Metanduno suggests that the migration took place even earlier. All these millennia later, Australia remains a favored destination for a variety of immigrants — some of whom do their part to keep Sydney’s art scene interesting.
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.
At least when I was in grade school, we learned the very basics of how the Third Reich came to power in the early 1930s. Paramilitary gangs terrorizing the opposition, the incompetence and opportunism of German conservatives, the Reichstag Fire. And we learned about the critical importance of propaganda, the deliberate misinforming of the public in order to sway opinions en masse and achieve popular support (or at least the appearance of it). While Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels purged Jewish and leftist artists and writers, he built a massive media infrastructure that played, writes PBS, “probably the most important role in creating an atmosphere in Germany that made it possible for the Nazis to commit terrible atrocities against Jews, homosexuals, and other minorities.”
How did the minority party of Hitler and Goebbels take over and break the will of the German people so thoroughly that they would allow and participate in mass murder? Post-war scholars of totalitarianism like Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt asked that question over and over, for several decades afterward. Their earliest studies on the subject looked at two sides of the equation. Adorno contributed to a massive volume of social psychology called The Authoritarian Personality, which studied individuals predisposed to the appeals of totalitarianism. He invented what he called the F‑Scale (“F” for “fascism”), one of several measures he used to theorize the Authoritarian Personality Type.
Arendt, on the other hand, looked closely at the regimes of Hitler and Stalin and their functionaries, at the ideology of scientific racism, and at the mechanism of propaganda in fostering “a curiously varying mixture of gullibility and cynicism with which each member… is expected to react to the changing lying statements of the leaders.” So she wrote in her 1951 Origins of Totalitarianism, going on to elaborate that this “mixture of gullibility and cynicism… is prevalent in all ranks of totalitarian movements”:
In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true… The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.
Why the constant, often blatant lying? For one thing, it functioned as a means of fully dominating subordinates, who would have to cast aside all their integrity to repeat outrageous falsehoods and would then be bound to the leader by shame and complicity. “The great analysts of truth and language in politics”—writes McGill University political philosophy professor Jacob T. Levy—including “George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Vaclav Havel—can help us recognize this kind of lie for what it is.… Saying something obviously untrue, and making your subordinates repeat it with a straight face in their own voice, is a particularly startling display of power over them. It’s something that was endemic to totalitarianism.”
Arendt and others recognized, writes Levy, that “being made to repeat an obvious lie makes it clear that you’re powerless.” She also recognized the function of an avalanche of lies to render a populace powerless to resist, the phenomenon we now refer to as “gaslighting”:
The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.
The epistemological ground thus pulled out from under them, most would depend on whatever the leader said, no matter its relation to truth. “The essential conviction shared by all ranks,” Arendt concluded, “from fellow traveler to leader, is that politics is a game of cheating and that the ‘first commandment’ of the movement: ‘The Fuehrer is always right,’ is as necessary for the purposes of world politics, i.e., world-wide cheating, as the rules of military discipline are for the purposes of war.”
Arendt wrote Origins of Totalitarianism from research and observations gathered during the 1940s, a very specific historical period. Nonetheless the book, Jeffrey Isaacs remarks at The Washington Post, “raises a set of fundamental questions about how tyranny can arise and the dangerous forms of inhumanity to which it can lead.” Arendt’s analysis of propaganda and the function of lies seems particularly relevant at this moment. The kinds of blatant lies she wrote of might become so commonplace as to become banal. We might begin to think they are an irrelevant sideshow. This, she suggests, would be a mistake.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.
The Renaissance did not, strictly speaking, occur in China. Yet it seems that the Middle Kingdom did have its Renaissance men, so to speak, and in much earlier times at that. We find one such illustrious figure in the Han dynasty of the first and second centuries: a statesman named Zhang Heng (78–139 AD), who managed to distinguish himself across a range of fields from mathematics to astronomy to philosophy to poetry. His accomplishments in science and technology include inventing the first hydraulic armillary sphere for observing the heavens, improving water clocks with a secondary tank, calculating pi further than it had been in China to date, and making discoveries about the nature of the moon. He also, so records show, put together the first-ever seismoscope, a device for detecting earthquakes.
A visual explanation of Zhang’s design appears in the ScienceWorld video above. His seismoscope, its narrator says, “was called hòufēng dìdòngyí, which means ‘instrument for measuring seasonal winds and movements of the earth,’ ” and it could “determine roughly the direction in which an earthquake occurred.”
Each of its eight dragon heads (a combination of number and creature that, in China, could hardly be more auspicious) holds a ball; when the ground shook, the dragon pointing toward the epicenter of the quake drops its ball into the mouth of one of the decorative toads waiting below. At one time, as history has recorded, it “detected an earthquake 650 kilometers, or 400 miles away, that wasn’t felt at the location of the seismoscope.”
Not bad, considering that neither Zhang nor anyone else had yet heard of tectonic plates. But as all engineers know, practical devices often work just fine even in the absence of completely sound theory. Though no contemporary examples of hòufēng dìdòngyí survive from Zhang’s time, “researchers believe that inside the seismoscope were a pendulum, a bronze ball under the pendulum, eight channels, and eight levers that activated the dragons’ mouths.” Moving in response to a shock wave, the pendulum would release the ball in the opposite direction, which would roll down a channel and release the mouth at the end of it. However innovative it was for its time, this scheme could, of course, provide no information about exactly how far away the earthquake happened, to say nothing of prediction. Fortunately, centuries of Renaissance men still lay ahead to figure all that out.
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.
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